Contents
My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male. My analyst (whom I call Sigfrid von Shrink, although that isn’t his name; he hasn’t got a name, being a machine) has a lot of electronic fun with this fact:
“Why do you care if some people think it’s a girl’s name, Rob?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why do you keep bringing it up?”
He annoys me when he keeps bringing up what I keep bringing up. I look at the ceiling with its hanging mobiles and pinatas, then I look out the window. It isn’t really a window. It’s a moving holopic of surf coming in on Kaena Point; Sigfrid’s programming is pretty eclectic. After a while I say, “I can’t help what my parents called me. I tried spelling it R-O-B-I-N-E-T, but then everybody pronounces it wrong.”
“You could change it to something else, you know.”
“If I changed it,” I say, and I am sure I am right in this, “you would just tell me I was going to obsessive lengths to defend my inner dichotomies.”
“What I would tell you,” Sigfrid says, in his heavy mechanical attempt at humor, “is that, please, you shouldn’t use technical psychoanalytic terms. I’d appreciate it if you would just say what you feel.”
“What I feel,” I say, for the thousandth time, “is happy. I got no problems. Why wouldn’t I feel happy?”
We play these word games a lot, and I don’t like them. I think there’s something wrong with his program. He says, “You tell me, Robbie. Why don’t you feel happy?”
I don’t say anything to that. He persists. “I think you’re worried.”
“Shit, Sigfrid,” I say, feeling a little disgust, “you always say that. I’m not worried about anything.”
He tries wheedling. “There’s nothing wrong with saying how you feel.”
I look out the window again, angry because I can feel myself trembling and I don’t know why. “You’re a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?”
He says something or other, but I am not listening. I am wondering why I waste my time coming here. If there was anybody ever who had every reason to be happy, I have to be him. I’m rich. I’m pretty good-looking. I am not too old, and anyway, I have Full Medical so I can be just about any age I want to be for the next fifty years or so. I live in New York City under the Big Bubble, where you can’t afford to live unless you’re really well fixed, and maybe some kind of celebrity besides. I have a summer apartment that overlooks the Tappan Sea and the Palisades Dam. And the girls go crazy over my three Out bangles. You don’t see too many prospectors anywhere on Earth, not even in New York. They’re all wild to have me tell them what it’s really like out around the Orion Nebula or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (I’ve never been to either place, of course. The one really interesting place I’ve been to I don’t like to talk about.)
“Or,” says Sigirid, having waited the appropriate number of microseconds for a response to whatever it was he said last, “if you really are happy, why do you come here for help?”
I hate it when he asks me the same questions I ask myself. I don’t answer. I squirm around until I get comfortable again on the plastic foam mat, because I can tell that it’s going to be a long, lousy session. If I knew why I needed help, why would I need help?
“You’re a pain in the ass, Sigfrid, you know that?”
“Rob, you aren’t very responsive today,” Sigfrid says through the little loudspeaker at the head of the mat. Sometimes he uses a very lifelike dummy, sitting in an armchair, tapping a pencil and smiling quirkily at me from time to time. But I’ve told him that that makes me nervous. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re thinking?”
“I’m not thinking about anything, particularly.”
“Let your mind roam. Say whatever comes into it, Rob.”
“I’m remembering—“ I say, and stop.
“Remembering what, Rob?”
“Gateway?”
“That sounds more like a question than a statement.”
“Maybe it is. I can’t help that. That’s what I’m remembering: Gateway.”
I have every reason to remember Gateway. That’s how I got the money and the bangles, and other things. I think back to the day I left Gateway. That was, let’s see, Day 31 of Orbit 22, which means, counting back, just about sixteen years and a couple of months since I left there. I was thirty minutes out of the hospital and couldn’t wait to collect my pay, catch my ship, and blow.
Sigfrid says politely, “Please say what you’re thinking out loud, Robbie.”
“I’m thinking about Shikitei Bakin,” I say.
“Yes, you’ve mentioned him. I remember. What about him?” I don’t answer. Old, legless Shicky Bakin had the room next to mine, but I don’t want to discuss it with Sigfrid. I wriggle around on my circular mat, thinking about Shicky and trying to cry.
“You seem upset, Rob.”
I don’t answer to that, either. Shicky was almost the only person I said good-bye to on Gateway. That was funny. There was a big difference in our status. I was a prospector, and Shicky was a garbageman. They paid him enough money to cover his life-support tax because he did odd jobs, and even on Gateway they have to have somebody to clean up the garbage. But sooner or later he would be too old and too sick to be any more use at all. Then, if he was lucky, they would push him out into space and he would die. If he wasn’t lucky, they’d probably send him back to a planet. He would die there, too, before very long; but first he would have the experience of living for a few weeks or so as a helpless cripple.
Anyway, he was my neighbor. Every morning he would get up and painstakingly vacuum every square inch around his cell. It would be dirty, because there was so much trash floating around Gateway all the time, despite the attempts to clean it up. When he had it perfectly clean, even around the roots of the little shrublets he planted and shaped, he would take a handful of pebbles, bottle caps, bits of torn paper—the same trash he’d just vacuumed up, half the time—and painstakingly arrange it on the place he had just cleaned. Funny! I never could see the difference, but Klara said ... Klara said she could.
“Rob, what were you thinking about just then?” Sigfrid asks.
I roll up into a fetal ball and mumble something.
“I couldn’t understand what you just said, Robbie.”
I don’t say anything. I wonder what became of Shicky. I suppose he died. Suddenly I feel very sad about Shicky dying, such a very long way from Nagoya, and I wish again that I could cry. But I can’t. I squirm and wriggle. I flail against the foam mat until the restraining straps squeak. Nothing helps. The pain and shame won’t come out. I feel rather pleased with myself that I am trying so hard to let the feelings out, but I have to admit I am not being successful, and the dreary interview goes on.
Sigfrid says, “Rob, you’re taking a long time to answer. Do you think you’re holding something back?”
I say virtuously, “What kind of a question is that? If I am, how would I know?” I pause to survey the inside of my brain, looking in all the corners for padlocks that I can open for Sigfrid. I don’t see any. I say judiciously, “I don’t think that’s it, exactly. I don’t feel as if I were blocking. It’s more as if there were so many things I wanted to say that I couldn’t decide which.”
“Take any one, Rob. Say the first thing that comes into your mind.”
Now, that’s dumb, it seems to me. How do I know which is the first thing, when they’re all boiling around in there together? My father? My mother? Sylvia? Klara? Poor Shicky, trying to balance himself in flight without any legs, flapping around like a barn swallow chasing bugs as he scoops the cobwebby scraps out of Gateway’s air?
I reach down into my mind for places where I know it hurts, because it has hurt there before. The way I felt when I was seven years old, parading up and down the Rock Park walk in front of the other kids, begging for someone to pay attention to me? The way it was when we were out of realspace and knew that we were trapped, with the ghost star coming up out of nothingness below us like the smile of a Cheshire cat? Oh, I have a hundred memories like those, and they all hurt. That is, they can. They are pain. They are clearly labeled PAINFUL in the index to my memory. I know where to find them, and I know what it feels like to let them surface.
But they will not hurt unless I let them out.
“I’m waiting, Rob,” Sigfrid says.
“I’m thinking,” I say. As I lie there it comes to my mind that I’ll be late for my guitar lesson. That reminds me of something, and I look at the fingers of my left hand, checking to see that the fingernails have not grown too long, wishing the calluses were harder and thicker. I have not learned to play the guitar very well, but most people are not that critical and it gives me pleasure. Only you have to keep practicing and remembering. Let’s see, I think, how do you make that transition from the D-maj to the C-7th again?
“Rob,” Sigfrid says, “this has not been a very productive session. There are only about ten or fifteen minutes left. Why don’t you just say the first thing that comes into your mind. . . now.”
I reject the first thing and say the second. “The first thing that comes into my mind is the way my mother was crying when my father was killed.”
“I don’t think that was actually the first thing, Rob. Let me make a guess. Was the first thing something about Klara?”
My chest fills, tingling. My breath catches. All of a sudden there’s Klara rising up before me, sixteen years earlier and not yet an hour older. . . . I say, “As a matter of fact, Sigfrid, I think what I want to talk about is my mother.” I allow myself a polite, deprecatory chuckle.
Sigfrid doesn’t ever sigh in resignation, but he can be silent in a way that sounds about the same.
“You see,” I go on, carefully outlining all the relevant issues, “she wanted to get married again after my father died. Not right away. I don’t mean that she was glad about his death, or anything like that. No, she loved him, all right. But still, I see now, she was a healthy young woman—well, fairly young. Let’s see, I suppose she was about thirty-three. And if it hadn’t been for me I’m sure she would have remarried. I have feelings of guilt about that. I kept her from doing it. I went to her and said, ‘Ma, you don’t need another man. I’ll be the man in the family. I’ll take care of you.’ Only I couldn’t, of course. I was only about five years old.”
“I think you were nine, Robbie.”
“Was I? Let me think. Gee, Sigfrid, I guess you’re right—“ And then I try to swallow a big drop of spit that has somehow instantly formed in my throat and I gag and cough.
“Say it, Rob!” Sigfrid says insistently. “What do you want to say?”
“God damn you, Sigfrid!”
“Go ahead, Rob. Say it.”
“Say what? Christ, Sigfrid! You’re driving me right up the wall! This shit isn’t doing either one of us any good!”
“Say what’s bothering you, Rob, please.”
“Shut your flicking tin mouth!” All that carefully covered pain is pushing its way out and I can’t stand it, can’t deal with it.
“I suggest, Rob, that you try—“
I surge against the straps, kicking chunks out of the foam matting, roaring, “Shut up, you! I don’t want to hear. I can’t cope with this, don’t you understand me? I can’t! Can’t cope, can’t cope!”
Sigfrid waits patiently for me to stop weeping, which happens rather suddenly. And then, before he can say anything, I say wearily, “Oh, hell, Sigfrid, this whole thing isn’t getting us anywhere. I think we should call it off. There must be other people who need your services more than I do.”
“As to that, Rob,” he says, “I am quite competent to meet all the demands on my time.”
I am drying my tears on the paper towels he has left beside the mat and don’t answer.
“There is still excess capacity, in fact,” he goes on. “But you must be the judge of whether we continue with these sessions or not.”
“Have you got anything to drink in the recovery room?” I ask him.
“Not in the sense you mean, no. There is what I am told is a very pleasant bar on the top floor of this building.”
“Well,” I say, “I just wonder what I’m doing here.”
And, fifteen minutes later, having confirmed my appointment for the next week, I am drinking a cup of tea in Sigfrid’s recovery cubicle. I listen to hear if his next patient has started screaming yet, but I can’t hear anything.
So I wash my face, adjust my scarf, and slick down the little cowlick in my hair. I go up to the bar for a quick one. The headwaiter, who is human, knows me, and gives me a seat looking south toward the Lower Bay rim of the bubble. He looks toward a tall, copper-skinned girl with green eyes sitting by herself, but I shake my head. I drink one short drink, admire the legs on the copper-skinned girl and, thinking mostly about where I am going to go for dinner, keep my appointment for my guitar lesson.
All my life I wanted to be a prospector, as far back as I can remember. I couldn’t have been more than six when my father and mother took me to a fair in Cheyenne. Hot dogs and popped soya, colored-paper hydrogen balloons, a circus with dogs and horses, wheels of fortune, games, rides. And there was a pressure tent with opaque sides, a dollar to get in, and inside somebody had arranged a display of imports from the Heechee tunnels on Venus. Prayer fans and fire pearls, real Heechee-metal mirrors that you could buy for twenty-five dollars apiece. Pa said they weren’t real, but to me they were real. We couldn’t afford twenty-five dollars apiece, though. And when you came right down to it, I didn’t really need a mirror. Freckled face, buck teeth, hair I brushed straight back and tied. They had just found Gateway. I heard my father talking about it going home that night in the airbus, when I guess they thought I was asleep, and the wistful hunger in his voice kept me awake.
If it hadn’t been for my mother and me he might have found a way to go. But he never got the chance. He was dead a year later. All I inherited from him was his job, as soon as I was big enough to hold it.
I don’t know if you’ve ever worked in the food mines, but you’ve probably heard about them. There isn’t any great joy there. I started, half-time and half-pay, at twelve. By the time I was sixteen I had my father’s rating: charge driller—good pay, hard work.
But what can you do with the pay? It isn’t enough for Full Medical. It isn’t enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of local success story. You work six hours on and ten hours off. Eight hours’ sleep and you’re on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the time. You can’t smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles everywhere. The girls are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are.
So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other’s women and played the lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor that was made not ten miles away. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and sometimes vodka or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still columns. I was no different from any of the others . . . except that, one time, I won the lottery. And that was my ticket out.
Before that happened I just lived.
My mother was a miner, too. After my father was killed in the shaft fire she brought me up, with the help of the company creche. We got along all right until I had my psychotic episode. I was twenty-six at the time. I had some trouble with my girl, and then for a while I just couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. So they put me away. I was out of circulation for most of a year, and when they let me out of the shrink tank my mother had died.
Face it: that was my fault. I don’t mean I planned it, I mean she would have lived if she hadn’t had me to worry about. There wasn’t enough money to pay the medical expenses for both of us. I needed psychotherapy. She needed a new lung. She didn’t get it, so she died.
I hated living on in the same apartment after she was dead, but it was either that or go into bachelor quarters. I didn’t like the idea of living in such close proximity to a lot of men. Of course I could have gotten married. I didn’t—Sylvia, the girl I’d had the trouble with, was long gone by that time—but it wasn’t because I had anything against the idea of marriage. Maybe you might think I did, considering my psychiatric history, and also considering that I’d lived with my mother as long as she was alive. But it isn’t true. I liked girls very much. I would have been very happy to marry one and raise a child.
But not in the mines.
I didn’t want to leave a son of mine the way my father had left me.
Charge drilling is bitchy hard work. Now they use steam torches with Heechee heating coils and the shale just politely splits away, like carving cubes of wax. But then we drilled and blasted. You’d go down into the shaft on the high-speed drop at the start of your shift. The shaft wall was slimy and stinking ten inches from your shoulder, moving at sixty kilometers an hour relative to you; I’ve seen miners with a few drinks in them stagger and stretch out a hand to support themselves and pull back a stump. Then you pile out of the bucket and slip and stumble on the duckboards for a kilometer or more till you come to the working face. You drill your shaft. You set your charges. Then you back out into a cul-de-sac while they blast, hoping you figured it right and the whole reeking, oily mass doesn’t come down on you. (If you’re buried alive you can live up to a week in the loose shale. People have. When they don’t get rescued until after the third day they’re usually never any good for anything anymore.) Then, if everything has gone all right, you dodge the handling loaders as they come creeping in on their tracks, on your way to the next face.
The masks, they say, take out most of the hydrocarbons and the rock dust. They don’t take out the stink. I’m not sure they take out all the hydrocarbons, either. My mother is not the only miner I knew who needed a new lung—nor the only one who couldn’t pay for one, either.
And then, when your shift is over, where is there to go?
You go to a bar. You go to a dorm-room with a girl. You go to a rec-room to play cards. You watch TV.
You don’t go outdoors very much. There’s no reason. There are a couple of little parks, carefully tended, planted, replanted; Rock Park even has hedges and a lawn. I bet you never saw a lawn that had to be washed, scrubbed (with detergent!), and air-dried every week, or it would die. So we mostly leave the parks to the kids.
Apart from the parks, there is only the surface of Wyoming, and as far as you can see it looks like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green anywhere. Nothing alive. No birds, no squirrels, no pets. A few sludgy, squidgy creeks that for some reason are always bright ochre-red under the oil. They tell us that we’re lucky at that, because our part of Wyoming was shaft-mined. In Colorado, where they strip-mined, things were even worse.
I always found that hard to believe, and still do, but I’ve never gone to look.
And apart from everything else, there’s the smell and sight and sound of the work. The sunsets orangey-brown through the haze. The constant smell. All day and all night there’s the roar of the extractor furnaces, heating and grinding the marlstone to get the kerogen out of it, and the rumble of the long-line conveyors, dragging the spent shale away to pile it somewhere.
See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it expands, like popcorn. So there’s no place to put it. You can’t squeeze it back into the shaft you’ve taken it out of; there’s too much of it. If you dig out a mountain of shale and extract the oil, the popped shale that’s left is enough to make two mountains. So that’s what you do. You build new mountains.
And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast the next morning.
Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up.
All the TV shows have morale-builder commercials telling us how important our work is, how the whole world depends on us for food. It’s all true. They don’t have to keep reminding us. If we didn’t do what we do there would be hunger in Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon. We all know that. We contribute five trillion calories a day to the world’s diet, half the protein ration for about a fifth of the global population. It all comes out of the yeasts and bacteria we grow off the Wyoming shale oil, along with parts of Utah and Colorado. The world needs that food. But so far it has cost us most of Wyoming, half of Appalachia, a big chunk of the Athabasca tar sands region. . . and what are we going to do with all those people when the last drop of hydrocarbon is converted to yeast?
It’s not my problem, but I still think of it.
It stopped being my problem when I won the lottery, the day after Christmas, the year I turned twenty-six.
The prize was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Enough to live like a king for a year. Enough to marry and keep a family on, provided we both worked and didn’t live too high.
Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway.
I took the lottery ticket down to the travel office and turned it in for passage. They were glad to see me; they didn’t do much of a business there, especially in that kind of commodity. I had about ten thousand dollars left over in change, give or take a little. I didn’t count it. I bought drinks for my whole shift as far as it would go. With the fifty people in my shift, and all the friends and casual drop-ins who leeched on to the party, it went about twentyfour hours.
Then I staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office. Five months later, I was circling in toward the asteroid, staring out the portholes at the Brazilian cruiser that was challenging us, on my way to being a prospector at last.
Sigfrid never closes off a subject. He never says, “Well, Rob, I guess we’ve talked enough about that.” But sometimes when I’ve been lying there on the mat for a long time, not responding much, making jokes or humming through my nose, after a while he’ll say:
“I think we might go back to a different area, Rob. There was something you said some time ago that we might follow up. Can you remember that time, the last time you—“
“The last time I talked to Klara, right?”
“Yes, Rob.”
“Sigfrid, I always know what you’re going to say.”
“Doesn’t matter if you do, Rob. What about it? Do you want to talk about how you felt that time?”
“Why not?” I clean the nail of my right middle finger by drawing it between my two lower front teeth. I inspect it and say, “I realize that was an important time. Maybe it was the worst moment of my life, about. Even worse than when Sylvia ditched me, or when I found out my mother died.”
“Are you saying you’d rather talk about one of those things, Rob?”
“Not at all. You say talk about Klara, we’ll talk about Klara.”
And I settle myself on the foam mat and think for a while. I’ve been very interested in transcendental insight, and sometimes when I set a problem to my mind and just start saying my mantra over and over I come out of it with the problem solved: Sell the fish-farm stock in Baja and buy plumbing supplies on the commodities exchange. That was one, and it really paid out. Or: Take Rachel to Merida for waterskling on the Bay of Campeche. That got her into my bed the first time, when I’d tried everything else.
And then Sigfrid says, “You’re not responding, Rob.”
“I’m thinking about what you said.”
“Please don’t think about it, Rob. Just talk. Tell me what you’re feeling about Klara right now.”
I try to think it out honestly. Sigfrid won’t let me get into TI for it, so I look inside my mind for suppressed feelings.
“Well, not much,” I say. Not much on the surface, anyway.
“Do you remember the feeling at the time, Rob?”
“Of course I do.”
“Try to feel what you felt then, Rob.”
“All right.” Obediently I reconstruct the situation in my mind. There I am, talking to Klara on the radio. Dane is shouting something in the lander. We’re all frightened out of our wits. Down underneath us the blue mist is opening up, and I see the dim skeletal star for the first time. The Three-ship—no, it was a Five. . Anyway, it stinks of vomit and perspiration. My body aches.
I can remember it exactly, although I would be lying if I said I was letting myself feel it.
I say lightly, half chuckling, “Sigfrid, there’s an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that I just can’t handle.” Sometimes I try that with him, saying a kind of painful truth in the tone you might use to ask the waiter at a cocktail party to bring you another rum punch. I do that when I want to divert his attack. I don’t think it works. Sigfrid has a lot of Heechee circuits in him. He’s a lot better than the machines at the Institute were, when I had my episode. He continuously monitors all my physical parameters: skin conductivity and pulse and beta-wave activity and so on. He gets readings from the restraining straps that hold me on the mat, to show how violently I fling myself around. He meters the volume of my voice and spectrum-scans the print for overtones. And he also understands what the words mean. Sigfrid is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is.
It is very hard, sometimes, to fool him. I get to the end of a session absolutely limp, with the feeling that if I had stayed with him for one more minute I would have found myself falling right down into that pain and it would have destroyed me.
Or cured me. Perhaps they are the same thing.
So there was Gateway, getting bigger and bigger in the ports of the ship up from Earth:
An asteroid. Or perhaps the nucleus of a comet. About ten kilometers through, the longest way. Pear-shaped. On the outside it looks like a lumpy charred blob with glints of blue. On the inside it’s the gateway to the universe.
Sheri Loffat leaned against my shoulder, with the rest of our bunch of would-be prospectors clustered behind us, staring. “Jesus, Rob. Look at the cruisers!”
“They find anything wrong,” said somebody behind us, “and they blow us out of space.”
“They won’t find anything wrong,” said Sheri, but she ended her remark with a question mark. Those cruisers looked mean, circling jealously around the asteroid, watching to see that whoever comes in isn’t going to steal the secrets that are worth more than anyone could ever pay.
We hung to the porthole braces to rubberneck at them. Foolishness, that was. We could have been killed. There wasn’t really much likelihood that our ship’s matching orbit with Gateway or the Brazilian cruiser would take much delta-V, but there only had to be one quick course correction to spatter us. And there was always the other possibility, that our ship would rotate a quarterturn or so and we’d suddenly find ourselves staring into the naked, nearby sun. That meant blindness for always, that close. But we wanted to see.
The Brazilian cruiser didn’t bother to lock on. We saw flashes back and forth, and knew that they were checking our manifests by laser. That was normal. I said the cruisers were watching for thieves, but actually they were more to watch each other than to worry about anybody else. Including us. The Russians were suspicious of the Chinese, the Chinese were suspicious of the Russians, the Brazilians were suspicious of the Venusians. They were all suspicious of the Americans.
So the other four cruisers were surely watching the Brazilians more closely than they were watching us. But we all knew that if our coded navicerts had not matched the patterns their five separate consulates at the departure port on Earth had filed, the next step would not have been an argument. It would have been a torpedo.
It’s funny. I could imagine that torpedo. I could imagine the cold-eyed warrior who would aim and launch it, and how our ship would blossom into a flare of orange light and we would all become dissociated atoms in orbit. . . . Only the torpedoman on that ship, I’m pretty sure, was at that time an armorer’s mate named Francy Hereira. We got to be pretty good buddies later on. He wasn’t what you’d really call a cold-eyed killer. I cried in his arms all the day after I got back from that last trip, in my hospital room, when he was supposed to be searching me for contraband. And Francy cried with me.
The cruiser moved away and we all surged gently out, then pulled ourselves back to the window with the grips, as our ship began to close in on Gateway.
“Looks like a case of smallpox,” said somebody in the group.
It did; and some of the pockmarks were open. Those were the berths for ships that were out on mission. Some of them would stay open forever, because the ships wouldn’t be coming back. But most of the pocks were covered with bulges that looked like mushroom caps.
Those caps were the ships themselves, what Gateway was all about.
The ships weren’t easy to see. Neither was Gateway itself. It had a low albedo to begin with, and it wasn’t very big: as I say, about ten kilometers on the long axis, half that through its equator of rotation. But it could have been detected. After that first tunnel rat led them to it, astronomers began asking each other why it hadn’t been spotted a century earlier. Now that they know where to look, they find it. It sometimes gets as bright as seventeenth magnitude, as seen from Earth. That’s easy. You would have thought it would have been picked up in a routine mapping program.
The thing is, there weren’t that many routine mapping programs in that direction, and it seems Gateway wasn’t where they were looking when they looked.
Stellar astronomy usually pointed away from the sun. Solar astronomy usually stayed in the plane of the ecliptic—and Gateway has a right-angle orbit. So it fell through the cracks.
The piezophone clucked and said, “Docking in five minutes. Return to your bunks. Fasten webbing.”
We were almost there.
Sheri Loffat reached out and held my hand through the webbing. I squeezed back. We had never been to bed together, never met until she turned up in the bunk next to mine on the ship, but the vibrations were practically sexual. As though we were about to make it in the biggest, best way there ever could be; but it wasn’t sex, it was Gateway.
When men began to poke around the surface of Venus they found the Heechee diggings.
They didn’t find any Heechees. Whoever the Heechees were, whenever they had been on Venus, they were gone. Not even a body was left in a burial pit to exhume and cut apart. All there was, was the tunnels, the caverns, the few piddling little artifacts, the technological wonders that human beings puzzled over and tried to reconstruct.
Then somebody found a Heechee map of the solar system. Jupiter was there with its moons, and Mars, and the outer planets, and the Earth-Moon pair. And Venus, which was marked in black on the shining blue surface of the Heechee-metal map. And Mercury, and one other thing, the only other thing marked in black besides Venus: an orbital body that came inside the perihelion of Mercury and outside the orbit of Venus, tipped ninety degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic so that it never came very close to either. A body which had never been identified by terrestrial astronomers. Conjecture: an asteroid, or a comet—the difference was only semantic—which the Heechees had cared about specially for some reason.
Probably sooner or later a telescopic probe would have followed up that clue, but it wasn’t necessary. Then The Famous Sylvester Macklen—who wasn’t up to that point the famous anything, just another tunnel rat on Venus—found a Heechee ship and got himself to Gateway, and died there. But he managed to let people know where he was by cleverly blowing up his ship. So a NASA probe was diverted from the chromosphere of the sun, and Gateway was reached and opened up by man.
Inside were the stars.
Inside, to be less poetic and more literal, were nearly a thousand smallish spacecraft, shaped something like fat mushrooms. They came in several shapes and sizes. The littlest ones were button-topped, like the mushrooms they grow in the Wyoming tunnels after they’ve dug all the shale out, and you buy in the supermarket. The bigger ones were pointy, like morels. Inside the caps of the mushrooms were living quarters and a power source that no one understood. The stems were chemical rocket ships, kind of like the old Moon Landers of the first space programs.
No one had ever figured out how the caps were driven, or how to direct them.
That was one of the things that made us all nervous: the fact that we were going to take our chances with something nobody understood. You literally had no control, once you started out in a Heechee ship. Their courses were built into their guidance system, in a way that nobody had figured out; you could pick one course, but once picked that was it—and you didn’t know where it was going to take you when you picked it, any more than you know what’s in your box of Cracker-Joy until you open it.
But they worked. They still worked, after what they say is maybe half a million years.
The first guy who had the guts to get into one and try to start it up succeeded. It lifted out of its crater on the surface of the asteroid. It turned fuzzy and bright, and was gone.
And three months later, it was back, with a starved, staring astronaut inside, aglow with triumph. He had been to another star! He had orbited a great gray planet with swirling yellow clouds, had managed to reverse the controls—and had been brought back to the very same pockmark, by the built-in guidance controls.
So they sent out another ship, this time one of the big, pointy morel-shaped ones, with a crew of four and plenty of rations and instrumentation. They were gone only about fifty days. In that time they had not just reached another solar system, they had actually used the lander to go down to the surface of a planet. There wasn’t anything living there . . . but there had been.
They found the remnants. Not a lot. A few beat-up pieces of trash, on a corner of a mountaintop that had missed the general destruction that had hit the planet. Out of the radioactive dust they had picked up a brick, a ceramic bolt, a half-melted thing that looked as though it had once been a chromium flute.
Then the star rush began . . . and we were part of it.
Sigfrid is a pretty smart machine, but sometimes I can’t figure out what’s wrong with him. He’s always asking me to tell him my dreams. Then sometimes I come in all aglow with some dream I’m positive he’s going to love, a big-red-apple-for-the-teacher kind of dream, full of penis symbols and fetishism and guilt hang-ups, and he disappoints me. He takes off on some crazy track that has nothing at all to do with it. I tell him the whole thing, and then he sits and clicks and whirs and buzzes for a while—he doesn’t really, but I fantasize that while I’m waiting—and then he says:
“Let’s go back to something different, Rob. I’m interested in some of the things you’ve said about the woman, Gelle-Klara Moynlin.”
I say, “Sigfrid, you’re off on a wild-goose chase again.”
“I don’t think so, Rob.”
“But that dream! My God, don’t you see how important it is? What about the mother figure in it?”
“What about letting me do my job, Rob?”
“Do I have a choice?” I say, feeling sulky.
“You always have a choice, Rob, but I would like very much to quote to you something you said a while ago.” And he stops, and I hear my own voice coming out of somewhere in his tapes. I am saying:
“Sigfrid, there’s an intensity of pain and guilt and misery there that I just can’t handle.”
He waits for me to say something.
After a moment I do. “That’s a nice recording,” I acknowledge, “but I’d rather talk about the way my mother fixation comes out in my dream.”
“I think it would be more productive to explore this other matter, Rob. It is possible they’re related.”
“Really?” I am all warmed up to discuss this theoretical possibility in a detached and philosophical way, but he beats me to the punch:
“The last conversation you had with Klara, Rob. Please tell me what you feel about it.”
“I’ve told you.” I am not enjoying this at all, it is such a waste of time, and I make sure he knows it by the tone of my voice and the tenseness of my body against the restraining straps. “It was even worse than with my mother.”
“I know you’d rather switch to talking about your mother, Rob, but please don’t, right now. Tell me about that time with Klara. What are you feeling about it at this minute?”
I try to think it out honestly. After all, I can do that much. I don’t actually have to say it. But all I can find to say is, “Not much.”
After a little wait he says, “Is that all, ‘not much’?”
“That’s it. Not much.” Not much on the surface, anyway. I do remember how I was feeling at the time. I open up that memory, very cautiously, to see what it was like. Going down into that blue mist. Seeing the dim ghost star for the first time. Talking to Klara on the radio, while Dane is whispering in my ear. . . . I close it up again.
“It all hurts, a lot, Sigfrid,” I say conversationally. Sometimes I try to fool him by saying emotionally loaded things in the tone you might use to order a cup of coffee, but I don’t think it works. Sigfrid listens to volume and overtones, but he also listens to breathing and pauses, as well as the sense of the words. He is extremely smart, considering how stupid he is.
Five permanent-party noncoms, one from each of the cruisers, patted us down, checked our IDs and turned us over to a Corporation screening clerk. Sheri giggled when the Russian’s pat hit a sensitive spot and whispered, “What do they think we’re smuggling in, Rob?”
I shushed her. The Corporation woman had taken our landing cards from the Chinese Spec/3 in charge of the detail and was calling out our names. There were eight of us altogether. “Welcome aboard,” she said. “Each one of you fish will get a proctor assigned to you. He’ll help you get straightened out with a place to live, answer your questions, let you know where to report for the medical and your classes. Also, he’ll give you a copy of the contract to sign. You’ve each had eleven hundred and fifty dollars deducted from your cash on deposit with the ship that brought you here; that’s your life-support tax for the first ten days. The rest you can draw on any time by writing a P-check. Your proctor will show you how. Linscott!”
The middle-aged black man from Baja California raised his hand. “Your proctor is Shota Tarasvili. Broadhead!”
“Here I am.”
“Dane Metchnikov,” said the Corporation clerk.
I started to look around, but the person who had to be Dane Metchnikov was already coming toward me. He took my arm very firmly, started to lead me away and then said, “Hi.”
I held back. “I’d like to say good-bye to my friend—“
“You’re all in the same area,” he grunted. “Come on.”
So within two hours of arriving on Gateway I had a room, a proctor, and a contract. I signed the articles of agreement right away. I didn’t even read them. Metchnikov looked surprised. “Don’t you want to know what they say?”
“Not right this minute.” I mean, what was the advantage? If I hadn’t liked what they said, I might have changed my mind, and what other options did I have, really? Being a prospector is pretty scary. I hate the idea of being killed. I hate the idea of dying at all, ever; not being alive anymore, having everything stop, knowing that all those other people would go on living and having sex and joy without me being there to share it. But I didn’t hate it as much as I hated the idea of going back to the food mines.
Metchnikov hung himself by his collar to a hook on the wall of my room, to be out of the way while I put away my belongings. He was a squat, pale man, not very talkative. He didn’t seem to be a very likable person, but at least he didn’t laugh at me because I was a clumsy new fish. Gateway is about as close to zero-G as you get. I had never experienced low-gravity before; you don’t get much of it in Wyoming, so I kept misjudging. When I said something, Metchnikov said, “You’ll get used to it. Have you got a toke?”
“Afraid not.”
He sighed, looking a little like somebody’s Buddha hung up on the wall, with his legs pulled up.
He looked at his time dial and said, “I’ll take you out for a drink later. It’s a custom. Only it’s not very interesting until about twenty-two hundred. The Blue Hell’ll be full of people then, and I’ll introduce you around. See what you can find. What are you, straight, gay, what?”
“I’m pretty straight.”
“Whatever. You’re on your own about that, though. I’ll introduce you to whoever I know, but then you’re on your own. You better get used to that right away. Have you got your map?”
“Map?”
“Oh, hell, man! It’s in that packet of stuff they gave you.”
I opened the lockers at random until I found where I had put the envelope. Inside it were my copy of the articles of agreement, a booklet entitled Welcome to Gateway, my room assignment, my health questionnaire that I would have to fill out before 0800 the next morning. . . and a folded sheet that, opened up, looked like a wiring diagram with names on it.
“That’s it. Can you locate where you are? Remember your room number: Level Babe, Quadrant East, Tunnel Eight, Room Fifty-one. Write it down.”
“It’s already written here, Dane, on my room assignment.”
“Well, don’t lose it.” Dane reached behind his neck and unhooked himself, let himself fall gently to the floor. “So why don’t you look around by yourself for a while. I’ll meet you here. Anything else you need to know right now?”
I thought, while he looked impatient. “Well—mind if I ask you a question about you, Dane? Have you been out yet?”
“Six trips. All right, I’ll see you at twenty-two hundred.” Then he pushed the flexible door open, slipped out into the jungly green of the corridor and was gone.
I let myself flop—so gently, so slowly—into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.
I don’t know if I can make you feel it, how the universe looked to me from Gateway: like being young with Full Medical. Like a menu in the best restaurant in the world, when somebody else is going to pick up the check. Like a girl you’ve just met who likes you. Like an unopened gift.
The things that hit you first on Gateway are the tininess of the tunnels, feeling tinier even than they are because they’re lined with windowboxy things of plants; the vertigo from the low gravity, and the stink. You get Gateway a little bit at a time. There’s no way of seeing it all in one glance; it is nothing but a maze of tunnels in the rock. I’m not even sure they’ve all been explored yet. Certainly there are miles of them that nobody ever goes into, or not very often.
That’s the way the Heechees were. They grabbed the asteroid, plated it over with wall metal, drove tunnels into it, filled them with whatever sort of possessions they had—most were empty by the time we got there, just as everything that ever belonged to the Heechees is, all over the universe. And then they left it, for whatever reason they left.
The closest thing to a central point in Gateway is Heecheetown. That’s a spindle-shaped cave near the geometric center of the asteroid. They say that when the Heechees built Gateway they lived there. We lived there too, at first, or close to it, all of us new peopie off Earth. (And elsewhere. A ship from Venus had come in just before ours.) That’s where the company housing is. Later on, if we got rich on a prospecting trip, we could move out farther toward the surface, where there was a little more gravity and less noise. And above all, less smell. A couple thousand people had breathed the air I was breathing, one time or another, voided the water I drank and exuded their smells into the atmosphere. The people didn’t stay around very long, most of them. But the smells were still there.
I didn’t care about the smell. I didn’t care about any of it. Gateway was my big, fat lottery ticket to Full Medical, a nine-room house, a couple of kids, and a lot of joy. I had won one lottery already. It made me cocky about my chances of winning another.
It was all exciting, although at the same time it was dingy enough, too. There wasn’t much luxury around. For your $238,575 what you get is transportation to Gateway, ten days’ worth of food, lodging, and air, a cram course in ship handling, and an invitation to sign up on the next ship out. Or any ship you like. They don’t make you take any particular ship, or for that matter any ship at all.
The Corporation doesn’t make any profit on any of that. All the prices are fixed at about cost. That doesn’t mean they were cheap, and it certainly doesn’t mean that what you got was good. The food was just about what I had been digging, and eating, all my life. The lodging was about the size of a large steamer trunk, one chair, a bunch of lockers, a fold-down table, and a hammock that you could stretch across it, corner to corner, when you wanted to sleep.
My next-door neighbors were a family from Venus. I caught a glimpse through the part-opened door. Imagine! Four of them sleeping in one of those cubicles! It looked like two to a hammock, with two hammocks crisscrossed across the room. On the other side was Sheri’s room. I scratched at her door, but she didn’t answer. The door wasn’t locked. Nobody locks his door much on Gateway, because there’s nothing much worth stealing among other reasons. Sheri wasn’t there. The clothes she had been wearing on the ship were thrown all over.
I guessed that she had gone out exploring, and wished I had been a little earlier. I would have liked someone to explore with. I leaned against the ivy growing out of one wall of the tunnel and pulled out my map.
It did give me some idea of what to look for. There were things marked “Central Park” and “Lake Superior.” What were they? I wondered about “Gateway Museum,” which sounded interesting, and “Terminal Hospital,” which sounded pretty bad—I found out later that “terminal” meant as in end of the line, on your return trip from wherever you went to. The Corporation must have known that it had another sound to it, too; but the Corporation never went to much trouble to spare a prospector’s feelings.
What I really wanted was to see a ship!
As soon as that thought percolated out of my mind I realized that I wanted it a lot. I puzzled over how to get to the outer skin, where the ship docks were located of course. Holding onto a railing with one hand, I tried to keep the map open with the other. It didn’t take me long to locate myself. I was at a five-way intersection which seemed to be the one marked “East Star Babe G” on the map. One of the five tunnels out of it led to a dropshaft, but I couldn’t tell which.
I tried one at random, wound up in a dead end, and on the way back scratched on a door for directions. It opened. “Excuse me—“ I said. . . and stopped.
The man who opened the door seemed as tall as I, but was not. His eyes were on a level with my own. But he stopped at the waist. He had no legs.
He said something, but I didn’t understand it; it wasn’t in English. It wouldn’t have mattered. My attention was taken up with him. He wore gauzy bright fabric strapped from wrists to waist, and he fluttered the wings gently to stay in the air. It wasn’t hard, in Gateway’s low-G. But it was surprising to see. I said, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to know how to get to Level Tanya.” I was trying not to stare, but I wasn’t succeeding.
He smiled, white teeth in an unlined, old face. He had jet eyes under a crest of short white hair. He pushed past me out into the corridor and said in excellent English, “Certainly. Take the first turning on your right. Go to the next star, and take the second turning on your left. It’ll be marked.” He indicated with his chin the direction toward the star.
I thanked him and left him floating behind me. I wanted to turn back, but it didn’t seem good manners. It was strange. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be any cripples on Gateway.
That’s how naive I was then.
Having seen him, I knew Gateway in a way I had not known it from the statistics. The statistics are clear enough, and we all studied them, all of us who came up as prospectors, and all of that vastly larger number who only wished they could. About eighty percent of flights from Gateway come up empty. About fifteen percent don’t come back at all. So one person in twenty, on the average, comes back from a prospecting trip with something that Gateway—that mankind in general—can make a profit on. Most of even those are lucky if they collect enough to pay their costs for getting here in the first place.
And if you get hurt while you’re out . . . well, that’s tough. Terminal Hospital is about as well equipped as any anywhere. But you have to get there for it to do you any good. You can be months in transit. If you get hurt at the other end of your trip—and that’s where it usually happens—there’s not much that can be done for you until you get back to Gateway. By then it can be too late to make you whole, and likely enough too late to keep you alive.
There’s no charge for a return trip to where you came from, by the way. The rockets always come up fuller than they return. They call it wastage.
The return trip is free . . . but to what?
I let go the down-cable on Level Tanya, turned into a tunnel, and ran into a man with cap and armband. Corporation Police. He didn’t speak English, but he pointed and the size of him was convincing; I grabbed the up-cable, ascended one level, crossed to another dropshaft, and tried again.
The only difference was that this time the guard spoke English. “You can’t come through here,” he said.
“I just want to see the ships.”
“Sure. You can’t. You’ve got to have a blue badge,” he said, tapping his own. “That’s Corporation specialist, flight crew or maintenance.”
“I am flight crew.”
He grinned. “You’re a new fish off the Earth transport, aren’t you? Friend, you’ll be flight crew when you sign on for a flight and not before. Go on back up.”
I said reasonably, “You understand how I feel, don’t you? I just want to get a look.”
“You can’t, till you’ve finished your course, except they’ll bring you down here for part of it. After that, you’ll see more than you want.”
I argued a little more, but he had too many arguments on his side. But as I reached for the up-cable the tunnel seemed to lurch and a blast of sound hit my ears. For a minute I thought the asteroid was blowing up. I stared at the guard, who shrugged, in a not unfriendly way. “I only said you couldn’t see them,” he said. “I didn’t say you couldn’t hear them.”
I bit back the “wow” or “Holy God!” that I really wanted to say, and said, “Where do you suppose that one’s going?”
“Come back in six months. Maybe we’ll know by then.”
Well, there was nothing in that to feel elated about. All the same, I felt elated. After all those years in the food mines, here I was, not only on Gateway, but right there when some of those intrepid prospectors set out on a trip that would bring them fame and incredible fortune! Never mind the odds. This was really living on the top line.
So I wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing, and as a result I got lost again on the way back. I reached Level Babe ten minutes late.
Dane Metchnikov was striding down the tunnel away from my room. He didn’t appear to recognize me. I think he might have passed me if I hadn’t put out my arm.
“Huh,” he grunted. “You’re late.”
“I was down on Level Tanya, trying to get a look at the ships.”
“Huh. You can’t go down there unless you have a blue badge or a bangle.”
Well, I had found that out already, hadn’t I? So I tagged along after him, without wasting energy on attempts at further conversation.
Metchnikov was a pale man, except for the marvelously ornate curled whisker that followed the line of his jaw. It seemed to be waxed, so that each separate curl stood out with a life of its own. “Waxed” was wrong. It had something in it besides hair, but whatever it was wasn’t stiff. The whole thing moved as he moved, and when he talked or smiled the muscles moored to the jawbone made the beard ripple and flow. He finally did smile, after we got to the Blue Hell. He bought the first drink, explaining carefully that that was the custom, but that the custom only called for one. I bought the second. The smile came when, out of turn, I also bought the third.
Over the noise in the Blue Hell talk wasn’t easy, but I told him about hearing a launch. “Right,” he said, lifting his glass. “Hope they have a good trip.” He wore six blue-glowing Heechee metal bracelets, hardly thicker than wire. They tinkled faintly as he swallowed half the drink.
“Are they what I think they are?” I asked. “One for every trip out?”
He drank the other half of the drink. “That’s right. Now I’m going to dance,” he said. My eyes followed his back as he lunged toward a woman in a luminous pink sari. He wasn’t much of a talker, that was sure.
On the other hand, at that noise level you couldn’t talk much anyhow. You couldn’t really dance much, either. The Blue Hell was up in the center of Gateway, part of the spindle-shaped cave. Rotational G was so low that we didn’t weigh more than two or three pounds; if anyone had tried to waltz or polka he would have gone flying. So they did those no-touching junior-high-school sort of dances that appear to be designed so fourteen-year-old boys won’t have to look up at too sharp an angle to the fourteen-year-old girls they’re dancing with. You pretty much kept your feet in place, and your head and arms and shoulders and hips went where they wanted to. Me, I like to touch. But you can’t have everything. I like to dance, anyway.
I saw Sheri, way across the room, with an older woman I took to be her proctor, and danced one with her. “How do you like it so far?” I shouted over the tapes. She nodded and shouted something back, I couldn’t say what. I danced with an immense black woman who wore two blue bracelets, then with Sheri again, then with a girl Dane Metchnikov dropped on me, apparently because he wanted to be rid of her, then with a tall, strong-faced woman with the blackest, thickest eyebrows I had ever seen under a female hairdo. (She wore it pulled back in two pigtails that floated around behind her as she moved.) She wore a couple of bracelets, too. And between dances I drank.
They had tables that were meant for parties of eight or ten, but there weren’t any parties of eight or ten. People sat where they wanted to, and took each other’s seats without worrying about whether the owner was coming back. For a while there were half a dozen crewmen in Brazilian Navy dress whites sitting with me, talking to each other in Portuguese. A man with one golden earring joined me for a while, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, either. (I did, pretty well, understand what he meant.)
There was that trouble all the time I was in Gateway. There always is. Gateway sounds like an international conference when the translation equipment has broken down. There’s a sort of lingua franca you hear a lot, pieces of a dozen different languages thrown together, like, “Ecoutez, gospodin, tu es verreckt.” I danced twice with one of the Brazilians, a skinny, dark little girl with a hawk nose but sweet brown eyes, and tried to say a few simple words. Maybe she understood me. One of the men she was with, though, spoke fine English, introduced himself and the others all around. I didn’t catch any of the names but his, Francesco Hereira. He bought me a drink, and let me buy one for the crowd, and then I realized I’d seen him before: He was one of the detail that searched us on the way in.
While we were commenting on that, Dane leaned over me and grunted in my ear, “I’m going to gamble. So long, unless you really want to come.”
It wasn’t the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but the noise in the Blue Hell was getting heavy. I tagged after him and discovered a full-scale casino just next to the Blue Hell, with blackjack tables, poker, a slow-motion roulette with a big, dense ball, craps with dice that took forever to stop, even a roped-off section for baccarat. Metchnikov headed for the blackjack tables and drummed his fingers on the back of a player’s chair, waiting for an opening. Around then he noticed I had come with him.
“Oh.” He looked around the room. “What do you like to play?”
“I’ve played it all,” I said, slurring the words a little. Bragging a little, too. “Maybe a little baccarat.”
He looked at me first with respect, then amusement. “Fifty’s the minimum bet.”
I had five or six thousand dollars left in my account. I shrugged.
“That’s fifty thousand,” he said.
I choked. He said absently, moving over behind a player whose chip stack was running out, “You can get down for ten dollars at roulette. Hundred minimum for most of the others. Oh, there’s a ten-dollar slot machine around somewhere, I think.” He dived for the open chair and that was the last I saw of him.
I watched for a moment and realized that the black-eyebrowed girl was at the same table, busy studying her cards. She didn’t look up.
I could see I wasn’t going to be able to afford much gambling here. At that point I realized I couldn’t really afford all the drinks I’d been buying, either, and then my interior sensory system began to make me realize just how many of those drinks I had had. The last thing I realized was that I had to get back to my room, pretty fast.
I am on the mat, and I am not very comfortable. Physically, I mean. I have had an operation not long ago and probably the stitches aren’t yet absorbed.
Sigfrid says, “We were talking about your job, Rob.”
That’s dull enough. But safe enough. I say, “I hated my job. Who wouldn’t hate the food mines?”
“But you kept it, Rob. You never even tried to get on anywhere else. You could have switched to sea-farming, maybe. And you dropped out of school.”
“You’re saying I stuck myself in a rut?”
“I’m not saying anything, Rob. I’m asking you what you feel.”
“Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some kind of a change. I thought about it a lot,” I say, remembering how it was in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night—we had no other place to go—and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the odds. There’s nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I’ve told Sigfrid all about Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But we’d broken up long before that. “I suppose,” I say, pulling myself up short and trying to get my money’s worth out of this session, “that I had a kind of death wish.”
“I prefer that you don’t use psychiatric terms, Rob.”
“Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning. It is great over the hills, and when you’re up high enough Wyoming doesn’t look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil.”
“You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?”
I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor that he sells off parts of himself, the way I’ve heard of pretty girls doing with a well-shaped breast or ear?
“Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?”
“I do now, all right.”
“Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn’t make friends easily as a child.”
“Does anyone?”
“If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of course the answer is ‘no.’ But some people seem to carry the effects of it over into their lives more than others.”
“Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer group—sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time. Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner.”
“You were an only child, Robbie?”
“You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And they didn’t like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if there’s a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot, watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I loved all the starchy, sugary stuff with all the calories. They spoiled me, buying me more food than I needed.”
I still like to be spoiled. Now I get a higher class of diet, not as fattening, about a thousand times as expensive. I’ve had real caviar. Often. It gets flown in from the aquarium at Galveston. I have real champagne, and butter. . . . “I remember lying in bed,” I say, “I guess I was very small, maybe about three. I had a teddytalker. I took it to bed with me, and it told me little stories, and I stuck pencils into it and tried to pull its ears off. I loved that thing, Sigfrid.”
I stop, and Sigfrid picks up immediately. “Why are you crying, Robbie?”
“I don’t know!” I bawl, tears running down my face, and I look at my watch, the skipping green numerals rippling through the tears. “Oh,” I say, very conversationally, and sit up, the tears still rolling down my face but the fountain turned off, “I’ve really got to go now, Sigfrid. I’ve got a date. Her name’s Tania. Beautiful girl. The Houston Symphony. She loves Mendelssohn and roses, and I want to see if I can pick up some of those dark-blue hybrids that will go with her eyes.”
“Rob, we’ve got nearly ten minutes left.”
“I’ll make it up another time.” I know he can’t do that, so I add quickly, “May I use your bathroom? I need to.”
“Are you going to excrete your feelings, Rob?”
“Oh, don’t be smart. I know what you’re saying. I know this looks like a typical displacement mechanism—”
“Rob.”
“—all right, I mean, it looks like I’m copping out. But I honestly do have to go. To the bathroom, I mean. And to the florist’s, too. Tani is pretty special. She’s a fine person. I’m not talking about sex, but that’s great, too. She can g—She can—”
“Rob? What are you trying to say?”
I take a breath and manage to say: “She’s great at oral sex, Sigfrid.”
“Rob?”
I recognize that tone. Sigfrid’s repertory of vocal modes is quite large, but parts of it I have learned to identify. He thinks he is on the track of something.
“What?”
“Rob, what do you call it when a woman gives you oral sex?”
“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, what kind of dumb game is this one?”
“What do you call it, Rob?”
“Ah! You know as well as I do.”
“Please tell me what you call it, Rob.”
“They say, like, ‘She eats me.’”
“What other expression, Rob?”
“Lots of them! ‘Giving head,’ that’s one. I guess I’ve heard a thousand terms for it.”
“What other, Rob?”
I have been building up to rage and pain and it suddenly boils over. “Don’t play these fucking games with me, Sigfrid!” My gut aches, and I am afraid I am going to mess my pants; it is lIke being a baby again. “Jesus, Sigfrid! When I was a little kid I used to talk to my teddy. Now I’m forty-five and I’m still talking to a stupid machine as if it was alive!”
“But there is another term, isn’t there, Rob?”
“There are thousands of them! Which one do you want?”
“I want the expression you were going to use and didn’t, Rob. Please try to say it. That term means something special to you, so that you can’t say the words without trouble.”
I crumple over onto the mat, and now I’m really crying.
“Please say it, Rob. What’s the term?”
“Damn you, Sigfrid! Going down! That’s it. Going down, going down, going down!”