The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

That hotshot AI that calls himself Marc Antony never asked, but I have a name. It's Phrygia Lorena Todd. If he blamed me for working for that freak, Wan, that's his problem. It wasn't my idea. I certainly didn't want to get involved in the Planetless Very White Very Hot Star thing at all, but Wan didn't give me any choice. He claimed he had the right to do anything he wanted with me, since, after those damn buildings collapsed into the subway station in Kuala Lumpur, where I was unlucky enough to be driving one of the cars, he claimed he owned me.

Wan wasn't the first man who thought that. He was the first one who had the law on his side, though. So when he told me I had to pilot Orbis McClune to where he could blow up that star, I didn't see any way of getting out of it.

Anyway, the way he put it to me, the blowing up wasn't necessarily going to happen. I listened to the broadcast when he made it and, sure enough, he said if they'd give him his damn cavemen he'd call it off.

All right, I shouldn't have believed a scum like him. But I wasn't in any position to argue, was I? If you think you could have handled the whole thing better, well, maybe you could, and I hope next time you're the one who's stuck with the problem, not me.

Still, the way it worked out, it was a damn good thing for everybody that I was there.

Maybe I shouldn't have taken so seriously the way Marc Antony treated me like dirt all the way back to the Core. He treated everybody else like dirt, too. All the same, I couldn't help snickering when he got his comeuppance.

See, the minute we passed through the Schwarzschild he got on his communicator, talking to whoever it was he'd left in charge of things when he took off for Arabella, and I could tell he wasn't liking what he was hearing. Most AIs won't lose their temper, but Marc Antony sure lost his. "You have not located the vessel with the nullifier?" he was snarling—it wasn't a statement, it was a question, and a rhetorical one at that. "That is unacceptable! It is also unacceptable that you cannot undertake to complete the task of locating it in less than two hundred million additional milliseconds! That much time is not available!"

When Marc Antony cut the connection he was looking—well, not worried, I'd say, because I don't think AIs worry much, but certainly kind of concerned. I asked him, "What's the problem?"—not really caring what the answer was.

I thought at first that he wasn't going to answer, but he did. "I do not think you would understand," he told me, "but it is a very serious matter. I left my subsets a task to do in my absence. It was a long and tedious job, to be sure but not a particularly demanding one. However, they have failed. Now I have no way of reaching the vessel in time to prevent the explosion."

"Huh," I said. "I do, though."

That got his attention. "Do not make jokes with me," he said, sounding dangerous.

"No joke. I was the one who set it in its orbit. I can take you right to it."

Antony probably didn't believe me right off, but he didn't have any better choices. When we got there and I showed him Orbis's torpedo on the lookplate I thought he might have said something a little bit apologetic to me. He didn't. "You, pilot," he said, looking straight at me. "Now you will do something else for me." Then he told me what the something else was. I wasn't thrilled about taking orders from a bad-tempered AI in an apron and white cap, especially when he was ordering me to do something I'd never done before. "Let me get this straight," I said. "You want me to, what, project myself to Orbis's ship? How do I know it will work?"

He gave me an impatient nod. "It works. I've done it myself."

"Okay,' I said, not entirely convinced but going along with it. "Then why don't you do it this time?"

"Because he knows you. I'll be there with you, but I won't show myself. I don't want to frighten him."

I didn't say what I thought the chances of Orbis McClune being frightened by a man in a chef's hat might be. I just said, "I'm not easy in my mind about this."

Then he just said, "Do it, pilot," and the tone he said it in didn't encourage any more argument. And it didn't actually sound so hard, you know. I figured about all I had to do was convince Orbis that, if he pushed the button, he'd die too. So I did what Marc Antony said.

II

Altogether I think I was talking to Orbis for something like thirty-one or thirty-two minutes, organic time. That may sound like a fair amount to you, but you don't know the half of it. That's thirty-one minutes times sixty seconds in every minute and a thousand milliseconds in every second— what I mean, it was a lot of time. I can't say I talked myself hoarse. Machine-stored people don't get hoarse. What I did do to myself, or really what that SOB Orbis did to me, was to pretty near drive myself as batty as he was.

When I looked around Orbis's tiny ship it appeared he wasn't expecting much of a career in it. He hadn't even made a surround for himself. The place looked like a garbage dump. There were odds and ends of all sorts of things sliding around on the floor—physically real things sliding on the physically real floor, I mean.

See, the thing was that Orbis wasn't giving me any chance to interfere with him. He was already holding the triggering thing—well, the simulated but nevertheless quite functional triggering thing—in his hand. I don't know why he was doing that. Maybe because he thought I was a more violent person than I really was. I thought it might have been because he'd been sort of toying with the idea of pushing the button right there and then. You know, like a nut with a razor might be laying the flat end of it against his wrist a couple of times while he made up his mind whether or not he was going to start slicing.

Then the argument started. "If you're in such a hurry to die," I'd say to him "—I mean really die, so you aren't even machine-stored anymore— why don't you just get a gun and blow your brains out? Or something; you know what I mean." "Can't do that," he'd say. "Suicide's a sin." "Then it's a sin to push that button, isn't it? Cause you'll be killing yourself too?" Then he'd give me a big smile. "That's the part I haven't figured out yet,' he'd say. "After all, Wan didn't say I'd be killing myself. I only have your word that that's true. And there are other considerations." But he wouldn't say what the considerations were, and so when we'd get to that point I'd start screaming things like, "Are you crazy? Killing yourself's a sin, but killing Christ knows how many goddam people that are going to die when the goddam star blows is, like, just a misdemeanor or something?" And then he'd give me another smile—he was the smiliest SOB I ever knew—and say he was studying it over and he'd let me know if he figured it out. God almighty! I could've killed the bastard. Would've been glad to, too, if only I'd had some way of doing it.

I gave up—I mean, I gave up about a thousand times, but each time then I'd shut up for a while, trying to calm myself down by thinking about something else—as if there was anything else I could think about!—and wondering if Marc Antony was really out there somewhere, and if so why he didn't show himself, because I was running on empty. And then I'd think, well, if he did, what could he do anyway? And then the whole thing would boil up in my mind again, and I just couldn't not go at it again with him.

It wasn't just my own life I was worrying about. Not entirely, anyway. Honest, those millions and billions who were going to die if I couldn't talk him out of it were on my mind, too. Maybe not as much. But there, all right.

A lot of what we said was just, me, "Please, Orbis!" and, him, "Screw you, Phrygia" in one variation or another. I tried all sorts of other things, too. I tried just working up a friendly conversation with him, just us two people that were stuck together and might as well be sociable. I tried asking him what did he miss most about not being organic anymore? (Not having a congregation to preach to, he said.) Another time we got to talking about how Wan came to own us. I told him about that damn Indochina-Malaysia war, and how when they bombed K.L. and the towers collapsed there were so many people getting killed that the Here After people weren't checking anybody's credit, just getting us all machine-stored as fast as they could. (Only when they did check credit I didn't have any, so Wan could buy me.) Orbis was much the same, only what did him in wasn't a war but an earthquake that dropped a big stone statue on his head. (Funny thing. It looked like what bothered him most, being a Protestant himself, was that the statue was of some Catholic priest.)

And so on, and on.

So, having done everything I could think of to get Orbis to change his mind, I more or less did it all over again. I was telling Orbis how I came to go from Homecoming Queen at Eastern New Mexico University to blackjack dealer in one of the big Los Angeles casinos to my last job, driving a subway train in Kuala Lumpur. (What a laugh that is. When Wan found out I'd driven a subway, he decided I was their best bet to learn how to pilot a spaceship. Go figure.)

Then I noticed that Orbis wasn't looking at me. He was staring at the lookplate, so I did too. (All right, no, I didn't exactly see anything on the lookplate. We didn't have a lookplate. Didn't need it, any more than we needed to display simulations of ourselves to each other. We skipped the middleman and went right to observing the inputs.)

What the inputs were showing us was the star itself.

Most stars look ordinary enough. This one wasn't ordinary. It looked to be eye-hurtingly white and scarily hot, and I could just imagine what it would be like if it did, in fact, blow itself to smithereens. I gave up. "Marc Antony," I said, "I give up. Show yourself. It's time for you to take over."

He didn't do that. He didn't show himself. He just whispered in my ear—all right, he "whispered" in my "ear"—and what he said, the son of a bitch, was, "No need. You're doing reasonably well."

I wasn't. I knew I wasn't. He knew I wasn't. I sighed and went back to what he said I was doing reasonably well at. I said, "Well, shit, Orbis—oh, sorry."

He said mildly, "There's nothing in the Commandments against having a dirty mouth. Say what you want to say, Phrygia."

"I was going to say I don't know what your problem is. If I wanted to die, I'd do it.'

He said reprovingly, "Suicide is sinful. I don't want to add to my burden of sins when I face my Judge."

"But blowing up a star and killing millions of people—"

"Not millions of people. They're mostly Heechee."

"Again shit. So, murdering even one single human being, are you saying that's not a sin?"

"Haven't I answered that already?" His voice sounded absent-minded. He was. He wasn't giving me much attention, because his look was on the piloting plate.

What I noticed was that, in his concentration on the image of that nasty-looking star on the lookplate, he had set his end of the triggering servomodule down. That appeared to he my best chance yet. I sidled over toward it, as inconspicuously as I could....

Not inconspicuously enough. He looked up and gave me one of those bullshit smiles. "Do you want the trigger? Help yourself. It might work if you push the button. It doesn't matter if it does."

I glowered at him. "What are you talking about?"

He sighed. "Oh, Phrygia, haven't you figured it out? Wan knows how I feel about suicide. He wouldn't trust me to do the job. He put it on a timer. I don't have to pull the button, it's going to blow anyway. I don't have to do anything at all. I can just let it happen. And do you know what that means?"

I didn't. He could see that was so, so he explained. "It means that if I die, no matter how many people die with me, it will not be due to an act of sin. You see," he said, sounding more like a lawyer than some godly person talking about his own death, "I've given this a lot of thought. If I take any action at all to change things it means that when I die an act of volition is included. That makes it suicide, and I don't want that on my soul. Do you understand me so far?"

I didn't, and I said so, but he went right on anyway. "But there may be a way out of that. At least, I hope so."

Then he put his hand on the ship's piloting controls—yeah, yeah, I mean he put his "hand" on the "controls"—and the little bits of actual physical trash on the ship's floor suddenly raised themselves up and floated in the air. "What the hell are you doing?" I yelled.

He didn't answer that directly. "You might prefer to leave now," he told me. "Your friend who's hiding, too." Pop! Marc Antony at once displayed himself, standing right beside me and, for the first time in my experience, looking almost baffled.

He didn't let it interfere with business, though. "You're flying the ship right into that star, Mr. McClune," he said. "Why are you doing that?"

"Actually," Orbis corrected him, "I've already done so. I believe we are now in what is called the star's photosphere."

We were certainly in some inhospitable place. Everything around me began to warp and twist and turn fuzzy—whether because the ship was physically stressed or because the star's radiation was interfering with our simulations I did not know.

"We don't want to leave this bomb thing around where the same thing might happen all over again, do we?" Orbis was saying. "Better turn it into plasma and get it over with." Then he looked up, all twisted out of shape and blurry around the edges, but with the biggest, warmest smile I'd seen from him yet. The last thing I heard from him was, "There is no doubt that suicide's a sin, but I'm pretty sure that a man can unsinfully give his own life if it's in order to save others—"

And then I didn't hear any more from him.