The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  That was a wholly new feeling for Stan. He could not remember a time since his mother’s death when he had felt happiness for more than a few minutes at a time.

  But there it was.

  II

  The sessions with Stork were as fascinating as ever, the glimpses the lookplates gave them of the galaxy Outside were as titillating—though less and less understandable. Even, for both of them, the pleasure of schooling as great.

  If Sigfrid von Shrink wanted them educated, Estrella and Stan agreed, they weren’t going to say no, even though school wasn’t exactly what they had expected. No classroom. No fellow students. No teacher, exactly—not what either of them had meant by the word teacher, anyway. What they got was a cheerful, elderly man—a simulation, of course—who wore a toga and began their first session by saying matter-of-factly, “We’re going to talk about economics. What do you think about money? What’s the point of having it in the first place?” And when Estrella guessed, “to buy things,” and Stan ventured, “so we can get paid for our work,” the old fellow smiled and nodded, and asked them why that was better than barter, say, or, come to that, just letting everybody produce what they wanted to produce and take what they wanted to take from the world’s general store.

  By the time the session was over they had got to the Dutch tulip craze of the seventeenth century, the Great Depressions of the twentieth and twenty-first and half a dozen other financial disasters. Then the teacher pretended to yawn. He glanced at the imaginary watch on his imaginary wrist and said, “That should do it for now. I’ve tinkered a bit with your lookplates. They’ll display more on any subject you like; just say the name of it, and keep going until you’ve got what you want. Next time, let’s talk about history. Till then—” And, nodding a courteous good-bye, he disappeared. His name, he said, was Socrates.

  Sure enough, the lookplates did as he promised. When they said “gold standard,” the lookplates displayed all kinds of things, from Roman coins clipped to the size of pharmacy pills to bearded, weary men doggedly sluicing wet sand in the Gold Rush of 1849.

  When they told Klara about it, she demanded to see some of those things for herself. Hypatia made it happen. They watched empires rise and fall, wars depopulate whole nations. Klara began looking less and less pleased with the plate, as the wars began to multiply. Then, without saying a word, she abruptly left the room and did not return.

  Hypatia remained, watching them silently as she lounged on a couch. Stan turned to her. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  The shipmind gave a sinuous shrug. “Klara doesn’t like wars.” She seemed about to leave it at that, then reconsidered. “Have you ever heard of the Crabbers? I suppose not. They were a nonhuman race from the old times that were wiping themselves out with wars when their star went nova and finished the job for them. They were horrid people, a lot like those old monks that murdered the original me. And then, just as she was showing signs of handling that, along came that big tsunami.”

  “Right,” Stan said, pleased to remember. “The one that messed California up.”

  Hypatia set him straight. “The one that destroyed a lot of places. One of those was Klara’s private island.”

  It was Estrella’s turn to remember. “She had some orphans living there, right?”

  “She provided a home for a number of children who didn’t have one, yes. But that isn’t all. Maybe you don’t know that Klara really wanted to have a child of her own body. She had ova stored on her island, hoping to find the right man to fertilize them. She didn’t. The ova were destroyed with the island.” She paused, looking at Estrella. “I think that’s why she’s so thrilled about your child.”

  “Oh, hell,” Stan said. “That poor woman.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Estrella said thoughtfully. “For all her money. Poor indeed, in the sense that you and I, Stan, are so very rich.”

  When they least expected it the door announced a visitor, and it was Achiever. “Have been away,” he informed them. “Now am returned. Wish urgent talking with you.”

  Surprised but endeavoring to be hospitable, Stan showed him to a Heechee perch, offered him a coffee (refused) and asked after his new family. Unexpectedly, that seemed to upset Achiever. “I do not have ‘family,’” he said frostily. “‘Family’ requires declaration of commonality. I have made no such declaration.” Then he unbent a fraction. “Unborn child of my parentage in generative space of Salt, however, is excellently well. When birth occurs his-or-her name will be Boundary Condition. Gender? Unknown. Baby has not yet decided.”

  Doggedly polite, Estrella tried: “And yourself, Achiever? Are you well, too?”

  Achiever mulled that over for a moment. “Well? Perhaps not. Not truly well, that is to say, but—” he flapped his long, skinny fingers at them “—what is one to do? One has been, as you say, scarred. By enforced and prolonged exposure to others of your race, that is. So would not say that word ‘well’ is appropriate. To be well would need—what is your word again?—more of concinnity than is possessed at this time. On the other hand”—he frowned reproof—“am not here for talk of this sort but to discuss coming with me of you two in accord with known wishes of human machine-intelligence person Sigfrid von Shrink.”

  Stan and Estrella exchanged looks. “What do you know about that?” Stan demanded.

  “Not a large amount. Nearly everything, however. For example, is known to me that aforesaid artificial intelligence person wishes it quite much. Also that you two organic human persons feel obligation to same. Is any statement herein incorrect?”

  “Not really,” Stan admitted.

  “Then is proper, is this not correct?, for you two to accede to said wishes and accompany me on spaceflight to permit mutual presence, as advocated by person hereinabove. Wait. Do not reply. Consider also fact that I fortunately now have excellent spacecraft at my disposal for said purpose.”

  “Hold it right there,” Stan commanded, patience all expended. “Sigfrid didn’t say a word about going on a spaceship. He just said he’d like us to spend time with you.”

  Achiever gave him an approximation of a supercilious smile. “And what better spending of joint time can be imagined than the becoming of shipmates? Especially utilizing spacecraft I have just returned from familiarizing self in? Now attend to proposal. If you join me in aforesaid craft, I will then transport you to splendid selection of interesting Core planets, each of which happens to contain specimens of your people. Are beyond numbering planets worthy of visit. Include Chilly Wet Planet of Blue-White Star Fifty-Four. To this place mother of self, who was Food Factory designer, brought me as young person. Extremely of interest.”

  “Extremely cold, too,” Stan offered.

  “Well then! Are many, many of others, some of quite high temperatures indeed. Do you understand what I speak of? Then I ask, considering all facts, notably those involving express desire of said Sigfrid von Shrink, will you accordingly agree to travel in my company for period of some days or weeks?”

  He gave them one final penetrating look, and was gone.

  Over the next day or two Stan and Estrella conversed on many subjects—their unborn child’s development, Estrella’s new traits of swollen feet and of a kind of snoring that no longer was really gentle, Salt’s pregnancy, Socrates’s lesson plans, Marc Antony’s delicious food and (but not in that order) Achiever’s invitation. That last subject would easily have made top billing, except that Stan was doing his best to avoid it. His preferred response was usually something along the lines of, “Come on, Strell, give it a rest. I need time to think about it.” But however much time Estrella gave him for thinking he never seemed to have thought it through. Finally she gave up and, exasperated, sat Stan down at one end of the lanai, herself between him and the door to prevent escape, and said, “Hon, pee or get off the slot. Are we going or aren’t we?” She didn’t give him a chance to complain that he hadn’t really had time to make up his mind. “It’s not a hard question, Stan. You just say
yes or no. Which?” And, when he still didn’t answer, “Here’s the thing. We really can’t refuse Sigfrid a favor. And I’m feeling pretty good right now—good enough that I can stand the idea of being around Achiever for a while, and I’d kind of like to see those other planets—and feeling good isn’t going to last. So the way I see it, either we do it now or we don’t do it for a really long time. So what do you say?”

  He looked doubtful. “If you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well…” he said. And then, not just then, exactly, in fact not for another two days, he said, “All right. I guess we might as well.”

  16

  * * *

  Working for Wan

  I

  At one split second in time Orbis McClune, or whatever was left of Orbis McClune, discovered that he no longer belonged to himself. He had become the property of that unpleasant lunatic, Wan Santos-Smith. Then—not after a moment, not separated by any time at all but immediately, seamlessly at once—his whole environment had inexplicably changed.

  Wan wasn’t there anymore. Now Orbis was in a two-window office with paintings on the walls, deep-pile carpet underfoot and a highly improbable vista of giant redwood trees showing through those make-believe windows. Instead of Wan, Orbis was with a harried-seeming, but quite attractive, young woman. You might even have said she was beautiful, if you liked that sort of heavily made-up look. She sat behind an apparently mahogany desk that held a data screen, a nameplate that said “Roz Borraly” and a vase with a single red rose. She was frowning at Orbis.

  “It says your name is Orbis McClune and you’re a Rev,” she said, glancing at something in the air above him. “What’s this Rev shit?”

  Reprimanding her didn’t seem worthwhile. He said only, “It means I’m a minister of the gospel.”

  “Huh,” she said, looking displeased. “Well, what you got to do now, Mister Minister of the Gospel, is learn some stuff so you’ll be useful to Wan when he gets ready to take care of those guys. You ever run a spaceship?”

  “What ‘guys’ are you talking about?” Orbis asked, and quickly regretted it. The woman named Roz Borraly sighed, and moved no more than a finger. In a moment Orbis McClune was writhing under the very worst pain he had ever known: heat like incandescent ice that was flogging across his back, face, eyes and testicles, striking him at every point on his body—on his purely simulated but evidently quite hurtable body—where there was a pain nerve to feel it. Then it was over.

  “See,” she said conversationally, “the way it works around here, I do the asking, you do the answering. Did you?”

  It took a moment for Orbis to collect himself enough to remember what she had asked. “Run a spaceship?” he managed to say, still gasping. “No. Never.”

  “At least you played spacewar games when you were a kid, though? Right?” When he shook his head she gave another sigh. “So tell me what it is that you can do—like, where’d you go to school?”

  He answered her question, warily leaving nothing out. As he got from high school (no, he hadn’t played any sports) through his two years in the community college (liberal arts, with a little history and one semester of introductory psychology) her face grew grimmer and grimmer. By the time he was describing his four years in the seminary she waved him to silence. “Christ,” she said dismally, “what are we supposed to do with geeks like you?” She studied the notes on her screen without hope for a moment, then asked, “But you’re from Illinois. What were you doing in California?”

  He said promptly, “I was doing the Lord’s business! To tell sinners how they have offended Him. To reprove them for mixing with those instruments of the Antichrist, the Heechee. To teach them why they were singled out for His terrible punishment, and to beg them to repent and save their souls.” He paused, not because he had nothing more to say on the subject but because the woman had suddenly begun making notes on the data-screen again.

  She looked up irritably. “Don’t stop. Say more about this punishment thing.” And when he had done so, at length, she looked very nearly pleased. “Huh,” she said. “Heart’s in the right place, anyway. We’ll talk more later, I guess.”

  And then she was gone—

  —and then again, click-click, gone from one place and now in another, she was back, but wearing a different dress and a different hairstyle, and now not alone. Another woman was standing next to her. Not a pretty one this time. She seemed to be a bit older than McClune himself and she wore a baseball cap, with twenty-centimeter blonde braids hanging out of it on either side. The worst thing about her was her expression, an unpleasant mixture of anger and disdain. She gave Orbis a quick uninterested look and went back to studying the place they were in.

  Which, actually, was worth looking at. All around them was a rose garden, where tables were laden with platters of fruits and meats and flagons of wine. Its rosebushes rose taller than Orbis McClune, and surrounded them so that he could form no guess about how large a space they were in.

  He could see, however, that that lavish open space didn’t have much furniture. The mahogany desk was back, though its single red rose had become a spray of two or three dozen. The desk also bore a screen, with a display of a bunch of stars on it, and a tall mahogany cabinet, doors closed. And there was a revolving chair at the desk for its occupant to sit in. The only other chair was better described as a throne, vacant but more handsome than any chair Orbis had ever seen before. It seemed to be made of ebony; its seat was upholstered in what looked like cloth of gold. Orbis did not believe for one moment that it was intended either for him or for the woman with the braids to sit on, which meant that they were intended to stand.

  The woman at the desk—what was her name? Roz something, Orbis thought—looked up at him. “I guess I better introduce you,” she said. “This”—nodding toward the woman with the braids—“is Phrygia Todd. She’s going to be our pilot. Not,” she added, finally offering a smile, “of this crummy little torpedo ship, of course. DeVon Washington can handle that. Wan is providing a much bigger one for our mission.”

  Automatically Orbis held out a hand to Phrygia Todd. She seemed to think it over but then decided to shake it. He didn’t take offense, though. He was preoccupied with what Roz Borraly had said. What “mission”? He was so busy turning that over in his mind that it took him a moment to register the other thing. “This ship!” Was he on a spacecraft? Was the man who had had to pray his way onto an airplane now flying somewhere in space?

  In a moment those questions were questions no longer, because the Roz Borraly woman was pointing at the screen. “That,” she said, “is the place where they’re hiding Wan’s property that we’re going to get back for him.”

  But what she said after that Orbis no longer heard, because the screen was changing, its view expanding. As the planet grew smaller, its sun had popped into view, bright and foreboding.

  And not alone. At the edge of the screen another star had appeared—no, two other stars—no. There were half a dozen of them now, and suddenly interstellar space did not seem very spacious anymore.

  Which, Orbis knew, could mean only one thing. Those stars were far too densely packed to be any part of the real galaxy. Whatever they were going to be doing, he realized, they were going to be doing it inside the Core.

  Inside the Core. In the very place where lived those plague carriers of evil unspeakable, the damned and damnable Heechee themselves.

  II

  So shaken up was Orbis by this discovery that he hardly noticed when Borraly began again to talk. It wasn’t until he heard her speaking his name that he looked up. She was staring at him in an unfriendly way, and her hand was worrisomely near something on her desk. “Sorry,” he said at once. “You said?”

  She pondered for a moment, then lifted her hand. “I said that you two can do our great friend and benefactor, Wan Santos-Smith, a service. You’re gonna help him get some of the justice he’s entitled to, finally, after all the ways he’s been wronged.
” She cast a glance, Orbis thought it might have been a worried glance, at the throne. It was still empty, and she went on. “The good news,” she said, flashing them the kind of smile that represented many hours of practice before a mirror, maybe even with an acting coach standing by—the kind of smile that Orbis McClune recognized with no trouble at all, since it was the same smile he had been presenting to an unworthy world all his life—“is that by helping Wan you’ll help yourselves. Not just pay. There’s more. Take a look at what’s in that cabinet.”

  She didn’t seem to touch any buttons or give any signs, but the carved wooden cabinet doors opened as she turned in that direction. What they revealed were shelves bearing a pair of those crystalline scroll things that some people called Heechee prayer fans.

  “Recognize them?” she asked. “Right. Those are your works. They’re the things all your data is stored in. If you had them yourselves you’d be your own boss, right? Well, you do a good job for Wan, and then they’ll be yours. Forever,” she added, flashing an encore of the same smile. She licked her lips, glancing again at the vacant throne. Then, the smile returning: “Any questions?”

  Whether idle curiosity would be punished with one of those nerve whippings Orbis did not know, but he took the chance. “I’m just wondering what this property is that Wan’s so anxious to get back.”

  The woman was abruptly solemn. “I will answer that. You see,” she said, “as a small child poor baby Wan was abandoned. Only the care and kindness of a small community of individuals made it possible for him to become the wise, just leader he is today. And what has happened to those individuals?” Her face was reddening with anger. “Robinette Broadhead and his gang of thugs kidnaped them! Took them out of their ancestral home and dumped them in some African jungle! Then, when Wan was able to rescue a few of them, Broadhead’s accomplices moved them to the Core and did their best to hunt him down!” She stopped talking there, because the woman she had called Phrygia, the one with the braids, had jumped to her feet.