I looked and saw the little girl, Watty, staring at me, her mouth open, tears rolling down her wide, purplish- black cheeks. I started to move toward her to reassure her. She screamed and ran behind a grape trellis.
I turned back toward Klara, who was sitting up, not looking at me, her hand cupped over her mouth. She took the hand away and stared at something in it: a tooth.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, and didn’t force myself to think of anything. I turned and left.
I don’t remember what I did for the next few hours. I didn’t sleep, although I was physically exhausted. I sat on a chest of drawers in my room for a while. Then I left it again. I remember talking to somebody, I think it was a straggler returning to off on the Venus ship, about how adventurous and exciting prospecting was. I remember eating something in the commissary. And all the time I was thinking: I wanted to kill Klara. I had been taming all that stored-up fury, and I hadn’t even let myself know it was there until she pulled the trigger.
I didn’t know if she would ever forgive me. I wasn’t sure she ought to, and I wasn’t even sure that I wanted her to. I couldn’t imagine our ever being lovers again. But what I finally decided I wanted was to apologize.
Only she wasn’t in her rooms. There was no one there except a plump young black woman, slowly sorting out clothes, with a tragic face. When I asked after Klara she began to cry. “She’s gone,” the woman sobbed.
“Gone?”
“Oh, she looked awful. Someone must have beaten her up! She brought Watty back and said she wouldn’t be able to take care of her anymore. She gave me all her clothes, but — what am I going to do with Watty when I’m working?”
“Gone where?”
The woman lifted her head. “Back to Venus. On the ship. She left an hour ago.”
I didn’t talk to anyone else. Alone in my own bed, somehow I got to sleep.
When I got up I gathered together everything I owned: my clothes, my holodisks, my chess set, my wristwatch. The Heechee bracelet that Kiara had given me. I went around and sold them off. I cleaned out my credit account and put all the money together: it came to a total of fourteen hundred dollars and change. I took the money up to the casino and put it all on Number 31 on the roulette wheel.
The big slow ball drifted into a socket: Green. Zero.
I went down to mission control and signed for the first One that was available, and twenty-four hours later I was in space.
Chapter 23
“How do you really feel about Dane, Rob?”
“How the hell do you think I feel? He seduced my girl.’
“That’s a strangely old-fashioned way to put it, Rob. And it happened an awfully long time ago.”
“Sure it did.” Sigfrid strikes me as being unfair. He sets rules, then he doesn’t play by them. I say indignantly, “Cut it out, Sigfrid. All that happened a long time ago, but it isn’t being a long time ago, for me, because I’ve never let it come out. It’s still brand new inside my head. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for me? Let all that old stuff inside my head come out so it can dry up and blow away and not cripple me anymore?”
“I’d still like to know why it stays so brand new inside your head, Rob.”
“Oh, Christ, Sigfrid!” This is one of Sigirid’s stupid times. He can’t handle some complex kinds of input, I guess. When it come right down to it he’s only a machine and can’t do anything he isn’t programmed to do. Mostly he just responds to key words well, with a little attention to meaning, sure. And to nuance, as as it is expressed by voice tone, or by what the sensors in the mat and in the straps tell him about my muscle activity.
“If you were a person instead of a machine, you’d understand,” I tell him.
“Perhaps so, Rob.”
To get him back on the right track I say: “It is true that it happened a long time ago. I don’t see what you’re asking beyond that.”
“I’m asking you to resolve a contradiction I perceive in what you say. You’ve been saying that you don’t mind the fact that your girlfriend, Klara, had sexual relations with other men. Why is it important that she did with Dane?”
“Dane didn’t treat her right!” And, good God, he certainly didn’t. He left her stuck like a fly in amber.
“Is it because of how he treated Klara, Rob? Or is it something between Dane and you?”
“Never! There was never anything between Dane and me!”
“You did tell me he was bi, Rob. What about the flight you took with him?”
“He had two other men to play with! Not me, boy, no, I say: Not me. Oh,” I say, trying to calm my voice enough to mask reflecting the very mild interest I really felt in this stupid subject, ” To be sure, he tried to put the make on me once or twice. But I told him it wasn’t my style.”
“Your voice, Rob,” he says, “seems to reflect more anger than your words account for.”
“Damn you, Sigfrid!” I really am angry now, I admit it. I hardly get the words out. “You get me pissed off with your stupid accusations. Sure, I let him put his arm around me once or twice. That’s as far as I went. Nothing serious. I was just abusing myself to make the time pass. I liked him well enough. Big, good-looking fellow. You get lonesome when- now what?”
Sigfrid is making a sound, sort of like clearing one’s throat. I hate how he interrupts without interrupting. “What did you just say, Rob?”
“What? When?”
“When you said there was nothing serious between you.”
“Christ, I don’t know what I said. There was nothing serious, that’s all. I was just entertaining myself, to make the time pass.”
“You didn’t use the word ’entertaining,’ Rob.”
“I didn’t? What word did I use?”
I reflect, listening for the echo of my own voice. “I guess I said ’amusing myself.’ What about it?”
“You didn’t say ’amusing’ either, Rob. What did you say?”
“I don’t know!”
“You said, ’I was just abusing myself,’ Rob.”
My defenses go up. I feel as though I had suddenly discovered I had wet my pants, or that my fly was open. I step outside my body and look at my own head.
“What does ’abusing myself’ mean to you, Rob?”
“Say,” I say, laughing, genuinely impressed and amused at the same time, “that’s a real Freudian slip, isn’t it? You fellows are pretty keen. My compliments to the programmers.”
Sigfrid doesn’t respond to my urbane comment. He just lets me stew in it for a minute.
“All right,” I say. I feel very open and vulnerable, letting nothing at all happen, living in that moment as though it were lasting forever, like Klara stuck in her instant and eternal fall.
