The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  There was no good answer to that. And half an hour later, leaving Estrella sleeping behind him, Stan began the long climb up the mountain.

  Climbing the slope was harder than he had expected. Forty-five minutes later he was covered with dirt and blood from the dozen slips and slides that had come when he lost footing on a rock, or tripped over some of the tangled undergrowth. Most of the scratches were still bleeding.

  But now in the dawnlight the ship, bright red and icy blue, gleamed clearer than he had ever seen it before. Panting, he paused for a moment before his last push. Between him and the ship was that outcrop of tumbled rocks, edges ominously jagged. There was an excellent chance of slipping and falling as he tried to cross it. More than that, he was right about where Wan’s punishing nerve weapon felled the others who had tried the climb.

  He had not forgotten that the punishment could be death.

  He stopped cold. It had just penetrated his mind that the word “death,” so easily spoken by those who had no immediate fear of it, might have a quite literal meaning for him. He might not be alive when the sun rose at the end of this night. Nor was there any Here After down the hill, nor was it likely that any of Wan’s people would risk displeasure by attempting to machine-store him.

  No. What dead meant to him in this place was never being alive in any form ever again. It meant never touching his living daughter, never finishing his lessons with Socrates—never doing anything at all that took an act on his part, nothing but lying forever in Arabella’s unfriendly soil until all the parts of him had decayed away.

  He swallowed, and then he found another fear.

  Even if he did gain entrance to the spacecraft, what would happen then? The little bit he remembered of the Gateway ships and of Achiever’s instructions to Geoffrey no longer seemed even remotely adequate. He might inadvertently fly the ship a thousand kilometers away and be unable to get back. Or crash it into the mountain. Or, most likely of all, never get it off the ground in the first place. Every one of those modes of failure seemed more likely than that he would somehow succeed in flying it, landing it and boarding all the captives—or at least boarding Estrella, with either Salt or Achiever to fly the thing home. He considered all those chances, then sighed and got back in crawling position—

  But didn’t crawl anywhere, because an unfamiliar voice in his ear was speaking to him. “You are Stan Avery, aren’t you? Don’t go any farther. We need to talk.”

  Stan looked around, saw no one, hazarded a guess. “Is that you, Raafat?”

  “No. Who is Raafat? In any case I am not he. I am Marc Antony, formerly your chef and now”—there was a hint of humor in the voice—“perhaps your rescuer. That is, with some assistance from yourself.”

  V

  Then everything went quickly. The last bit of the climb was the hardest. It was also the shortest, though, and if the climber didn’t worry about more scratches and scrapes—and now had no fear of the weapon that had killed Geoffrey; Marc Antony had disabled it—it could go quickly. By the time he reached the door Marc Antony had opened it. “Sit down by those knurled wheels,” he commanded. “Sorry about the perch, but you won’t have to be there long. Now, the first thing you have to do…”

  And Stan did as ordered, setting the smaller knobs on the right side just so, then the ones on the left side moved just a smidgen, then this, then that, then quickly this other—

  It all worked out just as Marc decreed. The spacecraft lifted. It slid gracefully through the air to the encampment, touched lightly down on the greensward, and there they were.

  The first captive to see the ship coming down for them shouted so loudly that everyone was awake and yelling with excitement by the time it touched down, a few meters from the lake shore. Then it was simple. Everyone began boarding at once. There was nothing to pack, nothing that anyone wanted to take away from the planet of Arabella.

  Achiever was the first aboard, twitching with excitement as he saw his ship’s controls again. Salt was next, but not by herself. She was shepherding Grace and the brightest of the Old Ones, the youth named Pony, as between the two of them they were helping Estrella aboard.

  Stan spent the next few minutes hugging and being hugged. When the last of the Old Ones, grumbling and belching, came aboard the ship Achiever—already perched at the pilot’s seat, his hands already on the controls—called impatiently to Marc Antony, “Is proper time for departure, I expect?”

  “One moment,” Marc Antony commanded. He indicated one of Wan’s handling machines, stilting down the slope. It bore eight or ten storage fans. “Bring them aboard,” he ordered. “Then we can leave.”

  Stan had been waiting for that moment. “Where to? Do you know where the nearest civilized planet is? I mean really civilized, with a good hospital and everything?”

  “I do not think the matter is that urgent, Stan. Estrella looks reasonably well to me. I prefer to return to the Core.”

  Stan looked baffled. “But—Oh, I see! It hadn’t gone off before you left, so you don’t know. Look, Marc. I wouldn’t guarantee there’s anything left of the Core. Wan left orders to blow up the star anyway.”

  That got Marc Antony’s full attention. “Explain that,” he ordered.

  “What’s to explain? Before Wan left the Core he ordered one of his people—Orbis? Some name like that—to give them enough time to get away, and then fire it off. This Orbis sounded like a real nut. He wanted—”

  “How long a time?” Marc demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Not long.”

  Grace cut in. “It was twenty-four hours. DeVon Washington told me.”

  Surprisingly, Stan saw the first smile he had ever seen on Marc Antony’s face. “Twenty-four hours,” he said. “Core time, you mean. That is twenty-four hours multiplied by the 40,000-to-1 differential. No, we’re in no hurry, Stan Avery. No hurry at all.”

  22

  * * *

  The Rescue

  I

  I was not unmoved by Gelle-Klara Moynlin’s passionate entreaties. I shared her impatience with the pusillanimous behavior of the Heechee. There is such a thing as being too unremittingly logical, and besides the Stored Minds had had no right to make decisions for human beings.

  However, it was true that the danger to Planetless Very Large White Very Hot Star overrode any personal considerations. My primary efforts, therefore, had to be directed to neutralizing that menace.

  It is embarrassing to me to admit my efforts did not succeed.

  The difficulty was in locating the torpedo that carried the star-bursting device. To do so required sorting through every spacecraft trail that had ever approached that star, identifying the approaches and departures for every one of them until the one which approached the star but did not depart again was found. That, of course, would be the one we sought. In principle it was quite a simple task, though arduous. When I displayed the trails for my analysis there were a much larger number of them than I had anticipated.

  While I was considering that matter, Klara’s shipmind called.

  I heard them out but made no promises. Then, when I returned to my own surround, I came to a decision. I summoned one of the high-speed torpedoes, and while waiting for its arrival gave my sous-chefs new instructions. No one of them was anywhere near as able as myself, to be sure. But there were 293 of them and, collectively, they possessed great analytical power.

  Diverting them away from their usual tasks meant that many clients would be getting a restricted menu for a time, but I saw no choice.

  Then I took off.

  It was a tedious flight, but not a challenging one. I had had no difficulty in tracking Wan’s ship-traces to his hideout. Its identity was not a surprise to me. There is a saying I have heard, though I was never given the source—most likely Plato, or George Washington, or some other ancient political person: “The dog returns to his vomit.” Wan had. Its name was Arabella.

  Truthfully, I had rather expected that would be the case. Even for an orga
nic, Wan was not particularly inventive.

  After I had left my vessel in a forced orbit I sought for and quickly found Achiever’s ship. It sat on top of a smallish mountain, below which lay the little valley where the captives were held.

  It was a nuisance that Wan had removed the servomodule, thus deprogramming the ship so that no nonmaterial person could fly it anymore. I suppose he did that because he was afraid that, given a chance, some of his nonmaterial people would get bored with life on Arabella and fly off with it. But with the help of one of the organics—it was that young Turkish boy that Klara had been concerned about, Stan Avery, the one who had excluded me from his residence for a time—I flew the ship to the valley. The captives seemed to be in good shape, or as good shape as organics ever are in, so I opened the ship’s doors to them. While they were boarding everyone my presence was not required, so I attended to the more important business.

  Dealing with Wan presented no real difficulties. I easily identified the collection of rabbit warrens tunneled into the mountain that Wan and his servants had occupied. It had not changed much since my last visit, except, of course, that everything that could decay had done so. (Not a surprise. By Outside standards, that had been a seriously long time ago.) Most of the tunnels were no longer in physical use, since there were no longer any organics with his company. But Wan did have to have a physical place to store their data fans, and that too was easy to locate.

  Wan’s people were all there, waiting for me as I entered the storage chamber—rather unimaginatively protected with bars and locks, but with nothing that could keep out even the feeblest AI. And his entire company of machine-stored servants were deployed around the rack of storage fans that held their—well, I’ve heard organics call them their “souls.” Most of them stood silently, looking as though they wished they were some-were else. One, however, seemed pugnacious.

  I recognized Wan immediately. Since becoming machine-stored he had elected to make himself a good deal less unattractive, but he was the most belligerent-looking of all. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded. “What the hell are you doing here? Anyway, you’re not leaving. Robin! DeVon! Take this man prisoner.”

  He was quite amusing, really. I didn’t bother to answer. I merely wrapped myself around him, as I had done to his servant long before, and began to squeeze.

  None of his present servants interfered. I hadn’t expected them to. It would have made no difference if they had, of course, nor did Wan’s own struggles. In less than ten milliseconds I had him cooped up in his data fan; I turned it off and ordered the others: “Have this delivered to the spacecraft in the valley.”

  They didn’t look eager to carry out my instructions. They didn’t look as though they objected much, either. After a moment one of them spoke. She was human and female, and she apparently had given much thought to her appearance. “Take us with you, please?” she asked.

  That had not been among my priorities, but I could see no objection. “You are not to waken Wan,” I told them, “or you will deeply regret it. However, you may include your data fans with his on the ship.” They had started a handling machine loading their fans for the trip down into the valley and I returned there as well. After that it was only a matter of completing the boarding and flying back home.

  23

  * * *

  In Orbis’s Ship

  I

  That hotshot AI that calls himself Marc Antony never asked, but I have a name. It’s Phrygia Lorena Todd. If he blamed me for working for that freak, Wan, that’s his problem. It wasn’t my idea. I certainly didn’t want to get involved in the Planetless Very White Very Hot Star thing at all, but Wan didn’t give me any choice. He claimed he had the right to do anything he wanted with me, since, after those damn buildings collapsed into the subway station in Kuala Lumpur, where I was unlucky enough to be driving one of the cars, he claimed he owned me.

  Wan wasn’t the first man who thought that. He was the first one who had the law on his side, though. So when he told me I had to pilot Orbis McClune to where he could blow up that star, I didn’t see any way of getting out of it.

  Anyway, the way he put it to me, the blowing up wasn’t necessarily going to happen. I listened to the broadcast when he made it and, sure enough, he said if they’d give him his damn cavemen he’d call it off.

  All right, I shouldn’t have believed a scum like him. But I wasn’t in any position to argue, was I? If you think you could have handled the whole thing better, well, maybe you could, and I hope next time you’re the one who’s stuck with the problem, not me.

  Still, the way it worked out, it was a damn good thing for everybody that I was there.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have taken so seriously the way Marc Antony treated me like dirt all the way back to the Core. He treated everybody else like dirt, too. All the same, I couldn’t help snickering when he got his comeuppance.

  See, the minute we passed through the Schwarzschild he got on his communicator, talking to whoever it was he’d left in charge of things when he took off for Arabella, and I could tell he wasn’t liking what he was hearing. Most AIs won’t lose their temper, but Marc Antony sure lost his. “You have not located the vessel with the nullifier?” he was snarling—it wasn’t a statement, it was a question, and a rhetorical one at that. “That is unacceptable! It is also unacceptable that you cannot undertake to complete the task of locating it in less than two hundred million additional milliseconds! That much time is not available!”

  When Marc Antony cut the connection he was looking—well, not worried, I’d say, because I don’t think AIs worry much, but certainly kind of concerned. I asked him, “What’s the problem?”—not really caring what the answer was.

  I thought at first that he wasn’t going to answer, but he did. “I do not think you would understand,” he told me, “but it is a very serious matter. I left my subsets a task to do in my absence. It was a long and tedious job, to be sure but not a particularly demanding one. However, they have failed. Now I have no way of reaching the vessel in time to prevent the explosion.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I do, though.”

  That got his attention. “Do not make jokes with me,” he said, sounding dangerous.

  “No joke. I was the one who set it in its orbit. I can take you right to it.”

  Antony probably didn’t believe me right off, but he didn’t have any better choices. When we got there and I showed him Orbis’s torpedo on the lookplate I thought he might have said something a little bit apologetic to me. He didn’t. “You, pilot,” he said, looking straight at me. “Now you will do something else for me.” Then he told me what the something else was.

  I wasn’t thrilled about taking orders from a bad-tempered AI in an apron and white cap, especially when he was ordering me to do something I’d never done before. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want me to, what, project myself to Orbis’s ship? How do I know it will work?”

  He gave me an impatient nod. “It works. I’ve done it myself.”

  “Okay,” I said, not entirely convinced but going along with it. “Then why don’t you do it this time?”

  “Because he knows you. I’ll be there with you, but I won’t show myself. I don’t want to frighten him.”

  I didn’t say what I thought the chances of Orbis McClune being frightened by a man in a chef’s hat might be. I just said, “I’m not easy in my mind about this.”

  Then he just said, “Do it, pilot,” and the tone he said it in didn’t encourage any more argument. And it didn’t actually sound so hard, you know. I figured about all I had to do was convince Orbis that, if he pushed the button, he’d die too. So I did what Marc Antony said.

  II

  Altogether I think I was talking to Orbis for something like thirty-one or thirty-two minutes, organic time. That may sound like a fair amount to you, but you don’t know the half of it. That’s thirty-one minutes times sixty seconds in every minute and a thousand milliseconds in every second—what I
mean, it was a lot of time. I can’t say I talked myself hoarse. Machine-stored people don’t get hoarse. What I did do to myself, or really what that SOB Orbis did to me, was to pretty near drive myself as batty as he was.

  When I looked around Orbis’s tiny ship it appeared he wasn’t expecting much of a career in it. He hadn’t even made a surround for himself. The place looked like a garbage dump. There were odds and ends of all sorts of things sliding around on the floor—physically real things sliding on the physically real floor, I mean.

  See, the thing was that Orbis wasn’t giving me any chance to interfere with him. He was already holding the triggering thing—well, the simulated but nevertheless quite functional triggering thing—in his hand. I don’t know why he was doing that. Maybe because he thought I was a more violent person than I really was. I thought it might have been because he’d been sort of toying with the idea of pushing the button right there and then. You know, like a nut with a razor might be laying the flat end of it against his wrist a couple of times while he made up his mind whether or not he was going to start slicing.

  Then the argument started. “If you’re in such a hurry to die,” I’d say to him “—I mean really die, so you aren’t even machine-stored anymore—why don’t you just get a gun and blow your brains out? Or something; you know what I mean.” “Can’t do that,” he’d say. “Suicide’s a sin.” “Then it’s a sin to push that button, isn’t it? Cause you’ll be killing yourself too?” Then he’d give me a big smile. “That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,” he’d say. “After all, Wan didn’t say I’d be killing myself. I only have your word that that’s true. And there are other considerations.” But he wouldn’t say what the considerations were, and so when we’d get to that point I’d start screaming things like, “Are you crazy? Killing yourself’s a sin, but killing Christ knows how many goddam people that are going to die when the goddam star blows is, like, just a misdemeanor or something?” And then he’d give me another smile—he was the smiliest SOB I ever knew—and say he was studying it over and he’d let me know if he figured it out. God almighty! I could’ve killed the bastard. Would’ve been glad to, too, if only I’d had some way of doing it.