Robert Silverberg: Going

“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.

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 he 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 Cypriote 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.