I thought about that for several minutes, unmoving, the plague pill wrapped in my right fist. Then I opened my eyes, restored the little globe to its nest, and gently pushed the safe’s door closed.
I felt myself smiling. Actually it was kind of funny. I seemed to be unwilling to take the action I thought I had been preparing to do for years. I had invested a whole hell of a lot of money and effort to get the damn things, and now that I had them I couldn’t make up my mind to use them.
It wasn’t that I had turned in revulsion from the whole idea of slaughtering humanity. I hadn’t. I was convinced that Gerda had made a pretty good case for wiping the species out. I simply wasn’t quite ready to be the one who did it.
That did not make a lot of sense to me. What was wrong with performing an action that I was convinced was a proper one to do? And then as I sat in that bleak room, my elbows on that bare table and my chin in my hands, I realized there was one element that was wrong.
I hadn’t given the other side a chance to be heard.
What I needed was some intelligent, kindly, well-informed person who was likely to love humanity more than I did to take the conventional side of that argument, and the more I thought about it the more eager I was for her to get back from her doctor’s appointment so we could talk.
39
COMING CLEAN WITH THE OTHER WOMAN I LOVED
When Shao-pin got back to the house she looked in on me in our calisthenics room, where I was exercising under the guidance of a good-looking virt female wearing hardly any clothes at all. “Glad you’re taking care of yourself, Brad,” she said.
I didn’t respond to that. I just said, “I need to talk to you, Shao-pin.”
That made her look faintly surprised, but what she said was, “Sounds like a good idea. Dinner’ll be in about an hour: before?”
“Why not? Come into the shower room with me and we’ll get started while I dress.”
She nodded. “Meet you there,” she said, and was gone into the hallway. Since I took the inner way I was there before her. I showered barely long enough to get wet all over, and was pulling up a pair of shorts when she arrived.
“So what are we going to talk about?” she asked, taking a seat on one of the chairs meant for tired athletes.
I pulled on a shirt and sat down next to her. “Listen, maybe we should order something to eat before we start.”
Shao-pin picked up the towel I had dropped on the floor and hung it over the back of a chair. “I called the kitchen already. Alison said we shouldn’t spoil our appetites so soon before dinner, and she’d send up some tea and coffee. What’d you want to talk about?”
There being no help for it I sat down across a tiny table from her, took a deep breath and started in. “What I have to tell you isn’t happy, Shao-pin. It may make you think less of me, but I have to tell you it anyway. When Gerda was dying from that car crash near Caserta she gave me something to hide. It was a funny-looking foreign coil, and I took it. I hid it, too. No one saw it, no one knew I had anything from her. Then, when I had it in my room that night, I began to worry. I couldn’t read it.
“I didn’t know what it was. I began imagining bad things. What if what I had in my pocket was a cure for the Pompeii Flu? What if because I was hiding it I was condemning a lot of other people to catch the disease and be mutilated by it and die from it? I didn’t know what to do … . Oh, here’s the coffee.”
I had been watching Shao-pin’s face attentively while I spoke. At first what she displayed was concern. When I mentioned hiding something Gerda had given me it was pure shock. Then, when I talked about my fears that I might be causing unnecessary sickness and death it was revulsion. She got up to let the coffee bearer in. Over her shoulder she said, “You mean nobody searched you?”
“Not a soul.”
She was scowling now, but when I started to say something she shook her head warningly, with a glance in the direction of Alison’s grandson, learning to be a chef like his grandmother by starting as a gofer. When he was gone she said, “That’s against all Security procedure, but I guess it’s too late to worry about that. Please go on.”
So I did. I told her how relieved I was when the actual cure was found on a different coil in Gerda’s bag, and how I’d dithered about for that long, long time before I connected with Artie Mason, and what Artie had done. And I finished by telling her about those little black marbles in the safe in the rescue room. And then I stopped and gazed at her, waiting for a reaction. The whole story, all those worrisome years of doubts and delays, had taken less than twenty minutes to tell, and through it all Shao-pin had sat listening politely, with an occasional half nod to show that she was grasping what I had to say or an appreciative sip of her cooling tea, and hadn’t said another word.
For a couple of minutes she didn’t say anything now, either, just stared into space, or down into her teacup and hardly at all at me. Then she shook herself and said, “And these little helpings of extermination that you’ve got in the rescue room, are they anything like the Flu?”
“Worse,” I said. “Or maybe in some ways better. Better because they’re not agonizing. But just as fatal, and there’s no cure with the pills.”
She nodded. “And you’ve saved them because you’re planning to turn them loose sometime soon and exterminate the human race?”
That was a hard one. “Planning” was way too strong a word for my muddled thinking on the subject. I said, “You’ve seen a lot of the stuff Gerda collected. Don’t you think the species that does that sort of thing should be put out of its misery?”
She wasn’t going to let me get away with that. “You’re the one who has the stuff to make it happen, so you’re the one whose opinion matters, not mine.”
“Yes, damn it, I know that,” I said, suddenly surly because she was touching me exactly where it hurt. “But you’ve seen Gerda’s evidence, and what do you think?”
She pursed her lips. “Well … All right. Gerda makes a pretty good case. But there’s something to be said on the other side, too.” She had begun fumbling in her bag, pulling out a large envelope. “This,” she said, taking a photograph out of the envelope, “is your daughter.” She made me take it, but it didn’t really look like anything I would call a daughter, more like a sloppily prepared scrambled egg, with a part of it circled in a grease pencil. “Yes, I’m pregnant, Brad. Dr. di Milo gave me this sonogram this morning. I call her Sasha, although so far she’s only a six-week fetus. But, Brad—dear Brad—I don’t want her to die.”
40
MY DAUGHTER
There is a point at which questions of logic and justice and retribution just do not matter anymore, isn’t there? I don’t think that simply seeing that splotch of matter in the X-ray picture took me to that point, but something did. The fact that that cluster of cells was energetically dividing in order to become a child? The look on Shao-pin’s face when she told me it had a name? The quick twist in my abdomen when I heard the words “your daughter”? Well, something did. And before we finished our delayed lunch I had promised that I wouldn’t do anything with the little pills that could end a race for a good, long time. Until Sasha was six months old? Shao-pin bargained. And I agreed.
I probably would have agreed to postpone a decision until Sasha was old enough to vote, if Shao-pin had proposed it, because I was in shock. But the actual length of time, once Sasha had got herself born, didn’t matter. This serious-minded little creature, determinedly attempting to wrap her insignificant fingers around my bony thumb, made her own case. Witless, often noisy, frequently smelly little lump of humanity that she was, she had her way of establishing the fact that she had a right to live. At any cost. Including, I was pretty sure, the cost of my own life.
So on Sasha’s six-month birthday we tucked her in and went down to the rescue room with a half bottle of Lacryma Christi wine, and when Shao-pin had poured us each a glass she looked up at me and said, “Well?”
“Oh, hell,” I said, “let the bast
ards live. Maybe they’ll get better.”
And so the next day we got in our limo, with instructions to our driver, Olivia, to not hit any bumps at all, took off for the funeral home of Terranozza I Guarnio, with me gingerly carrying the black velvet jewelry bag I had filled from Artie Mason’s expensive trophies.
We had long since abandoned the idea of dumping the poison pills into a vat of some molten noble metal like platinum. Such vats were not easy to come by on the Vomero, and so we had taken expert opinion, judiciously asked for, on alternative 100 percent guaranteed disposals. The one we liked best, or anyway disliked least, was the process called resomation, originally developed to dispose of the used-up cadavers from medical schools. A few funeral homes offered it as an alternative to burial or cremation, and one of them turned out to be less than twenty minutes from our house.
Resomation involved simmering the no-longer-wanted stuff in a bath of potassium hydroxide for a few hours, after which, our informants assured us, no complex molecule would survive in what would have become a layer of snow-white ash at the bottom of the sealed vessel it had cooked in. There would be a few centimeters of a chemically sterile liquid atop the ash, which could be poured away into the household disposal system, since it was now totally sterile. As was the snowy ash.
So we drove into the parking area, where Signore Guarnio was waiting for us, and he conducted us to their resomation chamber. I was glad to note that it didn’t smell of anything. A little acrid, maybe, but nothing like organic decay.
We had rehearsed Signore Guarnio carefully. He lifted the top of the vat of hot chemical, I gently placed the black bag of black marbles in it, he closed the top again and sealed it. And then we were through. “Come back if you wish in three hours and thirty,” he said, “and you can see us disposing the remains.”
But we said no, thanks, and drove back home, much more rapidly, to see if Sasha was still awake.
I haven’t regretted what I did. I don’t think I will in the future, either. But I don’t think that I want Shao-pin to know that we only resomationed nine of those little death eggs, I having removed one when she wasn’t around, just in case.
Oh, I don’t think that that in case will ever be the case. But, you see, things don’t always happen the way I think, and expect, they’re going to.
And in the remote and improbable event that fate goes in the wrong, in some terribly wrong, direction, I would like to have the option of changing my mind.
BOOKS BY FREDERIK POHL
The Heechee Saga
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon**
Heechee Rendezvous
The Annals of the Heechee
The Gateway Trip
The Boy Who Would Live Forever*
The Eschaton Sequence
The Other End of Time*
The Siege of Eternity*
The Far Shore of Time*
The Age of the Pussyfoot
Drunkard’s Walk
Black Star Rising
The Cool War
Homegoing
Mining the Oort
Narabedla Ltd.
Pohlstars
Starburst
The World at the End of Time
Jem
Midas World
The Merchants’ War
The Coming of the Quantum Cats
Man Plus* (forthcoming)
Chernobyl
The Day the Martians Came
Stopping at Slowyear
The Voices of Heaven*
O Pioneer!*
All the Lives He Led*
Platinum Pohl *
With Jack Williamson
The Starchild Trilogy
Undersea City
Undersea Quest
Undersea Fleet
Wall Around a Star
Farthest Star
Land’s End *
The Singers of Time
With Lester del Rey
Preferred Risk
With C. M. Kornbluth
The Space Merchants
The Best of Frederik Pohl
(edited by Lester del Rey)
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth
(editor)
Nonfiction
The Way the Future Was
Chasing Science*
*A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FREDERIK POHL has written science fiction for more than seventy years. His novel Gateway won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards for Best Science Fiction Novel. Man Plus won the Nebula Award, and altogether he has won seven Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards for his fiction, among his many kudos.
In addition to his solo fiction, Pohl has published collaborations with other writers, including C.M. Kornbluth, Lester del Rey, and Jack Williamson. One Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration, The Space Merchants, is a bestselling classic of satiric science fiction. The Starchild Trilogy with Williamson is one of the more notable collaborations in the field.
Pohl became a magazine editor when still a teenager. In the 1960s he piloted Worlds of If to three successive Hugos for Best Magazine. He has edited original-story anthologies, notably the seminal Star Science Fiction series of the early 1950s. Among his other activities in the field, he has been a literary agent, has edited lines of science fiction books, and has been president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Most recently, he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer for his blog, www.thewaythefutureblogs.com. He and his wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull, an editor and an academic active in the Science Fiction Research Association, live in Palatine, Illinois.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ALL THE LIVES HE LED
Copyright © 2011 by Frederik Pohl
All rights reserved.
Edited by James Frenkel
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429956642
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pohl, Frederik.
All the lives he led / Frederik Pohl.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
1. Vesuvius (Italy)—Fiction. 2. Volcanic eruptions—Fiction. 3. Terrorists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.O36A78 2011
813’.54—dc22
2010036667
First Edition: April 2011
All the Lives He Led Page 34