The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

What amazed Stan the most was how fast things happened in Achiever's ship. Only a moment after they heard the ultimatum he felt that little quiver that, so Achiever told him, meant they were spaceborne again. Moments later the simulated female named Sindi Something-or-other popped up right in the middle of the four captives. "Hi," she said. "I thought you'd like to know that we're on our way to—what do you call it?—One Moon Planet of Pale Yellow Star Fourteen. It'll be an hour or so before we get there, so you could take a nap if you wanted to. See you later." She winked out of existence, only to reappear almost immediately. "Forgot to tell you. Until we get everybody on board, you all have to stay right here." And when she was gone this time, she stayed gone.

Stan opened his mouth, but all that came out at first was, "Jesus." Then he recollected himself. "What's she talking about? Where can we get to that fast?"

Achiever gave him a moody look. "Can get most places, Stan. Recall my statement, this spacecraft come from Outside. New. Speedy. What I mean, goes like hell." He stared at the wall for a moment, then added, "Meaning is, nobody can catch us."

Maybe on purpose, maybe just because this coven of hijackers were new and unskilled at their trade, they had left the lookplates alive. Achiever got them going, and they showed the spacecraft landing on the planet. Stan watched in silence, hand in Estrella's hand, until she gasped and pointed. "Look," she commanded. One of the screens was displaying a rabble of ragged-looking bipeds that somewhat, but not very much, resembled human beings. They were being shepherded by some angry-looking humans.

"The Old Ones?" Stan more asked than said.

Achiever confirmed it glumly. "Meaning of this is this Wan has succeeded in purpose."

"Does that mean now he'll let us go?"

"Oh, Stan," Achiever moaned. "How foolishly you speak. This Wan will not ever let us go, for why should he?"

Stan was stubborn. "Maybe it doesn't matter what Wan wants, since he isn't here."

"Ah, additional foolish words! He is. We observed on lookplate while you slept, small message craft rendezvousing with self's ship here. Could only have been boarding of this Wan."

Estrella gave him an angry look. "Why do you make everything sound so bad?" she demanded.

Achiever gave a long, hissy sigh, but didn't answer. He simply pointed. The protohumans were climbing aboard the ship docilely enough—shaggy, bearded elderly ones, shaggy, bearded young adults, even fairly shaggy and beginning to be bearded children. Gender did not seem to make a difference. Most of them were carrying some kind of belonging, sometimes a spare kilt, a floppy rag thing that might have been considered a doll, packets of CHON-food, now and then a stick, a rock or a fistful of limp grasses. Their handlers were all black, and a lot less compliant. Futilely so; Stan saw one man lingering toward the back of the flock and then suddenly whirling to run away. At the first stride he threw up his hands, falling a sprawl.

That was when Stan saw that they were not the only ones on the screen. Behind them were three other humans, who looked less angry but more dangerous. One was a woman with two long blonde braids and a whip. Another woman was darker-skinned, also with a whip. Finally there was a man—with a whip—who was shouting angrily at the man on the ground, who struggled feebly, then managed to get up again. He meekly, if dourly, rejoined the others, rubbing his hips and elbows as though they were painful. Stan had no doubt they really were.

Achiever, striving with the lookplates, finally got an interior view on one of them. In the great entry chamber of the ship the new arrivals were milling around, the handlers seeming as puzzled as their charges. One of the black-skinned handlers was a woman who was doing something that Stan and the others couldn't follow, since what she was doing appeared to involve something on the same wall as their camera. Then it explained itself. The woman was picking varicolored packets of CHON-food from the wall and tossing them to the Old Ones. Achiever grunted and turned to their own dispenser. "Is not bad idea, this is not. Do you wish?" he asked, pulling similar packets out of their own dispenser for them.

Stan unwrapped one of them, frowning. "Now what? Are we going to take off for some other planet?"

Achiever made a sound as close to a human tsk-tsk as his nearly lip-less face would allow. "Have you no kinesthetic sense to any degree? Have you not felt takeoff already occurring?"

Stan opened his mouth to respond, but Estrella's hand was on his arm. Sulkily he subsided. The impulse to copy Achiever's attitude slowly dwindled ... and then was forgotten entirely, because one of those annoying simulations popped up again.

This time it was not the same woman. It wasn't a woman at all; it was a stocky, sallow-skinned man, and he took a moment to make sure he had everybody's attention before he spoke. "Hello," he said, his tone more like that of the host at a party than a villainous kidnaper. "My name is Raafat—Raafat Gerges, actually, but you can just call me Raafat. Now that we're on our way Wan says I can tell you that you're now free to move about the ship. You won't get that cattle-prod thing anymore—that is, you won't unless you try to enter the control chamber. That's still off limits. Not that you could do anything even if you were inside, because the controls are locked, but Wan doesn't want you to try. Talk to you later." And he was gone.

"Hey," Estrella said, sounding almost cheerful. "Things are getting a little better. Let's look around."

She was tugging Stan toward the door when he stopped short; sniffing. He wondered if a flock of goats had come aboard, or the ship's waste-disposal system was backing up, or—

Then he didn't have to wonder anymore, because one of the odor generators came ambling through the doorway, bearded, kilted and quite stinky, and for the first time in his life Stan was in the presence of an Old One.

One Old One smelled bad. Fifty-odd of them, in Stan's view, were close to life-threatening. Even their handlers seemed to prefer being in rooms where only a few of the Old Ones were present. Such rooms were hard to find. "We took care of them," one handler—his name was Yussuf something—told Stan, "but we never had to live with them. They stayed mainly outdoors. And they really do stink."

It wasn't just sweat that made the aroma, it was their cavalier disregard of toilet training. The Old Ones knew perfectly well what the Heechee sanitary slots were for. They had no objections to using them when they were quite handy. That is, no more than four or five meters from wherever the need struck one of them. Farther than that the Old Ones found it less troublesome to relieve themselves against any flat vertical surface, or to allow their other wastes simply to fall to the floor. Before the end of the first day, Stan and the others had learned well to watch where they stepped.

They were given the privilege of spending time, though not much time in any individual visit, with the famous Wan himself. It wasn't the humans or the Heechee pair he visited. It was definitely his Old Ones. On the other hand, his simulated presence didn't seem to move them one way or the other. They went right on eating those CHON-food packets, or aimlessly, if amiably, wandering.

They were not entirely on their own. The black people who had seemed to be shepherding the Old Ones were muttering to themselves and pointing to the low Heechee ceilings; the males had to keep their heads bowed to keep from scraping against them, and even the women missed by not much more than a centimeter or two. They nodded to Stan and the others, but their main concern was the Old Ones. They walked among them, patting them, murmuring to them.

And then, without warning, the entire ship abruptly filled with fire-bright motes of light, white, red, yellow, blue.

Stan threw his arm around Estrella to protect her against whatever might be threatening. "What's that?" he demanded, almost angry, mostly apprehensive.

Achiever had not lost his ability to sneer. "What thing could this that possibly be, I am asked. One thing only, I inform you. A disrupter of order has been put into service and we, accordingly, have transited what you call a Schwarzschild. Do you fail still to take my meaning? I put it more simply still. We are Outside. We have now totally departed the Core."

II

As time passed, the smell of the Old Ones got worse. Now and then the handlers would make some attempt to pick up their droppings, but appeared to be too distressed to do a proper job. Achiever didn't even try, though he directed Salt to do so and she did her game best. Stan wouldn't let Estrella do that kind of work—who knew what pathogens the Old Ones might carry, or what those might do to the baby? They attacked the problem from a different angle. Along with the herders they tried to encourage the Old Ones who looked ready for it to use the sanitary slots. Some did. Not enough, though, and with fifty-some Old One metabolisms continually turning food into waste products they were losing the battle.

The head handler was a woman named Grace Nkroma, not at all domitable and pretty thoroughly pissed off. She did her best to keep her helpers busy, but it was a losing game. "You can't blame them," she told Stan and Estrella. "Two weeks ago we were in Kenya, fat and happy and thinking we were going to stay there until retirement. Didn't happen that way. After Wan swiped a bunch of the Old Ones, somebody decided they'd be safer in the Core. They packed all of us up, except for a couple of my handlers that were on leave, and next thing we knew we were on our way to this What-Do-You-Call-It Planet of the What's-It Star, and do you have any idea what that was like? Nothing was ready for us! We had a CHON-food machine, and a kind of off-and-on fountain for drinking water and that was it! No rooms for the staff to live in. Not even tents; we had sleeping bags and that was all there was. No toilets. You can't be too hard on the Old Ones for peeing and pooping all over the place, because that's all they had. Talk about bad planning!' And talk about it she did, and kept on talking about it. Estrella did her best to be a sympathetic listener. Stan only wished she would shut up.

Then there were the simulations. Sometimes it was the pretty girl named Sindi, or the Egyptian, Raafat. Quite often it was Wan himself, chuckling with pleasure as he moved among the Old Ones, cooing at them, singing to them in a horrible tuneless voice, telling them stories about the ways in which the great exterior world of humans and Heechee was set on cheating and destroying them all. Of course, Wan couldn't physically touch the Old Ones, nor they him. Stan couldn't touch Wan either, which he deeply regretted. He would have enjoyed punching out the man who had stolen them from their lives, and showed no sign of letting them go back home.

Estrella, curled up in his arms as they got ready for sleep, turned to face him long enough to ask, "What do you think, hon? Are we ever going to get out of this?"

"Hell, yes," he said stoutly. But even as he said it he was pretty sure it was a lie.

The handlers were openly mourning for the loss of the places and people they might never see again. ("That Nairobi! That's a twenty-four-hour town, all right! All the action you could want—and cheap, too!") They were on terms of easy cameraderie with their charges, calling each of them by name. But the handlers were most interested in Salt and Achiever, who were of a different species. "Oh, sure," the handler named Jared told Stan, "we saw Heechee before, now and then, when they came to look at the Old Ones, and then naturally when we came to the Core we saw plenty. But this is the first time we lived with them."

That kind of attention brought Achiever no joy. He spent almost all his waking hours working the ship's lookplates, dispatching Salt to bring his meals. For nearly two days Stan saw little of him, until one of the Old Ones ambled, or tried to amble, into the control room and was shock-whipped back outside. Achiever popped his head outside to see what all the screaming was about, and caught sight of Stan. "You come on the hell here," he invited. "I possess a thing to show you."

It turned out to be the image of a planet, as blue and white as any other habitable planet anywhere. It was about the size of a grapefruit on the screen and growing perceptibly larger. "Our destination," he declared, flapping his bony fingers at the picture. "I am quite entirely confident that this is to be the case, as no other planetary object has appeared."

"But—" Stan said, "but—" thinking of the endless days and weeks that had taken Estrella and himself to reach the Core in the first place— "but are we there already? So fast? It's only been a couple of days."

"Adequate time for this journey," Achiever declared. "No. No doubt exists. This is quite speedy spacecraft, and we are here. Object in look-plate is to be new home for you, for quite some time almost certainly, perhaps indeed for always."

III

When they arrived on the planet, everybody piled out of the spacecraft at once, humans and Heechee and Old Ones all hurried along by the electronic whips and shouted orders of Wan's invisible crew.

What Stan saw when he caught his balance was a patch of tangled, lush greenery the size of a football field, treed around the edges, with a friendly little lake at the far side. In one direction was a mountainside, rather bleak, bearing a handful of buildings—or rather, Stan corrected himself, all that was left of some ancient buildings that now were in ruins. A gentle rain was falling. The air was not unpleasantly cool. And—Stan inhaled deeply and with unexpected pleasure—it smelled faintly of trees and grass and more distant vegetable odors, and not at all of the Old Ones.

That was a big plus as tar as Stan was concerned, but it was looking a lot like the only one. Moments after the last Old One shambled wincingly out of the ship, bellowing and waving its hands to protect itself from the unseen lash, the ship's ports closed. With only the faintest of shrill whines, it lifted itself off the greenery. It rotated a quarter-turn on its axis, then slid swiftly up and almost out of sight along the mountainside. A moment later it reappeared, setting down on the very peak. And there it stayed, silent and unmoving.

Then everybody began trying to figure out what to do in this place they had not chosen.

The first thing Stan discovered, Grace Nkroma right behind him, was that they did have food. There was a pyramidal structure by the lake that churned out packets of CHON-food from one side and clear, cold water from another. "Good," Grace said, and raised her voice. "Yussuf, get a couple of the others and start passing these out to the Old Ones to keep them quiet." And to Stan, "What are those huts?"

He hadn't seen them before, a dozen of them or so, beehive-shaped and made, as far as he could tell from here, out of clay and pebbles. There was one entrance to each, presumably a door, and nothing at all like a window. "They don't look very comfortable," he said.

"At least you could get Estrella out of the rain," Nkroma pointed out.

That was true enough. Annoyed because he hadn't thought of it himself, Stan took Estrella's arm to help her toward the shelter. She was having none of that. "Oh, Stan," she said, "don't you think I can walk over there by myself? Anyway—Oh!" she said, stopping short.

An elderly man, or a simulation of one, had appeared directly in front of them. He was wearing what looked like something that had been donated to some undemanding charity. The man himself didn't look much better. "Excuse me," he said politely, barring their way. "These places are for the Old Ones, not you."

Stan scowled at him, knowing perfectly well that he could push right through that intangible figure, holding back because of the unknown, but possibly very unpleasant, consequences. "And who the hell are you?" he demanded.

"I'm Horace Packer. Wan's orders were to make our guests, the Old Ones, as comfortable as possible. I don't have any orders like that for you."