He was even beginning to be jealous. When she talked about some of the shipmates she’d gone out with from Gateway, he paid particular attention to the talk about the men. “I bet you made a big hit with them,” he said dourly.
Alicia laughed. “Didn’t I wish!”
That surprised me. “Were they gays? Or maybe blind?”
She said, thanking me demurely for the implied compliment, “You don’t know what I looked like then. Before my appendix burst I was tall and gawky and-well, what they called me was ‘the Human Heechee.’ What you see isn’t what I was born with, Mr. Broadhead,” she said, speaking to me, but looking at Cassata to see how he would take it.
He took it well. “You look grand,” he said. “How come you died of appendicitis? No doctors around?”
“There was Full Medical around, and naturally they wanted to fix me up. They even wanted to do cosmetic work-take out some of the excess bone in the spine and the limbs, make some changes in the face-I didn’t want it, Julio. I wanted to be really good-looking, not just the closest approximation they could manage. There was only one way. They had machine storage available. I took that.”
And from the corner of the lanai, where it had been bending over to sniff at Essie’s flowers, a figure rose up and beamed at us. “Now you know the reason,” it said.
“Essie!” I yelled. “Come quick!” Because the figure was Albert Einstein.
“My God, Albert,” I said, “where have you been?”
“Oh, Robin,” he said pleasantly, “have we come to metaphysics again?”
“Not on purpose.” I sank down in a chair, looking at him. He had not changed. The pipe was still unlit, the socks down around his ankles, the mop of hair flying in all directions.
And his manner was still oblique. He came sedately up to take a seat on the rocker facing us. “But, you see, Robin, there are metaphysical answers to that question. I was not any ‘where.’ And it is not merely ‘I’ who is here.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said. It wasn’t entirely true. I just hoped I didn’t understand.
He said patiently, “I have accessed the Foe, Robin. More accurately, they accessed me. More precisely still,” he said apologetically, “the ‘I’ who is now speaking to you is not your data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein.”
“Then who?” I demanded.
He smiled, and by the smile I knew that I had, after all, understood him very well.
22
AND NOT ENDINGS
When I was a three-year-old child in Wyoming, I was not discouraged from believing in Santa Claus. My mother never said to me that Santa Claus was real, but she wouldn’t tell me that he wasn’t, either.
In all my long life since there has never been a question that I wanted answered more badly than I did that question then. I pondered it seriously, especially toward the last half of the month of December. I was burning to know. I could not wait to grow up-at least as far as, say, the teensbecause when I was that old, I believed, I would be wise enough to know the answer to that question for sure.
When I was an adolescent sickie in the nut wards of the hospital at the Food Mines, the doctors told me I would eventually get well. I would be able to deal with my fears and confusions. I would be selfconfident, sure of myself-at least enough so, they promised, that I could hold a job, or anyway cross a street by myself I couldn’t wait for that, either.
When I was a shit-scared prospector on Gateway—When I was a horrified survivor of the mission to a black hole. When I was a sobbing mass of jelly on Sigfrid von Shrink’s analysis couch—When I was all those things, I promised myself that, sooner or later, the time would come when I would be wiser and more sure. When I was thirty, I thought that might come at fifty. When I was fifty, I was positive it would happen by sixty-five or so. When I was seventy, I thought that, well, at least when I died there would be, anyway, some sort of final resolution of all the worries and uncertainties and doubts.
And then when I was older than I had ever thought possible (not to mention deader), with all the world’s data available to me why, I had the doubts and worries still.
Then Albert came back from the Foe, with all the knowledge they had given him, and offered to share it with me; and now what I want to know is how much older can I grow without feeling grown up at last? And how much more can I learn without being wise?
At least I know now why I have trouble with endings; it’s because there isn’t any end to endlessness. People like me don’t have ends. We don’t have to.
The Galaxy is our Wrinkle Rock, and the reunion party goes on forever. We have changes. We have interludes when we do something else for a while, maybe even a very long while. We have ends to conversations, but each end is a beginning of a new one, and the beginnings never stop, because that is what “eternity” means.
I can tell you about some of the ends (which were also beginnings), as, for example, Albert’s conversation with Essie. “I apologize to you, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said, “because I know it must have been upsetting for you to find a program of your own writing not responsive.”
“Damn true,” she said indignantly.
“But, you see, I’m no longer just your program. Part of me is now contributed by the others.”
“Others?”
“What you’ve been calling the Foe,” he explained. “What the Heechee called the Assassins. They are certainly not Assassins, or at least—”
“Oh?” Essie interrupted. “Can convince Sluggards of this? Not to mention any other races benign creatures who are not Assassins may have wiped out?”
“Mrs. Broadhead,” he said gently, “what I was about to say was that they were not Assassins on purpose. The Sluggards were made of matter. It was not within the experience of we-of these Others, that is to say, to suspect that bound protons and electrons could possibly produce intelligence. Consider, please. Suppose your grandfather had discovered that one of his primitive computers was doing something that might, potentially, at some time in the future have interfered with his own plans. What would he have done?”
“Smash it up,” Essie agreed. “Grandfather had one hellish short temper.”
“He would not, I am sure—” Albert smiled “—have considered that a machine intelligence might have-what can I call it? Soul? At any rate, what we machine intelligences have. So-the others-’smashed them up,’ as you put it. It was no problem for them; they observed that most matter creatures enjoyed destruction, so they simply encouraged them to do so to each other.”
I put in, “Are you saying that the Assassins love us now?”
“That is not one of their terms,” Albert said politely. “And, actually, you-myself included, I’m afraid-are rather rudimentary creatures by comparison. But when it was discovered, in a routine check, that there were machine-stored intelligences on the Watch Wheel, an investigation was ordered.” He smiled again. “You passed the test. So they do not wish to be Foe to you, they only wish that no one do anything to interfere with their plan-and,” he added seriously, “I do urge, Robin, that you do your best to see that no one does.”