The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  Breeze considered for a moment, then said, “I would like best, Achiever, simply to stay here and watch you for a time. How else am I to learn?”

  She could not have chosen a better response. Achiever was once again well pleased with his trainee, and remained so throughout his shift. There was little enough for her to watch, of course. The ship flew itself. But while Achiever himself was reading, or eating, or chatting with his student, he always kept one eye on the screen, just in case, and Breeze was suitably impressed.

  Later on, when it was Achiever’s resting time, he crawled into his bundle of sleeping grasses—they weren’t real grasses, of course, because real vegetation might release pollens that would pollute the spacecraft’s air, but they were manufactured to look and feel as much like grass as anything the primitive forebears of the Heechee race had plucked and wrapped around themselves when they found a moment to rest. Achiever didn’t let the grasses cover his face, though. He kept his eyes on Breeze. She was doing well, he thought with satisfaction.

  And continued to think so through the next shift, and the next.

  It wasn’t until they were almost at their destination that anything happened to worry him. He was in his sleeping bundle, this time really asleep, when the urgent-message bell rang.

  Well, it wasn’t a bell and it didn’t ring, it growled. But no matter. Its sound meant that something somewhere was very amiss. It had never sounded before in Achiever’s experience, and he was fighting his way out of his sleep bundle almost before it stopped. Even so, Breeze was before him. The communicator had begun to flicker, rapidly and frighteningly, in the bright green that announced an urgent message, as did every other communicator in the Core at the same moment.

  Breeze was scanning the message screen with an expression somewhere between stupefaction and horror. “What is it?” Achiever demanded, and she looked at him in bewilderment.

  “There have been visitors,” she said, every muscle writhing under her skin at once. “They are on Door now, but they are not Heechee. They are visitors who have come from Outside, and they are of another species, not our own.”

  II

  Achiever didn’t go back to sleep. Neither did Breeze. Nor did any other Heechee on the night-time sides of any of the hundreds of inhabited planets of the Core’s thousands of captive suns. Visitors? From Outside? No, there wasn’t much sleep for any Heechee after that news had spread. What there was instead was something close to terror. When the view screens displayed the actual images of these actual intruders the terror was mixed with gut-wrenching revulsion. The alien creatures were sickening to look upon. They were horrible travesties of the Heechee form, bloated, hairy, altogether hideous.

  The rest of Breeze and Achiever’s flight was brief. When their ship docked at Door, they discovered that the situation had become even worse. The people of Door’s permanent party were running about in confusion, and alarming fresh news was arriving, it seemed, every minute. Another ship had come in from outside! No, now there were two of the alien ships—no, three! And one of those ships had not only brought more of these “humans,” as they called themselves, but even a couple of Heechee who had been Outside on a scout patrol ship.

  The resulting wild confusion was un-Heecheeishly total. There were no handlers at the landing dock to arrange the unloading of Achiever’s cargo. Worse, there weren’t any instructions from the dispatch officer about their return flight, either. So Achiever left Breeze with the ship and went looking for the dispatcher, but when he reached the dispatcher’s quarters the man wasn’t there—wasn’t where anyone could say, because who knew where anybody was in this madhouse? A madhouse it was. The orderly calm that usually marked the activities of the outpost—indeed, that had always marked almost all of the transactions of the Heechee race, from the beginning of time to this moment—had vanished, destroyed by the news that had taken the whole Heechee race unaware. News of any kind from Outside was rare. But this news was terrifying!

  On the other hand, Achiever told himself as he fought his way through the disorderly throng, perhaps they should have been less surprised. After all, you always knew that someday someone might suddenly appear from Outside. You knew it in the same way that you knew that someday you would die and join the Massed Minds, or that, someday, that ill-chosen F-type star the Heechee had brought with them into the Core might grow unstable, and if it did do that, then great damage could be done for a considerable volume of space around it. But you certainly didn’t expect such a thing to happen now. Never now!

  The good part, of course, was that the news could have been much, much worse. These hideous and unexpected creatures from Outside were quite horrible, with their bloated bodies and flabby faces. But they definitely were not, indeed were not anything like, the ones who were called “the Assassins” or “the Foe,” those disembodied energy creatures who had decimated the living population of the galaxy before the Withdrawal. The appearance of these new aliens was revolting, yes, but they were not destroying anything.

  Achiever did the best he could to reassure himself. He had one never-failing resource for such problems. It was time for him to consult it.

  He found a corner to huddle in and called for help from the Stored Mind in the pod that hung between his wide-set, skinny thighs. “Ancestral Mind,” he said, trying to keep the turmoil out of his voice, “awaken and help me, please. What are these creatures?”

  The Stored Mind took a moment to answer, and then it—it was actually a she—sounded grumpy. “One moment, Achiever,” she said.

  Achiever expected no more from that particular ancestor. She had been stored for a long time, and, Achiever thought, was beginning to show it. It took a perceptible couple of seconds before there was a response. The ancestor’s tired voice said, “Forgive me, Achiever. I have been resting. I am now querying other Stored Minds about the nature of your question—” Then, with a sort of hiccough, the voice abruptly changed tone. “Achiever!” she said more strongly. “They are indeed from Outside! There is much confusion among the Stored Minds on this question! I am attempting to find a consensus.” The voice sounded startled, even worried—though Stored Minds never sounded startled, and especially not worried, since they no longer had anything to worry about.

  When she spoke again the voice was less worried, but no less confused. “This is quite puzzling, Achiever,” she said. “These new aliens appear to be the remote descendants of some kind of presentient being from the time before the retreat—perhaps, it is said, descendants of the race of hairy bipeds one of our survey ships had turned up on one not very interesting planet before the Withdrawal.”

  “They aren’t all that hairy,” Achiever objected.

  “It has been a long time for them, Outside. They have evolved. Now they appear to be civilized, at least to a degree.” Then the tone changed again. “Achiever, should you not be helping to deal with this matter instead of spending your time in idle curiosity?”

  Achiever accepted the rebuke and terminated the linkup. He could not, however, stop thinking about the aliens, even as he continued on his quest for the dispatcher. Civilized? Yes, they could be called civilized, he thought. In fact, they seemed to be even technologically sophisticated enough to have mastered interstellar flight on their own…

  Well, no, not exactly that, he corrected himself. They hadn’t done it on their own. The word was that their first ships were clearly Heechee-made, undoubtedly some of the handful of ships that the Heechee themselves had left behind long ago.

  That made Achiever wonder. Had it been a mistake? Would it not have been better to let the primitives do their own inventing?

  Achiever didn’t want to think such thoughts. That was coming close to accusing the ancestral Stored Minds of committing an error. That was not only unfair, but, by every lesson he had ever been taught, quite impossible. The Massed Minds were never wrong.

  Achiever was glad when the dispatcher at last appeared, emerging from a knot of supplicants with three of his subordina
tes hanging on his arm and demanding answers to urgent questions. He shook them all off when he saw Achiever. “You,” he said. “Your ship is in the third amber-gold dock. It is being offloaded to prepare it for your expedition.”

  Expedition? Achiever opened his mouth to ask what expedition the dispatcher was talking about, but he was hurrying on. “See that the offloading is finished, and that your own stores are put on board as quickly as possible. You have a copilot to relieve you when necessary, do you not? Good. Once your ship is ready, you are to wait for a passenger, who will have additional equipment to be stowed. Then you are to launch at once.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Achiever said, his abdominal muscles twisting in eager assent. “But where am I to launch to?”

  The dispatcher gave him an incredulous stare, then shook his head. “Where do you think we are sending you? Outside, of course. Why else would we have chosen your ship?”

  Quickly they went, straight up and out, out through the shell that enclosed the Core, the ship shuddering wildly, throwing them against their restraints, and the twisted crystal rod firing off its showers of sparks that didn’t burn, didn’t last, didn’t seem to do anything at all except mark the fact that they were going Outside. It was like nothing Achiever had ever experienced before. A faint sound from Breeze, almost a whimper, told him that she was hit as hard as himself. Her face was dark with—not with fright, no, but at least with a severe case of worry. And when the fat sparks sputtered and died away, and the jolting stopped, and they all three were staring at the lookplate, Breeze was the first to speak. “How very…many stars there are,” she said.

  Indeed there were countless stars out there, so many that they seemed to coalesce into one vast milky mist of starshine. Even their passenger was held to the plate. “I did not expect to see this spectacle again in my life,” he said softly, more to himself than to the pilots.

  Achiever turned away from the lookplate to gaze at him. The passenger, whose name was Burnish, was old, older than almost anyone Achiever had ever met, his scalp fuzz no longer gray but turned a muddy white. But he was a long way from frail. He returned Achiever’s stare, then flapped his hands. “Perhaps you would like to see for yourself,” he offered. “One moment and I will show you.”

  He gestured Achiever away from his pilot’s perch and took his place. Carefully he set the control wheels to a new position. On the lookplate a colorful overlay sprang into existence, first a line of tiny orange course-marking bubbles, with the fishhooks and arrowheads that marked navigational features. Burnish pointed with one bony hand.

  “We will proceed on this course that I have set until we are farther from the Core,” he said. “Then, you will see, the stars will be much more sparse and it will be easy to observe them optically. Do you have any other questions?”

  He was looking at Breeze, but it was Achiever who answered. “One question, yes,” he said. “We are Outside now. Isn’t there more you should tell us?”

  The old one looked him over carefully, his mouth widening with thought. Then he reached a decision. “Of course,” he said. “It is your right to know. The reason we have come into the Outside galaxy is that we are conducting a search which is of great importance to all our race—indeed to all intelligent living things everywhere. What we are searching for is the present location of the Foe.”

  III

  When they grew hungry, they ate. When they grew tired, they slept—both pilots at the same time, although in their separate nests, and neither mentioned Achiever’s preference for having someone always at the controls. And Burnish did not reappear.

  Which left them plenty of time to consider the meaning of what he had said, and to contemplate its consequences.

  If the thought of pursuing those creatures called the Assassins, or sometimes simply the Foe, terrified Achiever, it was no discredit to him. He was as brave as any other Heechee in the Core—which is to say, not very, except in such exceedingly rare times when bravery was absolutely necessary.

  This seemed to be one of those times. If it was true that they were going to track down the Foe, that faceless, formless embodiment of evil that had haunted every Heechee’s nightmares, then Achiever was going to have to use up quite a lot of bravery. He would also have to have more information about the nature of this horror they were trying to track down. Since he couldn’t ask Burnish, he sought other sources, pulling down from the shelves of the ship’s library one after another of the crystalline fans that were the Heechee equivalent of books. As he fed them, one by one, into the reading machines, the first thing he was looking for was the record of those intelligent galactic races that had been found by Heechee explorers to have gone suddenly and violently extinct, thus leading to the discovery of the source of those extinctions and thus, very soon afterward, to the Heechee’s Withdrawal to the Core.

  But after Achiever had scanned every document on the subject he still had not found answers for all the questions in his mind, so he turned to the Stored Mind in the pod that hung between his wide-set, skinny thighs. As he tapped the pod’s medallion, “Ancestral Mind,” he said to the air, but knowing the mind would hear, “is there no additional information on this race?”

  The Stored Mind took a moment to answer, and then she still sounded annoyed at being disturbed. “One moment, Achiever,” she said. And then: “The file you were just accessing dealt with the race of amphibious lizard-like creatures who had managed to send person-carrying rockets into their nearby space before their whole population was wiped out overnight. Is it additional material on them that you seek?”

  “Exactly,” Achiever said.

  “There isn’t any,” said the Stored Mind, and went silent.

  Gloomily Achiever checked the time. It was the period when it would be appropriate to sleep again, and still no sign of Burnish. As he burrowed into his nest he thought sourly that he probably would have insomnia, and if he did get to sleep his dreams would be unpleasant.

  They weren’t, though. He dropped off at once, and if he had any dreams at all he was not aware of them.

  When Achiever awoke, he did what any Heechee did upon arising: he removed the pod that held his Ancient Ancestor in order to void his wastes; he replaced it when through and brushed himself clean; he put on a fresh tunic and tossed the old one into the laundering machine; he snipped off a few shoots of the vine that grew over the door and chewed them for a moment before discarding them, his teeth now satisfactorily oiled; he ordered a morning-menu selection from the food machine and consumed it. Its textures and flavors were of the sorts he was on record as preferring, and he ate it with as much pleasure as on any normal day. In fact, nothing in his actions suggested this day was anything out of the way at all.

  Achiever had not suddenly stopped being afraid. He had simply reached a state of acceptance. Since he could not rid himself of the fear, he had done the next best thing; he had made up his mind to live with it, and get on with his life.

  When he entered the control chamber, Breeze was perched on the pilot’s rest, a couple of reading fans in her hands, gazing glumly at the lookplate. He greeted her in the language of Feel, and added: “You have been reading up on the Foe, haven’t you?”

  She looked at him almost angrily. “I have done that, of course,” she told him, “but there wasn’t much to learn, was there? They killed off sentient races; our ancestors thought they would kill us if they found us; so we ran into the Core to hide. Is there anything else?”

  “Not much,” Achiever admitted.

  “That’s what I thought. So then I decided to do something more useful, so I checked out the course Burnish laid for us, so at least I would have some idea of where we were going.”

  Achiever could feel the dense fur at the back of his head bristle in the startlement reflex. Why, of course! Clearly that was the most sensible thing to do, and why had he not thought of it himself? “And what did you find?” he asked.

  She shrugged her belly muscles irritably and touched the control cons
ole. A 3-D plot of the galaxy sprang up at once. “There,” she said. “But it means nothing to me.”

  Achiever studied it. It was a model to scale, which meant it could show almost no detail. What there was was a bright string of orange course-marking bubbles, like the beads on a child’s toy necklace that began among the thick wash of starlight at the Galaxy’s center. The first quarter or so of it was unremarkable, arrowing straight out of the dense galactic center. Then it looped around three or four of the dozen snakey galactic arms and the relatively barren spaces between them, until it ended partway out one of the arms.

  “If that line is our course,” Achiever said slowly, “we seem to be getting to our destination in a pretty roundabout way.” And from behind him another voice said:

  “So it is, Achiever. Would you care to try to guess why?”

  Both the pilots turned to see Burnish entering the control chamber. He seemed rested and at ease. “Well, Achiever?” he said. “Or you, Breeze?”

  “We’re looking for something that will lead us to the Foe,” she said, a beat before Achiever was about to make the same guess.

  “I hope it will not actually lead to a confrontation,” Burnish said wryly, “but, yes, that is the general plan. However, before we can even begin we must go out some distance from the Core. That is where the living things are. It is only out where the stars are farther apart that life can evolve, Breeze. Here in the center of the galaxy nothing organic exists. The radiation is far too intense for organic life to survive.”

  Breeze looked puzzled. “I didn’t think the Foe were organic life, exactly.”

  “No, they are not. But their prey is.”

  He glanced at Achiever, who had just straightened up with a baffled expression on his leathery face. “Do you have a problem?” Burnish asked.