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her to like bouillabaisse and ripe Stilton cheese and all sorts of gourmet grub. She developed a particular
appetite for oysters, to the point where she knew the difference between Wellfleets and Chincoteagues,
and why the Boulognes weren't as delicately flavored as the little Japanese variety. None of it made her
sick, either, the way some people thought it might. She ate three squares a day of my cooking right up
until the organic body failed and she had to go into machine storage. (Well, not the kind of machine
storage a human being would experience. She was a Heechee, so she became a Stored Mind instead.)
Anyway, after that she ate or "ate" twice as much, but electronically.
I wished she would hurry up and pick up her meal, because the situation Harry had laid on me was hard
for me to understand in two entirely different ways. First, I had had no idea that any of the Wheel people
were intimate enough with the Kugels to plan trips with them. Second, I couldn't see just what the Kugels
were supposed to do when they got there.
Harry was no help. "That's not my department, Markie. Me, I just think it would be interesting to see the
old place again. So are you changing your mind about coming along?" And when I thought it over and
told him that, no, I wasn't changing my mind he went off to tell the Authority we had a deal.
The Wheel Authority is made up almost entirely of organic, or formerly organic, persons human and
Heechee, with just one or two machine intelligences sharing their responsibilities. Having some actually
living members is important to the organics for political reasons. (Or maybe just so they can keep on
convincing themselves that organics matter.) The effect of it, though, is that the Authority is chronically,
deplorably slow to act. I have a lot of sympathy for the stored or machine members, like Breeze and my
other favorite Heechee customer, Thermocline. It cannot avoid being terribly tedious for them, waiting for
the organics to take their turns to speak in the Authority sessions. It certainly was for me, so while Harry
was informing the Authority of my agreement I had plenty of time to put my bread pudding in the oven,
take care of the sixty or seventy new orders that had come in, ready Breeze's Eggs Benedict, deal with
my other chores and, at the same time, access the relevant information on the planet I was about to visit,
which (as I mentioned earlier) was called by humans "Arabella."
Human records didn't have anything to say about Arabella that I didn't already know. I'd already heard it
all from Harry many times. Heechee records were somewhat more informative. According to them,
Arabella had once had a thriving biota, including a semi-intelligent species of cold-blooded hexapods,
whom the Kugels had killed off half a million or so years ago, as part of their program of diligent mass
murdering. There were pictures of the hexapods and a lot of technical data about geology and such, and
that was about all there was.
I was a bit puzzled. There was nothing special about that history. I could not see why this quite ordinary
planet was worth a trip, even with so expendable a crew as ourselves. There was nothing unusual in its
history. The Kugels had resolutely killed off every other intelligent, or nearly intelligent, form of organic
life they had come across in their explorations of the Galaxy. Everyone knows this, since that was what
had made the Heechee retreat into their hiding place in the Core, for fear it would be their turn next. The
only thing worth remembering about Arabella was that it had been one of the pre-programmed
destinations in the first human-manned Heechee ships from Gateway. Unfortunately for the human
explorers who by the luck of the draw got that particular flight plan, it was a one-way trip. They went
there. Then they stayed there. Their ships ran out of programming as soon as they arrived and they
couldn't come back. Three or four parties of those early Gateway explorers arrived on Arabella at one
time or another, and there they remained, scratching out a miserable existence from the planet's unfamiliar
plants and animals, until at last humans figured out how to make a Heechee ship do what they wanted,
instead of what the Heechee had designed it to do long ago. Not long after that human rescue parties got
around to checking out planets like Arabella and the marooned crews were saved the handful of them
who were still alive, that is.
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Harry had been one of those rescued castaways. He had been one of the first to arrive on Arabella, too.
He was a strong, adventurous young man when he landed on the catastrophic disappointment that was
the planet of Arabella. By the time the rescue ship got there, forty-five years later, he had become both
old and very feeble. Harry managed to squeeze out another couple of years of organic life, mostly in the
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