to feel all of it.
There was plenty of time, too, to learn. Albert had been careful to record for me all the data I had not had the wit to ask him for, and those tapes were available for me to play. They were not very interesting or sophisticated in delivery. The PMAL-2 was all memory: plenty of brain, not much display. There was no three-dimensional tank, only a stereo flatplate goggle system when my eyes would bear watching it, or a screen the size of the palm of my hand when they would not.
At first I did not use it. I just lay there, sleeping as much as I could. Partly I was recovering from the trauma of Peter’s death, so terrifyingly like my own. Partly I was experimenting with the inside of my head-allowing myself to feel fear (when I had every reason for it!), encouraging myself to feel guilt. There are kinds of guilt that I know I cherish, the contemplation of obligations unmet and commitments undone. I had plenty of those to think about, beginning with Peter (who would almost surely have been still alive, if I had not accepted him for that expedition) and ending, or rather not ending, with Kiara in her frozen black hole-not ending because I could always think of others. That amusement staled before long. To my surprise I found that the guilt was not very overpowering after all, once I let myself feel it; and that took care of the first day.
Then I turned to the tapes. I let the semi-Albert, the rigid, half-animated caricature of the program I knew and loved, lecture me on Mach’s Principle and gosh numbers and more curious forms of astrophysical speculation than I had ever dreamed of. I didn’t really listen, but I let the voice roll over me, and that was the second day.
Then, from the same source, I poured into myself all that was stored about the Dead Men. I had heard almost all of it before. I heard it all again. I had nothing better to do, and that was the third day.
Then there were miscellaneous lectures on Heechee Heaven and the provenance of the Old Ones and possible strategies for dealing with Henrietta and possible risks to be guarded against from the Old Ones, and that was the third day, and the fourth, and the fifth.
I began to wonder how I would fill twenty-two of them, so I went back and did those tapes all over again, and that was the sixth day, and the eighth, and the tenth; and on the eleventh-On the eleventh I cut off the computer entirely, grinning to myself with anticipated pleasure.
It was halfway day. I hung there in my restraining straps, waiting for the satisfaction of the one event this cramped and cussed trip could produce for me: the twinkling eruption of golden sparks of light in the crystal spiral that would signify turnover time. I didn’t know exactly when it would happen. Probably not in the first hour of the day (and it didn’t). Probably not, either, in the second or third . . . and it didn’t. Not in those hours, nor in the fourth, or fifth, or the ones after that. It did not happen at all on the eleventh day.
Or on the twelfth.
Or on the thirteenth.
Or on the fourteenth; and when at last I punched in the data to check out the arithmetic I did not care to do in my head, the computer told me what I did not want to know.
It was too late.
Even if the halfway point occurred any time now-even in the next minute-there would not be water, food and air enough to carry me through to the end.
There are economies one can make. I made them. I moistened my lips instead of drinking, slept all I could, breathed as shallowly as I knew how. And turnover at last did occur-on day nineteen. Eight days late.
When I played the figures into the computer they came back cold and clear.
The halfway point had come too late. Nineteen days from now the ship might well arrive at Heechee Heaven, but not with a living pilot aboard. By then I would have been dead for at least six.
14 The Long Night of the Dreams
As she began to be able to speak to the Old Ones they began to seem more like individuals to her. They were not really old, either. Or at least the three that most often guarded her and fed her and led her to her sessions in the long night of the dreams were not. They learned to call her Janine, or at least something close enough. Their own names were complicated, but each name had a short form-Tar, or Tor, or Hooay-and they responded to them, at need or just for play. They were as playful as puppies, and as solicitous. When she came out of the bright blue cocoon, racked and sweating from another life and another death-from another lesson, in this course that the Oldest One had prescribed for her-one of them was always there to coo and murmur and stroke.
But it was not enough! There was no consolation enough to make up for what happened in the dreams, over and over.
Every day was the same. A few hours of uneasy and unrestful sleep. A chance to eat. Maybe a game of tag or touch-tickle with Hooay or Tor. Perhaps a chance to wander about the Heaven, always guarded. Then Tar or Hooay or one of the others would tug her gently back to the cocoon and put her inside and then, for hours, sometimes for what seemed like the entire span of a life, Janine would be someone else. And such strange someones! Male. Female. Young. Old. Mad. Crippled-they were all different. None of them were quite human. Most were not human at all, especially the earliest, oldest someones.
The lives she “dreamed” that were the closest in time were the nearest to her own. At least, they were the lives of creatures not unlike Tor or Tar or Hooay. They were not usually frightening, though all of them ended in death. In them she lived random and chaotic snatches of their stored memories of the short and chancy, or dull and driven, lives they had known. As she came to understand the language of her captors she found out that the lives she lived were those which had been specially selected (by what criteria?) to be stored. So each had some special lesson. All of the dreams were learning experiences for her, of course, and of course she learned. She learned how to speak to the living ones; to understand their overshadowed existences; to comprehend their obsessed need to obey. They were slaves! Or pets? When they did what the Oldest One told them they were obedient, and therefore good. When, rarely, they did not, they were punished.
Between times she saw Wan sometimes, and sometimes her sister. They were kept apart from her as a matter of policy. At first she did not understand why; then she did, and laughed inside herself at the joke too secret to share with even jokey Tor. Lurvy and Wan were learning too, and taking it no better than she.
By the end of the first six “dreams” she could speak to the Old Ones. Her lips and throat would not quite form their chirping, murmuring vowels, but she could make herself understood. More urgently, she could follow their orders. That saved trouble. When she was meant to return to her private cell they did not need to push her, and when she was supposed to bathe they did not have to strip her of her clothes. By the tenth lesson they were almost friendly. By the fifteenth she (and Lurvy and Wan as well) knew all they ever would about Heechee Heaven,
