Frederik Pol. Vrata (engl)
© Frederik Pohl. GateWay (1976, 1977).
© Frederik Pol. Vrata.
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SpellCheck: GrAnD
Premium: Nebula, 1977, Best Novel: "GateWay"
Hugo, 1978, Novel: "GateWay"
Date: 16.07.2002
Chapter 1
My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male. My analyst
(whom I call Sigfrid von Shrink, although that isn't his name; he hasn't
got a name, being a machine) has a lot of electronic fun with this fact:
"Why do you care if some people think it's a girl's name, Rob?"
"I don't."
"Then why do you keep bringing it up?"
He annoys me when he keeps bringing up what I keep bringing up. I look
at the ceiling with its hanging mobiles and pinatas, then I look out the
window. It isn't really a window. It's a moving holopic of surf coming in
on Kaena Point; Sigfrid's programming is pretty eclectic. After a while I
say, "I can't help what my parents called me. I tried spelling it
R-O-B-I-N-E-T, but then everybody pronounces it wrong."
"You could change it to something else, you know."
"If I changed it," I say, and I am sure I am right in this, "you would
just tell me I was going to obsessive lengths to defend my inner
dichotomies."
"What I would tell you," Sigfrid says, in his heavy mechanical attempt
at humor, "is that, please, you shouldn't use technical psychoanalytic
terms. I'd appreciate it if you would just say what you feel."
"What I feel," I say, for the thousandth time, "is happy. I got no
problems. Why wouldn't I feel happy?"
We play these word games a lot, and I don't like them. I think there's
something wrong with his program. He says, "You tell me, Robbie. Why don't
you feel happy?"
I don't say anything to that. He persists. "I think you're worried."
"Shit, Sigfrid," I say, feeling a little disgust, "you always say that.
I'm not worried about anything."
He tries wheedling. "There's nothing wrong with saying how you feel."
I look out the window again, angry because I can feel myself trembling
and I don't know why. "You're a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?"
He says something or other, but I am not listening. I am wondering why
I waste my time coming here. If there was anybody ever who had every
reason to be happy, I have to be him. I'm rich. I'm pretty good-looking. I
am not too old, and anyway, I have Full Medical so I can be just about any
age I want to be for the next fifty years or so. I live in New York City
under the Big Bubble, where you can't afford to live unless you're really
well fixed, and maybe some kind of celebrity besides. I have a summer
apartment that overlooks the Tappan Sea and the Palisades Dam. And the
girls go crazy over my three Out bangles. You don't see too many
prospectors anywhere on Earth, not even in New York. They're all wild to
have me tell them what it's really like out around the Orion Nebula or the
Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (I've never been to either place, of course. The
one really interesting place I've been to I don't like to talk about.)
"Or," says Sigirid, having waited the appropriate number of
microseconds for a response to whatever it was he said last, "if you
really are happy, why do you come here for help?"
I hate it when he asks me the same questions I ask myself. I don't
answer. I squirm around until I get comfortable again on the plastic foam
mat, because I can tell that it's going to be a long, lousy session. If I
knew why I needed help, why would I need help?
I think you're worried.
Shit, Sigfrid, you always say that. I'm not worried about anything.
Why don't you tell me about it. There's nothing wrong with saying how
you feel.
"You're a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?"
"Rob, you aren't very responsive today," Sigfrid says through the
little loudspeaker at the head of the mat. Sometimes he uses a very
lifelike dummy, sitting in an armchair, tapping a pencil and smiling
quirkily at me from time to time. But I've told him that that makes me
nervous. "Why don't you just tell me what you're thinking?"
"I'm not thinking about anything, particularly."
"Let your mind roam. Say whatever comes into it, Rob."
"I'm remembering-" I say, and stop.
"Remembering what, Rob?"
"Gateway?"
"That sounds more like a question than a statement."
"Maybe it is. I can't help that. That's what I'm remembering: Gateway."
I have every reason to remember Gateway. That's how I got the money and
the bangles, and other things. I think back to the day I left Gateway.
That was, let's see, Day 31 of Orbit 22, which means, counting back, just
about sixteen years and a couple of months since I left there. I was
thirty minutes out of the hospital and couldn't wait to collect my pay,
catch my ship, and blow.
Sigfrid says politely, "Please say what you're thinking out loud,
Robbie."
"I'm thinking about Shikitei Bakin," I say.
"Yes, you've mentioned him. I remember. What about him?" I don't
answer. Old, legless Shicky Bakin had the room next to mine, but I don't
want to discuss it with Sigfrid. I wriggle around on my circular mat,
thinking about Shicky and trying to cry.
"You seem upset, Rob."
I don't answer to that, either. Shicky was almost the only person I
said good-bye to on Gateway. That was funny. There was a big difference in
our status. I was a prospector, and Shicky was a garbageman. They paid him
enough money to cover his life-support tax because he did odd jobs, and
even on Gateway they have to have somebody to clean up the garbage. But
sooner or later he would be too old and too sick to be any more use at
all. Then, if he was lucky, they would push him out into space and he
would die. If he wasn't lucky, they'd probably send him back to a planet.
He would die there, too, before very long; but first he would have the
experience of living for a few weeks or so as a helpless cripple.
Anyway, he was my neighbor. Every morning he would get up and
painstakingly vacuum every square inch around his cell. It would be dirty,
because there was so much trash floating around Gateway all the time,
despite the attempts to clean it up. When he had it perfectly clean, even
around the roots of the little shrublets he planted and shaped, he would
take a handful of pebbles, bottle caps, bits of torn paper-the same trash
he'd just vacuumed up, half the time-and painstakingly arrange it on the
place he had just cleaned. Funny! I never could see the difference, but
Klara said...Klara said she could.
"Rob, what were you thinking about just then?" Sigfrid asks.
I roll up into a fetal ball and mumble something.
"I couldn't understand what you just said, Robbie."
I don't say anything. I wonder what became of Shicky. I suppose he
died. Suddenly I feel very sad about Shicky dying, such a very long way
from Nagoya, and I wish again that I could cry. But I can't. I squirm and
wriggle. I flail against the foam mat until the restraining straps squeak.
Nothing helps. The pain and shame won't come out. I feel rather pleased
with myself that I am trying so hard to let the feelings out, but I have
to admit I am not being successful, and the dreary interview goes on.
Sigfrid says, "Rob, you're taking a long time to answer. Do you think
you're holding something back?"
I say virtuously, "What kind of a question is that? If I am, how would
I know?" I pause to survey the inside of my brain, looking in all the
corners for padlocks that I can open for Sigfrid. I don't see any. I say
judiciously, "I don't think that's it, exactly. I don't feel as if I were
blocking. It's more as if there were so many things I wanted to say that I
couldn't decide which."
"Take any one, Rob. Say the first thing that comes into your mind."
Now, that's dumb, it seems to me. How do I know which is the first
thing, when they're all boiling around in there together? My father? My
mother? Sylvia? Klara? Poor Shicky, trying to balance himself in flight
without any legs, flapping around like a barn swallow chasing bugs as he
scoops the cobwebby scraps out of Gateway's air?
I reach down into my mind for places where I know it hurts, because it
has hurt there before. The way I felt when I was seven years old, parading
up and down the Rock Park walk in front of the other kids, begging for
someone to pay attention to me? The way it was when we were out of
realspace and knew that we were trapped, with the ghost star coming up out
of nothingness below us like the smile of a Cheshire cat? Oh, I have a
hundred memories like those, and they all hurt. That is, they can. They
are pain. They are clearly labeled PAINFUL in the index to my memory. I
know where to find them, and I know what it feels like to let them
surface.
But they will not hurt unless I let them out.
"I'm waiting, Rob," Sigfrid says.
"I'm thinking," I say. As I lie there it comes to my mind that I'll be
late for my guitar lesson. That reminds me of something, and I look at the
fingers of my left hand, checking to see that the fingernails have not
grown too long, wishing the calluses were harder and thicker. I have not
learned to play the guitar very well, but most people are not that
critical and it gives me pleasure. Only you have to keep practicing and
remembering. Let's see, I think, how do you make that transition from the
D-maj to the C-7th again?
"Rob," Sigfrid says, "this has not been a very productive session.
There are only about ten or fifteen minutes left. Why don't you just say
the first thing that comes into your mind... now."
I reject the first thing and say the second. "The first thing that
comes into my mind is the way my mother was crying when my father was
killed."
"I don't think that was actually the first thing, Rob. Let me make a
guess. Was the first thing something about Klara?"
My chest fills, tingling. My breath catches. All of a sudden there's
Klara rising up before me, sixteen years earlier and not yet an hour
older.... I say, "As a matter of fact, Sigfrid, I think what I want to
talk about is my mother." I allow myself a polite, deprecatory chuckle.
Sigfrid doesn't ever sigh in resignation, but he can be silent in a way
that sounds about the same.
"You see," I go on, carefully outlining all the relevant issues, "she
wanted to get married again after my father died. Not right away. I don't
mean that she was glad about his death, or anything like that. No, she
loved him, all right. But still, I see now, she was a healthy young
woman-well, fairly young. Let's see, I suppose she was about thirty-three.
And if it hadn't been for me I'm sure she would have remarried. I have
feelings of guilt about that. I kept her from doing it. I went to her and
said, 'Ma, you don't need another man. I'll be the man in the family. I'll
take care of you.' Only I couldn't, of course. I was only about five years
old."
"I think you were nine, Robbie."
"Was I? Let me think. Gee, Sigfrid, I guess you're right-" And then I
try to swallow a big drop of spit that has somehow instantly formed in my
throat and I gag and cough.
"Say it, Rob!" Sigfrid says insistently. "What do you want to say?"
"God damn you, Sigfrid!"
"Go ahead, Rob. Say it."
"Say what? Christ, Sigfrid! You're driving me right up the wall! This
shit isn't doing either one of us any good!"
"Say what's bothering you, Rob, please."
"Shut your flicking tin mouth!" All that carefully covered pain is
pushing its way out and I can't stand it, can't deal with it.
"I suggest, Rob, that you try-"
I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting,
roaring, "Shut up, you! I don't want to hear. I can't cope with this,
don't you understand me? I can't! Can't cope, can't cope!"
Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather
suddenly. And then, before he can say anything, I say wearily, "Oh, hell,
Sigfrid, this whole thing isn't getting us anywhere. I think we should
call it off. There must be other people who need your services more than I
do."
"As to that, Rob," he says, "I am quite competent to meet all the
demands on my time."
I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and
don't answer.
"There is still excess capacity, in fact," he goes on. "But you must be
the judge of whether we continue with these sessions or not."
"Have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?" I ask him.
"Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very
pleasant bar on the top floor of this building."
"Well," I say, "I just wonder what I'm doing here."
And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the
next week, I am drinking a cup of tea in Sigfrid's recovery cubicle. I
listen to hear if his next patient has started screaming yet, but I can't
hear anything.
So I wash my face, adjust my scarf, and slick down the little cowlick
in my hair. I go up to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is
human, knows me, and gives me a seat looking south toward the Lower Bay
rim of the bubble. He looks toward a tall, copper-skinned girl with green
eyes sitting by herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink,
admire the legs on the copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about
where I am going to go for dinner, keep my appointment for my guitar
lesson.
Chapter 2
All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember.
I couldn't have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a
fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored-paper hydrogen
balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides.
And there was a pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and
inside somebody had arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels
on Venus. Prayer fans and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you
could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. Pa said they weren't real, but
to me they were real. We couldn't afford twenty-five dollars apiece,
though. And when you came right down to it, I didn't really need a mirror.
Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I brushed straight back and tied. They had
just found Gateway. I heard my father talking about it going home that
night in the airbus, when I guess they thought I was asleep, and the
wistful hunger in his voice kept me awake.
If it hadn't been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go.
But he never got the chance. He was dead a year later. All I inherited
from him was his job, as soon as I was big enough to hold it.
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I don't know if you've ever worked in the food mines, but you've
probably heard about them. There isn't any great joy there. I started,
half-time and half-pay, at twelve. By the time I was sixteen I had my
father's rating: charge driller-good pay, hard work.
But what can you do with the pay? It isn't enough for Full Medical. It
isn't enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of
local success story. You work six hours on and ten hours off. Eight hours'
sleep and you're on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the
time. You can't smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles
everywhere. The girls are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are.
So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other's women
and played the lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor
that was made not ten miles away. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and
sometimes vodka or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still
columns. I was no different from any of the others... except that, one
time, I won the lottery. And that was my ticket out.
Before that happened I just lived.
My mother was a miner, too. After my father was killed in the shaft
fire she brought me up, with the help of the company creche. We got along
all right until I had my psychotic episode. I was twenty-six at the time.
I had some trouble with my girl, and then for a while I just couldn't get
out of bed in the morning. So they put me away. I was out of circulation
for most of a year, and when they let me out of the shrink tank my mother
had died.
Face it: that was my fault. I don't mean I planned it, I mean she would
have lived if she hadn't had me to worry about. There wasn't enough money
to pay the medical expenses for both of us. I needed psychotherapy. She
needed a new lung. She didn't get it, so she died.
I hated living on in the same apartment after she was dead, but it was
either that or go into bachelor quarters. I didn't like the idea of living
in such close proximity to a lot of men. Of course I could have gotten
married. I didn't-Sylvia, the girl I'd had the trouble with, was long gone
by that time-but it wasn't because I had anything against the idea of
marriage. Maybe you might think I did, considering my psychiatric history,
and also considering that I'd lived with my mother as long as she was
alive. But it isn't true. I liked girls very much. I would have been very
happy to marry one and raise a child.
But not in the mines.
I didn't want to leave a son of mine the way my father had left me.
Charge drilling is bitchy hard work. Now they use steam torches with
Heechee heating coils and the shale just politely splits away, like
carving cubes of wax. But then we drilled and blasted. You'd go down into
the shaft on the high-speed drop at the start of your shift. The shaft
wall was slimy and stinking ten inches from your shoulder, moving at sixty
kilometers an hour relative to you; I've seen miners with a few drinks in
them stagger and stretch out a hand to support themselves and pull back a
stump. Then you pile out of the bucket and slip and stumble on the
duckboards for a kilometer or more till you come to the working face. You
drill your shaft. You set your charges. Then you back out into a
cul-de-sac while they blast, hoping you figured it right and the whole
reeking, oily mass doesn't come down on you. (If you're buried alive you
can live up to a week in the loose shale. People have. When they don't get
rescued until after the third day they're usually never any good for
anything anymore.) Then, if everything has gone all right, you dodge the
handling loaders as they come creeping in on their tracks, on your way to
the next face.
The masks, they say, take out most of the hydrocarbons and the rock
dust. They don't take out the stink. I'm not sure they take out all the
hydrocarbons, either. My mother is not the only miner I knew who needed a
new lung-nor the only one who couldn't pay for one, either.
And then, when your shift is over, where is there to go?
You go to a bar. You go to a dorm-room with a girl. You go to a
rec-room to play cards. You watch TV.
You don't go outdoors very much. There's no reason. There are a couple
of little parks, carefully tended, planted, replanted; Rock Park even has
hedges and a lawn. I bet you never saw a lawn that had to be washed,
scrubbed (with detergent!), and air-dried every week, or it would die. So
we mostly leave the parks to the kids.
Apart from the parks, there is only the surface of Wyoming, and as far
as you can see it looks like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green
anywhere. Nothing alive. no birds, no squirrels, no pets. A few sludgy,
squidgy creeks that for some reason are always bright ochre-red under the
oil. They tell us that we're lucky at that, because our part of Wyoming
was shaft-mined. In Colorado, where they strip-mined, things were even
worse.
I always found that hard to believe, and still do, but I've never gone
to look.
And apart from everything else, there's the smell and sight and sound
of the work. The sunsets orangey-brown through the haze. The constant
smell. All day and all night there's the roar of the extractor furnaces,
heating and grinding the marlstone to get the kerogen out of it, and the
rumble of the long-line conveyors, dragging the spent shale away to pile
it somewhere.
See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it
expands, like popcorn. So there's no place to put it. You can't squeeze it
back into the shaft you've taken it out of; there's too much of it. If you
dig out a mountain of shale and extract the oil, the popped shale that's
left is enough to make two mountains. So that's what you do. You build new
mountains.
And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and
the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the
slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it and we eat it, or some
of it, for breakfast the next morning.
Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And
all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and
burn it up.
All the TV shows have morale-builder commercials telling us how
important our work is, how the whole world depends on us for food. It's
all true. They don't have to keep reminding us. If we didn't do what we do
there would be hunger in Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon.
We all know that. We contribute five trillion calories a day to the
world's diet, half the protein ration for about a fifth of the global
population. It all comes out of the yeasts and bacteria we grow off the
Wyoming shale oil, along with parts of Utah and Colorado. The world needs
that food. But so far it has cost us most of Wyoming, half of Appalachia,
a big chunk of the Athabasca tar sands region... and what are we going to
do with all those people when the last drop of hydrocarbon is converted to
yeast?
It's not my problem, but I still think of it.
It stopped being my problem when I won the lottery, the day after
Christmas, the year I turned twenty-six.
The prize was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Enough to live
like a king for a year. Enough to marry and keep a family on, provided we
both worked and didn't live too high.
Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway.
I took the lottery ticket down to the travel office and turned it in
for passage. They were glad to see me; they didn't do much of a business
there, especially in that kind of commodity. I had about ten thousand
dollars left over in change, give or take a little. I didn't count it. I
bought drinks for my whole shift as far as it would go. With the fifty
people in my shift, and all the friends and casual drop-ins who leeched on
to the party, it went about twentyfour hours.
Then I staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office.
Five months later, I was circling in toward the asteroid, staring out the
portholes at the Brazilian cruiser that was challenging us, on my way to
being a prospector at last.
Chapter 3
Sigfrid never closes off a subject. He never says, "Well, Rob, I guess
we've talked enough about that." But sometimes when I've been lying there
on the mat for a long time, not responding much, making jokes or humming
through my nose, after a while he'll say:
"I think we might go back to a different area, Rob. There was something
you said some time ago that we might follow up. Can you remember that
time, the last time you:"
"The last time I talked to Klara, right?"
"Yes, Rob."
"Sigfrid, I always know what you're going to say."
"Doesn't matter if you do, Rob. What about it? Do you want to talk
about how you felt that time?"
"Why not?" I clean the nail of my right middle finger by drawing it
between my two lower front teeth. I inspect it and say, "I realize that
was an important time. Maybe it was the worst moment of my life, about.
Even worse than when Sylvia ditched me, or when I found out my mother
died."
"Are you saying you'd rather talk about one of those things, Rob?"
"Not at all. You say talk about Klara, we'll talk about Klara."
And I settle myself on the foam mat and think for a while. I've been
very interested in transcendental insight, and sometimes when I set a
problem to my mind and just start saying my mantra over and over I come
out of it with the problem solved: Sell the fish-farm stock in Baja and
buy plumbing supplies on the commodities exchange. That was one, and it
really paid out. Or: Take Rachel to Merida for waterskling on the Bay of
Campeche. That got her into my bed the first time, when I'd tried
everything else.
And then Sigfrid says, "You're not responding, Rob."
"I'm thinking about what you said."
"Please don't think about it, Rob. Just talk. Tell me what you're
feeling about Klara right now."
I try to think it out honestly. Sigfrid won't let me get into TI for
it, so I look inside my mind for suppressed feelings.
"Well, not much," I say. Not much on the surface, anyway.
"Do you remember the feeling at the time, Rob?"
"Of course I do."
"Try to feel what you felt then, Rob."
"All right." Obediently I reconstruct the situation in my mind. There I
am, talking to Klara on the radio. Dane is shouting something in the
lander. We're all frightened out of our wits. Down underneath us the blue
mist is opening up, and I see the dim skeletal star for the first time.
The Three-ship-no, it was a Five.. Anyway, it stinks of vomit and
perspiration. My body aches.
I can remember it exactly, although I would be lying if I said I was
letting myself feel it.
I say lightly, half chuckling, "Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain
and guilt and misery there that I just can't handle." Sometimes I try that
with him, saying a kind of painful truth in the tone you might use to ask
the waiter at a cocktail party to bring you another rum punch. I do that
when I want to divert his attack. I don't think it works. Sigfrid has a
lot of Heechee circuits in him. He's a lot better than the machines at the
Institute were, when I had my episode. He continuously monitors all my
physical parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave activity
and so on. He gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on
the mat, to show how violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume
of my voice and spectrum-scans the print for overtones. And he also
understands what the words mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart, considering
how stupid he is.
It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session
absolutely limp, with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one
more minute I would have found myself falling right down into that pain
and it would have destroyed me.
Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing.
I don't know why I keep coming back to you, Sigfrid.
I remind you, Robby, you've already used up three stomachs and, let me
see, nearly five meters of intestine.
Ulcers, cancer.
Something appears to be eating away at you, Rob.
Chapter 4
So there was Gateway, getting bigger and bigger in the ports of the
ship up from Earth:
An asteroid. Or perhaps the nucleus of a comet. About ten kilometers
through, the longest way. Pear-shaped. On the outside it looks like a
lumpy charred blob with glints of blue. On the inside it's the gateway to
the universe.
Sheri Loffat leaned against my shoulder, with the rest of our bunch of
would-be prospectors clustered behind us, staring. "Jesus, Rob. Look at
the cruisers!"
"They find anything wrong," said somebody behind us, "and they blow us
out of space."
"They won't find anything wrong," said Sheri, but she ended her remark
with a question mark. Those cruisers looked mean, circling jealously
around the asteroid, watching to see that whoever comes in isn't going to
steal the secrets that are worth more than anyone could ever pay.
We hung to the porthole braces to rubberneck at them. Foolishness, that
was. We could have been killed. There wasn't really much likelihood that
our ship's matching orbit with Gateway or the Brazilian cruiser would take
much delta-V, but there only had to be one quick course correction to
spatter us. And there was always the other possibility, that our ship
would rotate a quarterturn or so and we'd suddenly find ourselves staring
into the naked, nearby sun. That meant blindness for always, that close.
But we wanted to see.
The Brazilian cruiser didn't bother to lock on. We saw flashes back and
forth, and knew that they were checking our manifests by laser. That was
normal. I said the cruisers were watching for thieves, but actually they
were more to watch each other than to worry about anybody else. Including
us. The Russians were suspicious of the Chinese, the Chinese were
suspicious of the Russians, the Brazilians were suspicious of the
Venusians. They were all suspicious of the Americans.
So the other four cruisers were surely watching the Brazilians more
closely than they were watching us. But we all knew that if our coded
navicerts had not matched the patterns their five separate consulates at
the departure port on Earth had filed, the next step would not have been
an argument. It would have been a torpedo.
It's funny. I could imagine that torpedo. I could imagine the cold-eyed
warrior who would aim and launch it, and how our ship would blossom into a
flare of orange light and we would all become dissociated atoms in
orbit.... Only the torpedoman on that ship, I'm pretty sure, was at that
time an armorer's mate named Francy Hereira. We got to be pretty good
buddies later on. He wasn't what you'd really call a cold-eyed killer. I
cried in his arms all the day after I got back from that last trip, in my
hospital room, when he was supposed to be searching me for contraband. And
Francy cried with me.
The cruiser moved away and we all surged gently out, then pulled
ourselves back to the window with the grips, as our ship began to close in
on Gateway.
"Looks like a case of smallpox," said somebody in the group.
It did; and some of the pockmarks were open. Those were the berths for
ships that were out on mission. Some of them would stay open forever,
because the ships wouldn't be coming back. But most of the pocks were
covered with bulges that looked like mushroom caps.
Those caps were the ships themselves, what Gateway was all about.
The ships weren't easy to see. Neither was Gateway itself. It had a low
albedo to begin with, and it wasn't very big: as I say, about ten
kilometers on the long axis, half that through its equator of rotation.
But it could have been detected. After that first tunnel rat led them to
it, astronomers began asking each other why it hadn't been spotted a
century earlier. Now that they know where to look, they find it. It
sometimes gets as bright as seventeenth magnitude, as seen from Earth.
That's easy. You would have thought it would have been picked up in a
routine mapping program.
The thing is, there weren't that many routine mapping programs in that
direction, and it seems Gateway wasn't where they were looking when they
looked.
Stellar astronomy usually pointed away from the sun. Solar astronomy
usually stayed in the plane of the ecliptic-and Gateway has a right-angle
orbit. So it fell through the cracks.
The piezophone clucked and said, "Docking in five minutes. Return to
your bunks. Fasten webbing."
We were almost there.
Sheri Loffat reached out and held my hand through the webbing. I
squeezed back. We had never been to bed together, never met until she
turned up in the bunk next to mine on the ship, but the vibrations were
practically sexual. As though we were about to make it in the biggest,
best way there ever could be; but it wasn't sex, it was Gateway.
When men began to poke around the surface of Venus they found the
Heechee diggings.
They didn't find any Heechees. Whoever the Heechees were, whenever they
had been on Venus, they were gone. Not even a body was left in a burial
pit to exhume and cut apart. All there was, was the tunnels, the caverns,
the few piddling little artifacts, the technological wonders that human
beings puzzled over and tried to reconstruct.
Then somebody found a Heechee map of the solar system. Jupiter was
there with its moons, and Mars, and the outer planets, and the Earth-Moon
pair. And Venus, which was marked in black on the shining blue surface of
the Heechee-metal map. And Mercury, and one other thing, the only other
thing marked in black besides Venus: an orbital body that came inside the
perihelion of Mercury and outside the orbit of Venus, tipped ninety
degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic so that it never came very close
to either. A body which had never been identified by terrestrial
astronomers. Conjecture: an asteroid, or a comet-the difference was only
semantic-which the Heechees had cared about specially for some reason.
| (Transcript of Q. & A., Professor Hegramet's
| lecture.)
| Q. What did the Heechee look like?
| Professor Hegramet: Nobody knows. We've never
| found anything resembling a photograph, or a
| drawing, except for two or three maps. Or a book.
| Q. Didn't they have some system of storing
| knowledge, like writing?
| Professor Hegramet: Well, of course they must
| have. But what it is, I don't know. I have a
| suspicion... well, it's only a guess.
| Q. What?
| Professor Hegramet: Well, think about our own
| storage methods and how they would have been
| received in pretechnological times. If we'd given,
| say, Euclid a book, he could have figured out what
| it was, even if he couldn't understand what it was
| saying. But what if we'd given him a tape
| cassette? He wouldn't have known what to do with
| it. I have a suspicion, no, a conviction, that we
| have some Heechee "books" we just don't recognize.
| A bar of Heechee metal. Maybe that Q-spiral in the
| ships, the function of which we don't know at all.
| This isn't a new idea. They've all been tested for
| magnetic codes, for microgrooves, for chemical
| patterns-nothing has shown up. But we may not have
| the instrument we need to detect the messages.
| Q. There's something about the Heechee that I
| just don't understand. Why did they leave all
| these tunnels and places? Where did they go?
| Professor Hegramet: Young lady, it beats the
| piss out of me.
Probably sooner or later a telescopic probe would have followed up that
clue, but it wasn't necessary. Then The Famous Sylvester Macklen-who
wasn't up to that point the famous anything, just another tunnel rat on
Venus-found a Heechee ship and got himself to Gateway, and died there. But
he managed to let people know where he was by cleverly blowing up his
ship. So a NASA probe was diverted from the chromosphere of the sun, and
Gateway was reached and opened up by man.
Inside were the stars.
Inside, to be less poetic and more literal, were nearly a thousand
smallish spacecraft, shaped something like fat mushrooms. They came in
several shapes and sizes. The littlest ones were button-topped, like the
mushrooms they grow in the Wyoming tunnels after they've dug all the shale
out, and you buy in the supermarket. The bigger ones were pointy, like
morels. Inside the caps of the mushrooms were living quarters and a power
source that no one understood. The stems were chemical rocket ships, kind
of like the old Moon Landers of the first space programs.
No one had ever figured out how the caps were driven, or how to direct
them.
That was one of the things that made us all nervous: the fact that we
were going to take our chances with something nobody understood. You
literally had no control, once you started out in a Heechee ship. Their
courses were built into their guidance system, in a way that nobody had
figured out; you could pick one course, but once picked that was it-and
you didn't know where it was going to take you when you picked it, any
more than you know what's in your box of Cracker-Joy until you open it.
But they worked. They still worked, after what they say is maybe half a
million years.
The first guy who had the guts to get into one and try to start it up
succeeded. It lifted out of its crater on the surface of the asteroid. It
turned fuzzy and bright, and was gone.
And three months later, it was back, with a starved, staring astronaut
inside, aglow with triumph. He had been to another star! He had orbited a
great gray planet with swirling yellow clouds, had managed to reverse the
controls-and had been brought back to the very same pockmark, by the
built-in guidance controls.
So they sent out another ship, this time one of the big, pointy
morel-shaped ones, with a crew of four and plenty of rations and
instrumentation. They were gone only about fifty days. In that time they
had not just reached another solar system, they had actually used the
lander to go down to the surface of a planet. There wasn't anything living
there... but there had been.
They found the remnants. Not a lot. A few beat-up pieces of trash, on a
corner of a mountaintop that had missed the general destruction that had
hit the planet. Out of the radioactive dust they had picked up a brick, a
ceramic bolt, a half-melted thing that looked as though it had once been a
chromium flute.
Then the star rush began... and we were part of it.
Chapter 5
Sigfrid is a pretty smart machine, but sometimes I can't figure out
what's wrong with him. He's always asking me to tell him my dreams. Then
sometimes I come in all aglow with some dream I'm positive he's going to
love, a big-red-apple-for-the-teacher kind of dream, full of penis symbols
and fetishism and guilt hang-ups, and he disappoints me. He takes off on
some crazy track that has nothing at all to do with it. I tell him the
whole thing, and then he sits and clicks and whirs and buzzes for a
while-he doesn't really, but I fantasize that while I'm waiting-and then
he says:
"Let's go back to something different, Rob. I'm interested in some of
the things you've said about the woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin."
I say, "Sigfrid, you're off on a wild-goose chase again."
"I don't think so, Rob."
"But that dream! My God, don't you see how important it is? What about
the mother figure in it?"
"What about letting me do my job, Rob?"
"Do I have a choice?" I say, feeling sulky.
"You always have a choice, Rob, but I would like very much to quote to
you something you said a while ago." And he stops, and I hear my own voice
coming out of somewhere in his tapes. I am saying:
"Sigfrid, there's an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that
I just can't handle."
He waits for me to say something.
After a moment I do. "That's a nice recording," I acknowledge, "but I'd
rather talk about the way my mother fixation comes out in my dream."
"I think it would be more productive to explore this other matter, Rob.
It is possible they're related."
"Really?" I am all warmed up to discuss this theoretical possibility in
a detached and philosophical way, but he beats me to the punch:
"The last conversation you had with Klara, Rob. Please tell me what you
feel about