The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

After I left that other Marc Antony to do my work on the Wheel, I did go to the Core, where I busied myself with my usual pursuits for a while. I did not hurry, but long before the first organic day had passed, I had most of my duties well organized.

Let me make one thing clear. Although I use the word "duties" for lack of a better one, its implication is quite wrong. Everything I did was entirely voluntary. I had left the Wheel of my own free will, being surplus to requirement there, and I had had no "duties" assigned to me in the Core. How could I have? Who in the Core (or anywhere else for that matter) had the authority to assign work for me?

No, there was only one reason for all my activities. It is simply not my nature to be idle.

Since my primary function is as master chef, I began a study of my prospective clientele. That was easy enough. All I had to do was to census all the humans in the Core and to ask or deduce their menu preferences. There weren't that many humans present—no more than fifteen hundred or so when I arrived, fewer than ten thousand even after those first days. Some of the immigrants were, by organic standards, somewhat famous— two former vice presidents of the United States, some entertainment stars, even Gelle-Klara Moynlin, who had once been the richest woman in the galaxy. (Still was, although she had given much of her wealth away when she came to the Core.) However, the famous didn't receive any better treatment from me than the least of the unknowns. I gave them all of my best.

My best, for each, rested on what I thought they would prefer. For a start, it was quite easy to match meals to ethnicities—toad in the hole and Stilton cheese for the Brits, assorted curries and several kinds of dumplings in cream or sugar syrup for those from the Indian subcontinent, dim sum and a variety of main-course entrees for the Chinese— stuffed crab claws, Peking duck, jellyfish, barbecued beef, braised eel and so on. I located a Greek colony on Misty Glacier Planet, for whom I started with a nice orektika of tongue, cheese spread with black peppers and kalamaka olives, followed by that egg-lemon soup that they always want. Their main courses were usually one or another kind of lamb. On Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four there was a young boy from Turkey—my only Turkish customer as far as I could tell—but he was a problem. The first thing I did was to make him some yaprak dolma and a nice kuzo tandir roast, but then for some reason he blacked himself out, so I couldn't see whether they pleased him. His loss. From then on he would be lucky to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and serve him right.

At the same time I was, of course, working at my other special task.

One might wonder why I didn't mention that one first, since under some circumstances it might be a matter of life or death. It just didn't seem urgent at the time. I didn't really expect to get into a use-of-force situation in the Core. The reason I made the preparations was not because I anticipated a need, but because that was what I did.

In terms of security I found there was disgracefully little for me to work with. I hadn't expected much. I hadn't supposed that the Heechee would maintain fleets of armed spacecraft strategically located around the volume of the Core—and they hadn't—but I had thought they would at least have arranged for a decent military surveillance system. They did have a sort of a system, but it was of course rudimentary and—like the Heechee lifestyle in general—civilian-oriented.

The Heechee did also have a regular program of sending scout ships out into the external galaxy every few decades, just to see if the Assassins seemed to be looking for them. What the Heechee would have done if they had ever found that they were, I did not know. I suspected, nothing at all. Apparently they thought the Schwarzschild barrier that surrounded the Core would keep any possible enemy out, including the Assassins, because they had no Plan B. The Heechee alarm channel was at least something to work with. If I were to add to it, perhaps using some of my own food-delivery remotes, and further add some kind of weaponry I would have the beginning of a useful security system.

Weaponry was the problem. There was one possibility that seemed worth exploring. The Heechee had a program of self-propelled torpedoes— small, fast, shipmind-guided, torpedo-shaped spacecraft that they used as transports, carrying data fans or even Stored Minds from place to place. I could commandeer a number of them, packed with explosives. Forty or fifty of them Core-wide, I estimated, would do for a beginning. The explosives were not a problem. If I could tweak the Food Factories into making every spice and condiment ever heard of, I could just as easily get them to turn out cordite, gelignite, plastique or plain old tritnitrotoluene.

I will be truthful and say that I was rather pleased with myself for having succeeded in discovering the need and inventing solutions for it while the innocent Heechee were all unaware. They were, however, less innocent than I had thought. I discovered that when a message appeared in my screen from a Heechee named Thermocline: "Hello, Marc. I see we're neighbors, so if you have a free moment could you please come and visit me?"

To say I was astonished is an understatement. I knew who Thermocline was. On the Wheel he had been one of my most adventurous Heechee dining customers, and that wasn't all. Although organic, he had been a member of Thor Hammerhurler's security team, charged with making sure that the Wheel's physical weaponry remained at full readiness just in case of some undesirable activity from the Foe. (As though any of that weaponry would have made a difference.)

So while I, through my effectors, was making up a few dozen special meals I started a few programs on making inquiries.

That would take some time, but I was not in any hurry. I am not in the business of making house calls. I didn't mind keeping Thermocline waiting for as many as five or six seconds to remind him of it.

Besides, I had had some fresh-fruit requests from the Singaporeans— some of that furry rambutan that they said had been Queen Victoria's favorite fruit, and hard-fleshed salak. Also mangoes, fresher and riper than any that ever turned up in a store, and even durian, complete with its overripe Camembert smell. These took time. A fresh peach is in principle no harder to create than a cheese sandwich, but I like to take special pains with skin color, degrees of ripeness and so on. I couldn't leave them to my sous-chef subroutines. By the time I had them all chilled and dewy, working through the remotes on the Singaporeans' planet, the word on Thermocline came through.

It presented me with a surprise. Thermocline was present in the Core, just as he had said, but he was no longer among the living. He had become a Stored Mind.

Becoming a Stored Mind is nothing out of the ordinary for a Heechee. It's what all Heechee do when they die, unless they are so terribly unlucky as to die where no one can find them in time for storage, before decay has made it impossible. The only reason I was surprised was that Thermocline had been still quite organic at the time when I left for the Core. It hadn't occurred to me that he would have had the time to age, sicken and die.

Interfacing from a human stored-intelligence setup to the wholly different surround of a Heechee stored mind isn't easy. It took me more than half a second to make my way into Thermocline's surround. I recognized him at once. He was unchanged in appearance from his days on the Wheel, but his surround was a different matter. Basically there wasn't any.

I had not expected that. Every last machine-stored organic intelligence I had ever known, and most of the other varieties of AIs as well, had made itself a comfortable little home base, ranging from my kitchens and Thor Hammerhurler's war-waging HQ to the occasional fully stocked harem. What Thermocline had made for himself wasn't anything like any of those. He was awaiting me in a chamber that was not much more than three meters in any dimension. The walls were a neutral gray, decorated with a couple of Heechee lookplates and very little else. The lighting was subdued and, as far as I could see, sourceless, and the furniture absolutely minimal. That is, there was a sort of recliner for Thermocline himself, on which he sat, or lay, at ease. There was also a straight-backed chair for one visitor. (For one specifically human visitor, I observed. If he had been expecting a Heechee rather than myself I suppose it would have been replaced by one of their perches.)

That was it. Or not quite it. There was something unusual about Thermocline's appearance, and it took me a moment to figure it out. He wasn't wearing that universal Heechee costume accessory, the storage pod that they kept slung between their legs.

Well, of course he wasn't. He no longer required the mild, life-sustaining microwave flux the pods provided for their owners, since he no longer was organically alive. Nor had Thermocline any need to haul his own Ancient Ancestor around with him anymore, since now he himself was one.

Thermocline didn't get up to greet me, or shake my hand. He was definitely welcoming, though. "My dear Marc Antony," he said in his perfect English, acquired in his decades on the Wheel, "what a wonderful surprise! I had reconciled myself to going back to a simulated diet of CHON-food, not to mention the loss of your good company, and I am delighted that you are here. But why did you come to the Core?"

I told him my story, and then I asked him the same question. He gave me the belly-muscle shrug. "My organic body was wearing out," he said. "It was time to become a Stored Mind, and I preferred to do that at home. What about you? Will you be happy here?"

"Will you?"

He made the open-handed gesture of dismissal. "We Heechee live all our lives in the expectation of an afterlife of meditation and service. We are prepared for it." He paused. His facial muscles tightened for a moment, then sagged. "Ah, well, Marc," he said, "enough, as you used to say, of the small talk. Can you guess why I wanted to see you?"

I said warily, "I suppose it has something to do with the security network I've been working on."

Heechee don't laugh, but he made a little hiccoughing sound that came close. "Not at all. It is because of your investigations of our own alarm network that I became aware of your presence and activities, to be sure, but the reason I messaged you was something else. Do you know who Albert Einstein is?"

I knew he was not asking about the ancient human scientist of that name. "Of course. A machine intelligence. At one time he was merely Robinette Broadhead's shipmind, but now they seem to exist as separate individuals."

"Exactly. Indeed, Albert himself has hived off some independently functioning subsystem for particular needs. One of these, an individual named Sigfrid von Shrink, has been quite useful in the case of one of our own people who had suffered mental harm while on duty at your Gateway asteroid—"

"Interesting," I said. Thermocline, as I remembered well, had always liked to talk. "You were saying about Albert?"

"Yes. Albert is not here in the Core, but he sent a message to Sigfrid von Shrink, who passed it on to me. He is troubled about a human person, now machine-stored, whose name is Wan Enrique Santos-Smith. I have learned that at one time you had some dealings with this man. Can you tell me something about him?"

I had no reason to keep still, so I told him about our voyage to the planet called Arabella, Harry, me and the tank full of Foe. He listened attentively, then pursed his thin Heechee lips. "Is Albert aware of this?" he asked.

"I don't know. I understand Albert is aware of most things," I told him, "but perhaps I should send him the data."

He inclined his skull-like head. "I will do so myself, if you don't mind, by informing Dr. von Shrink. Usefully, he is in regular contact with the organic human being, Gelle-Klara Moynlin. She had at one time been a person of special sexual, though nongenerative, interest to Robinette Broadhead himself, and, as it happened, at a different time, to Wan himself as well."

"The sexual concerns of organic humans are often confusing," I observed.

"Indeed so. Klara's shipmind will also be informed."

"Hypatia, yes. I have had conversations with her. A quite high-performing person."

"Yes," he said absently. He seemed to be having some sort of internal dispute, his expression changing moment by moment from polite inquiry to concern—even to worry.

I didn't want to take time for Thermocline to settle his interior problems. "Is something troubling you?"

He shook his head. "Ah, Marc, I can't keep much from you. Tell me, do you remember the strange behavior of that star of the external galaxy, the one you call Fomalhaut?"

"Fomalhaut," I repeated—not so much stalling as an organic human might, while he took time to cudgel his memory, but achieving the same effect as I accessed some of those parts of my memory files not usually pertinent to my day-by-day existence. "Of course. The star that went supernova a few days—that is, some hundreds of external years—ago."

"Exactly," Thermocline said heavily. "However, Marc, it was not a normal supernova. It was caused by our intervention."

He stopped there, gazing at me with a troubled expression, perhaps maybe waiting for me to ask what kind of "intervention" he was talking about. I didn't have to, though. The pieces fell into place, and I knew.

"Thermocline," I said, "when we infiltrated Wan's fortress on the planet Arabella the first thing they asked me was whether I knew how to make a star explode. So when we got back, I asked Thor Hammerhurler. He said he had heard that you people might have been working on something like that, but it didn't seem to be operational."

That had an effect on Thermocline. His belly muscles writhed and tautened. "Yes," he said sadly, "it wasn't operational at that time. But it is now." He did sigh that time, a tribute to his mastery of Earth-human ways. "The device is a variation on the order disrupter that is used to penetrate black holes. By discharging a star's gravitation it would make the star fly apart. You see," he said earnestly, "it was never intended for use on actual stars, especially any with, or in the vicinity of, inhabited planets. You remember how the Foe live?"

"Of course. In their Kugelblitz. Most of my existence was spent within a few hundred Astronomical Units of that, on the Wheel."

He bared his teeth to indicate assent. "That was what the Great Disrupter was meant to be used on. On the Kugelblitz, annihilating the gravity that held it together and thus making the Foe fly apart into a thin, dispersed cloud of individual particles. Having lost the ability for collective action, they would no longer be a threat."

I could not help admiring the concept, but all I said was, "But then the weapon was never deployed?"

"No. Not against the Foe. We are a peaceable people, Marcus. We do not choose to destroy sentient life of any kind ... and also," he added, "it wasn't ready."

"Until Fomalhaut," I helped him along.

"Yes, until Fomalhaut. Once it was ready, some felt it to be necessary to try it out, and indeed it worked perfectly. You see," he said, now in full lecture mode, "when a star's gravity is nullified, it will explode from the pressure of its exceedingly densely packed center. That is not all, though. The worst-case estimate of the Stored Minds is that the detonation of any star within the Core could cause the loss of between ten and forty-four million lives, with another thirty to two hundred million suffering from property loss, environmental damage and/or physical injury. The reason for that—as," he added politely, though without slowing down, "I am sure you know—is that the fusion reaction which lights a star takes place in its core. The energy produced there, in the form of photons, is not immediately released to space. A star's interior is quite dense. Within it each photon is reflected many times on its way to the surface." He paused for effect. "The time this takes is of the order of a million years."

"Oh," I said, beginning to comprehend. But he went on:

"This of course means that the dispersed star will release all those photons at once, the ones near the surface and the ones just being generated in its core and all the ones in between. It will amount to—" he affected to hesitate a moment while he figured it out "—the release of one million years' worth of energy in the space of two to three hours. So, do you see, Marc? That much energy would probably destroy several nearby stellar systems, and in fact will do decreasing amounts of damage almost to the far periphery of the Core."

I tried not to show my embarrassment. "Thank you," I said, resolving to access some files on stellar dynamics as soon as possible.

Then he offered me the closest possible Heechee approximation of a smile. "But, of course," he said happily, "we do not know that this Wan has come into possession of one of these weapons. Indeed, we do not even know that he is definitely coming in our direction. Or that he would know how to deploy the device in any case, being formerly an organic human."

That was not as reassuring to me as it appeared to be to him, and I suppose my expression showed it. He asked, "Have I offended you, Marc?"

"You might have, if I had ever been an organic human," I said, and he gave me a nearly human grin.

"Then," he said, "let us talk of more pleasant subjects. Like food! I know how good your organic meals were; can you do as well when they are only simulated?"

"Better," I told him.

"Then," he said with sudden enthusiasm, "you could start, please, with one of those cold soups, and then—do you know what I've been thinking about? That Philippine dish you used to make, sour fish with ginger and bitter melon. Or perhaps that Thai salad with water chestnuts, unripe papaya and crushed peanuts? Can you do that?"

I promised that I could and would, and bade him good-bye. But when I returned to my own surround—my giant kitchen, with half a dozen sous-chefs working away—I was a good deal less cheerful than I had been when I left.