“Oh, Robin.” He sighed.
“No, listen to me. What about that biggest father figure there is? How can anybody grow up while Our Father Who Art in the Core is still hanging out there where we can’t even get at him, much less knock the old bastard oft?”
This is Albert Einstein again. I think I’d better clear up what Robin is saying about Gelle-Klara Moynlin. She was a fellow Gateway prospector with whom he was in love. The two of them, with other prospectors, found themselves trapped in a black hole. It was possible to free some of them at the expense of the others. Robin got free. Klara and the others did not. This may have been an accident; may have been Klara selflessly sacrificing herself to save him; may have been Robin panicking and saving himself at their expense; even now, there is no good way to tell. But Robin, who was a guilt addict, carried with him for years the picture of Klara in that black hole, where time almost stopped, always living that same moment of shock and terror-and always (he thought) blaming him. Only Sigfrid helped him out of that.
You may wonder how I know about this, since the interview with Sigfrid was sealed. That’s easy. I know it now, the same way Robin now knows so much about so many people doing so many things he was not present to see.
He shook his head sadly. “Father figures.’ Quotations from Freud.”
“No, I mean it! Don’t you understand?”
He said gravely, “Yes, Robin. I understand that you are referring to the Heechee. It is true. That is a problem for the human race, I agree, and unfortunately Dr. Freud never considered such a situation. But we aren’t talking about the human race now, we’re talking about you. You didn’t call on me for abstract discussions. You called me because you’re really unhappy, and you’ve already said it is the inevitable process of aging that has made you so. So let us confine ourselves to that if we can. Please don’t theorize, just tell me what you feel.”
‘What I feel,” I yelled, “is damn old. You can’t understand that, because you’re a machine. You don’t know what it’s like when your vision gets blurry and the back of your hands get those rusty age spots and your face sags down around your chin. When you have to sit down to put your socks on because if you stand on one foot you’ll fall over. When every time you forget a birthday you think it’s Alzheimer’s disease and sometimes you can’t pee when you want to! When-“ But I broke off then, not because he had interrupted me but because he was listening patiently and looked as though he would go on listening forever, and what was the use of saying all that? He gave me a moment to make sure I was finished and then began patiently:
“According to your medical records, you had your prostate replaced eighteen months ago, Robin. The middle-ear disturbance can easily be-“
“You hold it right there!” I shouted. “What do you know about my medical records, Sigfrid? I have orders this talk was sealed!”
“Of course it is, Robin. Believe me, not one word of this will be accessible to any of your other programs, or to anyone at all but yourself. But, of course, I am able to access all your datastores, including your medical charts. May I go on? The stirrup and anvil in your ear can readily be replaced, and that will cure your balance problem. Corneal transplants will take care of those incipient cataracts. The other matters are purely cosmetic, and of course there would be no problem in securing good young tissue for you. That leaves only the Alzheimer’s disease and, truthfully, Robin, I see no signs of that in you.”
I shrugged. He waited a moment, then said: “So each of the problems you mention-as well as a long list of others that you didn’t say anything about but that do appear on your medical history-can be repaired at any time, or already have been. Perhaps you have put your question the wrong way, Robin. Perhaps the problem is not that you are aging but that you aren’t willing to do what is necessary to reverse it.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
He nodded. “Why indeed, Robin. Can you answer that question?”
“No, I can’t! If I could, why would I be asking you?”
He pursed his lips and waited.
“Maybe I just want to be that way!”
He shrugged.
“Oh, come on, Sigfrid,” I wheedled. “All right. I admit what you say. I’ve got Full Medical Plus and I can take somebody else’s organs for myself as much as I want to, and the reason I don’t is in my head somewhere. I know what you call that. Endogenous depression. But that doesn’t explain anything!”
“Ah, Robin”-he sighed-“psychoanalytic jargon again. And bad jargon. ‘Endogenous’ only means ‘coming from within.’ It doesn’t mean there’s no cause.”
“Then what’s the cause?”
He said thoughtfully, “Let’s play a game. By your left hand there is a button-“
I looked; yes, there was a button on the leather chair. “That’s just to keep the leather in place,” I said.
“No doubt, but in the game we are going to play, this button will, the minute you press it, cause to be done at once all the transplant surgery you need or might want. Instantly. Put your finger on the button, Robin. Now. Do you want to press it?”
“I see. Can you tell me why not?”
“Because I don’t deserve to take body parts from somebody else!” I hadn’t planned to say it. I hadn’t known it. And when I had said it, all I could do was sit there and listen to the echo of what I had said; and Sigfrid, too, was silent for quite a long time.
Then he picked up his pencil and put it in his pocket, folded the pad and put it in another pocket, and leaned forward. “Robin,” he said, “I don’t think I can help you. There is a feeling of guilt here that I do not see a way to resolve.”
“But you helped me so much before!” I wailed.
“Before,” he said steadily, “you were causing yourself pain because of guilt over something that was probably not at all your fault, and in any case lay well in the past. This is not the same at all. You can live another fifty years, perhaps, by transplanting healthy organs to replace your damaged ones. But it is true that these organs will come from someone else, and for you to live longer may, in some sense, cause someone else to live much shorter. To recognize that truth is not a neurotic guilt feeling, Robin, it is only the admission of a moral truth.”
And that was all he said to me except, with a smile that was both kind and sorrowful, “Good-bye.”
I do hate it when my computer programs talk to me about morality. Especially when they are right.
Now, the thing to remember is that while I was having this depression, that was not the only thing going on. My God, no! Many things were happening to many people in the world-on all the worlds, and in the spaces between-that were not only a lot more interesting but mattered a great deal more even to me. I just did not happen to know about them then, even though they involved people (or non-people) I knew. (Or came to know or had known but had forgotten.) Let me give you some examples. My not-yet friend Captain, who was one of those mad-rapist-Santa-Claus Heechee who had haunted my childish dreams, was about to get a lot more scared than thinking about Heechee had ever made me. My former (and soon to be again) friend Audee Walthers, Jr., was about to meet, to his cost, my once friend (or non-friend) Wan. And my very best friend of all (making allowance for the fact that he was not “real”), the computer program Albert Einstein, was about to surprise me … How very complicated all these statements are! I can’t help it. I lived at a complicated time and in a very complicated way. Now that I have been vastened all the parts fit neatly together, as you will see, but then I didn’t even know what all the parts were. I was one single aging man, oppressed by mortality and conscious of sin; and when my wife came home and found me slumped on a chaise lounge, gazing out over the Tappan Sea, she at once cried, “Now then, Robin! What in hell is matter with you?”
I grinned up at her and let her kiss me. Essie scolds a lot. Essie also loves a lot and she is a lot of woman to love. Tall. Slim. Long goldy-blondy hair that she wears in a tight Soviet bun when she’s being a professor or a businesswoman, and lets fall to her waist when she’s coming to bed. Before I could think over what I was going to say long enough to censor it, I blurted, “I’ve been talking to Sigfrid von Shrink.”