Gateways (22 page)

“Write about something else,” Roy suggested.

Varney smiled. “Well, but this is the cutting edge in the science fiction field. And I got to thinking. We should have the singularity
now
. Some man or woman or machine, someone out there is increasing his intelligence toward infinity.”

“This is not a new thing, Uncle,” Roy said patiently. “A child does that growing up. It’s a big breakthrough when he learns to read.”

“A child growing up reaches a limit. A computer might not. A computer programmer might not. I was thinking that we’d be there already if it weren’t that nerds get distracted. What if we went looking for the fated ones? We might find someone like Diane Hire.”

“Name-dropper.”

“Roy, she’s been in the news. Diane Hire suffered from depression. None of the usual treatments worked. Twenty years of despair in a mental institution, and then some doctors put electrodes in her brain and batteries under the skin in her upper chest. The current runs through what we used to call the pleasure center in her brain. She’s smiling for the first time in decades. Roy, she’s got a wonderful smile! She grins like she means it, with faith and energy and a plan for the future. You look at her, you want to elect her, or invest money.”

Roy was laughing.

His uncle said, “But could she have gone further? Suppose her doctors had linked her directly to a computer instead, and kept on fiddling. She might have been the first of the . . . call ’em ‘singular ones.’ Bought stocks on the Internet. Bought more memory. Wound up owning the world. Or take Richard Feynman, a real seminal genius, worked on the atomic bomb, the founder—”

“Quantum electrodynamics. QED.”

“Yeah. What if Feynman hadn’t been distracted by bongo drums and wine and women and song? Or Bill Gates.
He
could have been the one, but he went for wealth instead, and social interactions, a wife and family, and happiness. Just as soon as he was able.”

“I think he should have all that,” Roy said positively.

“Okay,” said Varney, and sucked up the last of his cappuccino.

Roy sipped at his iced mocha latte. “But that’s doing nothing for you. Uncle, what if Bill Gates
did
it? Linked to one of his own computers. Boosted his intelligence. Didn’t tell the rest of us.”

“Mmm?”

“You know, Gates works all his minions half to death, but the implied payoff is that they all get rich. They
did
get rich, all of them. He’s been sharing
the secret with all the bright guys who accept his offer, and work their decade or two with no thought for anything but Microsoft, and come out owning half the planet. How many are they? Could that many keep the secret?”

“If you can’t keep the secret, you disappear,” his uncle said. “Any decent writer of fiction would tell you that.”

Roy’s laugh somehow dried up. “Maybe you should write some other story.”

Varney smiled.

The Boss was an old man, feeling his mortality. He’d be wealthy if he hadn’t spent everything on constant upgrades to his market, his computers. He’d have friends and a family if he’d trusted enough, but he might have lost control too. The computers had been everything to him.

And he finally had the computer power he needed.

Each of the four employees here present was crazy in his own way. Nerds together. Elmer Haines and Guy Towers had built the Kaiser supercomputer; Gary Hoberman had been invaluable in shaping the Solipsist program; but they didn’t understand what they’d built. He still needed them all, and Orren too, to make it all work.

Of course it was all for him.
His
daydream. The old man should have known that they wouldn’t share his enthusiasm.

He tried talking money. “It’ll make us all indecently rich. What I’ve put together here is the ultimate entertainment—”

Orren Garvey broke in, a thing the lawyer wouldn’t usually do. “It’s too big. We couldn’t sell it—no, lease it, more likely—for less than a hundred million dollars a year. Who’d pay that?”

“Half a dozen oil sheiks, maybe. Some of the other computer companies, if only to copy us. Orren, the price will drop. Once we’ve got the kinks out, we’ll have customers. I know a guy who paid twenty million dollars to live in the Space Station for a week. Now it’d be thirty million.”

“We’ve got maybe a hundred possible customers, worldwide. Willy, when they see the interface, they’ll flinch. Wires in the brain! You want to test it yourself, don’t you? But you’ll
feel
the bad programming, the bugs, they’ll be in your
head
before you can write them out.”

“Orren, I’ve already tried the prototype.”

Orren was silent.

“It’ll get cheaper again. Moore’s Law: you get double the computer
power per dollar every year and a half. When it gets cheap enough, we could have the whole human race living inside the hard drive.”

Orren was frowning. Was he having ethical problems? Orren could be talked around, but later. The lawyer could always play catch-up.

Gary was fascinated.

Guy wasn’t, but he was following all right. He wasn’t a leader anyway.

But Elmer Haines had a sleepy look, and that wasn’t so good. So the old man said, “You won’t have to wait to get rich, Elmer. Hook up and you’re already there. A whole world, and you own it. The Kaiser has the capacity to simulate billions of units. Virtual people, and anyone can play, but I’ll be in there first. I’m going to create a utopia with the Solipsist program. The world as we always wanted it to be. When I’ve got the bugs out, you can just hook in.”

Elmer asked, “What’ll you call yourself?”

“What?”

Elmer said, “
Second Life
and the like, the users give their avatars names—”

The old man shook his head hard. “I’ll use my own name. William Gates.”

“What’s your perfect world like, Willy?”

“Well—” He stopped. His sudden horrifying insight was that he hadn’t done enough daydreaming. Computers, programming, tiny components growing tinier, competing machines: these had been his life, but they were not the kind of dream that can give a world its shape.

“I suppose I’ll make myself the richest man on Earth. I’ll make you all rich too, everone who’s worked for me or with me. There’ve been too many computers in my life. In the next I’ll have family and children. I’ll have presidents and kings for friends. I’ll be strong. Healthy. Better eyesight.”

“That’s just you. What about the world? What’s in it for us?” Gary Hoberman asked.

“I hadn’t thought . . . oh, all right.” This wasn’t coming easily. “I’ll take down the Soviet Union. Make the United States the most powerful nation in the world.”

“Won’t the Soviets just nuke everything?”

“I won’t write it that way.”

“Cities on the moon? Base on Mars?”

The old man laughed, then coughed. When he had it under control he said, “The Kaiser doesn’t have
that
much capacity. Maybe the 2.0 version. Or I can say we went to the moon and came back and stopped. Leave it at that.”

Elmer said, “I wonder if those six billion people you’re going to program in could be self-aware?”

“Hah! Maybe with the 2.0 version.”

“We should think about it now. Orren, is it ethical to build people into an artificial world? Willy, you know perfectly well that it won’t stay peaceful. Peace is dull. You can’t sell dull. You’ll end with a shoot-’em-up game.”

The lawyer said, “Willy, what if you’re right, what if they’ll be self-aware? Is it ethical to deny all these people their existence? It’s like the ethics of abortion. There are two sides.”

Elmer shook his head violently, and the old man said, “I never would have thought of that one. You think I
owe
it to them?” He laughed out loud, but he was the only one.

He didn’t wait for an answer. “Let’s do it. We’ll start tomorrow,” he said, and that was that.

Frederik Pohl bought my first four stories. From that point on he got first look at almost everything.

The third of those stories was a novelette. He retitled it
World of Ptavvs,
using a word I’d made up for the story background. And he ran the novelette down the street to Betty Ballantine and suggested it could become a novel. Ballantine Books published it, my first.

Fred saw the short story “Becalmed in Hell” first. I got back a letter telling me everything he thought was wrong with it. I rewrote the story, and sent it to
F&SF
, which bought and published it. The next time we met, he explained that a long letter from an editor means he’d like to see an altered version: a thing I should have realized myself.

I sent him “Neutron Star.” He didn’t just publish it; he suggested a series of stories about the weirdest objects in the universe, paired with articles about the same objects. That series never quite jelled, but Fred did start me looking for the weirdness about us, and I’ve continued to do that.

This is for Fred.

—L
ARRY
N
IVEN

While Fred Pohl’s writing career will almost certainly be the thing most celebrated and talked about in this anthology, there’s one other thing I wouldn’t want to see overlooked: his career as a magazine editor. Although most people would name John W. Campbell for this role, for me Fred was quite probably the best SF magazine editor who ever lived, and when I became an SF magazine editor myself, back in the early eighties, the editor I consciously modeled myself upon was not John W. Campbell, but Fred Pohl.

I’m more jealous of Fred for having been the one who got to publish all those great Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance stories than I am of any other editor; the publication of Smith’s “On the Storm Planet,” “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell,” “A Planet Named Shayol,” “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons,” and “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” and Vance’s
The Dragon Masters
,
The Last Castle
, and “The Moon Moth” would be enough all by themselves to cement Fred’s position in the hierarchy of great SF editors, to say nothing of all the other first-rate fiction by first-rate authors that appeared in both
Galaxy
and
Worlds of If
during the years that he edited them.

Although Fred thought of
Worlds of If
as
Galaxy
’s remainder outlet, a magazine in which to dump stuff that was good but not good enough for Pohl’s frontline magazine,
Galaxy
, I must admit that it was
Worlds of If
that owned my adolescent heart as it apparently did the hearts of many another fan, as, seemingly almost to Fred’s annoyance, it kept winning the Hugo Award for best magazine year after year instead of the more “respectable”
Galaxy
.
Galaxy
may have been more substantial, but
Worlds of If
was more fun, a magazine that specialized in the sort of colorful rip-snorting adventure tales that had become rarer in more somber magazines such as
Analog
by then. Fred used
Worlds of If
as a platform to revitalize the space adventure tale by publishing Larry Niven’s early “Known Space”
stories and Fred Saberhagen’s long sequence of “Berserker” stories, and a little later started something of a miniboom in the even-more-specialized form of the “interstellar espionage” story, with Keith Laumer’s hugely popular “Retief” stories; they were later joined by similar stories by C. C. MacApp, James H. Schmitz, and others, and there was also always highly entertaining work to be found in the pages of
If
by Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree Jr., Philip K. Dick, R. A. Lafferty, and others.

Remainder outlet or not, Fred made
If
a loose, lively, and entertaining magazine. Not the least of the lessons from Fred’s work that I kept in mind when I began editing a monthly SF magazine was that in addition to whatever work of great profundity and social worth you could find to publish, such a magazine also always had to be fun, and that it was the reasonable expectation of finding fun there that would keep the readers coming back month after month.

Speaking of which, the one thing I quite consciously stole from Fred’s
If
when I took over
Asimov’s
was a device known as the Next Issue Box. Fred used these Coming Attractions very shrewdly not only to whip up anticipation for the wonders that could be found in the next issue, but to create a sense of community, of readers joined together in excitement and expectation, all of them looking forward eagerly to what was to come. I followed his example at
Asimov’s
, where the Next Issue Boxes had previously often been nothing more than a list of author names. I made them lurid and hucksterish, trying my best to drum up excitement and anticipation for the stories that were going to be in the next issue. Now that kind of Coming Attractions announcement is pretty much the industry standard. It may be a small one, but that also is a part of Fred’s legacy.

There have ever only been a handful of great SF magazine editors, and, in my opinion, Fred deserves to be ranked right at the very top.