20 Unwanted Encounter

The phone was ringing in Wan’s ship. Well, it was not really a phone, and it certainly wasn’t ringing; but there was the signal to show that someone was directing a message to the ship on the FTL radio. “Off!” shouted Wan, waking up indignantly from his sleep. “I will speak to no one!” And then, somewhat more awake, he looked not only angry but puzzled. “It has been turned off,” he said, staring at the FTL radio, and the look on his face went the rest of the way across the spectrum to fear.

What makes Wan less than loathsome to me, I think, is that ulcer of fear that ate away at him always. Heaven knows he was a brute. He was surly; he was a thief he cared for nothing but himself. But that only means that he was what we all once were, but we are socialized out of it by parents and playmates and school and police. No one had ever socialized Wan, and so he was still a child. “I will speak to no one!” he shouted, and woke Klara.

I can see Klara as she was then, since now I can see so much that was hidden. She was tired, she was irritable, and she had had all of Wan any person could be expected to stand. “You might as well answer it,” she said, and Wan glared at her as though she were insane.

“Answer? Of course I shall not answer! It is only at most some interfering bureaucrat to complain that I have not followed the exact proper procedures-“

“To complain that you stole the ship,” she corrected mildly, and crossed to the FFL radio. “How do you answer it?” she asked.

“Do not be foolish!” he howled. “Wait! Stop! What are you doing?”

“Is it this lever?” she asked, and his yell was answer enough. He leaped across the tiny cabin, but she was larger than he and stronger. She fended him off. The signal chirp stopped; the golden light went off; and Wan, suddenly relaxing, laughed out loud.

“Ho, what a fool you are! There is no one there,” he cried.

But he was wrong. There was a hissing sound for a moment, then recognizable words-almost recognizable, at least. A shrill and queerly stressed voice said:

“I fill to you no harrum.”

For Klara to understand what had been said took considerable thought, and then when she had understood it, it did not achieve its desired effect. Was it what it sounded like? Some stranger, with a terrible hissing speech impediment, trying to say “I will do you no harm”? And why would he say that? To be reassured that you are not in danger at a time when you had no reason to think you were is not reassuring.

Wan was scowling. “What is it?” he cried sharply, beginning to sweat. “Who is there? What do you want?”

There was no answer. The reason there was no answer was that Captain had used up his entire vocabulary and was busy rehearsing his next speech; to Wan and Klara, however, the silence had more meaning than the words. “The screen!” Wan cried. “Foolish woman, use the screen, find out what this is!”

It took time for Klara to work the controls; the use of the Heechee vision screen was a skill she had only begun to acquire on this voyage, since no one in her time had known how to operate it. It clarified to display a ship, a big one. The biggest Klara bad ever seen, far larger than any of the Fives that had operated out of Gateway in her time. “What- What-What-“ whimpered Wan, and only on the fourth try managed to complete it: “What is it?”

Klara didn’t try to answer. She didn’t know. She feared, though. She feared that it was the sight every Gateway prospector had both longed for and dreaded, and when Captain finished rehearsing and delivered his next speech she was sure:

“I ... cummin ... a-bore-ud ... tchew.”

Coming aboard! For one ship to dock with another in full drive was not impossible, Klara knew; it had been done. But no Earthly pilot had had much practice in doing it.

“Don’t let him in!” shrieked Wan. “Run away! Hide! Do something!” He glared at Klara in terror, then made a lunge for the controls.

“Don’t be a fool!” she yelled, springing to intercept him. Klara was a strong woman, but he was all she could handle just then. Mad fear made him strong. He flailed out at her and sent her reeling and, weeping with fear, leaped at the controls.

In the terror of this unexpected contact, Klara nevertheless had room for another stabbing fear. Everything she had learned about Heechee ships had taught her that you never, never tried to change course once it was established. Newer skills had made it possible to do it, she knew; but she also knew that it was not to be done lightly, only after careful calculation and planning, and Wan was in no shape for either of those.

And even so-it made no difference. The great shark-shaped ship moved closer.

In spite of herself Klara watched admiringly as the pilot of the other ship matched course change and velocity increment without difficulty. It was a technically fascinating process. Wan froze at the controls, watching it, mouth open, slobbering. Then, when the other ship loomed large and disappeared below the view of the scanners, and there was a grating sound from the lander hatch, he bellowed in fear and dove for the toilet. Klara was alone as she saw the lander hatch open and fall back; and so it was Gelle-Klara Moynlin who was the first human being to stand in the presence of a Heechee.

It rose from the hatch, stood erect, and confronted her. Less tall than she. Reeking of something ammoniacal. Its eyes were round, because that is the best design for an organ that must rotate in any direction, but they were not human eyes. There was no concentric ring of pigment around a central pupil. There was no pupil, just a cross-shaped blotch of darkness in the middle of a pinkish marble that stared at her. Its pelvis was wide. Slung below the pelvis, between what would have been its thighs if its legs had been articulated in a human way, was a capsule of bright blue metal. As much as anything else, the Heechee looked like a diapered toddler with a load in its pants.

That thought penetrated through Klara’s terror and eased it-minutely-briefly-not enough. As the creature moved forward she leaped back.

As Klara moved, the Heechee moved, too. It started as the hatch cover moved again and another one of them came through. From the tension and hesitancy of its movements it seemed to Klara that it was nearly as frightened as she, and so she said, not with the expectation of being understood but because it was impossible for her to say nothing:

“Hello, there.”

The creature studied her. A forked tongue licked the shiny black wrinkles of its face. It made a strange, purring sound, as though it were thinking. Then, in something close to recognizable English, it said: “I em Heetsee. I fill to you no harrum.”

It gazed with fascination and repugnance at Klara, then chittered briskly to the other one, who began to search the vessel. They found Wan without trouble, and without trouble moved both Klara and Wan down through the hatch, through the connected landers, into the Heechee ship. Klara heard the batches scrape closed, and then a moment later felt the lurch that meant that Wan’s ship had been cast free

She was a captive of the Heechee, in a Heechee ship.

They did not harm her. If they were intending to do it, at least they were in no hurry about it. There were five of them, and they were very busy.

What they were busy at Klara could not guess, and apparently the one with the limited English vocabulary was too busy at it to take time for the laborious task of explaining. What they really wanted from Klara at that moment was for her to stay out of the way. They had no trouble communicating that to her. They unceremoniously took her by the arm, with a leathery and painful grip, and shoved her where they wanted her.

Wan gave them no trouble at all. He lay huddled in a corner with his eyes tightly closed. When he discovered that Klara was nearby he peered at her with one eye, poked her in the spine to get her attention, and whispered: “Did he really mean he wouldn’t harm us, do you think?”

She shrugged. He whimpered almost inaudibly, then relapsed into his fetal crouch. She saw with disgust that a trickle of saliva was coming out of the side of his mouth. He was the next thing to catatonic.

If there was anyone to help her, that was not Wan. She would have to face the Heechee alone-whatever it might be that they intended.

But what was happening was fascinating. So much was new to Klara! She had spent the decades of rapid accretion of Heechee technology whirling at very nearly light-speed around the core of the black hole. Her acquaintance with Heechee vessels was limited to the antiques she and I and the other prospectors had operated out of Gateway.

This was something else. It was a lot bigger than a Five. It far outshone even Wan’s private yacht in its fittings. It didn’t have one control panel; it had three-of course, Klara did not know that two of them were for purposes other than piloting the ship itself. Those two possessed instruments and operating readouts she had never seen before. Not only was it eight or ten times the cubic volume of a Five, but relatively less of the space was taken up with equipment. It was possible to move about it quite freely! It had the standard features-the worm-shaped thing that glowed during faster-than-light travel, the V-shaped seats, and so on. But it also had blue-glowing boxes that whined and peeped and flickered with lights, and a different sort of worm-shaped crystal that, Wan told her, terrified, was for digging into black holes.

Above all, it had Heechee.

Heechee! The semi-mythical, perplexing, nearly divine Heechee! No human being had ever seen one, or even a picture. And here was Gelle-Klara Moynlin, with no less than five of them all about her-growling and hissing and tweeting, and smelling quite strange.

They looked strange, too. They were smaller than human beings, and their very wide pelvises gave them a gait like a walking skeleton. Their skin was plastic-smooth and mostly dark, though there were patches and curlicues of bright gold and scarlet that looked like Indian war paint. Their physiology was not merely lean. It was gaunt. There was not much flesh on those quick, strong limbs and fingers. Although their faces seemed as though they were carved out of shiny plastic, they were at least resilient enough to allow for facial expression ... though Klara could not be sure what the expressions represented.

And swinging below the crotches of every one of them, male and female alike, was a great cone-shaped thing.

At first Klara thought it was part of their bodies, but when one of them disappeared into what she assumed was some sort of toilet it fussed for a moment and removed the cone. Was it something like a knapsack? A pocketbook? An attache case, to carry papers, pencils, and a brown-bag lunch? Whatever it was, it came off when they wanted it off. And when it was on it explained one of the great puzzles of Heechee anatomy, namely how they managed to sit down on those incredibly painful V-shaped seats. It was their dependent cones that filled the V-shaped gap. The Heechee themselves perched comfortably on the top of the cones. Klara

For decades the Heechee “prayer fans” were a mystery. We did not know that they were actually their equivalent of books and datastores, because the greatest minds of the time (my own included) could not find a way to read them, or even to find indications that they contained anything to be read. The reason was that although scansion was simple enough, it could only take place in the presence of a background microwave radiation. The Heechee themselves had no problem with that, because their cones produced the proper radiation all the time, since they were always in some sort of contact with the datafans that contained the stored memories of their ancestors held in their cones. Human beings could be excused for not guessing that the Heechee carried data between their legs, for human anatomy would not allow such a thing. (My own excuse is less evident.)

shook her head, wondering-all the idle guesses and jokes on the subject in Gateway, why had no one ever thought of that?

She felt Wan’s hot breath on the back of her neck. “What are they doing?” he demanded.

She had almost forgotten he was there. She had almost forgotten even to be afraid, so fascinated was she by what she saw. That was not prudent. Who could tell what these monsters would do with their human captives?

For that matter, who could guess what they were doing now? They were all buzzing and chirping in an agitated way, the four larger ones clustered around the smaller fifth, the one with blue and yellow markings on its-no, definitely, on her-upper arms. All five of them were paying no attention to the humans just now. They were concentrating on one of the display panels, which was showing a star chart that Klara thought vaguely familiar. A group of stars, and around them a cluster of check marks-hadn’t Wan displayed such a pattern on his own screen?

“I’m hungry,” Wan growled sullenly in her ear.

“Hungry!” Klara pulled sharply away from him, astonishment as much as revulsion. Hungry! She was nearly sick to her stomach with fear and worry-and, she realized, a queer odor, half ammonia and half rotting stump, that seemed to come from the Heechee themselves. Besides, she had to go to the bathroom ... and this other monster could think of nothing but that he was hungry! “Please shut up,” she said over her shoulder, and touched off Wan’s always available fury.

“What? Me shut up?” he demanded. “No, you shut up, foolish woman!” He almost stood up to tower over her, but got no farther than a crouch, quickly groveling back to the floor, for one of the Heechee looked up and came toward them.

It stood over them for a moment, its wide, narrow-lipped mouth working as it rehearsed what it was about to say.

“Be fair,” it pronounced distinctly, and waved a skinny arm toward the viewscreen.

Klara swallowed laughter nervously trying to bubble out of her throat. Be fair! To whom? For what?

“Be fair,” it said again, “for dese are sass sass sins.”

So there was Klara, my truest love that was. She had suffered in a matter of weeks the terror of the black hole, the shock of losing decades of the world’s life, the misery of Wan, the intolerable trauma of being taken by the Heechee. And meanwhile- And meanwhile, I had problems of my own. I had not yet been vastened and did not know where she was; I did not hear the warning to beware of the Assassins; I didn’t then know that the Assassins existed. I couldn’t reach out to comfort her in her fear-not just because I didn’t know, but because I was full of fears of my own. And the worst of them did not involve Klara or the Heechee, or even my aberrant program Albert Einstein; it was in my own belly.