The Annals of the Heechee

Among other bad things, he once tried to kill me personally.

It may have been twice, because not everything came out at his trial. With me he failed. With several hundred others, though-at least several hundred-he was more efficient. Heimat refused to plead guilty to murder at his trial. He wouldn’t call it murder. He called it revolutionary justice, because he was a terrorist. The court, on the other hand, had no trouble calling it murder-calling each individual case of it murder-and they gave him a life sentence for each one of the deaths. And as Heirnat had been not just any mixed-up moke but a trusted general in the American space forces, they made the sentences consecutive. Altogether, Heimat’s sentences added up to an aggregate minimum stay in jail of 8,750 years, but time had passed and now Heimat had only 8,683 yet to serve.

He had every reason to believe that he would serve every day of those years, too, because even felons were entitled to machine storage. His prison term would not automatically end with his death.

Actually, I rather enjoy talking about General Beaupre Heimat now. It makes a welcome relief. After Albert’s soul-numbing display of immensity and eternity, it is relaxing to think about a mere person, who is merely despicable.

One day for Heimat was much like every other. This is how he started his days:

When he woke up, the bedthing was still and curled beside him, but he knew she wasn’t asleep. He also knew she was not a she but an it, but as Heimat had almost nothing but its for company anymore, he had stopped recognizing the difference.

As Heirnat threw his legs over the side of the bed, she started to get up, too. He pushed her back down. Gently enough, after the violence of the night before. Not all that gently, because (disappointingly) she was very strong.

She watched him dress for a moment before she asked, “Where are you going?”

“Why,” said Heimat, “I think I will walk down to the beach, then swim across the channel and catch a plane to Los Angeles, where I propose to blow up a few buildings.” He waited a moment for a response, and got none. He hadn’t expected any. Typically, she had no sense of humor. It was a chronic disappointment. Heimat would have enjoyed his life a great deal more if he could have made some of his bedthings laugh-though not, of course, as much as if he had been able to make them weep in pain. The authorities gave him female constructions that looked and felt and smelled and tasted like humans, why couldn’t they be considerate enough to make them fret?

It did not occur to Heimat that he had not earned much consideration from the authorities, or from anyone else.

Outside the door his guardthing winked and whispered, “What do you say, Heimat? Was she all right?”

“Not really.” Heimat kept walking and finished the conversation without turning his head: “I told you I like blondes. Little young ones. Fragile.”

The guard called after him, “I’ll see what I can do tonight,” but Heimat didn’t answer. He was thinking of the word he had just used—“fragile”—and the way it made him feel. Fragile. A tiny fragile blonde. A live one! A real female human one, with her fragile little limbs twisted and broken and her mouth screaming and her face contorted in pain—He stopped the thought at that point. He didn’t stop because what he was thinking shamed him, because Heimat was long past shame. He stopped because he was enjoying it so much, with such desperate yearning, that he was afraid his face might give away something of what he was feeling; and the only victory Heimat ever had anymore was to keep some secrets to himself.

Heimat’s island prison was very far from any continent or any major city. It had been built to hold thirty-eight hundred desperate convicts and keep them inside no matter what they planned or did.

Now all that construction was overkill, because the only active survivor in the prison was Heimat himself. There weren’t thirty-eight hundred desperate prisoners left in his prison. There weren’t that many in the whole world. Recruitment had fallen off greatly since the bad old days of terrorism and famine. Oh, sociopaths turned up every now and then, of course, but what Albert (when he and I discussed such matters) called “the preconditions for opportunistic crime” were scarce. —

The thing was, conditions had got a lot better. Nowhere in the human galaxy were there places where whole generations grew up to mug or murder or destroy because they had no easier way to ease their miseries. Most of the worst of the prisoners still somewhere jailed were veterans of the days of terrorism and mass crime, and there weren’t many of those left. Many of the malcontents had long since let themselves be plea-bargained into a different kind of imprisonment in one of the hard-service colonies. Most of the others had finally become either sufficiently rehabilitated or sufficiently dead. Heimat himself was quite an old man-older than I, a hundred and thirty at least. Of course, he got Full Medical. He might go on another fifty years in the flesh, because the prisoners were repaired and reconditioned as often as necessary; it wasn’t usually age, sickness, or accident that they died of when they died. It was almost always simple, terminal boredom. On one morning just like every other morning they would wake up and look around and decide that enough was at last enough and machine storage could be no worse. Then they would find the right chance and kill themselves.