“Did you talk to either of these women, Rob?”
“Please don’t interrupt, Sigfrid, you make me lose my train of thought.”
“I’m sorry, Rob.”
I go on with the dream: “I left them—no, I didn’t talk to them. I went back into the next car. That was the last one on the train. It was coupled to the rest of the train with a sort of—let’s see, I don’t know how to describe it. It was like one of those expanding gatefold things, made out of metal, you know? And it stretched.”
I stop for a moment, mostly out of boredom. I feel like apologizing for having such a dumb, irrelevant dream. “You say the metal connector stretched, Rob?” Sigfrid prompts me.
“That’s right, it stretched. So of course the car I was in kept dropping back, farther and farther behind the others. All I could see was the taillight, which was sort of in the shape of her face, looking at me. She—” I lose the thread of what I am saying. I try to get back on the track: “I guess I felt as though it was going to be difficult to get back to her, as if she—I’m sorry, Sigfrid, I don’t remember clearly what happened around there. Then I woke up. And,” I finish virtuously, “I wrote it all down as soon as I could, just the way you tell me to.”
“I appreciate that, Rob,” Sigfrid says gravely. He waits for me to go on.
I shift restlessly. “This couch isn’t nearly as comfortable as the mat,” I complain.
“I’m sorry about that, Rob. You said you recognized them?”
“Who?”
“The two women on the train, that you were getting farther and farther away from.”
“Oh. No, I see what you mean. I recognized them in the dream. Really I have no idea who they were.”
“Did they look like anyone you knew?”
“Not a bit. I wondered about that myself.”
Sigfrid says, after a moment, which I happen to know is his way of giving me a chance to change my mind about an answer he doesn’t like, “You mentioned one of the women was a motherly type who coughed—”
“Yes. But I didn’t recognize her. I think in a way she did look familiar, but, you know, the way people in a dream do.”
He says patiently, “Can you think of any woman you’ve ever known who was motherly and coughed a lot?”
I laugh out loud at that. “Dear friend Sigfrid! I assure you the women I know are not at all the motherly type! And they are all on at least Major Medical. They’re not likely to cough.”
“I see. Are you sure, Robbie?”
“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Sigfrid,” I say, angry because the crappy couch is hard to get comfortable on, and also because I need to go to the bathroom, and this situation looks to be prolonging itself indefinitely.
“I see.” And after a moment he picks up on something else, as I know he is going to: he’s a pigeon, Sigfrid is, pecking at everything I throw out before him, one piece at a time. “How about the other woman, the one with the bushy eyebrows?”
“What about her?”
“Did you ever know any girl who had bushy eyesbrows?”
“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, I’ve gone to bed with five hundred girls! Some of them had every kind of eyebrows you ever heard of.”
“No particular one?”
“Not that I can think of offhand.”
“Not offhand, Rob. Please make an effort to remember.”
It is easier to do what he wants than to argue with him about it, so I make the effort. “All right, let’s see. Ida Mae? No. Sue-Ann? No. S. Ya.? No. Gretchen? No—well, to tell you the truth, Sigfrid, Gretchen was so blond I couldn’t really tell you if she had eyebrows at all.”
“Those are girls you’ve known recently, aren’t they, Rob? Perhaps someone longer ago?”
“You mean way back?” I reflect deeply as far back as I can go, all the way to the food mines and Sylvia. I laugh out loud. “You know something, Sigfrid? It’s funny, but I can hardly remember what Sylvia looked like—oh, wait a minute. No. Now I remember. She used to pluck her eyebrows almost altogether away, and then pencil them in. The reason I know is one time when we were in bed together we drew pictures on each other with her eyebrow pencil.”
I can almost hear him sigh. “The cars,” he says, pecking at another bright bit. “How would you describe them?”
“Like any railroad train. Long. Narrow. Moving pretty fast through the tunnel.”
“Long and narrow, moving through a tunnel, Rob?”
I lose my patience at that. He is so fucking transparent! “Come on, Sigfrid! You don’t get away with any corny penis symbols with me.”
“I’m not trying to get away with anything, Rob.”
“Well, you’re being an asshole about this whole dream, I swear you are. There’s nothing in it. The train was just a train. I don’t know who the women were. And listen, while we’re on the subject, I really hate this goddamned couch. For the kind of money my insurance is paying you, you can do a lot better than this!”
He has really got me angry now. He keeps trying to get back to the dream, but I am determined to get a fair shake from him for the insurance company’s money, and by the time I leave he has promised to redecorate before my next visit.
As I go out that day I feel pretty pleased with myself. He is really doing me a lot of good. I suppose it is because I am getting the courage to stand up to him, and perhaps all this nonsense has been helpful to me in that way, or in some way, even if it is true that some of his ideas are pretty crazy.
14
I struggled out of my sling to get out of the way of Klara’s knee and bumped into Sam Kahane’s elbow. “Sorry,” he said, not even looking around to see who he was sorry about. His hand was still on the go-teat, although we were ten minutes on our way. He was studying the flickering colors on the Heechee instrument board, and the only time he looked away was when he glanced at the viewsereen overhead.
I sat up, feeling very queasy. It had taken me weeks to get used to Gateway’s virtual absence of gravity. The fluctuating G forces in the capsule were something else. They were very light, but they didn’t stay the same for more than a minute at a time, and my inner ear was complaining.
I squeezed out of the way into the kitchen area, with one eye on the door to the toilet. Ham Tayeh was still in there. If he didn’t get out pretty soon my situation was going to become critical. Klara laughed, reached out from her sling, and put an arm around me. “Poor Robbie,” she said. “And we’re just beginning.”
I swallowed a pill and recklessly lit a cigarette and concentrated on not throwing up. I don’t know how much it was actually motion sickness. A lot of it was fear. There is something very fright-citing about knowing that there is nothing between you and instant, ugly death except a thin skin of metal made by some peculiar strangers half a million years ago. And about knowing that you’re committed to go somewhere over which you no longer have any control, which may turn out to be extremely unpleasant.
I crawled back into my sling, stubbed out the cigarette, closed my eyes, and concentrated on making the time pass.
There was going to be a lot of it to pass. The average trip lasts maybe forty-five days each way. It doesn’t matter as much as you might think, how far you are going. Ten light-years or ten thousand: it matters some, but not linearly. They tell me that the ships are continually accelerating and accelerating the rate of acceleration the whole time. That delta isn’t linear, either, or even exponential, in any way that anybody can figure out. You hit the speed of light very quickly, in less than an hour. Then it seems to take quite a while before you exceed it by very much. Then they really pick up speed.
You can tell all this (they say) by watching the stars displayed on the overhead Heechee navigation screen (they say). Inside the first hour the stars all begin to change color and swim around. When you pass c you know it because they’ve all clustered in the center of the screen, which is in front of the ship as it ifies.
Actually the stars haven’t moved. You’re catching up with the light emitted by sources behind you, or to one side. The photons that are hitting the front viewer were emitted a day, or a week, or a hundred years ago. After a day or two they stop even looking like stars. There’s just a sort of mottled gray surface. It looks a little like a holofilm held up to the light, but you can make a virtual image out of a holofllm with a flashlight and nobody has ever made anything but pebbly gray out of what’s on the Heechee screens.