All this time dinner orders were coming in—sauerbraten, red cabbage and Tyrolean dumplings for the Klagenkamps, a shrimp stir-fry for the Daos, an assortment of Heechee finger foods for the party welcoming the new arrivals from the Core, about forty other assorted orders. Since none of them had bothered to give me any advance warning, what they were going to get would all be Food Factory dishes, without any of the from-scratch recipes that I am so good at, but they weren't any more likely to notice than most of my customers. While I was filling the orders, I commented to Harry, "I've never been off the Wheel."
He took a last bite of his apple and tossed the core over his shoulder. I erased it before it fell. "I know that, Markie," he said eagerly. "I thought you'd like to get out for a change."
Actually, it sounded like a potentially rewarding experience. I mused, "I suppose I could arrange to have my responsibilities met by another program."
"Of course you can, Markie. Does that mean you'll do it?"
Having assessed the relevant considerations, the most important of which is that I am the Wheel Authority's servant and I don't decline their orders, I gave him my decision. I said, "Yes. Will any organic humans accompany us?"
He looked shocked. "Oh, no, Markie. Not a chance. The Kugels don't get along real well with organic humans. They aren't so crazy about stored ones like me, either; that's why they wanted somebody like you to come along, so you could, you know, sort of keep them happy."
"I am uncertain of whom your pronouns refer to, Harry. Which 'they' is which?"
He said patiently, "The Wheel Authority people are the ones who decided they ought to have someone like you in the party. The other 'them' is the ones who are coming with us. Didn't I tell you? We're taking some of the components of the Kugelblitz along so they can—what would you call it?—revisit the scene of their crime. Like, you know, some of the Foe."
II
Filling orders kept me busy for the next half second or so, but not so busy that I didn't have time to ponder Harry's story. Unfortunately pondering produced little added data. I needed more. I began a search through the archives, but, while that might tell me all I could want to know about Harry's former planet, it was unlikely to have anything about the expedition itself. Still, we major programs do oblige each other when we can, and there were at least thirty or forty unofficial sources I could go to....
And while I was considering which would be most useful, one of them rang me up. "Marcus," she said, "I am extremely hungry. Please prepare for me some of those eggs Benedict, perhaps with a side of home-fried potatoes and a small salad."
Being herself a Stored Mind, she was not likely really to be hungry in the usual organic sense, but I was pretty sure I knew what was on her mind. Boredom often makes people want to eat, stored or organic, and there was frequent boredom in her job. "Certainly, Breeze," I said. "Shall I deliver it as usual?"
"No, no," she said crossly. "We're still in session. I'll come by for it when I get a moment." And was gone.
Breeze is one of my best and most senior customers, and one of the few really daringly experimental ones who happen to be a Heechee. Before the Heechee got corrupted by human beings, every one of them, Breeze included, would have been sickened—I don't mean just mildly repelled, I mean toss-your-cookies physically sickened—by the idea of eating the dead remains of formerly living creatures—other than the one kind of fish they did eat, anyway. Most still didn't like it. Cooking for them is just a matter of dictating pleasing colors, textures and scents to the Food Factory, the way they did back home in the Core.
That's not true for all of them now, though. This one old female Heechee on the Authority had been on stakeout duty for the Foe (as she called them back then) even before the Wheel was built, and I guess she was getting pretty bored with it. Anyway, she was one of the few Heechee to let me try a few experiments with her CHON-food while she was still organic. So I gave her a few hints of human taste sensations.
It wasn't hard. I had no trouble including some new flavors in her food—furanthiols for fruitiness, pyrazines for fresh green vegetables, that sort of thing. It went well, until I tried to give her an idea of what meat tasted like with a little bis-2-methyl-3-furyl-disulfide. The first dozen times she tried it she couldn't get it down—not so surprising, because the disulfides are tricky even for humans. But she stuck with it, and by and by she was eating cheeseburgers and hot dogs like any high-school kid. Then I taught her to like bouillabaisse and ripe Stilton cheese and all sorts of gourmet grub. She developed a particular appetite for oysters, to the point where she knew the difference between Wellfleets and Chincoteagues, and why the Boulognes weren't as delicately flavored as the little Japanese variety. None of it made her sick, either, the way some people thought it might. She ate three squares a day of my cooking right up until the organic body failed and she had to go into machine storage. (Well, not the kind of machine storage a human being would experience. She was a Heechee, so she became a Stored Mind instead.) Anyway, after that she ate—or "ate"—twice as much, but electronically.
I wished she would hurry up and pick up her meal, because the situation Harry had laid on me was hard for me to understand in two entirely different ways. First, I had had no idea that any of the Wheel people were intimate enough with the Kugels to plan trips with them. Second, I couldn't see just what the Kugels were supposed to do when they got there.
Harry was no help. "That's not my department, Markie. Me, I just think it would be interesting to see the old place again. So are you changing your mind about coming along?" And when I thought it over and told him that, no, I wasn't changing my mind he went off to tell the Authority we had a deal.
The Wheel Authority is made up almost entirely of organic, or formerly organic, persons—human and Heechee, with just one or two machine intelligences sharing their responsibilities. Having some actually living members is important to the organics for political reasons. (Or maybe just so they can keep on convincing themselves that organics matter.) The effect of it, though, is that the Authority is chronically, deplorably slow to act. I have a lot of sympathy for the stored or machine members, like Breeze and my other favorite Heechee customer, Thermocline. It cannot avoid being terribly tedious for them, waiting for the organics to take their turns to speak in the Authority sessions. It certainly was for me, so while Harry was informing the Authority of my agreement I had plenty of time to put my bread pudding in the oven, take care of the sixty or seventy new orders that had come in, ready Breeze's Eggs Benedict, deal with my other chores and, at the same time, access the relevant information on the planet I was about to visit, which (as I mentioned earlier) was called by humans "Arabella."
Human records didn't have anything to say about Arabella that I didn't already know. I'd already heard it all from Harry—many times. Heechee records were somewhat more informative. According to them, Arabella had once had a thriving biota, including a semi-intelligent species of cold-blooded hexapods, whom the Kugels had killed off half a million or so years ago, as part of their program of diligent mass murdering. There were pictures of the hexapods and a lot of technical data about geology and such, and that was about all there was.
I was a bit puzzled. There was nothing special about that history. I could not see why this quite ordinary planet was worth a trip, even with so expendable a crew as ourselves. There was nothing unusual in its history. The Kugels had resolutely killed off every other intelligent, or nearly intelligent, form of organic life they had come across in their explorations of the Galaxy. Everyone knows this, since that was what had made the Heechee retreat into their hiding place in the Core, for fear it would be their turn next. The only thing worth remembering about Arabella was that it had been one of the pre-programmed destinations in the first human-manned Heechee ships from Gateway. Unfortunately for the human explorers who by the luck of the draw got that particular flight plan, it was a one-way trip. They went there. Then they stayed there. Their ships ran out of programming as soon as they arrived and they couldn't come back. Three or four parties of those early Gateway explorers arrived on Arabella at one time or another, and there they remained, scratching out a miserable existence from the planet's unfamiliar plants and animals, until at last humans figured out how to make a Heechee ship do what they wanted, instead of what the Heechee had designed it to do long ago. Not long after that human rescue parties got around to checking out planets like Arabella and the marooned crews were saved—the handful of them who were still alive, that is.