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Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon is a science fiction novel by Frederick Pohl. It is a continuation of the story begun in the Gateway novel, beginning about six years after the previous novel's end. It received nominations for a Hugo Award (1981), a British Science Fiction Association Award (1980), a Locus Science Fiction Award (1981), and a Nebula Award (1981).

Publishing History

The novel was first published by Del Rey Books in 1980.

Plot Summary

Robinette Broadway returns, now famously rich and five years into the marriage to his girlfriend S. Ya. from the first novel. He has assembled a financial empire, and one of his ventures includes a mission to the Oort cloud to investigate the discovery of a CHON food factory, a discovery that was made by another Gateway prospector, Trish Bover, who was not able to return, but sent a message detailing her discovery. A four member crew, the Herter-Hall family (Payter, Lurvy, Paul, and Janine), was sent on a three and a half year mission to bring the CHON food factory back to earth to help alleviate the global food crisis. Once they arrived, they discovered that the factory, an office building sized construction with several empty Heechee ships docked to it, resisted their attempts to move it toward earth.

While they were figuring out what to do in light of the failure of the original plan, a 15 year old orphan boy named Wan appears. Through Wan they learn much about the workings of the Food Factory. When Wan uses a Heechee device called the "dreaming couch", an episode of the "fever" strikes the crew (as well as everyone on earth), and it becomes apparent that Wan's regular use of the "dreaming couch" is the source of the strange 130-day fever which has been afflicting earth for the past decade. Finally, they learn that Wan travels regularly between the Food Factory and a much large facility, the latter of which he considers his home, and which is populated by crude machine intelligences that Wan calls the Dead Men, and living creatures that Wan refers to as the Old Ones. The Herter-Hall believes these Old Ones to be the mysterious Heechee.

After much debate, the Herter-Hall party decides to journey with Wan to his "home", now referred to as Heechee Heaven. The journey will take 45 days one way, so they elect the patriarch of the family, Payter, to stay behind to keep in contact with earth. Several more discoveries are made there, but Wan, Lurvey, and Janine are captured by the Old Ones, and brought before a stored machine intelligence known as the Oldest One. Wan, Lurvey, and Janine are forced to live vicariously through several stored lives of the Old Ones, and through that experience learn that the Old Ones are not Heechee at all. The Old Ones are descendants of australapithacines that where taken from earth by the Heechee to facilitate there evolution into a more intelligent species.

Back on the Food Factory, Payter is becoming increasingly stressed and ill as the result of the demands placed on him by the flood of requests from earth. That stress and his perception that the people back on earth are ungrateful for his sacrifices leads him to use the dreaming couch as a tool to blackmail the people of earth into giving him more money once he returns.

Meanwhile on earth, things become difficult for Robin. When Wan's use of the couch triggers another episode of the fever, S. Ya. nearly dies in an auto accident. A lawsuit filed previously by Trish Bover's husband, Hanson Bover, claiming Trish's share of the bonus from the Food Factory discovery, becomes more menacing. The Gateway Corporation threatens to shut the Herter-Hall expedition down, in part because of Payter use of the dreaming couch as a blackmail tool. Despite these obstacles, Robin hatches a plan with the help of his AI assistants (all written by S. Ya.) to take a Heechee five to Heechee Heaven and interrogate one of the Dead Men to directly tap Heechee information stored on Heetchee computers. Robin burns through his financial capital to buy equipment and charter a Heechee five from the moon, makes a deal to get Hanson Bover to lift his injunction, but is stopped when he arrives at the mooon by the Gateway Corporation.

Payter's stress and overwork finally trigger a heart attach, and in a last act of spite he seals himself in the dreaming couch so the people on earth are forced to experience it with him. The chaos that results allows Robin to steal aboard the Heechee ship he had worked to equip and make the trip to Heetchee Heaven. When he arrives, he and Paul successfully pilfer information from the Heetchee computers via the Dead Man, rescue Wan, Lurvey, and Janine, and destroy the Oldest One before he destroys them.

In the final chapters the reader learns that the Oldest One was the first descendants of the australapithacines taken from earth 800,000 years ago to evolve on Heechee Heaven to be intelligent enough to be worthy of becoming the stored intelligence that went on to guide his people for a quarter of a million years.

twenty in nine ship had come recently, the last giving birth to Wan. These were the Dead Men. The first austros were taken from earth 800,000 years ago and bread and given challenges designed to hurry along the evolution of human intelligence.

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