The Annals of the Heechee

5 THE TIDE AT ITS CREST

The Heechee were great explorers, and in all the annals of the Heechee the most famous voyage of all was Tangent’s.

It was a well-planned trip, and it had a wonderful leader. Tangent was very wise. It was her wisdom, as a matter of fact, that caused the Heechee to run away from the Gateway asteroid and nearly everything else.

It wasn’t hard for Tangent to be wise. She had her own considerable knowledge and experience, plus those of the living members of her crew, like Glare. And best of all, she had twelve or thirteen dead people to contribute their smarts to her own. To all this she added an awful lot of courage, enterprise, and compassion. You would have liked her-not counting that she did look pretty funny to human eyes. She couldn’t help that, of course, being a Heechee.

When I say Tangent was an explorer, I don’t mean that she went hunting for new bits of geography, like Magellan or Captain Cook. Tangent’s explorations didn’t involve geography at all. Long before Tangent was born, the Heechee’s huge spacegoing telescopes had done all the geography the Heechee would ever need. They had spied out every star, and nearly every planet, in all the Galaxy-several hundred billion pieces of geography in all, every one photographed and spectroscoped and catalogued in the central datastores.

So Tangent didn’t have to trouble herself with maps and surveys. She had more interesting things to think about.

What Tangent explored was creatures. Living beings. Tangent’s mission was to study the organic things that inhabited some of that geography.

The other thing to remember about Tangent is that, by Heechee standards, she was breathtakingly beautiful.

I don’t personally happen to share Heechee standards. Heechee look like Heechee to me, and I wouldn’t marry one on a bet. To me Tangent would have looked like something out of my childhood in the Food Mines in Wyoming. The way we celebrated Halloween in my childhood was with pumpkins and goblins; and one of the most popular figures, pulled out of the closet every October by every gradeschool teacher, was a cardboard skeleton, arms and legs jointed, skull-faced, every bone articulated.

Tangent looked a lot like one of those figures, except that she was real. She actually lived. You couldn’t see between her bones. Like all the Heechee, her bones were covered by a tough, dense, muscled skin about as voluptuous to the touch as an acorn squash. Because she was female, she was bald-males sometimes had a little fur on their scalps, females almost never. She had eyes that no popular songwriter would ever find rhymes for, because, basically, they looked terrible; the pupils were blotchy blue, and the overall color of the eyes was more or less pink. Her limbs were about as thick as a six-year-old famine victim’s, though nowhere near that sexy-to a human being, anyway. Her pelvis was wide. Her legs came down off the ends of it, and between those pipestem legs she wore the typical Heechee survival kit. That was a pear-shaped pod that generated the microwave flux that they needed to stay healthy, as terrestrial plants need sunlight, and in addition contained all sorts of useful or merely enjoyable tools and sundries. Including the stored minds of dead ancestors, which the Heechee used instead of computers.

Sounds ravishing, doesn’t it?

No, it doesn’t. But beauty is in the eyes of the cultural norm. To Heechee eyes (those glittery, pink, reptilian things!), especially to male Heechee eyes, Tangent was a knockout.

To Heechee ears, even her name was kind of sexy. She had taken the name “Tangent,” as all Heechee got their adult names, as soon as she was old enough to show an interest in any abstract thing. In her case the interest was in geometry. But the Heechee language provided many opportunities for puns and plays on words, and she was quickly called by a nickname, a word very much like “tangent” which can roughly (and politely) be translated as “that-which-causes-drooping-things-to-straighten.”

None of this had anything to do with her qualifications as a leader of exploration parties, but those were equally impressive. She was a credit to the Heechee race.

This made the fact that she had a large part to play in their downfall even more traumatic.

On Tangent’s historic trip, her command was a huge Heechee ship. It carried instruments and devices of a thousand kinds, and a crew of ninety-one. That included Glare, who was the penetration pilot. It wasn’t just a very large ship, it was a very special one. Tangent’s ship was purpose-designed, and its purpose was tailored to her special needs.

It could land on a planet.

Hardly any Heechee interstellar ships could do that, or ever needed to. They were designed to go into orbit around a planet and leave the problems of reentry and takeoff to specialized landing craft. Tangent’s was an exception. It would not exactly “land,” because the planet she was investigating hardly had a solid core to land on, apart from a lump of metallic hydrogen 2,000 kilometers inside its freezing, crushing, slushy atmosphere. But it had something more important to the Heechee:

It had life.

There was life on Tangent’s ship, too. Every member of the crew of ninety-one was a specialist in one of the many varied kinds of operations that would be required. My new friend Glare, for instance, the penetration pilot, was the one who would guide the ship down into the frigid, sludgy, dense “atmosphere” of the Sluggard planet. It was a skill few Heechee had, and her training had been extensive. So there was a lot of life on that ship, and lusty, roaring life at that. The Heechee weren’t emotionless machines. In their own peculiar Heechee way, they were as horny and as temperamental as human beings. This occasionally made problems for them, just as it does for humans.

The three male Heechee who constituted Tangent’s particular problem in that respect were named Quark, Angstrom 3754, and Searchand-Say.

I don’t mean you to believe that these were their precise names, even if you were to translate them literally from the Heechee. Those are just as close as I know how to come. Quark was named after a subatomic particle; Angstrom 3754 was named after a color of that wavelength; and Search-and-Say was a command given to their ancestral databases when they wanted to find out what was available.

Tangent thought they were a neat bunch of guys. Among the three of them they embodied all the Heechee manly virtues. Quark was brave, Angstrom was strong, and Search-and-Say was gentle. Any one of them would have made a fine mate. Since Tangent’s mating time was coming up, it was good that a male was available who would make a perfect mate.

The Heechee race was at the crest of its flood tide. There is nothing in human history that approaches the vastness and majesty of the Heechee epic. Dutch merchants, Spanish dons, and English queens, centuries ago, sent adventurers out to capture slaves, collect spices, mine gold—to discover and to loot all of the unexplored world. But that was only one single world.

The Heechee conquered billions of worlds.

Now, that has a cruel sound. The Heechee were not cruel. They deprived no natives of anything they valued, not even clay tablets or cowrie shells.

For one thing, it wasn’t necessary. The Heechee never had to enslave a native population to extract precious ores. It was much easier to locate an asteroid of the proper composition, then tow it to a factory that would swallow it whole and excrete finished products. They didn’t even need to grow exotic foods, or rare spices, or pharmaceuticals. Heechee chemistry could sample any organic matter and duplicate it from its elements.

The other reason they weren’t ruthless toward natives is that there almost never were any natives.

In all the Galaxy, the Heechee found fewer than 80,000 worlds with life anywhere above the prokaryote stage. And, of planets inhabited by civilized sentients comparable to themselves, none at all.

There were a few near misses.

One of the near misses was the good old planet Earth. They missed because the time was out of joint; they were about half a million years too early. On Earth, the closest thing to intelligence at that time was inside the hairy, sloped skull of a stooped and smelly little primate we now call Australopithecus. Too soon, the Heechee mused regretfully when they found them; so they took a few samples and went away. Another near miss was a handless, tubby creature that lived in a swill on the planet of an F-9 star not far from Canopus. If they weren’t exactly intelligent, they had evolved, at least, as far as superstition. (And stayed there; when human beings found them, they christened them the “Voodoo Pigs.”) There were vanished traces of extinct civilizations here and there, some of them puzzlingly fragmentary. There were a number of potentially interesting ones that might be expected to reach the point of social institutions some time in the next million years .

And then there were the ones Tangent was investigating now. They called them “the Sluggards.”

The Sluggards were really quite intelligent. They had machines! They had governments. They had a language-they even had poetry. The Sluggards were not the only race the Heechee had found with some of such things, but they were by all odds the most promising.

If only one could talk to them!

So Tangent’s ship settled itself in orbit, and the explorers gazed down at the turbulent planet below. Said Angstrom to Tangent, “Ugly-looking planet. It reminds me of the place where the Voodoo Pigs lived, remember?”

“I remember,” Tangent said fondly. In fact, she remembered well enough that she let herself lean against Angstrom’s exploring hand, which was delicately tweaking the ropy tendons of her back in the way she knew well.

Said Search-and-Say jealously, “It is not in the least like that planet! That one was hot; this one freezes gases. On this one we couldn’t breathe even if it were warm enough, because the methane would poison us, while among the Voodoo Pigs we could walk about even without masks-except for the smell, anyway.”

Tangent touched Angstrom affectionately. “But we didn’t mind the smell, did we?” she asked. Then, considering, she stroked Search-and-Say as well. Although she was missing nothing of the view of the planet and was quite aware of the clicks and wheeps of the ship’s sensors, which were busy drinking in data from the instruments that had been left on the planet many years before, she also missed nothing of the sexual innuendos.

Tangent said kindly, “Both of you have work to do-Quark too, and so do I. Let’s do it.”

Actually (Glare said, rubbing her abdomen nostalgically), the eightyseven crew members not directly involved were rather touched by Tangent’s romance. They liked her. They wished her well. Besides, all the Heechee world loved lovers, just like ours.

By the end of the second day of the voyage, Search-and-Say reported peevishly that the Ancestors were not only ready but positively clamorous to talk to Tangent. She sighed and took her seat in the control cabin. What she was sitting on mostly was her pod; her seat was so constructed that her pod was plugged in directly to all the Ancestral pods on the ship. It was a useful arrangement. It wasn’t always a comfortable one.

The Ancient Ancestors had neither sight nor hearing, being only stored intelligences in a databank, just like me. But the brightest and most experienced of them learned to read the electron-flow of optics or instrumentation almost as well as with ears and eyes. The most senior Ancestor aboard was a long-dead male named Flocculence. Flocculence was a VIP. He was the most valuable person aboard-perhaps even more valuable than Tangent herself-because before his death Floeculence had actually visited this planet.

Tangent opened her ears to the Ancestors. There was an immediate babble of voices. Every Ancestor in the ship’s store wanted to talk. The only one of them that had the right to talk just then, though, was Flocculence. He quickly hushed the others.

“I have been monitoring the recordings,” he said at once. “Nine of the recording channels we left in place have no data-I don’t yet know if they malfunctioned, or if the Sluggards simply never visited those locations. The other fifty-one, however, are full; they average nearly three hundred thousand morphemes each.”

“But that’s a lot!” cried Tangent, delighted. “That’s almost a whole book-equivalent for each channel!”

“More,” Flocculence corrected her. “For the Sluggard language is extremely compact. Listen. I will replay a section of one of the recordings—”

There was a faint, low hooting sound-Tangent did not so much hear it as feel it in her bones—“And now the same recording, speeded up and frequency-shifted to a normal bit-rate for us—”

The hooting became a quick, shrill twittering. Tangent listened with impatience. It hurt her ears. “Have you translated any of it?” she asked, less for information-she knew that if there had been any major breakthroughs she would have been notified at once-than to make the noise stop.

But surprisingly the Ancient Ancestor crowed, “Oh, yes! Much! In Listening Post Seventeen there was what I think you would call a political meeting. It has to do with the nature of the site itself; it is either theologically sacred or dangerously polluted, and the Sluggards were discussing what to do about it. The debate is still going on—”

“After sixty-one years?”

“Well, only about seven hours of their time, Tangent.”

“Good, good,” Tangent said happily. It was a major victory; there were few better ways of gaining insight into a culture than through studying its modes of settling public questions. “And you’re sure that’s what it is? Are your translations reliable?”

“Oh,” said Flocculence doubtfully, “fairly reliable. I wish we had Binding Force here with us.” Binding Force was Flocculence’s former partner in many investigations. The two of them had made a wonderful team. Some day, no doubt, they would again. But for the moment Binding Force was far too ancient to go into space again, and too healthy to die.

“How reliable is ‘fairly’ reliable?”

“Well, at least half our Sluggard vocabulary is words deduced from context. I could be deducing wrong.”

“Unlucky for you if you are,” Tangent snapped, and then immediately caught herself. “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job,” she soothed. And hoped it was true.

Glare hadn’t been on Flocculence’s first trip, but before she shipped out with Tangent, she had learned quite a lot about the Sluggards. For that matter, everybody had. The Sluggards were, after all, really quite important to the Heechee. As important, say, as a diagnosis of cancer would have been to any human before Full Medical came along.

The Sluggards possessed an ancient civilization. In terms of years, it was far older even than the Heechee’s own, but that didn’t really signify, because nothing much had happened in it. What did happen happened very slowly. The Sluggard’s planet was cold. The Sluggards themselves were both cold and sluggish-that was how they got their name. They swam slowly through a slush of gases; the chemistry of their bodies was as tedious as their movements, and so was their speech.

So was the propagation of impulses through their nervous systems—which is to say, their thoughts.

So when that first Heechee expedition could no longer doubt that these slushy, creepy creatures possessed intelligence, they were both delighted and ticked off. What was the use of discovering another intelligent race at last if so simple an exchange as—“Take me to your leader.”

“Which leader?”—could take six months to complete?

That first Heechee discovery ship lingered in orbit around the Sluggard planet for a year. Flocculence and Binding Force dropped sondes into the sludgy atmosphere and painfully built up a slow recognition of discrete sounds that was the first step toward a vocabulary. It wasn’t easy. It certainly wasn’t simple. The sondes were dropped more or less at random, aiming only at spots where the deep-probe radars and sonars had identified clusters of beings. Often the clusters were gone by the time the sondes got there. The ones that were best aimed recorded slow, deep moans. Transmitters passed the sounds into orbit, recording experts speeded them up and transposed them down to the audible range, and after weeks each tape might produce a single word.

But Heechee semanticists had many resources. At the end of their year in orbit they had identified enough of a vocabulary to prepare a simple tape. Then they constructed a graven tablet with a picture of a Heechee, a picture of a Sluggard, a picture of a sound playback unit, and a picture of the tablet itself. All the images were incised on flat surfaces of crystal, so that the Sluggards could feel them-they were, after all, blind.

Then the Heechee duplicated the lot sixty times and dropped a set into each of sixty Sluggard population centers.

The tapes read:

Greetings.

We are friends.

Talk to this and we will hear.

We will answer soon.

“Soon,” in that context, meant a good long time. When that was done, the Heechee ship left. The crew was somewhat glum. There was no sense waiting around for an answer. The best thing was to come back when the Sluggards had had time to discover the messages, get over the initial shock, and respond. Even then there would be an inevitable longish period of dumb questions and time-wasting answers; but they didn’t need a live Heechee for that. They chose their least valuable Ancient Ancestor, explained to her what sorts of questions might be asked and what sorts of answers-and urgings, and counterquestions-should be returned, and left her in orbit to spend a dismal few decades in solitude. Every Heechee in the crew wished he could be there to get those answers, but few could feel very confident of doing it-their best guess was that to get any solid information from the Sluggards would take more than half a century.

As indeed it did.

Twenty days after arrival in orbit around the Sluggard planet, Tangent was as ready for the real work of the expedition as she ever would be.

The Ancient Ancestor they had left behind was unfortunately no longer operational, but she had served her purpose. Questions had been asked and answered, and the data was in store. Radar, or the Heechee device that did for the Heechee what radar had done for human beings, had located the present positions of the physical clusters that marked Sluggard communities, as well as other objects solid enough and large enough to constitute navigation hazards. FTL radio contact had been made with the home planets and the data transmitted, and frail old Binding Force had sent a cheery message approving their translation attempts and urging them on. The special structures on Tangent’s ship that would allow it to carry out its main mission had been checked and tested and reported ready.

There was one other Heechee device which they had hoped would serve them well, but it was a disappointment. That was a sort of communications instrument. What it transmitted and received was a special sort of data-well, what you might call “feelings.” It neither transmitted nor received “information” in the classical sense-one could not use it to order another thousand kilotons of structural metal or to command a ship to change its course. But one Heechee wearing the appropriate metal-mesh helmet could “hear” the emotions of others, even at planetary distances.

It was what we came to call the “Dream Seat.”

For the Heechee, the main domestic use of the device was for what passed among them as police work. The Heechee didn’t detect crimes. They prevented them. The emanations from a mind so disordered as to be about to commit an antisocial act, a violent act in particular, could be detected in the early stages. A counseling-and-intervention team was then dispatched at once to apply corrective therapy.

The Dream Seats had also been very helpful in deciding that, for instance, the “Voodoo Pigs” were close enough to inteffigent to bear watching, because their “feelings” were far more complex than those of the lower animals. So it was a standard Heechee resource instrument in that fundamental Heechee quest for interstellar companionship. It had been hoped that Tangent’s orbiting spacecraft could simply listen in on the Sluggards and “hear” their moods and anxieties and joys.

The Dream Seat did work, as a matter of fact. It just didn’t work in any very useful way. As with everything else the Sluggards did, their emotions were hopelessly slow. Said Quark glumly, pulling off the headset, “You might as well be listening to how a sedimentary rock feels about metamorphosis.”

“Keep trying,” Tangent instructed. “When at last we understand the Sluggards, it will all be worthwhile.”

Later on she remembered saying that, and wondered how she could have been so wrong.

I’ve told you an awful lot about Tangent and her shipmates, and I haven’t yet told you why it all matters. Trust me. It mattered a lot. Not only to Tangent, and to the whole Heechee race, but to humanity in general and, most especially, to me in particular.

But good old Albert tells me I talk too much, and so I’ll try to keep to essentials. The essentials were that Tangent and her crew did what Heechee ships almost never did. They took their specially armored spacecraft and dived it down into the dense, frigid, damaging gases of the Sluggard planet in order to visit the Sluggards on their home turf.

“Turf” isn’t the right word, either-I have a lot of trouble finding right words, because the vocabulary I learned as a meat person on Earth really doesn’t apply anymore. The Sluggards didn’t have turt in the sense of plots of land to build on. They didn’t have any land. Their specific gravity was so close to the specific gravity of the gases they lived in that they floated, along with all their household goods, their households, and their Sluggard equivalents of factories, farms, offices, and schools. And, of course, neither human nor Heechee could live in that environment unprotected. Although the Heechee were careful engineers (I know humans who would call them cowardly, in fact), there was at least a nagging worry that even their ship might fail in the crushing pressures where the Sluggards lived.

So before they entered the planet’s atmosphere they checked and rechecked and double-checked everything there was to check. Flocculence and the other Ancient Ancestors had to do double duty, not only keeping up with their work of translation but storing and analyzing all the data about the ship’s own systems.

“Are we ready?” Tangent asked at last, seated at the captain’s stool in the control room, webbing herself in as did all the others. One by one the section chiefs reported readiness, and she took a deep breath. “I would commence descent now,” she said to the penetration pilot, Glare.

Glare ordered the steerperson, “Commence descent.”

The ship slowed its orbital speed and slipped down into the cold, thick, swirling poison gases the Sluggards swam in.

Entry was bouncy, but the ship had been built for that. Navigation was blind, at least optically speaking; but the ship had sonar and electronic eyes, and on the screens in the room they could see the shapes of clusters of Sluggard “homes” and other objects as they approached. “I would not go so fast,” Tangent cautioned, “because of the risk of cavitation.”

Glare agreed. “Slow down,” she ordered, and the great ship inched toward the nearest Sluggard arcology.

The whole crew watched the screens with awe and delight. Sludgy objects began to appear. There were structures like clouds, and creatures like the soft-plastic toys, shaped like amoebae or jellyfish, that children play with. The Sluggards were almost as still as their “buildings.” All of the females, and most of the males, moved so slowly that no Heechee eye could see a change; only a few of the males, going into what they called “high mode,” now and then exhibited visible motion. And more and more of the males did that as the ship approached and their torpid senses let them know that something or other seemed to be happening.

That was when Tangent made her first mistake.

She assumed that the movement of the males was because they were startled at the sudden appearance of the Heechee ship. Heaven knows, that must have startled them-like a high-speed lander suddenly appearing over a primitive human village that had never seen a spacecraft, or even an airplane, before. But it wasn’t startlement that sent the males lashing about so fast and destructively. It was pain. The high-frequency sound the Heechee ship steered by was agony to the Sluggards. It drove them out of their minds, and, before long, the weaker of them died of it.

Could the Heechee ever have really satisfied their yearning for interstellar friends with the Sluggards?

I don’t see how. My own experience says no; it was as hard for Heechee to communicate with Sluggards as it is for us stored persons to get into any meaningful real-time relationship with meat people. It’s not impossible. It’s generally just more trouble than it’s worth. And when I talk to meat people at close range, they don’t usually die of it.

After that it wasn’t a happy ship anymore (said Glare, morosely shrugging her belly muscles). The expectation had been so delicious; the letdown was mean.

It got worse.

The mission was teetering on the verge of failure. Though the sondes continued to trickJe words into the recorders, the attempts to approach Sluggards in their homes were always both catastrophic and disappointing-disappointing for the Heechee, catastrophic for their new “friends.”

And then, in orbit, there came the news from home.

It was a message from Binding Force, and what he said, with the testiness of age and the resentment of one who wishes he had been present, was, in free translation, “You’ve screwed it up. The important parts of the data were not customs and polity of the Sluggards. It is their poetry.”

The shipboard Ancient Ancestors had recognized the poetry as poetry-as a sort of combination of the songs of the great whales and the old Norse eddas of Earth. Like the eddas, they sang of great battles of the past, and the battles were important.

The songs were of creatures who had appeared without bodies and had caused great destruction. The Sluggards called them the equivalent of “Assassins,” and according to Binding Force they were in fact without bodies-were creatures of energy; had in fact really appeared and caused great destruction . . .

“What you thought were mere legends,” scolded Binding Force in his message, “were not about gods and devils. They are straightforward accounts of an actual visit by creatures that seem totally hostile to all organic life. And there is every reason to believe they are still around.”

That was the first time the Heechee had ever heard of the Foe.