The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  V

  A lander’s default program is to take off in the direction of the planet’s rotation. I saw no reason to override it, so we kept going eastward, dispatching an exploration pattern out over the easterly parts that had been hidden from us. It was dark to the east now, but that made no difference to our sensors. Or to Harry. At each new site we checked his responses were the same. “No. Nope. No, nothing looks familiar here, Markie. No.”

  Harry’s endless negatives got old fast, because I saw no end to them in reasonable time.

  Let me define what I mean by “reasonable time.” Our spacecraft was in a hundred-minute orbit, which meant that was how long it would take us to scan the entire planet. So we were condemned to go on doing that job, with all its unbearable tedium, for all those wholly unreasonable six million milliseconds.

  Harry found it all almost as boring as I did. That had a small benefit, because he relieved tedium the way he always did, by eating, and so I had some distraction in cooking some particularly ornate dishes for him. Some of them were fairly fancy—a soufflé with true balsamic vinegar, the poisonous Japanese puffer fish they call torafugu, desserts that required more artistry than I usually wasted on Harry. A sea battle, for instance. Maybe it was Trafalgar—I didn’t bother with historical accuracy, since Harry would never know the difference. I created spun-sugar wave tops on a lime-custard sea, with white-chocolate sailors firing marzipan cannon out of gingerbread ships with marshmallow sails. Harry watched the construction interestedly enough, but when I told him it was done he took no time at all to swallow the whole thing. Then he said, fairly politely, “Hey, Markie, enough with the sweet stuff, all right? How about a nice roast beef?”

  “Sure,” I said and set about making it. A proper roast presents challenges. I aimed for perfection, from the red-rare middle of the meat to the crispy charred fat at the edges, with particular care for the Maillard reactions. They’re what give the meat its perfect taste; the big molecules break up into the tiny, good-tasting ones at about 413 kelvins; a few kelvins too many and there’s charcoal mixed in with the fat, a few too few and you don’t bring out all the taste. I did it just right this time. Harry thought so too, because he grunted approvingly.

  Then something happened.

  We were across the ocean and coming into the daylight side again. Harry pushed the last forkful of beef aside and said, with genuine interest, “Markie, do you see what’s out there?”

  Of course I did, in a literal sense. What I didn’t see was why the spectacle of the sun appearing before us was worth commenting on. “It’s a sunrise, Markie!” he said. “It’s the first one I’ve seen in forever. Can’t you see how beautiful it is?”

  The truth was that I couldn’t. I have no systems for the recognition of visual beauty unless it relates to the presentation of food. I could easily identify all the colors involved, which ranged from the pale pink of sweetbreads before they are poached to the deep crimson of a boiled lobster shell, but those were nothing more than the natural frequencies of visible light that has been refracted through water droplets of the appropriate sizes, in the appropriate position relative to the sun. What was special enough about that to make Harry ignore his food I could not say.

  Then he made a noise I had never heard from him before. He jumped to his feet, knocking his table over and spilling everything on the floor. He was pointing toward the horizon with the hand that held a fork. He cried, “Look there! It’s where we lived, Markie! Come on, I’m going down to take a look.”

  I automatically erased the mess he had made as I saw what he was looking at. To be honest, the prospect did not excite me nearly as much as it did Harry, but as he was projecting himself to the surface I followed.

  I would have identified the place at once, without any help from Harry, because as soon as we were down I could see the hulk of an old, abandoned lander from a Five resting at the edge of a swamp. The wreck was almost overgrown by rushes, but it definitely was nothing that had grown there naturally. The ground rose steeply away from the marshland to a group of rocky hills, and Harry pointed out a ledge with an opening below it: “That’s where we mostly lived! That cave! And look over there—that’s the blind we made to catch bugs in the cold weather.” He was pointing to what was left of a sort of tepee of rushes, just where the muddy swamp margin began to turn into dark, sludgy open water. “We’d climb into the blind just before daylight,” he was telling me excitedly. “Then when the bugs came out to feed we’d jump them. Had to have the blind, though. They were pretty antsy. If we tried to come at them from the shore they’d be gone before we were within five meters of them. And all up along the hillside—see?—are the trees with the leaves we could eat. And you can’t see them from here, but under the tree branches there were things like mushrooms, and—”

  And so on and on.

  I am not lacking in friendship for Harry. It is part of my programming to be obliging, when feasible, to persons, machine-stored or otherwise. So I allow Harry to use up much of my time and even some of my skills without complaint. But our spacecraft was orbiting more than three degrees of longitude every minute. True, a minute is a very long time to us, but there was also very much to investigate in an entire planet. Harry didn’t want to leave. “We could land, Markie,” he said. “Why not? Hey, be reasonable, okay? We can check the rest of this Arabella dump out any time, for God’s sake!”

  I didn’t say anything to that. I just didn’t do anything, and since I was the one with the override for the lander I just kept on in orbit, while Harry sulked.

  Maybe he would have kept on sulking for all those interminable six thousand seconds that a single orbit would take, except that then we did see something down in a valley that didn’t belong there.

  More than anything else, it looked like some crumbling old castle out of Earth’s organic history, big enough for a Caesar, surrounded by gardens grandiose enough for a French king, next to a patch of greenery, perfectly round, not much more than a kilometer across. And in the middle of it was a perfectly round pond.

  My first thought was that maybe the Kugels hadn’t destroyed every trace of that old culture they had killed off. It only took a moment for me to see that that couldn’t have been the way it was.

  It was a castle, all right, and it wasn’t old at all. It just looked that way. Then it showed us pretty conclusively that it was quite up to date in important ways. A pair of what had looked like fruit trellises pulled back from where they had seemed to grow right out of the roof. They hadn’t. When they moved away, they revealed shiny metallic things that were definitely not a bit old. Even more definitely, they were traversing toward our orbiting lander. Most definitely of all, they were particle-beam weapons very like the ones that Thor Hammerhurler kept poised for any possible problem with the Kugelblitz.

  VI

  There are times when being a machine intelligence is of great value. This was one of them. While the deadly barrels crept around to point at us we had plenty of time to analyze the problem, consider alternatives and—oh, in as many as 210 or 225 milliseconds, perhaps even a few more—decide what to do about it.

  It wasn’t just the two of us discussing the matter. The Kugel showed himself, in his crazy-quilt melange of features, almost at once—just about the time Harry had yelped, “Get us the hell away from here!”

  Whether the Kugel heard what Harry said or not I don’t know. He certainly didn’t respond to it. What he said, almost shaking with some emotion I could not recognize, was, “It is an obscenity! This place was thoroughly sterilized! We are greatly displeased that it is populated once more!”

  I did a double take, struck by the queerness of the fact that that travesty of a person was actually displaying feelings. Then enlightenment dawned.

  “This is it, isn’t it?” I cried. “This is why you wanted to come here, because somehow or other you found out there was someone alive on the planet?”

  I thought for a moment he was actually going to answer that, becaus
e there was a perceptible hesitation before the image of the Kugels slowly broke up into a shimmer of dots of light and was gone. That didn’t matter. I knew I was right, and so did Harry.

  It worried him, too. “What’s he talking about, Markie?” he demanded. “You don’t think he’s planning to do some more sterilizing on those guys, do you?”

  “I hope not,” I said. “Maybe he can’t. When the Kugels were killing everybody off, it took the whole bunch of them, not just a little clump like we’ve got here.”

  Harry pondered over that. “So how did they do it, when they were doing it?”

  Well, now, that was a good question. It might even have been the question we’d been sent here to answer. “Let’s ask,” I said, and said to the air, “Kugel? Can you tell us how your people sterilized this planet?”

  I didn’t think he was going to answer at first. Then slowly the figure coalesced. “We were displeased by chemical creatures which seemed to show intelligent behavior, so we took action,” he said.

  “Right, Kugel,” I said, trying to be patient. “What was that action, exactly?”

  “We caused their chemical functions to terminate,” he said. As though that meant anything. “We deactivated every matter-based creature that was larger than—” he hesitated—“your pedal extremity.”

  “And how did you do that, exactly?” Harry put in.

  Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe the Kugels would have answered the question if I had been the one to ask it. I hadn’t, though. He didn’t disappear, he just froze. By which I mean froze, without any motion at all.

  Harry tried waving a hand in front of the creature’s face, without response. “Shit,” he said in disgust. “They’re just goddam rude, don’t you think?”

  “I do think that, Harry,” I said. “But perhaps we should consider our present situation.” Because nearly a hundred of our milliseconds had gone by, and those ugly weapon snouts were getting closer and closer to our line of fire.

  Recalled to the realities of the case, Harry swallowed. “Maybe we should go,” he said nervously.

  “Maybe,” I agreed, “but first I want to see what there is here.” What I was looking for was the human beings that occupied the castle. I was using infrared to pick up body heat, if any…

  And then, for a moment, I thought I had found them. In a little meadow next to the pond some scruffy people were disconsolately feeding from a clump of berry bushes.

  I said “people.” That’s an exaggeration. They were biped, yes. Maybe they were even primate. But people they were not. At magnification they turned out to be hairier and nakeder and a lot more stupid-looking than any organic human in my experience had ever been. Whatever they were, they were definitely not the builders of this castle.

  Harry looked at the scene; looked at me, looked at the Kugel. He got no clue from the Kugel, who stood still in a sense never applicable to any organic being: still was still for the Kugel’s simulation, with no motion at all of any kind. Harry retreated to me. “Maybe we should get closer,” he volunteered.

  I pointed out the flaw in his argument. “They’ll blow us up.”

  “Oh,” he said, squinting down at the weapons that still were tracking toward us. He then had an alternate suggestion. “Let’s get the hell out of here, okay?”

  I wasn’t quite ready to do that, especially since we had a number of milliseconds before the weapons’ tracking could complete. Harry and I debated a variety of possibilities. For example, ducking back into stellar orbit and calling home for guidance. Or landing somewhere out of sight of the castle and, somehow, sneaking up on it on the surface. Or even calling the whole thing off and heading back to the Wheel.

  Actually, though, it was Kugel who made the best suggestion. He had been frozen silent and motionless while Harry and I talked, but then the components of face, limb and body rearranged themselves in slightly different configurations. “You are aware,” he said in that hollow, unpleasant voice, “that the organics are mostly underground?”

  “Underground?” I said, and he shifted position to gaze into my eyes with his own empty ones.

  “In tunnels,” he said. “Left by the Heechee, perhaps.” Well, I hadn’t been aware of that, but as soon as he said it it sounded plausible. I didn’t comment, though, and so then he asked a question.

  “Are these technologies familiar to you?” he asked. “That is, are they largely electromagnetic in nature?”

  I assumed he was talking about the weapons, since that was all the technology I could see. “Pretty much, I guess. Why do you ask?”

  “We have two alternate proposals for your consideration. Number One: If you wish we will volatilize these weapons, thus rendering them harmless.”

  I blinked at him. “Volatilize? How would you do that?”

  “It would merely require opening a femtowidth slit in our containment for a femtosecond period of time, thus directing some of our components at the weapons. We calculate the drain on our mass would be negligible, no more than some seventeenths-to-the-eleventh power of our constituents. Of course,” it added, “it would be necessary to devote some of the beam to opening a channel through the wall of the ship itself, with consequent cosmetic damage and loss of volatiles.”

  I had had no idea the Kugel could do anything of the sort. Neither had Harry, whose jaw had dropped. “Hell with the volatiles!” he began, but I had already made a decision on that.

  “No, Kugel. We don’t want to do them any physical damage unless we have to. There are organics down there—” knowing perfectly well that he wouldn’t see that as an objection to the plan, in fact more likely the opposite. But I hoped he would take my veto as binding, and he did.

  “Number Two: Since the nature of your own technology is electromagnetic as well, might this structure’s systems not be compatible enough for you to penetrate them?”

  He seemed to think that that was all he needed to say. It wasn’t. “So what should we do?” I asked.

  His odd assemblage of features didn’t really deserve to be called a face, but it managed to express a little disappointment at my slowness. “First, pour yourselves into a thin data store. Second, transmit yourselves to their systems. Third, complete your reconnaissance. Fourth, return here for consideration of next step.”

  “Oh,” said Harry, bobbing his head. “Hey, Markie, that might work, right? Worth a try, don’t you think?”

  “What I think,” I said, glancing down at the surface scan, “is that that first weapons barrel is about one arc-second from alignment on us, and the other one is close behind. What’s going to happen to our ship while we’re fooling around down there?”

  “But that is not a problem,” said Kugel. “We will deal with it. We will retreat in/or/to the supraluminal spacecraft and remain out of range for a time. At arbitrary times, but not more than intervals of a few seconds, we will return, then to listen for messages, or else to accept your return from target place. We will not, however, remain within range long enough for the weaponry to threaten us.”

  Harry turned and gave me one of his most scathing looks. “So that’s what we do then, isn’t it? What’s the matter with you, Markie? Why didn’t you think of that for yourself?”

  I didn’t answer that directly. I just said, “Let’s do it. Reformat yourself while I locate a target.”

  I had a good answer, I just didn’t want to tell him what it was. The reason was simply that the Kugels had handed me another total surprise. I hadn’t had any idea that they were capable of using our servomodules to operate the ship.

  There were some flower-shaped things on the roofs of the castle that I thought might be signal or search antennae. We hurled ourselves down at the best-looking of them, and that’s what it was—fortunately, because if it had been a rain collector or a lightning rod instead we would then have had the problem of somehow insinuating ourselves in the computer’s electronics from outside.

  But we didn’t have to do that. We were there on the first try. And to prove i
t, a voice, harsh and loud, rang out to greet us: “You two! Hold it right there! Display yourselves at once!”

  It wasn’t an organic person speaking, of course. It was a guardmind, an AI like myself, but when he muscled himself right into our surround he displayed himself as much like an organic as he could—as an Old West sheriff, complete with six-shooter, ten-gallon hat and boots with spurs that had never touched the hide of a horse. It is my experience that the more trivial an AI’s system, the more elaborate its simulations are likely to be.

  However, I am courteous whenever possible. It was his house. So we made ourselves visible, me in my white toque and apron, Harry in his customary flashy sportswear. “Don’t move,” the guardmind ordered, hand on the butt of its gun. We didn’t, having no particular reason to, but the guardmind’s tone was a lot more belligerent than its status entitled it to be. I could see at once that its programs were far less powerful than my own, or even Harry’s. However, out of politeness we stayed fixed in our tracks.

  The longer we stood there, the less confident the guardmind appeared. “It was not known that you were to come here,” it said worriedly, looking us up and down.

  “It wasn’t known that you were, either,” Harry said, aggrieved—and, being less inclined to politeness than I am, added: “Markie, why don’t you just make this clown go away?”

  I shook my head. I could easily have neutralized it, as it was clearly in the process, of beginning to realize for itself. I didn’t want to make unnecessary trouble. I said, as mildly as I could, “Please forgive us if we frightened you. As we were passing by in our spacecraft we observed your installation and decided to pay you a friendly call. We do wish to be friendly. We would not dream of doing any harm here—unless,” I added, smiling to show how remote the possibility was, “we were forced to protect ourselves.”

  By then the guardmind had had a chance to realize what he was up against. “I ask you to wait one moment,” it said, the voice suddenly stilted and mechanical—because, I knew, it was simultaneously conferring with some program higher in authority.