I wrenched myself free (metaphorically) and glared at my two nearest and dearest; I wasn’t even aware of the JAWS officers. “It’s fine for you to say,” I said bitterly. “You didn’t have to feel it. I died. And it’s not the first time, I remind you both. I’ve had the experience before, and I am so terribly tired of dying. If there’s one thing I want in all the world, it’s to do it again!”
I stopped, because they were looking at me in a peculiar way.
“Oh,” I said, managing to grin, “I mean I want not to do it again.” But which I meant really was very unclear even to me.
15
SCARED RATS RUNNING
When a stored personality in gigabit space has had a terrible shock, you don’t give him a stiff drink and a place to lie down, but sometimes it helps if you pretend you do.
“You should rest for a moment, Robin,” said Albert.
“Let me make comfortable, dove-heart,” murmured Essie, and a moment later I was comfortable indeed. Essie made it so. I was lying in a (metaphorical) hammock on the (unreal) lanai outside my (datastored) home overlooking the Tappan Sea, with dear Portable-Essie hovering over me and pressing a (nonexistent) drink in my hand. It was an icy margarita with just enough salt on the rim of the glass, and it tasted quite as good as if it had been real.
I was the center of attention.
Essie was sitting next to the hammock, stroking my hair lovingly and looking worried. Albert was seated on the edge of a chaise longue, scratching his ear meditatively with the stem of his pipe as he watched my face. That was all homely and familiar enough, but there were other people there. I wasn’t surprised to see Julio Cassata, who was pacing up and down on the grass just below the steps, but stopping at the end of each patrol to look searchingly in my direction. Even Alicia Lo, sitting quietly on a rocker at the edge of the lanai, was no surprise; but there was someone else there.
The someone was a Heechee.
I was not ready for surprises. I sat up and said, “What the hell?” I didn’t say it meanly. If anything, I think I said it beseechingly.
Essie took it in the right way. “I don’t know if you remember Double-Bond,” she said. She was right. I didn’t. “He was a Heechee representative to JAWS,” Essie added, and vaguely I did remember. There had been a Heechee or two there, and, yes, one of them had been an Ancient Ancestor, like this one, and had had the sparse head-fuzz and deep-set eyes of age, like this one.
“I’m pleased to see you again,” I said. I gulped the last of the tequila and looked around. And then I said again, “What the helP?” But this time it was in a quite different tone, because I had looked past the simulated, friendly Tappan Sea surround. I expected to find that we were in the True Love, and we were.
But the screen was showing only mottled gray. When I looked through the True Love’s skin sensors, I saw we were in faster-than-light travel. When I peered at the retrolog, I saw the JAWS satellites dwindling behind us. JAWS looked different to me in some way. I wasn’t sure what, and didn’t take the time to figure it out. What was more important was what True Love was doing. We were en route somewhere, and I had not expected that at all.
“Where are we going?” I cried.
Albert coughed. “There were some developments while you were working through your doppel,” he said.
“Didn’t dare disturb your concentration,” Essie said worriedly. “Sorry about that. But is all right, honest, dearest Robin, are safe and sound in True Love, as you see.”
“You didn’t answer my question!”
She laid the hand that had been stroking my hair alongside my cheek. It felt warm and caring. “We go to source,” she said soberly. “To kugelblitz. To home of Foe, fast as we can.”
I let myself return to the pleasant Tappan Sea surround, feeling very disoriented. Essie had another margarita ready, and I reached out for it automatically. I held it in my hand, trying to figure out what was happening. We had left JAWS.
Then I remembered what was different about the way the JAWS satellites had looked when we departed. “The fleet is gone!” I cried.
“Exactly,” said Albert. “We are following them.”
“Against orders,” added Julio Cassata.
“Cannot give orders to us!” snapped Essie.
“They can give orders to me,” said Cassata, “and we’re going against them. The fleet movement is a military operation, after all.”
“Military!” I stared at the man, wondering if it was at all possible that he meant what I thought he meant. He shrugged. I translated the shrug easily enough; it was, yes, that was indeed what he meant.
“This is crazy!” I shouted.
He shrugged again. “But—” I said. “But—But I wasn’t ready to go on a long trip just now!”
Essie leaned over and kissed me. “Dear Robin,” she said, “is no choice, after all. Is there? JAWS fleet is not to be trusted by itself. Who knows what idiocy they may try?”
“But—But back on Wrinkle Rock—”
She said lovingly, “Is nothing on Wrinkle Rock for you anymore, dear Robin. Farewells are said. After all, party is now over.”
16
THE LONG VOYAGE
All the time I was messing around with the kids and their captors on the island of Tahiti was meat time. There had been time for meat people to do things. Meat people had.
The meat people who ran JAWS had decided the threat on Earth was nothing they needed a fleet there for, so they had sent the cruisers off to the Watch Wheel. Meat-Cassata hadn’t bothered to terminate doppelCassata, whose datastore was still on True Love along with the store for Alicia Lo. Albert was the one who had insisted on taking along the “prayer fan” that was the store for the Heechee Ancient Ancestor, Double-Bond. It wasn’t the only store he had put aboard, and he had his reasons; when I realized what they were, I could only approve.
And, of course, doppel-Cassata approved very much. He hadn’t been terminated! Not only that, he couldn’t be terminated as long as he was aboard True Love in transit, because there was no one there to terminate him. For Cassata it was not only a reprieve, it was practically an eternity-weeks and weeks of travel-the equivalent, for him, of decades and decades of added life!
That’s what is was for Julio Cassata.
For me it was something quite different.
The first thing I had to do was get over the terrible shocks that had come from my mind mingling with the Foe and the Foe entering into my mind, as well as that other shock of feeling myself die yet once again.
One of the (many) advantages of being a stored intelligence is that you can edit the stores if you want to. If something hurts, you can just take it out, seal it up, put it on a shelf marked “Warning. Not to be opened unless necessary,” and go about your business pain-free.
Like many of those many advantages, it carries a penalty with it.
I know this, because I’d tried it. Long and long ago-oh, something like ten-to-the-eleventh milliseconds ago-I was really, really screwed up. I had just died then, too, only that time it was my real meat body that had died, and Albert and Essie had just poured me into machine storage. That is a real jolt. There was more. I had just encountered Klara, the woman I loved before I loved the woman who was my wife, Essie, and there were the two of them in my life; not only that, but I had actually thought I had murdered that other woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin; and, oh, yes, I had just met a live Heechee for the first time.
Put them all together, it was bloody shattering.
So to get me through the worst of it, Albert and Essie had restructured the program that was all that remained of me. They had isolated the datastores that had to do with Klara and the terrible crush of guilt that had cost me years of psychoanalysis to ease, and they had encapsulated them in a read-only file and given it back to me, with a seal on it so I wouldn’t open it until I was ready.