But after Achiever had scanned every document on the subject he still had not found answers for all the questions in his mind, so he turned to the Stored Mind in the pod that hung between his wide-set, skinny thighs. As he tapped the pod's medallion, "Ancestral Mind," he said to the air, but knowing the mind would hear, "is there no additional information on this race?"
The Stored Mind took a moment to answer, and then she still sounded annoyed at being disturbed. "One moment, Achiever," she said. And then: "The file you were just accessing dealt with the race of amphibious lizard-like creatures who had managed to send person-carrying rockets into their nearby space before their whole population was wiped out overnight. Is it additional material on them that you seek?"
"Exactly," Achiever said.
"There isn't any," said the Stored Mind, and went silent.
Gloomily Achiever checked the time. It was the period when it would be appropriate to sleep again, and still no sign of Burnish. As he burrowed into his nest he thought sourly that he probably would have insomnia, and if he did get to sleep his dreams would be unpleasant.
They weren't, though. He dropped off at once, and if he had any dreams at all he was not aware of them.
When Achiever awoke, he did what any Heechee did upon arising: he removed the pod that held his Ancient Ancestor in order to void his wastes; he replaced it when through and brushed himself clean; he put on a fresh tunic and tossed the old one into the laundering machine; he snipped off a few shoots of the vine that grew over the door and chewed them for a moment before discarding them, his teeth now satisfactorily oiled; he ordered a morning-menu selection from the food machine and consumed it. Its textures and flavors were of the sorts he was on record as preferring, and he ate it with as much pleasure as on any normal day. In fact, nothing in his actions suggested this day was anything out of the way at all.
Achiever had not suddenly stopped being afraid. He had simply reached a state of acceptance. Since he could not rid himself of the fear, he had done the next best thing; he had made up his mind to live with it, and get on with his life.
When he entered the control chamber, Breeze was perched on the pilot's rest, a couple of reading fans in her hands, gazing glumly at the lookplate. He greeted her in the language of Feel, and added: "You have been reading up on the Foe, haven't you?"
She looked at him almost angrily. "I have done that, of course," she told him, "but there wasn't much to learn, was there? They killed off sentient races; our ancestors thought they would kill us if they found us; so we ran into the Core to hide. Is there anything else?"
"Not much," Achiever admitted.
"That's what I thought. So then I decided to do something more useful, so I checked out the course Burnish laid for us, so at least I would have some idea of where we were going."
Achiever could feel the dense fur at the back of his head bristle in the startlement reflex. Why, of course! Clearly that was the most sensible thing to do, and why had he not thought of it himself? "And what did you find?" he asked.
She shrugged her belly muscles irritably and touched the control console. A 3-D plot of the galaxy sprang up at once. "There," she said. "But it means nothing to me."
Achiever studied it. It was a model to scale, which meant it could show almost no detail. What there was was a bright string of orange course-marking bubbles, like the beads on a child's toy necklace that began among the thick wash of starlight at the Galaxy's center. The first quarter or so of it was unremarkable, arrowing straight out of the dense galactic center. Then it looped around three or four of the dozen snakey galactic arms and the relatively barren spaces between them, until it ended partway out one of the arms.
"If that line is our course," Achiever said slowly, "we seem to be getting to our destination in a pretty roundabout way." And from behind him another voice said:
"So it is, Achiever. Would you care to try to guess why?"
Both the pilots turned to see Burnish entering the control chamber. He seemed rested and at ease. "Well, Achiever?" he said. "Or you, Breeze?"
"We're looking for something that will lead us to the Foe," she said, a beat before Achiever was about to make the same guess.
"I hope it will not actually lead to a confrontation," Burnish said wryly, "but, yes, that is the general plan. However, before we can even begin we must go out some distance from the Core. That is where the living things are. It is only out where the stars are farther apart that life can evolve, Breeze. Here in the center of the galaxy nothing organic exists. The radiation is far too intense for organic life to survive."
Breeze looked puzzled. "I didn't think the Foe were organic life, exactly."
"No, they are not. But their prey is."
He glanced at Achiever, who had just straightened up with a baffled expression on his leathery face. "Do you have a problem?" Burnish asked.
"No. That is, yes. I mean I just remembered, didn't the explorers find that the Foe had holed up in a sort of aligned system that was actually outside the galaxy?"
"They did. We did, that is, since I was one of those explorers. The Foe were found to be in a cluster of such systems just outside the galactic halo."
"Then what are we looking for?" Achiever demanded.
"We are looking to make sure that they are still there," Burnish said somberly. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then his belly muscles rippled in the equivalent of a shrug. "Come into my chamber, both of you. Let me show you what I have been doing."
The small chunks of unidentifiable instrumentation that Burnish had brought aboard had now been assembled into larger masses of unidentifiable instrumentation. A pile of blue-glowing boxes were stacked against one wall, the one at the top displaying a lookplate like the lookplate over the piloting module, but blank. Against another wall was a lustrous silvery cage, and within it a jagged diamond. Burnish touched a knurled wheel and the wall lookplate lit up, displaying a pebbly gray field. "It might be better if I had some help here," he said, "so perhaps I had best teach you two how to do this. Watch." As he adjusted the wheel the gray dissolved, and they were looking at the same exterior scene of the central galaxy. No, Achiever corrected himself, not quite the same. This lookplate narrowed the field and increased the magnification; now individual stars were visible, and many showed actual disks.
"You know," Burnish said professorially, "that each voyage of a highspeed ship like ours leaves a sort of ripple in space behind it?"
"I have been taught this, yes," Achiever said, and Breeze nodded.
"Then let me show you what these ripples look like." He made other adjustments. The magnification increased again, while the stars themselves faded slightly. Breeze gasped, and then Achiever saw it too. Images like bundles of pinkly luminous straws showed among the stars. What they resembled most of all was what human scientists would have called Feynman diagrams. As no one in the ship had ever heard of Richard Feynman nor his graphic displays of the summation of probabilities, they only called them "representations of potential loci."