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something one can recognize." He slipped it into the tulip. There was a quick
tiny flutter of electronic whispers, and then the tulip and scroll
disappeared. A lemon-shaped cloud of color enveloped them, and shaped itself
to display a sewn book, opened at a page of vertical lines of ideographs. A
tinny voice-a human voice!-began to declaim something in a staccato, highly
tonal language.
Lurvy could not understand the words, but two years on Gateway had made her
cosmopolitan.
She gasped, "I-I think that's Japanese! And those look like haiku! Wan, what
are the Heechee doing with books in Japanese?"
He said in a superior tone, "These are not really the Old Ones, Lurvy, they
are only copies of other books. The good ones are all like that. Tiny Jim says
that all the tapes and books of the Dead Men, all the Dead Men, even the ones
that are no longer here, are stored in these. I
read them all the time."
"My God," said Lurvy. "And how many times have I had one of those in my hands
and not known what it was for?"
Paul shook his head wonderingly. He reached into the glowing image and pulled
the fan out of its tulip. It came away easily; the picture vanished and voice
stopped in mid-syllable, and he turned the scroll over in his hands. "That
beats me," he said. "Every scientist in the world has had a go at these
things. How come nobody ever figured out what they were?"
Wan shrugged. He was no longer angry; he was enjoying the triumph of showing
these people how much more than they he knew. "Perhaps they are stupid too,"
he shrilled. Then, charitably, "Or perhaps they merely have only the ones that
no one can understand-except perhaps the Old Ones, If they ever bothered to
read them."
"Have you got one of those handy, Wan?" Lurvy asked.
He shrugged petulantly. "I never bother with those," he explained. "Still, if
you do not believe me-" He rummaged around in the heaps, his expression making
it clear that they were wasting time with things he had already explored and
found without interest. "Yes. I think this is one of the worthless ones."
When he slipped it into the tulip, the hologram that sprang up was bright-and
baffling. It was as hard to read as the play of colors on the controls of a
Heechee spacecraft. Harder.
Strange, oscillating lines that twined around each other, leaped apart in a
spray of color, and then drew together again. If it was written language, it
was as remote from any Western alphabet as cuneiform. More so. All Earthly
languages had characteristics in common, if only that they were almost all
represented by symbols on a plane surface. This seemed meant to be perceived
in three dimensions. And with it came a sort of interrupted mosquito-whine of
sound, like telemetry which, by mistake, was being received on a pocket radio.
All in all, it was unnerving.
"I did not think you would enjoy it," Wan observed spitefully. "Turn it off,
Wan," Lurvy said; and then, energetically, "We want to take as many of these
things as we can. Paul, take off your shirt. Load up as many as you can and
take them back to the Dead Men's room. And take that old camera, too; give it
to the bio-assay unit, and see if it can make anything out of the Heechee
blood."
"And what are you going to do?" Paul asked. But he had already slipped off his
blouse and was filling it with the glittery "books".
"We'll be right along. Go ahead, Paul. Wan? Can you tell which are which-I
mean, which are the ones you don't bother with?"
"Of course I can, Lurvy. They are very much older, sometimes a little
chipped-you can see."
"All right. You two, take off your top clothes too-as much as you need to make
a carrying-
bag out of. Go ahead. We'll be modest some other time," she said, slipping out
of her coverall.
She stood in bra and panties, tying knots in the arms and legs of the garment.
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She could fit at least fifty or sixty of the fans in that, she calculated-with
Wan's tunic and Janine's dress they could carry at least half of the objects
away. And that would be enough. She would not be greedy.
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