Oniko, toweling herself, said doubtfully, “My father told me my grandfather was terribly frightened when he went out from Gateway.”
Harold shrugged. “There are individual exceptions.”
“And women went out, too. There were almost as many women as men on the artifact.”
“Oh, Oniko,” said Harold, exasperated, “I’m talking about a general law, not about individuals. See, you just don’t know what it’s like in a human world, because you never got to live on a good one, like Peggys Planet.”
Oniko dragged herself erect on her walker. “I don’t think it’s really that way on Earth either, Harold.”
“Sure it is. Didn’t I just tell you?”
“No, I don’t think so. I did some research after we came here. Sneezy? Hand me my pod; I think I have it in my diary.”
She put her pod on and bent down to it. Then, laboriously straightening, she said, “Yes, that’s it. Listen: ‘The old-fashioned “nuclear family” is less frequent on Earth now. Childless couples are frequent. When couples have children it is usual for both parents to work; there is also a large proportion of single-parent families.’ So it’s not exactly the way you say, Harold.”
Harold sniffed disdainfully. “Keeping a diary is a baby thing to do,” he said. “When did you start it?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “I don’t remember exactly. When we were on the Wheel.”
“Why, I keep one too,” cried Sneezy. “I guess when you told me you were doing it, I decided it sounded like a good idea.”
Oniko frowned. “I thought you were the one who told me,” she said. Then she grimaced. “But right now I want to get back to my dorm so I can lie down for a while before dinner, please.”
I feel a little apologetic, because I’ve jerked us around in time so much (though not by a long shot, I’m sorry to say, as much as I wifi a little later on). I think I should pin this time frame down a little more accurately. This didn’t happen while Essie and I were on the Wheel, not by many millions of milliseconds. It happened earlier, at a time when Essie and I were just beginning to debate whether we were really going to go to the one hundredth reunion on Wrinkle Rock and my life, almost, seemed placid. I didn’t know what was coming.
Of course, the kids didn’t know what was coming either. They were going about their business, which was the business of being children. When, in the normal course of school practice, Sneezy went for his twice-monthly examination, the docthing was pleased to see him; it didn’t often get a chance to examine a healthy Heechee, with his double heart, almost fatless internal organs, and ropy musculature. “Everything is normative,” it said, scanning the test monitors approvingly. “Only you don’t seem to be sleeping well, Sneezy.”
Sneezy said reluctantly, “Sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep. Then I dream—”
“Oh?” The docthing had taken the form of a young human male; it smiled reassuringly and said, “Tell me about it.”
Sneezy hesitated. Then, unwillingly, he said, “I do not have a cocoon, you know.”
“Ah,” said the program. Sneezy waited. He did not want to have to tell this mechanical program what it was like for a young Heechee to have to sleep on a bed, with nothing but sheets to pull over his head. Heechee slept enclosed, preferably with some sort of warm, soft clumps of material to burrow down into; that was the right and proper way to sleep, and blankets and sheets were no substitute. How right his father had been to forbid him a bed, he thought wistfully.
He did not have to elaborate; the docthing’s databases provided the explanation. “I have ordered you a cocoon,” said the program benignly. “Now. About those dreams . . .
“Yes?” said Sneezy dismally. He did not want to talk about the dreams. He never had, not even to Oniko; he didn’t even like to remember them when he was awake.
“Well? What do you dream?”
Sneezy hesitated. What did he dream? What did he not! “I dream about my parents,” he began, “and about Home. I mean my real home, in the core—”
“Of course you do,” said the docthing, smiling.
“And then there are the other dreams. They’re-different.” Sneezy paused for a moment, thinldng. “They’re scary. They’re-well, sometimes there are these bugs. Clouds of them. Swarming, floating, ifickering—” They swooped around him and crept into his clothing, into his mouth, into his skin, stinging without pain. “They’re like fireflies,” he finished, trembling.
“Have you ever seen a firefly?” the program asked patiently.
“No. Only in pictures, I mean.”
“Fireffles do not sting, Sneezy,” the docthing pointed out. “And the sort of insects which do sting cause itching and pain. Do you have any of that?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that—At least, not exactly,” Sneezy corrected himself. “But there is a kind of, I don’t know how to say it, an itch in the head. I mean, it makes me-I don’t know-it makes me want to learn things.”
“What sort of things, Sneezy?”
“Things,” the boy said unhappily. Sneezy knew that he was describing the dreams poorly. What else could you do when you tried to put a dream into words? Dreams were soft and fuzzy and shapeless. Words were hard and exact. The Heechee language of Feel would have been a little better for the purpose, but the program had chosen to speak in English, and Sneezy was too polite to complain.
But the program nodded understandingly. “Yes, yes, Sneezy,” it said kindly, “such dreams are symbols. Perhaps they represent your perfectly normal child’s interest in the sexuality of your parents. Perhaps they refer to the traumas you have experienced. You may not realize it, Sneezy, but you have gone through more stress in the past few weeks than most adults experience in years.”
“Oh,” said Sneezy. He did actually realize it very well.
“And also,” the program sighed, “there is the general apprehension everyone feels these days. Not just children. Adults of both races, and even machine intelligences; no one is exempt. You understand that I am referring to the Foe.”
“They are frightening,” Sneezy agreed.
“And particularly for an impressionable child, who has even had some personal experience of the scare, apparently baseless though it was, on the Watch Wheel.” The docthing cleared its throat, announcing a change of subject. “Now, what about these diaries of yours?” It beamed.
Sneezy hissed faintly, then accommodated himself to the new course. “They keep me from being homesick,” he said, not because that was true-they didn’t-but because Sneezy had learned what every child learns, human or Heechee: When adults ask hard questions, you can satisfy them with the easy answers they expect.
“Very good therapy.” The docthing nodded, “But such detail, Sneezy! So many pages of data! One would think you were trying to compile an encyclopedia. Don’t you think you should spend less time on that sort of thing and more playing with your classmates?”
“I’ll try,” Sneezy promised, and when he was released at last, he rehearsed entries for his diary all the way back to his dormitory. They mostly began with a single observation: “Human programs don’t know much about Heechee kids.”
But when he did begin writing in his diary again, that was not what he wrote at all.
I don’t care what Albert says, I can’t help feeling sorry for Sneezy. And for Oniko. And-oh, hell, yes, even for Harold Wroczek. Harold wasn’t really bad. He simply hadn’t had much practice at being nice.
The three of them continued to spend more time with each other than with any of the three hundred-odd other students, though Harold hated it when Sneezy and Oniko insisted on spending hours on end with the databases. “My God,” he complained, “do you think you have to learn everything there is to know?”