24 The Geography of Heaven

Where was I, really? It took me a long time to answer that question for myself, not least because my mentor, Albert, dismissed it as silly. “The question of ‘where’ is a foolish human preoccupation, Robin,” he grumped. “Concentrate! Learn how to do and how to feel! Reserve the philosophy and the metaphysics for those long evenings of leisure with a pipe and a stein of good beer.”

“Beer, Albert?”

He sighed. “The electronic analog of beer,” he said testily, “is quite ‘real’ enough for the electronic analog of a person. Now pay attention, please, to the inputs I am now offering you, which are video scans of the interior of the control cabin of the True Love.

I did as he said, of course. I was at least as eager as Albert to complete my training course so that I could go on to do-whatever it was possible for me to do in this new and scary state. But in my odd femtoseconds I could not help turning over that question in my mind, and I finally found an answer. Where was I, really?

I was in heaven.

Think about it. It meets most of the specifications, you know. My belly didn’t hurt anymore-I didn’t have a belly. My enslavement to mortality was over, for if I had owed a death I had paid it, and was quit for the morrow. If it was not quite eternity that waited for me, it was something pretty close. Data storage in the Heechee fans we already knew was good for at least half a million years without significant degradation-because we had the original Heechee fans still working-and that’s a lot of femtoseconds. No more earthly cares; no cares at all, except those I chose to take on for myself~

Yes. Heaven.

You probably don’t believe that, because you won’t accept that an existence as a disembodied ~clutter of databits in fan storage can have anything really “heavenly” about it. I know that because I had trouble accepting it myself. Yet “reality” is-is “really”-a subjective matter. We flesh-and-blood creatures “really” perceived reality only at second or third hand, as an analog painted by our sensory systems on the synapses of our brains. So Albert had always said. It was true-or almost true-no, it was more than true, in some ways, because we disembodied clutters have a wider choice of realities than you.

But if you still don’t believe me I can’t complain. However many times I told myself it was so, I didn’t find it very heavenly either. It had never occurred to me before how terribly inconvenient it was-financially, legally, and in many otherlies, not least maritally-to be dead.

So, coming back to the question, where was I really? Why, really I was at home. As soon as I had-well-died, Albert in remorse had turned the ship around. It took quite a while to get there, but I wasn’t doing anything special. Just learning how to pretend to be alive when in fact I wasn’t. It took the whole flight back just to make a start on that, for it was a lot harder to be born into fan storage than into the world in the old biological way-I had to actively do it, you see. Everything about me was a great deal vaster. In one sense I was limited to a Heechee-model datafan with a cubic content of not much more than a thousand cc, and in that sense I was detached from my plug-in and carried through customs and brought back to the old place on the Tappan Sea with no more trouble than you’d carry an extra pair of shoes. In another sense I was

vaster than galaxies, for I had all the accumulated datafans in the world to play in. Faster than a silver bullet, quick as quicksilver, swift as the shining lightning-I could go anywhere that any of the stored Heechee and human datastores had ever gone, and that was everywhere I had ever heard of. I heard the eddas of the slush dwellers from the sailship and hunted with the first exploring Heechee party that captured the australopithecines; I chatted with the Dead Men from Heechee Heaven (poor inarticulate wrecks, so badly stored in such haste by such inexpert help, but still remembering what it was to be alive). Well. Never mind where all I went; you don’t have time to hear. And that was all easy.

Human affairs were harder...

By the time we were back on the Tappan Sea Essie had had a chance to rest up and I had had the time and practice to recognize what I saw, and both of us had got over some of the trauma of my death. I don’t say we’d got over it all, but at least we could talk.

At first it was only talk, for I was shy of trying to display myself to my dear wife as a hologram. Then said Essie commandingly, “You, Robin! Is no longer tolerable, this talking to you on voice-only phone. Come where I can see!”

“Yes, do!” ordered the other Essie, stored with me, and Albert chimed in:

“Simply relax and let it happen. Robin. The subroutines are well in place.” In spite of them all, it took all my courage to show myself, and when I did my dear wife looked me up and down and said:

“Oh, Robin. How lousy you look!”

Now, that might sound less than loving, but I knew what Essie meant. She wasn’t criticizing; she was sympathizing, and trying to keep from tears. “I’ll do better later, darling,” I said, wishing I could touch her.

“Indeed he will, Mrs. Broadhead,” said Albert earnestly, which made me realize that he was sitting by my side. “At present I am helping him, and the attempt to project two images at once is difficult. I am afraid they are both degraded.”

“Then you disappear!” she suggested, but he shook his head. “There is also the need for Robin to practice-and, I think, you yourself may wish to make some programming amendments. For example, surround. I cannot give Robin a background unless I share it with him. Improvements are also needed in full animation, real-time reaction, consistency between frames-“

“Yes, yes,” groaned Essie, and set about doing things in her workshop. So did we all. There was much to do, especially for me.

I have worried about many things in my time, and almost always about the wrong ones. Worrying about dying hovered in the edges of my concerns for most of my physical life-just as it does in yours. What I feared was extinction. I didn’t get extinction. I got a whole new set of problems. A dead man, you see, no longer has any rights. He can’t own property. He can’t dispose of property. He can’t vote-not only can’t he vote in an election to a government office; he cannot even vote the large majority of shares he owns in the hundred corporations he himself has set up. When he is only a minority interest-even a very powerful one, as I was in, for example, the transport system that sent new colonists to Peggy’s Planet- he won’t even be heard. As you could say, he might as well be dead.

I was unwilling to be that dead.

It wasn’t avarice. As a stored intelligence I had very few needs; there was no risk of my being turned off because I couldn’t pay the utility bills. It was an urgency more pressing than that. The terrorists had not disappeared because the Pentagon captured their spaceship. Every day there were bombings and kidnappings and shootings. Two other launch loops were attacked and one of them damaged; a tanker of pesticide was deliberately scuttled off the coast of Queensland and so a hundred kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef was dying. There were actual battles being fought in Africa and Central America and the Near East; the lid was barely being kept on the pressure cooker. What we needed was a thousand more transports like the S. Ya., and who was going to build them if I were silent?

So we lied.

The story went out that Robin Broadhead had suffered a cerebrovascular accident, all right, but the lie that was tacked on said I was showing steady improvement. Well, I was. Not in the exact sense implied, of course. But almost as soon as we were back home I was able to talk, voice-only, with General Manzbergen and some of the people in Rotterdam; in a week I was showing myself, from time to time-swathed in lap robes supplied courtesy of Albert’s fertile imagination; after a month I allowed a PV crew to film me, tanned and fit, if thin, sailing our little catboat on the sea. Of course, the PY crew was my very own and the clips that appeared on the newscasts were more art than reportage, but it was very good art. I could not handle face-to-face confrontations. But I didn’t need to.

So all in all, you see, I wasn’t too badly off. I conducted my business. I planned, and carried out plans, to ease the ferment that fed the terrorists not enough to cure the problem, but to sit on the lid for a while longer. I had time to listen to Albert’s worries about the curious objects he called kugelblitz, and if we didn’t then know what they meant it was probably just as well. All I lacked was a body, and when I complained about that Essie said forcefully: “Dear God, Robin, is not end of world for you! How many others have had same problem!”

“To be reduced to a datastore? Not many, I should think.”

“But same problem anyhow,” she insisted. “Consider! Healthy young male goes ski-jumping, falls and cracks spine. Paraplegic, eh? No body that amounts to anything except liability, needs to be fed, needs to be diapered, needs to be bathed-you are spared that, Robin. But the important part of you, that is still here!”

“Sure,” I said. I did not add, what Essie of all people did not need to have me add, that my own definition of “important” parts included some accessories to which I had always attached particular value. Even there there were pluses to set against the losses. If I no longer had, e.g., sexual organs, there was surely no further problem about my suddenly complicated sexual relationships.

None of that had to be said. What Essie said instead was: “Buck up, old Robin. Keep in mind you are so far only first approximation of final product.”

“What does that mean?” I demanded.

“Were great problem, Robin! Here After storage was, I admit, quite imperfect. Learned much in development of new Albert for you. Had never before attempted complete storage of entire, and very valued, person unfortunately dead. The technical problems-“

“I understand there were technical problems,” I interrupted; I didn’t really want to hear, just yet, the details of the risky, untried, exquisitely complex job of pouring “me” out of the decaying bucket of my head into the waiting basin of a storage matrix.

“To be sure. Well. Now have more leisure. Now can make fine tuning. Trust me, old Robin, improvements can yet be made.”

“In me?”

“In you, certainly! Also,” she said, twinkling, “in very inadequate stored copy of self. Have good reason to believe same can be made much more interesting to you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Wow.” And wished more than ever for at least the temporary loan of some parts of a body, for what I wanted more than anything else just then was to put my arms around my very dear wife. And meanwhile and meanwhile the worlds went on. Even the very small worlds of my friend Audee Walthers and his own complicated loving.

When you look at them from inside, all worlds are the same size. Audee’s didn’t seem small to him. I took care of one of their problems very quickly; I gave each of them ten thousand shares of stock in the Peggy’s Planet ferry, the S. Ya. and its pendant enterprises. Janie Yee-xing didn’t have to worry about being fired anymore; she could rehire herself as a pilot if she chose, or ride the S. Ya. as passenger if she liked. So could Audee; or he could go back to Peggy’s and boss his former bosses on the oilfield; or none of the above, but lounge around in luxury for all his life; and so could Dolly. And, of course, that didn’t solve their problems at all. The three of them mooned around the guest suites for a while until finally Essie suggested we lend them the True Love for a cruise to nowhere until they got their heads straightened out, and we did.

None of them were foolish at all-like the rest of us, they acted that way now and then, maybe. They recognized a bribe when they saw one. They knew that what I really wanted was for them to keep their mouths shut about my present unpleasantly noncorporeal state. But they also knew what a friendly gift was, and there was that component in the stock transfer, too.

And what did they do, the three of them on the True Love?

I think I don’t want to say. Most of it is no one’s business but theirs. Consider. There are times in everyone’s life-certainly including yours, most definitely including my own-when what you are doing and saying is not either important or pretty. You strain at a bowel movement, you have a fugitive and shocking thought, you break wind, you tell a lie. None of it matters very much, but you do not want advertised those parts of everyone’s life in which he looks ludicrous or contemptible or mean. Usually they don’t get advertised, because there is no one to see-but now that I am vastened there is always one to see, and that is me. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, as everyone’s memories are added to the database, there are no personal mysteries left at all.

I will say this much of Audee Walthers’ private concerns. What motivated his actions and fueled his worries was that admirable and desirable thing, love. What frustrated his loving was also love. He loved his wife, Dolly, because he had schooled himself to love her all the while they were married-that was his view of how married people should be. On the other hand, Dolly had left him for another man (I use the term loosely in Wan’s case), and Janie Yee-xing had turned up to console him. They were both very attractive persons. But there were too many of them. Audee was as monogamous as I was. If he thought to make up with Dolly, there was Janie in the way-she had been kind, he owed her some sort of consideration-call it love. But between him and Janie there was Dolly: They had planned a life together and he had had no intention ever of changing it, so you could call that love, too. Complicated by some feeling that he owed Dolly some kind of punishment for abandoning him, and Janie some sort of resentment for being in the way-remember, I told you there were contemptible and ludicrous parts. Complicated much more by the equally complex feelings of Dolly and Janie

It must almost have been a relief to them when-orbiting idly in a great cometary ellipse that was pushing them out toward the asteroids and at angle to the ecliptic-whatever discussion they were having at the moment was interrupted by a gasp from Dolly and a stifled scream from Janie, and Audee Walthers turned to see on the screen a great cluster of vessels huger and more numerous and far, far bigger than any human being had seen in Earth’s solar system before.

They were scared out of their minds, no doubt.

But no more than the rest of us. All over the Earth, and everywhere in space where there were human beings and communications facilities to carry the word, there was shock and terror. It was the worst nightmare of every human being for the past century or so.

The Heechee were coming back

They didn’t hide. They were there-and so many of them! Optical sensors in the orbital stations spotted more than fifty ships-and what ships! Twelve or fourteen as big as the S. Ya. Another dozen bigger still, great globular structures like the one that had swallowed the sailship. There were Threes and Fives and some intermediate ones that the High Pentagon thought looked suspiciously like cruisers, and all of them coming straight down at us from the general direction of Vega. I could say Earth’s defenses were caught unprepared, but that would be a flattering lie. The truth was that Earth had no defenses worth mentioning. There were patrol ships, to be sure; but they had been built by Earthmen to fight other Earthmen. No one had dreamed of pitting them against the semi-mythical Heechee.

And then they spoke to us.

The message was in English, and it was short. It said: “The Heechee can’t allow interstellar travel or communication anymore except under certain conditions that they will decide and supervise. Everything else has to stop right away. They’ve come to stop it.” That was all before the speaker, with a helpless shake of the head, faded away.

It sounded a lot like a declaration of war.

It was interpreted that way, too. In the High Pentagon, in the orbiting forts of other nations, in the councils of power all over the world, there were abrupt meetings and conferences and planning sessions; ships were called in for rearming, and others were redirected toward the Heechee fleet; the orbital weapons that had been quiet for decades were checked and aligned-useless as arbalests, they might be, but if they were all we had to fight with, we would fight them. The confusion and shock and reaction swept the world.

And there was nowhere that suffered more astonishment and bewilderment than the people who made up my own happy household; for the person who gave the Heechee ultimatum Albert had recognized at once, and Essie only a moment later, and I before I even saw her face. It was Gelle-Klara Moynlin.