The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway

by Frederik Pohl

  When Harry entered my surround, he was wearing his usual silk polo shirt, cutoff shorts and sandals, and he was munching on a Granny Smith apple I had simulated for him earlier. “Hey there, Markie,” he said. “You busy? How would you like to go for a ride?”

  I wasn’t actually any busier than usual. Besides the routine tasks of the kitchen, plus my side jobs of keeping the books on the eleven Wheel restaurants I serve, observing the emanations from the Kugelblitz and maintaining a state of military readiness, I was physically preparing some Hawaiian bread pudding from scratch for the Lorenzini family. “What kind of a ride?” I asked.

  He was craning his neck—well, that isn’t exactly what he did; more accurately, he was entering into my operational surround to see what I was cooking up in my physical kitchen. “They want me to go back to Arabella,” he said, sniffing.

  Well, he wasn’t exactly sniffing, either. Machine entities like Harry and me don’t have physical noses, so we can’t react directly to airborne molecules. The instrumentation in the kitchen area can, though, and I’ve taught Harry how to interpret the readouts as cooking aromas. It’s what I do myself.

  In Harry’s case, it doesn’t much matter what I am cooking, he always says the same thing: “Hey, that smells good. What is it?” He said it this time, too.

  It saves time to answer Harry’s questions when he asks them, so I told him about the sweet Molokai bread I had already baked, and what went into the sauce I was making for it—a sort of sweet Hollandaise, with a half-kilo of powdered sugar and a deciliter of melted butter introduced to the sauce, a little bit at a time, as my effectors mixed it.

  When I told him he said, “Hum. Hah. Hey, Markie, how come you do all that stuff? It’s just all different atoms, right? So why don’t you just line up all the atoms where you want them instead of all that cooking?”

  Well, I don’t actually “cook,” but I didn’t argue the point. “Do you know how many atoms are involved in this one dish? About ten to the 24th—that’s a ten followed by 24 zeroes after it. I can do a lot, but I can’t keep track of ten to the 24th atoms at once.”

  “Yeah?” He began to display the smirk that means he is about to start teasing me. “You say you can do a lot? How much is that, exactly, Markie?”

  Now, how do you answer a question like that? My primary program alone is pretty large. I never know when I’m going to be asked for something like Vietnamese fish sauce, or haggis, or baby back ribs, New Orleans style, so I have to keep an accessible store of nearly thirty thousand specific recipes, from the cuisines of nearly five hundred nations, regions and ethnicities. That’s plus the chemical and physicochemical formulae for all the ingredients. (You have to have both, especially for the polysaccharides, where cellulose and starch are basically the same compound; the only difference is the way the glucose rings that make them up are joined. If I got the geometry wrong, my clients would be getting cellulose to eat and then they’d all starve to death—well, unless they were termites, they would.) There are over twelve thousand standard ingredients, from pears and pearl onions to beets (five varieties) and radicchio and you name it, because you’d be surprised what some people will eat. Plus programs for the instant retrieval of any of them, in any combination. How much does that come to? About enough, I would say, to run four or five major manufacturies at once, or to fight a medium-sized war. Actually I’m one of the most powerful programs on the Wheel.

  However, I gave Harry a short answer. “It comes to plenty,” I said. “Eat your apple. And listen, you didn’t tell me why you were going to Arabella.”

  “Oh, it’s just one of those research projects,” he said, shrugging as though research projects happened to him all the time. (I knew they didn’t, though. After Harry was rescued, he had very few usable skills. Mostly he had nothing at all to do with his time on the Wheel.) “It’s some idea they’ve got about wanting more dope about the planet. Arabella, that is. They want me to go back and take a look. They said I should bring a pure machine intelligence along, not another salvaged organic human like me. I thought of you right away.”

  All this time dinner orders were coming in—sauerbraten, red cabbage and Tyrolean dumplings for the Klagenkamps, a shrimp stir-fry for the Daos, an assortment of Heechee finger foods for the party welcoming the new arrivals from the Core, about forty other assorted orders. Since none of them had bothered to give me any advance warning, what they were going to get would all be Food Factory dishes, without any of the from-scratch recipes that I am so good at, but they weren’t any more likely to notice than most of my customers. While I was filling the orders, I commented to Harry, “I’ve never been off the Wheel.”

  He took a last bite of his apple and tossed the core over his shoulder. I erased it before it fell. “I know that, Markie,” he said eagerly. “I thought you’d like to get out for a change.”

  Actually, it sounded like a potentially rewarding experience. I mused, “I suppose I could arrange to have my responsibilities met by another program.”

  “Of course you can, Markie. Does that mean you’ll do it?”

  Having assessed the relevant considerations, the most important of which is that I am the Wheel Authority’s servant and I don’t decline their orders, I gave him my decision. I said, “Yes. Will any organic humans accompany us?”

  He looked shocked. “Oh, no, Markie. Not a chance. The Kugels don’t get along real well with organic humans. They aren’t so crazy about stored ones like me, either; that’s why they wanted somebody like you to come along, so you could, you know, sort of keep them happy.”

  “I am uncertain of whom your pronouns refer to, Harry. Which ‘they’ is which?”

  He said patiently, “The Wheel Authority people are the ones who decided they ought to have someone like you in the party. The other ‘them’ is the ones who are coming with us. Didn’t I tell you? We’re taking some of the components of the Kugelblitz along so they can—what would you call it?—revisit the scene of their crime. Like, you know, some of the Foe.”

  II

  Filling orders kept me busy for the next half second or so, but not so busy that I didn’t have time to ponder Harry’s story. Unfortunately pondering produced little added data. I needed more. I began a search through the archives, but, while that might tell me all I could want to know about Harry’s former planet, it was unlikely to have anything about the expedition itself. Still, we major programs do oblige each other when we can, and there were at least thirty or forty unofficial sources I could go to…

  And while I was considering which would be most useful, one of them rang me up. “Marcus,” she said, “I am extremely hungry. Please prepare for me some of those eggs Benedict, perhaps with a side of home-fried potatoes and a small salad.”

  Being herself a Stored Mind, she was not likely really to be hungry in the usual organic sense, but I was pretty sure I knew what was on her mind. Boredom often makes people want to eat, stored or organic, and there was frequent boredom in her job. “Certainly, Breeze,” I said. “Shall I deliver it as usual?”

  “No, no,” she said crossly. “We’re still in session. I’ll come by for it when I get a moment.” And was gone.

  Breeze is one of my best and most senior customers, and one of the few really daringly experimental ones who happen to be a Heechee. Before the Heechee got corrupted by human beings, every one of them, Breeze included, would have been sickened—I don’t mean just mildly repelled, I mean toss-your-cookies physically sickened—by the idea of eating the dead remains of formerly living creatures—other than the one kind of fish they did eat, anyway. Most still didn’t like it. Cooking for them is just a matter of dictating pleasing colors, textures and scents to the Food Factory, the way they did back home in the Core.

  That’s not true for all of them now, though. This one old female Heechee on the Authority had been on stakeout duty for the Foe (as she called them back then) even before the Wheel was built, and I guess she was getting pretty bored with it. Anyway, she was o
ne of the few Heechee to let me try a few experiments with her CHON-food while she was still organic. So I gave her a few hints of human taste sensations.

  It wasn’t hard. I had no trouble including some new flavors in her food—furanthiols for fruitiness, pyrazines for fresh green vegetables, that sort of thing. It went well, until I tried to give her an idea of what meat tasted like with a little bis-2-methyl-3-furyl-disulfide. The first dozen times she tried it she couldn’t get it down—not so surprising, because the disulfides are tricky even for humans. But she stuck with it, and by and by she was eating cheeseburgers and hot dogs like any high-school kid. Then I taught her to like bouillabaisse and ripe Stilton cheese and all sorts of gourmet grub. She developed a particular appetite for oysters, to the point where she knew the difference between Wellfleets and Chincoteagues, and why the Boulognes weren’t as delicately flavored as the little Japanese variety. None of it made her sick, either, the way some people thought it might. She ate three squares a day of my cooking right up until the organic body failed and she had to go into machine storage. (Well, not the kind of machine storage a human being would experience. She was a Heechee, so she became a Stored Mind instead.) Anyway, after that she ate—or “ate”—twice as much, but electronically.

  I wished she would hurry up and pick up her meal, because the situation Harry had laid on me was hard for me to understand in two entirely different ways. First, I had had no idea that any of the Wheel people were intimate enough with the Kugels to plan trips with them. Second, I couldn’t see just what the Kugels were supposed to do when they got there.

  Harry was no help. “That’s not my department, Markie. Me, I just think it would be interesting to see the old place again. So are you changing your mind about coming along?” And when I thought it over and told him that, no, I wasn’t changing my mind he went off to tell the Authority we had a deal.

  The Wheel Authority is made up almost entirely of organic, or formerly organic, persons—human and Heechee, with just one or two machine intelligences sharing their responsibilities. Having some actually living members is important to the organics for political reasons. (Or maybe just so they can keep on convincing themselves that organics matter.) The effect of it, though, is that the Authority is chronically, deplorably slow to act. I have a lot of sympathy for the stored or machine members, like Breeze and my other favorite Heechee customer, Thermocline. It cannot avoid being terribly tedious for them, waiting for the organics to take their turns to speak in the Authority sessions. It certainly was for me, so while Harry was informing the Authority of my agreement I had plenty of time to put my bread pudding in the oven, take care of the sixty or seventy new orders that had come in, ready Breeze’s Eggs Benedict, deal with my other chores and, at the same time, access the relevant information on the planet I was about to visit, which (as I mentioned earlier) was called by humans “Arabella.”

  Human records didn’t have anything to say about Arabella that I didn’t already know. I’d already heard it all from Harry—many times. Heechee records were somewhat more informative. According to them, Arabella had once had a thriving biota, including a semi-intelligent species of cold-blooded hexapods, whom the Kugels had killed off half a million or so years ago, as part of their program of diligent mass murdering. There were pictures of the hexapods and a lot of technical data about geology and such, and that was about all there was.

  I was a bit puzzled. There was nothing special about that history. I could not see why this quite ordinary planet was worth a trip, even with so expendable a crew as ourselves. There was nothing unusual in its history. The Kugels had resolutely killed off every other intelligent, or nearly intelligent, form of organic life they had come across in their explorations of the Galaxy. Everyone knows this, since that was what had made the Heechee retreat into their hiding place in the Core, for fear it would be their turn next. The only thing worth remembering about Arabella was that it had been one of the preprogrammed destinations in the first human-manned Heechee ships from Gateway. Unfortunately for the human explorers who by the luck of the draw got that particular flight plan, it was a one-way trip. They went there. Then they stayed there. Their ships ran out of programming as soon as they arrived and they couldn’t come back. Three or four parties of those early Gateway explorers arrived on Arabella at one time or another, and there they remained, scratching out a miserable existence from the planet’s unfamiliar plants and animals, until at last humans figured out how to make a Heechee ship do what they wanted, instead of what the Heechee had designed it to do long ago. Not long after that human rescue parties got around to checking out planets like Arabella and the marooned crews were saved—the handful of them who were still alive, that is.

  Harry had been one of those rescued castaways. He had been one of the first to arrive on Arabella, too. He was a strong, adventurous young man when he landed on the catastrophic disappointment that was the planet of Arabella. By the time the rescue ship got there, forty-five years later, he had become both old and very feeble. Harry managed to squeeze out another couple of years of organic life, mostly in the intensive-care units of the nearest medical facility. But by then his physical body had deteriorated past the point where repair was possible, and so he had been vastened as a machine intelligence. At some point it was decided that he might be considered to have some value as an expert, if not on the Kugels, at least on what the Kugels could do in the way of destruction. So he was brought out here.

  Harry had told me this story before, of course—in fact, he told it quite frequently, with special emphasis on how little variety they had had in what they had to eat. Probably, he said, the planet had once had lots of plants and animals, but the Kugels had been pretty thorough.

  What interested me was that there would be some of those same Kugels in our party.

  That was really unusual. I had never seen any Kugels up close. No one else on the Wheel had, either. The Kugelblitz itself was perfectly visible at all times from the Wheel; that’s what the Wheel was there for. The Kugelblitz wasn’t just one thing. It was a congeries of yellowish blobs surrounded by a screen of black holes (so that if any stray bit of matter, say a wandering comet, threatened to fall into one of the Kugelblitzes it would be drawn into one of the black holes instead). Usually there was no contact with it except through the Dream Seat operators whose job was to “watch” the object day and night.

  Apparently the watching had gone much farther than I had known.

  While I was checking Arabella out, one of my more annoying clients had suddenly requested a dinner of samphire salad with naan. I wasn’t surprised. This was one of the ones who were always trying to stump me with unusual orders—Savoie dishes from the thirteenth-century court of Amedée VIII, fried squid ink, oddities of all sorts. What made this one annoying was that he was a living organic human, so my effectors had to prepare real physical food.

  This meal was fairly easy. Naan is just a flat wheat bread from Afghanistan, and I had the recipe in my datastore. Samphire took a little more work. It’s a kind of salad green from England’s midland bogs that people ate in the Middle Ages because they didn’t have anything better. I had no record of it, and there was no way to get a sample to analyze, because it’s been extinct for centuries. So I made up some spinach with a few bok choy genes and sent it along. He didn’t question it. He’d never seen the real thing either.

  That was when Breeze showed up, looking frazzled. “I’ve got about twenty milliseconds. Got my eggs?” she demanded. I had, of course. “Good, they’re nice and hot,” she said, tasting. Of course they were. That’s one advantage of preparing meals for customers like her. My simulated dishes for machine-stored intelligences are at whatever temperature I order them to be, and they stay that way, with no loss of freshness or flavor, until I order them to be otherwise.

  I had set a little table for her, a single white rose in a crystal vase, a damask napkin in the peacock fold, heavy silver tableware and Spode china—Breeze liked these human fripper
ies. “Pretty busy at the Authority?” I asked, politely.

  She gave me a shrewd look. Between bites she said, “You know we are. Right about now—” She paused, as though listening for something. When it came I felt it too. Not a full-fledged alarm, because there would have been no mistaking that, but a sort of hiccough of the alarm systems, quickly aborted. “There it is,” she said with satisfaction, “so I’d better get back.”

  I was already checking all my sensors to find out what had happened. I stopped long enough to ask her, “What should I be doing right now?”

  She swallowed a final bite, dabbed at her thin Heechee lips with the napkin, said, “Pack,” and was gone.

  She was right about that, so I decided to get ready for the trip. Neither she nor I was talking about packing a bag, of course—machine intelligences don’t have anything to pack—but about something a bit more personal.

  It isn’t hard to duplicate a machine intelligence like me. All you need to do is copy the programs, one by one, onto an assembler. That took only a few dozen microseconds, and then there were two of us in my surround.

  “Hello, Marc Antony Two,” I said to my double, and my double responded at once:

  “Why do you call me Two? You’re the one who’s a copy.”

  That’s the sort of thing you always get among us programs when you make us into precisely identical copies. We always solve it the same way, too. The other Marc Antony and I each generated three random prime numbers, fairly big ones of three or four hundred digits each. Then we added all six of them together. The new number wasn’t a prime anymore. It obviously couldn’t be, right?, since as a minimum it had become even when we added six odd numbers together. Then it was a simple matter to factor out its divisors. One of which turned out to be closer to one of my original primes than to any of Marc Two’s, so I won.