Outnumbering the Dead

by Frederik Pohl

  The doorwarden was unperturbed. 'There is always an exception,' it informed him, right out of its basic programming, 'in the case of visitors with special urgency, and I am informed this is one. The woman says she is from Hakluyt and she states that she is certain you will wish to see her.'

  'Hakluyt? Is it that fou dramaturge woman again? Well, she's wrong about that, I don't want to talk about her stupid show-'

  But then the voice from the speaker changed. It wasn't the doorwarden's any more. It was a human voice, and a familiar, female human voice at that. 'Rafiel,' she said fondly, 'what is this crap about a show? It's me, Alegretta. I came to visit you all the way from my ship Hakluyt, and I don't know anything about any stupid shows. Won't you please tell your doorwarden to let me in?'

  10

  Rafiel knows that Alegretta has come from somewhere near Mars, and he knows pretty well how far away Mars is from the Earth: many millions of kilometres. He knows how long even a steady-thrust spacecraft takes to cross that immense void between planets, and then how long it takes for a passenger to descend to a spaceport and get to this remote outpost on the edge of the Sonoran desert. And he is well able to count back the days and see that Alegretta must have started this trip to his side - at the very least - ten days or two weeks before, which is to say right around the time when he collapsed into the hospital back in Indiana. He knows all that, and understands its unpleasing implications. He just doesn't want to think about any of those implications at that moment.

  When you have lost the love of your life and suddenly, without warning, she appears in it again, what do you do?

  First, of course, there is kissing, and It's been so longs, and How good it is to see yous, and of course Alegretta has to see how well the kitten she sent is doing, and Rafiel has to admire the fat white cat Alegretta has brought with her, a server carrying it for her in a great screened box (it has turned out to be the kitten's mother), and of course Rafiel has to offer food and drink, and Alegretta has to accept something ... but then what? What - after half a century or more - do you say to each other? What Rafiel said, watching his love nibble on biscuits and monkey-orange and beer, was only, 'I didn't expect you here.'

  'Well, I had to come,' she said, diffident, smiling, stroking the snow-white cat that lay like a puddle in her lap, 'because Nicolette here kept rubbing up against me to tell me that she really missed her baby kitten - and because, oh, Rafiel, I've been so damn much missing you.' Which of course led to more kissing over the table, and while the server was cleaning up the beer that had got spilled in the process, Rafiel sank back to study her. She hadn't changed. The hair was a darker red now, but it was still Alegretta's unruly curly-mop hair, and the face and the body that went with the hair were not one hour older than they had been - sixty? seventy? however many years it had been since they last touched like this. Rafiel felt his heart trembling in his chest and said quickly, 'What were you saying about Hakluyt?'

  'My ship. Yes.'

  'You're going on that ship?'

  'Of course I am, dear.' And it turned out that she was, though such a thing had never occurred to him when he was talking to the dramaturge woman. There definitely was a Hakluyt habitat, and it really was, even now, being fitted with lukewarm-fusion drives and a whole congeries of pion generators that were there to produce the muons that would make the fusion reactor react.

  'You know all this nuclear fusion stuff?' Rafiel asked, marvelling.

  'Certainly I do. I'm the head engineer on the ship, Rafiel,' she said with pride, 'and I'm afraid that means I can't stay here long. They're installing the drive engines right now, and I must be there before they finish.'

  He shook his head. 'So now you've become a particle physicist.'

  'Well, an engineer, anyway. Why not? You get tired of one thing, after you've done it for ninety or a hundred years. I just didn't want to be a doctor any more; when things go right it's boring, and when they don't-'

  She stopped, biting her lip, as though there were something she wanted to say. Rafiel headed her off. 'But what will you find when you get to this distant what's-its-name star?'

  'It's called Tau Ceti.'

  'This Tau Ceti. What do you expect? Will people be able to live there?'

  She thought about that. 'Well, yes, certainly they will - in the habitat, if nothing else. The habitat doesn't care what star it orbits. We do know there are planets there, too. We don't know, really, if any of them has life....'

  'But you're going anyway?'

  'What else is there to do?' she asked, and he laughed.

  'You haven't changed a bit,' he said fondly.

  'Of course not. Why should I?' She sounded almost angry - perhaps at Rafiel because, after all, he had. He shook his head, reached for her with loving hunger, and pulled her to him.

  Of course they made love, with the cat and the kitten watching interestedly from the chaise longue at the side of the room. Then they slept a while, or Alegretta did, because she was still tired from the long trip. Remarkably, Rafiel was not in the least tired. He watched over her tenderly, allowing himself to be happy in spite of the fact that he knew why she was there.

  She didn't sleep long, and woke smiling up at him. 'I'm sorry, Rafiel,' she said.

  'What have you got to be sorry for?'

  'I'm sorry I stayed away so long. I was afraid, you see.' She sat up, naked. 'I didn't know if I could handle seeing you, well, grow old.'

  Rafiel felt embarrassment. 'It isn't pretty, I suppose.'

  'It's frightening,' she said honestly. 'I think you're the main reason I gave up medicine.'

  'It's all right,' he said, soothing. 'Anyway, I'm sure what you're doing now is more interesting. Going to another star. It takes a lot of courage, that.'

  'It takes a lot of hard work.' Then she admitted, 'It takes courage, too. It certainly took me a long time to make up my mind to do it. Sometimes I still wonder if I have the nerve to go through with it. We'll be thirty-five years en route, Rafiel. Nearly five thousand people, all packed together for that long.'

  He frowned. 'I thought somebody said the Hakluyt was supposed to have twenty thousand to start.'

  'We were. We are. But there aren't that many volunteers for the trip, you see. That's why they made me chief engineer; the other experts didn't see any reason to leave the solar system, when they were doing so many interesting things here.' She leaned forward to kiss him. 'Do you know what my work is, Rafiel? Do you know anything about lukewarm-fusion?'

  'Well,' he began, and then honestly finished: 'No.'

  She looked astonished, or perhaps it was just pitying. 'But there are powerplants in every arcology. Haven't you ever visited one?' She didn't wait for an answer but began to tell him about her work, and how long she had had to study to master the engineering details. And in his turn he told her about his life as a star, with the personal appearances and the fans always showing up, wherever he went, with their love and excitement; and about the production of Oedipus they had just finished, and the members of the troupe. Alegretta was fascinated by the inside glimpses of the lives of the famous. Then, when he got to the point of telling her about Docilia and her decision to try monogamy with the father of her child, as soon as the child was born, anyway, Alegretta began to purse her lips again. She got up to stare out the window.

  He called, 'Is something wrong?'

  She was silent for a moment, then turned to him seriously. 'Rafiel, dear,' she said. 'There's something I have to tell you.'

  'I know,' he said reluctantly.

  'No, I don't think you do. I didn't come here by accident. Mosay-'

  He was beside her by then, and closed her lips with a kiss. 'But I do know,' he said. 'Mosay called you to tell you, didn't he? Why else would you come all the way back to Earth in such a great hurry? That little episode I had, it wasn't just fatigue, was it? It meant they can't keep me going much longer, so the bad news is that I don't have much time left, do I? I'm going to die.'

  'Oh, Rafiel,' she s
aid, woebegone.

  'But I've known that this was going to happen all my life,' he said reasonably, 'or at least since you told me. It's all right.'

  'It isn't!'

  He shrugged, almost annoyed. 'It has to be all right, because I'm mortal,' he explained.

  She was shaking her head. 'Yes. But no.' She seemed almost near tears as she plunged on. 'Don't you see, that's why I came here like this. You don't have to die completely. There's a kind of immortality that even short-timers have open to them if they want it. Like your Docilia.'

  He frowned at her, and she reached out and touched his lips. 'Will you give me a baby?' she whispered. 'A son? A boy who will look just like you when he grows up - around Tau Ceti?'

  11

  Although the Sonora arcology is far tinier and dingier than some of those in the busy, crowded north, it naturally does not lack any of the standard facilities - including a clinic for implanting a human foetus into a nurturing animal womb. On the fourth day after the donation the new parents (or, usually, at least one of them) may come up to the sunny, brightly painted nursery to receive their foetus. It is true that the circumstances for Rafiel and Alegretta are a bit unusual. Most foetuses are implanted at once into the large mammal - a cow most often, or a large sow - that will bring them to term and deliver them. Their child has a more complicated incubation in store. He (it is definitely to be a boy, and they have spent a lot of time thinking of names for him) must go with Alegretta to the interstellar ship Hakluyt, which means that the baby's host must go there too. Cows are not really very portable. So, just for now, for the sake of ease in transportation, their foetus has been temporarily implanted in a much smaller mammal, which is now spending as much time as it is allowed sitting purring in Alegretta's lap, a bit ruffled at recent indignities, but quite content.

  They didn't just talk and make love and babies. On the second day Alegretta announced she was temporarily going to be a doctor again.

  'But you've probably forgotten how to do it,' Rafiel said, half joking.

  'The computer hasn't,' she told him, not joking at all. She got his medical records from the datafile and studied them seriously for a long time. Then she sent the server out for some odds and ends. When they came she pressed sticky sensor buttons on his chest and belly - 'I hope I remember how to do this without pulling all your hair off,' she said - and pored over the readings on her screen. Then she had long conversations over the tel with someone, from which Rafiel was excluded and which wound up in the server bringing him new little bottles of spansules and syrups to take. 'These will make you feel better,' she told him.

  But they both knew that even the best efforts of loving Alegretta could not possibly make him be better.

  They were also both well aware that they could not stay long together in Sonora. If they hadn't known that, they would have been told so, because the callback lists kept piling up on the communications screen - Mosay and Jeftha and ten or twelve others for Rafiel, faxed messages from Hakluyt for Alegretta. Once a day they took time to read them, and occasionally to answer them. 'They're putting the frozen stocks on board now,' Alegretta announced to her lover, between callbacks.

  'Frozen food for the trip? You must need a lot-'

  'No, no. Not food - well, a little bit of frozen food, yes, but we couldn't carry enough to last out the trip. Most of the food we need we'll grow along the way. What I'm talking about is frozen sperm and ova - cats, dogs, livestock, birds - and frozen seeds and clones for planting. We'll need them when we get there.'

  'And what if there's no good planet there to plant them on?' he asked.

  'Bite your tongue,' she said absently, making him smile at her as she sat huddled over the manifest. He found himself smiling a good deal these days. His kitten, which had not let either of them out of its sight while its mother was off in the implantation clinic, was licking its left forepaw with concentrated attention. The lovers touched a lot, sometimes talking, sometimes just drowsing in the scents and warmths of each other. They looked at each other a lot, charmed to see in each other a prospective parent of a shared child.

  Rafiel said meditatively, 'It would have been fun to conceive it in the old-fashioned way.'

  She looked up. 'It's safer when they do it in the laboratory. Not to mention this way we can be sure it's a boy.'

  She came over and kissed him. 'Anyway, we can - well, in a day or two we can - do all of that we want to.'

  Rafiel rubbed his ear against her cheek, quite content. It was a very minor inconvenience that sexual intercourse had to be postponed a bit, Alegretta's womb tender from the removal of the ovum.

  'Are you getting restless?' she asked.

  'Me? No, I'm happy to stay right here in the condo. Are you?'

  She said, 'Not really, but there is something I'd like to do outside.'

  'Name it.'

  'It's so you'll know what my work's like,' she explained. 'If you think you'd like to, I'd enjoy showing you what this arcology's powerplant looks like.'

  'Of course,' he said.

  He would have said the same to almost anything Alegretta proposed. Still, it wasn't the kind of 'of course' he felt totally confident about, because one of Mosay's calls had been to warn him that the paparazzi knew he was still in the arcology. They somehow even knew that he and Alegretta had conceived a child. Someone in the clinic had let the news out. But Rafiel took what precautions he could to preserve their privacy. They chose their time - it was after midnight - and the doorwarden reported no one in the area when they stole out and down into the lowest reaches of the arcology.

  It turned out that the powerplant wasn't particularly hot. It didn't look dangerous at all; everything was enamelled white or glittering steel, no more worrisome in appearance than a kitchen. It was noisy, though; they both had to put on earplugs when the shift engineer, as a professional courtesy to his colleague, Alegretta, let them in. With all the roaring and whining around them they couldn't talk very well, but Alegretta had explained some of it on the way down, and pointed meaningfully to this great buzzing cylinder and that red-striped blank wall, and Rafiel was nearly sure he understood what he was seeing. He knew it was muon-catalysed fusion. He even knew that it was, in fact, the most desperately desired dream of powerplant designers for generations, a source of power that took its energy from the commonest of all elements: hydrogen, the same universal fuel that stoked the fires of the stars themselves, and delivered it in almost any form anyone could wish - heat, kinetic energy or electricity - without fuss or bother. Well, not entirely without bother. It had taken a long time and a lot of clever engineering to figure out how to get the pions to make the muons that would make the reaction go; but there it was. Lukewarm fusion operated without violent explosions, impossible containment or deadly radioactive contamination. It worked best at an optimal temperature of 700 degrees Celsius (instead of many thousands!), and so it was intrinsically both safe and convenient. It was, really, the fundamental reason why the living members of the human race now outnumbered the dead. The foetal procedures could extend life, but it was only the cheap and easy energy that would never run out that could keep all ten trillion human beings alive.

  'Thanks,' Alegretta said to the shift engineer as he collected their dosimeters and earplugs on the way out. Rafiel wasn't looking at the engineer as she checked the dosimeters and nodded to Alegretta to show they were all right. He was looking at Alegretta, so small and pretty and, well, yes, so young to be the master of so much energy.

  And so damned intelligent. She was explaining the system to him, pleased and flushed, as they moved toward the exit door. 'It's really hydrogen we burn; it's muonized deuterium; you know, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, but with a muon replacing its electron.'

  He didn't know, but he said, 'Yes. Yes, I see.'

  She was going right on. 'So, since the muon is heavier, it orbits closer to the nucleus. This means that two atoms of deuterium can come closer to each other than electron- hydrogen ever could, and thus they
fuse very easily into helium - oh, hell!’ she finished, looking out the door. 'Who are they?'

  He swore softly and took her arm. 'Come on,' he said, pushing their way through the swarm of paparazzi.

  *

  'We must have been seen going in,' he told her, once they were safely back in the condo. 'Or your friend the engineer called somebody.'

  'Is it always like this, Rafiel?'

  He wanted to be honest with her. 'Sometimes we tip the paps off ourselves,' he admitted. 'I mean, I don't personally do it. I don't have to. Jeftha or Mosay or somebody will, because we want the paparazzi there, you know? They're good for business. They're the source of the publicity that makes us into stars.'

  'Did you?'

  'Did I tip them off? No. No, this time they found us out on their own. They're good at that.'

  -So he had no secrets any more: the paparazzi knew that his life was nearing its end and that he had started a child he would not live to see grow, all of which made him more newsworthy than ever, for the same reasons: because he was Rafiel, the short-timer; because he was going to do that black-comic thing, to die. Since hardly anybody really suffered, people like Rafiel filled a necessary niche in the human design: they did the suffering for everyone else to enjoy vicariously - and with the audience's inestimable privilege of turning the suffering off when they chose.

  'Yes, but is it always like this?'

  He picked up the kitten and cradled it in his arms, upside down, its blue eyes looking up warily at him.

  'It will be as long as we're here together,' he said.

  She did not respond to that. She just walked silently over to the communications screen.

  It seemed to Rafiel that his beloved wanted not to be beloved, or not actively beloved, right then. Her back was significantly turned toward him. She had taken some faxes from Hakluyt and was poring over them, not looking at him. He took his cue from her and went into the other room to deal with a couple of callbacks. He did not think he had satisfactorily explained the situation to her. On the other hand, he didn't think he had to.