10 The Oldest One The Oldest One bestirred himself slowly, one organ at a time. First came the piezophonic external receptors. Call them "ears". They were always "on", in the sense that sounds always reached them. Their tiny rag crystals were squeezed by vibrations in the air and, when the patterns of sound corresponded to the name the children of the Oldest One called him by, they passed a gate and went on to activate what corresponded to his peripheral nervous system. At that point the Oldest One was not yet awake, but knew he was being wakened. His true ears, the inner ones that analyzed and interpreted sound, came to life. His cognitive circuits sampled the signals. The Oldest One heard the voices of his children and understood what they were saying. But only in an offhand and inattentive way, like a drowsy human aware of the buzzing of a fly. He had not yet "opened his eyes". Some decision-making took place at that stage. If the interruption seemed worthwhile, the Oldest One woke further circuits. If not, not. A human sleeper may awaken enough to swat a fly. When the Oldest One was awakened for trivial reasons he had ways to "swat" his children. They did not wake him lightly. But if he decided to wake further, either to act or to punish the interruption to his sleep, the Oldest One then activated his major external optics, and with them a whole congeries of information-processing systems and short-term memories. He was then fully awake, like a man looking up at the ceiling after a nap. The Oldest One's internal clocks told him that this nap had been rather short. Less than ten years. Unless there was a good reason for this awakening, someone would have to be swatted. By then the Oldest One was fully aware of his surroundings, all of them. His internal telemetry was receiving status reports from all of its remote sensors, all through the ten million ton mass in which he and his children lived. A hundred inputs recirculated through his short-term memory: the words that had wakened him; the image of the three captives his children had just brought him; a breakdown in repair facilities in the 4700 A sections; the fact that there was unusual activity among the stored intelligences; temperatures; inventories; moments of thrust. His long-term storage, though dormant, was accessible at need. The wisest of his children was standing before him, with beads of sweat trickling through the sparse hairs on his cheeks and lip. The Oldest One perceived that this was a new leader, shorter and younger than the one he remembered from ten years before, but he wore the necklace of reading scrolls that symbolized the office as he waited for judgment. The Oldest One turned his major external lenses on him as a signal to speak. "We have captured intruders and brought them to you," the leader said, and added, trembling, "Have we done well?" The Oldest One turned his attention to observe the captives. One was not an intruder, but the pup he had allowed to be born fifteen years before, now nearly grown. The other two, however, were strangers, and both female. That presented an option worth pondering. When the other intruders had presented themselves, he had failed to take advantage of the chance to establish new breeding stock until it was too late for any of the available specimens. And then they had stopped coming. That was a chance the Oldest One had missed, and one which, on the basis of past terrifying experience, he should not have failed to take. The Oldest One was aware that for some thousands of years his judgments had not been always right, his opinions no longer confident. He was slowing down. He was subject to error. The Oldest One did not know what personal penalty he would have to pay for error and did not want to find out. He began to make decisions. He reached into his long-term memory for precedents and prospects, and found that he had a satisfying number of alternatives. He activated mobility and handling effectors. His great metal body rose on its supports and moved past the leader, toward the chamber where the intruders were being kept He heard the gasp from his children as he moved. All were startled. A few of the younger ones, who had never seen him move as adults, were terrified. "You have done well," he judged, and there was a long sigh of relief. The Oldest One could not enter the chamber because of his size, but with long, soft-metal feelers he reached inside and touched the captives. It did not interest him that they screamed and struggled. His interest at that moment was only in their physical state. That was very satisfactory: two of them, including the male, were quite young, and therefore good for many years of use. In whatever fashion he might decide to use them. All seemed in good health. As far as communicating with them went, there was the nuisance that their yells and imprecations were in one of those unpleasant languages their predecessors had used. The Oldest One did not understand one word. That was not a real problem, because he could always talk to them through the intervention of the stored intelligences of their predecessors. Even his own children, over the centuries, tended to evolve their language so that he could not have talked to them, either, if he had not stored one or two of them every dozen generations as translators-as nothing but translators, because the Oldest One's children regrettably did not seem to be much use for anything else. So such problems could be solved. Meanwhile the facts were favorable. Fact: The specimens were in good condition. Fact: They were clearly intelligent, tool-using, even technological. Fact: They were his to employ as he saw fit. "Feed them. Keep them secure. Wait for further instructions," he commanded the children clustered behind him. He then turned down his external receptors so that he could consider just how to employ these intruders in the furtherance of the imperatives that were the central core of his very long life. As a personality stored in a machine, the Oldest One's normal life expectancy was very great-perhaps as much as several thousand years-but not great enough to carry out his plans. He had extended it by diluting it. In standby mode he hardly aged at all. So he spent most of his time powered-down, motionless. He was not resting at such times, not even dreaming. He was merely abiding, while his children lived their lives and carried out his will and the astrophysical events outside crept sluggishly forward. From time to time he woke at the urging of his internal clocks, to check and correct and revise. At other times his children woke him. They were instructed to do so at need, and very often (though not really very by any standard other than his own) the need arose. Time was when the Oldest One was a flesh-and-blood creature, as much an animal as his present children or the captives they had brought him. That time had been very short indeed, less than a nap, from the moment when he was expelled from his mother's sweated and straining loins to the terrible time at its end, lying helpless as strange needles poured sleep into his veins and the whirling knives waited to trepan his skull. He could remember that time quite clearly when he chose. He could remember anything, in that short life or in the long, long pseudolife that followed, provided only that he could remember where to look for it in his stored memories. And that he could not always remember. There was too much stored. The Oldest One had no clear conception of how many memories he had available to him, or of how much time had passed, one way or another. Or even of where things were. This place where he and his children dwelt was "Here". That certain other place that figured so largely in his thoughts was "There". Everything else in the universe was merely "Everywhere else", and he did not trouble to locate points as they related to one another. Where did the intruders come from? From somewhere or other. It did not matter exactly where. Where was the food source that the boy visited? Some other somewhere. Where had his people come from, in the long ages before he himself had been born? It didn't matter. The central Here had existed for a long, long time-longer than one could comprehend, even for the Oldest One himself. Here had sailed through space since it was built and outfitted and launched; Here had seen many births and deaths-nearly five million of them-though at no one time did it hold more than a few hundred living things, and seldom more than a few score. Here had seen constant slow changes through all that time. The newborns were larger, softer, fatter, and more helpless as time went on. The adults were taller, slower, less hairy. Here had often seen rapid changes, as well. At such times the children were well advised to wake the Oldest One. Sometimes the changes were political, for Here had held a thousand different social systems, one at a time. There were spans of a generation or two, or even of centuries, when the existing culture was sensate and hedonistic, or puritanically stark; when one individual became a despot or a divinity, or when none rose above any other at all. There was never a democratic republic like those Earth had tried-Here was not big enough for representative government-and only once a racially stratified society. (It ended when the dun-furred lowers rose against the chocolate-furred uppers and wiped them out for good.) There had been many ideologies Here, and a various collection of moralities, but only one religion-at least, in the last many millennia. There was only room for one, when its living god rested among the children all the days of their lives, and awoke to smite or favor when it chose. For many eons Here held no true people at all, only a collection of puzzled semisentients confronted with challenges that had been engineered to make them wise. The process worked. Only slowly. It took a hundred thousand years before the first of them comprehended even the concept of writing, nearly half a million more before one was found to be wise enough to be trusted with real work to do. That honor had gone to the Oldest One himself. It had not been welcome. no other had earned it since. And that, too, was a failing, the Oldest One knew. Somehow he had failed, what had he done wrong? Surely he had done his best! He had always, particularly in the first few centuries of his machine-bodied afterlife, been diligent and careful in supervising every act of the children. When they did wrong he punished. When they did well he praised. Always he cared for their needs. But perhaps that was where he had gone wrong. There had been a time, long and long ago, when he had awakened with a terrible "pain" in the metal carapace he dwelt within. It was not the pain of flesh, but the sensors' report of unacceptable physical damage; but it was quite as alarming. His children were gathered around in terror, all shouting at once as they displayed to him the hacked-dead corpse of a young female. "She was insane!" they cried, quaking. "She tried to destroy you!" The Oldest One's quick check of systems revealed that the damage was trivial. It had been an explosive of some sort, and all it had cost him was a few effectors and some destruction of control nets, nothing that could not be repaired. He asked to know why she had done this. Their answers came only slowly, for they were terrified, but they came: "She wanted us to destroy you. She said you were damaging us, and that we could not grow without you. We beg forgiveness! We know we did wrong by not killing her sooner!" "You did wrong," the Oldest One said justly, "but that was not the reason. If any such person appears among you again you are to awaken me at once. He may be restrained if it is necessary. But he may not be killed." And then-was it a few centuries later? It seemed only the wink of an eye. And then there had been the time when they had not awakened him soon enough. For a dozen generations they had failed to observe the laws, and the reproductive budgets had not been met, and the total census of his living children was down to four individuals before they dared risk his displeasure by waking him. Well, they felt it. That had nearly been the end of all plans, because only one of the four was a female, and she near the end of child-bearing. He had used a dozen years of his life then, waking fretfully every few months, disciplining, teaching-worrying. With the help of biological lore stored deep in his oldest memories he had insured that the two babies the female managed to bear were also female. With stored sperm from the terrified males he kept the gene pool as diverse as he could. But it was a near thing. And some things had been forever lost. no other would-be assassin had ever risen against him. If only one would! no other like himself had ever appeared. The Oldest One recognized that he had no real hope there would ever be another from his children. If it could happen, it would have. There had been time. Ten thousand generations of his children had been born and died since then, over a span of a quarter of a million years. When the Oldest One moved again, all his children jumped too. They knew he would act. They did not know what the actions would be. "The repair mechanisms in the 4700 A corridors are to be replaced," he said. "Three artificers see to it" There was a stilled murmur of relief from the seventy-odd adults-punishment always came first, and if his first orders were not punishment then there would be none. This time. The three artificers the leader pointed to were less relieved, because that meant some days of very hard work in manhandling new machines to the green corridors and bringing back the old for repair; but it was their excuse to get away from the awful presence of the Oldest One. They seized it immediately. "The male intruder and the older female are to be penned together," he said. If they were to breed they had best get on with it, and better to start with the older female. "Do any of you survive who have had experience with the rapporter?" Three of the children were pushed reluctantly forward. "One of you will educate the younger female," he instructed. "Do any survive who have had experience in preparing intruders for storage?" "I prepared the last two," the leader said. "Also there are persons who assisted me still alive." "See that the skills are maintained," the Oldest One ordered. "If one of you should die, he is to be prepared by the others, and new persons must be taught" That was a convenience. If the skills had been lost-and the lives of these creatures were so brief that many skills did get lost while he was powered down-it would have been necessary to set some of them to practicing brain surgery on others, to be ready in case he decided that these intruders, too, should go into storage. Continuing down his priority list, he gave additional instructions. Dead or spindly plantings should be replaced. All permitted areas of Here should be visited at least once a month. And, as the number of infants and young was only eleven, at least five babies should be born each year for the next ten years. The Oldest One then powered down his external receptors, resumed his place at the central communications terminals and plugged himself in to his long-term memories. All about the central spindle his children were hastening to do his bidding as the leader parceled out assignments. Half a dozen left to dig up berryfruit bushes and airvines to replace the defective plants, others went to deal with the captives and attend to housekeeping chores, several young couples were sent to their quarters to breed. If they had had other plans, they were now deferred. At this particular awakening the Oldest One was not dissatisfied with his children, and whether they were dissatisfied with him did not occur to him to wonder. His concerns were elsewhere. With his externals reduced to the standby trickle of his resting mode, the Oldest One was not resting. He was assimilating these new factors into his reference store. There was change. Change was danger. Change was also opportunity, if approached right. Change might be used to advance his purposes, and could not be allowed to interfere with them. He had dealt with the immediate and the tactical. Now his attention went to the strategic and the ultimate. He reached into his long-term memory. Some memories represented events very far away in space and in time, and were frightening even to the Oldest One. (How had he dared such temerity!) Some were quite near, and not frightening at all, for example those stored intruder intelligences the boy called "the Dead Men". There was nothing in them to be frightening. But, oh, how irritating they could be. When the intruders first blundered Here, shattered castaways in their tiny ships, the Oldest One had had a moment of terror. They were unexplained. Who were they? Were they the lords he was trying to serve, come to reproach his presumption? He quickly learned they were not. Were they, then, some other breed of servants to the lords, from whom he could learn new modes of service? They were not that either. They were wanderers. They had come Here by chance, in ancient, abandoned ships they did not truly know how to use. When their ships' course directors neutralized themselves, as they were meant to do on arriving Here, they were terrified. They were not, as it turned out, even very interesting. He had used up many days of life with them as they appeared, first one, then another lone adventurer, then a group of three. In all there had been nearly twenty of them, in nine ships, not counting the child who had been born here, and none of them worth the concern they had caused him. The first few he had had his children sacrifice at once, in order to put their stored intelligence into the machine form that he could best deal with. The others he had given orders to preserve, even to allow to roam free, when it appeared they might be more interesting in an independent life in the unused areas of Here. He had given them everything he perceived they might need. He had even given some of them immortality, as he himself had been made immortal-as fewer than one in a hundred thousand of his children ever were. It was a waste. Alive and capricious, or stored for eternity, they were more trouble than they were worth. They brought diseases to his children, and some of them had died. They caught diseases from the children, and some of the intruders died, too. And they did not store well. Properly programmed into his long-term memories, by the machine-directed techniques that had been used on him thousands of centuries ago and taught to his children ever since, they performed badly. Their time sense was deficient. Their response to interrogatories was erratic. Large sections of their memories were gone. Some of them could not be read at all. The fault was not in the techniques; they were defective to begin with. When the Oldest One himself had been made immortal after the death of his flesh, he awoke as his exact self. All the knowledge and skills he had ever had were duplicated in the machine store. So with his children, when at random intervals he chose one to store. So even with his flesh ancestors, so far back that even his own immense age dwindled in comparison. So with those other stored memories that he did not like even to consult. Not so with the intruders. There was something wrong with their chemistry. They recorded imperfectly and retrieved haphazardly, and there were times when he thought to erase them all. He had banished the little storage spheres and their readout systems to the remote periphery of Here, and his children never went near them. He had decided to preserve them at the last only out of thrift. A time might come when he would need them. Perhaps that time was now. With a sense of reluctant distaste, as a man might reach into a sewer to retrieve a dropped gem, the Oldest One opened the pathways that linked him to the stored intruder minds. And recoiled. Three of the children, hurrying Janine around the curvature of the spindle from her. pen to the rapporter, saw the Oldest One's effectors quiver and external lenses flash open. They stumbled and stopped, waiting fearfully for what would come next Nothing came next. The effectors relaxed again. The lenses powered down to standby. After a moment, the children collected themselves and dragged Janine to the waiting metallic couch. But inside the Oldest One's metal shell he had received his greatest shock in many awakenings. Someone had been interfering with his stored memories! It was not merely that they were mad. They had always been mad; worse, they were in some ways more sane now, or at least more lucid, as though something had been trying to reprogram them. There were inputs he had never given them. They contained memories he had never shared. These were not storage that had come to the surface from their past lives. They were new. They spoke of organized knowledge on a scale that dwarfed even his own. Spaceships and machines. Living intelligences by the tens of billions. Machine intelligences that were slow and even almost stupid, by his standards, but possessed incredible stores to draw on. It was no wonder that he had reacted physically, as a man shocked out of a reverie might start and twitch. Somehow his stored intruders had made contact with the culture they had come from. It was easy for the Oldest One to learn how that contact had been made. From Here to the food facility, by means of the long-unused communications net. Interpreted and processed on the food facility by a pathetically crude machine. Transmitted the long light-days to the planets that circled that nearest star, by means of the creeping electromagnetic impulses of lightspeed radio. Contemptible! Until one considered how much information had been transmitted each way. The Oldest One was like a hydraulic engineer transfixed at the base of a hydroelectric dam, watching a thin needle of water spurt hundreds of meters into the air, out of an almost invisible pinhole. The quantity was trivial. But that so much poured through so tiny an opening bespoke the pressure of a vast body behind the dam. And the leak went both ways. The Oldest One acknowledged that he had been careless. In interrogating the stored intruders to find out what they knew, he had let them know much about himself. About Here. About the technology that guided it. About his consecration, and about the lords his life was meant to serve. At least the leak had been tiny, and the transmissions confused by the imperfections of the stored intelligences themselves. There was no part of that storage inaccessible to the Oldest One. He opened them up for study, and traced every bit. He did not "speak" to them. He allowed their minds to flow into his own. The Dead Men could not resist him, any more than a prepared frog on a dissecting table could resist a surgeon's scalpel. When he was done, he withdrew to ponder. Were his plans in jeopardy? He activated his internal scanning systems, and a three-dimensional tank of the Galaxy sprang up in his "mind". It had no real existence. There was no vantage point from which any person could have seen it. He himself did not "see" it, he simply knew it was there. It was a sort of trompe-l'oeil. An optical illusion, except that it was not optical. On it, very far away, an object appeared, haloed in light. It had been many centuries since the Oldest One had allowed himself to observe that object. It was time to look at it again. The Oldest One reached down into and activated long undisturbed memory stores. It was not an easy experience. It was almost the equivalent of a session on the analyst's couch for a human, for he was uncovering thoughts, memories, guilts, worries, and uncertainties that his "conscious" mind-the reasoning and problem-solving circuits-had long since decided to lay away. Those memories were not gone. They had not become impotent. They still held "shame" and "fear" for him. Was he doing the right thing? Did he dare act on his own responsibility? The old circular arguments raced through his mind as they had done two hundred thousand years before, and were no closer to resolution. It was not possible for the Oldest One to fugue into hysteria or depression. His circuits did not allow it. It was, however, possible for him to be terrified. After a prolonged time he emerged from his introspection. He was still afraid. But he was committed. He had to act. The children scattered in terror as the Oldest One woke once more. His forward effectors quivered, straightened and pointed at a young female, caught in midpassage nearby. Any other would have done as well. "Come with me," he ordered. She sobbed, but followed. Her mate took a step after her as they hurried toward a gold-lit corridor. But he had not been told to go with them, and so he stopped and looked sadly after. Ten minutes earlier they had been mating, in pleasure and obedience. Now he was not sure he would ever see her again. The Oldest One's cruising pace was not a great deal faster than a rapid walk, but the little difference kept the weeping female trotting and panting to keep up. He glided on, past machines that had not been used even in his memories-wall aligners, landers huge as houses, a queer little six-screwed thing like a helicopter that had once, though even the Oldest One did not remember so far back, been used to stock Heechee Heaven with its angels. The gold skeins changed to radiant silver, the silver to purest white. A passage that none of the children had ever entered stood waiting open for them, the heavy door fanned wide as the Oldest One approached. By the time they reached a place where the female had never been, had not known existed, where the skeins in the wall ran in a riot of a dozen colors and strange patterns flickered in panels all around a great, dim chamber, she was out of breath. no rest. "Go there," the Oldest One commanded. "Adjust those wheels. Watch mine. Do as I do." At opposite sides of the chamber, too widely spaced for any one individual to operate them, were controls. Set on the floor at each was a sort of angled bench, very uncomfortable for the young female to sit on. In front of each bench, a sort of hummock of ridged wheels, ten of them in a row, with rainbow lights glinting faintly between them. The Oldest One ignored the bench and touched an effector to the nearest wheel, turning it slowly. The lights shivered and rippled. Green brightened to yellow, to pale orange, with a triple row of ochre lines in the middle of it "Match my pattern!" The young female tried to obey. The wheel was terribly hard to turn, as though it had not been moved for a terribly long time. (It had not.) The colors merged and swirled, and it took forever for her to achieve the pattern of the controls before the Oldest One. He did not hurry or reprove her. He merely waited. He knew she was doing her best By the time all ten wheels were showing the pattern he had chosen tears were gone and sweat was stinging her eyes and trickling through her sparse beard. The colors were not a perfect match. Between the doubled, redundant, safed controls, the rosette of screens that should have displayed their course coordinates was blank. This was not surprising. The surprise might have been that, after eight hundred thousand years, the controls worked at all. But they did work. The Oldest One touched something under his own bank of controls and quickly, wonderfully, the lights developed a life of their own. They blurred and strengthened again, and now as the automatic fine-tuners took over the two patterns became identical. The rosette of screens sprang into life with a pattern of glowing dots and lines. The young female peered fearfully at the screens. She did not know that what she saw was a field of stars. She had never seen a star, or heard of one. She felt what happened next. So did everyone else Here. The intruders in their pens, the near hundred children all over the construct, the young female and the Oldest One himself all felt it, felt suddenly queasy as the eternal gravity died and was replaced by tweaks of pseudoacceleration punctuating weightlessness. After more than three-quarters of a million years of rolling slowly around Earth's very distant sun, the artifact pulled itself into a new orbit and surged away. 11 S. Ya. Lavorovna At precisely five-fifteen AM a gentle green glow appeared in the bedside monitor of 5. Ya. Lavorosrna-Broadhead. It was not bright enough to disturb deep slumber, but she had been less than half asleep. "Very well," she called, "I am already awake, you do not have to continue this program. But give me a moment." "Da, gospozha," her secretary acknowledged, but the green glow remained. If S. Ya. did not show further signs of alertness the secretary would buzz gently in another minute, regardless of what she told it to do; that was what she had told it to do when she wrote the program. In this case there was no need. Essie woke up quite clear in her mind. There was surgery again this morning, and Robin would not be here. Because old Peter Herter had given warning before he invaded the world's minds, there had been time to prepare. There had been almost no damage. Not real damage; but what made that possible was a frantic flurry of postponing and rearranging, and in the course of it Robin's flights had been inextricably confused. Pity. Worse than that, even fear. But it was not as though he had not tried. Essie accepted that consolation from herself. It was good to know that he had tried. "Am I allowed to eat?" she called. "No, gospozha Broadhead. Nothing at all, not even a drink of water," her secretary responded at once. "Do you wish your messages?" "Perhaps. What messages?" If they were of interest at all she would take them, she decided; anything to keep her mind off the surgery, and the indignities of catheters and tubes that bound her to this bed. "There is a voice-only from your husband, gospozha, but if you wish I believe I can reach him direct. I have a location, if he is still there." "Do so." Experimentally, Essie rose to sit on the edge of the bed while she was waiting for the connection to be completed, or, more likely, for her husband to be found in some transit lounge and called to the comm. She carefully kept the dozen tubes unkinked as she rose to her feet. Apart from feeling weak, she did not feel bad. Fearful. Thirsty. Even shaky. But there was no pain. Perhaps it would all have seemed more serious if it had hurt more, and perhaps that would have been good. These months of demeaning annoyance were only an irritation; there was enough of Anna Karenina in Essie to long to suffer. How trivializing the world had come to be! Her life was on the line, and all she felt was discomfort in her private parts. "Gospozha Broadhead?" "Yes?" The visual program appeared, looking apologetic. "Your husband cannot be reached at present. He is en route from Mexico City to Dallas and has just taken off; all the aircraft's communications are at present required for navigation." "Mexico City? Dallas?" The poor man! He would be circumnavigating the Earth to get to her! "Then at least give me the recorded message," she ordered. "Da, gospozha." Face and greenish glow shrank away, and out of the sound-circuits her husband's voice addressed her: "Honey, I'm having a little trouble making connections. I got a charter to Merida, supposed to make connections to Miami, but I missed the flight. Now I'm hoping to make a connection to Dallas and-Anyway, I'm on my way." Pause. He sounded fretful, which was no surprise, and Essie could almost see him casting around for something cheerful to say. But it was all rambling. Something about the great news about prayer fans. Something about the Heechee who weren't Heechee, and-and just a babble. Poor creature! He was trying to be bright for her. She listened to the sound of his heart, rather than to his words, until he paused again, and then said, "Oh, hell, Essie. I wish I were there. I will be. Fast as I can. In the meantime. Take care of yourself. If you've got any spare time before you, uh, before Wilma gets going, I've told Albert to tape all the essential stuff for you. He's a good old program...." Long pause. "I love you," he said, and was gone. S. Ya. lay back on her gently humming bed, wondering what to do with the next (and perhaps last?) hour of her life. She missed her husband quite a lot, especially in view of the fact that in some ways she considered him quite a silly man. "Good old program"! How foolish of him to anthropomorphize computer programs! His Albert Einstein program was, she had no other word for it, cute. And it had been his idea to make the bio-assay unit look like a pet. And give it a name! "Squiffy." It was like giving a name to a cleaning machine or a shotgun. Foolish. Unless it were done by someone one cared for... in which case it was instead endearing. But machines were machines. At the graduate institute at Akademogorsk young S. Ya. Lavorovna had learned very completely that machine intelligence was not "personal". You built them up, from adding machines to number-crunchers. You packed them full of data. You constructed for them a store of appropriate responses to stimuli and provided them with a hierarchical scale of appropriateness; and that was all there was to it. Now and then, to be sure, you were surprised by what came out of a program you had written. Of course you were; that was the nature of the exercise. None of that implied the existence of free will on the part of the machine, or of personal identity. All the same, it was rather touching to watch him crack jokes with his programs. He was a touching man. He touched her in places where she was most open and vulnerable, because in some ways he was very like that only other man in her life who had ever really mattered to her, her father. When Semya Yagrodna was a small girl her father had been the central person in the world-tall, skinny old man who played the ukulele and the mandolin and taught biology at the gymnasium. He was delighted to have a bright and inquiring child. It might have pleased him even more if her talents had seemed to go toward the life sciences rather than to physics and engineering, but he cherished her as she was. He taught her about the world when he could no longer teach her mathematics, because she had surpassed him. "You must be aware of what you will have to deal with," he explained to her. "Even here. Even now. Even when I was a young boy in Stalin's time, and the women's movements were promoting girls to lead machine-gun squads and run tractors. This is always the same, Semya. It is a fact of history that mathematics is for the young, and that girls excel equally with boys until the age of fifteen, perhaps, or at most twenty. And then, just when the boys are turning into Lobachewskis and Fermats, the girls stop. Why? For childbearing. For marriage. For heaven knows what. We will not let it happen to you, small dove. Study! Read! Learn! Comprehend! Every day, for as many hours as you must! And I will assist you in all the ways I can." And he did; and from the ages of eight to eighteen young Semya Yagrodna Lavorovna came home from school every day, deposited one book bag in their apartment and picked up another, and trotted away to the old yellow building off the Nevsky Prospekt where her tutor lived. She had never dropped out of mathematics, and for this she had her father to thank. She had never learned to dance, either-or to try a thousand sorts of scent and makeup, or to date-not until she was away at Akademogorsk, and for that also she had her father to thank. Where the world tried to force her into a female role he defended her like a tiger. But at home, to be sure, there was a need to cook and sew, and to polish the rosewood chairs; and none of those things were done by him. Her father in physical appearance had not looked in the least like Robin Broadhead... but in other ways, so like! Robin had asked her to marry him when they had known each other less than a year. It had taken her a full year beyond that to decide to say yes. She talked to everyone she knew about it. Her roommate. The dean of her department. Her former love; who had married the girl next door. Stay away from this one, S. Ya., they all advised her. On the face of it the advice was sound, for who was he? A feckless millionaire, still mourning a woman he had loved and shatteringly lost, guilt-ridden, just out of years of intensive psychoanalysis-what a perfect description of the completely hopeless marriage risk! But... On the other hand... Nevertheless... Nevertheless he touched her. They had gone to New Orleans for Mardi Gras in stinging cold weather, sitting most of the days inside the Cafe du Monde, never even seeing the parade. The rest of the time they stayed in their hotel, out of the sleet and the crowds, and made love, emerging only for fried sweet dough with clouds of powdered sugar, and sweet, milky, chicory-laced coffee in the mornings. Robin bestirred himself to be gallant. "Shall we go for a cruise on the river today? Visit an art gallery? Dance at a night club?" But she could see that he did not want to do any of these things, this man twice her age who wanted to marry he; sitting with his hands cupped around his coffee as though merely getting warm were formidable enough a task to contemplate for one day. And she made her decision. She said, "I think instead we might get married, after all." And so they had. Not that day, but as soon as they could. S. Ya. never regretted it; it was not a thing to regret. After the first few weeks she had not even worried about how it would turn out. He was not a jealous man or a mean one. If he was often absorbed in his work, well, so was she. There was only this question of the woman, Gelle-Kiara Moyrilin, the lost love. She might well be dead. Was as good as dead, in any case, because she was hopelessly out of human reach forever. It was well known that this was so, from the fundamental laws of physics... but there were times, Essie was sure, when her husband did not believe it to be so. And then she wondered: If there was any possibility of a choice between them, how would Robin choose? And what if the laws of physics, after all, turned out to permit an exception now and then? There was the matter of the Heechee ships, and how could one apply known physical law to them? As with every other thinking person in the world, the questions raised by the Heechee had intrigued S. Ya. for a long time. The Gateway asteroid had been discovered while she was still a schoolgirl. The headlines announcing new findings had come every few weeks, all through her college years. Some of her classmates had taken the plunge and specialized in the theory of Heechee control systems. Two were on Gateway now. At least three had shipped out and never returned. The Heechee ships were not uncontrollable. T