Frederik Pohl: Gateway

“I know,” I howl. “Don’t you understand, Sigfrid? That’s the point. I not only killed her, I’m still killing her!”

Patiently: “Do you think what you just said is true, Rob?”

“She thinks it is! Now, and forever, as long as I live. It’s not years ago that it happened for her. It’s only a few minutes, and it goes on for all of my life. I’m down here, getting older, trying to forget, and there’s Klara up there in Sagittarius YY, floating around like a fly in amber!”

I drop to the bare plastic mat, sobbing. Little by little, Sigfrid has been restoring the whole office, patching in this decoration and that. There are pinatas hanging over my head, and a holopic Lake Garda at Sirmione on the wall, hoverfloats, sailboats, bathers having fun.

“Let the pain out, Rob,” Sigfrid says gently. “Let it all out.’

“What do you think I’m doing?” I roll over on the foam staring at the ceiling. “I could get over the pain and the guilt, Sigfrid, if she could. But for her it isn’t over. She’s out there, stuck in time.”

“Go ahead, Rob,” he encourages.

“I am going ahead. Every second is still the newest second in her mind — the second when I threw her life away to save my own. I’ll live and get old and die before she lives past that second, Sigfrid.”

“Keep going, Rob. Say it all.”

“She’s thinking I betrayed her, and she’s thinking it now! I can’t live with that.”

There is a very, very long silence, and at last Sigfrid says:

“You are, you know.”

“What?” My mind has gone a thousand light-years away.

“You are living with it, Rob.”

“Do you call this living?” I sneer, sitting up and wiping my nose with another of his million tissues.

“You respond very quickly to anything I say, Rob,” says Sigfrid, “and therefore sometimes I think your response is a counterpunch. You parry what I say with words. Let me strike home for once, Rob. Let this sink in: you are living.”

Well, I suppose I am.” It is true enough; it is just not very rewarding.

Another long pause, and then Sigfrid says:

“Rob. You know that I am a machine. You also know that my function is to deal with human feelings. I cannot feel feelings. But I can represent them with models, I can analyze them, I can evaluate them. I can do this for you. I can even do it for myself. I can construct a paradigm within which I can assess the value of emotions. Guilt? It is a painful thing; but because it is painful it is a behavior modifier. It can influence you to avoid guilt-inducing actions, and this is a valuable thing for you and for society. But you cannot use it if you do not feel it.”

“I do feel it! Jesus Christ, Sigfrid, you know I’m feeling it!”

“I know,” he says, “that now you are letting yourself feel it. It is out in the open, where you can let it work for you, not buried where it can only harm you. That is what I am for, Rob. To bring your feelings out where you can use them.”

“Even the bad feelings? Guilt, fear, pain, envy?”

“Guilt. Fear. Pain. Envy. The motivators. The modifiers. The qualities that I, Rob, do not have, except in a hypothetical sense, when I make a paradigm and assign them to myself for study.”

There is another pause. I have a funny feeling about it. Sigfrid’s pauses are usually either to give me time to let something sink in, or to permit him to compute some complex chain of argument about me. This time I think it is me but not about me. And at last he says, “You asked me, Rob.”

“Asked you? What was that?”

“You asked me, ’Do you call this living?’ And I answer: Yes. It is exactly what I call living. And in my best hypothetical sense, I envy it very much.”