So I added to the picture the halos and gas clouds that showed up only in infrared or microwave, and even the clouds of particles that, we supposed, were the Foe’s own contribution to the universe we lived in.
Actually, that is to say, I showed my unseen (and, I had to fear, perhaps wholly uncaring) audience the pictures Albert had showed me in Deep Time. I let it hang there for a moment, and then I made it move.
In reverse. Just as Albert had done for me.
I shrank the picture. Galaxies came closer together. As they approached, they spread out, so that I was showing less structure and less, more and more tightly compacted together.
I shrank it still farther. Catastrophically. I crushed the universe down to a single terrible point of light.
And then I reenacted the Big Bang, and froze the whole scene at that moment in time when all options were open. And then I tried another of those wordless questioning feelings: Hmmm?
And then I had my answer.
Of course, the answer didn’t come in words.
Of course, the answer seemed hardly like an answer at all. I had not expected that it would. I hadn’t expected anything, really, or at least I had had no idea what to expect.
What I had was a picture, and of all the possible responses I might have thought likely, this was the least. The picture was me. Grinning at the other me. My own face, angular, ugly, but recognizable, perhaps as I had looked to Oniko and Sneezy as I peered out of the commset.
It did not seem an appropriate response to the burning question I had tried to ask.
Probably the reason for that, I told myseli was that I had failed to ask a proper question. Perhaps my picture of what the Foe were trying to do-at least, what we thought the Foe were trying to do-lacked some essential feature in their eyes. (“Eyes!”) I didn’t know how to remedy that. All our assumptions about the Foe were based on the conjecture that, as pure energy beings, they found our present universe less hospitable than they liked, and so they had resolved to create enough “missing mass” to cause it to fall back together into the primeval atom . . . from which it would explode in a second or a third or an nth Big Bang, to create a new one more to their liking. Reshaping the universe. “Foeforming” it, as you might say, in the same way that both the Heechee and ourselves had terraformed planets.
That was the sense of what I wanted to convey, but I didn’t know how to picture it in their terms.
Except that, it seemed, I just had.
How long I hung in there, staring at the caricature of my own face and wondering what to try next, I cannot guess.
It was a long time. Even by meat standards it was long enough to matter, because I was aware that the glacial movements of the people in the room were actually making changes. There were more people there now. There were other human beings in the room, and a lot of machines. When I took time to flash a question to Albert and Essie, through the other me back on the True Love, Albert said reassuringly, “It’s the police, Robin, and the physics people to make sure conilnement is still working, and the death-reversal teams for Basingstoke and General Heimat; don’t worry; you’re doing fine.”
Fine?
And yes, perhaps I was. Because the pictures changed.
I didn’t know what I was seeing at first, an odd ball of nasty-looking fire that opened up to show stars and planets crowded close together, and zoomed in on one of the planets to show stick figures bounding about that were recognizably meant to be Heechee. Their hideaway in the core? Of course.
And as soon as I recognized that, there was another picture. It was almost like a documentary, or a travelogue: Life Among the Heechee. I saw Heechee world-ships hanging near the Schwarzschild barrier, and Heechee cities under their glassed-in domes; I saw Heechee factories producing Heechee consumer goods, and Heechee persons working and marrying and giving birth and growing; I saw more about the Heechee in that long gigabit-time display than I had known about them before in all my long life.
I will put it mildly: I was astonished, and I was horribly, hopelessly confused. I had no idea why I was seeing what I saw; and then the picture changed again.
It was another travelogue. It wasn’t the Heechee anymore. It was us. I don’t know, perhaps I saw every human being there ever was in that eternal-brief display. Some of them I recognized. I saw Oniko being born on the Heechee artifact, and the death of her grandparents. I saw her rescued with all her little colony, and I saw her brought to the Watch Wheel. I saw the human race, maybe all the hundred billion members of it there were on all the twenty inhabited planets and in ships between. I even saw history. I saw armies, and space navies, and weapons practice, and ships being launched that were armed to kill a world if they chose to. I saw cities bombed and obliterated. I saw a Gateway prospector in a Five, stealthily slitting the throats of his four companions. I saw my dear wife, Essie, with the tubes in her throat and nose and the life-support machines chugging all around her-a picture I remembered, because once she had been just like that.
I saw Basingstoke in tights and air mask, swimming through lucid tropical waters to fix a limpet bomb to the hull of a cruise ship. I saw General Beaupre Heimat press a button that destroyed a spacecraft, and I saw him again doing-oh, doing vile and terrible things to a tiny female child-it was only a minuscule relief from the stomach-twisting sight to realize that the “child” was only a robot.
The flood of pictures went on forever.
And then they forever ended.
I saw nothing. I did not even see the room, or Oniko and the other children, or the newcomers who were going about their business in it. I saw nothing at all; my senses had been blacked out.
And then I realized that I was indeed getting answers to my questions, only they were not the questions I had asked. I was not being told “what.” I was only being told “why.”
The other “I” back on the True Love was watching it all, but I couldn’t see him (me). I couldn’t see anything at all.
And then I saw everything, all at once. All the pictures I had seen before, floating before me at once like a storm of confetti. They danced around and blended; Heechee became half human, humans began to look like Heechee, and they blurred into computer constructs and Sluggards and Voodoo Pigs and into things that bore no resemblance at all to anything the universe had ever known . . . and then it all began to dissolve in a torrent of multicolored sparks, all of it.
Even me.
I felt myself dissolving. I felt my very own person melting and coruscating into nothingness.
It took quite a long time for me to understand what was happening.
“I’m dying, for God’s sake!” I shouted into empty gigabit space—Just as I did.
“I died!” I screamed in terror to Albert and my dear Portable-Essie and the officers of JAWS, gathered solicitously around me in the True Love.
I felt Essie’s warm (if only virtual) arms around me. “Oh, shoo, shoo, dear Robin,” she soothed. “Is all right now. Are not dead anymore, not here.”
Cassata cried exultantly, “But you did the job, Robin! You talked to them! Now we can go out to the Watch Wheel and—”
“General Cassata,” said Albert politely, “please shut up. How do you feel, Robin? It is true that in a sense, yes, you did die. At least that copy of you is gone forever, and maybe the Foe with it; I think they neutralized you, Robin, even though it cost them themselves. I’m sorry it was so traumatic for you.”
“Sorry!” I screamed. “Do you know what it’s like to die? To know that you are disappearing, and there won’t be any you ever again anywhere?”
Essie hugged me tighter than ever, murmuring comfort in my ear. “But is still a you, Robin. Is here with me. Was only duplicate that entered gigabit-isolate with Foe, you know?”