Heechee Saga
The Heechee are a fictional alien race from the science fiction works of Frederik Pohl. The Heechee are portrayed as an exceedingly advanced star-travelling race that explored Earth's solar system millenia ago and then disappeared without a trace before humankind began space exploration.
Pohl's novels featuring the Heechee are:
- Gateway (1976)
- Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
- Heechee Rendezvous (1984)
- Annals of the Heechee (1987)
- The Boy Who Would Live Forever : A Novel of Gateway (2004)
Pohl has also released a collection of short stories in the series:
- The Gateway Trip (1990)
Pohl purportedly has a new novel in the works although the release date is unknown:
- From Gateway to the Core
Synopsis of Series
At the outset of the Gateway series, the Heechee are nowhere to be found and humans know of them only from their artifacts. The first evidence came with the discovery of tunnels constructed under the planet Venus, each tunnel distinguished by the mysterious cobalt blue metal covering the interior sections. After several years, explorers discovered an asteroid orbiting perpendicular to the solar plane, filled with cobalt blue tunnels, and hundreds of small Heechee spaceships. Named Gateway by the discovers, the powerful nations of the world occupy the asteroid and subsequently form the Gateway Corporation to administer the object.
By happenstance, one of the asteroid explorers entered a ship and hit a button, activating the vehicle and sending him on a thirty day journey to another solar system. Upon his return, the Gateway Corporation decided to allow explorers (called Prospectors) to take trips on the mostly still-functioning ships. Prospectors who find valuable materials or make discoveries are rewarded with substantial bonuses. Ships on the asteroids come in three sizes and are defined as a "one," "three," or "five" based upon the number of passengers that it can (for the most part) uncomfortably carry. Not every vehicle returns and there are other great hazards to the explorers.
The Gateway novel focuses on the exploits of one of those explorers, Robinette Broadhead. Broadhead hits the jackpot by becoming the first person to return from a black hole's event horizon. In the sequel, Broadhead uses the money to fund further discoveries involving Heechee technology, locating a Heechee food factory that is capable of turning raw carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) that can be made into edible food for an overpopulated Earth.
The Heechee do not appear until book three in the series where the reason for their absence is explained. Some 100,000 years earlier, the Heechee were active in discovering the galaxy, including an Australopithecine-inhabited Earth (where a sampling of the creatures were extracted and left to propogate to modern time on a Heechee station). The Heechee found out that there was a race of pure energy (called simply The Foe (alternatively called The Assassins or The Kugel) wiping out civilizations on any planet where it emerged. The inherently cautious Heechee retreated to the interior of the black hole in the galactic core hoping to avoid being destroyed. In the interior of the black hole, only a few hundred years have passed since the Heechee left the universe as a result of time dilation. After going into hiding, Heechee scout ships were sent out of the interior to periodically check on developments through the universe including the development of the emerging Earth.
When a Heechee crew exited the core, they are shocked to discover that humans were flying their spaceships to all parts of the galaxy -- and one of those places happens to be the Kugelblitz, (a black hole made of energy and not matter) where The Foe was concentrated. The Heechee expected humans to discover the ships, but the cautious race believed Earth people would study and unlock the ships' secrets over a period of hundreds of years -- and not simply take the equipment out for random rides in the dangerous galaxy.
When the Heechee finally arrive in force, it's decided that the human intrusion cannot be reversed and The Foe must be confronted.
The Heechee have collected evidence that The Foe have been adding matter into the universe. The Foe intend to tilt the balance and allowing the Big Bang to be reversed and the universe to collapse into a Big Crunch billions of years into the future. The Foe intend that once the universe rebounds into a second big bang, it will do so in the form of pure energy, removing the atomic matter that The Foe regard as so much clutter. A detente is created between Broadhead and The Foe allowing the aliens to continue their project and the human and Heechee growing to accept that they will eventually progressing toward bodyless minds.
Physical and Cultural Attributes
The Heechee's appearance is described as smaller than humans, bow-legged with skeletal frames, and possessed of dark, plastic-smooth skin with patches and curlicues of bright gold and scarlet. Each Heechee carries a microwave emitter in a storage pod between his or her legs. The pod is a trapezohedron shaped device and is also used for carrying equipment. The pods also explain why the seats on the ship have V-shaped indentations to accommodate the devices. The Heechee's home planet evolved near a naturally occurring microwave source making the background radiation a necessary requirement for an ambient environment; the extended absence of the radiation will cause illness and death.
Heechee relationships do not generally feature couple cohabitation for lengthy periods as with human marriages. A burrowing species, they tend to display more solitary conduct than humans. A Heechee bed is a cocoon, stuffed with soft bits of fabric. Heechees only breed when a female is in season.
Heechee are vegetarians and use a fibrous plant to clean their teeth. There are two Heechee languages: the language of Do and Feel, with communications with humans restricted to the former.
Unlike humans, the Heechee did not develop artificial intelligence. Instead, they relied upon technology to pour the brains of departed Heechee into data storage, giving them a limited immortality. These "stored minds" operate at exponentially faster speeds than "meat" brains. Those stored operate in their own social strata often separate from their organic counterparts. After centuries of existance, the various Heechee consciousnesses join the "massed minds," essentially dying while memories are distributed among other macine stored intelligences.
Heechee Devices
In addition to the Food Factory, the Heechee created a number of devices that the Earth people discovered and used, including:
- Piezoelectric devices (allowing voltage to be generated from placing pressure on crystals).
- "Prayer fans" that appear and unfold like traditional fans but are actually computer-related equipment containing the minds of dead Heechees and, later, dead humans. The fans also are used for data storage.
- Faster-than-light spaceships that act by nullifying the mass of the ship and avoiding the implication of Einstein's Relativity Theory that states that an object becomes more massive as it approaches the speed of light.
- A Disruptor of Order in Aligned Systems is the device that allows Heechee to unseal the Schwarzschild barrier in black holes and let ships to traverse the boundaries.
- The "Dream Couch" or, more properly, a telempathic psychokinetic transceiver, is capable of receiving and transmitting thoughts across long distances. Heechees focus their law enforcement efforts on catching criminals while they are having perverse thoughts. In the novels, terrorists are depicted as putting insane people in Dream Couches and broadcast their thoughts into populated areas, causing widespread damage and destruction.
Other Mediums
Two computer adventure games based on the Gateway series were made by Legend Entertainment: Frederik Pohl's Gateway (1992), and a sequel, Gateway 2: Homeworld (1993). The former was released as freeware in 1996.