The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway

by Frederik Pohl

  “Studied operation of spacecraft?” Achiever asked skeptically.

  “Sure. Well, sort of. There was a vid game about Gateway, you know—you got in the ship, and you took off, and flew to some planet. They said it was really realistic. I played it a lot.”

  Achiever said, “Hah!” again, but this time with less force. He studied Geoffrey’s face for some moments before, at last, saying, “Tell of this game. Describe for me layout and purpose of controlling implements. And do so quickly and in detail.”

  For the next four days Achiever was constantly drilling Geoffrey in how to use the ship’s controls in the unlikely event that he ever did get his hands on them. Stan eavesdropped on as much of it as he could, trying to relate what Achiever was talking about to his memory of their old Five. More complicated, sure, he thought. But not hopelessly so.

  Then, on the fourth day, Geoffrey began the climb.

  Every person in the compound—human, Heechee, Old One—was watching. As Geoffrey at last stood up and began that final run across the rocks at the top of the mountain, Stan, for one moment, allowed himself a dizzying feeling of hope…

  Blighted, of course. As with Achiever, Geoffrey’s arms suddenly flew wildly about. He dropped to the ground and did not move.

  The handling machines had him halfway down the slope before Stan and Grace Nkroma and the others could reach him. It was too late. “He’s dead,” Grace said, straightening up. “That does it.”

  Achiever bobbed his head. “All greatly unfortunate,” he said, “but next time—”

  Grace gave him a look between sorrow and rage. “There won’t be a next time! Not ever!” she snapped. “That’s over!”

  III

  Then, for a time, things began to look a little better for the castaways. Not actually good, no. But not quite as bad.

  The first sign came after Wan’s visits to his Old Ones had dwindled almost to nothing. Perhaps that was what made the simulations a little braver. When one of the handling machines appeared with something on its back the captives found it was a gift for them.

  What kind of a gift was another question. “Is that a school desk?” Grace asked.

  “I think it’s the kind the Heechee use sometimes. It’s got one of those flowerpot things on the back.”

  “So what does it do?”

  Though Stan and the other humans puzzled over the desk, its secrets remained unlearned until Achiever turned up. “Oh, how fractionally witted you all are,” he remarked, and Stan was reminded that, although Heechee didn’t smile very well, their sneer was nearly perfect. “Simply step back. Farther. Now, you see.” When he twiddled with something under the ledge of the desk there was a faint click and a nearly silent hiss as three racks of prayer fans rolled themselves out from storage. Achiever glanced at them and saw no reason to alter his look of disdain. “How outmoded! Simply resembling those of my childhood or somewhat more recent, before adoption of faster, smaller, more capacious recording systems invented Outside. However, may be of use. You are familiar with method for same?”

  They were. Grace especially; before Achiever had finished speaking she had already picked a fan at random and slipped it into the receptacle. An image at once sprang into light. Image of what, though?—poster, advertising sign, title page of a book? They all crowed around to study it, and Estrella was the first to speak. “It’s printing,” she said.

  “But not English printing,” Stan added, his mouth ajar in concentration. “I think—yeah, maybe it’s Russian. There was this Russian embassy kid in school with me and he had magazines that looked like this. He tried to teach me the alphabet…” He was tracing some of the letters with a finger. “I think that’s a T…and an O…that next thing is an L…the C is an S…another T and an O—Oh, cripes,” he said, suddenly grinning. “You know what we’ve got here? I think it’s probably the Russian-language works of Leo Tolstoy.”

  Estrella wrinkled her nose. “And how are we going to read them, would you say?”

  Stan would not be discouraged. “There are lots of other fans. Let’s look!”

  There were indeed lots of others, twenty-two by count. Fifteen unfortunately were in the same undecipherable Russian, but seven were more useful.

  Whichever of Wan’s long-ago organic servitors had assembled them, she—it had to have been a she—had obviously been young, lonely and foreign-born. The Russian-language fans were—well, Russian. Stan concluded, by his best attempt at phonetic reconstruction, that a wide spectrum of Russian literature was represented, though the only other author he was reasonably sure of identifying was Solzhenitsyn. Some were even poetry, or looked that way in the manner they were set on their pages. Some were not books at all: they were ballet performances (beautiful), or plays (as incomprehensible as the texts), or musical numbers (splendid, at least where nobody was singing in Russian).

  The whole camp, a few of the Old Ones included, was watching some sort of incomprehensible musical thing when DeVon Washington popped up, smiling, pleased with himself for having thought of such a clever gift. No, he admitted, the fans weren’t actually his—weren’t anybody’s, really, because they had been left behind by one of Wan’s long-ago organic concubines.

  Which made Grace Nkroma look up. “What else did she leave?” she demanded.

  Washington held up a finger, flicked out of existence for a moment and returned. “This is what we’ve got,” he said, and began to recite a catalogue of available leftover goods. There wasn’t anything really useful. No food or clothing; everything of that sort had long since rotted away. Most ceramics had survived pretty well, though, and so of course had everything made of the nearly indestructible Heechee metal. So when Washington’s next load of gifts arrived, Estrella had a mirror that not only reflected well but radiated a faint blue glow, and everyone in the compound had teacups to drink their water out of, though of course no tea.

  IV

  There were many things Stan missed, in this dismal corner of the universe, but none much more than Stork. He missed his daily viewing of his child. He saw that Estrella’s belly was getting a little rounder every day, and he listened to her tell about all the little kicks and twitches she felt—but, even when he put his hand on her, he couldn’t feel them. He supposed that by now the tiny thing might have changed in wonderful ways, actual features, usable limbs, all sorts of things he could have seen for himself.

  But then, while they were having their before-bed dip in the lake he saw something that even Stork wouldn’t have shown him. He was staring at her gently rounded midsection. “Hey! What happened to your belly button?”

  She laughed at him. “You just noticed? Right, I used to be an insy and now I’m an outsy. That’s what happens when you’re pregnant. The baby’s growing. Like babies do.” She tossed the last of her laundered garments on the narrow beach to dry. “But don’t worry,” she told him. “I’m still pretty spry for an almost mom. Let’s race back to the bedroll to warm up.”

  They did warm up, actually very enjoyably, but then Stan lay next to the sleeping Estrella, wide awake, staring up at Arabella’s unfamiliar stars, thinking about the morrow. It was not a happy thought because after tomorrow there would be another tomorrow, and another. And some time, after all those tomorrows had passed, would come an inescapable today, the today when Estrella would come to term, and the only person around to help her through childbirth would be the veterinarian, Grace Nkroma.

  The next morning, the first minute he could get away from Estrella herself, Stan sought out Grace Nkroma. When he began to tell her his worries she didn’t provide much comforting. “For God’s sake, buck up!” she ordered. “She’ll be all right. I know what I’m doing.”

  Stan gave her a ferocious look. “You? What makes you think you can handle Estrella having a baby?”

  “Well, let’s see. I got my Doctor of Veterinary Medicine in Johannesburg and then I had two years with the Bureau of Game in Nairobi, mostly on breeding programs, before this job with the Old Ones came al
ong.”

  “Game! You’re talking about animals!”

  Grace’s expression froze. “The Old Ones are animals, all right. Just like you and I are animals. The kind of animals they are is called primates. Same as you and me. How much difference do you think there is between one primate and another?”

  “Yeah, but have you ever actually done a childbirth?”

  Grace sounded exasperated. “Sure. Shelly had twins right after I got there. You’ve seen them running around, haven’t you? There was no problem.”

  “And how did you prepare her for the birth?”

  Grace regarded him with annoyance, then with the kind of look that conceded a point made by the other debater. “I loaded Shelly into the ultralight and flew her into Nairobi for ultrasounds, is all. Okay, we don’t have any of that stuff. I’ll just have to get along without it.” She turned away, then back. Her voice softened. “Listen, there’s every chance she’ll be all right.”

  “And if something goes wrong?” A shrug. “You know what I wish? I wish I had one of those what-to-do books.”

  “And what kind of books are those?”

  Stan turned defensive. “I saw one once. One of the, ah, girls who lived near us in Istanbul had it. It was in Turkish, actually, but that didn’t matter. When Tan and I sneaked it once all we were looking for was dirty pictures. There weren’t any, though.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Grace said, her annoyance no longer faint. “Take a good look around. I don’t have one of those books. I don’t have any equipment, either. All I have is what I know, and if that isn’t good enough—If that isn’t good enough—” Her voice trailed off. She was silent for a moment. Then in a different tone, “Never mind that, Stan. She’s healthy. I don’t anticipate any big problem. Just make sure she gets food and rest and you don’t aggravate her too much. I think we’ll be fine.”

  Grace’s reassurances didn’t reassure Stan. He couldn’t get the worry out of his mind, and couldn’t help talking to everyone who would listen about the problem—when Estrella wasn’t nearby, that is. It didn’t take long for them to get tired of the subject, though. He began on Wan’s people.

  DeVon Washington showed some tolerance for the discussion. His patience wasn’t endless, though, and when Washington began to look as though he might flicker away at any moment Stan changed his tack. “Okay, DeVon, then tell me something else. What do you think are the chances that somebody will come to rescue us in the next month or so?”

  Washington was amused but patient. “Who would that somebody be?”

  “God, I don’t know. There must be some inhabited planets somewhere near here, mustn’t there?”

  Washington considered the question, shook his head. “Um…no. I don’t know much about it, but I don’t think so. The way I heard it there are only a few inhabited planets left in the outside galaxy. Maybe a dozen, and most of them pretty nearly empty anyway—you know, religious cults that don’t believe in machine storage and so on. I heard Wan say once that there was less than a billion flesh-and-blood people left out here.”

  Stan was taken aback. “I had no idea. What about machine-stored?”

  “Oh, sure, there’s plenty of them out there, but they wouldn’t help you. They don’t care a bit for anyone but themselves. Can you blame them? You know what it’s like to be machine-stored? When you own your own works, I mean, so you can do anything you like, with anybody you like, as long as you like? Hell, I can’t wait for Wan to turn me loose.”

  Stan said stoutly, “Then somebody will come after us from the Core.”

  Washington gave him a look of wide-eyed surprise. “From the Core? How could they?—oh, maybe you didn’t know!”

  “Know what?” Stan said, afraid to ask the question because he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what the answer would be.

  It was as bad as he feared. Worse. “That star,” Washington said. “It’s going to explode. Honest. Never mind what Wan said. Letting people he hates get away with anything isn’t his way. He left orders. Give us enough time to get clear out into the galaxy, he said. Then blow the sucker up.”

  The first thing any one of the captives did when they heard Stan’s news was to deny it. “Jesus, Stan, can’t you see that’s just some of Wan’s crap to make us suffer more?” Or just, “You’re crazy.” But then they began third-degreeing each of the simulations from Wan’s retinue, every chance they got. And then, when it finally sank in, they just stopped talking about it at all. Because what was the use?

  They didn’t stop thinking about it, though. Long after Estrella had gone to sleep, Stan lay awake, thinking, until he heard the sound of one of the handling machines coming, then going away again, heard no sound of anyone else getting up to see what the machine had left, and dismissed it from his mind until he had to get up to pee.

  It was, he thought, pretty nearly time to fill in this slit trench and start a new one. Wondering if some of the Old Ones could be taught to dig a latrine, he was strolling back under the stars when he caught sight of what the machines had left. It was a simple record fan, set down next to the desk, on top of a sheet of blue-glowing Heechee metal so that it was conspicuous in the dark.

  Estrella was still sound asleep, her cheek on her two joined hands and very faintly snoring. He debated waking her up to see. Curiosity won out. He juggled the fan into the flower-holder receptacle as he had been taught, and at once a picture sprang up.

  What he had there, he discovered, was an actual book. A book that was in the English language, perhaps once the property of one of Wan’s organic lovers, back when they were all still organic. And its title was From Zero to Thirty-nine: The Weeks of a Pregnancy.

  It was the work he had longed for, the gift of one of Wan’s people. Which one Stan could not guess, but whoever it was had earned a deep gratitude. He couldn’t wait until morning to dip into it.

  His intention was to read it from the beginning, but as he scrolled through the pages it became evident that the beginning dealt with things that had already happened. Trying to read about them made his own eyelids droop. He promised himself that one day quite soon he would read every word, but meanwhile he sped through the chapters. There was one for each week, and each chapter had a drawing of what the unborn child should look like at that point. The book was no Stork, of course. But it was a lot better than anything he had had before. He scrolled right through to the end of that part with pleasure.

  Then he turned to another page and the pleasure rapidly diminished. The next chapter was on the possibility of miscarriages.

  Stan was astonished to find how many things could cause a woman to lose her baby, from lupus (whatever that was) to congenital heart disease. As well as bacterial vaginosis (whatever that was), and even things like high fever and smoking (whatever that was.) Furthermore, the immune systems of some women might mistake the embryo for an invading microorganism, and do their best to destroy it. Some women might have a malformed uterus, or some sort of growth there, and that might be just as deadly.

  How could he tell if Estrella had any of those things? He couldn’t. Sigfrid might have been able to tell, or Dr. Kusmeroglu, but neither of them was present.

  He turned the book off and stared up at the unfamiliar stars in the night sky of Arabella. He was no longer at all sleepy. He was worried. It occurred to him that there was more to the book, possibly even some healing thing for it to say. He scrolled through the book again, looking for cheer.

  It wasn’t there.

  What he found was even worse than the chapter on miscarriages. It wasn’t just that a baby might be lost. It was more horrible by far. The baby might be born, but born as a monster. Born with two heads! Or born as a Cyclops, with a single great central eye. Or as a kind of preparation for a student course in anatomy, with the internal organs on the outside of the body; or with a tiny head that held no brain at all; or—

  Oh, there was no limit to the things that could go wrong! For instance, what about twins? They did not always turn ou
t to be a lovably cute pair. Sometimes what you got was two babies joined together at skull or spine. Or one twin so ravaged by the other’s hunger that it was born no bigger than a finger, sometimes as a tiny, hideous animalcule still attached to the larger twin.

  And even if none of those terrible disasters happened, what could occur if the baby simply took a little longer to be born? With no more than an extra week or two in the womb it could arrive with skin cracked or peeling, or thin and wrinkled, likely enough having moved its little bowels while still unborn, so that it was stained green with meconium, which it might well have inhaled…likely gasping for breath…likely born with a more difficult labor, and thus with the greater chance of the baby twisting itself into strangulation inside the coils of the umbilical cord.

  Stan raised his horrified eyes from the book because, two meters away, Estrella was stirring. He quickly turned the book off again, debated destroying it, but was too late. “Hon?” she said drowsily. “What are you doing?”

  “I had to pee,” he told her, desperately looking for a hiding place for the book.

  “Well, come back to bed,” she ordered.

  “In a minute.” The only place to put the book was in one of those little closets at the base of the desk. He shoved it in, hoping to find a better place in the morning, and slid into the sleeping bag next to her warm, soft body.

  It was becoming a tight fit, but she commanded, “Put your arms around me,” and he did, the two of them spooned together under the bright stars of no constellations Stan had ever seen before. Over the top of the mountain the sky was paling, the sun—whatever nameless sun that was—almost ready to rise.

  Estrella was asleep again already. Not Stan. Stan had lost any desire to sleep at all, his mind filled with thoughts about the woman next to him, and the growing organism in her belly, and how he was going to deal with such matters as the kind of pregnancy disorders he had been reading about, or indeed with simple childbirth and infant care, in this place where no baby had been born for thousands of years.