The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway Read online

  It took me a moment. Then, “Oh, my God,” I said. “Really? Wan?” And when Bertie confirmed that Wan was who the mysterious stranger was, identity checked and correct, it all fell into place.

  Since he was Wan, he had been telling the truth, almost. He wasn’t really the owner of the Old Ones, but you could make an argument that he was something pretty close, because legally he was the man who had discovered them.

  Well, that argument didn’t actually make much sense in my book. If you stopped to think about it, Wan himself had been discovered by that Herter-Hall party as much as the Old Ones had. However, it didn’t have to make sense. That was the way Gateway Corp had ruled—had given him a finder’s share of property rights in the place where the Old Ones had been discovered and everything on it—and nobody argued with the findings of Gateway Corp.

  The thing about the Old Ones was that they had been found on a far-out, Sun-orbiting Heechee artifact, and it was the Heechee themselves who had put them there, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago when the Heechee had come to check out Earth’s solar system.

  The Heechee were looking for intelligent races to be friends with. What they discovered was the ancestors of the Old Ones, the dumb, hairy little hominids called australopithecines. They weren’t much, but they were the closest the Earth had to the intelligent race the Heechee were looking for at the time, so the Heechee had taken away some australopithecine breeding stock to study. And then, a little later, when the Heechee got so scared that they ran off and hid in the Core, all the billions of them, they left the australopithecines behind. They weren’t exactly abandoned. The Heechee had left them the Food Factory they inhabited, so they never went hungry. And so they stayed there, generation after generation, for hundreds of thousands of years, until human beings finally got to Gateway and its abandoned Heechee spacecraft. And, the story went, one of those human beings on that huge old artifact, and the only one of them who had survived long enough to be rescued, was the kid named Wan.

  As soon as I got to the compound I saw him. He wasn’t a kid anymore, but he wasn’t hard to recognize, either. His size picked him out. He wasn’t all that much taller than some of the Old Ones, a dozen or so of whom had gathered around to regard him with tepid interest. He was dressed better than the Old Ones, though. In fact, he was dressed better than we were. He’d deep-sixed the fur collars, sensibly enough, and the outfit he was wearing now was one of those safari-jacket things with all the pockets, that tourists are so crazy about. His, however, was made of pure natural silk. And he was carrying a riding crop, although there wasn’t a horse within five hundred kilometers of us. (Zebras don’t count.)

  As soon as he saw me he bustled over, hand outstretched and a big told-you-so grin on his face. “I’m Wan,” he said. “I don’t hold that thing yesterday against you.”

  I didn’t feel any blame, but I let it go. I shook his hand. “Grace Nkroma,” I said. “Head ranger. What do you want?”

  The grin got bigger. “I guess you’d call it nostalgia. Is that the right word? I’m kind of sentimental about my Old Ones, since they sort of took care of me while I was growing up. I’ve been meaning to visit them ever since they were relocated here, but I’ve been so busy—” He gave a winsome little shrug, to show how busy he’d been.

  Then he gazed benevolently around at the Old Ones. “Yes,” he said, nodding, “I recognize several of them, I think. Do you see how happy they are to see me?” Well, maybe they were. The one we called Beautiful was jabbing a muddy thorn into the arm of her son, Gadget, to make one of their ugly tattoos. The rest of them were a fifty-fifty split, half looking at Beautiful, the other half at Wan. He didn’t seem to mind. He told me, “I’ve brought them some wonderful gifts.” He jerked a thumb at his vehicle. “You people better unload them. They’ve been in the car a while, and you need to get them into the ground as soon as possible.” And then he linked arms with a couple of the Old Ones, seemingly unaware of how they smelled, and strolled off, leaving us to do his bidding.

  III

  There were about forty of the “gifts” that Wan had brought for his former family, and what they turned out to be were little green seedlings in pressed-soil pots. Carlo looked at them, and then at me. “What the hell are we supposed to do with those things?” he wanted to know.

  “I’ll ask,” I said, and got on the line with Bertie ap Dora again.

  “They’re berry bushes,” he told me, sounding defensive. “They’re some kind of fruit the Old Ones had growing wild when they were out there. They’re supposed to love the berries. Actually, it’s quite a thoughtful gift, wouldn’t you say?”

  I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I said, “It would be a lot more thoughtful if he planted the damn things himself. What’s with this guy, anyway? Is he always like that?”

  It was pretty much a rhetorical question, but Bertie chose to answer it. He took a moment to think first. Then he said delicately, “Wan has done quite a few—ah—impulsive things, now and then. Some of them caused some trouble. Police trouble, even.”

  “You mean he’s a criminal?”

  “Oh, well,” Bertie said dismissively, “never with any kind of real jail time. There wouldn’t be, would there? With the kind of lawyers his kind of money can buy?” Then he changed the subject. “One thing I should tell you about. Those berry bushes are supposed to need quite a lot of water, so make sure you plant them near the runoff from the drinking fountains, all right? And, listen, see if you can keep the giraffes from eating the seedlings before they grow out.”

  “How are we supposed to do that?” I asked, but Bertie had already cut the connection. Naturally. He’s a boss. You know the story about the second lieutenant and the sergeant and the flagpole? There’s this eight-meter flagpole and the lieutenant only has six meters of rope. Big problem. How does the lieutenant get the flagpole up?

  Simple. The lieutenant says, “Sergeant, put that flagpole up,” and goes off to have a beer at the officers’ club.

  As far as Bertie is concerned, I’m his sergeant. I don’t have to be, though. Bertie keeps asking me to come in and take a job as a sector chief at the Nairobi office. There’d be more money, too, but then I’d have to live in the big city. Besides, that would mean I wouldn’t be in direct contact with the Old Ones anymore.

  Everything considered, you might think that wouldn’t sound so bad, but—oh, hell, I admit it—I knew I’d miss every smelly, dumb-ass one of them. They weren’t very bright and they weren’t very clean, and most of the time, although I liked them, I wasn’t a bit sure that they liked me back. But they needed me.

  By the time Wan had been with us for three days, we had got kind of used to having him around. We didn’t actually see a lot of him. Most of the daylight time he was off in his hover with a couple of the Old Ones for company, feeding them ice-cream pops and lemonade out of his freezer—things that really weren’t good for them but, I had to admit, wouldn’t do them much harm once or twice in a lifetime. When it got dark he was always back in the housing compound, but he didn’t mingle with us rangers even then. He stayed in his vehicle, watching soaps and cartoons again with a couple of Old Ones for company. He slept in it, too.

  When I finally asked Wan just how long he intended to be with us, he just gave me that grin again and said, “Can’t say, Gracie. I’m having fun.”

  “Don’t call me Gracie,” I said. But he had already turned his back on me to collect another handful of Old Ones for a joyride.

  Having fun seemed to be what Wan’s life was all about. He’d already been all over the galaxy before he came back to see us, flying around in his own private ship. (Did you get that? His own private ship!) He could afford it. Those royalties on the Heechee stuff that came out of the Food Factory made him, he told us, the eighth richest person in the galaxy, and what Wan could afford was pretty nearly anything he could think up. He made sure he let us all know it, too, which didn’t endear him to most of the staff, especially Carlo. “He gets on my nerves with his g
oddamn bragging all the time,” Carlo complained to me. “Can’t I run the son of a bitch off?”

  “As long as he doesn’t make trouble,” I said, “no. How are you coming with the planting?”

  Actually that was going pretty well. All the guys had to do was scoop out a little hole in the ground, a couple of meters away from a fountain, and set one of the pressed-earth pots in it. That was the whole drill. Since there were a couple of patrols going out all over the reservation every day anyway, checking for signs of elephant incursions or unauthorized human trespassers, it only took them a couple of extra minutes at each stop.

  Then, without warning, Wan left us.

  I thought I heard the sound of his hover’s fans, just as I was going to sleep. I considered getting up to see what was going on, but—damn it!—the pillow seemed more interesting than Wan just then and I rolled over and forgot it.

  Or almost forgot it. I guess it was my subconscious, smarter than the rest of me, that made my sleep uneasy. And about the fourth or fifth time I half woke, I heard the voices of Old Ones softly, worriedly, murmuring at each other just outside my window.

  That woke me all the way up. Old Ones don’t like the dark, never having had any back home. I pulled on a pair of shorts and stumbled outside. Spot was sitting there on her haunches, along with Brute and Blackeye, all three of them turning to stare at me. “What’s the matter?” I demanded.

  She was munching on a chunk of CHON-food. “Grathe,” she said politely, acknowledging my existence. “He. Gone.” She made sweeping-away gestures with her hands to make sure I understood her.

  “Well, hell,” I said. “Gone where?”

  She made the same gesture again. “Away.”

  “Yes, I know away,” I snarled. “Did he say when he was coming back?”

  She swallowed and spat out of a piece of wrapper. “No back,” she said.

  I guess I was still pretty sleepy, because I didn’t take it in right away. “What do you mean, ‘no back?’”

  “Gone,” she told me placidly. “Also Beautiful. Pony. Gadget. They too.”

  IV

  I woke Shelly and Carlo and sent them up in the ultralight to check out the whole reservation, but I didn’t wait for their report. I was calling headquarters even before they were airborne. Bertie wasn’t in his office, of course—it was the middle of the night, and the headquarters people kept city hours—but I got him out of bed at home. He didn’t sound like he believed me. “Why the hell would anyone kidnap a couple of Old Ones?” he wanted to know.

  “Ask the bastard yourself,” I snarled at him. “Only find him first. That’s three of the Old Ones that he’s kidnaped—Beauty and her two-year-old, Gadget. And Pony. Pony is the kid’s father, probably.”

  He made a sound of irritation. “All right. First thing, I’ll need descriptions—no, sorry,” he said, catching himself; how would you describe three Old Ones? And why would you need to? “Forget that part. I’ll take it from here. I guarantee he won’t get off the planet. I’ll have cops at the Loop in ten minutes, and a general alarm everywhere. I’ll—”

  But I cut him off there. “No, Bertie. Not so much you will. More like we will. I’ll meet you at the Loop and, I don’t care how rich the son of a bitch is, when we catch him I’m going to punch him out. And then he’s going to see what the inside of a jail looks like.”

  But that wasn’t the way the hand played out.

  I took our two-man hover, which is almost as fast as the ultra-light. The way I was goosing it along, maybe a little faster. By the time I got within sight of the Lofstrom Loop, with Nairobi’s glowing bubble a few kilometers to the north, I was already aware of police planes crisscrossing across the sky—once or twice dropping down to get a good look at me before they were satisfied and zoomed away.

  At night the Loop is picked out with lights, so that it looks like a kind of roller-coaster ride, kilometers long. I could hear the whine of its rotating magnetic cables long before I got to the terminal. There weren’t many pods either coming or going—maybe because it was nighttime in this part of the world—so, I figured, there wouldn’t be so many passengers that Wan and his captives might not be noticed. (As though anybody wouldn’t notice three Old Ones.)

  Actually at that time of night there were hardly any passengers waiting around in the terminal. Bertie was there already, with half a dozen Nairobi city cops, but they didn’t have much to do. Neither did I, except to fret and swear to myself for letting him get away.

  Then the cop manning the communicator listened to something, snarled something back and came toward us, looking shamefaced. “He won’t be coming here,” he told Bertie. “He didn’t use the Loop coming down. He used his own lander, and it looks like he used it to get off, too, because it’s gone.”

  And so he had.

  By the time Bertie, fuming, was able to get in touch with any of the authorities in orbit, Wan had had plenty of time to dock with his spaceship and be on his way, wherever it was he was going, at FTL speeds. And I never saw him, or any of the three missing Old Ones, again.

  Heard about him, though. You bet I heard about him. Everybody did, because everybody likes to read about nasty, spoiled rich kids, and this Wan sure filled the bill.

  The whole thing made you wonder, though. They brought the Old Ones to Africa to make them safe, and that certainly hadn’t worked out. So what were they going to do with them next?

  6

  * * *

  The One Who Hated Humans

  I

  The private place that had been provided for Estrella and Stan on the ship was about the size of an elevator cage. Apparently it had been intended for occupancy by only one person. Only one Heechee person, that was to say, because it obviously was not meant for habitation by any number of humans at all. The furnishings made that clear. There was one of those bifurcated perches that the Heechee used to sit on, one sack of the weedy things they used for sleeping in and one shelf, like a child’s desk built into the wall, with one of the flowerpot-shaped things Stan had seen before, for which he could see no use at all. There was also, conspicuously out in the open, one of those shining Heechee slit-trench receptacles for the disposal of bodily wastes. That was about it, not counting the collection of fifteen or twenty of the crystalline things the first Gateway prospectors called “prayer fans,” which, Estrella then told him, fitted into the flower-pot. “They’re like books,” she said. “I saw Salt doing it. You put them in the reader.” She pointed to the flowerpot-shaped thing. “That’s the reader.”

  “Huh,” he said, turning one of the fans over in his hand. He was less interested in it than in the passing time. He was wishing he had a watch so he could see how long they were being kept waiting; wishing the Heechee female would come and tell them that they could go out of this room; and wishing even more that someone would feed them pretty soon, because it was getting to be a long time between meals.

  He tried sitting down at the desk, but didn’t remain sitting there for long; unlike the ones in their old Five, this Heechee-designed perch had not been modified to the contours of the human butt. Finally he turned to Estrella, where she was sitting on the bundle of sleep-rushes. “Can I borrow those for a moment?” he said, and lugged the bundle over to the desk. When he jammed it between the prongs of the Heechee perch it made a seat that wasn’t comfortable, no, but at least didn’t feel like he was sliding, rump first, into some lethal vise.

  When he went back to fiddling with the prayer fan and its holder, Estrella, now standing beside him and watching with interest, said, “Don’t break it, Stan dear. I don’t know how valuable those things are—” And then, in a quite different tone, “Oh.”

  That made Stan look around and discover they were no longer alone. A male Heechee stood in the opened doorway, watching them with clinical interest. “That is most excellently good advice,” he said—in fair, if accented, English!—“You two had better not be messing around with things not understood.”

  To Stan, the
Heechee in the doorway was undistinguishable from any other male Heechee in terms of color of pelt, shape of face or body silhouette, but there was one thing about him even Stan could not mistake. That was the clothes he had on. This visitor was wearing bright green sports shoes—human sports shoes—over his splayed Heechee feet, along with a kilt that covered him from waist to ankles—perhaps, Stan thought, to conceal that universal Heechee between-the-thighs pod. And on his Heechee head he wore a human sports cap, pulled down low over his eyes.

  Stan had no doubt that this must be the male Heechee Salt had warned them against talking to, the one in “peculiar clothing.” But the decision to stay away from him wasn’t in their hands anymore, because he was already present and speaking to them. “Hello,” he said. “Give to me that for a minute.” He advanced on Stan and took the prayer fan out of Stan’s hand without waiting for permission. “Two of you, now listen to that which you will hear!” he commanded.

  He juggled the fan expertly and then pulled the thing open by one protruding edge. When he released it it made a thin, metallic, almost tuneful whispering sound as it slithered back into its ice-cream-cone shape. “What is that sound sounding like?” he asked.

  Stan looked up at him, open-mouthed, then turned in puzzlement to Estrella. It was she who answered. “Some kind of machine?” she hazarded.

  The stranger emitted what might have been a human chuckle, or an attempt to copy one. “Yes, a machine, I agree to that,” he said. “It sounds like a machine because that is what it is. Agreed? Right? Now listen to this other sound.” He fiddled with the base of the fan, then pulled out a pearly little globe which he held up. “This is called fuel button, what you of human extraction designate ‘fire pearl.’ Again listen.” He rubbed it with his skinny thumb, producing a faint, sibilant whisper. “You have now heard. Therefore tell this to me. Do either of them sound like this human-speaking word ‘Heechee’?”