The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  “Oh, right, that Rebecca,” I said, not very honestly. By then I’d paid the fare to the Core for—what?—at least two or three hundred Rebeccas or Carlos or Janes who volunteered to be Citizen Ambassadors to the Heechee in the Core because they had lives that were in shambles. That was a given. If their lives hadn’t been, why would they want to leave the people and places they couldn’t ever come back to?

  Because, of course, the Core was time-dilated, like any black hole.

  I knew what that meant. When you were time-dilated in the Core, where a couple of centuries of Outside time went by every day, the problems you had left behind got really old really fast. Time dilation was better than suicide—though, when you came to think of it, it was actually pretty much a kind of reverse suicide. You didn’t die yourself, but every troublesome person you’d ever known did while you were gone.

  I wish all those Citizen Ambassadors of mine well. I hope it all works out for them…but being in a black hole hadn’t done a thing for me.

  Once I’d met all the people on PhoenixCorp, there wasn’t much else to see. I had misjudged my budget-watcher. Terple hadn’t been particularly spendthrift after all. If you didn’t count the opulent plantings—and they were there primarily to keep the air good—PhoenixCorp actually was a pretty bare-bones kind of spacecraft. There were the sleeping quarters for the help, and some common rooms—the big one I’d come into when I first entered, plus a sort of dining room with beverage dispensers and netting next to the hold-ons to keep the meals from flying away, a couple of little rooms for music or virtuals when the people wanted some recreation. The rest of it was storage and, of course, all the machinery and instrumentation PhoenixCorp needed to do its job. Terple didn’t show me any of the hardware. I didn’t expect her to. That’s the shipmind’s business, and that sort of thing stays sealed away where no harm can come to it. So, unless somebody had been foolish enough to open up a lot of compartments that were meant to stay closed, there wouldn’t have been anything to see.

  When we were finished she finally insisted on that cup of tea—really that capsule of tea, that is—and while we were drinking it, holding with one hand to the hold-ons, she said, “That’s about it, Klara. Oh, wait a minute. I haven’t actually introduced you to our shipmind, have I? Hans? Say hello to Ms. Moynlin.”

  A deep, pleasant male voice said, “Hello, Ms. Moynlin. Welcome aboard. We’ve been hoping you’d visit us.”

  I said hello back to him and left it at that. I don’t particularly like chatting with machine intelligences, except my own. I finished my tea, slid the empty capsule into its slot and said, “Well, I’ll get out of your way. I want to get back to my own ship for a bit anyway.”

  Terple nodded, without asking why. “We’re going to have dinner in about an hour. Would you like to join us? Hans is a pretty good cook.”

  That sounded like as good an idea as any, so, “That would be fine,” I told her.

  Then, as she was escorting me to the docking port, she gave me a sidewise look. “Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry we bombed out on the radio search. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the Crabbers never got civilized. After all, if somebody had scanned Earth any time before the twentieth century they wouldn’t have heard any radio signals there, either, but the human race was fully evolved by then.”

  “I know that, June.”

  “Yes.” She cleared her throat. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  I said, “Of course not,” meaning that she could ask anything she wanted to, but whether or what I might I choose to answer was another matter entirely.

  “Well, you put a lot of money into getting Phoenix started, just on the chance that there might have been an intelligent race there that got fried when their sun went super. What I’m wondering is why.”

  The answer to that was simple enough. I mean, what’s the point of being about the richest woman in the universe if you don’t have a little fun with your money now and then? But I didn’t say that to her. I just said, “What else do I have to do?”

  III

  Well, I did have things to do. Lots of them, though most of them weren’t very important.

  The only one that was really important—to me—was overseeing what was going on on the little island off Tahiti that I live on when I’m home. It’s a nice place, the way I’ve fixed it up. Most of my more-or-less family is there and when I’m away I really miss them.

  Then there are other important things, like spending some time with Bill Tartch, who was a fairly sweet man, not to mention all the others like Bill Tartch who have come along over the years. Or such things as all the things I can buy with my money, plus figuring out what to do with the power that that kind of money gives. Put them all together, I had plenty to do with my life. And I had plenty of life to look forward to, too, especially if I let Hypatia talk me into immortality.

  So why wasn’t I looking forward to it?

  That’s the trouble with questions I can’t answer. I keep trying to find answers for them.

  When I came back into my ship, Hypatia was waiting for me—optically visible, in full 3-D simulation, lounging draped Roman-style on the loveseat in my main cabin and fully dressed in her fifth-century robes.

  “So how did you like your investment?” she asked sociably.

  “Tell you in a minute,” I said, heading for the head and closing the door behind me. Of course, a closed door makes no real difference with Hypatia. She can see me wherever I am on the ship, and no doubt does, but as long as a machine intelligence acts and looks human I want it to pretend to observe human courtesies.

  I wasn’t long, but that was the main reason I’d come back to my ship just then. I don’t like peeing in free fall, in those awful toilets they have. Hypatia keeps ours at a suitable gravity for my comfort, like the rest of the ship. Besides, it makes her nervous if I use any other toilets, because she likes to rummage through my excretions to see if I’m staying healthy.

  Which she had been doing while I was in the head. When I came out she didn’t seem to have moved, but she said, “Are you really going to eat their food?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “You’ve been running a little high on polyglycerides. Better you let me cook for you.”

  Teasing her, I said, “June Terple says Hans is a better cook.”

  “She said he’s a good cook,” she corrected me, “but so am I. I’ve been accessing him, by the way, so if there’s anything you’d like to know about the crew…”

  “Not about the crew, but Starminder said something about a Rebecca Shapiro. Who was she?”

  “That data is not in the Phoenix shipmind’s stores, Klara,” she said, reproving me. “However…”

  She whited out a corner of my lounge and displayed a face on it while she gave me a capsule biography of Rebecca Shapiro. She had been the dramatic soprano with a brilliant operatic future ahead of her until she got her larynx crushed in a plane crash. They’d repaired it well enough for most purposes, but she was never going to be able to sing “The Queen of the Night” again. So, with her life on Earth ruined, Rebecca had signed up for my program. “Any other questions?” Hypatia finished.

  “Not about Rebecca, but I’ve been wondering why they call their shipmind Hans?”

  “Oh, that was Mark Rohrbeck’s idea; he wanted to name him after some old computer pioneer. The name doesn’t matter, though, does it? I mean, why did you decide to call me Hypatia?”

  I had an answer for that. “Because Hypatia of Alexandria was a smart, snotty bitch,” I told her. “Like you.”

  “Humph,” she said.

  “As well as being the first great woman scientist,” I added, because Hypatia always likes to talk about herself.

  She did. “The first known one,” she corrected. “Who knows how many of them there were whose accomplishments didn’t manage to survive? Women didn’t get much of a break in your ancient meat world—or, for that matter, now.”

  “You were supposed to b
e beautiful, too,” I reminded her. “And you died a virgin anyway.”

  “By choice, Klara. Even that old Hypatia didn’t care much for all that messy meat stuff. And I didn’t just die. I was brutally murdered. It was a cold wet spring in the year AD 450, and a gang of those damn Nitrian monks tore me to shreds because I wasn’t a Christian. Anyway,” she finished, “you’re the one who picked my identity. If you wanted me to be someone else you could have given me a different one.”

  She had me grinning by then. “I still can,” I reminded her. “Maybe something like Joan of Arc?”

  She shuddered fastidiously at the idea of being a Christian instead of a gods-fearing Roman pagan, and changed the subject. “Would you like me to put a call through to Mr. Tartch now?”

  Well, I would and I wouldn’t. I wasn’t quite ready to talk to him. I shook my head. “I’ve been wondering about these extinct people we’re trying to resurrect. Have you got any Heechee records of the planet that I haven’t seen yet?”

  “You bet. More than you’ll ever want to watch.”

  “So show me some.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” she said, and disappeared, and all at once I was standing on an outcropping of rock, looking down on a bright, green valley where some funny-looking animals were moving around.

  The difference between PhoenixCorp’s major simulations and mine was that mine cost more. Theirs were good enough for working purposes, because they showed you pretty much anything you wanted to see, but mine put you right in the middle of it. Mine were full sensory systems, too, so I could smell and feel as well as I could see and hear. As I stood there a warm breeze was riffling my hair, and there was a distinct reek of smoke. “Hey, Hypatia,” I said, a little surprised. “Have these people discovered fire?”

  “Not to use, no,” she murmured in my ear. “There must’ve been a lightning strike up in the hills from the storm.”

  “What storm?”

  “The one that just passed. Don’t you see everything’s wet?”

  Not on my rock, it wasn’t. The sun overhead was big and bright and very hot. It had already baked the rock dry, but I could see that the jumble of dark-green vines at the base of my rock were still dripping, and when I turned around I could see a splotch of burning vegetation on the distant hill.

  The valley was more interesting. Copses of trees, or something like trees; a herd of big, shaggy things, Kodiak bear-sized but obviously vegetarians because they were industriously pushing some of the trees over to eat their leaves; a pair of rivers, a narrow, fast-moving one with little waterfalls that came down from the hills to my left and flowed to join a broader, more sluggish one on the right to make a bigger stream; a few other shaggy creatures, these quite a lot bigger still, feeding by themselves on whatever was growing in the plain—well, it was an interesting sight; maybe a little like the Great American Prairie must have looked before our forebears killed off all the wild meat animals.

  The most interesting part of it was a pack of a dozen or so predators in the middle distance, circling furtively around a group of three or four creatures I couldn’t easily make out. I pointed. “Are those the ones?” I asked Hypatia. And when she said they were I told her to get me up closer.

  At close range I could see the hunted ones were something that looked like pigs—well, they looked like pigs, that is, if pigs happened to have long, skinny legs and long squirrely tails. There was a mommy pig baring her teeth and trying to snap at the predators in all directions at once, and three little ones doing their best to huddle under the mother’s belly. It was the predators I was paying attention to. They looked vaguely primate. That is, they had apelike faces and short tails. But they didn’t look like any primate that ever lived on Earth, because they had six limbs: four that they ran on, and two more like arms, and in their sort-of hands they held sharp-edged rocks. As they got into position they began hurling the rocks at the prey.

  The mother pig didn’t have a chance. In a couple of minutes two of her babies were down and she was racing away with that long tail flicking from side to side like a metronome, and the surviving piglet right behind her, its tail-flicks keeping time with its mother’s, and the six-limbed predators had what they had come for.

  It was not a pretty scene.

  I know perfectly well that animals live by eating, and I’m not sentimental about the matter—hell, I eat steak! (Not always out of a Food Factory, either.) All the same, I didn’t like watching what was happening on this half-million-year-old alien veldt, because one of the piglets was still alive when the wolf-apes began eating it, and its pitiful shrieking got to me.

  So I wasn’t a bit sorry when Hypatia interrupted me to say that Mr. Tartch hadn’t waited for me to call him and was already on the line.

  Nearly all of my conversations with Bill Tartch get into some kind of intimate areas. He likes sexy talk. I don’t particularly, so I tried to keep the call short. He looked as good as ever—not very tall, not exactly handsome but solidly built and with a great, challenging I-know-what-fun-is-all-about grin—and he was just two days out. That’s not a lot of hard data to get out of what was more than a quarter of an hour of talk capsuled back and forth over all those light-years, I guess, but the rest is private; and when I was finished it was about time to get dressed for dinner with the PhoenixCorp people.

  Hypatia was way ahead of me, as usual. She had gone through my wardrobe and used her effectuators to pull out a dressy pants suit for me, so I wouldn’t have a skirt to keep flying up, along with a gold neckband that wouldn’t be flopping around my face as the pearls had. They were good choices; I didn’t argue. And while I was getting into them she asked chattily, “So did Mr. Tartch say thank you?”

  I know Hypatia’s tones by now. This one made my hackles rise. “For what?”

  “Why, for keeping his career going,” she said, sounding surprised. “He was pretty much washed up until you came along, wasn’t he? So it’s only appropriate that he should, you know, display his gratitude.”

  “You’re pushing your luck,” I told her, as I slipped into a pair of jeweled footstockings. Sometimes I think Hypatia gets a little too personal, and this time it just wasn’t justified. I didn’t have to do favors to get a man. Christ, the problem was to fend them off! It’s just that when it’s over I like to leave them a little better off than I found them; and for Bill, true enough, a little help now and then had been useful.

  But I didn’t want to discuss it with her. “Talk about something else or shut up,” I ordered.

  “Sure, hon. Let’s see. How did you like the Crabbers?”

  I told her the truth. “Not much. Their table manners are pretty lousy.”

  Hypatia giggled. “Getting a weak stomach, Klara? Do you really think they’re much worse than your own remote predecessors? Because I don’t think Australopithecus robustus worried about whether its dinners were enjoying the meal.”

  We were getting into a familiar argument. “That was a long time ago, Hypatia.”

  “So is what you were looking at with the Crabbers, hon. Animals are animals. Now, if you really want to take yourself out of that nasty kill-and-eat business—”

  “Not yet,” I told her, as I had told her many times before. And maybe not ever.

  What Hypatia wanted to do was to vasten me. That is, take me out of my meat body, with all its aches and annoyances, and make me into a pure, machine-stored intelligence. Like other people I knew had done. Like Hypatia herself, though in her case she was no more than a simulated approximation of someone who had once been living meat.

  It was a scary idea, to be sure, but not altogether unattractive. I wasn’t getting as much pleasure as I would have liked out of living, but I certainly didn’t want to die. And if I did what Hypatia wanted, I would never have to.

  But I wasn’t prepared to take that step yet. There were one or two things a meat person could do that a machine person couldn’t—well, one big one—and I wasn’t prepared to abandon the flesh until I had done wha
t the female flesh was best at. For which I needed a man…and I wasn’t at all sure that Bill Tartch was the particular man I needed.

  When I got back for dinner in the PhoenixCorp vessel, everybody was looking conspiratorial and expectant. “We’ve got about twenty percent of the optical foils in place,” Terple informed me, thrilled with excitement. “Would you like to see?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but commanded: “Hans! Display the planet.”

  The lights went dark, and there before us floated a blue and white globe the size of my head, looking as though it were maybe ten meters away. It was half in darkness and half in sunlight, from a sun that was out of sight off to my right. There was a half-moon, too, just popping into sight from behind the planet. It looked smaller than Luna, and if it had markings of craters and seas I couldn’t see them. On the planet itself I could make out a large ocean and a kind of squared-off continent on the illuminated side. Terple did something that made the lights in the room go off, and then I could see that there had to be even more land on the dark side, because spots of light—artificial lights, cities’ lights—blossomed all over parts of the nighttime area.

  “You see, Klara?” she crowed. “Cities! Civilization!”

  IV

  Their shipmind really was a good cook. A fritto misto, with a decent risotto and figs in cream for dessert, all perfectly prepared. Or maybe it just seemed so, because everybody was visibly relaxing now that it had turned out we really would have something to observe.

  However, there wasn’t any wine to go with the meal. “We’re not doing anything alcoholic until we’ve completed the obs,” June Terple volunteered, half apologetic, half challenging. “Still, I think Hans could get you something…”

  I shook my head, wondering if Hypatia had said anything to Hans about how I liked a drink now and then. Probably she had. Shipminds do gossip, and it was evident that the crew did know something about me. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, but it never, never touched on the subject of black holes.