The good part, of course, was that the news could have been much, much worse. These hideous and unexpected creatures from Outside were quite horrible, with their bloated bodies and flabby faces. But they definitely were not, indeed were not anything like, the ones who were called "the Assassins" or "the Foe," those disembodied energy creatures who had decimated the living population of the galaxy before the Withdrawal. The appearance of these new aliens was revolting, yes, but they were not destroying anything.
Achiever did the best he could to reassure himself. He had one never-failing resource for such problems. It was time for him to consult it.
He found a corner to huddle in and called for help from the Stored Mind in the pod that hung between his wide-set, skinny thighs. "Ancestral Mind," he said, trying to keep the turmoil out of his voice, "awaken and help me, please. What are these creatures?"
The Stored Mind took a moment to answer, and then it—it was actually a she—sounded grumpy. "One moment, Achiever," she said.
Achiever expected no more from that particular ancestor. She had been stored for a long time, and, Achiever thought, was beginning to show it. It took a perceptible couple of seconds before there was a response. The ancestor's tired voice said, "Forgive me, Achiever. I have been resting. I am now querying other Stored Minds about the nature of your question—" Then, with a sort of hiccough, the voice abruptly changed tone. "Achiever!" she said more strongly. "They are indeed from Outside! There is much confusion among the Stored Minds on this question! I am attempting to find a consensus." The voice sounded startled, even worried—though Stored Minds never sounded startled, and especially not worried, since they no longer had anything to worry about.
When she spoke again the voice was less worried, but no less confused. "This is quite puzzling, Achiever," she said. "These new aliens appear to be the remote descendants of some kind of presentient being from the time before the retreat—perhaps, it is said, descendants of the race of hairy bipeds one of our survey ships had turned up on one not very interesting planet before the Withdrawal."
"They aren't all that hairy," Achiever objected.
"It has been a long time for them, Outside. They have evolved. Now they appear to be civilized, at least to a degree." Then the tone changed again. "Achiever, should you not be helping to deal with this matter instead of spending your time in idle curiosity?"
Achiever accepted the rebuke and terminated the linkup. He could not, however, stop thinking about the aliens, even as he continued on his quest for the dispatcher. Civilized? Yes, they could be called civilized, he thought. In fact, they seemed to be even technologically sophisticated enough to have mastered interstellar flight on their own....
Well, no, not exactly that, he corrected himself. They hadn't done it on their own. The word was that their first ships were clearly Heechee-made, undoubtedly some of the handful of ships that the Heechee themselves had left behind long ago.
That made Achiever wonder. Had it been a mistake? Would it not have been better to let the primitives do their own inventing?
Achiever didn't want to think such thoughts. That was coming close to accusing the ancestral Stored Minds of committing an error. That was not only unfair, but, by every lesson he had ever been taught, quite impossible. The Massed Minds were never wrong.
Achiever was glad when the dispatcher at last appeared, emerging from a knot of supplicants with throe of his subordinates hanging on his arm and demanding answers to urgent questions. He shook them all off when he saw Achiever. "You," he said. "Your ship is in the third amber-gold dock. It is being offloaded to prepare it for your expedition."
Expedition? Achiever opened his mouth to ask what expedition the dispatcher was talking about, but he was hurrying on. "See that the offloading is finished, and that your own stores are put on board as quickly as possible. You have a copilot to relieve you when necessary, do you not? Good. Once your ship is ready, you are to wait for a passenger, who will have additional equipment to be stowed. Then you are to launch at once."
"Yes, certainly," Achiever said, his abdominal muscles twisting in eager assent. "But where am I to launch to?"
The dispatcher gave him an incredulous stare, then shook his head. "Where do you think we are sending you? Outside, of course. Why else would we have chosen your ship?"
Quickly they went, straight up and out, out through the shell that enclosed the Core, the ship shuddering wildly, throwing them against their restraints, and the twisted crystal rod firing off its showers of sparks that didn't burn, didn't last, didn't seem to do anything at all except mark the fact that they were going Outside. It was like nothing Achiever had ever experienced before. A faint sound from Breeze, almost a whimper, told him that she was hit as hard as himself. Her face was dark with—not with fright, no, but at least with a severe case of worry. And when the fat sparks sputtered and died away, and the jolting stopped, and they all three were staring at the lookplate, Breeze was the first to speak. "How very ... many stars there are," she said.
Indeed there were countless stars out there, so many that they seemed to coalesce into one vast milky mist of starshine. Even their passenger was held to the plate. "I did not expect to see this spectacle again in my life," he said softly, more to himself than to the pilots.
Achiever turned away from the lookplate to gaze at him. The passenger, whose name was Burnish, was old, older than almost anyone Achiever had ever met, his scalp fuzz no longer gray but turned a muddy white. But he was a long way from frail. He returned Achiever's stare, then flapped his hands. "Perhaps you would like to see for yourself," he offered. "One moment and I will show you."
He gestured Achiever away from his pilot's perch and took his place. Carefully he set the control wheels to a new position. On the lookplate a colorful overlay sprang into existence, first a line of tiny orange course-marking bubbles, with the fishheads and arrowheads that marked navigational features. Burnish pointed with one bony hand.
"We will proceed on this course that I have set until we are farther from the Core," he said. "Then, you will see, the stars will be much more sparse and it will be easy to observe them optically. Do you have any other questions?"
He was looking at Breeze, but it was Achiever who answered. "One question, yes," he said. "We are Outside now. Isn't there more you should tell us?"
The old one looked him over carefully, his mouth widening with thought. Then he reached a decision. "Of course," he said. "It is your right to know. The reason we have come into the Outside galaxy is that we are conducting a search which is of great importance to all our race—indeed to all intelligent living things everywhere. What we are searching for is the present location of the Foe."
III
When they grew hungry, they ate. When they grew tired, they slept—both pilots at the same time, although in their separate nests, and neither mentioned Achiever's preference for having someone always at the controls. And Burnish did not reappear.
Which left them plenty of time to consider the meaning of what he had said, and to contemplate its consequences.
If the thought of pursuing those creatures called the Assassins, or sometimes simply the Foe, terrified Achiever, it was no discredit to him. He was as brave as any other Heechee in the Core—which is to say, not very, except in such exceedingly rare times when bravery was absolutely necessary.
This seemed to be one of those times. If it was true that they were going to track down the Foe, that faceless, formless embodiment of evil that had haunted every Heechee's nightmares, then Achiever was going to have to use up quite a lot of bravery. He would also have to have more information about the nature of this horror they were trying to track down. Since he couldn't ask Burnish, he sought other sources, pulling down from the shelves of the ship's library one after another of the crystalline fans that were the Heechee equivalent of books. As he fed them, one by one, into the reading machines, the first thing he was looking for was the record of those intelligent galactic races that had been found by Heechee explorers to have gone suddenly and violently extinct, thus leading to the discovery of the source of those extinctions and thus, very soon afterward, to the Heechee's Withdrawal to the Core.