no polar ice caps and a temperature range similar to Earth tropics at the equator, Earth temperate extending almost to the poles. We detected no animal life or signatures (methane, etc.) thereof. Some of the vegetation predates at a very slow pace, advancing by uprooting portions of a vinelike structure, curling around and rerooting. Maximum velocity measured was approximately 2 kilometers per hour. No artifacts. Parreno and Nimkin landed and returned with samples of vegetation, but died of a toxicodendron-like reaction. Great blisters formed over their bodies. Then they developed pain, itching and apparent suffocation, probably due to fluids accumulating in the lung. I did not bring them aboard the vessel. I did not open the lander, or dock it to the vessel. I recorded personal messages for both, then jettisoned the lander and returned without it.”
Corporation assessment: No charge made against N. Ahoya in view of past record.
“Yeah. You remember good, Sigfrid. When I was crying, it was about my mother. Partly…”
“You told me that, Rob.”
“Right.” And I close up. Sigfrid waits. I wait, too. I suppose I want to be coaxed some more, and after a while Sigfrid obliges me:
“Let’s see if I can help you, Rob,” he says. “What do crying about your mother, and your fantasies about anal sex with Dane, have to do with each other?”
I feel something happening inside of me. It feels as though the soft, wet inside of my chest is starting to bubble into my throat. I can tell that when my voice comes out, it is going to be tremulous and desperately forlorn if I don’t control it. So I try to control it, although I know perfectly well that I have no secrets of this sort from Sigfrid; he can read his sensors and know what is going on inside me from the tremble of a triceps or the dampness of a palm.
But I make the effort anyway. In the tones of a biology instructor explaining a prepared frog I say: “See, Sigfrid, my mother loved me. I knew it. You know it. It was a logical demonstration; she had no choice. And Freud said once that no boy who is certain he was his mother’s favorite ever grows up to be neurotic. Only—”
“Please, Robbie, that isn’t quite right, and besides you’re intellectualizing. You know you really don’t want to put in all these preambles. You’re stalling, aren’t you?”
Other times I would tear the circuits out of his chips for that, but this time he has my mood gauged correctly. “All right. But I did know that my mother loved me. She couldn’t help it! I was her only son. My father was dead — don’t clear your throat, Sigfrid, I’m getting to it. It was a logical necessity that she loved me, and I understood it that way with no doubt at all in my mind, but she never said so. Never once.”
“You mean that never, in your whole life, did she say to you, ’I love you, son?’”
“No!” I scream. Then I get control again. “Or not directly, no. I mean, once when I was like eighteen years old and going to sleep in the next room, I heard her to say to one of her friends — girlfriends, I mean — that she really thought I was a tremendous kid. She was proud of me. I don’t remember what I’d done, something, won a prize or got a job, but she right that minute was proud of me and loved me, and said so… But not to me.”
“Please go on, Rob,” Sigfrid says after a moment.
“I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it’s what you call primal pain.”
“Please don’t diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out.”
“Oh, shit.”
I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That’s usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, “Look, Sigfrid, here’s how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know — knew! — she loved me. I knew she wasn’t very good at showing it.”
I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn’t even commented on it. I plunge right on: “She didn’t say the words to me. Not only that. It’s funny, Sigfrid, but, you know I can’t remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But—”
I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow.
“But you see, Sigfrid,” I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, “she didn’t touch me much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick a lot. Everybody around the food mines has runny noses, skin infections — you know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick she…”
After a moment Sigfrid says, “Go on, Robbie. Say it.”
I try, but I am still stuck, and he says:
“Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don’t worry if you understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words.”
“Well, she would take my temperature,” I explain. “You know, stick a thermometer into me. And she’d hold me for, you know, whatever it is, three minutes or so. And then she’d take the thermometer out and read it.”
I am right on the verge of bawling. I’m willing to let it happen, but first I want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don’t think you really want to let her be that much a part of you but you go ahead anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won’t run out before I finish. Sigfrid doesn’t say anything, and after a moment I manage the words:
“You see how it is, Sigfrid? It’s funny. All my life now — what is it, maybe forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved has something to do with having things stuck up my ass.”
Chapter 25
There had been a lot of changes on Gateway while I was Out. The head tax had been raised. The Corporation wanted to get rid of some of the extra hangers-on, like Shicky and me; bad news meant that my prepaid per capita wasn’t good for two or three weeks, it was only good for ten days. They had imported a bunch of double-domes from Earth, astronomers, xenotechs, mathmaticians, even old Professor Hegramet was up from Earth, bruised from the lift-off deltas but hopping spryly around the tunnels.
One thing that hadn’t changed was the Evaluation Board, and I was impaled on the hot seat in front of it, squirming while my friend Emma told me what a fool I was. Mr. Hsien was actually doing the telling, Emma only translated. But she loved her voice: “I warned you you’d fuck up, Broadhead. You should have listened to me. Why did you change the setting?”
“I told you. When I found out I was at Gateway Two I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to go somewhere else.”
“Extraordinarily stupid of you, Broadhead.”
I glanced at Hsien. He had hung himself up on the wall by his rolled-up collar and was hanging there, beaming benignly, hands folded. “Emma,” I said, “do whatever you want to do, but get off my back.”
She said sunnily, “I am doing what I want to do, Broadhead, because it’s what I have to do. It’s my job. You knew it was against the rules to change the settings.”
“What rules? It was my ass that was on the line.”
“The rules that say you shouldn’t destroy a ship,” she explained. I didn’t answer, and she chirped some sort of a translation to Hsien, who listened gravely, pursed his lips and then delivered two neat paragraphs in Mandarin. You could hear the punctuation.
“Mr. Hsien says,” said Emma, “that you are a very irresponsible person. You have killed an irreplaceable piece of equipment. It was not your property. It belonged to the whole human race.” He lilted a few more sentences, and she finished: “We cannot make a final determination of your liability until we have further information about the condition of the ship you damaged. According to Mr. Ituno he will have a complete check made of the ship at the
