Collected Short Fiction, page 850
“Splendid.”
“And that completes the official part of my visit. You can stop thinking of me as your Guide for a while. Naturally, I’ll be with you a good deal of the time at the House of Leavetaking, handling any queries you may have, doing whatever I can to make things easier for you. For the moment, though, I’m here simply as your friend, not as your Guide. Would you care to talk? Not about Going, I mean. About music, politics, the weather, anything you like.”
Staunt said, “Somehow I don’t feel very talkative.”
“Shall I leave you alone?”
“I think that would be best. I’m starting to think of myself as a Departing One, Martin. I’d like a few hours to get accustomed to the idea.”
Bollinger bowed awkwardly. “It must be a difficult moment for you. I don’t want to intrude. I’ll come back just before dinnertime, all right?”
“Fine,” Staunt said.
Three
Afterward, feeling adrift, Staunt wandered aimlessly through his house, wondering how soon it would be before he changed his mind. He put no credence in Bollinger’s flattering, hopeful hypothesis that he might yet have important works of art to give the world; Staunt knew better. If he had ever owed a debt of creativity to mankind, that debt had long since been paid in full, and civilization need not fear it would be losing anything significant by his Going. Even so, he might find it difficult, after all, to remove himself from all he loved. Would the sight of his familiar possessions shake his decision? Here were the memorabilia of a long, comfortable life: the African masks, the Pueblo pots, the Mozart manuscript, the little Elizabethan harpsichord, the lunar boulder, the Sung bowl, the Canopic jars, the Persian miniatures, the dueling pistols, the Greek coins, all the elegant things that he had collected him in his years of traveling. Once it had seemed unbearable to him that he might ever be parted from these precious objects. They had taken on life for him, so that when a clumsy cleaning machine knocked a Cypriote statuette to the floor and smashed it, he had wept not for the monetary loss, but for the pain he imagined the little clay creature was suffering, for the humiliation it must feel at being ruined. He imagined it hurling bitter reproaches at him: I survived four thousand years so that I might become yours, and you let me get broken! As a child might pretend that her dolls were alive, and talk to them, and apologize to them for fancied slights. It was, he had known all along, a foolish, sentimental, even contemptible attitude, this attachment he had to his inanimate belongings, this solemn fond concern for their “comfort” and “feelings,” this way of speaking of them as “he” or “she” instead of “it,” of worrying about whether some prized piece was receiving a place of display that was properly satisfying to its ego. He acknowledged the half-submerged notion that he had created a family, a special entity, by assembling this hodgepodge of artifacts from a hundred cultures and a hundred eras.
Now, though, he deliberately confronted himself with ugly reality: when he had Gone, his “family” would be scattered, his beloved things sold or given away, some of them surely lost or broken in transit, some ending up on the dusty shelves of ignorant people, none of them ever again to know the warmth of ownership he had lavished on them. And he did not care. Except in the most remote, abstract way, he simply did not care. Today the life was gone out of them, and they were merely masks and pots and bits of bone and pieces of paper—objects, interesting and valuable and attractive, but lacking all feeling. Objects. They needed no coddling. He was under no obligation to them to worry about their welfare. Somehow, without his noticing it, his possessions had ceased to be his pets, and he felt no pain at the thought of parting from them. I must indeed be ready to Go, he told himself.
Here, in the little alcove off the studio, was his real family. A stack of portrait cubes: his wife, his son, his daughter, his children’s children, his children’s children’s children, each of them recorded in a gleaming plastic box a couple of inches high. There were so many of them—dozens! He had had only the socially approved two children, and so had his own children, and none of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren had had more than three, and yet look at the clutter of cubes! The multitude of them was the most vivid possible argument in favor of the idea of Going. One simply had to make room, or everyone would be overwhelmed by the tide of oncoming young ones. Of course in a world where practically no one ever died except voluntarily, and that only at a great old age, families did tend to accumulate amazingly as the generations came along. Even a small family, and these days there was no other kind, was bound to become immense over the course of eighty or ninety years through the compounding progressions of controlled but persistent fertility. All additions, no subtractions. Or very few. And so the numbers mounted. Look at all the cubes!
The cubes were clever things: computer-actuated personality simulations. Everyone got himself cubed at least once, and those who were particularly hungry for the odd sort of immortality that cubing conferred had new cubes made every few years. The process itself was a simple electronic transfer; it took about an hour to make a cube. The scanning machines recorded your voice and patterns of speech, your motion habits, your facial gestures, your whole set of standard reactions and responses. A battery of concise, cunningly perceptive personality tests yielded a character profile. This, too, went into the cube. They ended by having your soul in a box. Plug the cube into a receptor slot, and you came to life on a screen, smiling as you would smile, moving as you would move, sounding as you would sound, saying things you were likely to say. Of course, the thing on the screen was unreal, a mechanical mock-up, a counterfeit approximation of the person who had been cubed; but it was programmed to respond to conversation and to initiate its own conversational gambits without the stimulus of prior inputs, to absorb new data and change its outlook in the light of what it heard; in short, it behaved not like a frozen portrait but like a convincing imitation of the living person from whom it had been drawn.
Staunt studied the collection of cubes. He had five of his son, spanning Paul’s life from early middle age to early old age; Paul faithfully sent his father a new cube at the beginning of each decade. Three cubes of his daughter. A number of the grandchildren. The proud parents sent him cubes of the young ones when they were ten or twelve years old, and the grandchildren themselves, when they were adults, sent along more mature versions of themselves. By now he had four or five cubes of some of them. Each year there were new cubes: an updating of someone’s old one, or some great-great-grandchild getting immortalized for the first time, and everything landing on the patriarch’s shelf. Staunt rather liked the custom.
He had only one cube of his wife. They had developed the process about fifty years ago, and Edith had been dead since ’47, forty-eight years back. Staunt and his wife had been among the first to be cubed; just as well, for her time had been short, though they hadn’t known it. Even now, not all deaths were voluntary. Edith had died in a copter crash, and Staunt, close to ninety, had not remarried. Having the cube of her had been a great comfort to him in the years just after her death. He rarely played it now, mainly because of its technical imperfections; since the process was so new when her cube had been made, the simulation was only approximate, and her movements were jerky and awkward, not much like those of the graceful Edith he had known. He had no idea how long it had been since he had last played her. Impulsively, he slipped her cube into the slot.
The screen brightened, and there was Edith. Supple, alert, aglow. Long creamy-white hair, a purple wrap, her favorite gold pin clasped to her shoulder. She had been in her late seventies when the cube was made; she looked hardly more than fifty. Their marriage had lasted half a century. Staunt had only recently realized that the span of his life without her was now nearly as long as the span of his life with her.
“You’re looking well, Henry,” she said as soon as her image appeared.
“Not bad for an old relic. It’s 2095, Edith. I’ll be one hundred thirty-six.”
“You haven’t switched me on in a while, then. Not for five years, in fact.”
“No. But it isn’t that I haven’t thought of you, Edith. It’s just that I’ve tended to drift away from everything I once loved. I’ve become a sleepwalker, in a way. Wandering through the days, filling in my time.”
“Have you been well?”
“Well enough,” Staunt said. “Healthy. Astonishingly healthy. I can’t complain.”
“Are you composing?”
“Very little, these days. Nothing, really. I’ve made some sketches for intended work, but that’s all.”
“I’m sorry. I was hoping you’d have something to play for me.”
“No,” he said. “Nothing.”
Over the years, he had faithfully played each of his new compositions to Edith’s cube, just as he had kept her up to date on the doings of their family and friends, on world events, on cultural fads. He had not wanted her cube to remain fixed forever in 2046. To have her constantly learning, growing, changing, helped to sustain his illusion that the Edith on the screen was the real Edith. He had even told her the details of her own death.
“How are the children?” she asked.
“Fine. I see them often. Paul’s in fine shape, a tough old man just like his father. He’s ninety-one, Edith. Does it puzzle you to be the mother of a son who’s older than you are?”
She laughed. “Why should I think of it that way? If he’s ninety-one, I’m one hundred twenty-five.”
“Of course. Of course.” If she wanted it like that.
“And Crystal’s eighty-seven. Yes, that is a little strange. I can’t help thinking of her as a young woman. Why, her children must be old themselves, and they were just babies!”
“Donna is sixty-one. David is fifty-eight. Henry is forty-seven.”
“Henry?” Edith said, her face going blank. After a moment’s confusion she recovered. “Oh, yes. The third child, the little accident. Your namesake. I forgot him for a moment.” Henry had been born soon after Edith’s death; Staunt had told her cube about him, but imprinting of post-cubing events never took as well as the original programming; she had lost the datum for a moment. As if to cover her embarrassment, Edith began asking him about all the other grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, the whole horde that had accumulated after her lifetime. She called forth names, assigned the right children to the right parents, scampered up and down the entire Staunt family tree, showing off to please him.
But he forced an abrupt switch of subject. “I want to tell you, Edith, that I’ve decided it’s time for me to Go.”
Again the blank look. “Go? Go where?”
“You know what I mean. Going.”
“No, I don’t. Really, I don’t.”
“To a House of Leavetaking.”
“I still don’t follow.”
He struggled against being impatient with her. “I’ve explained the idioms to you. Long ago. They’ve been in use at least thirty or forty years. It’s voluntary termination of life, Edith. I’ve discussed it with you. Everyone comes to it sooner or later.”
“You’ve decided to die?”
“To Go, yes, to die, to Go.”
“Why?”
“Because of the boredom. The loneliness. I’ve outlived most of my early friends. I’ve outlived my own talent. I’ve outlived myself, Edith. A hundred thirty-six years. And I could go on another fifty. But why bother? To live just for the sake of living?”
“Poor Henry. You always had such a wonderful capacity for being interested in things. The day wasn’t long enough for you, with your collections, and your books, and your music, and traveling around the world, and your friends—”
“I’ve read everything I want to read. I’ve seen the whole world. I’m tired of collecting things.”
“Perhaps I was the lucky one, then. A decent number of years, a happy life, and then out. Quickly.”
“No. I’ve enjoyed living on like this, Edith. I kept my health, I didn’t go senile—it’s been good, all of it. Except for not having you with me. But I’ve stopped enjoying things. Quite suddenly I’ve realized that there’s no point in staying any longer. The wheel has to turn. The old have to clear themselves away. Somewhere there are people waiting to have a child, waiting for a vacancy in the world, and it’s up to me to create that vacancy.”
“Have you told Paul and Crystal?”
“Not yet. I made the decision just today. But I’ll notify them—or it’ll be done for me. They’ll have most of my property. I’ll give my cube of you to Paul. Everything’s handled very efficiently for a Departing One.”
“How soon will you—Go?”
Staunt shrugged. “I don’t know yet. A month, two months—there’s no rush about it.”
“You sound as though you don’t really want to do it.”
He shook his head. “I want to, Edith. But in a civilized way. Taking my leave properly. I’ve lived a long time; I can’t let go in a single day. But I won’t stay here much longer.”
“I’ll miss you, Henry.”
He pondered the intricacies of that. The cube missing the living man. Chuckling, he said, “Paul will play my cube to you, and yours to me. We’ll talk to each other through the machinery. We’ll always be there for each other.”
The image of Edith reached a hand toward him. He cursed the clumsiness of the simulation. Gently he touched his fingertips to the screen, making a kind of contact with her across the decades, across the barriers separating them. He blew a kiss to her. Then, quickly, before sentimentality overcame him, he pulled her cube from the slot and set it beside those of his son and daughter. In haste, nearly stumbling, he went on into his studio.
The big room held the tangible residue of his long career. Over here, the music itself, in recorded performance: disks and cassettes for the early works, sparkling playback cubes for the later ones. Here were the manuscripts, uniformly bound in red half-morocco, one of his little vanities. Here were the scrapbooks of reviews and the programs of concerts. Here were the trophies. Here were the volumes of his critical writings. Staunt had been a busy man. He looked at the titles stamped on the bindings of the manuscripts: the symphonies, the string quartets, the concerti, the miscellaneous chamber works, the songs, the sonatas, the cantatas, the operas. So much. So much. He had tried his hand at virtually every form. His music was polite, agreeable, conservative, even a bit academic, yet he made no apologies for it: he had followed his own inner voices wherever they led, and if he had not been led to rebellion and fulminations, so be it. He had given pleasure through his work. He had added to the world’s small stock of beauty. It was a respectable life’s accomplishment. If he had had more passion, more turbulence, more dynamism, perhaps, he would have shaken the world as Beethoven had, as Wagner. Well, the great gesture had never been his to brandish; yet he had done his best, and in his way he had achieved enough. Some men heal the sick, some men soothe the souls of the troubled, some men invent wondrous machines—and some make songs and symphonies, because they must, and because it is all they can do to enrich the world into which they had been thrust. Even now, with his life’s flame burning low, with everything suddenly seeming pointless and hollow to him, Staunt felt no sense of having wasted his time filling this room with what it held. Never in the past hundred years had a week gone by without a performance of one of his compositions somewhere. That was sufficient justification for having written, for having lived.
He turned on the synthesizer and rested his fingers lightly on the keys, and of their own will they played the opening theme of his Venus symphony of 1989, his first mature work. How far away all that seemed now—the glittering autumn of triumphs as he conducted it himself in a dozen capitals, the critics agog, everyone from the disgruntled Brahms-fanciers to the pundits of the avant-garde rushing to embrace him as the savior of serious music. Of course, there had been a reaction to that hysterical overpraise later, when the modernists decided that no one so popular could possibly be good and the conservatives began to find him too modern, but such things were only to be expected. He had gone his own way. Eventually others had recognized his genius—a limited and qualified genius, a small and tranquil genius, but genius nevertheless. As the world emerged from the storms of the twentieth century’s bitter second half, as the new society of peace and harmony took shape on the debris of the old, Staunt created the music a quieter era needed, and became its lyric voice.
Here. He pushed a cube into a playback slot. The sweet outcry of his wind quintet. Here: The Trials of Job, his first opera. Here: Three Orbits for Strings and Stasis Generator. Here: Polyphonies for Five Worlds. He got them all going at once, bringing wild skeins of sound out of the room’s assortment of speakers, and stood in the middle, trembling a little, accepting the sonic barrage and untangling everything in his mind.
After perhaps four minutes he cut off the sound. He did not need to play the music; it was all within his head, whenever he wanted it. Lightly he caressed the smooth, glossy black backs of his scrapbooks, with all the documentation of his successes and his occasional failures neatly mounted. He ran his fingers along the rows of bound manuscripts. So much. So very much. Such a long productive life. He had no complaints.
He told his telephone to get him the Office of Fulfillment again.
“My Guide is Martin Bollinger,” he said. “Would you let him know that I’d like to be transferred to the House of Leavetaking as soon as possible?”
Four
Bollinger, sitting beside him in the copter, leaned across him and pointed down.
“That’s it,” he said. “Omega Prime, right below.”
The House of Leavetaking seemed to be a string of gauzy white tentlike pavilions, arranged in a U-shape around a courtyard garden. The late afternoon sun tinged the pavilions with gold and red. Bare fangs of purplish mountains rose on the north and east; on the other side of Omega Prime the fiat flat brown Arizona desert, pocked with cacti and palo verde, stretched toward the dark horizon.
