The Annals of the Heechee

1 ON WRINKLE ROCK

It isn’t easy to begin. I thought of a whole bunch of different ways to do it, like cute:

You don’t know about me without you have read some books that was made by Mr. Fred Pohl. He told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. But my friendly data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein, says I’m too prone to obscure literary references anyway, so the Huckleberry Finn gambit was out. And I thought of starting with a searing expression of the soul-searching, cosmic angst that’s always (as Albert also reminds me) so much a part of my normal conversation:

To be immortal and yet dead; to be almost omniscient and nearly omnipotent, and yet no more real than the phosphor flicker on a screen-that’s how I exist. When people ask what I do with my time (so much time! so much of it crammed into each second, and with an eternity of seconds), I give them an honest answer. I tell them that I study, I play, I plan, I work. Indeed, that is all true. I do all these things. But during and between them I do one other thing. I hurt.

Or I could just start with a typical day. Like they do in the PV interviews. “A candid look at one moment in the life of the celebrated Robinette Broadhead, titan of finance, political powerhouse, maker and shaker of events on all the myriad worlds.” Maybe including a glimpse of me wheeling and dealing-for example, a table-pounding conference with the brass hats at the Joint Assassin Watch or, better still, a session at the Robinette Broadhead Institute for Extra-Solar Research:

I stepped up to the podium in a storm of serious applause. Smiling, I raised my arms to quell it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “I thank each of you for making time in your busy schedules to join us here. You are a distinguished group of astrophysicists and cosmologists, famed theorists and Nobel laureates, and I welcome you to the Institute. I declare this workshop on the fine physical structure of the early universe to be in session.”

I really do say that kind of thing, or at least I send down a doppel to do it and my doppel does. I have to. It’s expected of me. I’m not a scientist, but through my Institute I supply the cash that pays the bills that lets science get done. So they want me to show up to greet them at the opening sessions. Then they want me to go away so they can work, and I do.

Anyway, I could not decide which of those tracks to begin on, and so I won’t use any of them. They’re all characteristic enough, though. I admit it. Sometimes I’m a little too cute. Sometimes, maybe even often, I am unattractively burdened with my own interior pain, which never seems to go away. Often I’m just a touch pompous; but at the same time, honestly, I am frequently quite effective in ways that matter a lot. The place where I’m actually going to start is with the party on Wrinkle Rock. Please bear with me. You have to put up with me only for a little while, and I have to do it always.

I would go almost anywhere for a really good party. Why not? It’s easy enough for me, and some parties happen only once. I even flew my own spaceship there; that was easy, too, and didn’t really take any time from the eighteen or twenty other things I was doing at the time.

Even before we got there I could feel the beginning of that nice party tingle, because they had the old asteroid dressed up for the occasion. Left to itself, Wrinkle Rock wasn’t much to look at. It was patchy black, spotted with blue, ten kilometers long. It was shaped more or less like a badly planned pear that the birds had been pecking at. Of course, those pockmarks weren’t from pecking birds. They were landing sockets for ships like ours. And, just for the party, the Rock had been prettied up with big, twinidy starburst letters-Our Galaxy The First 100 Years Are the Hardest-revolving around the rock like a belt of trained fireflies. The first part of what it said wasn’t diplomatic. The second part wasn’t true. But it was pretty to look at, anyway.

I said as much to my dear portable wife, and she grunted comfortably, settling herself in my arm, “Is garish. Real lights! Could have used holograms.”

“Essie,” I said, turning my head to nibble her ear, “you have the soul of a cybernetician.”

“Ho!” she said, twisting around to nibble back-only she nibbled a lot harder-“Am nothing but soul of cybernetician, as are you, dear Robin, and kindly pay attention to controls of ship instead of fooling around.”

That was just a joke, naturally. We were right on course, sliding into a dock with that agonizing slowness of all material objects; I had hundreds of milliseconds to spare when I gave the True Love its final nudge. So I gave Essie a kiss .

Well, I didn’t exactly give her a kiss, but let me leave it that way for now, all right? And she added, “Are making a big deal of this, you agree?”

“It is a big deal,” I told her, and kissed her a little harder, and, since we had plenty of time, she kissed me back.

We spent the long quarter of a second or so while True Love drifted through the intangible glitter of the party sign in as pleasant and leisurely a fashion as one could wish. That’s to say, we made love.

Since I am no longer “real” (but neither is my Essie)-since neither of us is still really meat-one may ask, “How do you do that?” I have an answer for that question. The answer is, “Beautifully.” Also “layishly,” “lovingly,” and, above all, “expeditiously.” I don’t mean we shirk our work. I just mean that it doesn’t take long to do it; and so, after we had pleased each other powerfully, and lounged around for a while afterwards languidly, and even showered sharingly (a wholly unnecessary ritual that, like most of our rituals, we do just for fun), we still had plenty of time out of that quarter of a second to study the other docking sockets on the Rock.

We had some interesting company ahead of us. I noted that one of the ships docked ahead of us was a big old original-Heechee vessel, the kind that we would have called a “Twenty” if we’d known that so huge a ship existed, back in the old days. We didn’t just spend that time rubbernecking. We’re shared-time programs, you know. We can easily do a dozen things at once. So I also kept in touch with Albert, to check on whether there were any new transmissions from the core, and make sure there was nothing from the Wheel, and keep in touch with a dozen other interests of one kind or another; while Essie ran her own search-and-merge scans. So by the time our locking ring mated with one of those bird-pecked holes that were actually the berthing ports for the asteroid, we were both in a pretty good mood and ready to party.

One of the (many) advantages of being what dear Portable-Essie and I are is that we didn’t have to unfasten seat belts and check seals and open locks. We don’t have to do anything much. We don’t have to move our storage fans around-they stay right where they are, and we go where we like through the electrical circuits of whatever kind of place we happen to be plugged into. (Usually that’s the True Love when we’re traveling, which we usually are.) If we want to go farther than that, we can go by radio, but then we’re up against that tiresome lag in round-trip communications.

So we docked. We plugged in to Wrinkle Rock’s systems. We were there.

Specifically, we were on Level Tango, Bay Forty-something of the tired old asteroid, and we were not by any means alone. The party had begun. The joint was jumping. There were a dozen people gathered to greet us-people like us, I mean-wearing party hats or holding party drinks, singing, laughing. (There were even a couple of meat people in sight, but they wouldn’t even discern that we had arrived for many milliseconds yet.) “Janie!” I shouted at one, hugging her; and “Sergei, golubka!” Essie cried, hugging another; and right then, while we were in the first moment of greeting and hugging and being happy, a nasty new voice snapped, “Hey, Broadhead.”

I knew the voice.

I even knew what would come next. What bad manners! Flicker, flash, pop, and there was General Julio Cassata, looking at me with the (barely) controlled sneer of soldier-to-civilian contempt, across a broad, bare desktop that hadn’t been there a moment before. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

I said, “Oh, shit.”

I didn’t like General Julio Cassata. I never had, though we kept running into each other’s lives.

That wasn’t because I wanted it that way. Cassata was always bad news. He didn’t like civilians (like me) messing in what he still called “military affairs,” and he didn’t much like machine-stored people of any kind. Cassata was not only a soldier, he was still meat.

Only this time he wasn’t meat. He was a doppel.

That was an interesting fact in itself, because meat people don’t make doppels of themselves lightly.

I would have pursued that odd fact farther, except that I was too busy thinking about all the things I didn’t like about Julio Cassata. His manners are lousy. He had just demonstrated that. There is an etiquette to the gigabit space that we machine-stored people inhabit. Polite machine-stored people don’t just dump themselves on each other without warning. They approach politely when they want to talk to you. Maybe they even “knock” on a “door” and wait outside politely until you say, “Come in.” And they certainly do not impose their private surrounds on each other. That’s the kind of behavior that Essie calls nekulturny, meaning it stinks. Just what I would expect from Julio Cassata: He’d overridden the physical bay we were in and the gigabit-space simulation of it that we were jointly occupying. There he was with his desk and his medals and his cigars and all; and that was just plain rude.

Of course, I could have pushed all that out and got back to my own surround. Guys do that sort of thing when they’re stubborn. It’s like two secretaries one-upping each other about whose boss gets put on the PV-phone first. I didn’t choose to do that. It wasn’t because I have any hang-up about being rude to rude people. It was something else.

I had finally got around to wondering why the real, or meat, Cassata had made a machine duplicate of himself.

What was before us was a machine simulation in gigabit space, just as my own beloved Portable-Essie was a doppel of my also beloved (but, these days, beloved only at second hand) real-Essie. The original meatCassata was no doubt chomping a real cigar several hundred thousand kilometers away, on the JAWS satellite.

When I figured out the implications of that, I actually almost felt sorry for the doppel. So I suppressed all the instinctive words that suggested themselves. I only said, “What the hell do you want from me?”

Bullies respond well to being bullied. He let a little of the fire go out of the steely-eyed glare. He even smiled-I think he meant it to be friendly. His eyes slid from my face over to Essie, who had popped herself into Cassata’s surround to see what was going on, and said, in what could have been intended as a light tone, “Now, now, Mrs. Broadhead, is that any way for old friends to talk to each other?”

“Is very poor way for old friends to talk,” she said noncommittally.

I pressed: “What are you doing here, Cassata?”

“I came to the party.” He smiled-oily smile, fake smile; he had very little to smile about, considering. “When we came off maneuvers, most of the old ex-prospectors got leave to come here for the reunion. I hitched a ride. I mean,” he explained, as though, of all people, Essie and I needed explaining to, “I doppeled myself and put the store on the ship that was coming here.”

“Maneuvers!” Essie sniffed. “Maneuvers against what? When Foe come out, are going to pull out six-shooters and fill skunks with holes like Swiss cheese, blam-blam-blam?”

“We have better than six-shooters on our cruisers these days, Mrs. Broadhead,” Cassata said genially; but I had had enough small talk.

I asked again, “What do you want?”

Cassata abandoned the smile and got back to his natural state of nasty. “Nothing,” said Cassata. “By that I mean nothing, Broadhead. I want you to butt out.” He wasn’t even trying to be genial anymore.

I kept my temper. “I’m not even butting in.”

“Wrong! You’re butting in right now in your damn Institute. You’ve got workshops going on. One in New Jersey, one in Des Moines. One on Assassin signatures. One on early cosmology.”

Since those statements were perfectly true, I only said, “The Broadhead Institute is in business to do that kind of thing. That’s our charter. It’s what we founded it for, and it’s why JAWS gives me exofficio status so I have a right to sit in on JAWS planning sessions.”

“Well, old buddy,” Cassata said happily, “see, you’re wrong about that, too. You don’t have a right. You have that privilege. Sometimes. A privilege isn’t a right, and I’m warning you not to put it on the line. We don’t want you getting in the way.”

I really hate those guys sometimes. “Now, look, Cassata,” I began, but Essie stopped me before I’d even picked up speed.

“Boys, boys! Cannot save this for another time? Came here to party, not to fight.”

Cassata hesitated, looking belligerent. Then he nodded slowly, looking thoughtful. “Well, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said, “that’s not a bad idea. It can keep a while; after all, I don’t have to report back for five or six meat hours yet.” Then he turned to me. “Don’t leave the Rock,” he ordered. And vanished.

Essie and I looked at each other. “Nekulturny,” she said, wrinkling up her nose as though she still smelled his cigar.

What I said was worse than that, and Essie put her arm around me. “Robin? Is pig, that man. Forget him, okay? Aren’t going to let him make you all gloopy and sour again, please?”

“Not a chance!” I said bravely. “Party time! I’ll race you to the Blue Hell!”

It was, actually, one hell of a fine party.

I hadn’t taken Essie seriously when she asked if I thought the party was too much of a big deal. I knew she didn’t mean it. Essie had never been a prospector herself; but every human being alive knew what this party was.

It was to celebrate nothing less than the centennial of the finding of the Gateway asteroid, and if there was ever a bigger deal in the history of the human race, I don’t know what it could have been.

There were two reasons why Wrinide Rock was chosen for the site of the hundredth anniversary party. One was that, basically, the asteroid had been converted into an old folks’ home. It was perfect for the geriatric cases. When the treatment for atherosclerosis made the osteoporosis worse, and the antitumor phages brought on Meniere’s syndrome or Alzheimer’s, Wrinide Rock was the place to be. Old hearts didn’t have to pump so hard. Old limbs didn’t have to struggle to keep a hundred kilos of meat and bone erect. The maximum gravity anywhere was about one percent of Earth-normal. Totterers could trot and skip; they could turn cartwheels if they wanted to. They couldn’t be caught by slow, uncertain reflexes in front of a speeding car; there weren’t any cars. Oh, they could die, of course. But that didn’t have to be fatal, because Wrinide Rock had the very best (and most heavily used) personality-storage facilities in the universe. When the old meat carcass passed the point of repair, the ancient put himself in the hands of the Here After people, and the next thing he knew he was seeing the world with unfiawed vision, hearing the tiniest sound, forgetting nothing, learning fast. He was bloody well reborn!—only without the mess and nastiness of the first time. Life-maybe I should say “life”—as a machine-stored intelligence was not the same as being in your own body. But it wasn’t bad. In some ways it was better.

So say I, and I ought to know.

You never saw a happier bunch of machine-stored citizens than the folks who lived on Wrinlde Rock. It really was a rock. It was a lumpy old asteroid, a few kilometers through, more or less, just like the million others that circle the Sun between Jupiter and Mars or some other place. Well-not just like. This particular asteroid was pierced and drilled with tunnels from crust to crust. No human being had drilled them. We found it that way; and that was the other reason why it was the best place to have the celebration for the hundredth anniversary of human interstellar flight.

Wrinkle Rock, you see, was quite an unusual asteroid, even a unique one. Originally it circled the Sun in an orbit at right angles to the ecliptic. That was the merely unusual part. The unique part was that when it was found, it had been stuffed full of ancient Heechee spaceships. Not just one or two, but lots of them-nine hundred and twentyfour, in fact! Ships that still worked!—well, that worked most of the time, anyway, especially if you didn’t care where you were going. We never knew where that would be, at first. We got in the ship, and we fired ‘er up, and leaned back, and waited, and prayed.

Sometimes we hit lucky.

More often, we died. Most of the ones of us still around for the party were the ones who had been lucky.

But every successful voyage in a Heechee ship taught us something, and by and by we could go anywhere in the Galaxy, and even be pretty sure of arriving alive. We even improved on the Heechee technology in a few ways. They used rockets to get from dirtside to low orbit; we used Lofstrom loops. Then the asteroid wasn’t necessary anymore to the people running the space-exploration program.

So they moved it into Earth orbit.

First they were going to turn it into a museum. Then they decided to make it a home for survivors of the Heechee trips. That’s when we began to call it Wrinkle Rock. Before that its name had been Gateway.

Now, here we are going to come up against another communication problem, because how do I say what Essie and I did next?

The easy way is just to say we partied.

Well, we did that, all right. That’s what you do at parties. We flitted around in our disembodied way to greet and hug and trade catch-up stones with our disembodied friends-not that all our friends on the Rock were disembodied, but we didn’t bother with the meat ones right away. (I don’t want to give the impression we don’t love our meat friends. They are just as dear to us as the machine-stored ones, but, my God, they’re tediously slow.)

So for the next tens of thousands of milliseconds it was just one long succession of, “Marty! Long time no see!” and, “Oh, Robin, look how young Janie Yee-xing has made self!” and, “Remember the way this place used to smelt?” It went on for a long time, because after all this was a pretty big party. Well, I’ll give you the numbers. After about the first fifty big hugs and glad lies I took a moment to call up my faithful data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein. “Albert,” I said when he ambled in, blinking at me amiably, “how many?”

He sucked his pipe a moment, then pointed the stem at me. “Quite a lot, I’m afraid. There were, all in all, thirteen thousand eight hundred forty-two Gateway prospectors, first to last. Some are, of course, irretrievably dead. A number of others have chosen not to come, or couldn’t, or perhaps are not here yet. But my present count is that three thousand seven hundred twenty-six are present, about half of whom are machine-stored. There are also, to be sure, a number of guests of former prospectors, as in the case of Mrs. Broadhead, not to mention a number of patients here for medical reasons unconnected with exploration.”

“Thank you,” I said; and then, as he started to leave, “One more thing, Albert. Julio Cassata. It has been bugging me to try to figure out just why he is getting nasty about the Institute workshops, and especially why he is here at all. I’d appreciate it if you could look into the matter.”

“But I already am doing that, Robin.” Albert smiled. “I’ll report to you when I think I have some information. Meanwhile, have a nice time.”

“I already am,” I said, satisfied. An Albert Einstein is a handy gadget to have around; he takes care of things when I’m having fun. So I went back to partying with an easy mind.

We didn’t know all of the 3,726 reuniting veterans. But we knew an awful lot of them; and that’s what makes it a little hard to tell you exactly what we were doing, because who wants to hear how many times one of us shrieked to one of them, or one of them cried to one of us, “What a surprise! How wonderful you look!”

We zoomed through gigabit space all up and down and through the riddled quadrants and levels and tunnels of the old rock, greeting this one and that one of our colleagues and machine-stored peers. We had drinks with Sergei Borbosnoy in the Spindle-Sergei had been Essie’s classmate in Leningrad before taking off for Gateway and, eventually, a mean, lingering death from radiation exposure. We spent a long time at a cocktail party in the Gateway museum, wandering with glasses in hand around the exhibits of artifacts from Venus and Peggys Planet, and bits and pieces of tools and fire pearls and’ prayer-fan datastores from all over the galaxy. We ran into Janie Yee-xing, who had been going with our friend Audee Walthers III before he took off to visit the Heechee in the core. Probably she’d wanted to marry him, I thought, but the question no longer was relevant, because Janie had got herself killed trying to land a chopper in the middle of a winter-weather hum-cane on a planet called Persephone. “Of all dumb things,” I said, grinning at her. “An aircraft accident!” And then I had to apologize, because nobody likes to hear that their death was dumb.

Those were the stored souls like us, the ones we could talk to easily and without intermediaries. Of course, there were a lot of meat people we wanted to greet, too.

But that was a whole other problem.

Being a disembodied mind in gigabit space is not easily described.

In a way, it’s like sex.

That is, it’s something that you can’t easily say what it’s like to someone who hasn’t tried it. I know this about sex, because I’ve tried to describe the joys of making love to some rather odd people-well, not exactly people but intelligences-never mind who they were just yet—and it takes a lot of work. After many milliseconds of listening to my attempts at description and discussion and metaphor-and a lot of incomprehension-what they’ve said was something like, “Oh, yeah, now I get it! It’s like that other thing you do-sneezing-right? When you know you have to, and you can’t do it, only you have to? And it gets to be more and more of an itch until you can’t stand it if you don’t sneeze, and then you do, and it feels good? Is that right?”

And I say, “No, that’s wrong,” and give up.

It’s just as hard to tell what it’s like in gigabit space. I can describe some of the sorts of things I do there, though. For instance, when we were drinking with Sergei Borbosnoy in the Spindle, we weren’t “really” in the Spindle. A Spindle did, actually, exist; it was the central hollow in the Gateway asteroid. At one time the bar it contained-it was called the Blue Hell-had been every prospector’s favorite place for drinking and gambling and trying to get up enough courage to sign on for one of those terrifying, often fatal and one-way rides in a Heechee ship. But the “real” Spindle wasn’t used for drinking anymore. It had been converted into a sunlamped solarium for the feeblest cases among the geriatric inhabitants of Wrinkle Rock.

Did that cause us any problems? Not a bit! We just created our own simulated Spindle, complete with Blue Hell gambling casino, and we sat there with Sergei, swilling down icy vodka and nibbling pretzels and smoked fish. The simulation had tables, bartenders, pretty serving waitresses, a three-piece band playing hits of half a century ago, and a noisy, celebrating, party crowd.

It had, in fact, everything you would expect in a happy little gin mill except one thing. “Reality.” None of it was “real.”

The whole scene, including some of the partying people, was nothing but a collection of simulations taken out of machine storage. Just as I am, just as Essie is in her portable form-just as Sergei was.

You see, we didn’t have to be in the Spindle, real or otherwise. When we sat down to have a drink, we could have created any setting we liked. We often did, Essie and I. “Where want to dine?” Essie would ask, and I’d say, “Oh, I don’t know, Lutece? La Tour d’Argent? Or, no, I know, I’ve got a taste for fried chicken. How about a picnic in front of the Taj Mahal?”

And then our support systems would dutifully access the files marked “Taj Mahal” and “Chicken, fried,” and there we would be.

Of course, neither the background nor the food and drinks would be “real”—but neither were we. Essie was a machine-stored analog of my dear wife, who was still alive somewhere or other-and still my wife, too. I was the stored remainder of me, what was left after I died on the exciting occasion when we first met a living Heechee. Sergei was stored Sergei, because he’d died, too. And Albert Einstein—Well, Albert was something else entirely; but we kept him with us, because he was a hell of a lot of fun at a party.

And none of that made any difference! The drinks hit just as hard, the smoked fish was just as fat and salty, the little bits of raw crudites were just as crisp and tasty. And we never gained weight, and we never had hangovers.

While meat people—Well, meat people were a whole other thing.

There were plenty of meat people among the 3,726 Gateway veterans gathered to celebrate the Rock’s hundredth anniversary. A lot of them were good friends. A lot of the others were people I would have loved to have for friends, because all us old prospectors have a lot in common.

The difficulty with meat people is trying to carry on a conversation with them. I’m fast-I operate in gigabit time. They’re slow.

Fortunately, there’s a way of dealing with the situation, because otherwise trying to talk to one of those torpid, tardy, flesh and blood people would drive me right out of my mind.

When I was a kid in Wyoming, I used to admire the chess masters who hung around the parks, pushing their greasy pieces over the oilsmeared boards. Some of them could play twenty games at once, moving from board to board. I marveled. How could they keep track of twenty positions at once, remembering every move, when I could barely keep one in my head?

Then I caught on. They didn’t remember anything at all.

They simply came to a board, took in the position, saw a strategy, made a move, and went on to the next. They didn’t have to remember anything. Their chess-playing minds were so quick that any one of them could take the whole picture in while his opponent was scratching his ear.

See, that’s the way it is with me and meat people. I could not stand to carry on a conversation with a living person without doing at least three or four other things at the same time. They stood like statues! When I saw my old buddy Frankie Hereira, he was licking his lips as he watched some other ancient codger struggling to open a bottle of champagne. Sam Struthers was just coming out of the men’s room, his mouth opening to shout a greeting to some other live person in the hall. I didn’t speak to either. I didn’t even try. I just set up an image of myself and started it in motion, one for each of them. Then I “went away.”

I don’t mean I actually went anywhere; I just paid attention to other things. I didn’t have to stay around, because the subroutines in my programs were perfectly capable of walking one of my doppels toward Frankie and one toward Sam, and smiling, and opening “my” mouth to speak when they noticed “me.” By the time I had to make a decision on what it was I wanted to say, I would be back there.

But that was the meat people. Fortunately for my boredom threshold, there were lots of machine-stored people (or not exactly all of them people) as well. Some were very old friends. Some were people I knew because everybody knew them. There was Detweiler, who had discovered the Voodoo Pigs, and Liao Xiechen, who was a terrorist until the Heechee appeared and he changed sides. He was the one who had exposed the entire gang of murderers and bomb-throwers in the American space program. There was even Harriman, who had actually seen a supernova explode, and coasted long enough on the expanding wavefront to win a five-million-dollar science award in the old days. There was Mangrove, who wound up in a Heechee station orbiting a neutron star and found out that the queer, tiny, maneuverable globes moored to the station were actually sample collectors and could be made to go down to the star’s surface and bring back some eleven tons-a chunk almost as large as a fingernail-of neutronium. Mangrove ultimately died of the radiation dose he got bringing it home, but that didn’t keep him from joining us on Wrinkle Rock.

So I raced along the conduits of Gateway, quick as the lightning in the serried sky, and greeted a hundred old friends and new. Sometimes Portable-Essie was with me. Sometimes she was off on her own excursions of greeting. Faithful Albert was never out of call, but he never joined in the hugs and embraces, either. Fact was, he never showed himself except to me, or when invited to. Nobody in that giggly, steamy, high-school-reunion, New-Year’s-Eve, wedding-reception atmosphere wanted to bother with a mere data-retrieval system, even though he was about the very best friend I had ever had.

So when we were back in the Spindle, back drinldng with Sergei Borbosnoy, and things got a little tedious for me, I whispered, “Albert?”

Essie gave me a look. She knew what I was doing. (After all, she wrote his program, not to mention my own.) She didn’t mind; she just went on rattling along in Russian to Sergei. There wasn’t anything wrong in that, because of course I understand Russian-speak it fluently, along with a bunch of other languages, because, after all, I’ve had plenty of time to learn. What was wrong was that they were talking about people I didn’t know and didn’t care about.

“You called, O Master?” Albert murmured in my ear.

I said, “Don’t be cute. Have you figured out what’s going on with Cassata?”

“Not entirely, Robin,” he said, “because if I had I would of course have sought you out to report. However, I have drawn some interesting inferences.”

“Infer ahead,” I whispered, smiling at Sergei as he poured another freezing shot of vodka into my glass without even looking at me.

“I perceive three discrete questions,” said Albert comfortably, set-fling himself down to a nice, long tutorial. “The question of the relevance of the Institute seminars to JAWS, the question of the maneuvers, and the question of the presence of General Cassata himself here. These could be further subdivided into—”

“No,” I whispered, “they could not. Quick and simple, Albert.”

“Very well. The seminars are, of course, directly related to the central question of the Foe: How they could be recognized through their signatures, and why they wish to alter the evolution of the universe. The only real puzzle is why JAWS should now express concern about the Institute’s seminars, since there have been many similar conferences, without objection, from JAWS. I believe that that is related to the question of the maneuvers. For this belief I can adduce a datum: Since the maneuvers began, all communications from both the JAWS satellite and the Watch Wheel have been embargoed.”

“Err what?”

“Embargoed, yes, Robin. Cut off. Censored. Prohibited. No communication of any sort with either is allowed. I infer that, first, these events are related, and both are related to the maneuvers. As you know, there was a false alarm on the Watch Wheel some weeks ago. Perhaps it was not a false alarm—”

“Albert! What are you saying?” I wasn’t speaking out loud, but Essie gave me a puzzled look. I smiled reassuringly, or tried to, though there was nothing reassuring about the thought.

“No, Robin,” said Albert soothingly, “I have no reason to believe the alarm was other than false. But perhaps JAWS is more concerned than I; this would account for the sudden maneuvers, which appear to have included testing some new weapons—”

“Weapons!”

Another look from Essie. Out loud I said cheerily, “Na zhdrovya,” and raised my glass.

“Exactly, Robin,” said Albert gloomily. “That leaves only the presence of General Cassata to account for. I believe that is quite simply explained. He is keeping an eye on you.”

“He isn’t doing a very good job of it.”

“That’s not exactly true, Robin. It is a fact that the general seems to be quite involved in his own affairs just now, yes. He is in fact closeted with a young lady, and has been for some time. But before retiring with the young person he ordered that no spacecraft may leave for the next thirty minutes, organic time. I think it quite probable that he will check up on you before that time has expired, and meanwhile you cannot leave the asteroid.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“I think not,” Albert corrected me deferentially.

“He can’t do that!”

Albert pursed his lips. “In the long run, that is so,” he agreed. “Cartainly you will sooner or later be able to get higher authority to overrule General Cassata, since there is still some degree of civilian control of the Joint Assassin Watch Service. However, for the moment I am afraid he has the asteroid sealed.”

“Bastard!”

“Probably he is.” Albert smiled. “I’ve taken the liberty of notifying the Institute of this development, and undoubtedly they will respond—unfortunately, that will be at organic speeds, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Is there anything else? Or should I go on with my investigations?”

“Go, damn it!”

I stewed around in gigabit space for a while, trying to cool off. When I thought I was at least marginally fit to talk to again, I rejoined Essie and Sergei Borbosnoy in their simulation of the Blue Hell drinking parlor. Essie glanced up amiably in the middle of a long anecdote, then fixed her eyes on me. “Ho,” she said. “Something is upsetting you once more, Robin.”

I told her what Albert had told me. “Bastard,” she said, concurring with my own diagnosis, and Sergei chimed in, “Nekulturny, that one.” Then Essie took my hand fondly. “After all, dear Robin,” she said, “is not important at this time, you agree? Had no intention of leaving party for quite some considerable time, even meat time.”

“Yes, but, damn his soul—”

“That soul is well damned already, dear Robin. Drink a little. Wifi cheer you up.”

So I gave it a try.

It didn’t work very well. Nor was I having a lot of fun listening to Essie and Sergei talk.

Understand that I liked Sergei. Not because he was handsome. He wasn’t. Sergei Borbosnoy was tall, cadaverous, balding. He had soulful Russian eyes and a sincere, systematic Russian way of swallowing vast quantities of ice-cold vodka, a tumblerful at a time. Since he, too, was dead, he could keep that up indefinitely without getting any drunker than he wanted to be. However, according to Essie, he had had the same capacity when they were students together in Leningrad and both were still meat. That kind of thing is a lot of fun, sure, if you’re a student-especially if you’re Russian. It wasn’t that much fun for me.

“So how’s it going?” I said genially, when I noticed that they had stopped talking and were gazing at me.

Essie reached over, smoothed my hair affectionately, and said, “Hey, old Robin. Is not so interesting for you, all this old-times stuff, right? Why not go look around?”

“I’m fine,” I said untruthfully, and she just sighed and said, “Go.” So I went. I had some private thinking to do, anyway.

It isn’t easy for me to say just what I needed to think about because, no offense, meat people can’t quite take in the large number of assorted topics a shared-time, machine-stored personality like me can keep in my head-that is, my “head”—all at once.

Which leads me to realize that I’ve already made a mistake.

Meat people can’t juggle that many thoughts. Meat people are hardly any good at all at parallel processing. Meat people are linear. What I have to keep in mind is that when communicating with meat people I must make allowances for these lacks.

So, having tried three times to figure out how to start, I now perceive that I should have started in a fourth and wholly different way.

I should have started by telling about the kids who lived on the Watch Wheel.