The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

At one split second in time Orbis McClune, or whatever was left of Orbis McClune, discovered that he no longer belonged to himself. He had become the property of that unpleasant lunatic, Wan Santos-Smith. Then— not after a moment, not separated by any time at all but immediately, seamlessly at once—his whole environment had inexplicably changed.

Wan wasn't there anymore. Now Orbis was in a two-window office with paintings on the walls, deep-pile carpet underfoot and a highly improbable vista of giant redwood trees showing through those make-believe windows. Instead of Wan, Orbis was with a harried-seeming, but quite attractive, young woman. You might even have said she was beautiful, if you liked that sort of heavily made-up look. She sat behind an apparently mahogany desk that held a data screen, a nameplate that said "Roz Borraly" and a vase with a single red rose. She was frowning at Orbis.

"It says your name is Orbis McClune and you're a Rev," she said, glancing at something in the air above him. "What's this Rev shit?"

Reprimanding her didn't seem worthwhile. He said only, "It means I'm a minister of the gospel."

"Huh," she said, looking displeased. "Well, what you got to do now, Mister Minister of the Gospel, is learn some stuff so you'll be useful to Wan when he gets ready to take care of those guys. You ever run a spaceship?"

"What 'guys' are you talking about?" Orbis asked, and quickly regretted it. The woman named Roz Borraly sighed, and moved no more than a finger. In a moment Orbis McClune was writhing under the very worst pain he had ever known: heat like incandescent ice that was flogging across his back, face, eyes and testicles, striking him at every point on his body—on his purely simulated but evidently quite hurtable body—where there was a pain nerve to feel it. Then it was over.

"See," she said conversationally, "the way it works around here, I do the asking, you do the answering. Did you?"

It took a moment for Orbis to collect himself enough to remember what she had asked. "Run a spaceship?" he managed to say, still gasping. "No. Never."

"At least you played spacewar games when you were a kid, though? Right?" When he shook his head she gave another sigh. "So tell me what it is that you can do—like, where'd you go to school?"

He answered her question, warily leaving nothing out. As he got from high school (no, he hadn't played any sports) through his two years in the community college (liberal arts, with a little history and one semester of introductory psychology) her face grew grimmer and grimmer. By the time he was describing his four years in the seminary she waved him to silence. "Christ," she said dismally, "what are we supposed to do with geeks like you?" She studied the notes on her screen without hope for a moment, then asked, "But you're from Illinois. What were you doing in California?"

He said promptly, "I was doing the Lord's business! To tell sinners how they have offended Him. To reprove them for mixing with those instruments of the Antichrist, the Heechee. To teach them why they were singled out for His terrible punishment, and to beg them to repent and save their souls." He paused, not because he had nothing more to say on the subject but because the woman had suddenly begun making notes on the data-screen again.

She looked up irritably. "Don't stop. Say more about this punishment thing." And when he had done so, at length, she looked very nearly pleased. "Huh," she said. "Heart's in the right place, anyway. We'll talk more later, I guess."

And then she was gone—

—and then again, click-click, gone from one place and now in another, she was back, but wearing a different dress and a different hairstyle, and now not alone. Another woman was standing next to her. Not a pretty one this time. She seemed to be a bit older than McClune himself and she wore a baseball cap, with twenty-centimeter blonde braids hanging out of it on either side. The worst thing about her was her expression, an unpleasant mixture of anger and disdain. She gave Orbis a quick uninterested look and went back to studying the place they were in.

Which, actually, was worth looking at. All around them was a rose garden, where tables were laden with platters of fruits and meats and flagons of wine. Its rosebushes rose taller than Orbis McClune, and surrounded them so that he could form no guess about how large a space they were in.

He could see, however, that that lavish open space didn't have much furniture. The mahogany desk was back, though its single red rose had become a spray of two or three dozen. The desk also bore a screen, with a display of a bunch of stars on it, and a tall mahogany cabinet, doors closed. And there was a revolving chair at the desk for its occupant to sit in. The only other chair was better described as a throne, vacant but more handsome than any chair Orbis had ever seen before. It seemed to be made of ebony; its seat was upholstered in what looked like cloth of gold. Orbis did not believe for one moment that it was intended either for him or for the woman with the braids to sit on, which meant that they were intended to stand.

The woman at the desk—what was her name? Roz something, Orbis thought—looked up at him. "I guess I better introduce you," she said. "This"—nodding toward the woman with the braids—"is Phrygia Todd. She's going to be our pilot. Not," she added, finally offering a smile, "of this crummy little torpedo ship, of course. DeVon Washington can handle that. Wan is providing a much bigger one for our mission."

Automatically Orbis held out a hand to Phrygia Todd. She seemed to think it over but then decided to shake it. He didn't take offense, though. He was preoccupied with what Roz Borraly had said. What "mission"? He was so busy turning that over in his mind that it took him a moment to register the other thing. "This ship!" Was he on a spacecraft? Was the man who had had to pray his way onto an airplane now flying somewhere in space?

In a moment those questions were questions no longer, because the Roz Borraly woman was pointing at the screen. "That," she said, "is the place where they're hiding Wan's property that we're going to get back for him."

But what she said after that Orbis no longer heard, because the screen was changing, its view expanding. As the planet grew smaller, its sun had popped into view, bright and foreboding.

And not alone. At the edge of the screen another star had appeared— no, two other stars—no. There were half a dozen of them now, and suddenly interstellar space did not seem very spacious anymore.

Which, Orbis knew, could mean only one thing. Those stars were far too densely packed to be any part of the real galaxy. Whatever they were going to be doing, he realized, they were going to be doing it inside the Core.

Inside the Core. In the very place where lived those plague carriers of evil unspeakable, the damned and damnable Heechee themselves.

II

So shaken up was Orbis by this discovery that he hardly noticed when Borraly began again to talk. It wasn't until he heard her speaking his name that he looked up. She was staring at him in an unfriendly way, and her hand was worrisomely near something on her desk. "Sorry," he said at once. "You said?"

She pondered for a moment, then lifted her hand. "I said that you two can do our great friend and benefactor, Wan Santos-Smith, a service. You're gonna help him get some of the justice he's entitled to, finally, after all the ways he's been wronged." She cast a glance, Orbis thought it might have been a worried glance, at the throne. It was still empty, and she went on. "The good news," she said, flashing them the kind of smile that represented many hours of practice before a mirror, maybe even with an acting coach standing by—the kind of smile that Orbis McClune recognized with no trouble at all, since it was the same smile he had been presenting to an unworthy world all his life—"is that by helping Wan you'll help yourselves. Not just pay. There's more. Take a look at what's in that cabinet."

She didn't seem to touch any buttons or give any signs, but the carved wooden cabinet doors opened as she turned in that direction. What they revealed were shelves bearing a pair of those crystalline scroll things that some people called Heechee prayer fans.

"Recognize them?" she asked. "Right. Those are your works. They're the things all your data is stored in. If you had them yourselves you'd be your own boss, right? Well, you do a good job for Wan, and then they'll be yours. Forever," she added, flashing an encore of the same smile. She licked her lips, glancing again at the vacant throne. Then, the smile returning: "Any questions?"

Whether idle curiosity would be punished with one of those nerve whippings Orbis did not know, but he took the chance. "I'm just wondering what this property is that Wan's so anxious to get back."

The woman was abruptly solemn. I will answer that. You see," she said, "as a small child poor baby Wan was abandoned. Only the care and kindness of a small community of individuals made it possible for him to become the wise, just leader he is today. And what has happened to those individuals?" Her face was reddening with anger. "Robinette Broadhead and his gang of thugs kidnapped them! Took them out of their ancestral home and dumped them in some African jungle! Then, when Wan was able to rescue a few of them, Broadhead's accomplices moved them to the Core and did their best to hunt him down!" She stopped talking there, because the woman she had called Phrygia, the one with the braids, had jumped to her feet.

"Oh, wow!" she gasped. "Are you talking about the cavemen?"

Phrygia didn't say what she meant by that. She couldn't. She was contorted and screaming from the nerve whip that followed her injudicious remark.

But Orbis realized what she was talking about. The—what did you call them? The australopithecines. The soulless animals that, unbelievers claimed, were somehow the great grandparents of the human race.

It was for them that Wan was keeping Orbis McClune in this damnable state of life in death.

Beyond that Orbis couldn't think, because while Phrygia's screaming was still going on the woman, grim-faced, turned them both off—

—And back on, but this time in a place different still, and with a man he had never seen before. "Tell me why you hate the Heechee," he demanded....

And that was another awakening of very, very many of them, and nearly every one repeating something that had been done before.

First to last, Orbis McClune was in Wan's employ for, as nearly as he could calculate, somewhere between two and two thousand eternities. He didn't have many opportunities to brood about it. When he was turned off he was off. Completely. The length of such periods could have been microseconds or centuries—in the time of the real world outside—but to Orbis they were no time at all. It was the "waking" times that were both tedious and exhausting. Exhausting because most of them were sessions of intensive questioning, sometimes by that woman or that man, sometimes by some other of Wan's flunkies. Tedious because they went over and over the same ground. Did he really hate the Heechee? Did he hate them a lot? Would he be willing to do them some serious harm, even if that meant that some human beings should get harmed at the same time?

Always the same questions, or minor variations on them. Always the same answers from Orbis, too. Which meant, he thought, one of two possible things: either he was being vetted for some supremely important task. Or they were all loons.

He didn't have much time to think such thoughts, much less to speculate on what was going on. When he did have a moment—when, for instance, his interrogator paused in the questioning to confer with her screen—it was other thoughts that first crossed his mind. They were brief flashes of memory, fleeting, sometimes almost painful. Memories of the humans he had shared his last days with, up on the hills that bordered Waveland. Of the members of his old Rantoul congregation, a few of whom he hadn't really disliked very much. Of his childhood, some of which had been reasonably pleasant. Of his wife.

Of his wife, deceased and machine-stored and thus finally lost to him forever. Or at least lost for what had seemed forever to Orbis McClune, in those days before he had become machine-stored himself.

The next time Orbis awoke it was to a place that resembled a conference room, a fumed-oak table that was long enough for a score of people though only half that were seated at it.

One was Wan himself, relaxed and almost calm, elbows on the table and chin in his hands as he studied a data screen without looking at Orbis. The other person Orbis recognized was Phrygia Todd; the others were equally elderly, shabby, unprepossessing. (Not unlike Orbis himself, he thought.) They sat in uneasy silence while Roz Borraly pointed at things on the screen and whispered in Wan's ear.

Finally Wan peevishly pushed her aside. He looked around the table, making eye contact with each person, one by one. He didn't speak until he had completed the circle. Then he gave them all a great, heartwarming smile and said, "Welcome to you all! From now on you aren't my purchased employees anymore. Now you're gonna be my trusted allies, companions in my struggle against the damned dirty Heechee and their damned dirty Gateway accomplices. We're all in this together, and we'll all win!"

He went on from there, painting rosy pictures of the great rewards they would earn for helping in his crusade for justice, but Orbis had stopped listening. He didn't need to hear more. He knew it all ahead of time, had known what was coming ever since the moment that he saw that great, practiced-before-the-mirror smile that he himself had smiled at so many loathed human beings so many times before.

Most of Wan's oratory was denunciation of the Heechee. He hated them, Wan said. He blamed them for their vile gift of spaceflight, and blamed them for rotting the fiber of human spirit by their horrid Food Factories that ended hunger for all, even the unworthy. He blamed them, in short, for everything that was wrong with the age they lived in, of which, in both his view and Orbis's, there was plenty.

Nearly every word Wan spoke was one Orbis could have said himself. But how to ignore the fact that the man was obviously crazy? Now he was saying, "The individuals who make up my property are very dear to me. They took care of me when I was little, so I want to care for them now. Anyway, they're mine and I want them back."

Orbis stared at him. That really was Wan's stolen treasure? Some kind of creatures from the remote past, before God's gift of salvation? Orbis thought it extremely unlikely that they possessed souls, nearly certain that these might-be ancestors were not included in the general amnesty that followed Calvary.

Which meant that they were not really worth bothering about.

Orbis was shocked. It was one thing to hate the Heechee because they had profaned God's human world. It was another to work condign vengeance on them because they had kidnapped a handful of house pets.

As Wan, sweating and triumphant, concluded his lesson and turned back to his data screen, Orbis decided, he had been right in the first place. The man was a loon.

Even the looniest loco may ultimately wend toward a point. Wan finally reached his. "So here's where we come right down to it. You people aren't the only ones I've been recruiting, all this time. No. There were others, many, many others, but none that were worth more than being, like, house servants. You were the ones with the fire!" Orbis stole a look at the others. They did not seem afire to him. "Anyway, here are your assignments. Horace Packer!" A white-haired little man, looking as though he had long been homeless, raised one finger. "Sindi Gas—Gas—What is it, Sindi?"

A dark-skinned woman with a scarf over her head said, "Gaslakhpard. It's a perfectly normal name."

Wan shrugged. "If you say so. When we land you and Horace will supervise freeing of the Old Ones, along with—what is it, Raffy something or other? You Arab fellow?"

A small, muscular, Middle Eastern-looking man stood up. "I am Egyptian, not Arab. My name is Raafat Gerges."

"Whatever. You guys get the Old Ones onto the ship, right? You might have to knock them around a little bit, but that's all right. They're tough." The people at the foot of the table all responded with some sort of nod or hand movement, and then the only ones left were Orbis himself and the woman with the Dutch-girl braids.

On them Wan now turned one of those effulgent and meaningless smiles. "Now we come to our star players, the ones who are going to make sure nobody tries to interfere with saving the Old Ones. See," he said, so pleased with himself that he was almost doing a little dance, "we got them where they can't do a thing to stop us. If they try, well—" He paused to glance at Roz Borraly. "Is he on time?" he demanded.

"He's just waiting in orbit," she reported. "Here, I'll put it on the screen." In a moment the screen was displaying a rather unattractive ice-blue planet, circled by a largish moon. They all watched in silence for a moment. "It ought to be happening right about now," said Borraly, beginning to sound worried. "Any minute. Pretty soon.... Wow! There it is!"

On the screen that big moon had suddenly swelled, bloated, exploded in all directions. It was no longer a solid object, just an expanding sphere of particles.

Wan was grinning. "We did that," he bragged. "You wouldn't believe how much trouble it was to find the gadgets that did it, but it looks like they work. We blew that sucker up just to teach them a lesson because if anybody gives us any trouble when we do the rescue, why, we'll just blow up a whole big star and kill a few gazillion of them off."

He gave them a real grin this time, as he waited for applause. After a moment, Roz Borraly leading, he got some and returned to his subject. "You, Phrygia Todd! You're going to pilot this ship. You've been trained, right? You think you can do it?"

The woman with the braids shrugged. "Guess so."

Wan scowled at her. "You better more than just guess. So you, Phrygia, after we rescue the Old Ones you pilot us to where Orbis can take his little torpedo to what they call, let me see. Planetless Very Large White Very Hot Star. That's the one we're going to blow up—I mean threaten to." He paused for a moment, then went on. "All right. Then you take us to where we're going that they'll never find us, Phrygia. Then, Orbis, you orbit that star, close up, in your little ship, and you wait for orders from me. If I order it, zap, you blow the sucker up." He took a moment to applaud himself vigorously, his example followed at once by Roz Borraly and, a little more slowly and a lot less vigorously, by most of the others. Any questions?"

Orbis was about to ask one, but Phrygia Todd was ahead of him. "Why am I going to be the pilot? What happened to the guy that blew up the moon?"

Wan's face contorted in the direction of a frown. Orbis could see Todd's body involuntarily tensing up, ready for what might be coming. But Wan relaxed and gave them another of those overripe smiles. "That was Will Barendt," he said. "Too bad. His heart wasn't in it, you know, so I told him after he did this one job for me I'd release him from his contract." He shrugged modestly. "People say I'm too soft, but that's the way I saw it. So he put this torpedo on course and took off in the other one with one of the gadgets. Probably he's on his way to the saloons on Peggys Planet by now." Wan looked around to see if anyone was going to challenge what he said.

"He did the same thing with Ferdie Grossmutter after they blew up that Fomalhaut star," Roz Borraly put in loyally.

He scowled again. Then, "Anyway," he added, "what you want to remember, Orbis, is we really probably aren't going to need to detonate it, on account of once they see what happened to that moon nobody's going to take the chance of interfering. Got it? Everybody know their part?"

Orbis raised his hand. "I don't. How do I blow this star up?"

Wan gave him a leer. "Oh, Roz'll show you that. Probably she'll show you a few other things, too. I guess we're through here, so you can all go do what, you know, you now have the privilege to do. So long." And when he clapped his hand the shapes of Orbis's surroundings melted and flowed, the harsh white light softened, the table and chairs shrank into themselves and disappeared.

Orbis was in the garden again. He was standing before a table loaded with food and drink, and by his side was a wide, soft couch on which a woman sat. It was the same woman as always, Roz Borraly, but now differently dressed. She wore a nearly transparent gown. Her hair was down, and she was quite beautiful. "There you are, Orbis," she said. "I'm what you might call your pay in advance. What would you like to do with me?"

Inviting she was, but what she offered was not what interested Orbis McClune. "What about this bomb?" he demanded.

She gave him a winsome smile. "See," she said, "I'll show you all that, all right. But wouldn't you like to have some fun first?"

Artificial intelligences do not require food, drink, rest or sleep, and they certainly don't have to have sex. This is not to say, however, that they aren't capable of enjoying any of them when offered.

It wasn't the sex that appealed to Orbis, it was the food. He could not remember when he had last eaten—or simulated eating, to be more accurate, but either way it was something he missed and it hadn't happened for quite a while. He wasted no time before ravaging the loaded table, while the woman poured beverages for him. He waved the wine away but eagerly accepted the fruit juices, the cold, sweet milk, then the steaming coffee. They were delicious. It was by any measure the best experience he had had since the confounded statue had fallen on his head, but there was one troubling aspect to it, and that was the woman herself.

She hadn't contented herself with pouring his drinks and heaping his plate with goodies. She seemed always to be very close to him, always touching him—and not just with her hands, either; as she leaned over him her firm, perfectly shaped breast stroked his shoulder; her long hair caressed his face, and he was nearly sure she was breathing into his ear. "Please don't do that, Ms. Borraly," he said, moving half a meter away. "You're a very pretty girl, but—"

Orbis was not without residual courtesy, and he didn't know what to say after the "but" that wouldn't call her a whore. But she made that moot very quickly. "Thank you for saying that," she said in his ear. In fact she wasn't just breathing into his ear, he was now quite sure that she was nibbling at it with her soft, full lips. "I'm glad you think I'm pretty, but that's not all I am. I'm your little present from Wan. For the next 200 milliseconds you can do anything to me you like, for as long as you like." And while she was talking—whispering, really—she was changing position so that at the end they were face to face, lips to lips, and he broke away just as he felt the first warm, wet thrust of her tongue.

"Stop it!" he said sharply. "I am not a fornicator!"

She pulled her head a few centimeters away, regarding him. Her breath was warm and sweet on his face and her eyes puzzled. "Not ever?" she asked. "I mean, nobody's watching us, as far as I know."

"My God is watching us!" he said, voice as stern as the look on his face.

She leaned back, studying him. She sighed. "It's just too damn bad that the interesting ones are all gay," she said.

"I am not—" he began, but then stopped himself. Her opinion meant nothing to him, and there was no point in denying what he knew to be untrue. "Let's just get on with it," he said. "Tell me about the bomb."

She sighed, then waved a hand. The flower garden disappeared, and they were in what, Orbis realized, had to be the control room of a spaceship.

"All right," the woman said, sounding resigned. "You see that kind of gearshift thing there? Push it to one side, your torpedo turns that way. Push it the other and—right, you've got it. Now, you see that button by the screen?" Orbis did, all right; it was the size of his fist, red and labeled "button." "It isn't a real button. The toggle wasn't real either, because if they were how could you touch it? It's all what they call a servomodule, but if you press the button it'll work like it was real, all right. It'll blow up that star. Only—now pay attention to this part—don't press it unless Wan personally gives you the order, all right? You understand that?"

It didn't seem to be a rhetorical question, so Orbis said, "I do."

"Well, you damn better. Okay. So long...."

And that was all she said. Her voice was getting tinny, and her body swelled and bloated, while the laden table rose and swirled around him; and then he was in the pilot chamber of a different spacecraft, and the only person with him was the blonde-braids woman, Phrygia Todd. She sat uncomfortably on one of those Heechee perches, and she didn't speak.

Orbis made the effort. Holding out a hand to be shaken, he said, "Hi. I'm the Reverend Orbis McClune."

She looked up, ignoring the hand. "I know what your damn name is. Listen. Did you understand what will happen if you push that button?"

He frowned at her. "I just said I did. It'll destroy that star. Is that what you mean?"

"Yeah. That's what I mean. It will neutralize its gravity, which means—can you guess?"

"Make it explode?" he hazarded.

"Damn straight it will explode," she told him contemptuously. "Like the kind of explosion that will make everybody anywhere near it dead. Like it did Will Barendt when he blew up that moon—you didn't believe Wan was going to let him go free, did you? Like the two of us."

He was puzzled. "But we're dead already, really."

"Idiot. That's just our bodies. Remember, our works are going to be with us, and if this ship gets destroyed, as it will, what do you suppose is going to happen to them?" She nodded somberly. "So then we'll be really, really dead. Mr. Reverend McClune. So no mater what he says, unless you want to be permanently dead, don't push that button!"

He blinked at her. "You mean dead dead?"

"That's exactly what I mean. Totally dead. No more alive in any form dead. Meet your Maker dead. Past this mortal coil dead."

He gazed at her in silence for a moment. Then, "Oh," he said. "I see."