It had, in fact, everything you would expect in a happy little gin mill except one thing. “Reality.” None of it was “real.”
The whole scene, including some of the partying people, was nothing but a collection of simulations taken out of machine storage. Just as I am, just as Essie is in her portable form-just as Sergei was.
You see, we didn’t have to be in the Spindle, real or otherwise. When we sat down to have a drink, we could have created any setting we liked. We often did, Essie and I. “Where want to dine?” Essie would ask, and I’d say, “Oh, I don’t know, Lutece? La Tour d’Argent? Or, no, I know, I’ve got a taste for fried chicken. How about a picnic in front of the Taj Mahal?”
And then our support systems would dutifully access the files marked “Taj Mahal” and “Chicken, fried,” and there we would be.
Of course, neither the background nor the food and drinks would be “real”—but neither were we. Essie was a machine-stored analog of my dear wife, who was still alive somewhere or other-and still my wife, too. I was the stored remainder of me, what was left after I died on the exciting occasion when we first met a living Heechee. Sergei was stored Sergei, because he’d died, too. And Albert Einstein—Well, Albert was something else entirely; but we kept him with us, because he was a hell of a lot of fun at a party.
And none of that made any difference! The drinks hit just as hard, the smoked fish was just as fat and salty, the little bits of raw crudites were just as crisp and tasty. And we never gained weight, and we never had hangovers.
While meat people—Well, meat people were a whole other thing.
There were plenty of meat people among the 3,726 Gateway veterans gathered to celebrate the Rock’s hundredth anniversary. A lot of them were good friends. A lot of the others were people I would have loved to have for friends, because all us old prospectors have a lot in common.
The difficulty with meat people is trying to carry on a conversation with them. I’m fast-I operate in gigabit time. They’re slow.
Fortunately, there’s a way of dealing with the situation, because otherwise trying to talk to one of those torpid, tardy, flesh and blood people would drive me right out of my mind.
When I was a kid in Wyoming, I used to admire the chess masters who hung around the parks, pushing their greasy pieces over the oilsmeared boards. Some of them could play twenty games at once, moving from board to board. I marveled. How could they keep track of twenty positions at once, remembering every move, when I could barely keep one in my head?
Then I caught on. They didn’t remember anything at all.
They simply came to a board, took in the position, saw a strategy, made a move, and went on to the next. They didn’t have to remember anything. Their chess-playing minds were so quick that any one of them could take the whole picture in while his opponent was scratching his ear.
See, that’s the way it is with me and meat people. I could not stand to carry on a conversation with a living person without doing at least three or four other things at the same time. They stood like statues! When I saw my old buddy Frankie Hereira, he was licking his lips as he watched some other ancient codger struggling to open a bottle of champagne. Sam Struthers was just coming out of the men’s room, his mouth opening to shout a greeting to some other live person in the hall. I didn’t speak to either. I didn’t even try. I just set up an image of myself and started it in motion, one for each of them. Then I “went away.”
I don’t mean I actually went anywhere; I just paid attention to other things. I didn’t have to stay around, because the subroutines in my programs were perfectly capable of walking one of my doppels toward Frankie and one toward Sam, and smiling, and opening “my” mouth to speak when they noticed “me.” By the time I had to make a decision on what it was I wanted to say, I would be back there.
But that was the meat people. Fortunately for my boredom threshold, there were lots of machine-stored people (or not exactly all of them people) as well. Some were very old friends. Some were people I knew because everybody knew them. There was Detweiler, who had discovered the Voodoo Pigs, and Liao Xiechen, who was a terrorist until the Heechee appeared and he changed sides. He was the one who had exposed the entire gang of murderers and bomb-throwers in the American space program. There was even Harriman, who had actually seen a supernova explode, and coasted long enough on the expanding wavefront to win a five-million-dollar science award in the old days. There was Mangrove, who wound up in a Heechee station orbiting a neutron star and found out that the queer, tiny, maneuverable globes moored to the station were actually sample collectors and could be made to go down to the star’s surface and bring back some eleven tons-a chunk almost as large as a fingernail-of neutronium. Mangrove ultimately died of the radiation dose he got bringing it home, but that didn’t keep him from joining us on Wrinkle Rock.
So I raced along the conduits of Gateway, quick as the lightning in the serried sky, and greeted a hundred old friends and new. Sometimes Portable-Essie was with me. Sometimes she was off on her own excursions of greeting. Faithful Albert was never out of call, but he never joined in the hugs and embraces, either. Fact was, he never showed himself except to me, or when invited to. Nobody in that giggly, steamy, high-school-reunion, New-Year’s-Eve, wedding-reception atmosphere wanted to bother with a mere data-retrieval system, even though he was about the very best friend I had ever had.
So when we were back in the Spindle, back drinldng with Sergei Borbosnoy, and things got a little tedious for me, I whispered, “Albert?”
Essie gave me a look. She knew what I was doing. (After all, she wrote his program, not to mention my own.) She didn’t mind; she just went on rattling along in Russian to Sergei. There wasn’t anything wrong in that, because of course I understand Russian-speak it fluently, along with a bunch of other languages, because, after all, I’ve had plenty of time to learn. What was wrong was that they were talking about people I didn’t know and didn’t care about.
“You called, O Master?” Albert murmured in my ear.
I said, “Don’t be cute. Have you figured out what’s going on with Cassata?”
“Not entirely, Robin,” he said, “because if I had I would of course have sought you out to report. However, I have drawn some interesting inferences.”
“Infer ahead,” I whispered, smiling at Sergei as he poured another freezing shot of vodka into my glass without even looking at me.
“I perceive three discrete questions,” said Albert comfortably, set-fling himself down to a nice, long tutorial. “The question of the relevance of the Institute seminars to JAWS, the question of the maneuvers, and the question of the presence of General Cassata himself here. These could be further subdivided into—”
“No,” I whispered, “they could not. Quick and simple, Albert.”
“Very well. The seminars are, of course, directly related to the central question of the Foe: How they could be recognized through their signatures, and why they wish to alter the evolution of the universe. The only real puzzle is why JAWS should now express concern about the Institute’s seminars, since there have been many similar conferences, without objection, from JAWS. I believe that that is related to the question of the maneuvers. For this belief I can adduce a datum: Since the maneuvers began, all communications from both the JAWS satellite and the Watch Wheel have been embargoed.”
“Err what?”
“Embargoed, yes, Robin. Cut off. Censored. Prohibited. No communication of any sort with either is allowed. I infer that, first, these events are related, and both are related to the maneuvers. As you know, there was a false alarm on the Watch Wheel some weeks ago. Perhaps it was not a false alarm—”