And now I couldn’t tell you what that dream was to save my life.
“I see you don’t want to talk about dreams,” says Sigfrid. “Is there anything you do want to talk about?”
“Not really.”
He doesn’t answer that for a moment, and I know he is just biding his time to outwait me so that I will say something, I don’t know, something foolish. So I say, “Can I ask you a question, Sigfrid?”
“Can’t you always, Rob?” Sometimes I think he’s actually trying to smile. I mean, really smile. His voice sounds like it.
“Well, what I want to know is, what do you do with all the things I tell you?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question, Robbie. If you’re asking what the information storage program is, the answer is quite technical.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” I hesitate, trying to make sure what the question is, and wondering why I want to ask it. I guess it all goes back to Sylvia, who was a lapsed Catholic. I really envied her her church, and let her know I thought she was dumb to have left it, because I envied her the confession. The inside of my head was littered with all these doubts and fears that I couldn’t get rid of. I would have loved to unload them on the parish priest. I could see that you could make quite a nice hierarchical flow pattern, with all the shit from inside my own head flushing into the confessional, where the parish priest flushes it onto the diocesan monsignor (or whoever; I don’t really know much about the Church), and it all winds up with the Pope, who is the settling tank for all the world’s sludge of pain and misery and guilt, until he passes it on by transmitting it directly to God. (I mean, assuming the existence of a God, or at least assuming that there is an address called “God” to which you can send the shit.)
Anyway, the point is that I sort of had a vision of the same system in psychotherapy: local drains going into branch sewers going into community trunk lines treeing out of flesh-and-blood psychiatrists, if you see what I mean. If Sigfrid were a real person, he wouldn’t be able to hold all the misery that’s poured into him. To begin with, he would have his own problems. He would have mine, because that’s how I would get rid of them, by unloading them onto him. He would also have those of all the other unloaders who share the hot couch; and he would unload all that, because he had to, onto the next man up, who shrank him, and so on and so on until they got to — who? The ghost of Sigmund Freud?
But Sigfrid isn’t real. He’s a machine. He can’t feel pain. So where does all that pain and slime go?
I try to explain all that to him, ending with: “Don’t you see, Sigfrid? If I give you my pain and you give it to someone else, it has to end somewhere. It doesn’t feel real to me that it just winds up as magnetic bubbles in a piece of quartz that nobody ever feels.”
“I don’t think it’s profitable to discuss the nature of pain with you, Rob.”
“Is it profitable to discuss whether you’re real or not?”
He almost sighs. “Rob,” he says, “I don’t think it’s profitable to discuss the nature of reality with you, either. I know I’m a machine. You know I’m a machine. What is the purpose in our being here? Are we here to help me?”
“I sometimes wonder,” I say, sulking.
“I don’t think you actually wonder about that. I think you know that you are here to help you, and the way to do it is by trying to make something happen inside you. What I do with the information may be interesting to your curiosity, and it may also provide you with an excuse to spend these sessions on intellectual conversation instead of therapy—”
“Touche, Sigfrid,” I interrupt.
“Yes. But it is what you do with it that makes the difference in how you feel, and whether you function somewhat better or somewhat worse in situations that are important to you. Please concern yourself with the inside of your own head, Rob, not mine.”
I say admiringly, “You sure are one fucking intelligent machine, Sigfrid.”
He says, “I have the impression that what you’re actually saying there is, ’I hate your fucking guts, Sigfrid.’”
I have never heard him say anything like that before, and it takes me aback, until I remember that as a matter of fact I have said exactly that to him, not once but quite a few times. And that it’s true.
I do hate his guts.
He is trying to help me, and I hate him for it very much. I think about sweet, sexy S. Ya. and how willing she is to do anything I ask her, pretty nearly. I want, a lot, to make Sigfrid hurt.
Chapter 12
I came back to my room one morning and found the P-phone whining faintly, like a distant, angry mosquito. I punched the message code and found that the assistant personnel director required my presence in her office at ten hundred hours that morning. Well, it was later than that already. I had formed the habit of spending a lot of time, and most nights, with Klara. Her pad was a lot more comfortable than mine. So I didn’t get the message until nearly eleven, and my tardiness in getting to the Corporation personnel offices didn’t help the assistant director’s mood.
She was a very fat woman named Emma Fother. She brushed off my excuses and accused, “You graduated your courses seventeen days ago. You haven’t done a thing since.”
“I’m waiting for the right mission,” I said.
“How long are you going to wait? Your per capita’s paid up for three more days, then what?”
“Well,” I said, almost truthfully, “I was going to come in to see you about that today anyway. I’d like a job here on Gateway.”
“Pshaw.” (I’d never heard anyone say that before, but that’s how it sounded.) “Is that why you came to Gateway, to clean sewers?”
Vessel 3-31, Voyage 08D27. Crew C. Pitrin, N. Ginza, J. Krabbe.
Transit time out 19 days 4 hours. Position uncertain, vicinity (21.y.) Zeta Tauri.
“Landing made. This planet has evidently gone through a warming period. There are no ice caps, and the present shorelines do not appear very old. No detected signs of habitation. No intelligent life.
“Finescreen scanning located what appeared to be a Heechee rendezvous station in our orbit. We approached it. It was intact. In forcing an entrance it exploded and N. Ginza was killed. Our vessel was damaged and we returned, J. Krabbe dying en route. No artifacts were secured. Biotic samples from planet destroyed in damage to vessel.”
I was pretty sure that was a bluff, because there weren’t that many sewers; there wasn’t enough gravity flow to support them. “The right mission could come along any day.”
“Oh, sure, Rob. You know, people like you worry me. Do you have any idea how important our work here is?”
“Well, I think so—”
“There’s a whole universe out there for us to find and bring home! Gateway’s the only way we can reach it. A person like you, who grew up on the plankton farms—”
“Actually it was the Wyoming food mines.”
