Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

“Of course. It is not very difficult,” Wan boasted. “Watch me carefully, and you will see how to do it.” He sat himself with careless ease on the one unbroken seat, and frowned at the controls. “I will bring you Tiny Jim,” he decided, and thumbed the controls before him. The lights on the stained wall flickered and flowed, and Wan said, “Wake up, Tiny Jim. There is someone here for you to meet.”

Silence.

Wan scowled, glanced over his shoulder at the others and then ordered: “Tiny Jim! Speak to me at once!” He pursed his lips and spat a gobbet at the wall. Lurvy recognized the source of the stains, but said nothing.

A weary voice over their heads said, “Hello, Wan.”

“That is better,” Wan shrilled, grinning at the others. “Now, Tiny Jim! Tell my friends something interesting, or I will spit on you again.”

“I wish you would be more respectful,” sighed the voice, “but very well. Let me see. On the ninth planet of the star Saiph there is an old civilization. Their rulers are a class of shit-handlers, who exercise power by removing the excrement only from the homes of those citizens who are honest, industrious, clever, and unfailing in the payment of their taxes. On their principal holiday, which they call the Feast of St. Gautama, the youngest maiden in each family bathes herself in sunflower oil, takes a hazelnut between her teeth, and ritually-“

“Tiny Jim,” Wan interrupted, “is this a true story?”

Pause. “Metaphorically it is,” Tiny Jim said sullenly.

“You are very foolish,” Wan reproved the Dead Man, “and I am shamed before my friends. Pay attention. Here are Dorema Herter-Hall, who you will call Lurvy, and her sister Janine Herter. And Paul. Say hello to them.”

Long pause. “Are there other living human beings here?” the voice asked doubtfully.

“I have just told you there are!”

Another long pause. Then, “Good-bye, Wan,” the voice said sadly, and would not speak again, no matter how loudly Wan commanded or how furiously he spat at the wall.

“Christ,” grumbled Paul. “Is he always like that?”

“No, not always,” Wan shrilled. “But sometimes he is worse. Shall I try one of the others for you?”

“Are they any better?”

“Well, no,” Wan admitted. “Tiny Jim is the best.”

Paul closed his eyes in despair, and opened them again to glare at Lurvy. “How simply bloody wonderful,” he said. “Do you know what I’m beginning to think? I’m beginning to think your father was right. We should have stayed on the Food Factory.”

Lurvy took a deep breath. “Well, we didn’t,” she pointed out. “We’re here. Let’s give it forty-eight hours, and then-And then we’ll make up our minds.”

Long before the forty-eight hours were up they had made up their minds to stay. At least for a while. There was simply too much in Heechee Heaven to abandon it.

The big factor in the decision was reaching Payter on the FTL radio. No one had thought to ask Wan if his ability to call Heechee Heaven from the Food Factory implied that he could call in the other direction. It turned out he could not. He had never had a reason to try, because there had never been anyone there to answer the phone. Lurvy drafted Janine to help her carry food and a few essentials out of the ship, fighting depression and worry all the way, and returned to find Paul proud and Wan jubilant. They had made contact. “How is he?” Lurvy demanded at once.

“Oh, you mean your father? He’s all right,” Paul said. “He sounded grouchy, come to think of it-cabin fever, I suppose. There were about a million messages. He patched them through as a burst transmission and I’ve got them on tape-but it’ll take us a week to play them all.” He rummaged through the stuff Janine and Lurvy had brought until he found the tools he had demanded. He was patching together a digitalized picture transmitter, to make use of the voice-only FTL circuits. “We can only transmit single frames,” he said, eyes on the picture-tape machine. “But if we’re going to be here for very long, maybe I can work out a burst-transmission system from here. Meanwhile, we’ve got voice and-oh, yeah. The old man said to kiss you for him.”

“Then I guess we’re going to stay for a while,” said Janine.

“Then I guess we’d better bring more stuff out of the ship,” her sister agreed. “Wan? Where should we sleep?”

So while Paul worked on the communications, Wan and the two women hustled the necessities of life to a cluster of chambers in the red-walled corridors. Wan was proud to show them off. There were wall bunks larger than the ones the ship had offered-large enough, actually, for even Paul to sleep in, if he didn’t mind bending his knees. There was a place for toilet facilities, not quite of human design. Or not of very recent human design. The facilities were simply lustrous metal slits in the floor, like the squat-toilets of Eastern Europe. There was even a place to bathe. It was something between a wading pool and a tub, with something between a shower head and a small waterfall coming out of the wall behind it. When you got inside tepid water poured out. After that they all began to smell much better. Wan, in particular, bathed ostentatiously often, sometimes beginning to undress to bathe again before the last drops of unsopped water had dried on the back of his neck from the bath before. Tiny Jim had told him that bathing was a custom among polite people. Besides, he had perceived that Janine did it regularly. Lurvy watched them both, remembered how much trouble it had been to get Janine to bathe on the long flight up from Earth, and did not comment.

As pilot, therefore captain, Lurvy constituted herself head of the expedition. She assigned Paul to establish and maintain communication with her father on the Food Factory, with Wan’s help in dealing with the Dead Men. She assigned Janine, with her own help and Wan’s, to housekeeping tasks like washing their clothes in the tepid tub. She assigned Wan, with anyone who could be spared, to roam the safe parts of Heechee Heaven, photographing and recording for transmission to Payter and Earth. Usually Wan’s compaanion was Janine. When someone else could be spared, the two young people were chaperoned, but that was seldom.

Janine did not seem to mind either way. She had not finished with the preliminary thrill of Wan’s companionship and was in no hurry to move to a further stage-except when they touched. Or when she caught him staring at her. Or when she saw the knotted bulge in his ragged kilt. Even then, her fantasies and reveries were almost as good as that next stage, at least for now. She played with the Dead Men, and munched on berryfruit, brown-skinned and green-fleshed, and did her chores, and waited to grow up a little more.

There were not many objections to Lurvy’s rule, since she had taken care to assign tasks that the draftees were willing to do anyhow, which left for herself such drudgery as going through the backed-up cormuands and persuasions from Payter, and faroff Earth.

The communication was a long way from satisfactory. Lurvy had not appreciated Shipboard-Vera until she had to get along without her. She could not command priority messages first, or have the computer sort them out by theme. There was no computer she could use, except the overtaxed one in her own head. The messages came in higgledy-piggledy, and when she replied, or transmitted reports for downlink relay to Earth, she had no confidence at all that they were getting where they were supposed to go.

The Dead Men seemed to be basically read-only memories, interactive but limited. And their circuits had been further scrambled in the makeshift attempt to use them for communication to the Food Factory, a task for which they had never been designed. (But what had they really been designed for? And by whom?) Wan blustered and bluffed, in his pose as expert, and then miserably confessed that they were not doing what they were supposed to do any more. Sometimes he would dial Tiny Jim and get Henrietta, and sometimes a former-English Lit professor named Willard; and once he got a voice he had never heard before, shaking and whispering on the near side of inaudibility, muttering on the far side of madness. “Go to the gold,” whimpered Henrietta, fretful as ever, and without pause Tiny Jim’s thick tenor would override: “They’ll kill you! They don’t like castaways!”