That was every bit as good as his connection with these impossibly distant people was ever going to get.
It had never occurred to Pete that the stars might go out.
He’d cut himself a sacred, demonic bolt-hole, in a taboo area of the starship. Every once in a while, he would saw his way through the robots’ repair efforts and nick out for a good long look at the artificial cosmos. This reassured him, somehow. And he had other motives as well. He had a very well founded concern that the inhabitants of Starship Two might somehow forge their way over, for an violent racist orgy of looting, slaughter, and rapine.
But Starship Two had their hands full with the robots. Any defeat of the bubbling gelbrain and its hallucinatory tools could only be temporary. Like an onrushing mudslide, the gizmos would route around obstructions, infiltrate every evolutionary possibility, and always, always keep the pressure on.
After the crushing defeat, the bubbling production vats went into biomechanical overdrive. The old regime had been overthrown. All equilibrium was gone. The machines had gone back to their cybernetic dreamtime. Anything was possible now.
The starry walls grew thick as fleas with a seething mass of new-model jailers. Starship Two was beaten back once again, in another bitter, uncounted, historical humiliation. Their persecuted homeland became a mass of grotesque cement. Even the portholes were gone now, cruelly sealed in technological spit and ooze. A living grave.
Pete had assumed that this would pretty much finish the job. After all, this clearly fit the parameters of the system’s original designers.
But the system could no longer bother with the limits of human intent.
When Pete gazed through a porthole and saw that the stars were fading, he knew that all bets were off. The stars were being robbed. Something was embezzling their energy.
He left the starship. Outside, all heaven had broken loose. An unspeakable host of creatures were migrating up the rocky walls, bounding, creeping, lurching, rappelling on a web of gooey ropes. Heading for the stellar zenith.
Bound for transcendence. Bound for escape.
Pete checked his aging cleats and gloves, and joined the exodus at once.
None of the creatures bothered him. He had become one of them now. His equipment had fallen among them, been absorbed, and kicked open new doors of evolution. Anything that could breed a can opener could breed a rock chock and a piton, a crampon, and a pulley, and a carabiner. His haul bags, Katrinko’s bags, had been stuffed with generations of focused human genius, and it was all about one concept: UP. Going up. Up and out.
The unearthly landscape of the Taklamakan was hosting a robot war. A spreading mechanical prairie of inching, crawling, biting, wrenching, hopping mutations. And pillars of fire: Sphere satellite warfare. Beams pouring down from the authentic heavens, invisible torrents of energy that threw up geysers of searing dust. A bio-engineer’s final nightmare. Smart, autonomous hell. They couldn’t kill a thing this big and keep it secret. They couldn’t burn it up fast enough. No, not without breaking the containment domes, and spilling their own ancient trash across the face of the earth.
A beam crossed the horizon like the finger of God, smiting everything in its path. The sky and earth were thick with flying creatures, buzzing, tumbling, sculling. The beam caught a big machine, and it fell spinning like a multiton maple seed. It bounded from the side of a containment dome, caromed like a dying gymnast, and landed below Spider Pete. He crouched there in his camou, recording it all.
It looked back at him. This was no mere robot. It was a mechanical civilian journalist. A brightly painted, ultramodern, European network drone, with as many cameras on board as a top-flight media mogul had martinis. The machine had smashed violently against the secret wall, but it was not dead. Death was not on its agenda. It was way game. It had spotted him with no trouble at all. He was a human interest story. It was looking at him.
Glancing into the cold spring sky, Pete could see that the journalist had brought a lot of its friends.
The robot rallied its fried circuits, and centered him within a spiraling focus. Then it lifted a multipronged limb, and ceremonially spat out every marvel it had witnessed, up into the sky and out into the seething depths of the global web.
Pete adjusted his mask and his camou suit. He wouldn’t look right, otherwise.
“Dang,” he said.
HATCHING THE PHOENIX
Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl (born 1919) is both a writer of the first rank and one of the most important editors in the history of the SF field. He has edited magazines such as Galaxy and If, original anthologies such as Star Science Fiction, and the Bantam Books SF publishing line.
Back when SF fans were cellar Christians, a small group of, for the most part, teenagers holding meetings in basements and planning for the future, Frederik Pohl was a member of the most left-wing of the fan groups, the Futurians. Pohl says in his autobiography, The Way the Future Was (1978), that some of them were Communists and some fellow travelers in the 1930s and into the 1940s. But to a very large extent in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the real-life politics of the writers was not overtly present in the fiction.
Sf had built a consensus future involving atomic power, space travel and the exploration of space, and the eventual evolution of a human-dominated galactic empire in the distant future. But politics was certainly present in the fanzines, and in the reviewing and criticism—Damon Knight’s famous demolition of A. E. van Vogt is based in part on van Vogt’s monarchism. When SF discovered its capacities as a genre for social satire and covert political criticism in the 1950s, when American SF became the major literature embodying criticism of McCarthyism, Pohl and his friends were leaders. As a group the Futurians were the cutting edge of the satirical movement of the fifties, and he was the satirical SF writer whom Kingsley Amis in his influential book on SF, New Maps of Hell, called “the most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced.” Although he edited pulp science fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, in 1940—41 before he was twenty-one, he became prominent in the 1950s for his novels in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth—including the classic The Space Merchants (1953); for a number of powerful and satiric short stories including “The Midas Plague” (1954) and “The Tunnel Under The World” (1955); and for editing anthologies—the most innovative all-original anthologies (and the first such in paperback) of the decade were the six volumes of Star SF (1953-1959).
His second flowering, as a hard SF writer, began in the 1970s with “The Gold at the Starbow’s End,” Man Plus (1976), and Gateway (1977), and has never abated. The continuing center of his later works has been stories and novels in the Heechee series, of which this is one. He was still at the peak of his powers in the 1990s and a continuing influence on other writers. It is interesting to compare and contrast Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee series to Pohl’s. Although Pohl’s chosen mode has frequently been extrapolation of politics and society, with a deep and canny bow to psychology and psychiatry, his rigorous methodology has lent an underpinning of “hardness,” to much of his best fiction (especially his work since 1970) that places it rightfully beside the best of Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, and Heinlein.
“Hatching the Phoenix” follows the human crew of a Heechee ship being taken to observe a supernova.
CHAPTER I
We were only about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab supernova. I wouldn’t even have noticed it, but my shipmind, Hypatia, is programmed to notice things that might interest me. So she asked me if I wanted to take a look at it, and I did.
Of course I’d already seen the star blow up two or three times in simulations, but as a flesh-and-blood human being I like reality better than simulations—most of the time, anyway. Hypatia had already turned on the Heechee screen, but it showed nothing other than the pebbly gray blur that the Heechee use. Hypatia can read those things, but I can’t, so she changed the phase for me.
She said, “You can’t see it yet. We don’t have that much magnification. But keep your eyes open. Wait a moment. Another moment. Now, there it is.”
She didn’t have to say that. I could see it for myself. Suddenly a point of light emerged and got brighter, and brighter still, until it outshone everything else on the screen. It actually made me squint. “It happens pretty fast,” I said.
“Well, not really that fast, Klara. Our vector velocity, relative to the star, is quite a lot faster than light, so we’re speeding things up. Also, we’re catching up with the wavefront, so we’re seeing it all in reverse. It’ll be gone soon.”
And a moment later it was. Just as the star was brightest of all, it unexploded itself. It became a simple star again, so unremarkable that I couldn’t even pick it out. Its planets were unscorched again, their populations, if any, not yet whiffed into plasma. “All right,” I said, somewhat impressed but not enough to want Hypatia to know it, “turn the screen off and let’s get back to work.”
Hypatia sniffed—she has built herself a whole repertoire of human behaviors that I had never had programmed into her. She said darkly, “We’d better, if we want to be able to pay all the bills for this thing. Do you have any idea what this is costing?”
Of course, she wasn’t serious about that. I have problems, but being able to pay my bills isn’t one of them.
I wasn’t always this solvent. When I was a kid on that chunk of burned-out hell they call the planet Venus, driving an airbody around its baked, bleak surface for the tourists all day and trying not to spend any of my pay all night, what I wanted most was to have money. I wasn’t hoping for a whole lot of money. I just wanted enough money so that I could afford Full Medical and a place to live that didn’t stink of rancid seafood. I wasn’t dreaming on any vast scale.
It didn’t work out that way, though. I never did have exactly that much money. First I had none at all and no real hopes of ever getting any. Then I had much, much more than that, and I found out something about having a lot of money. When you have the kind of money that’s spelled M*O*N*E*Y, it’s like having a kitten in the house. The money wants you to play with it. You can try to leave it alone, but if you do it’ll be crawling into your lap and nibbling at your chin for attention. You don’t have to give in to what the money wants. You can just push it away and go about your business, but then God knows what mischief it’ll get into if you do, and anyway then where’s the fun of having it?
So most of the way out to the PhoenixCorp site, Hypatia and I played with my money. That is, I played with it while Hypatia kept score. She remembers what I own better than I do—that’s her nature, being the sort of task she was designed to do—and she’s always full of suggestions about what investments I should dump or hold or what new ventures I should get into.
The key word there is “suggestions.” I don’t have to do what Hypatia says. Sometimes I don’t. As a general rule I follow Hypatia’s suggestions about four times out of five. The fifth time I do something different, just to let her know that I’m the one who makes the decisions here. I know that’s not smart, and it generally costs me money when I do. But that’s all right. I have plenty to spare.
There’s a limit to how long I’m willing to go on tickling the money’s tummy, though. When I had just about reached that point, Hypatia put down her pointer and waved the graphics displays away. She had made herself optically visible to humor me, because I like to see the person I’m talking to, wearing her fifth-century robes and coronet of rough-cut rubies and all, and she gave me an inquiring look. “Ready to take a little break, Klara?” she asked. “Do you want something to eat?”
Well, I was, and I did. She knew that perfectly well. She’s continually monitoring my body, because that’s one of the other tasks she’s designed to do, but I like to keep my free will going there, too. “Actually,” I said, “I’d rather have a drink. How are we doing for time?”
“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 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, and what we were looking at was a dish-shaped metal spiderweb, with little things crawling across it. I could form no precise picture of its size, because there was nothing in the space around it to compare it with. But I didn’t have to. 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 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 and round and unoccupied 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 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 lock a little less masculine. It just made me look weak-faced. For a couple of years I’d gone blonde, then 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, pr
etty natural, anyway. I didn’t want to look old.
I didn’t, of course. By then time I was bathed and my hair was fixed and I was wearing a simple dress that showed off my pretty good legs, actually, I looked as good as I ever had. “Almost there,” Hypatia called. “You better hang on to 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.” What there was was a sharp transition from the comfortable one gee I kept in my own ship to the gravityless environment of the PhoenixCorp ship. 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 fug, 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.
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