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.”