“Why, sure, honey,” she said obligingly, though it would have been so very much nicer if he didn’t always have to put it like that. But her spirits were a little higher. She felt the tiny suggestion of a lurch that meant that the spacecraft was starting off on another trip, and indeed, the great blue and violet horror on the screen was already dwindling away. That made up for a lot!
Of course, it only meant they were on their way to the next one.
“Do the Heechee,” commanded Wan, “and, let me see, yes. With Robinette Broadhead.”
“Sure, Wan,” said Dolly, retrieving her puppets from where Wan had kicked them and slipping them over her hands. The Heechee did not, of course, look like a real Heechee; and as a matter of fact the Robinette Broadhead was pretty libelous, too. But they amused Wan. That was what mattered to Dolly, since he was paying the bills. The first day out of Port Hegramet he had boastfully shown Dolly his bankbook. Six million dollars automatically socked into it every month! The numbers staggered Dolly. They made up for a lot. Out of all that cataract of cash there had to be a way, sooner or later, of squeezing a few drops for herself. To Dolly there was nothing immoral in such thoughts. Perhaps in an earlier day Americans would have called her a golddigger. But most of the human race, through most of its history, would only have called her poor.
So she fed him and bedded him. When he was in a bad mood she tried to look invisible, and when he wanted entertainment she tried to entertain:
“Halo thar, Mr. Heechee,” said the Broadhead hand, Dolly’s fingers twisting to give it a simpering grin, Dolly’s voice thick and corn-pone-bumpkin (part of the libel!). “I’m moughty pleased to make your acquaintance.”
The Heechee hand, Dolly’s voice a serpentine whine: “Greetings, rash Earthman. You are just in time for dinner.”
“Aw, gosh,” cried the Broadhead hand, grin widening, “I’m hungry, too. What’s fer dinner?”
“Aargh!” shrieked the Heechee hand, fingers a claw, mouth open. “You are!” And the right-hand fingers closed on the left-hand puppet.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” laughed Wan. “That is very good! Though that is not what a Heechee looks like. You do not know what a Heechee is.”
“Do you?” asked Dolly in her own voice.
“Nearly! More nearly than you!”
And Dolly, grinning, raised the Heechee hand. “Oh, but you’re wrong, Mr. Wan,” came the silky, snaky Heechee voice. “This is what I look like, and I’m waiting to meet you in the next black hole!”
Crash went the chair Wan was sitting on as he sprang up. “That is not funny!” he shouted, and Dolly was astonished to see he was trembling. “Make me food!” he demanded, and stomped off to his private lander, muttering.
It was not wise to joke with him. So Dolly made him his dinner and served him with a smile she did not feel. She gained nothing from the smile. His mood was fouler than ever. He screeched: “Stupid woman! Have you eaten all the good food when I was not looking? Is there nothing left fit to be eaten?”
Dolly was near tears. “But you like steak,” she protested.
“Steak! Of course I like steak, but look at what you serve for dessert!” He pushed the steak and broccoli out of the way to seize the plate of chocolate-chip cookies and shake it under her nose. Cookies sailed away in all directions, and Dolly tried to retrieve them. “I know it’s not what you’d like, honey, but there isn’t any more ice cream.”
He glared at her. “Huh! No more ice cream! Oh, very well, then. A chocolate soufflé-or a flan-“
“Wan, they’re almost all gone, too. You ate them.”
“Stupid woman! That is not possible!”
“Well, they’re gone. Anyway, all that sweet stuff isn’t good for you.”
“You have not been appointed my nurse! If I rot my teeth I will buy new ones.” He struck at the dish in her hand, and the cookies went flying indeed. “Jettison this trash. I do not wish to eat at all now,” he snapped.
It was just another typical meal on the frontiers of the Galaxy. It finished typically, too, with Dolly clearing away the mess and weeping. He was such a terrible person! And he didn’t even seem to know it.
But as a matter of fact, Wan did know that he was mean, antisocial, exploitive-a whole long list of things that had been explained to him by the psychoanalysis programs. More than three hundred sessions of them. Six days a week, for almost a year. And at the end he had terminated the analysis with a joke. “I have a question,” he told the holographic analyst, displayed for him as a good-looking woman, old enough to be his mother, young enough to be attractive, “and the question is this: How many psychoanalysts does it take to change a light bulb?”
The analyst said, sighing, “Oh, Wan, you’re resisting again. All right. How many?”
“Only one,” he told her, laughing, “but the light bulb has to really want to change. Haw-haw! -And you see, I don’t.”
She looked directly at him for a silent moment. The way she was displayed, she was sitting on a sort of beanbag chair, with her legs tucked under her, a note pad in her hand, a pencil in the other. She used it to push up the glasses that were sliding down her nose as she looked at him. As with everything else in her programming, the gesture was meant to have a purpose, the reassuring indication that she was, after all, only another human being like himself, not an austere goddess. Of course, human she was not. But she sounded human enough as she said, “That’s really a very old joke, Wan. What’s a light bulb?”
He shrugged irritably. “It is a round thing that gives off light,” he guessed, “but you are missing the point. I do not wish to be changed anymore. It is not fun for me. It was not my desire to begin this in the first place, and now I have decided to end it.”
The computer program said peacefully, “That’s your right, of course, Wan. What will you do?”
“I will go looking for my-I will go out of here and enjoy myself,” he said savagely. “That is also one of my rights!”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “Wan? Would you like to tell me what it was you started to say, before you changed your mind?”
“No,” he said, getting up, “I would not like to tell you what it is I will do; instead, I will do it. Good-bye.”
“You’re going to look for your father, aren’t you?” the psychoanalytic program called after him, but he didn’t answer. The only indication he gave that he heard was that instead of merely closing the door, he slammed it.
A normal human being-in fact, almost any human being at all, really would have told his analyst that she was right. Would have at some time in three long weeks have told his ship companion and bed companion the same thing, if only to have someone to share in his outside-chance hope and his very real fear. Wan had never learned to share his feelings, because he had never learned to share anything at all. Brought up in Heechee Heaven, without any sort of warm-blooded human companion for the most crucial decade of his childhood, he had become the archetype of a sociopath. That terrible yearning for love was what drove him to seek his lost father through all the terrors of space. Its total lack of fulfillment made it impossible for him to accept love, or sharing, now. His closest companions for those terrified ten years had been the computer programs of stored, dead intelligences called the Dead Men. He had copied them and taken them with him when he took a Heechee starship, and he talked to them, as he would not to flesh-and-blood Dolly, because he knew they were only machines. They didn’t mind being treated that way. To Wan, flesh-and-blood human beings were also machines-vending machines, you might call them. He had the coin to make them yield what he wanted. Sex. Or conversation. Or the preparation of his food, or cleaning up after his piggish habits.
It did not occur to him to consider a vending machine’s feelings. Not even when the vending machine was actually a nineteen-year-old female human being who would have been grateful for the chance of being allowed to think she loved him.
The Heechee early discovered how to store the intelligence and even an approximation of the personality of a dead or dying person in mechanical Systems-as human beings learned when they first encountered the so-called Heechee Heaven where the boy Wan grew up. Robin considered that a tremendously valuable invention. I don’t see it that way. Of course, I may be considered prejudiced in the matter-a person like me, being mechanical storage in the first place, doesn’t need it; and the Heechee, having discovered that, did not bother to invent persons like me.