So no harm came to young Sneezy, except that when he told his parents about it that night they were, respectively, angry and amused.
The angry one was his father, Bremsstrahlung, who took his skeletal son on his bony knee and hissed, “This is sickening! I am going to request a work order on the schoolthing for letting this fat-bodied bully hurt our son!”
The amused one was Sneezy’s mother. “Worse happened to me in school, Bremmy,” she said, “and that was back Home. Let the boy fight his own battles.”
“Heechee do not fight, Femtowave.”
“Human beings do, Bremmy, and I speculate that we will have to learn this from them-oh, in a nondamaging way, to be sure.” She put down the shiny, light-emitting instrument she had been studying be-cause she had brought some work home from the office. She stepped-it was a motion more like skating than walking, because of the light gravity on the Wheel-across the room to lift Sneezy from his father’s lap. “Feed the boy, my dear,” she said good-humoredly, “and he will forget the whole matter. You are taking it more seriously than he.”
So Femtowave scored fifty percent on that exchange. She was quite right in that her mate was far more upset than their son. (In fact, Bremsstrahlung was reprimanded the next day in his Dream Seat, be-cause he was still irritated. That caused him to allow his mind to drift toward the smart-ass human kid when it should have been kept vacant. That was a no-no. It meant Bremsstrahlung was broadcasting more remanent irritation than he should be letting himself feel-after all, the very purpose of Dream-Seat specialists like himself was to feel nothing, but only be wholly receptive to whatever sensations might come through the Seat.)
However, Femtowave was wrong in her other assertion. Sneezy never forgot it.
Perhaps he did not remember it properly. What stuck with him was not just that human beings did indeed fight sometimes, but that their fighting did not take place only with those grossly bulging fists or grossly swollen feet. They could hurt someone simply by calling a name.
Did I do it wrong again? Should I have started by explaining the purpose of the Watch Wheel?
Well, better late than never. Let’s back up again to get the loose ends reraveled.
When the first Heechee who could not control his own destiny (his name was Captain) met the first human being who could (his name was Robinette Broadhead, because he was me), the Heechee child named Sternutator was on that standby ship in the core with his parents. He was homesick. “Home” was a cozy little city of eight or ten million on a planet of an orangey-yellowy little star inside the great black hole that was the core of the Galaxy. Even at three, Sneezy knew what that meant. He knew that the reason his family was on the ship was that there might come a time when they would all have to drop everything and plunge through the Schwarzschild barrier, and rejoin the outside stars.
He didn’t expect it to happen to him, of course. No one ever does.
Then, when he and his family were assigned to the Watch Wheel, Sneezy found out what real homesickness was.
The purpose of the Wheel was simple.
It was a place to put Dream Seats.
The Dream Seats were a Heechee invention that we’d come across before we ever met a living Heechee. What the Heechee used them for (among other things) was to keep tabs on planets where intelligent life might someday evolve but hadn’t yet-like our own planet, a few hundred thousand years ago, when the Heechee last came to Earth.
The “dream” signals weren’t dreams. Basically, they were emotions. A Heechee (or a human being), encased in the Dream-Seat web of glittering antenna-metal, could feel what others were feeling-even when the others were far away. “Far away” in planetary terms, at least. They didn’t work in any useful way in galactic terms. This was because the Dream-Seat signals unfortunately came by simple EMF. They were limited by the speed of light and obeyed the law of inverse squares, so the effective range of the Dream Seats was only in the billions of kilometers, not the trillions of trillions that separated star from star.
The job of Bremsstrahlung and the other Dream-Seat operators, both human and Heechee, was to be the eyes and ears of the Wheel. Their assignment was to monitor the most important object in either Heechee or human cosmology, the kugelblitz that hung outside the galactic halo. There wasn’t any point in the galaxy itself close enough for the purpose. So the Wheel had been built and flown to a position only six AU from the kugelblitz, in its lonely position in near-intergalactic space.
That was, everyone agreed, a reasonable way to do it. It was true that in the event that something at last did transpire around the kugelblitz, and the watchers did finally receive the signals they feared, it would be some forty-odd minutes after the actual event, because that was how long it would take light-speed signals to cross six times the distance of the Earth from the Sun (which is what 6 AU means, dummy).
There was also just a tiny bit of uncertainty over whether the Dream Seats would catch anything at all in that event.
After all, some argued, the model of the Dream Seat the Heechee had originally used did not have any sensitivity for, say, machine-stored intelligences like my very own Albert Einstein; it was only after people like Essie tinkered with them that they could handle that chore. What reason was there to believe it would be able to detect the wholly unknown signatures of the basically theoretical Assassins?
But there wasn’t anything they could do about the second problem.
And as to the first, as nothing had happened around the kugelblitz for, almost certainly, some millions of years, it did not seem that three quarters of an hour one way or another would make any difference.
The next morning Sneezy was awakened by the voice of the house-thing in the wall, saying in the Heechee language, “Drill Day, Sternutator. Drill Day. Wake up now for Drill Day!” It kept repeating its message until Sneezy had slid out of the warm hug of his pouchy hammock, and then it relented: “Drill Day, Sternutator-but it is only a aass Two Drill. There will be no school.”
That was a case of bad news turned good for Sneezy! He slung his pod between his skinny thighs and pulled on the rest of his clothes and put a call through to Harold-for they did not always fight-while he oiled his teeth. “Shall we watch the ship come in?” Sneezy proposed, and Harold, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, yawned and said, “You bet your tiny ass, Dopey. Meet you in ten minutes at the schoolhall corner.”
Since it was a Drill Day, even a Class Two Drill, both Sneezy’s parents were already gone to their posts, but the housething parented for both of them. It pleaded with Sneezy to eat some breakfast (not this morning! but he let it make him a sandwich to eat on the run) and urged him to take an airbath (but he’d had one the night before, and even his father was not that strict about hygiene). Sneezy closed the apartment door on the housething’s entreaties and hurried through the quiet Drill-Day passages of the Wheel toward the schoolhall.
When Harold was not being overbearing, and Sneezy not sullenly resentful, they were friends.
That hadn’t happened right away. Harold was nearly the first human being Sneezy ever saw, and Sneezy was definitely Harold’s first Heechee. The looks of each appalled the other. To Sneezy, Harold looked fat, bloated, grossly swollen-about like a corpse that’s been in the water for a week, maybe. To Harold, Sneezy looked worse than that.
The thing a Heechee looks most like is a human being who has died in the desert and dried out to rope and leather. Sneezy had arms and legs like a person, but he didn’t have any flesh to speak of on them. And, of course, he had that funny pod. Not to mention that faint ammonia smell that hovers around all Heechee all the time.
So friendship wasn’t instinctive at first. On the other hand, they didn’t have much choice. There were fewer than fifty children on the whole Watch Wheel, and two-thirds of those were in the other schools spaced around the rim. So their choice of peers was limited. The babies, six-year-olds and younger, of course didn’t count. The near-adult teenagers counted a lot, to be sure-either Sneezy or Harold would have been thrilled to be allowed to hang out with any of them-but they also, of course, didn’t want to be bothered with kids.