Captain had learned to read human body language about as well as Audee had learned Heechee—that is, not very well-but he did not miss the whitening around Audee’s jaw. “You seem afraid,” he commented.
By Heechee standards it was not an impolite remark. Audee took it without offense. “Yes,” he said, gazing at the eye-wrenching surface of infalling gases, “I am terribly, terribly afraid of entering a black hole.”
“That is curious,” Captain said thoughtfully. “We have done this many times, and there is no peril to this ship. Tell me. Which are you more afraid of, this penetration or the Foe?”
Audee thought it over. The two kinds of fear were not at all the same. “I guess,” he said slowly, “the Foe.”
Captain’s cheek muscles writhed approvingly. “That is not in any way nonrational,” he said. “That is wise. Now we go in.”
The diamond corkscrew erupted in showers of sparks; thousands of them struck Audee, and all the others aboard, but they did not burn; they did nothing at all, but seemed to pass right through the bodies and come out the other side. The lurching of the ship threw Audee violently against the harnesses of his safety cocoon; it had been built for Heechee mass, not that of the larger human body, and it creaked alarmingly.
The process went on for a long time. Audee had no way to measure it; many minutes, surely; perhaps an hour or more; and it didn’t get less violent. He could hear the Heechee crew croaking comments and orders back and forth among themselves, and wondered dazedly how they were able to function when their gizzards were being jolted out of them . . . and wondered if Heechee had gizzards . . . and wondered if he were going to die .
And then, without warning it was over.
The Heechee began to unstrap themselves. Captain glanced curiously at Audee and called, “Would you like to see our core?” He waved a skinny arm at the viewscreen . . . and there it was.
What appeared on the ship’s viewing plates was a dazzle of light.
The Heechee core was packed with suns-ten thousand suns-more suns than there are in a thousand light-years from Earth, packed into a sphere of space only twenty light-years across. There were golden stars and dull crimson stars and blindingly blue-white stars. There was a whole rainbow Hertzsprung-Russell spectrum of stars that made the night sky a flood of color on any planet in the core-that made the term “night” an exotic abstraction, in fact, because there was no place in the core that was ever dark.
I wish I could have seen it.
I don’t envy very many people very many things, but I envied Audee Walthers that when I heard what he had seen. A dense compaction of stars-more than in any cluster-well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? Or else any globular cluster would itself have become a black hole. And constellations like Christmas trees! I mean, colors. Even from Earth the stars are different colors, everyone knows that, but hardly anyone ever sees what the colors are. They’re all so far and so faint that the colors wash out, and mostly they look like various impure versions of white. But in the core—In the core red is ruby and green is emerald and blue is sapphire and yellow is gleaming gold and white is, by God, blinding. And there isn’t any gradation of first-magnitude down to faint or invisible. The bright ones are far brighter than first-magnitude. And there are hardly any stars on the borderline of visibility, because there aren’t any faraway stars at all.
I did envy Audee for what he saw—But, really, what he saw was only the viewscreen of the Heechee ship.
He never set foot on a Heechee planet. He didn’t have time.
First to last, Audee’s elapsed time inside the core was about equal to the span of a normal night’s sleep. He didn’t do any sleeping, of course.
He certainly didn’t have time for that. He hardly had time to breathe, as a matter of fact, because there was so hopelessly much to see and do.
If it hadn’t been for the Ancient Ancestors, things would have taken so ponderously long that it might hardly have mattered whether Audee got to the core or not. But Captain’s messages had been received-only moments before, by Heechee standards. Their relay machines worked in machine-storage time, and the Ancient Ancestors nearly could, too.
With only minutes of warning, the Heechee had had time to do almost nothing but bleat and shake, but they rallied fast. They had always kept a full flotilla of standby crews and ships available for just this situation. They were dispatched at once. By the time Audee had been inside the core for four local hours, he had seen six large Heechee ships sent off with hastily drafted, often bewildered ship-handlers, historians, Dream-Seat sensitives, and diplomats-at least, what passed among the Heechee for diplomats. (Relations with foreign powers had never been much of a Heechee concern, since they hadn’t been able to find any foreign powers to have relations with.)
Those first shiploads of Heechee specialists had been standing by, waiting for just that summons.
Probably none of them had actually expected to get it-“Not on my shift, anyway!” each one of them might have prayed, if Heechee had prayed, or at least asked of massed ancestral minds. Those crews had been standing by for a good long while-thousands of centuries, by galactic time. Even by the clocks in the core it had been a matter of decades.
No one crew stayed on standby for that long. They rotated at intervals of what local time measured as the equivalent of eight or nine months, then returned to their normal homes and habits. It was a lot like National Guard service in the old days in the United States. Like National Guardsmen, too, the surprise was ugly when the emergency they were standing by for turned out to be real, and immediate.
Half the Heechee had families. Half the ones with families had been allowed to bring mate and offspring with them, just as peacetime American soldiers had carried along wives and kids. The similarities ended there. Peacetime soldiers suddenly called on to fight usually had the chance to send their families out of the way. The Heechee didn’t. The places they were stationed in were the ships they set out in, and so in those first half dozen ships the crews included pregnant females, infants, and a fair number of school-age Heechee children. Most of these were terrified. Few wanted to go on this mystery-bus excursion into the unknown . . . but then, much of the same was true of the crews themselves.
None of this Audee saw with his own eyes, only in the communications screens of Captain’s spaceship. That was what he arrived in, and there he stayed.
By the beginning of the fifth hour of his visit to the core, another spaceship had had time to reach them.
The two ships docked. The second ship was much larger than Captain’s. It had a complement of nearly thirty, and all of them slid as rapidly as they could through the mated hatches to observe this queer animal, this “human,” at first hand.
The first thing that happened was that three of the new Heechee, gently and carefully, took Audee’s pod away from him. So he was deprived at once of the comforting presence of Twice. He understood the necessity; none of the new Heechee spoke English, and anyway, they could get from the stored mind of the Ancient Ancestor all the information she had been getting from him over weeks, in far less time than he could say any of it. That was an explanation; it didn’t make the loss less acute.
The second thing was that all his familiar Heechee shipmates were dragged away into the roil of newcomers, standing packed against each other in knots around each of the Heechee from the ship, talking and gesticulating and, yes, smelling. The typical, ammomacal Heechee reek was overpowering, with so many of them squeezed into the ship. Audee had almost forgotten the smell existed, through custom; and besides, the Heechee who produced it were friends. The new ones were all strangers.