Stan found words at last. "How long?"
"Not long, if that's what you want. A week or two—"
"Estrella! That'll be—what? A thousand years or more on Earth!"
She nodded. "And by then maybe it'll be worth going back to."
3
Hunting the Hunters
I
Before Estrella and Stan ever got to the Core—indeed, when you factor that enormous 40,000-to-l time difference into your calculations, long before they had even been born—a Heechee space pilot named Achiever was there already. That was because he lived there. He had lived in the Core all his life and had no desire ever to leave it. Achiever knew that there were a lot of highly interesting things Outside. However, he also knew how dangerous those interesting things might be, and so he had no more desire to see them for himself than did any other Heechee. (Not that Achiever thought of himself as a "Heechee." That was a human word. Achiever at that point had never heard it, and was not going to like it when he did.)
The flight for which Achiever was preparing certainly was not intended to take him Outside—though, curiously, his ship happened to be one of the few in the Heechee fleet that could actually have made the journey. It was also one of the larger Heechee ships, and so it would have flabbergasted any of those early Gateway prospectors if they had ever seen it. Any one of the Ones and Threes and Fives those early adventurers flew could have fit easily into one of its cargo holds.
Cargo was what Achiever's mission was all about. He was preparing to ferry essential supplies from the factories of the planet he was orbiting to the free-floating space station called Door. It was a run that ho had made more than thirty times already, without a single accident of any kind and with no serious delays. For this reason Achiever had just been promoted. His new title might be translated as "Pilot Who Is Sufficiently Capable and Cautious to Be Both Permitted and Required to Instruct Others," and the physical evidence of his new status was standing there before him. Her name was Breeze. She was the very first student pilot he had had assigned to him for training.
Although Achiever had never had a trainee before, he knew what was expected of him. "Tell me, Breeze," he addressed her, his voice kindly but in the tone of one who had the right to ask, "what would you do if you were approaching an object such as Door and your lookplate flipped from nearspace to a panoramic view?"
She didn't hesitate. "First I would check the bias on the lookplate and correct it if needed. If that didn't work I would activate the standby plate. If that too was inoperative, I would abort the docking, enter a holding orbit and disassemble the lookplate for repair. Do you want me to tell you how I would go about troubleshooting the system?"
He flapped his wrists, the equivalent of a shake of a human head. "Not just yet. First I want to know why you didn't simply allow the automatic systems to land you."
"That is of course what I would do for a planet landing, provided we had already passed the planet's radiation shield, Achiever, but you specified a destination like Door. Even a small excess of velocity at docking might breach Door's hull integrity, with loss of interior pressure. I would not take that risk. Now would you like me to describe the troubleshooting?"
Indeed he would. He listened attentively to her reply, and to her answers to the other technical problems he posed for her. They were all satisfactory. He could have complimented her. He didn't. He simply said, "Let's finish getting the cargo on board, shall we?"
By that time the human female Estrella had been born on her parents' New Mexican ranch, a very long distance away. As Breeze activated the handlers and the cargo began to move out of the landers into the ship itself, the male human, Stan, also was born in the American embassy hospital in Ankara, and a youth named Robinette Broadhead was dismally wondering if there was any possible way for him to escape a lifetime of drudgery in the Wyoming food mines.
These particular persons were all human beings. Of course Achiever had never heard of any of them, yet.
By the time loading was complete, Achiever had decided that he liked Breeze—liked her not in any sexual way but simply because she was smart and diligent and willing.
This might have been thought curious by any young human male in the presence of a good-looking young female. To Achiever there was nothing curious about it. He was hardly even aware that Breeze was pleasingly broad in the shoulders and slim in the waist, with her soft, gray neck fuzz decorously brushed flat. All those things were true enough, but what was also true was that Breeze's female genital organs were not in their mating configuration. That being so, her attractive features hardly mattered.
It is a known fact that the Heechee were reasonably like humans in that, now and then, some of them liked sorts of sexual practices that others might conceivably describe as "kinky." Not that kinky, though. Very few Heechee males were perverted enough to desire intercourse with a female who wasn't in estrus.
Achiever waved Breeze to the seat beside his own. "You may perch here," he informed her in the language of Do, but then, less formally, he added in the language of Feel, "At this point I think I should begin the voyage, but probably at some later time I will allow you to run the controls."
"Thank you, Achiever," she said gratefully, stowing her pod in the space between the leaves of the perch and watching attentively—although, in truth, she had experienced the setting of a course many times in her previous training. As he perfectly well knew.
Achiever put his splayed fingers on the knurled control wheel. That produced an immediate display of colored light that would have baffled any human—that had indeed baffled thousands of humans in the ancient Gateway days when every new prospector had to confront the fact that those incomprehensible settings could make the difference between life and death for him.
With quick competency Achiever set the course, paused and asked, "What about temperature, humidity, trace gases, all those parameters? I usually let the settings go to default, but if you have any special preferences?"
"Default is acceptable," she assured him. "I generally do that, too. I wonder sometimes why we bother with those settings."
Achiever made a woofling sort of sound, partly of sympathy, partly of good-humored reproach. "Yes. One might wonder so. But if someday you have a passenger with a medical problem, or a cargo that can be damaged if the settings are wrong, then you will know why."
Abashed, Breeze watched in silence as he squeezed the start control. All the subsidiary wheels crawled to their default settings, and they were off.
Unlike the largest vessels in the Heechee fleet, Achiever's craft did not require a hand on the controls after launch. He sat back and regarded his charge. "I could not help but notice," he said mildly, "that you have shown interest in this craft's special feature." He gestured toward the twisted crystal rod that rose in the center of the control chamber.
"I paid close attention to your teaching, Achiever!"
"Of course you did," he said, "but you could hardly fail to notice it, could you? You may have thought it was a penetrator, to let us through planetary radiation screens?"
"It does not look like one, Achiever."
"No," he agreed. "It does not. You've probably never seen one before. It is an order disruptor."
He expected a reaction to that. It took a moment, but then it came. "Oh," she said, and then, "Oh!"
"Yes," he said, with the shoulder shrug that was the Heechee equivalent of a human nod of sympathy. "It is the instrument that the generation of our parents used to transit into aligned systems." (Which is to say, in human terms, black holes. The Heechee didn't see them as holes, though. To be fair, even a human would have had to admit that, with all the radiation from infalling material, they were hardly ever black, either.) "You need not be alarmed," he added. "Naturally we are not going to be using it for that purpose. It is an interesting fact, however, that it is fully functional."