Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (36 page)

Squint was not a preparation, in the sense that the live but exposed nervous system of a biologist’s brittle star is a preparation. She was an experiment.

She was not a very great success. The attempt to preserve her identity in machine storage did not fail for the reasons that had terminated the earlier trials, with the other members of her tribe: poor match of chemistry to receptors; incomplete transfer of information; wrong coding. One by one the Heechee experimenters had met all of those problems and solved them. Her experiment failed, or succeeded only in part, for a different reason. There was not enough of an identity in the being that could be recognized as “Squint” to preserve. She was not a biography, not even a journal. She was something like a census datum, punctuated by pain and illustrated with fear.

But that was not the only experiment the Heechee had in progress.

In another section of the immense machine that orbited Earth’s sun from half a light-year out, the stolen babies were beginning to thrive. They were leading lives quite different from Squint’s-lives marked by automatic care, heuristic tests and programmed challenges. The Heechee recognized that, although these australopithecines were a long way from intelligent, they contained the seeds of wiser descendants. They decided to hurry the process along.

Not much development occurred in the fifteen years between the removal of the colony from its prehistoric African home and Squint’s death. The Heechee were not discouraged. In fifteen years, they did not expect much. They had much longer-range plans than that.

As their plans also called for them, all of them, to be somewhere else long before any true intelligence could look out of the eyes of one of Squint’s descendants, they built accordingly. They so constructed and programmed the artifact that it would last indefinitely. They arranged for it to be supplied with CHONfood from a convenient processor of cometary material, which they had already set operating to serve other of their installations, and which was potentially equally long-lived. They constructed machines to sample the skills of the descendants of the newborns from time to time, and to repeat, as often as necessary, the attempt to file their identities in machine storage for later review- if any of them ever came back to see how the experiment had gone. They would have estimated this as very improbable, in view of their other plans.

Still, their plans encompassed very many alternatives, all going simultaneously; because the object of their plans was of great concern to them. None of them might ever come back. But perhaps someone would.

Since Squint could not communicate, or act, in any useful way, the Heechee experimenters thriftily wiped the effective sections of her storage and kept her on the shelves only as a sort of library book, for consultation by later individuals of whatever kind they might be. (It was this that Janine was forced to consult, by reliving what Squint had lived all those hundreds of millennia before.) They left certain clues and data for use by whatever generations might be able to understand them. They tidied up behind them, as they always did. Then they went away and allowed the rest of that particular experiment, among all their experiments, to run.

For eight hundred thousand years.

“Danine,” Hooay was moaning, “Danine, are you dead?”

She looked up at his face, unable at first to focus, so that he looked like a blurred, broad-faced moon with a double comet’s tail wagging below. “Help me up, Hooay,” she sobbed. “Take me back.” Of them all, this had been the worst. She felt raped, violated, expanded, changed. Her world would never be the same again. Janine did not know the word “australopithecine,” but she knew that the life she had just shared had been an animal’s. Worse than an animal’s, because somewhere in Squint had been the spark of the invention of thinking, and thus the unwanted capacity to fear.

Janine was exhausted and she felt older than the Oldest One. At just-turned fifteen, she was not a child any more. That account had been overdrawn. There was no more childhood left for her. At the slope-walled chamber that was her personal pen she stopped. Hooay said apprehensively, “Danine? What’s wrong?”

“There is a joke to tell you,” she said.

“You do not look like joking,” he said.

“It is a funny joke, though. Listen. The Oldest One has penned Wan with my sister to breed them. But my sister cannot breed. She has had an operation so that she can never again bear a child.”

“That is not a good joke,” he protested. “No one would do a thing like that!”

“She did it, Hooay.” She added quickly, “Do not be frightened. You will not be punished. Only now bring the boy to me.”

Her soft eyes were brimming with tears. “How can I not be frightened? Perhaps I should awaken the Oldest One to tell him-“ Then the tears spilled over; he was terrified.

She comforted him and coaxed him, until other Old Ones came and he spilled his terrible joke to them. Janine lay down on her pad, closing her ears to their excited, woeful chatter. She did not sleep, but she was lying with her eyes closed when she heard Wan and Tor come to the door. When the boy was pushed inside she stood up to meet him.

“Wan,” she said, “I want you to put your aims around me.”

He looked at her grumpily. No one had told him what this was about, and Wan, too, had had his hour in the couch with Squint. He looked terrible. He had never really had a chance to recover from the flu, had not rested, had not accustomed himself to the great changes in his life since he had met the Herter-Halls. There were circles under his eyes and cracks at the corners of his mouth. His feet were dirty, and so were his frayed clothes. “Are you afraid you will fall down?” he shrilled.

“I am not afraid of falling, and I want you to talk to me properly. Don’t squeak.”

He looked startled, but his voice settled into the lower register she had tried to teach him. “Then why?”

“Oh, Wan.” She shook her head impatiently and stepped forward into his personal space. It had not been necessary for her to tell him what to do. His arms went around her automatically- both at the same height, as though she were a barrel to lift, the palms pressing against her shoulderblades. She pressed her lips against his, hard, dry and closed, then pulled away. “Do you remember what this is, Wan?”

“Of course! It is ‘kissing’.”

“But we are doing it wrong, Wan. Wait. Do it again while I do this.” She protruded the tip of her tongue between almost closed lips and ran it back and forth across his closed ones. “I think,” she said, moving her head away, “that that is a better way, don’t you? It makes me feel-it makes me feel-I feel a little bit as though I were going to throw up.”

Alarmed, he tried to step back, but she followed him closely. “Not really throw up, just real funny.”

He stayed tensely near her, face held away, but his expression was troubled. Carefully keeping the pitch of his voice down, he said, “Tiny Jim says people do this before copulating. Or one person does it sometimes to see if the other person is in heat.”

“In heat, Wan! That stinks. Say ‘in love’.”

“I think that ‘in love’ is different,” he said stubbornly, “but anyway to kiss is related to copulating. Tiny Jim says-“

She put her hands on his shoulders. “Tiny Jim isn’t here.”

“No, but Paul doesn’t want us to-“

“Paul isn’t here,” she said, stroking his slim neck with the tips of her fingers to see what that felt like. “Lurvy isn’t here either. Anyway, none of what they think matters.” The way it felt, she decided, was quite strange. It wasn’t really as though she were going to throw up, but as though some sort of liquid readjustment were going on inside her belly, a sensation like nothing she had ever known before. It was not at all unpleasant. “Let me take your clothes off, Wan, and then you can take off mine.”

After they had practiced kissing again she said, “I think we should not be standing up now.” And some time later, when they were lying down, she opened her eyes to stare into his wide-open ones.

As he raised himself for better leverage he hesitated. “If I do that,” he said, “perhaps you will get pregnant.”

“If you don’t do that,” she said, “I think I will die.”

When Janine woke up, hours later, Wan was already awake and dressed, sitting at the side of the room, leaning against the gold-skeined wall. Janine’s heart went out to him. He looked like himself fifty years later. The youthful face seemed to have lines graven by decades of trouble and pain.

“I love you, Wan,” she said.

He stirred and shrilled, “Oh, yes-“ Then he caught himself and dropped his voice to a grumble, “Oh, yes, Janine. And I love you. But I do not know what they will do.”

“Probably they won’t hurt you, Wan.”

Scornfully, “Me? It is you I worry about, Janine. This is where I have lived all my life and sooner or later this would have happened. But you-I am worried about you.” He added gloomily, “They are very noisy out there, too. Something is happening.”

“I don’t think they will hurt us-any more, I mean,” Janine corrected herself, thinking about the dreaming couch. The distant chirping cries were coming closer. She dressed quickly and looked around, as Tor’s voice hailed Hooay outside the door.

There was nothing to show what had happened. Not even a drop of blood. But when Tor opened the door, fussed and worried, he stopped to squint at them suspiciously, then sniffed the air. “Perhaps I will not have to breed you, Danine, after all,” he said, kind but frightened. “But Danine! Oowan! There is a terrible thing! Tar has fallen asleep and the old female has run away!”

Wan and Janine were dragged to the spindle, filled with nearly all of the Old Ones. They were milling around in panic. Three of them lay sprawled and snoring where they had been dumped-Tar and two others of Lurvy’s guards, failures in their missions, found sound asleep and brought back in fear and disgrace for the judgment of the Oldest One. Who lay motionless but alert on his pedestal, cascades of color rippling around his perimeter.

To the flesh-and-blood creatures the Oldest One showed nothing of his thoughts. He was metal. He was formidable. He could be neither understood nor challenged. Neither Wan nor Janine, nor any of his near hundred quaking children, could perceive the fear and anger that raced through his circulating memories. Fear that his plans were in jeopardy. Rage that his children had failed to carry out their orders.

The three that had failed would have to be punished, to set an example. The hundred-odd others would also have to be punished-somewhat more lightly, so that the race would not become extinct-for failing to keep the three to their duty. As for the intruders-there was no punishment grave enough for them! Perhaps they should be abolished, like any other challenging organism that threatened to damage its host. Perhaps worse than that. Perhaps nothing within his powers was quite severe enough.

But what was still in his power? He forced himself to stand. Janine saw the ripple of lights flicker and freeze into a pattern as the Oldest One rose to his extended height and spoke. “The female is to be recaptured and preserved,” he said. “This is to be done at once.”

He stood there, wobbling uneasily; the effectors for his limbs were performing erratically. He allowed himself to kneel once more while he pondered his options. The exertion of going to the control room to set course-the turmoil in his mind that had led him to do it-half a million years of existence, all had taken their toll. He needed time to “rest”-time, that is, for his autonomic systems to retrace and repair what damage they could, and perhaps time no longer would be enough. “Do not wake me again till this is done,” he said, and the lights resumed their random flicker, and slowly dwindled to darkness.

Janine, circled in Wan’s arm-his body half toward the Oldest One, half sheltering her, trembling with fear-knew without being told that “preserved” meant killed. She was frightened, too.

But she was also puzzled.

The Old Ones who lay snoring through their trial and judgment had not fallen asleep by chance. Janine recognized the results of a sleep-gun. Janine knew also that none of her party had had one.

For that reason, Janine was not entirely surprised when, an hour later and back in their pen, they heard a stifled grunt from outside.

She was not surprised to see her sister run in, waving a gun and calling to them; not surprised that behind Lurvy a tattered Paul stepped over the sleeping form of Tor. She was not even surprised, or not very much surprised, to see that with them was another armed man she almost recognized. She was not sure. She had met him only when she was a child. But he looked like the person she had seen on the relayed PV broadcasts from Earth, and in jolly messages that came from him on anniversaries and holidays: Robin Broadhead.

Not at his worst-not even when he was feeling older than the Oldest One himself and as dead as dead Payter-had Paul looked as bad as the pitiful creature waving a gun at him from the hatch of his own ship. Under the skungy, month-old beard the man’s face looked like a mummy’s. He stank.

“You’d better take a bath!” Paul snapped. “And put that silly gun away.”

The mummy slumped against the hatch of the ship. “You’re Paul Hall,” it said, squinting at him. “For God’s sake, do you have anything to eat?”

Paul stared past him. “Isn’t there plenty still left in there?” He pushed into the ship and found that, of course, there were stacks of CHON-food packets exactly as they had been left. The mummy had been into the water bags, had ripped at least three of them open; the floor of the ship was puddled and muddied. Paul offered a ration. “Keep your voice down,” he ordered. “And by the way, who are you?”