The flesh-and-blood things had control of his artifacts, and his plans were at an end forever.
16 The Richest Person There Is
My name is Robin Broadhead, and I am the richest person there is in the whole solar system. The only one who comes close is old Bover, and he would come a lot closer if he hadn’t thrown half of his money into slum clearance and urban rehabilitation and a lot of what was left into an inch-by-inch scan of trans-Plutonian space, looking for the ship with what was left of his wife, Trish. (What he is going to do with her if he finds her I can’t imagine.) The surviving Herter-Halls are also filthy with money. That’s a good thing, especially for Wan and Janine, who have a complicated relationship to sort out, in a complicatedly unwelcoming world. My wife, Essie, is in the best of health. I love her. When I die, that is, when even Full Medical can’t patch me up any more, I have a little plan about how to deal with someone else I love, and that satisfies me. Almost everything satisfies me. The only exception is my science advisor, Albert, who keeps trying to explain Mach’s Principle to me.
When we took over Heechee Heaven, we got it all. The way to control Heechee ships. The way to build Heechee ships, including the theory that makes it possible to go faster than light. No, it doesn’t involve “hyperspace” or the “fourth dimension”. It is very simple. Acceleration multiplies mass, so says Einstein-the real one, not Albert. But if the rest mass is zero it does not matter how many times you multiply it. It remains zero. Albert says that mass can be created, and proves it by basic logical principles: it exists, therefore it can be created. Therefore it can be eliminated, since what can be made to be can also be made to stop being. That is the Heechee secret, and with Albert’s help to set up the experiment, and Morton’s help to coerce the Gateway Corp into making ships available, we tried it out. It didn’t cost me a cent; one of the advantages of great wealth is that you don’t have to spend it. All you have to do is get other people to spend it for you, and that’s what law programs are for.
So we sent two Fives out at once from Gateway. One was on lander power only, and it contained two people and a cylinder of solid aluminum with strain detectors attached. The other held a full crew, ready for an actual mission. The instrument ship had a live camera pickup with an image split three ways: one on the gravity meter, one on the second ship, one on a cesium-atom digital clock.
To my eyes the experiment didn’t show a thing. The second ship began to disappear, and the gravity meter recorded its disappearance. Big deal! But Albert was elated. “Its mass began to disappear before it did, Robin! My God. Anyone could have tried that experiment any time in the last dozen years! There’s going to be at least a ten- million-dollar science bonus for this!”
“Put it in petty cash,” I said, and stretched, and rolled over to kiss Essie, because we happened to be in bed at the time.
“Is very interesting, dear Robin,” she said drowsily, and kissed me back. Albert grinned and averted his eyes, partly because Essie has been tinkering with his program and partly because he knew as well as I did that what she said was politely untrue. Astrophysics did not much interest my Essie. What interested her was the chance to play with working Heechee machine intelligences, and that interested her very much. Eighteen hours a day much, until she had tracked down all the major systems in what was left of the Oldest One, and the Dead Men, and the Dead Non-Men whose memories went back to an African savannah the better part of a million years ago. Not that she cared a lot about what was in the memories; but how it was there was her very business, at which she was very good. Reshuffling my Albert program was the least of what Essie got out of Heechee Heaven. What we all got was a very great deal indeed. The grand charts of the Galaxy, showing everywhere the Heechee had been. The grand charts of black holes, showing where they are now. Even where Kiara is. As one tiny fringe benefit, I even got the answer to one question that on a purely subjective level had been interesting me very much: why was I still alive? The ship that carried me to Heechee Heaven had flipped over into deceleration mode after nineteen days. By all the laws of parity and common sense, that meant it would not arrive for another nineteen, by which time I should have been surely dead; but in fact it docked in five. And I wasn’t dead at all, or not quite; but why?
Albert gave me the answer. Every flight ever successfully completed in a Heechee ship had been between two bodies that, relatively, were more or less at rest-a few tens or at most a few hundreds of kilometers a second difference in their relative velocities. No more. Not enough to make a difference. But my flight had been pursuing an object itself in very rapid motion. It had been almost all acceleration. The slowdown had taken only a tiny fraction of the speedup. And so I lived.
And all that was very satisfying, and yet-And yet there is always a price.
There always has been. Every big jump forward has carried a hidden cost, all through history. Man invented agriculture. That meant someone had to plant de cotton and someone had to hoe de corn. And dat’s how slavery was born. Man invented the automobile, and got a dividend of pollution and highway death. Man got curious about the way the sun shines, and out of his curiosity came the H-bomb. Man found the Heechee artifacts and tracked down some of their secrets. And what did we get? For one thing, we got Payter, almost killing a world, with a power no one had ever had before him. For another we got some brand-new questions, the answers to which I have not yet quite nerved myself up to face. Questions that Albert wants to try to answer, about Mach’s Principle; and that Henrietta raised, with her talk about Point X and the “missing mass”. And a very big question in my own mind. When the Oldest One broke Heechee Heaven out of its orbit and sent it flying through space toward the core of the Galaxy what, exactly, was he heading toward?
The scariest, I guess, and also the most satisfying, I know, moment of my life was when we had burned the feelers off the Oldest One and, armed with Henrietta’s instructions, sat down before the control board of Heechee Heaven. It took two to make it move. Lurvy Herter-Hall and I were the two most experienced pilots present-if you didn’t count Wan, who was off with Janine, rounding up the waking Old Ones to tell them there had been a change in government. Lurvy took the right-hand seat and I took the left (wondering a lot just what strange-shaped butt had first sat in it). And there we went. It took more than a month to get back to orbiting the Moon, which was the point I had picked out. It wasn’t a wasted month, there was plenty to do on Heechee Heaven; but it went pretty slowly, because I was in a very big hurry to get home.
It took all the nerve I had to squeeze that teat, but, you know, it wasn’t all that hard. Once we understood that the main bank of controls carried the codes for all the preset objectives-there are more than fifteen thousand of them, all over the Galaxy and some outside-it was just a matter of knowing which code was which. Then, all of us really delighted with ourselves, we decided to show off. We got a squawk from the radio-astronomers on the far side because our circumlunar orbit was getting in the way of their dishes every time we came around. So we moved. You do that with the secondary boards, the ones no one has ever dared to touch in midflight and that don’t seem to do much on the original launch. Main boards, preprogrammed objectives; secondary boards, any point you want, provided you can spell out its galactic coordinates. But the joker is that you can’t use the secondary boards until you’ve nulled the primaries by setting them all down to zero-that translates to a clear deep red color on each- and if any prospector ever happened to do that on his own, he lost his programming to get back to Gateway. How simple everything is once you know. And so we put that big son-of-a-bitching artifact, half a million metric tons of it, in close Earth orbit, and invited company.
The company I wanted most was my wife. What I wanted next was my science program, Albert Einstein-that’s not really a reflection on Essie, you know, because she wrote him. It was a tossup whether I went down to her or
