“I’d like to,” Paul said.
Staunt realized he was quivering. The muscles of his face were drawn taut. He made a deliberate attempt to relax, and after a moment, said quietly, “It’s a perfectly normal, desirable step to take. I’m old and tired and lonely and bored. I’m no use to myself or to anybody else, and there’s really no sense troubling my doctors to keep me functioning any longer. So I’m going to Go. I’d rather Go now, when I’m still reasonably healthy and clear-witted, instead of trying to hang on another few decades until I’ve slid into senility. I’ve moved to Omega Prime, and you’ll all come to visit me before my Leavetaking, and it’ll be a peaceful and beautiful Going, I hope. That’s all. There’s nothing to weep about. In forty or fifty years you’ll understand all this a lot better.”
“I understand it now,” Paul said. “You caught me by surprise when you called, but I understand. Of course. Of course. We don’t want to lose you, but that’s only our selfishness talking. You’ve lived a full life, and, well, the wheel has to turn.”
How smoothly he does it, Staunt thought. How easily he slips into the jargon. How readily he agrees with me, after his first reflexive moment of shock. Yes, Henry, certainly, Henry, it’s wise of you to Go, Henry, you’ve lived long enough. Staunt wondered which was the fraud: Paul’s initial resistance to the idea of his Going, or his philosophical acquiescence. And what difference did it make? Why, Staunt asked himself, should I be offended if my son thinks it’s right for me to Go when I was offended two minutes earlier by his trying to talk me out of it?
He was beginning to be unsure of his own ground. Perhaps he did want to be talked out of it.
I must read Hallam shortly, he told himself.
He said to Paul, “I have a great deal to do this evening. I’ll call you tomorrow. Or you call me.”
The screen went blank.
Bollinger said, “He took it rather well, I thought. The children don’t always accept the idea that a parent is Going. They accept the theory of Leavetaking, but they always assume that it’s someone else’s old folks who’ll Go.”
“They want their own parents to live forever, even if the parents don’t feel like staying around any longer?”
“That’s it.”
“What if someone does feel like staying forever?” Staunt asked.
Bollinger shrugged. “We never try to force the issue. We hint a little, as subtly as we know how, if someone is one hundred forty or one hundred fifty or so, and really a wreck, but clinging to life anyway. For that matter, if he’s eighty or ninety, even, and just going through the motions of living, held together by his doctors alone, we’ll try to encourage Going. We have gentle ways of working through doctors or friends or relatives, trying to overcome the fear of dying in the ones who linger, trying to get across the idea that it’s not only best for society for them to move on, it’s best for themselves. If they don’t take the hint, there’s nothing we can do. Involuntary euthanasia just isn’t part of our system.”
“How old,” Staunt asked, “are the oldest living people now?”
“I think the oldest ones known are something like one hundred seventy-five or one hundred eighty. Which means they were born in the early part of the twentieth century, around the time of the First World War. Anyone born before that simply spent too much of his life in the era of medieval medicine to hope for a really long span. But if you were born, say, in 1920, you were still only fifty-five or sixty when the era of organ transplants and computerized health services and laser surgery was beginning, and if you were lucky enough to be in good shape in the 1970’s, the 1980’s, why, you could be kept going just about indefinitely thereafter. Into the era of tissue regeneration and all the rest. A few from the early twentieth century did hang on into the era of total medicine, and some of them are still with us. Politely declining to Go.”
“How much longer can they last?”
“Hard to say,” Bollinger replied. “We just don’t know what the practical limits of the human life-span are. Our experience with total medicine doesn’t go back far enough. I’ve heard it said that two hundred or two hundred ten is the top figure, but in another twenty or thirty years we may have some people who’ve reached that figure, and we’ll find that we can keep them going beyond it. Maybe there is no top limit, now that we can do the things we do to rebuild a decaying body. But how hideously antisocial it is of them to hang around for century after century just to test our medical skills!”
“But if they’re making valuable contributions to society through all those hundreds of years—”
“If,” Bollinger said. “But the fact is that ninety, ninety-five percent of all people never make any contributions to society, even when they’re young. They just occupy space, do jobs that could really be done better by machines, sire children who aren’t any more gifted than they are—and hang on, living and living and living. We don’t want to lose anyone who’s valuable, Henry; I’ve been through that with you already. But most people aren’t valuable to begin with, and get less valuable as they go along, and there’s no reason in the universe why they should live past one hundred or one hundred ten, let alone to two hundred or three hundred or whatever.”
“That’s a harsh philosophy. Cynical, even.”
“I know. But read Hallam. The wheel’s got to turn. We’ve reached an average life-span that would have seemed wild fantasy as late as the time when you were a child, Henry, but that doesn’t mean we have to strive to make everyone immortal. Not unless people are willing to give up having children, and they aren’t. It’s a finite planet. If there’s inflow, there has to be outflow, and I like to think that those flowing out are the ones who have the least to offer to the rest of us. The decrepit, the feeble, the slow-witted, the mean-souled. Thank God, most old folks agree. For every one who absolutely won’t give up his grip on life, there are fifty who are glad to go once they’ve hit one hundred or so. And as the remainder get even older, they change their minds about staying, just as you’ve done lately. Not many want to go on past one hundred fifty. The few who do, well, we’ll look on them as experiments in geriatrics, and let them be.”
“How old are those four who met my copter?” Staunt asked.
“I couldn’t tell you. One hundred twenty, one hundred thirty, something like that. Most of those who arrange for Leavetaking now are people born between 1960 and 1980.”
“Of my generation, then.”
“I suppose, yes.”
“Do I look as bad as they do? They’re a bunch of walking mummies, Martin. I’d have guessed they were fifty years older than I am.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“But I’m not like them, am I? I’ve got my teeth. My hair. My real eyes. I look old, but not ancient. Or am I fooling myself, Martin? Am I really a dried-up nightmare too? Is it just that I’ve grown accustomed to the way I look, I haven’t noticed the changes, decade after decade as I get older and older?”
“There’s a mirror,” Bollinger said. “Answer your own questions.”
Staunt stared at himself. Lines and wrinkles, yes: a contour map of time, the valleys and ravines of a long life. Blotches on the skin. The glittering eyes deeply recessed; the cheeks fleshless, revealing the sharp outlines of the skull beneath. An old face, tremendously old. But yet not like their faces. He was no mummy yet. He imagined that a man of the twentieth century would guess him to be no more than eighty or eighty-five, just as a man of the twentieth century would guess Paul to be in his late sixties and Martin Bollinger in his late fifties. Those others, those four, showed their true ages. It must take all the magic at their doctors’ command to keep them together. And now, weary of cheating death, they’ve come here to Go and be over with the farce. Whereas I am still strong, whereas I could continue easily, if only I wanted to continue.
“Well?” Bollinger asked.
“I’m in pretty good shape,” Staunt said. “I’m quitting while I’m ahead. It’s the right way to do it.” He picked up the
data terminal again. “I wonder if they have any of my music in storage here,” he said, and opened the access node and made a request; and the room flooded with the first chords of his Twelfth Symphony. He was pleased. He closed his eyes and listened. When the movement ended, he looked around the room, and found that Bollinger had gone.
Five
Dr. James came to see him a little while later, as night was enfolding the desert. Staunt was standing by the window, watching the brilliant stars appear, when the room annunciator told him of his visitor.
The doctor was a youngish man—forty, fifty, Staunt was no longer good at guessing ages—with a long fragile-looking nose and a gentle, faintly unctuous, I-want-you-to-have-a-lovely-Going sort of manner. His first words to Staunt were, “I’ve been looking through your medical file. I really must congratulate you on the excellent state of your health.”
“There’s something about music that keeps people in good shape,” Staunt said.
“Are you a conductor?”
“A composer. But I’ve conducted my own works quite often. Waving the baton—it’s obviously good exercise.”
“I don’t know much about music, I’m afraid. Some afternoon you must program some of your favorite pieces for me.” The doctor grinned shyly. “The simpler ones. Music for an unsophisticated medic, if you’ve written any.” He was silent a moment. Then he said, “You really do have an excellent medical history. Your doctor’s computer transferred your whole file to us this afternoon when your reservation was made. Naturally, while you’re with us we want you to remain in perfect health and comfort. You’ll receive the same kind of care here that you were getting at home—the muscle therapies, the ion-balance treatments, the circulatory clearances, and so forth. Including any special supportive therapy that may become necessary. Not that I anticipate someone like you to need a great deal of that.”
“I could last another fifty years, eh?”
Dr. James looked abashed. His plump cheeks glowed. “That choice is entirely up to you, Mr. Staunt.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not about to change my mind.”
“No one here will hurry you,” the doctor said. “We’ve had people remain at Omega Prime for three, even four years. Each man’s Leavetaking is the most important event in his life, after all; he’s entitled to go about it at his own pace, to disengage himself from the world as gradually as he wants. You do understand that there is no cost to you for any part of your residence here. The government underwrites the whole business.”
“I think Martin Bollinger explained that to me.”
“Good. Let me discuss with you, then, some of your Leavetaking options. Many Departing Ones prefer to begin their withdrawal from the world by making a grand tour—a kind of farewell to all the great sights, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Notre Dame, the Sahara, Antarctica, whatever. We can make any such travel arrangements you’d like. We have several organized tours, on which you’d travel with five or six or ten other Departing Ones and several Guides—a one-month tour of the most famous places, a two-month tour, or a three-month tour. These are packaged in advance, but we can make changes in itinerary by unanimous consent of the Departing Ones. Or, if you prefer, you could travel alone, that is, just you and your Guide, to any part of the world that—”
Staunt looked at him in astonishment. Was this man a doctor or a travel agent?
And did he want to take any such tour? It was vaguely tempting. At government expense to see the temples of Chichen Itza by moonlight, to float over the Andes and descend into Machu Picchu, to smell the scent of cloves on Zanzibar, to look up at a sequoia’s distant blue-green crown, to see the hippos jostling in the Nile, to roam the crumbling dusty streets of Babylon, to drift above the baroque intricacies of the Great Barrier Reef, to see the red sandstone spires of Utah, to tramp along the Great Wall of China, to make his farewells to lakes and deserts and mountains and valleys, to cities and wastelands, to penguins, to polar bears—
But he had seen all those places. Why go back? Why bother to make a breathless pilgrimage, dragging his flimsy bones from place to place? Once was enough. He had his memories.
“No,” he said. “If I had any desire to travel anywhere, I wouldn’t have thought of Going in the first place. If you follow me. The flavor’s gone out of everything, do you see? I don’t have the motivation for hauling myself around. Not even to make sentimental gestures of farewell.”
“As you wish, Mr. Staunt. Most Departing Ones do take advantage of the travel option. But you’ll find no coercion here. If you feel no urge to travel, why, stay right where you are.”
“Thank you. What are some of the other Leavetaking options?”
“It’s customary for the Departing Ones to seek experiences they may have missed during their lifetimes, or to repeat ones that they found particularly rewarding. If there’s some special type of food that you enjoy—”
“I was never a gourmet.”
“Or works of music you want to hear again, masterpieces you’d like to live with one last time—”
“There are some,” Staunt said. “Not many. Most of them bore me now. When Mozart and Bach and Beethoven begin to bore a man, he knows it’s time to Go. Do you know, even Staunt has begun to seem less interesting to me lately?”
Dr. James did not smile.
He said, “In any event, you’ll find that we’re programmed for every imaginable work of music, and if there are any you know of that we don’t have and ought to have, I hope you’ll tell us. It’s the same with books. Your screen can give you any work in any language—just put in the requisition. A number of Departing Ones use this opportunity at last to read War and Peace, or Ulysses, or The Tale of Genji, say.”
“Or The Encyclopæaedia Britannica,” Staunt said, “from ‘Aardvark’ to ‘Zwingli.”‘
“You think you’re joking. We had a Departing One here five years ago who set out to do just that.”
“How far did he get?” Staunt wanted to know. “‘Antimony’? ‘Betelgeuse’?”
“‘Magnetism,’ I think. He was quite dedicated to the job.”
“Perhaps I’ll do some reading, too, doctor. Not the Britannica. But Hallam, at least. Maybe Montaigne, and maybe Hobbes, and maybe Ben Jonson. For about sixty years I’ve been meaning to read my way through Ben Jonson. I suppose this is my last chance.”
“Another option,” Dr. James said, “is a memory jolt.”
“Which is?”
“Chemical stimulation of the mnemonic centers. It stirs up the memories, awakens things you may not have thought about for eighty or ninety years, sends images and textures and odors and colors of past experiences through your mind in a remarkably vivid way. In a sense, it’s a trip through your entire past. I don’t know any Departing One who’s done it and not come out of it in a kind of ecstasy, a radiant glow of joy.”
Staunt frowned. “I’d guess that it could be a painful experience. Disturbing. Depressing.”
“Not at all. Never. It’s emotion recollected in tranquility: the experiences may have been painful originally, but the replay of them never is. The jolt allows you to come to terms with all that you’ve been and done. I’ve known people to ask to Go within an hour of coming out of the jolt, and not because they were depressed; they simply want to take their leave on a high note.”
“I’ll think about it,” Staunt said.
“Other than the things I’ve mentioned, your period of Leavetaking is completely unstructured. You write the script. Your family will come to see you, and your friends; I think you’ll get to know some of the other Departing Ones here; there’ll be Leavetaking parties as one by one they opt to Go, and then there’ll be Farewell ceremonies for them, and they’ll Go; and eventually, a month, six months, as you choose, you’ll request your own Leavetaking party and Farewell ceremony, and finally you’ll Go. You know, Mr. Staunt, I feel a tremendous sense of exhilaration here every day, working with these wonderful Departing Ones, helping to make their last weeks beautiful, watchin
g the serenity with which they Go. My own time of Going is still ninety or a hundred years away, I suppose, and yet in a way I look forward to it now; I feel a certain impatience, knowing that the happiest hours of my life will come at the very end of it. To Go when still healthy, to step voluntarily out of the world in an atmosphere of peace and fulfillment, to know that you cap a long and successful life by the noblest of all deeds, letting the wheel turn, giving younger people an opportunity to occupy your place—how marvelous it all is!”
“I wish,” Staunt said, “that I could orchestrate your aria. Shimmering tremolos in the strings—the plaintive wail of the oboes—harps, six harps, making celestial noises—and then a great crescendo of trombones and French horns and bassoons, a sort of Valhalla music welling up—”
Looking baffled, Dr. James said, “I told you, I don’t really know much about music.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t mock, not at my age. I’m sure it is beautiful and marvelous. I’m very happy to be here.”
“A pleasure to have you,” said Dr. James.
Six
Staunt did not feel up to having dinner in the community dining room; he had had a long journey, crossing several time zones, and his appetite was awry. He ordered a light meal, juice and soup and fruit, and it arrived almost instantaneously via a subterranean conveyor system. He ate sparingly. Before I Go, he promised himself, I will have steak au poivre again, and escargots, and a curry of lamb, and all the other things I never cared much for while I was young enough to digest them. James offers me a chance; why not take it? I will become a preposthumous gourmet. Even if it kills me. Better to Go like that than by drinking whatever tasteless potion it is they give you at the end.
After dinner he asked where Bollinger was.
“Mr. Bollinger has gone home,” Staunt was told. “But he’ll be back the day after tomorrow. He’ll spend three days a week with you while you’re here.”
Staunt supposed it was unreasonable of him to expect his Guide to devote all his time to him. But Bollinger might at least have stayed around for the first night. Unless the idea was to have the Departing One make his own adaptation to life in the House of Leavetaking.
Something Wild is Loose: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Three Page 15
