The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  That Stan could do something about. When he phoned Tan’s home it was Tan’s mother who answered, and she began weeping as soon as she heard the news. It was a while before Mrs. Kusmeroglu could manage to tell Stan that Oltan wasn’t home. He was at work, but she would get the sad message to him at once, and if there was anything they could do…

  When he got off the phone with Mrs. Kusmeroglu, Stan looked at the clock. He had plenty of time before he had to get to the morgue, so he opened up the couch he slept on—he wasn’t quite ready to move into his father’s bed—and lay down in case he needed to cry some more.

  He didn’t, though. He fell asleep instantly, which was even better for him. What woke him, hours later, was Tan Kusmeroglu standing over him. Stan could hear the braying of the muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer from the little mosque around the corner, almost drowned out by Tan’s excited voice as he shook Stan awake. “Come on, Stan, wake up! The old fart’s at prayer now and I borrowed my boss’s van. You’ll never have a better time to get your stuff out!”

  That meant they had ten minutes at most. Stan didn’t argue. It took less than that to load the drums, the trumpet, the precious music disks and player and a handful of other things into the van. They were already driving away before Stan remembered. “I have to go to the morgue,” he said.

  Tan took his eyes from the tour bus that was weaving from side to side before them and the delivery truck that was trying to cut in from the side long enough to glance at Stan. His expression was peculiar—almost un-Tanly sympathetic, a little bit flushed in the way he always looked when about to propose some new escapade. “I have been thinking about that,” he announced. “You don’t want to go there.”

  “But they want me to identify my father’s body. I have to.”

  “No, you don’t. What’s going to happen if you do? They’re going to want you to pay for a funeral, and how are you going to do that? No. You stay out of sight.”

  Stan asked simply, “Where?”

  “With us, stupid! You can share my room. Or,” he added, grinning, “you can share my sister’s if you’d rather, only you would have to marry her first.”

  III

  Everybody in the Kusmeroglu family worked. Mr. Kusmeroglu was a junior accountant in a factory that made Korean-brand cars for export. Tan delivered household appliances for a hardware store. His sixteen-year-old sister, Naslan, worked in the patisserie of one of the big hotels along the Bosphorus. Even Mrs. Kusmeroglu worked at home, assembling beads into bracelets that spelled out verses from the Koran, for the tourist trade—when she wasn’t cleaning or cooking or mending the family’s clothes. Even so, Stan knew without being told, they were barely making ends meet, with only the sketchiest of Basic Medical and a constant fear of the future. Going back to complete his schooling was now as hopelessly out of the question for Stan as it had been for Tan. So was sponging off the Kusmeroglus for any length of time.

  He had to find a way to make money.

  That wasn’t easy. Stan couldn’t get a regular job, even if there was one to be got, because under Turkish law he was now an unregistered nonperson. He wasn’t the only one of that sort, of course. There were millions like him in poverty-stricken Istanbul. It wasn’t likely the authorities would bother trying to track him down—unless he turned up on some official record.

  The good part was that the season was nearly summer. The city’s normal population of 25 million, largely destitute, was being enriched each week by two or three million tourists, sometimes even more. These people, by definition, had money and nothing better to spend it on than Istanbul’s sights, meals, curios and inhabitants. “You can become a guide,” Mr. Kusmeroglu pronounced at dinner. “You speak both Turkish and English without flaw, Stanley. You will do well.”

  “A guide,” Stan repeated, looking, out of courtesy to his host, as though he thought it a good idea, but very far from convinced.

  “Of course a guide,” Tan said reprovingly. “My father is right. You have learned all you need to know about Istanbul already—you remember all those dull history classes when we were at school together. Simply subtract the Ottoman period and concentrate on those crazy empresses in the Byzantine, which is what tourists want to hear about anyway. Also we can get guide books from the library for you to study.”

  Stan went right to the heart of the matter. “But I can’t get a guide’s license! The polls—”

  “Will not bother you,” Tan’s mother said firmly. “You simply linger around Topkapi, perhaps, or the Grand Bazaar. When you see some Americans who are not with a tour group you merely offer information to them in a friendly way. Tell them you are an American student here—that is almost true, isn’t it? And if any polis should ask you any questions, speak to them only in English, tell them you are looking for your parents who have your papers. Fair-haired, with those blue eyes, you will not be doubted.”

  “He doesn’t have any American clothes, though,” Naslan put in.

  Her mother pursed her lips for a moment, then smiled. “That can be dealt with. You and I will make him some, Naslan. It is time you learned more about sewing anyway.”

  The endless resources of the Lost & Found at Naslan’s hotel provided the raw material, the Kusmeroglu women made it all fit. Stan became a model American college student on tour: flared slacks that looked like designer pants, but weren’t, spring-soled running shoes, a Dallas Dodgers baseball cap and a T-shirt that said, “Gateway or Bust,” on the front, and on the back, “I busted.” The crowds of tourists were as milkable as imagined. No, more so. The Americans on whom he concentrated all seemed to have more money than they knew what to do with. Like the elderly couple from Riverdale, New York, so confused by the hyperinflated Turkish currency that they pressed a billion New Lira banknote on Stan as a tip for helping them find clean toilets when a million or two would have been generous. And then, when he pointed out the error, insisted that he keep the billion as a reward for his honesty. So in his first week Stan brought back more than Tan earned at his job and almost as much as Naslan. He tried to give it all to Mrs. Kusmeroglu, but she would take only half. “Save for the future, Stanley,” she instructed him kindly. “A little capital is a good thing for a young man to have.”

  And her daughter added, “After all, some day soon you may want to get married.”

  Of course, Stan had no such plans, although Naslan certainly was pretty enough in the perky pillbox hat and miniskirt that was her uniform in the patisserie. She smelled good, too. That was by courtesy of the nearly empty leftover bits of perfume and cosmetics the women guests of the hotel discarded in the ladies’ room, which it was part of her duties to keep spotless. It had its effect on Stan. Sometimes, when she sat close to him as the family watched TV together in the evenings, he hoped no one was noticing the embarrassing swelling in his groin. He was, after all, male, and seventeen.

  But he was also thoroughly taken up by his new status as an earner of significant income. He memorized whole pages from the guidebooks, and supplemented them by lurking about to listen in on the professional guides as they lectured to their tour groups. The best places for that were in sights like the Grand Mosque or Hagia Sofia. There all the little clusters of a dozen or a score tourists were crowded together, with their six or eight competing guides all talking at once, in half a dozen languages. The guide gossip was usually more interesting than anything in the books, and always a lot more scurrilous.

  Eavesdropping on them carried a risk, though. In the narrow alleyway outside the great kitchens that had once served Topkapi Palace he saw a couple of the licensed guides looking at him in a way he didn’t like as they waited for their tour groups to trickle out of the displays. When both of them began talking on their carry phones, still looking at him, he quickly left the scene.

  Actually, he was less afraid of the guides, or of the polis, than he was of Mr. Ozden finding him. What the old man could do if that happened Stan didn’t know. In a pinch, he supposed he could actually pay off
the overdue rent out of the wads of lira that were accumulating under his side of the mattress he shared with Tan. But who knew what law he had broken by his furtive departure? Mr. Ozden would, all right, and so Stan stayed far away from his old tenement.

  It wasn’t all work for Stan. If he got home in time he helped Mrs. Kusmeroglu with the dinner—she affected to be amazed by his cooking skills, which were actually pretty rudimentary. Then usually they would all watch the family’s old thousand-channel TV together. Mrs. Kusmeroglu liked the weighty talk shows, pundits discussing the meaning of such bizarre events as that inexplicable Wrath of God that visited them from time to time, or what to do about the Cyprus question. Mr. Kusmeroglu preferred music—not the kind the boys played, though. Both Tan and Stan voted for programs about space or sports. But then it seldom came to a vote, because what Naslan liked was American sitcoms—on the English-language channels, so she could practice her English—happy groups of wealthy, handsome people enjoying life in Las Vegas or Malibu or the Tappan Sea, and Naslan talked faster than anyone else. It didn’t matter. They shared things as a real family. And that was in some ways the best part of all for Stan, who had only the sketchiest memories of what living in a family was like.

  Although the Kusmeroglus were all unfailingly kind to Stan, their tolerance did not extend to allowing the boys to get out the drums and trumpet in the house. So once or twice Stan and Tan lugged their instruments to the school gym, where the nighttime guard was a cousin and nobody cared how much noise you made when school was out.

  It wasn’t the same, of course. When they were twelve-year-olds in school, they had had a plan. With the Kurdish boy on the bass fiddle and the plain little girl from the form below theirs on keyboard, they were going to be a group. The four of them argued for days, and finally picked out a winner of a name: “Stan, Tan and the Gang.” The plan was to start small, with birthday parties and maybe weddings. Go on to the clubs as soon as they were old enough. Get a recording contract. Make it big… But then the Kurdish boy got expelled because his father was found to be contributing money to the underground Kurdistani movement, and the little girl’s mother didn’t want her spending so much time with boys anyway.

  It wasn’t too much of a blow. By then Stan and Tan had a larger dream to work on. Space. The endless frontier. Where the sky was no limit to a young man’s ambitions.

  If they could only somehow get their hands on enough money to do it, they were determined to go to Gateway, or maybe to one of the planetary outposts. Tan liked Mars, where the colonists were making an almost Earthlike habitat under their plastic domes. Stan preferred the idea of roaming the ancient Heechee catacombs on Venus, where—who knew?—there might still be some old artifacts to discover that might make them almost as rich as a Gateway prospector.

  The insuperable problem was the money to get to any of those places. Still, maybe you didn’t need money, because there were other chances. The famed old explorer Robinette Broadhead, for instance, was rich beyond avarice with his Gateway earnings, and he was always funding space missions. Like the one that even now was gradually climbing its years-long way toward the Oort cloud, where some fabulous Heechee object was known to exist but no one had found a way to get to it other than on a slow, human rocket ship. Broadhead had paid the way for volunteers to make that dreary quest. He might pay for others, when Tan and Stan were old enough. If by then everything hadn’t already been explored.

  Of course, those were childish dreams. Stan no longer hoped they could actually become real. But he still dreamed them.

  Meanwhile there was his work as a guide and his life with the Kusmeroglu family, and those weren’t bad, either. In his first month he had accumulated more money than he had ever seen before. He made the mistake of letting Naslan catch him counting it, and she immediately said, “Why, you’re loaded, Stanley! Don’t you think it’s about time you spent some of it?”

  He gave her a guarded look. “On what?”

  “On some decent clothes, for God’s sake! Look, Friday’s my day off. Dad won’t let me skip morning prayers, but afterward how about if I take you shopping?”

  So the first thing that Friday morning Stan and Naslan were on a bus to the big supersouks and Stan was accumulating his first grown-up wardrobe. Everything seemed to cost far more than Stan wanted to pay, but Naslan was good at sniffing out bargains. Of course, she made him try on six different versions of everything before letting him buy any. Then, when they had all the bundles they could carry and half his bankroll was gone, they were waiting for a bus when a car pulled up in front of them. “Hey, you!” a man’s voice called.

  It was a consulate car, with the logo of the United States of America in gold on its immaculate black door, and the driver was leaning out, gesturing urgently to Stan. “Aren’t you Stan Avery, Walter Avery’s son? Sure you are. Listen, Mr. Goodpastor’s been looking all over hell and gone for you. Where’ve you been hiding yourself, for God’s sake?”

  Stan gave Naslan a trapped look. “I, uh, I’ve been staying with friends.”

  Behind the stopped car half a dozen others were stuck, and they were all blowing their horns. The driver flipped them an obscene gesture, then barked at Stan: “I can’t stay here. Look, Mr. Goodpastor’s got something for you. Have you at least got an address?”

  While Stan was trying to think of an answer, Naslan cut in smoothly. “But you’re not sure of what your address will be, are you, Stan? He’s getting ready to move into his own place,” she informed the driver. “Why don’t you send whatever it is to where he works? That’s the Eklek Linen Supply Company. It’s in Zincirlikuyu, Kaya Aldero Sok, Number 34/18. Here, I’ll write it down for you.” And when the consulate driver at last unplugged the street and was gone, she said sweetly, “Who knows what it might be, Stan? Maybe they want money for something or other, maybe your father’s funeral? Anyway, there’s a foreman at the linen supply who likes me. He’ll see that I get whatever it is, and he won’t tell anybody where it went.”

  But when Naslan brought the envelope home, thick with consular seals, it wasn’t a bill. There was a testy note from Mr. Goodpastor:

  Dear Stanley:

  When we checked the files it turned out your father still held a life-insurance policy, with you as beneficiary. The face amount is indexed, so it amounts to quite a sum. I hope it will help you make a proper life for yourself.

  Stan held the note in one hand, the envelope it was attached to in the other, looking perplexedly at Mr. Kusmeroglu. “What does ‘indexed’ mean?”

  “It means the face value of the policy is tied to the cost of living, so the amount goes up with inflation. Open it, Stanley. It might be quite a lot of money.”

  But when Stan plucked the green U.S. government voucher out of its envelope the numbers were a cruel disappointment. “Well,” he said, trying to smile as he displayed it to the family, “what shall we do with it? Buy a pizza all around?”

  But Naslan’s eyes were sharper than his. She snatched it from his hand. “You stupid boy,” she scolded, half laughing, “don’t you see? It isn’t lira, it is in American dollars! You’re rich now, Stan! You can do what you like. Buy yourself Full Medical. Marry. Start a business. Even go to a whole new life in America!”

  “Or,” Tan put in, “you can pay your way to the Gateway asteroid, Stan.”

  Stan blinked at him, then again, more carefully, at the voucher. What Naslan had said was true. There was plenty of money there—easily enough for the fare to Gateway, indeed much more than even that would cost.

  Stan didn’t stop to think it over. His voice trembled as he said, “Actually, there’s enough for two. Shall we do it, Tan? Shall we go to Gateway?”

  2

  * * *

  In the Steps of Heroes

  I

  The first thing that struck Stan about the Gateway asteroid was that, since he weighed next to nothing at all there, the place had no real up. His body had only one way of dealing with that. It became violently ill. T
his sudden mal d’espace took Stan completely by surprise. He had never had any experience of being seasick or airsick—well, couldn’t have, since he had never been on either a ship or a plane at all before the trip to the asteroid. He was wiped out by the sudden dizzying vertigo as much as by the quick and copious fountaining that followed. The guards at Reception weren’t surprised. “New meat,” one sighed to another, who quickly produced a paper sack for Stan to finish puking into.

  Mercifully, Stan wasn’t the only one affected. Both of the other two strange men in his group were hurling as violently as he. The one woman, sallow, frail and young—and with something very wrong about the way her face was put together, so that the left side seemed shorter than the right—was in obvious distress, too, but she waved the sick bag away. Tan was spared. So he was the one who collected their belongings—drums, trumpet, music and not much else—and got himself and Stan registered. Then he managed to haul Stan, baggage and all, through the labyrinthine drops and corridors of Gateway to their assigned cubicle. Stan succeeded in hitching himself into his sleeping sack, miserably closed his eyes and was gone.

  When he woke, Tan was looming over him, one hand on a holdfast, the other carrying a rubbery pouch of coffee. “Don’t spill,” he cautioned. “It is weak, but it is coffee. Do you think you can keep it down?”

  Stan could. In fact, he was suddenly hungry. Nor was the twisting, falling feeling as bad as it had been, though there were enough remnant discomforts to make him uneasy.

  Tan remained immune. “While you slept I have been busy, old Stan,” he announced affectionately. “I have found where we eat, and where we can go for pleasure. There do not seem to be any people from Istanbul on Gateway, but I have met another Moslem here. Tarsheesh. He is a Shiite from Iran, but seems a good enough fellow. He checked and told me that we have funds enough to stay for eighteen days, while we select a mission. Unfortunately there are not very many missions scheduled for some reason, but we’ll find something. We have to. If our funds run out before that they will simply deport us.” Then he grinned. “I also spoke with the young woman who came up with us. One could get used to the way her face looks, I think. With luck, soon I will know her quite well.”