The Annals of the Heechee

You understand, we didn’t actually “go” anywhere. We didn’t have to. Cassata fed us into JAWS-Delta’s communications system, and we saw what he wanted us to see. He was a polite host, so he did better than that; he created a sort of officer’s club lounge for us to sit in, with a fire blazing at one end of the room and a table laid out with drinks and snacks. The other end of the room was-whatever we were being shown.

When Cassata offhandedly proposed a look at a nest of Sluggards, Alicia was thrilled-as, of course, he had intended she should be.

The Sluggards were a historic “first” for human beings, because they were the first alien intelligent race any member of the human race had ever seen. Or not “seen,” exactly. FelL Audee Walthers, fooling around with a Dream Couch, had detected their pathetic, huge, lumbering sail-ship in interstellar space decades before.

That was a most important event, but what it led to was more important by a whole lot, because the Slugs detected Audee, too. And that was what told the Heechee that people like us were abroad in the Galaxy, and that was what brought the Heechee, kicking and screaming, Out of their hidey-hole in the core.

“I thought the Heechee kidnaped this Sluggard ship back to its own planet,” Alicia offered.

“They did,” Cassata agreed, “but old Broadhead here kidnaped them back here for study. Or his Institute did. The Slugs don’t mind. They were expecting another thousand years or so on their trip. Their sail is still in orbit just outside JAWS—”

“Saw. Looks seriously mashed,” Essie said severely.

“Well, what else were we going to do? Spread out, the damn thing’s forty thousand kilometers long. Anyway, they won’t need it again. Do you want to see them or not?”

“Oh, yes,” said Alicia Lo, cutting through the argument. Cassata waved a hand, and there they were.

Sluggards aren’t pretty. Some people say they sort of look like some kind of tropical flower. Others think they look like one of those deep-sea things with a lot of tentacles; it’s hard to say what they resemble, because they don’t very much resemble anything on Earth. The males are considerably bigger than the females, but that isn’t the females’ only problem. The females have nothing but problems, because there’s no such thing as women’s rights among Sluggards. A female Sluggard may not worry about this much, though, since they are not intellectual. Their lives are entirely taken up with birthing. One infant comes out every cycle-the cycle runs a little less than four months. If the lucky lady has been visited by a male at the right time, the infant is male. If not, it’s female. Sluggard males do not seem to be particularly horny (considering the Sluggard females, who can blame them?), and so usually the female has not been sexually favored lately.

So there are endless numbers of female Sluggards being born all the time.

They don’t go to waste, though. From time to time one of the males picks out a particularly fat and appealing female. Then he eats her.

One supposes the females don’t like that. No female Sluggard has ever complained, though. They can’t. They don’t talk at all.

Males, on the other hand, talk incessantly-or sing-or anyway make some sort of sounds continuously throughout their lives. You might not know that, though, if you happened to be sitting right next to a Sluggard in full cry-assuming you could, since what they live in is both cold and heavy and poisonous to meat people. You might be aware of a faint pulsing, like a heavy truck going by outside your house. The Slugs are slow. So are their voices; the shrillest coloratura soprano among the Slugs might get way up to twenty or twenty-five hertz. So you couldn’t hear what they were singing.

There were several dozen of the creatures, male and female, floating around in the slush of their spaceship. One male was in a small compartment by himself. The rest were in a common tank, surrounded by all sorts of curious Slug devices that floated with them: the furnishings and gadgets, I supposed, that made up a comfortable Sluggard home, and the only way I could tell the people from the furniture was that I had seen pictures of Slugs before. I couldn’t see anything move. They looked funny in another way, too. I didn’t remember exactly what the natural hues of a Sluggard should be, but they looked as though they had been colored by someone who didn’t remember even as well as I did.

“One is moving!” cried Essie.

It was clever of her to have noticed it. The one in the separate chamber was, barely, extending a tentacle. It was terribly slow even by meat-human standards (not to mention my own!). In the Slugs’ own terms, however, he was writhing in great agitation and high speed; you could see little ripply lines in the sludge all around him, where he had made pressure waves.

“That’s one of the new ones,” said Cassata. “They finished debriefing the original crew, so they imported six more males from the Slug planet a few weeks ago.”