The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  Actually it didn’t make us wait long at all—a few microseconds, barely enough for me to summon up a bowl of oyster stew and a green salad for Harry. Then it coughed and said apologetically, “Follow me, please. The secretary to the Owner will see you now.”

  We followed. I didn’t even bother to cancel Harry’s dirty dishes—they could do their own housekeeping as far as I was concerned. The guardmind wasn’t being particularly friendly to us, either. He didn’t pause to see if we were keeping up, just bustled ahead without a rearward glance, toward he did not say what.

  Traveling through eigenspace is exactly as hard—or as easy—as the surround controller likes to make it. This particular guardmind chose to make it tedious. We followed it through featureless corridors, a lot more of them than any reasonable AI would need to get from point to point. I think it was trying to get us lost. But the trip finally came to an end. Without warning the end of the passage widened and let us into what looked like some tycoon’s high-rent office. The carpets were thick, there was a mahogany-looking desk that bore a sign that said “Ms. Roz Borraly” and there were “windows” that looked—or “looked”—out on the waters of a bright blue (simulated) bay with perky little sailboats, under an equally fictitious blue sky. The person behind the desk was an equally improbably beautiful human female, hair golden, teeth perfect, breasts big, who didn’t bother to welcome us but said simply: “Do either of you know how to explode a star?”

  It was not a question I had expected to be asked. What I did know I was not prepared to share with her. I felt no obligation to be forthcoming, either, so I simply said, “No,” while Harry asked, “What the hell is she talking about?”

  She looked disappointed, then thoughtful. “So then who are you?” she demanded.

  I gave her the same story I had given the guardmind, and added, “We were curious about some sort of people we saw on your roof.”

  She thought that over for a bit, and then gave us a smile—not the kind of smile that means, “I’m a friendly person,” but the kind that means, “I want you to think I am.” She even chuckled a little. “I suppose you were,” she said. “Disgusting, aren’t they? They’re the Owner’s pet hominids, what they call australopithecines. They’re a family. There’s a mommy, a daddy and a little boy—although Gadget isn’t so little anymore, and I think he’s trying to get it on with his mom.”

  She thought a moment longer. Then she told us, “You may know that the Owner has been seriously and unforgivably harmed in the past. He has a just resentment against the Gateway Corp. and all its instruments—which are just about everybody.” She looked us up and down. Then she said, “However, the Owner is a kind and generous person. He may be willing to grant you an interview. If he does, you should be aware that the Owner is the seventh richest human being in the galaxy, and is powerful in many other ways, so if you are given this courtesy do not offend him. Be polite. Be brief, and do nothing to startle him. Is all of that understood?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  She nodded. “Very well then. You must be patient. It will take a number of seconds for me to get instructions from the Owner as he is organic.”

  By organic timekeeping we weren’t made to wait for very long. Far less than a minute, or, in our time, several eternities. I had no real trouble with that. I have often had to wait much longer while some dithering organic tries to make up her mind between the gazpacho and the clear oxtail soup. Practice makes perfect.

  Harry, however, is a different story. As a former organic himself, he gets fidgety, so I returned to my usual solution for that problem. “Hungry?” I asked him, confident that he was because it had been the better part of a second since the last time I fed him. “How about a couple of pork chops, big thick ones, burned black the way you like them?”

  But he was already shaking his head eagerly. “I could eat all right, Markie, but those aren’t exactly what I want right now. You know what I’ve been thinking about? That Greek lemon soup, you know? With egg? And then for a main course, um, let me see”—he thoughtfully patted his pursed lips for a moment—“oh, yeah! I know! A great big tom turkey, like at Thanksgiving, with chestnut stuffing and—no, wait a minute—half chestnut and half oyster…and then, well, you know, the usual, pumpkin pie or something. And pickles and olives…and listen, Markie, hurry it up as much as you can, because I’m getting pretty hungry!”

  Well, I did as he asked. Almost, anyway. The part I didn’t do was hurry it up.

  I could have done that easily enough. I could have simulated the whole six or seven courses at once, plus wine and coffee and a little bit of sorbet to clean the palate now and then, and maybe some dessert chocolates or mints. There was no point to it, though. Harry can eat an amazing amount of food in hardly any time at all—it all being simulation, of course—and then come back for more hardly any time later. It’s his favorite recreation. But he enjoys looking forward to it while it’s being prepared almost as much, and it keeps him quieter because he doesn’t want to disturb me in my work.

  So I did it the slow way, from scratch. I simulated every last bit of the menu being made. I carved the simulated meat out of a nonexistent pumpkin for the pie and pretend-boiled a batch of imaginary chestnuts for the dressing. I simulated a six-kilogram turkey, complete with feathers and internal organs and all to make it interesting. The turkey was a Narragansett, of course; in his time with me Harry has learned to despise those giant-breasted but totally tasteless twentieth-century birds. So I had to amputate the legs to braise them in chicken stock first; Narragansetts actually use their legs to walk around on, so they can turn out a little tough if you don’t do that Then I plucked and cleaned the bird and set the giblets to cooking for gravy. And on and on.

  And, since that took hardly any of my capacity, I was using some of the rest for my own purposes.

  The first thing I wanted to do was to test this system’s capabilities.

  They didn’t seem particularly strong. The guardmind was pretty oblivious to anything I did. The secretary not so much so, but no real threat. When I slipped away I left behind the simulacrum of myself busily cooking Harry’s dinner, and she never even glanced up.

  That did not mean that there were not more capable programs somewhere in the system. Accordingly, I proceeded slowly, my primary aim being merely to map out the physical metrics of the installation. Nothing interfered, and there were no surprises.

  Ground truth confirmed the Kugel’s statement that these were some old Heechee tunnels. With the exception of one particularly large chamber none of the rooms appeared to contain any living organic persons. Most of the rooms seemed hardly even furnished. Evidently the Owner didn’t go in much for entertaining guests.

  I had identified all the castle’s weaponry and charted, but did not approach, the main AI centers when the secretary called, “Stovemind?” I was back within my simulacrum before she got the next words of her instructions out, while Harry was still chewing on his turkey drumstick. “Remembering all the cautions you have been given,” she said, “you will display yourself to the Owner at once.”

  She didn’t tell us how to get to where this Owner was, although I had expected she would and was preparing to match her directions against the passages I had mapped out. She did it the quick and dirty way. She just disappeared. She took all her surround with her, and we were suddenly in another one entirely.

  This time not a simulated one.

  We were in the large organic-occupied chamber I had identified. In optical observation it resembled nothing so much as a tsar’s throne room, or a high-end Las Vegas hotel suite. Apart from a number of simulations there were four or five female persons lounging about, each one of them very nearly as spectacular looking as the simulation that had sent us here. These were not simulations, however. They were organic. So was the room’s one male occupant, a sallow-skinned man who was boredly picking through a tray of chocolates as he looked up at us. I knew at once that he was the Owner.

  Tha
t was not all I knew, though. I recognized him as soon as I saw his face. He was indeed one of the richest human beings in the entire galaxy, and his name was Juan Enrique Santos-Smith. Or, for short, Wan.

  VII

  A master chef does not merely cook palatable meals, he cooks them for what sometimes are very unusual clients. In my professional capacity I had been expected to deal with whatever VIPs might turn up on the Wheel. For that reason I had been given a recognition library of some two hundred thousand of the most important human beings in the Galaxy. That was so that I could not only feed them well but greet them by name and even ask after the health of their families, if they had any.

  The Owner was definitely on that list. I was aware that this Wan was the offspring of two old Gateway prospectors whose ships had unerringly taken them to an ancient Heechee artifact and left them there. That, as you might say, had been both good luck and bad. The bad luck was that they were even worse off than Harry had been in his own marooning on Arabella. Wan’s parents never got rescued from their artifact. They died there. The good luck was that the artifact they died on was nothing less than a giant, sophisticated Heechee spacecraft of a type no human had previously seen, and it was crammed full of all sorts of technology of great worth to human beings.

  For Wan, the important thing was that when at last humans did get to the spacecraft, the Gateway rules of discovery applied. Wan, the son and thus the only heir of those lost and nameless prospectors, owned every bit of it. Which made him just about unbelievably rich.

  That explained several things. For one, it explained how Wan, who had to be reaching a pretty significant age, managed to look reasonably spry; organics medicine could do wonders for those who could pay the bill. For another, it explained how he had been able to afford constructing this retreat. He could have built a dozen like it, and still have enough money left over to, if he chose, fly them to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

  With all that money, Wan wasn’t going to limit himself to a retinue of only a handful of attendants, however gorgeous. There were at least a dozen other persons in the room, though these were all AI simulations rather than organics. A couple were half-heartedly playing chess, a group sat around a card table, others were in conversations here and there around the room. All of them wore unusual outfits. There was a man in a clown suit with a red putty nose, another in the white coat, stethoscope and scrubs of a physician, a couple of women with pencils stuck behind their ears and carrying the ruled notebooks of an old-time stenographer. Whatever they had been doing, they all stopped doing it to turn and stare at Harry and me.

  The Owner stared like the others, while chewing on whatever it was he had in his mouth. Then he swallowed and said, sounding as surly as he looked: “I didn’t invite you two here. Can either of you give me any reason for letting you stay?”

  I spoke right up. “My name is Marc Antony and I am one of the finest professional chefs in the galaxy. I can prepare, excellently, any dish you choose, from whatever cuisine you like, including—” and I rattled off a list of the most interesting cuisines from most of the great cultures in human history—

  Well, no, that’s not exactly true.

  It was a mere simulation of me that did all that. I wasn’t exactly there anymore.

  I didn’t see any reason to stay in Wan’s throne room simply to rattle off lists, or, for that matter, to listen to Wan’s interminable eight- or nine-second tactless substitute for a civilized greeting. I simply provided my simulation with instructions as to which expressions to display and what things to say.

  Of course, there was a slight risk there. Something might have gone wrong, but I provided for that. I came back every twenty or thirty milliseconds to check on how things were going and revise my instructions to the simulation when necessary.

  I needed a little personal time to conduct a more detailed exploration of Wan’s little kingdom.

  I had all the time in the world to do that. The Owner let my simulation talk on for more than eighteen seconds before he interrupted. That, plus his original greeting, gave me more than twenty-seven seconds of organics time to explore. If you want to know what a competent AI can do in twenty-seven organics seconds, the answer is, “Anything he wants to.”

  I used the first couple thousandths of those many seconds to set up fire-alarm bars, making sure that none of Wan’s AIs would interfere with my investigations. That was easy. Then, as I allowed myself a more leisurely examination of Wan and his realm, the picture began to emerge.

  I have never been a young organic male. Nevertheless I have fed enough of them, and listened to enough of their chatter, to know what sort of thing they would like. They would like high ivied towers, and Olympic-sized swimming pools, and game rooms of all kinds by the dozen. They would like military statuary and obscene statuary; they would like weapons of all kinds and target ranges to fire them on. In particular they would like exactly what I saw before me in Wan’s chamber…especially when you added in the clutch of four young, good-looking and minimally clad organic females who were sharing the throne room.

  Though Wan was not a boy anymore, not by several organic generations, a part of him had never grown up. I could almost have felt sorry for him, if it were not for the other playthings I had discovered. Those were much more numerous, and much worse.

  Every one of the hills around the castle was honeycombed with tunnels, Heechee legacies from the time before they went and hid in the Core. All of those underground spaces were packed with the machineries of murder. There were bombs and missiles, shells and mines, bioweapons and chemical, plus rank on rank of the small, unmanned spacecraft that could deliver any of these death-wielders wherever Wan might choose.

  It was not a boy who had stocked his fiefdom with these things. It was a fully functional, adult organic human male—and, I was pretty sure, an insane one.

  When I came back to the throne room on my next check visit, Harry was there. He had been exploring in the same way as I and was anxious to compare notes. By the time Wan the Owner had begun the first “Wwwwwhhhh—” of his first interruption (it would eventually turn out to be “Where did you learn all this?”), Harry was excitedly spilling his news. He had discovered something I had missed entirely.

  Harry had found a girl—young, good-looking and human, though not presently organic. She was machine-stored like Harry himself. “Her name’s Allison,” he told me eagerly, “and I think she likes me!” He thought for a second and then added, “She definitely doesn’t like this Wan, anyway. She says he’d cut your throat as soon as look at you.”

  “We don’t actually have throats,” I reminded him. Wan was finally embarking on the “errrrre” of his first word, while the young organic women had yet to move off their hassocks.

  “But if we did, I mean. Anyhow, it isn’t just us he could kill. Allison says she’s positive he’s gonna blow up some planet or other one of these days.”

  That accounted for the stock of weaponry. And it made me think seriously about what I had to do next.

  You see, my status as an adjunct peacekeeper for Thor Hammerhurler wasn’t entirely honorary. If, worst-case scenario, a firefight with the Kugels had ever broken out, I would at once have become a big part of Thor’s strike force. Preserving the peace was a big part of my job description, here as well as on the Wheel.

  Therefore, if this rogue organic male was collecting these nasty gadgets for any practical purpose, something had to be done about it. And the only one around to do it was me.

  The best available source of information had to be this machine-stored Allison that Harry had found. When I got to the place she was occupying she was sitting at an antique little piano, expecting me to arrive, and posed to make an impression on me when I did.

  Allison might be no more than a congeries of charged particles, like myself, but she didn’t let that keep her from making things nice. I could see that right away. I don’t know a great deal about the ways of young human females, but I did not fail to observe th
e pastel-flowered throw pillows on the chintz-covered couch and the huge stuffed panda on her pink-canopied bed. Pictures on the wall (pretty flower arrangements or lithe, limber ballerinas), plates of fruit on the tables, music playing softly in the distance—it was exactly the man-trap that any young, organic, single female might create for asking dates in for a nightcap.

  I let her make a social occasion of it; allowed her to seat me on the couch and politely waved off the tray of figs and nuts she offered me—imagine someone else offering food to me! And began to ask her questions.

  What I wanted from Allison was for her to tell me everything she knew about Wan. She was willing enough to do that, but what she wanted first was to tell me about herself. I did a quick flash to my simulation to make sure there wasn’t any problem that might require my actual presence. There wasn’t. Wan was just reaching the “ih” in “did,” so I let her talk as she wanted.

  When she first met Wan, Allison told me, she was a broken-down ballet dancer. She had signed up as a Gateway prospector when she could no longer face three hours on the barre every morning. Though she didn’t express it that way, she had wound up as a barfly on Peggys Planet. “So then this weird guy, Wan, showed up at the joint. I think he was laying low because he’d been getting into some kinds of trouble that even his money couldn’t cover up right away. Listen, could I offer you a drink? Some coffee? Anything?” she offered, a little wistfully; I don’t think she’d had that many visitors to practice her hospitality on.

  “Thank you, no,” I said, although it was still tempting to have someone else offer to provide refreshments for me. “What kind of trouble are we talking about?”

  She shrugged. “I only heard about it later, but, like, one thing, it seems Wan somehow got the idea he owned the Old Ones, so he kidnaped a batch from their reserve in Kenya. There was law trouble about that. Some of the stuff he has here he didn’t get exactly legally, too. And there was a lot of other stuff, too, but I don’t know much about the details. Then he happened to show up on Peggys Planet, where I was stuck, and that’s where he met me.” She paused, looking at me in a way that I hadn’t expected. “Marc, huh?” she said. “Nice name. Nice looking man, actually. Mind if I ask you something?” I nodded permission. “What would you look like if you hadn’t, you know, sort of polished up the image?”