Harlan Ellison - Approaching Oblivion - Road Signs On the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow

She wasn't in her seat. The formfit still held the shape of her body. Glance right.

He floated lazily in the nimbus, his spine like water, his thoughts relaxed. He was talking to the memory box that contained his wife, dead these last sixty-three years-since his most recent anti-agapic rejuvenation.

“It's the end of summer, Annie.”

“How did the children take it, Rai?”

They had had no children. It was an old memory box, the synthesizing channels were worn; the responses were frequently imprecise or non sequitur. The bead in which her voice had been cored, had become microscopically crusted; Annie now spoke with a slur and sometimes-drawl.

“I look about thirty now. They even fixed the prostate. I'm taller, and they lengthened the fingers on my sensor hand. I'm much faster at the console now, wider reach. But the work isn't any better.”

“Why don't you speak to the Designer about it, darling?”

“That sententious lemming. I may be undertalented,

but at least I don't try to sustain a miserable existence by deluding myself I'm creating great works of art.”

He turned onto his stomach, staring out the port. It was dark out there. “ And while we float here talking, outside this great space-going vessel cut in the shape of a moonstone, the universe whirls past at millions of light-years an hour, doo-wah-diddy mop-mop.”

“Isn't that parsecs, dear?”

“How should I know. I'm a sensu programmer, not an astrophysicist.”

“Is it chilly in here, Rai?”

“Oh, Annie, forget it. Say something I haven't heard. I'm dying, Annie, dying of ennui and the stupids. I don't want, I don't need, I haven't anything, don't care!”

“What do you want me to say, dear? I miss you, I'm sorry you're lonely-”

“It's not even that I'm lonely. Annie, you went through three rejuvenations with me. You were the lucky one.”

“Lucky? Lucky that I died during the fourth? How do you get lucky out of that, Rai?”

“Because I've had to live sixty-three more years, and in another ten or fifteen I'm scheduled for a fifth, long-dead baby wife of mine, and I tell you three times — one two three — it's the end of summer, love. Gone. Done. All the birds has flowed south for the final flutter. I'm going to give it a pass when rejuve comes around. I'm going to settle into dust. Summer ends, goodbye. Mother of God, is this how Rico dies?”

“What sensu is that from, Rai?”

“Not sensu, Annie. Movie. Movie film. All-singing, all-dancing, all-talking. I've told you a million times, by direct count. Movie. Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson, Warner Bros. Oh to hell with it, there was a woman in the lounge tonight, Annie.”

“That's nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”

“God help me, Annie, I wanted her! Do you know what that means to me? To want a woman again? I don't know what it was about her…I think she hated me…I could feel it, something deep and ugly when she stopped me…”

“That's nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”

“She was bloody gorgeous, you ghost of Christmas Past. She was so unbelievably unreal I wanted to crawl inside her and live there. Annie…Annie…I'm going crazy with it all, with what I do, with the novae, with programming death for indolent swine who need their cheap death thrills to make it through the day just to make it through a day…God, Annie, speak to me, come out of that awful square coffin and save me, Annie! I want night, my baby, I want night and sleep and end to summer…”

The suite door hummed and a holograph of the one seeking entrance appeared in the tank. It was the woman from the theater lounge.

“That's nice, sweetheart…was she attractive?”

He swam out of the nimbus and whistled the door open. She came in and smiled at him.

“You were always like that when I was alive, Rai; you simply never talked to me; you never listened…”

He lurched sidewise and palmed the memory box to stillness.

“Yes?” She stared at him with curiosity and he said it again, “Yes?”

“A little conversation, Mr. Redditch.”

“I was just talking about you.”

“To your little black box?”

“To what's left of my wife.”

“I didn't mean to be flippant. It's very personal and dear to many people, I know.”

“Not to me. Annie's gone. I'm still here…and it's getting to be the end of summer.”

He motioned to the nimbus, and she walked to it with her eyes still on his face. “You're a very attractive human,” she said, removing her clothes and sliding into the free-fall glow.

“Can I get you something? A crystal? Something to eat?”

“Perhaps some water.”

He whistled up the dispenser. It rose from the grass-rugged deck, and revolved. “Fresh water, three sparkles of (seed) in it,” he said. The checker in the dispenser mixed up the drink and set it out for him to remove.

He carried it to her and she took it, giving him a faint look of amusement. “I seem to entertain you.”

She drank from the crystal, barely moving her lips. “You do.”

“You aren't from the Near Colony.”

“I'm not a Terrestrial.”

“I didn't want to say that; I thought it might offend.”

“We needn't circle each other, Mr. Redditch. Clearly, I sought you out, I want something from you, we can be straightline with one another.”

“Apart from sex, what do you want from me?”

“My, you're taking the initiative.”

“If you don't care for me, you can move out now. I'm frankly not up to badinage.” He turned sharply and went back to the dispenser. “It's the end of summer,” he said, softly.

She sipped at the cool water in the crystal. He turned back to her, a melt in its helical container warm against his hand, and caught her unguarded expression: there was so much amusement in her face, in every line of her languid body, he felt like an adolescent again. “Oh, Mr. Redditch!” Her chiding was as deep and meaningful as that of a mommy's suitor, feigning concern for the offspring of the ex-husband. He turned back a second time, feeling violence in him for the first time in years; furious at her for playing him like a puppet; furious at himself for being furious.

“That's all…get out.”

“The end of summer, Mr. Redditch?” She made no move to go. “What do you mean by the end of summer?”

“I said out. I mean out.”

“You're going to ignore the rejuvenation next time? You must want something on the other side very badly.”

“Who the hell are you? What do you want from me? It's been a bad day, a bad week, a rotten year and a stinking cycle, so why don't you just put an egg in your shoe and beat it.”

“My name is Jeen.”

He shook his head, totally bewildered. “What?”

“If we're going to touch, you should at least know my name,” she said, and held out the crystal for him to take it away. But when he reached out, she laid her other hand on his wrist and drew him into the nimbus. It had been a very long time since he had wanted a woman this way, but his body betrayed him the moment her lips touched his naked chest. He lay back and closed his eyes and she made it all silk.

“Talk to me,” she said.

The things he said were not love matters.

He spoke of what it was to live as something like a man for over two hundred years, and to grow weary of it because its infinite variety did grow stale. He spoke of what he did to send emotion and dreams of conflict to a race that ruled whole galaxies, entire nations of planets, great sectors of space. He was a programmer of death. A practitioner of one of the last occupations left to humans. And he spoke of ennui, of jaded appetites, of nights and days aboard a moonstone vessel as large as a city. Roaming through emptiness till worlds were pinpointed. And then they were surveyed with sophisticated equipment that told them the peoples who had lived there were gone, but their racial memories were still preserved in the stones and soil and silted river bottoms of the planet. Like ghosts of alien dreams, the remembrances of all times past were still there, contained forever, immolated in the soulskins of worlds, like haunted houses that had soaked up the terrible events that had transpired within and retained them as ambience. He spoke of Designers and their special talents-those peculiar alien empaths-and how they designed the demise of whole solar systems.