Robert Silverberg - Going

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, watching 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.

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.

He toyed with his data terminal, testing its resources. For a while he amused himself by pulling obscure music from the machine: medieval organs, Hummel sonatas, eighteenth-century German opera, odd electronic things from the middle of the twentieth century. But it was impossible to win that game; apparently, if the music had ever been recorded, the computer had access to it. Staunt turned next to books, asking for Hobbes and Hallam, Montaigne and Jonson—not screenings but actual print-out copies of his own, and within minutes after he placed the requisitions, the fresh crisp sheaves of pages began arriving on the same conveyor that had brought his dinner. He put the books aside without looking through them. Perhaps some telephone calls, he thought: my daughter, maybe, or a friend or two. But everyone he knew seemed to live in the East or in Europe, and it was some miserable early hour of the morning there. Staunt gave up the idea of talking to anyone. He dropped into a dull leaden mood. Why had he come to these three little plastic rooms in the desert, giving up his fine well-tended house, his treasures of art, his dogwoods, his books? Surrendering everything for this sterile halfway station on the road to death? I could call Dr. James, I suppose, and tell him I’d like to Go right now. Save the staff some trouble, save the taxpayers some money, save my family the bother of going through the Farewell rituals. How is Going managed, anyway? He believed it was a drug. Something sweet and pleasant, and then the body goes to sleep. A tranquil death, like Socrates’, just a chill climbing quickly through the legs toward the heart. Tonight. Tonight. To Go tonight.