The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

In their first week on Arabella a couple of significant things happened. After two or three shivering nights on the bare ground, one morning a weird-looking machine with five spindly legs came rattling down over the rocks to their valley. If it had the power of speech, it didn't use it. All it did was deposit a load of sleeping bags in front of Stan, then back away and climb the hill again.

There were five of the bags. Enough for Stan and Estrella and for Grace Nkroma and her two helpers. There was none for Salt or Achiever. However, Stan and Estrella elected to double up in one bag, so that Salt and Achiever, whether they would have chosen it or not, could do the same with the other.

The other event wasn't as pleasant. Stan was not the only person whose thoughts were on the spacecraft so temptingly perched on the mountaintop, out of reach. After a few days Achiever could resist no longer. He was more than halfway up the mountainside before anyone noticed. He didn't get much farther than that. As he was gingerly picking his way through a belt of jagged rocks approaching the top he suddenly threw up his hands; his body jerked and twisted in improbable ways, and he fell to the ground.

Down below, everybody was shouting at once. It was Nkroma's assistant, Yussuf Pike, who first started up the hill after him. Stan dropped the hand he had been holding, gave Estrella a wild look, took a deep breath and was close behind.

It turned out that heroics were not needed. Suddenly a pair of the five-legged machines appeared from behind the crest of the hill. One loaded the unconscious Achiever onto the cargo flat atop the other, and they carried him back down.

He was unconscious, though writhing in pain. But not dead. Still, for the next couple of days he lay racked on his bedding, every limb and joint excruciatingly reminding him of his mistake.

All in all, by the end of their first month Stan and Estrella had learned more about their place of captivity, though not all of it was useful. They learned, for instance, that Wan would show up many times a day, moving affectionately among his Old Ones, and completely ignoring the humans. They learned that if they needed a bath, which they all quickly did, the little lake was the only place to get one. They learned that trying to get to the ship by climbing some other slope and coming at it from behind didn't work, because everywhere they tried, giant, jagged-edged rockslides made the mountain unclimbable. They learned that trying to subvert Wan's own people was doomed; the humans had nothing to offer that outweighed Wan's considerable capacity for punishment.

And yet, when Wan was with his Old Ones, he didn't seem so bad. He crooned to them. Whether the Old Ones enjoyed it very much was unclear. They were certainly aware of his presence, though not apparently much interested. Sometimes they would grunt back in response to his endearments. Mostly, though, they just ignored him.

"I bet he wishes he could scratch their tummies," Estrella observed, watching Wan's simulation murmur fondly to a couple of the Old Ones as they idly munched CHON-food in the shade of a giant tree.

Estrella pointed out, "At least this way he doesn't have to smell them." And suddenly sat erect, looking worriedly around, as a voice from nowhere asked, "Do they really smell bad? Smell like what?"

"Well," Stan began, a little startled but game, "it's kind of like—"

Estrella cut him off. "We don't like to talk to people we can't see," she said loftily. "Why don't you show yourself?"

A long pause. Then, hesitantly, "I better not. He's still here."

"What he?" Estrella demanded. "Are you talking about Wan?"

"Of course I'm talking about Wan. I don't know if he'd like the idea of me showing myself."

Stan was about to speak, but Estrella laid a hand on his arm. "All right, if you're afraid to be seen, at least tell us your name."

A pause longer still. Then, "Oh, all right. I'm Raafat Gerges. You can just call me Raafat. I'm the one who got you the sleeping bags. I would have thought"—the voice now sounding injured—"that you'd've been grateful."

"Oh, we are," Estrella assured him. "That was kind of you, even if you didn't give us enough to go around."

Another of those pauses. Then, the voice now sounding puzzled, "I saw what you did for those Heechee, but I don't know why."

"They're our friends," she explained.

That brought about the longest pause of all, as though Raafat Gerges was trying to digest that concept, but Estrella didn't wait him out. She stood up, looking around all the parts of the compound. "Raafat? See for yourself, Wan isn't there now. Why don't you let us see you?"

That took some thinking over, too, but then he said, "Okay," and appeared before them at the same moment.

Raafat Gerges was a sight worth waiting for. Not physically. He had black hair and a sallow complexion, not a spectacle to turn anyone's head. What he wore, on the other hand, was undeniably impressive: a snow-white tunic, jeweled bracelets, sandals studded with what looked like more jewels, and a headgear—you couldn't call it a hat—that looked something like a brimless stovepipe, though made of some sort of colorful fabric and studded with the most jewels yet.

He knew what a spectacle he was, too. He preened himself some more, explaining, "I'm Egyptian, you know. But I didn't want to look like just any old Egyptian, so Wan let me dress myself up a little." He struck an attitude. "I think it works well, don't you?"

Raafat Gerges was the first of their bashful visitors to show himself, but not the last. While they talked, one by one, others appeared—two women and a pair of remarkably muscled men. "When you get a chance to simulate a body for yourself," said one of them—he was velvety black and very tall—"you might as well do one that looks good. I'm DeVon Washington," he added, and the others in turn introduced themselves: a man with a shaved head and black, closely cropped beard, Khoa Yukman; a woman with almond skin, delicate little nose and masses of wavy blonde hair, Sindi Gaslakhpard; and another woman, also blonde, though a lot less sexy, with the name of Phrygia Todd.

The simulations gazed at the captives silently, seeming wary, until Estrella remembered her manners. "I'm Estrella Pancorbo,' she said. This is Stan—"

DeVon raised a hand. "We know your names," he told her. "You people also," he added to Grace Nkroma and some of the others as they began to gather around.

"Oh," Estrella said, and then ventured small talk. "Raafat's been very kind to us," she told them. "He got us sleeping bags—"

"We know," the blonde named Sindi said.

"Ah," Estrella said. She tried again. "We had some excitement when Achiever tried to get into—"

"—the spaceship," the blonde named Phrygia finished for her. "We saw it. Can we ask you something? What's the matter with your face?"

Years of getting used to the question hadn't made Estrella like it. "Accident," she said shortly, and changed the subject back. "It seems you guys spend a lot of time watching us. How come?"

DeVon Washington grinned, more rueful than amused. "We've got a lot of time."

He stopped there, looking over Stan's shoulder. "Oh, hell! So long," he said, and all four of them disappeared at once.

When Stan turned he saw that Wan was back again, now murmuring to a pair of Old Ones by the shore of the lake. Grace was looking at him, too.

"You know," she said, "I think they're more afraid of him than we are."

Behind her Achiever made the sound that he intended for a chuckle. "Of course this is so. You ask why? I answer this for you: it simply is because of their knowing him better than we."

II

The second month wasn't any better than the first, and the third was worse than that. There was the boredom. There was the unacceptable food. There was the boredom. ("If we had Stork at least we could look at the baby." "Please, Stan. It wasn't my fault, the way they hustled us out of the ship." Every morning at sunrise Stan lifted his eyes to the hilltop where the spacecraft was perched. He wasn't just looking. He was yearning, not just for the hope of escape, not just for the Stork bracelet that was still in it. He knew, of course, that he was yearning for the unattainable, as Achiever had demonstrated. Was still demonstrating sometimes, going to sleep, when his eyes were closed but every muscle in his torso was rippling wildly.

When Estrella and the others challenged him, he insisted he was all right. "Sleep badly for reason of having no good sleeping grasses, merely. In regard to sleeping bag, what I declare is, étui. Better than nothing? Perhaps. Arguable. However, assuredly less good than nearly any other possible thing." To show that that subject was finished he turned his narrow head and stared up at the ship. "In any event," he said, "on next attempt will surely achieve purpose, as person named Achiever would properly achieve." He gave them a thin-lipped grin to show that he had just made a joke.

Salt was not in a joking mood. "This cannot occur," she declared. "You don't remember? Ship was made obedient to machine commands by means of servomodule, not persons. You could not operate same."

He gave her a superior look. "Not correct. Have spoken of this with Raafat Gerges. Wan has since nullified machine override. Reason due no doubt to keep Raafat or other such person from flying it away."

Stan straightened up. "So if you could get into the ship you could fly it?"

"Mean exactly this, yes."

But Salt was flapping her bony fingers at him. "Nevertheless," she said sharply. "Never-the-damn-less. May not survive a second punishment. No. If person is to make additional attempt I am to be that person."

"Are not!" Achiever roared. "Are carrying child of mine, which cannot be risked! I firmly and irrevocably order this to you!"

"But it can't be you, either,' Estrella put in. "You tried it once, and the second time could kill you. Right?" She was looking for confirmation at Stan and a couple of the Old Ones' handlers, who had been drawn to the discussion.

Most of them were nodding, but not Stan. He took a deep breath. "I'll do it," he said.

Estrella gave him a horrified look, but again it was Achiever who demurred. "How foolish you are," he said, flapping his bony fingers at Stan. "What is point of entering ship? To bring same down here so we can enter and depart this planet. Who can do this? Trained pilot can do this. No other person can. Are you trained pilot? You are not, apart from childish task of sitting in spacecraft others have programmed when coming to Core. Especially have you piloted spacecraft of this new and quite fast model? No. Have not. Therefore have no hope of achieving."

While Achiever was laying down his logical proofs, one of the Old Ones' handlers, Geoffrey, was listening intently. "I'm a pilot," he said.

Achiever gave him an unbelieving look. "You? Pilot of spacecraft?"

"Well, no, I never actually piloted any spacecraft," Geoffrey conceded. "I flew our ultralight back in the Maasai Mara, though." ("Hah," Achiever sneered.) "Well, that's not all. When I was a kid I was going to go to Gateway, only this job came along and I didn't. But I studied for it."

"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 along."

"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 ill 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 out 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.

There was no good answer to that. And half an hour later, leaving Estrella sleeping behind him, Stan began the long climb up the mountain.

Climbing the slope was harder than he had expected. Forty-five minutes later he was covered with dirt and blood from the dozen slips and slides that had come when he lost footing on a rock, or tripped over some of the tangled undergrowth. Most of the scratches were still bleeding. .

But now in the dawnlight the ship, bright red and icy blue, gleamed clearer than he had ever seen it before. Panting, he paused for a moment before his last push. Between him and the ship was that outcrop of tumbled rocks, edges ominously jagged. There was an excellent chance of slipping and falling as he tried to cross it. More than that, he was right about where Wan's punishing nerve weapon felled the others who had tried the climb.

He had not forgotten that the punishment could be death.

He stopped cold. It had just penetrated his mind that the word "death," so easily spoken by those who had no immediate fear of it, might have a quite literal meaning for him. He might not be alive when the sun rose at the end of this night. Nor was there any Here After down the hill, nor was it likely that any of Wan's people would risk displeasure by attempting to machine-store him.

No. What dead meant to him in this place was never being alive in any form ever again. It meant never touching his living daughter, never finishing his lessons with Socrates—never doing anything at all that took an act on his part, nothing but lying forever in Arabella's unfriendly soil until all the parts of him had decayed away.

He swallowed, and then he found another fear.

Even if he did gain entrance to the spacecraft, what would happen then? The little bit he remembered of the Gateway ships and of Achiever's instructions to Geoffrey no longer seemed even remotely adequate. He might inadvertently fly the ship a thousand kilometers away and be unable to get back. Or crash it into the mountain. Or, most likely of all, never get it off the ground in the first place. Every one of those modes of failure seemed more likely than that he would somehow succeed in flying it, landing it and boarding all the captives—or at least boarding Estrella, with either Salt or Achiever to fly the thing home. He considered all those chances, then sighed and got back in crawling position—

But didn't crawl anywhere, because an unfamiliar voice in his ear was speaking to him. "You are Stan Avery, aren't you? Don't go any farther. We need to talk."

Stan looked around, saw no one, hazarded a guess. "Is that you, Raafat?"

"No. Who is Raafat? In any case I am not he. I am Marc Antony, formerly your chef and now"—there was a hint of humor in the voice— "perhaps your rescuer. That is, with some assistance from yourself."

Then everything went quickly. The last bit of the climb was the hardest. It was also the shortest, though, and if the climber didn't worry about more scratches and scrapes—and now had no fear of the weapon that had killed Geoffrey; Marc Antony had disabled it—it could go quickly. By the time he reached the door Marc Antony had opened it. "Sit down by those knurled wheels," he commanded. "Sorry about the perch, but you won't have to be there long. Now, the first thing you have to do ..."

And Stan did as ordered, setting the smaller knobs on the right side just so, then the ones on the left side moved just a smidgen, then this, then that, then quickly this other—

It all worked out just as Marc decreed. The spacecraft lifted. It slid gracefully through the air to the encampment, touched lightly down on the greensward, and there they were.

The first captive to see the ship coming down for them shouted so loudly that everyone was awake and yelling with excitement by the time it touched down, a few meters from the lake shore. Then it was simple. Everyone began boarding at once. There was nothing to pack, nothing that anyone wanted to take away from the planet of Arabella.

Achiever was the first aboard, twitching with excitement as he saw his ship's controls again. Salt was next, but not by herself. She was shepherding Grace and the brightest of the Old Ones, the youth named Pony, as between the two of them they were helping Estrella aboard.

Stan spent the next few minutes hugging and being hugged. When the last of the Old Ones, grumbling and belching, came aboard the ship Achiever—already perched at the pilot's seat, his hands already on the controls—called impatiently to Marc Antony, "Is proper time for departure, I expect?"

"One moment," Marc Antony commanded. He indicated one of Wan's handling machines, stilting down the slope. It bore eight or ten storage fans. "Bring them aboard," he ordered. "Then we can leave."

Stan had been waiting for that moment. "Where to? Do you know where the nearest civilized planet is? I mean really civilized, with a good hospital and everything?"

"I do not think the matter is that urgent, Stan. Estrella looks reasonably well to me. I prefer to return to the Core."

Stan looked baffled. "But—Oh, I see! It hadn't gone off before you left, so you don't know. Look, Marc. I wouldn't guarantee there's anything left of the Core. Wan left orders to blow up the star anyway."

That got Marc Antony's full attention. "Explain that," he ordered.

"What's to explain? Before Wan left the Core he ordered one of his people—Orbis? Some name like that—to give them enough time to get away, and then fire it off. This Orbis sounded like a real nut. He wanted—"

"How long a time?" Marc demanded.

"Oh, I don't know. Not long."

Grace cut in. "It was twenty-four hours. DeVon Washington told me."

Surprisingly, Stan saw the first smile he had ever seen on Marc Antony's face. "Twenty-four hours," he said. "Core time, you mean. That is twenty-four hours multiplied by the 40,000-to-l differential. No, we're in no hurry, Stan Avery. No hurry at all."