The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72

by Robert Silverberg

  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 justificat
ion 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 flat brown Arizona desert, pocked with cacti and paloverde, stretched toward the dark horizon.

  The copter landed silently. When the hatch opened, Staunt felt the blast of heat. “We don’t modulate the outdoor climate here,” Bollinger explained. “Most Departing Ones seem to prefer it that way. Contact with the natural environment.”

  “I don’t mind,” Staunt said. “I’ve always loved the desert.”

  A welcoming party had gathered by the time he emerged from the copter. Three members of Omega Prime’s staff, in smocks monogrammed with the Fulfillment insignia. Four withered oldsters, evidently awaiting their own imminent Going. A transport robot, with its wheelchair seat already in position. Staunt, picking his way carefully over the rough, pebble-strewn surface of the landing field, was embarrassed by the attention. He said in a low voice to Bollinger, “Tell them I don’t need the chair. I can still walk. I’m no invalid.”

  They clustered around him, introducing themselves: Dr. James, Miss Elliot, Mr. Falkenbridge. Those were the staff people. The four Departing Ones croaked their names at him too, but Staunt was so astonished by their appearance that he forgot to pay attention. The shriveled faces, the palsied clawlike hands, the parchment skin—did he look like that, too? It was years since he had seen anyone his own age. He had the impression that he had come through his fourteen decades well preserved, but perhaps that was only an illusion born of vanity, perhaps he really was as much of a ruin as these four. Unless they were much older than he, one hundred seventy-five, one hundred eighty years old, right at the limits of what was now the human span of mortality. Staunt stared at them in wonder, awed and dismayed by their gummy grins.

  Falkenbridge, a husky red-haired young man, apparently some sort of orderly, was trying to ease him into the wheelchair. Irritably Staunt shook him off, saying, “No. No. I’ll manage. Martin, tell him I don’t need it.”

  Bollinger whispered something to Falkenbridge. The young man shrugged and sent the transport robot away. Now they all began walking toward the House of Leavetaking, Falkenbridge on Staunt’s right, Miss Elliot on his left, both of them staying close to him in case he should topple.

  He found himself under unexpectedly severe strain. Possibly refusing the wheelchair had been foolish bravado. The fierce dry heat, the fatigue of his ninety-minute rocket journey across the continent, the coarse texture of the ground, all conspired to make his legs wobbly. Twice he came close to falling. The first time Miss Elliot gently caught his elbow and steadied him; the second, he managed to recover himself, after a short half-stumble that sent pain shooting through his left ankle.

  Suddenly, all at once, he was feeling his age. In a single day he had begun to dodder, as though his decision to enter a House of Leavetaking had stripped him of all his late-staying vigor. No. No. He rejected the idea. He was merely tired, as a man his age had every right to be; with a little rest he’d be himself again. He walked faster, despite the effort it cost him. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. There was a stitch in his side. His entire left leg ached.

  At last they reached the entrance to Omega Prime.

  He saw now that what had seemed to be gauzy tents, viewed from above, were in fact sturdy and substantial plastic domes, linked by an intricate network of covered passageways. The courtyard around which they were grouped contained elaborate plantings of desert flora: giant stiff-armed cacti, looping white-whiskered succulents, odd and angular thorny things. The plants had been grouped with remarkable grace and subtleness around an assortment of strange boulders and sleek stone slabs; the effect was one of extraordinary beauty. Staunt stood a moment contemplating it. Bollinger said gently, “Why not go to your suite first? The garden will still be here this evening.”

  He had an entire dome to himself. Interior walls divided it into a bedroom, a sitting room, and a kind of utility room; everything was airy and tastefully simple, and the temperature was twenty-five degrees cooler than outside. A window faced the garden.

  The staff people and the quartet of Departing Ones vanished, leaving Staunt alone with his Guide. Bollinger said, “Each of the residents has a suite like this. You can eat here, if you like, although there’s a community dining room under the courtyard. There are recreational facilities there too—a library, a theater, a game room—but you can spend all of your time perfectly happily right where you are.”

  Staunt lowered himself gingerly into a webfoam hammock. As his weight registered, tiny mechanical hands began to massage his back. Bollinger smiled.

  “This is your data terminal,” he said, handing Staunt a copper-colored rod about eight inches long. “It’s a standard access unit. You can get any book in the library—and there are thousands of them—screened on request, and you can play whatever music you’d like, and it’s also a telephone input. Ask it to connect you with anyone at all. Go on. Ask.”

  “My son Paul,” Staunt said.

  “Ask it,” said Bollinger.

  Staunt activated the terminal and gave it Paul’s name and access number. Instantly a screen came to life just beside the hammock. Staunt’s son appeared in its silvery depths. The screen could almost have been a mirror, a strange sort of time-softening mirror that was capable of taking the face of a very old man and reflecting it as that of a man who was merely old. Staunt beheld someone who was a younger version of himself, though far from young: cool gray eyes, thin lips, lean bony face, a dense mane of white hair.

  Paul’s face was deeply lined but still vigorous. At the age of ninety-one he had
not yet retired from the firm of architects he headed. So long as a man’s health was good and his mind was sound and he still found his career rewarding, there was no reason to retire; when mind or body failed or career lost its savor, that was the time to withdraw and make one’s self ready to Go.

  Staunt said, “I’m calling you from Omega Prime.”

  “What’s that, Henry?”

  “You’ve never heard of it? A House of Leavetaking in Arizona. It looks like a lovely place. Martin Bollinger brought me here this evening.”

  Paul looked startled. “Are you thinking of Going, Henry?”

  “I am.”

  “You never told me you had any such thing in mind!”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “Are you in poor health?”

  “I feel fine,” Staunt said. “Everyone asks me that, and I say the same thing. My health is excellent.”

  “Then why—”

  “Do I have to justify it? I’ve lived long enough. My life is over.”

  “But you’ve been so alert, so involved—”

  “It’s my decision to make. It’s ungracious of you to quarrel with me over it.”

  “I’m not quarreling,” Paul said. “I’m trying to adapt to it. You know, you’ve been part of my life for nine decades. I don’t give a damn what the social conventions are: I can’t simply smile and nod and say how sweet when my father announces he’s going to die.”

  “To Go.”

  “To Go,” Paul muttered. “Whatever. Have you told Crystal?”

  “You’re the first member of the family to know. Except for your mother, that is.”

  “My mother?”

  “The cube,” said Staunt.

  “Oh. Yes. The cube.” A thin, edgy laugh. “All right. I’ll tell the others. I suppose I’ll have to learn how to be head of the family, finally. You’re not going to be doing this immediately, are you?”