Boy Who Would Live Forever A Novel Of Gateway

Chapter One From Istanbul to the Stars I On Stan's seventeenth birthday the Wrath of God came again, as it had been doing every six weeks or so. At the time Stan was alone in the apartment, cutting up vegetables for his birthday dinner. When he felt that familiar, sudden, overwhelming, disorienting, horny rush of vertigo he knew that it was what everybody he knew called "the Wrath of God" and nobody understood at all. Screams and sirens from outside the building told him that everybody else in that part of Istanbul was feeling it, too. Stan managed to drop the paring knife to the floor so he wouldn't cut himself. Then he staggered to a kitchen chair to wait it out. People said the Wrath was a terrible thing. Well, that was true enough. Whatever the Wrath of God really was, it struck everyone in the world at once---and not just the people still living on Earth, either. Ships in space, the colonies on Mars and Venus, as long as human beings were still within the confines of the Solar System, they all were caught up in its madness at the same moment, and the Wrath's costs in accidents and disasters were enormous. Personally, Stan didn't mind it all that much. What it felt like to him was like suddenly being overwhelmed by a vast, lonely, erotic nightmare. Like, Stan thought, probably what it would be like to get good and drunk. The erotic part was not very different from some of the yearnings Stan himself felt often enough. It didn't last very long. When it passed, Stan shook himself, picked up the things he had knocked to the floor and turned on the local TV news to see how it had gone this time. It had gone badly enough. Fires, car smashes---Istanbul's aggressive drivers relied on their split-second reflexes to avert disaster, and when the Wrath took away their skill the crashes came fast. The single worst thing that happened this time was an oil tanker that had been coming into the Golden Horn. With everyone on both the tanker's tugs and its own bridge suddenly incapacitated, the vessel had plowed, dead slow and irresistible, into one of the cruise-ship docks on the Old City side, and there it had exploded into flame. That was a really bad accident. Like any teenager, however, Stan had a high tolerance for other people's misfortunes. He yawned and got back to his chores, hoping only that the commotion wouldn't make his father too late in getting back home with the saffron and mussels for the birthday stew. When Stan finished with the vegetables he put them in a pot of cold water, and put a couple of his precious old disks on to play. This time it was Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Teagarden and the Firehouse Five Plus Three. Then he sat down to wait as he listened, thumbing through some of his comics and wondering if, this time, his father would have stayed sober long enough to get him some kind of a present for his birthday. That was the moment at which the polis came to the door. There were two of them, male and female, and they looked around the shabby apartment suspiciously. "Is this where the American citizen Walter Avery lived?" the woman demanded, and the past tense of the verb told Stan the whole story. It didn't take the polis long to tell Stan just how it was that the Wrath had made a statistic of his father. Walter Avery had fallen down while crossing the street and a spellbound taxi driver ran right over him. There was no hope of holding the driver responsible, the woman said at once; the Wrath, you know. Anyway, the driver had long since disappeared. And, besides, witnesses said that Stan's father had been drunk at the time. Of course. The male polis took pity on Stan's wretched stare. "At least he didn't suffer," he said gruffly. "HePohl, Frederik is the author of 'Boy Who Would Live Forever A Novel Of Gateway', published 2004 under ISBN 9780765310491 and ISBN 076531049X.