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

by Robert Silverberg

  “Get me the Office of Fulfillment,” he told his telephone.

  A gentle female face appeared on the small screen.

  Staunt smiled. “My name’s Henry Staunt, and I think I’m ready to Go. Would you send a Guide over as soon as you can?”

  Two

  An hour later, as Staunt stood by the studio window listening to one of his favorites among his own compositions, the string quartet of 2038, a green-blue copter descended and came fluttering to a halt on his lawn, resting on a cushion of air a short distance above the tips of the grass. It bore on its hull the symbol of the Office of Fulfillment—a wheel and a set of enmeshed gears. The hatch of the copter lifted and, to Staunt’s surprise, Martin Bollinger got out. Bollinger was a neighbor, a friend of long standing, possibly the closest friend Staunt had these days; he often came over for visits; lately there had been some talk of Staunt’s setting a group of Bollinger’s poems to music; but what was Bollinger doing riding around in a Fulfillment Office copter?

  Jauntily Bollinger approached the house. He was short, compact, buoyant, with sparkling brown eyes and soft, wavy hair. Staunt supposed he must be seventy or so, eighty at most. Still a young man. Prime of life. It made Staunt feel youthful just to have Bollinger around, and yet he knew that to Bollinger, Bollinger was no youngster. Staunt hadn’t felt like a boy when he was eighty, either. But living to one hundred thirty-six changes your perspective about what’s old.

  From outside Bollinger said, “Can I come in, Henry?”

  “Let him in,” Staunt murmured. One of the sensors in the studio wall picked up the command and relayed it to the front door, which opened. “Tell him I’m in the studio,” Staunt said, and the house guided Bollinger in. With a flick of two fingers Staunt cut down the volume of the music. Bollinger, as he entered, nodded and said pleasantly, “I’ve always loved that quartet.”

  Staunt embraced him. “So have I. How good to see you, Martin.”

  “I’m sorry it’s been so long. Two weeks, isn’t it?”

  “I’m glad you’ve come. Although—to be really honest—I’m not going to be free this afternoon, Martin. I’m expecting someone else.”

  “Oh?”

  “In fact, someone from the very organization whose vehicle you seem to have borrowed. How do you happen to come here in one of their copters, anyway?”

  “Why not?” Bollinger asked.

  “I can’t understand why you should. It makes no sense.”

  “When I come on official business, I use an official copter, Henry.”

  “Official business?”

  “You asked for a Guide.”

  Staunt was shaken. “You?”

  “When they told me who had called, I insisted I be given the assignment, or I’d resign instantly. So I came. So here I am.”

  “I never realized you were with Fulfillment, Martin!”

  “You never asked.”

  Staunt managed a baffled smile. “How long ago did you go into it?”

  “Eight, ten years. A while ago.”

  “And why?”

  “A sense of public duty. We all have to help out if the wheel’s going to keep turning smoothly. Eh, Henry? Eh?” Bollinger came close to Staunt, looked up at him, staring straight into his eyes, and flashed an unexpectedly brilliant, somehow overpowering grin. Then he said in a crisp, aggressive tone, “What’s all this about wanting to Go, Henry?”

  “The idea came to me this morning. I was strolling around the house when suddenly I realized there was no further point in my staying here. I’m done: why not admit it? Turn the wheel. Clear a space.”

  “You’re still relatively young.”

  Staunt laughed harshly. “Coming up on one hundred and thirty-six.”

  “I know men of one hundred sixty and one hundred seventy who haven’t even dreamed of Going.”

  “That’s their problem. I’m ready.”

  “Are you ill, Henry?”

  “Never felt better.”

  “Are you in any kind of trouble, then?”

  “None whatever. My life is unutterably tranquil. I have only the purest of motives in applying for Leavetaking.”

  Bollinger seemed agitated. He paced the studio, picked up and set down one of Staunt’s Polynesian carvings, clasped his hands to his elbows, and said finally, “We have to talk about this first, Henry. We have to talk about this!”

  “I don’t understand. Isn’t it a Guide’s function to speed me serenely on the way to oblivion? You sound as if you’re trying to talk me out of Going!”

  “It’s the Guide’s function,” Bollinger said, “to serve the best interests of the Departing One, whatever those interests may be. The Guide may attempt to persuade the Departing One to delay his Going, or not to Go at all, if in his judgment that’s the proper course to take.”

  Staunt shook his head. “There’s a whole bustling world full of healthy young people out there who want to have more children, and who can’t have them unless useless antiquities like myself get out of the way. I volunteer to make some space available. Are you telling me that you’d oppose my Going, Martin, if—”

  “Maintaining the level of population at a consistent quantity is only one aspect of our work,” Bollinger said. “We’re also concerned with maintaining quality. We don’t want useful older citizens taking themselves out of the world merely to make room for a newcomer whose capabilities we can’t predict. If a man still has something important to give society—”

  “I have nothing important left to give.”

  “If he does,” Bollinger went on smoothly, “we will try to discourage him from Going until he’s given it. In your case I think Going may be somewhat premature, and so I’ve wangled the assignment to be your Guide so that I can help you explore the consequences of what you propose to do, and perhaps—”

  “What do you think I still can offer the world, Martin?”

  “Your music.”

  “Haven’t I written enough?”

  “We can’t be certain of that. You may have a masterpiece or two lurking in you.” Bollinger began to pace again. “Henry, have you read Hallam’s The Turning of the Wheel?”

  “I’ve glanced at it. This morning, in fact.”

  “Did you look at the section in which he explains why our society is unique in western civilization?”

  “It may have slipped my mind.”

  Bollinger said, “Henry, ours is the first that accepts the concept of suicide as a virtuous act. In the past, you know, suicide was considered filthy and evil and cowardly; religions condemned it as an attack against the will of God, and even people who weren’t religious tended to try to cover it up when a friend or a relative killed himself. Well, we’re into a different concept. Since our medical skills are now so highly developed that almost no one ever dies naturally, even enlightened birth-limitation measures can’t keep the world from filling up with people. So long as anyone is born at all, and no one dies, there’s a constant and dangerous buildup of population, so that—”

  “Yes, yes, but—”

  “Let me finish. To cope with our population problem, we eventually decided to regard the voluntary ending of one’s life as a noble sacrifice, and so forth. Hence the whole mystique of Going. Even so, we haven’t entirely lost our old moral outlook on suicide. We still don’t want valuable people to Go, because we feel they have no right to throw away their gifts, to deprive us of what they have to give. And so one of the functions of the Office of Fulfillment is to lead the old and useless toward the exit in a civilized and gentle way, but another of our functions is to keep the old and useful from Going too soon. Therefore—”

  “I understand,” Staunt said softly. “I agree with the philosophy. I merely deny that I’m useful any more.”

  “That’s open to question.”

  “Can it be, Martin, that you’re letting personal factors interfere with your judgment?”

  “What do you mean? That I’d keep you from Going because I prize your friendship so dea
rly?”

  “I mean my promise to set your poems to music.”

  Bollinger reddened faintly. “That’s absurd. Do you believe that my ego is so bound up in those poems that I’d meddle with your Going, simply so that you’d live to—No. I like to think that my judgment is objective.”

  “You could be wrong. You might disqualify yourself from being my Guide. Simply on the chance that—”

  “No. I’m your Guide.”

  “Are we going to fight, then, over whether I’ll be allowed to Go?”

  “Of course not, Henry. We just want you to understand the significance of the step you’ve asked to take.”

  “The significance is that I’ll die. Is that such a complicated thing to understand?”

  Bollinger looked disturbed by Staunt’s blunt choice of words. One tried not to connect Going and dying. One was supposed to resort to the euphemisms.

  He said, “Henry, I just want to follow orderly procedure.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’ll get you into a House of Leavetaking. Then we’ll ask you to examine your soul and see if you’re as truly ready to Go as you think you are. That’s all. The final decision about when you Go will remain in your hands. If you insisted, you could Go this evening; we wouldn’t stop you. Couldn’t. But of course such haste would be unseemly.”

  “As you say.”

  “The House of Leavetaking I recommend for you,” Bollinger said, “is known as Omega Prime. It’s in Arizona—beautiful desert country rimmed with mountains—and the staff is superb. I could show you brochures on several others, but—”

  “I’ll trust your judgment.”

  “Fine. May I use the phone?”

  It took less than a minute for Bollinger to book the reservation. For the first time, Staunt felt a sense of inexorability about the course of events. He was on his way out. There would be no turning back now. He would never have the audacity to cancel his Going once he had taken up residence at Omega Prime. But why, he wondered, was he showing even these faint tremors of hesitation? Had Bollinger already begun to undermine his resolution?

  “There,” Bollinger said. “They’ll have your suite ready in an hour. Would you like to leave tonight?”

  “Why not?”

  “Under our procedures,” Bollinger said, “your family will be notified as soon as you’ve arrived there. I’ll do it myself. A custodian will be appointed for your house; it’ll be sealed and placed under guard pending transfer of your property to your heirs. At the House of Leavetaking you’ll have all the legal advice you’ll require, assistance in making a distribution of assets, et cetera, et cetera. There’ll be no loose ends left dangling. It’ll all go quite smoothly.”

  “Splendid.”

  “And that completes the official part of my visit. You can stop thinking of me as your Guide for a while. Naturally, I’ll be with you a good deal of the time at the House of Leavetaking, handling any queries you may have, doing whatever I can to make things easier for you. For the moment, though, I’m here simply as your friend, not as your Guide. Would you care to talk? Not about Going, I mean. About music, politics, the weather, anything you like.”

  Staunt said, “Somehow I don’t feel very talkative.”

  “Shall I leave you alone?”

  “I think that would be best. I’m starting to think of myself as a Departing One, Martin. I’d like a few hours to get accustomed to the idea.”

  Bollinger bowed awkwardly. “It must be a difficult moment for you. I don’t want to intrude. I’ll come back just before dinnertime, all right?”

  “Fine,” Staunt said.

  Three

  Afterward, feeling adrift, Staunt wandered aimlessly through his house, wondering how soon it would be before he changed his mind. He put no credence in Bollinger’s flattering, hopeful hypothesis that he might yet have important works of art to give the world; Staunt knew better. If he had ever owed a debt of creativity to mankind, that debt had long since been paid in full, and civilization need not fear it would be losing anything significant by his Going. Even so, he might find it difficult, after all, to remove himself from all he loved. Would the sight of his familiar possessions shake his decision? Here were the memorabilia of a long, comfortable life: the African masks, the Pueblo pots, the Mozart manuscript, the little Elizabethan harpsichord, the lunar boulder, the Sung bowl, the Canopic jars, the Persian miniatures, the dueling pistols, the Greek coins, all the elegant things that had collected him in his years of traveling. Once it had seemed unbearable to him that he might ever be parted from these precious objects. They had taken on life for him, so that when a clumsy cleaning machine knocked a Cypriot statuette to the floor and smashed it, he had wept not for the monetary loss, but for the pain he imagined the little clay creature was suffering, for the humiliation it must feel at being ruined. He imagined it hurling bitter reproaches at him: I survived four thousand years so that I might become yours, and you let me get broken! As a child might pretend that her dolls were alive, and talk to them, and apologize to them for fancied slights. It was, he had known all along, a foolish, sentimental, even contemptible attitude, this attachment he had to his inanimate belongings, this solemn fond concern for their “comfort” and “feelings,” this way of speaking of them as “he” or “she” instead of “it,” of worrying about whether some prized piece was receiving a place of display that was properly satisfying to its ego. He acknowledged the half-submerged notion that he had created a family, a special entity, by assembling this hodgepodge of artifacts from a hundred cultures and a hundred eras.

  Now, though, he deliberately confronted himself with ugly reality: when he had Gone, his “family” would be scattered, his beloved things sold or given away, some of them surely lost or broken in transit, some ending up on the dusty shelves of ignorant people, none of them ever again to know the warmth of ownership he had lavished on them. And he did not care. Except in the most remote, abstract way, he simply did not care. Today the life was gone out of them, and they were merely masks and pots and bits of bone and pieces of paper—objects, interesting and valuable and attractive, but lacking all feeling. Objects. They needed no coddling. He was under no obligation to them to worry about their welfare. Somehow, without his noticing it, his possessions had ceased to be his pets, and he felt no pain at the thought of parting from them. I must indeed be ready to Go, he told himself.

  Here, in the little alcove off the studio, was his real family. A stack of portrait cubes: his wife, his son, his daughter, his children’s children, his children’s children’s children, each of them recorded in a gleaming plastic box a couple of inches high. There were so many of them—dozens! He had had only the socially approved two children, and so had his own children, and none of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren had had more than three, and yet look at the clutter of cubes! The multitude of them was the most vivid possible argument in favor of the idea of Going. One simply had to make room, or everyone would be overwhelmed by the tide of oncoming young ones. Of course in a world where practically no one ever died except voluntarily, and that only at a great old age, families did tend to accumulate amazingly as the generations came along. Even a small family, and these days there was no other kind, was bound to become immense over the course of eighty or ninety years through the compounding progressions of controlled but persistent fertility. All additions, no subtractions. Or very few. And so the numbers mounted. Look at all the cubes!

  The cubes were clever things: computer-actuated personality simulations. Everyone got himself cubed at least once, and those who were particularly hungry for the odd sort of immortality that cubing conferred had new cubes made every few years. The process itself was a simple electronic transfer; it took about an hour to make a cube. The scanning machines recorded your voice and patterns of speech, your motion habits, your facial gestures, your whole set of standard reactions and responses. A battery of concise, cunningly perceptive personality tests yielded a character profile. This, too, went
into the cube. They ended by having your soul in a box. Plug the cube into a receptor slot, and you came to life on a screen, smiling as you would smile, moving as you would move, sounding as you would sound, saying things you were likely to say. Of course, the thing on the screen was unreal, a mechanical mock-up, a counterfeit approximation of the person who had been cubed; but it was programmed to respond to conversation and to initiate its own conversational gambits without the stimulus of prior inputs, to absorb new data and change its outlook in the light of what it heard; in short, it behaved not like a frozen portrait but like a convincing imitation of the living person from whom it had been drawn.

  Staunt studied the collection of cubes. He had five of his son, spanning Paul’s life from early middle age to early old age; Paul faithfully sent his father a new cube at the beginning of each decade. Three cubes of his daughter. A number of the grandchildren. The proud parents sent him cubes of the young ones when they were ten or twelve years old, and the grandchildren themselves, when they were adults, sent along more mature versions of themselves. By now he had four or five cubes of some of them. Each year there were new cubes: an updating of someone’s old one, or some great-great-grandchild getting immortalized for the first time, and everything landing on the patriarch’s shelf. Staunt rather liked the custom.

  He had only one cube of his wife. They had developed the process about fifty years ago, and Edith had been dead since ’47, forty-eight years back. Staunt and his wife had been among the first to be cubed; just as well, for her time had been short, though they hadn’t known it. Even now, not all deaths were voluntary. Edith had died in a copter crash, and Staunt, close to ninety, had not remarried. Having the cube of her had been a great comfort to him in the years just after her death. He rarely played it now, mainly because of its technical imperfections; since the process was so new when her cube had been made, the simulation was only approximate, and her movements were jerky and awkward, not much like those of the graceful Edith he had known. He had no idea how long it had been since he had last played her. Impulsively, he slipped her cube into the slot.