All the Lives He Led-A Novel (44 page)
Resomation involved simmering the no-longer-wanted stuff in a bath of potassium hydroxide for a few hours, after which, our informants assured us, no complex molecule would survive in what would have become a layer of snow-white ash at the bottom of the sealed vessel it had cooked in. There would be a few centimeters of a chemically sterile liquid atop the ash, which could be poured away into the household disposal system, since it was now totally sterile. As was the snowy ash.
So we drove into the parking area, where Signore Guarnio was waiting for us, and he conducted us to their resomation chamber. I was glad to note that it didn’t smell of anything. A little acrid, maybe, but nothing like organic decay.
We had rehearsed Signore Guarnio carefully. He lifted the top of the vat of hot chemical, I gently placed the black bag of black marbles in it, he closed the top again and sealed it. And then we were through. “Come back if you wish in three hours and thirty,” he said, “and you can see us disposing the remains.”
But we said no, thanks, and drove back home, much more rapidly, to see if Sasha was still awake.
I haven’t regretted what I did. I don’t think I will in the future, either. But I don’t think that I want Shao-pin to know that we only resomationed nine of those little death eggs, I having removed one when she wasn’t around, just in case.
Oh, I don’t think that that in case will ever be the case. But, you see, things don’t always happen the way I think, and expect, they’re going to.
And in the remote and improbable event that fate goes in the wrong, in some terribly wrong, direction, I would like to have the option of changing my mind.
The Heechee Saga
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon*
*
Heechee Rendezvous
The Annals of the Heechee
The Gateway Trip
The Boy Who Would Live Forever*
The Eschaton Sequence
The Other End of Time*
The Siege of Eternity*
The Far Shore of Time*
The Age of the Pussyfoot
Drunkard’s Walk
Black Star Rising
The Cool War
Homegoing
Mining the Oort
Narabedla Ltd.
Pohlstars
Starburst
The World at the End of Time
Jem
Midas World
The Merchants’ War
The Coming of the Quantum Cats
Man Plus*
(forthcoming)
Chernobyl
The Day the Martians Came
Stopping at Slowyear
The Voices of Heaven*
O Pioneer!*
All the Lives He Led*
Platinum Pohl *
With Jack Williamson
The Starchild Trilogy
Undersea City
Undersea Quest
Undersea Fleet
Wall Around a Star
Farthest Star
Land’s End *
The Singers of Time
With Lester del Rey
Preferred Risk
With C. M. Kornbluth
The Space Merchants
The Best of Frederik Pohl
(edited by Lester del Rey)
The Best of C. M. Kornbluth
(editor)
Nonfiction
The Way the Future Was
Chasing Science*
*A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
FREDERIK POHL has written science fiction for more than seventy years. His novel
Gateway
won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Man Plus
won the Nebula Award, and altogether he has won seven Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards for his fiction, among his many kudos.
In addition to his solo fiction, Pohl has published collaborations with other writers, including C.M. Kornbluth, Lester del Rey, and Jack Williamson. One Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration,
The Space Merchants,
is a bestselling classic of satiric science fiction.
The Starchild Trilogy
with Williamson is one of the more notable collaborations in the field.
Pohl became a magazine editor when still a teenager. In the 1960s he piloted
Worlds of If
to three successive Hugos for Best Magazine. He has edited original-story anthologies, notably the seminal Star Science Fiction series of the early 1950s. Among his other activities in the field, he has been a literary agent, has edited lines of science fiction books, and has been president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Most recently, he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer for his blog,
www.thewaythefutureblogs.com
. He and his wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull, an editor and an academic active in the Science Fiction Research Association, live in Palatine, Illinois.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ALL THE LIVES HE LED
Copyright © 2011 by Frederik Pohl
All rights reserved.
Edited by James Frenkel
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429956642
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pohl, Frederik.
All the lives he led / Frederik Pohl.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
1. Vesuvius (Italy)—Fiction. 2. Volcanic eruptions—Fiction. 3. Terrorists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.O36A78 2011
813’.54—dc22
2010036667
First Edition: April 2011