Gateways (37 page)

“Sure. If you give us a good enough price. Traditional terraforming also has its place, of course. Both ways, the human race is spreading out.” He smiled at the gleaming day. “Up to a few decades ago, we were trapped on one tiny world—and we were getting crowded and deadly. We were close to global catastrophe. That was a very narrow passage. But we got through it. And because of the near-zero values of ‘fl’ and ‘fi’ and ‘fc,’ we’ve discovered that ‘L’ may be unbounded. The whole universe is our private playground! We just have to supply the trees and the grass and the pets. I know the biologists are still hunting for higher life. I read how Dae Park is flying around beyond the beyond. She’ll be ecstatic if she ever finds a living algae mat. But don’t you see? It really doesn’t matter anymore. A thousand years from now, we humans will be beyond the reach of any disaster. A hundred thousand years, and the profs will be arguing about whether humans originated on a single world or many. And a million years from now . . . well, by then life will be scattered across the universe and evolved into new species. I’ll bet some will be as smart as us.
That
will be the time for a new assessment of the Drake equation!”

Maybe Ron is right about the future; his view is widely held these days. But I can’t wait a million years—or even a thousand. And in a way, the spread of Earth’s life messes with our learning the truth. It did on Mars. It tried to on Lee’s World. I’d like to stay ahead of that, to continue to open up the universe to you, my customers. I remain an explorer, my boots planted in the hard vacuum of reality, my gaze directed beyond this horizon.

Frederik Pohl’s work came spectacularly into my world circa 1957, when I read
The Space Merchants
(written in collaboration with another of my favorite authors, Cyril M. Kornbluth). I was thirteen.

The Space Merchants
stood out from the many wonderful stories I encountered because more than any other, it showed how deeply propaganda and economics affect the fabric of our world. Of course, there are other science-fiction writers who do great things with social issues, but I discovered that Fred was also exploring the technological ideas that the social ideas play out upon. I think the first mind-to-computer upload story that I ever read was by Fred. And then there was
Slave Ship
and “The Tunnel under the World.”

These came at a formative time for me, but they are just a tiny fraction of Fred’s writing. His later novels have considered the physical limits of the astronomical universe. Both for readers and writers, it has been a marvelous exploration.

Thanks, Fred.

—V
ERNOR
V
INGE

The old man floated in the middle of the warm sea in a tiny sailboat. He dabbled his toes in the gentle swell. He was far from shore. He was home. He doubted anyone would miss him.

The water slapped the hull playfully. The sun, tipping at the horizon, glinted orange in his dark, heavy-lidded eyes. He had made the ocean his family and now that he had just a few months to live, he had come here to think and work up his courage.

His happiest days had been spent sailing back and forth across the Atlantic and the Caribbean on a research ship, making slow sweeps dragging sensors far behind the metal hull, mapping seamounts. He had loved the glowing evening wake that spread aft of the ship, the twin screws tricking microscopic plankton into switching on their lights like sleepless old ladies alarmed by a noise.

Once, the ship’s dredge had pulled up a twenty-foot length of squid arm, ruddy orange in color. They had packed the arm in ice and donated it to a museum in Florida. The old man had often dreamed since about netting the whole creature, a forty or fifty foot kraken, or building a robot with a camera that could follow the giant cephalopods into their hunting grounds in the deep offshore canyons.

The ocean was calm, drowsy. He stared into the blue-black depths. Three miles of water fell off below his feet.

The little crab in his groin nudged through the drop of morphine he had tongued half an hour before. He was used to that, he told himself; but he would never get used to it. The old man did not know how to accept the finality of his flesh. When he dreamed, he was young, closer to an angel than to ashes. Age had taught him truths that the mind tried to ignore. But the body knew.

He lay back on the rough fiberglass deck. The first star, Sirius, winked behind the boat’s mast. If he lifted his knees, the pain eased back. But it
was getting worse, no doubt about that. In a month he would be unable to think for more than a few seconds without losing track. The little crab would gnaw at him bit by bit. He would be crazy with pain, a burden.

Best to get it over with and leave his remains to the real crabs or the deep-living fishes with their big eyes, honest scavengers. He could become a true captain’s plate, a sea-dweller’s feast and delight.

So much better than a coffin.

The pain relented. He felt light-headed with relief. Life had been good and longer than most.

The old man sat up and again dropped his toes into the water. Swished them like a boy getting ready for a swim. Even before he knew he would actually do it, he pushed up on trembling arms and slid over the side. The ocean enveloped him. He expertly blew the water out of his nose with a little puff and opened his eyes. The salt stung briefly and he saw murky grayness, then the sunset falling in choppy sparks through the roof of the sea.

He let himself drift. It was peaceful. His lungs would hurt in a minute or so. The body knew, however, and it was resolved. A chorus of tired little wills, all the smaller voices below his conscious self, sick of fighting, suddenly made him take the big swallow. He blew out all his air.

For a moment, his arms and legs flailed. It was awful beyond belief, but short. The little crab in his stomach had eaten away most of his fat. He sank slowly, arms out, surrounded by wavering lines of silver bubbles.

To his surprise, he could still think. Where am I going? he thought. What’s next? His eyes blinked white in the gloom. He could still see, but he could not focus. The pain was gone. He did not worry. He felt some curiosity, however. The last emotion, and the first.

He managed to raise his arm and reach out, flex his fingers. He touched something.

A galaxy exploded, a blurred pinwheel of intense green with a sucking hole in the center.

The old man’s arm dropped. The sunset was gone. The water was black. His brain filled with salt and cold. One last thing: he saw, far away, a Christmas tree, waiting for him in his parents’ house, blinking green and yellow.

It was not the fabled ruddy kraken that found the old man hanging in the water, but she was of the same family. She, too, had been waiting for the dark, hovering some distance from the boat, with her short arms and two long tentacles dangling like a big clump of kelp. Fish rising to the surface might foolishly dart close and be snared. Most of her time she spent fishing
with lazy, looping sweeps that would not alarm the naïve. Whatever was foolish was food.

She had been drawn first by the boat, floating like a log or raft of weed. Then she had heard the splash. Now she could taste the odd creature even at a tentacle’s length. It was tangy and oily. It moved and touched her. She flashed in alarm and released a flood of glowing bacteria that sparkled like a thick cloud of stars. Her jet roiled the cloud as she retreated many lengths into the dark.

From the low level of electricity, she quickly observed that she was not being followed. The interloper in the water was not big enough to be dangerous. Muscles were not being engaged to chase her, and the boat did not growl. After a few seconds, she jetted back toward the shape.

She had once before met a creature from the stinging emptiness above the roof of the world. It had drifted with the brackish flow from a river, in an estuary where she had gone to hide from the big-headed whales. It had been brown and white with four kinked limbs and a huge, protruding pink sac. She had felt some curiosity about that thing, but had not thought it would be worth eating, so she had left it to the sharks. They had relished it.

There were so many mysteries, especially above the roof of the world.

The big squid knew how to fish, she knew how to breed, she knew to avoid the big-headed whales that could shatter her insides with an intense pulse of song. To her, during the time of mating, all the world was mystery, either frightening or intriguing, nothing in between. All of her shiniest memories were of puzzlements and impulses, sprinkled with the rich satisfactions of food and mating. Impressions of what she had experienced sparkled in her tiny brain and huge knots of nerves like flitting sardines in a shoal.

She had much time as she fished to contemplate this private album of impressions, paging back and forth in no particular sequence.

The interloper was sinking. With her skin, she could taste the oily slick of it in the water. She lit up along her mantle and on the tips of her tentacles as if signaling a mate, telling the shape to slow down, linger. Somehow she knew that wasn’t appropriate, but she had no other response. She rolled her wings in shimmering arcs on both sides of her mantle, adjusting her trim in the slow currents.

The interloper reached a thermocline and paused, caught between warm and cold. Its eyes were so tiny, no bigger than a shark’s and much smaller than hers. Strangely, the eyes covered themselves once, then opened wide and stayed that way.

The squid jetted and flowered, then slimmed, flowered again, and slimmed, making a circle. The interloper was neither food nor mate, but it intrigued her. She was disappointed when it finally slipped below the thermocline and continued its fall.

There were males about, and she was hungry and full of eggs. She did not want to waste her strength tonight; she wanted to mate and to fish. Still, the squid followed, adjusting the concentration of ammonia in her tissues to sink in the colder flow. Then, with some alarm, she realized the interloper was dropping to where there would be very few fishes, and at this time of evening, no males.

Regretfully, she hovered, indecisive. Then she reached down with her longest tentacle and touched the flesh below the tiny eyes. Now that they were uncovered, their blank stare seemed familiar, even friendly. She gave the interloper one last taste, one spreading wave of fleshy lights, a salute of red and green along her mantle, as she might touch a friend and tell of the best places to fish and avoid whales.

The body fell deeper. She extended her tentacle, reluctant to give it up even now. Besides, she was proud of her long reach. It was a sign of beauty, to tap a mate from many body lengths away, to touch it below the eyes and then dart off.

The tentacle unwound, straightened, reached down twenty feet, thirty feet, forty feet, fifty, sixty, seventy, ninety.

One hundred.

One hundred and ten. One hundred and twenty.

She knew she was the longest thing in the sea, the brightest, the prettiest, infinitely desirable.

With a will of its own, tired of her curiosity, the long tentacle retracted and recoiled, its swift, springy withdrawal leaving bubbles in the water.