The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  “Right on schedule, Klara. We’ll be there in ten hours or so.” She didn’t move—that is, her simulation didn’t move—but I could hear the clink of ice going into a glass in the galley. “I’ve been accessing the PhoenixCorp shipmind, if you want to see what’s going on?”

  “Do it,” I said, but she was already doing it. She waved again-pure theater, of course, but Hypatia’s full of that—and at once we got a new set of graphics. As the little serving cart rolled in and stopped just by my right hand we were looking through PhoenixCorp’s own visuals, at a dish-shaped metal spiderweb. Little things were crawling across it.

  I could form no real picture of its size, because there was nothing in the space around it to compare it with. I didn’t have to compare. I knew it was big.

  “Have one for yourself,” I said, lifting my glass.

  She gave me that patient, exasperated look and let it pass. Sometimes she does simulate having a simulated drink with me while I have a real one, but this time she was in her schoolteacher mode. “As you can see, Klara,” she informed me, “the shipment of optical mirror pieces has arrived and the drones are putting them in place on the parabolic dish. They’ll be getting first light from the planet in an hour or so, but I don’t think you’ll care about seeing it. The resolution will be poor until they get everything put together; that should take about eighteen hours. Then we should have optimal resolution to observe the planet.”

  “For four days,” I said, taking a pull at my glass.

  She gave me a different look—still the schoolteacher, but now a schoolteacher, putting up with a particularly annoying student. “Hey, Klara. You knew there wouldn’t be much observing time. It wasn’t my idea to come all the way out here, anyway. We could have watched the whole thing from your island.”

  I swallowed the rest of my nightcap and stood up. “That’s not how I wanted to do it,” I told her. “The trouble with you simulations is that you don’t appreciate what reality is like. Wake me up an hour before we get there.”

  And I headed for my stateroom, with my big round under-occupied bed. I didn’t want to chat with Hypatia just then. The main reason I had kept her busy giving me financial advice so long was that it prevented her from giving me advice on other things, like the thing she was always trying to talk me into. Or that one other big thing that I really needed to make up my mind about, and couldn’t.

  The cart with my black coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice—make that quote fresh-squeezed unquote orange juice, but Hypatia was too good at her job for me to be able to tell the difference—was right by my bed when she woke me up. “Ninety minutes to linkup,” she said cheerily, “and a very good morning to you. Shall I start your shower?”

  I said, “Um.” Ninety minutes is not a second too long for me to sit and swallow coffee, staring into space, before I have to do anything as energetic as getting into a shower. But then I looked into the wall mirror by the bed, didn’t like what I saw, and decided I’d better spruce myself up a little bit.

  I was never what you’d call a pretty woman. My eyebrows were a lot too heavy, for one thing. Once or twice over the years I’d had the damn things thinned down to fashion-model proportions, just to see if it would help any. It didn’t. I’d even messed around with my bone structure, more cheekbones, less jaw, to try to look a little less masculine. It just made me look weak-faced. For a couple of years I’d gone blonde, tried redhead once but checked it out and made them change it back before I left the beauty parlor. They were all mistakes. They didn’t work. Whenever I looked at myself, whatever the cosmetologists and the medical fixer-uppers had done, I could still see the old Gelle-Klara Moynlin hiding there behind all the trim. So screw it. For the last little while I’d gone natural.

  Well, pretty natural, anyway. I didn’t want to look old.

  I didn’t, of course. By the time I was bathed and hair fixed and wearing a simple dress that showed off my actually pretty decent legs, I looked as good as I ever had. “Almost there,” Hypatia called. “You better hang onto something. I have to match velocities and it’s a tricky job.” She sounded annoyed, as she usually does when I give her something hard to do. She does it, of course, but she complains a lot. “Faster than light I can do, slower than light I can do, but when you tell me to match velocity with somebody who’s doing exactly c you’re into some pretty weird effects, so—oh, sorry.”

  “You should be,” I told her, because that last lurch had nearly made me spill my third cup of coffee. “Hypatia? What do you think, the pearls or the cameo?”

  She did that fake two or three second pause, as though she really needed any time at all to make a decision, before she gave me the verdict. “I’d wear the cameo. Only whores wear pearls in the daytime.”

  So of course I decided to wear the pearls. She sighed but didn’t comment. “All right,” she said, opening the port. “We’re docked. Mind the step, and I’ll keep in touch.”

  I nodded and stepped over the seals into the PhoenixCorp mother ship.

  There wasn’t any real “step.” But there was a sharp transition from the comfortable one gee I kept in my own ship to the gravityless environment of PhoenixCorp. My stomach did a quick little flip-flop of protest, but I grabbed a hold-on bar and looked around.

  I don’t know what I’d expected to find, maybe something like the old Gateway asteroid. PhoenixCorp had done itself a lot more lavishly than that, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t maybe been a touch too open-handed with the financing. The place certainly didn’t smell like Gateway. Instead of Gateway’s sour, ancient fugg it had the wetly sweet smell of a greenhouse. That was because there were vines and ferns and flowers growing in pots all around the room—spreading out in all directions, because of that zero-gee environment, and if I’d thought about that ahead of time I wouldn’t have worn a skirt. The only human being in sight was a tall, nearly naked black man who was hanging by one toe from a wall bracket, exercising his muscles with one of those metal-spring gadgets. (“Humphrey Mason-Manley,” Hypatia whispered in my ear. “He’s the archeologist-anthropologist guy from the British Museum.”) Without breaking his rhythm Humphrey gave me a look of annoyance.

  “What are you doing here, miss? No visitors are permitted. This is private property, and—”

  Then he got a better look at me and his expression changed. Not to welcoming exactly, but to what I’d call sort of unwillingly impressed. “Oh, crikey,” he said. “You’re Gelle-Klara Moynlin, are you not? That’s a bit different. Welcome aboard, I guess.”

  II

  It wasn’t the most affable greeting I’d ever had. However, when Humphrey Mason-Manley woke up the head engineer for me, she turned out to be a lot more courteous. She didn’t have to be, either. Although I had put up the seed money to get the project started, PhoenixCorp was set up as a nonprofit quango, owned by nobody but itself. I wasn’t even on the board.

  The boss engineer’s name, Hypatia whispered to me, was June Thaddeus Terple—Doctor Terple. I didn’t really need the reminder. Terple and I had met before, though only by screen. In person she was taller than I’d thought. She looked to be about the age I looked to be myself, which is to say, charitably, thirtyish. She was wearing a kind of string bikini, plus a workman’s belt of little pouches around her waist so she could keep things in it. She took me into her office, which was a sort of wedge-shaped chamber with nothing much visible in it but hand-holds on the walls and a lot more of those flowering plants. “Sorry I wasn’t there to meet you, Dr. Moynlin,” she said.

  “The only kind of doctor I am is honorary, and Klara’s good enough.”

  She bobbed her head. “Anyway, of course you’re welcome here any time. I guess you wanted to see for yourself how we’re coming along.”

  “Well, I did want that, yes. I also wanted to set something up, if you don’t mind.” That was me returning courtesy for courtesy, however unnecessary it was in either direction. “Do you know who Wilhelm Tartch is?”

  She thought for a mo
ment. “No.”

  So much for his galaxy-wide fame. I explained. “Bill’s a kind of a roving reporter. He has a program that goes out all over, even to the Heechee in the Core. It’s kind of a travelogue. He visits exciting and colorful places and reports on them for the stay-at-homes.” He was also my present main lover, but there wasn’t any reason to mention that to Terple; she would figure it out for herself fast enough.

  “And he wants to do Phoenix?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said again. “I did clear it with the board.”

  She grinned at me. “So you did, but I sort of lost track of it. We’ve been deploying the mirror-builder drones, so it’s been kind of busy.” She shook herself. “Anyway, Hans tells me your shipmind displayed the actual supernova explosion to you on the way out—”

  “That’s right, she did.” In my ear Hypatia was whispering that Hans was the name of their shipmind, as though I couldn’t figure that out for myself.

  “And I suppose you know what it looks like from Earth now?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  I could see her assessing how much “sort of” amounted to, and deciding to be diplomatic to the money person. “It wouldn’t hurt to take another look. Hans! Telescopic view from Earth, please.”

  She was looking toward one end of her office. It disappeared, and in its place we were looking out at a blotchy patch of light. “That’s it. It’s called the Crab Nebula. Of course, they named it that before they really knew what it was, but you can see where they got the name.” I agreed that it did look a little like some sort of deformed crab, and Terple went on. “The nebula itself is just the gases and stuff that the supernova threw off, a thousand years or so later. I don’t know if you can make it out, but there’s a little spot in the middle of it that’s the Crab pulsar. That’s all that’s left of the star. Now let’s look at the way it was before it went super. Real-time. From here.”

  Hans wiped the nebula away and we were looking into the same deep, black space Hypatia had shown me already. There were the same zillion stars hanging there, but as the shipmind zoomed the picture closer, one extraordinarily bright one appeared. “Bright” didn’t do it justice. It was a blazing golden yellow, curiously fuzzy. It wasn’t really hot. It couldn’t be; the simulation was only optical. But I could almost feel its heat on my face.

  “I don’t see any planet,” I offered.

  “Oh, you will, once we get all the optical segments in place.” Then she interrupted herself. “I forgot to ask. Would you like a cup of tea or something?”

  “Thanks, no. Nothing right this minute.” I was peering at the star. “I thought it would be brighter,” I said, a little disappointed.

  “Oh, it will be, Klara. That’s what we’re building that 500-kilometer mirror for. Right now we’re just getting the gravitational lensing from the black hole we’re using—there’s a little camera in the mirror. I don’t know if you know much about black holes, but—oh, shit,” she interrupted herself, suddenly stricken. “You do know, don’t you? I mean, after you were stuck in one for thirty or forty years…”

  She looked as though she had inadvertently caused me great pain. She hadn’t. I was used to that sort of reaction. People rarely brought up the subject of black holes in my presence, on the general principle that you don’t talk about rope when there’s been a hanging in the house. But the time when I had been trapped in one of the things was far back in the past. It had gone like a flash for me in the black hole’s time dilation, however many years it was on the outside, and I wasn’t sensitive about it.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t interested in discussing it one more damn time, either. I just said, “My black hole didn’t look like that. It was a creepy kind of pale blue.”

  Terple recovered quickly. She gave me a wise nod of the head. “That would have been Cérenkov radiation. Yours must have been what they call a naked singularity. This one’s different. It’s wrapped up in its own ergosphere and you can’t see a thing. Most black holes produce a lot of radiation—not from themselves, from the gases and stuff they’re swallowing—but this one has already swallowed everything around it. Anyway.” She paused to recollect her train of thought. Then she nodded. “I was telling you about the gravitational lensing. Hans?”

  She didn’t say what she wanted from Hans, but evidently he could figure it out for himself. The stars disappeared and a sort of wall of misty white appeared in front of us. Terple poked at it here and there with a finger, drawing a little picture for me:

  “That little dot on the left, that’s the Crabber planet we want to study. The circle’s the black hole. The arc on the right is our mirror, which is right at the point of convergence—where the gravitational lensing from the black hole gives us the sharpest image. And the little dot next to it is us, at the Cassegrain focus of the mirror. I didn’t show the Crabber sun—actually we have to avoid aiming the camera at it, because it could burn out our optics. Am I making sense so far?”

  “So far,” I agreed.

  She gave me another of those assessing looks, then said, “We’ll actually be doing our observing by looking toward the mirror. There too we’ll have to block out the star itself, or we won’t see the Crab planet at all, but that’s just another of the things we’ll be adjusting. We’ll actually be looking diametrically away from the planet in order to observe it.”

  I hadn’t been able to resist the temptation with Hypatia, and I couldn’t now with June Terple. “For four or five days,” I said in my friendliest voice.

  I guess the tone wasn’t friendly enough. She looked nettled. “Listen, we didn’t put the damn black hole where it is. It took us two years of searching to find one in the right position. There’s a neutron star that we could’ve used. Orbitwise it was a better deal because it would have given us nearly eighty years to observe, but it’s just a damn neutron star. It wouldn’t have given us anywhere the same magnification, because a neutron star just doesn’t have anywhere near as much mass as a black hole, so the gravitational lensing would’ve been a lot less powerful. We’ll get a lot more detail with our black hole. Anyway,” she added, “once we’ve observed from here we’ll move this whole lashup to the neutron star for whatever additional data we can get—I mean, uh, if that seems advisable we will.”

  What she meant by that was if I was willing to pay for it. Well, I probably was. The capital costs were paid already. It would only mean meeting their payroll for another eighty years or so, and none of them were getting big bucks. Hypatia had seen to that.

  But I wasn’t ready to make that commitment. To take her mind off it, I said, “I thought we were supposed to have almost thirty days of observing right here.”

  She looked glum. “Radio observing. That’s why we built the mesh dish. But it turns out there’s no artifactual radio coming from the Crabber planet, so we had to get mirror plates so we could convert it to optical. Took us over three weeks, which is why we lost so much observing time.”

  “I see,” I said. “No radio signals. So there might not be any civilization there to observe, anyway.”

  She bit her lip. “We know definitely that there’s life there. Or was, anyway. It’s one of the planets the Heechee surveyed long ago, and there were advanced living organisms there at the time—pretty primitive, sure, but they certainly looked as though they had the potential to evolve.”

  “The potential to evolve, right. But whether they did or not we just don’t know.”

  She didn’t answer that. She just sighed. Then she said, “As long as you’re here, would you like a look around?”

  “If I won’t be in the way,” I said.

  Of course I was in the way. June Terple didn’t let it show, but some of the others barely gave me the courtesy of looking up when we were introduced. There were eight of them altogether, with names like Julia Ibarruru and Mark Rohrbeck and Humphrey Mason-Manley and Oleg Kekuskian and—well, I didn’t have to try to retain them all; Hypatia would clue me as needed. Julia was floating in
a harness surrounded by fifteen or twenty 3-D icons that she was busy poking at and glowering at and poking at again, and she gave me no more than a quick and noncommittal nod. If my name meant anything to her, or to most of the others, they didn’t show any signs of being impressed. Especially Rohrbeck and Kekuskian didn’t, because they were sound asleep in their harnesses when we peeked in on them, and Terple had a finger to her lips. “Third shift,” she whispered when we’d closed the flaps on their cubicles and moved away. “They’ll be waking up for dinner in a little while, but we should let them get their sleep. And there’s only one other. Let’s go find her.”

  On the way to that one other member of the crew Hypatia was whispering bits of biography in my ear. Kekuskian was the quite elderly bisexual astrophysicist; Rohrbeck the quite young and deeply depressed program designer, whose marriage had just come painfully apart. And the one remaining person was—

  Was a Heechee.

  I didn’t have to be told that. Once you’ve seen any one Heechee you know what they all look like, skeletally thin front-to-back, squarish, skull-like face, a data pod hanging between its legs where, if it were male, his balls should be, and if female (as this one turned out to be) there shouldn’t be anything much at all. Her name, Terple said, was Starminder, and as we entered her chamber she was working at a set of icons of her own. But as soon as she heard my name, she wiped them and barreled over to me to shake my hand. “You are very famous among persons in the Core, Gelle-Klara Moynlin,” she informed me, hanging on to my hand for support. “Because of your Moynlin Citizen Ambassadors, you see. When your Rebecca Shapiro person came to the Core I met her. She was quite informative about human beings; indeed, it was because of her that I volunteered at once to come out. Do you know her?”

  I tried to remember Rebecca Shapiro. I had put up grant money for a good many batches of recruits since I funded the program, and she would have had to be one of the earliest of them. Starminder saw my uncertainty and tried to be helpful. “Young woman. Very sad. She sang music composed by your now-dead Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for our people, which I almost came to enjoy.”