“The hell you say!” snapped Heimat. “We’ll pick the planet, and don’t forget the money!”
“I’ll give you the money,” I said politely. “A million each; you can use it to buy programs for yourselves for company. Think it over, you guys. You know we really can’t let you kill off any more cities.” And then I saw Heimat’s eyes narrow as he heard sounds from the other room, so I added quickly: “You don’t have any other choice, because otherwise you’ll both be dead. Look at what we have for you,” I invited, and displayed on the screen some of Nash’s orbital particle-beam weapons.
They looked. It took them only a second or two (but more than a thousand milliseconds!) to register what was on the screen, but by then it was too late. For Albert had found something else for me out of the contents of the house. The workthing he had located and I had taken over came through the door, its cleaner hoses elevated. A workthing isn’t a weapon. When designed as a houseboy it can scrub and mend and tidy up, it can even do windows and take out the garbage, but it doesn’t kill. It does, however, have jets that can blast detergent into cracks, and pumps that can put extra muscle behind the jets; and when it has pumped up its charge to maximum and slipped paring knives into the nozzles of the jets, as I had commanded this one to do while I was talking, it can then project the knives with great force and considerable accuracy.
I didn’t kill the old men, or at least not permanently. But before they could look around Heimat had a knife in his throat and Basingstoke one in his heart, and they were no longer a problem for the children, just for the technicians who would pump what remained of their minds into storage for the Dead Files. “I wonder,” I said, watching the second slow knife gradually bury itself in Basingstoke’s chest, “if we shouldn’t have done that in the first place, Albert. They’ll be a lot less trouble as machine-stored intelligences, won’t they?”
“Why should they be?” Albert smiled. “You aren’t, you know. But now take care of the children, please.”
“Children!” Cassata cried. “You’ve got Foe there! They’re the ones you have to pay attention to!”
“But in this case,” said Albert politely, “it is the same thing, you see.”
I didn’t need to be reminded of that. I was sufficiently scared already. A workthing isn’t any better at untying knots than at overcoming criminals, but it has its scrapers and cutters; it simply chewed through the ropes. It freed Oniko first, then Sneezy and Harold, and I talked to them while it was still doing it.
I said soothingly, “You’re all right now, kids, except for one important thing. I want you two to take your pods off, without any argument or discussion, because it is very important. And I want you to do it right away.”
They were good kids. It wasn’t easy for them. Nothing would have been easy for them after what they’d been through-especially for Oniko, exhausted as she was and terrified as she had been-harder still for Sneezy, I guess, because a Heechee is almost never without his pod from the age of three up. They did it, all the same, and they did it without any argument or discussion. But, oh, how many milliseconds it took for them to do it, while I waited on tenterhooks for the next step. That was the one I feared!
But there was no choice.
I said, “Now, I want the two of you to bring the pods to the commset and plug them in to the data receptors.”
It wasn’t that easy; pod terminals weren’t meant for any such use, but Albert had already been figuring out ways and means. So Sneezy saw how an adapter could fit, and Harold rummaged something that would do out of the beach house’s junk drawers, and with the help of the workthing they manhandled and wrestled it into shape, stepping carefully around the two grisly things on the floor.
And all that time, millisecond after millisecond, I watched them doing the thing that would make it possible for me to do what I dreaded, and wanted, most of anything in the world:
To come face to face-however metaphorically, since I had no real face and didn’t suppose the Foe had ever had any-with the creatures who had upset the tranquillity of the never very tranquil universe I lived in.
And then Oniko touched the terminals of her pod to the terminals of the commset, and there they were.
I can’t really tell you what the Foe looked like. How do you describe in terms of physical attributes what has none?
I could not tell you how big the Foe were, or what color, or what shape; they didn’t have any of those things. If they had gender, or anything at all that distinguished one of them from another, I wasn’t aware of it. I was not even sure there were two of them. More than one, yes. Less than many, I suppose. My assumption was that there were two, because in the time (quite a long time, by my standards and theirs) between Oniko putting her pod against the terminals of the commset and Sneezy following with his, I thought there was only a single being sharing gigabit space with me, and after that I thought there were more.
I tried to speak to them.
It wasn’t easy. I didn’t know how to go about it.
First I tried a question:
Who are you?
That wasn’t precisely what I said, because I didn’t say anything in words. It was more like a vast, soundless, Hmmm?
There wasn’t any answer.
I tried again, this time in pictures. I recalled a picture of the kugelblitz, the dozen turd-colored smears turning restlessly by themselves in intergalactic space.
Nothing came back.
I made a picture of the Wheel and put it in the frame with the kugelblitz. I wiped that, and showed Sneezy and Oniko, and then their pods.
Then I tried another Hmmm?
No answer. Nothing. Just the knowledge that somebody, somehow was sharing that space with me—No! There was an answer! Because I had shown the pods as they were, opaque, dull, top-shaped metal things; and in my own picture they were luminous. They were radiating.
Although all my attention was focused tightly on my doppel, there was still the other me, half a second away, in the True Love with Essie and Albert and General Cassata. I was aware of stirrings there, even questions, even comment; but the “real” me was always a couple of seconds behind the doppel, and by the time Albert cried sharply, “They’re telling you they were in the pods!” I had already been told.
It was, after all, an answer of sorts. Communication had begun.
I tried a hard picture. I tried to show the entire universe-from outside; from the place that had never existed, because there was no “outside” of what was, by definition, everywhere. The only picture that conveyed any of that to me was simply a great, glowing, featureless blob; whether it would mean anything to the Foe I could not say, but it was the best I could approximate of the things Albert had showed me in Deep Time. Then, as Albert had, I zoomed in on it. The blob approached and spread out and displayed one section of the universe, a few thousand galaxies, ellipticals and spirals and odd pairs crashing through each other and singles spewing out arms of starlets and gas.
Was that right? Something was nagging at me that said I was doing something wrong.
Right, I thought; I was. I had been making an assumption I had no right to make. I was showing the universe as it appeared to human eyes, in the optical frequencies of light. Bad assumption! I had no reason to assume the Foe had eyes. Even if they did, in some sense, what right had I to assume that they saw only the familiar, human rainbow frequencies from violet to red?