Going

Four

Bollinger, sitting beside him in the copter, leaned across him and pointed down.

“That’s it,” he said. “Omega Prime, right below.”

The House of Leavetaking seemed to be a string of gauzy white tentlike pavilions, arranged in a U-shape around a courtyard garden. The late afternoon sun tinged the pavilions with gold and red. Bare fangs of purplish mountains rose on the north and east; on the other side of Omega Prime the fiat flat brown Arizona desert, pocked with cacti and palo verde, stretched toward the dark horizon.

The copter landed silently. When the hatch opened, Staunt felt the blast of heat. “We don’t modulate the outdoor climate here,” Bollinger explained. “Most Departing Ones seem to prefer it that way. Contact with the natural environment.”

“I don’t mind,” Staunt said. “I’ve always loved the desert.”

A welcoming party had gathered by the time he emerged from the copter. Three members of Omega Prime’s staff, in smocks monogrammed with the Fulfillment insignia. Four withered oldsters, evidently awaiting their own imminent Going. A transport robot, with its wheelchair seat already in position. Staunt, picking his way carefully over the rough, pebble-strewn surface of the landing field, was embarrassed by the attention. He said in a low voice to Bollinger, “Tell them I don’t need the chair. I can still walk. I’m no invalid.”

They clustered around him, introducing themselves: Dr. James, Miss Elliot, Mr. Falkenbridge. Those were the staff people. The four Departing Ones croaked their names at him too, but Staunt was so astonished by their appearance that he forgot to pay attention. The shriveled faces, the palsied clawlike hands, the parchment skin—did he look like that, too? It was years since he had seen anyone his own age. He had the impression that he had come through his fourteen decades well preserved, but perhaps that was only an illusion born of vanity, perhaps he really was as much of a ruin as these four. Unless they were much older than he, one hundred seventy-five, one hundred eighty years old, right at the limits of what was now the human span of mortality. Staunt stared at them in wonder, awed and dismayed by their gummy grins.

Falkenbridge, a husky red-haired young man, apparently some sort of orderly, was trying to ease him into the wheelchair. Irritably Staunt shook him off, saying, “No. No. I’ll manage. Martin, tell him I don’t need it.”

Bollinger whispered something to Falkenbridge. The young man shrugged and sent the transport robot away. Now they all began walking toward the House of Leavetaking, Falkenbridge on Staunt’s right, Miss Elliot on his left, both of them staying close to him in case he should topple.

He found himself under unexpectedly severe strain. Possibly refusing the wheelchair had been foolish bravado. The fierce dry heat, the fatigue of his ninety-minute rocket journey across the continent, the coarse texture of the ground, all conspired to make his legs wobbly. Twice he came close to falling. The first time Miss Elliot gently caught his elbow and steadied him; the second, he managed to recover himself, after a short half-stumble that sent pain shooting through his left ankle.

Suddenly, all at once, he was feeling his age. In a single day he had begun to dodder, as though his decision to enter a House of Leavetaking had stripped him of all his late-staying vigor. No. No. He rejected the idea. He was merely tired, as a man his age had every right to be; with a little rest he’d be himself again. He walked faster, despite the effort it cost him. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. There was a stitch in his side. His entire left leg ached.

At last they reached the entrance to Omega Prime. He saw now that what had seemed to be gauzy tents, viewed from above, were in fact sturdy and substantial plastic domes, linked by an intricate network of covered passageways. The courtyard around which they were grouped, contained elaborate plantings of desert flora: giant stiff-armed cacti, looping white-whiskered succulents, odd and angular thorny things. The plants had been grouped with remarkable grace and subtleness around an assortment of strange boulders and sleek stone slabs; the effect was one of extraordinary beauty. Staunt stood a moment contemplating it. Bollinger said gently, “Why not go to your suite first? The garden will still be here this evening.”

He had an entire dome to himself. Interior walls divided it into a bedroom, a sitting room, and a kind of utility room; everything was airy and tastefully simple, and the temperature was twenty-five degrees cooler than outside. A window faced the garden.

The staff people and the quartet of Departing Ones vanished, leaving Staunt alone with his Guide. Bollinger said, “Each of the residents has a suite like this. You can eat here, if you like, although there’s a community dining room under the courtyard. There are recreational facilities there too—a library, a theater, a game room—but you can spend all of your time perfectly happily right where you are.”

Staunt lowered himself gingerly into a webfoam hammock. As his weight registered, tiny Mechanical hands began to massage his back. Bollinger smiled.

“This is your data terminal,” he said, handing Staunt a copper-colored rod about eight inches long. “It’s a standard access unit. You can get any book in the library—and there are thousands of them—screened on request, and you can play whatever music you’d like, and it’s also a telephone input. Ask it to connect you with anyone at all. Go on. Ask.”

“My son Paul,” Staunt said.

“Ask it,” said Bollinger.

Staunt activated the terminal and gave it Paul’s name and access number. Instantly a screen came to life just beside the hammock. Staunt’s son appeared in its silvery depths. The screen could almost have been a mirror, a strange sort of time-softening mirror that was capable of taking the face of a very old man and reflecting it as that of a man who was merely old. Staunt beheld someone who was a younger version of himself, though far from young: cool gray eyes, thin lips, lean bony face, a dense mane of white hair.

Paul’s face was deeply lined but still vigorous. At the age of ninety-one he had not yet retired from the firm of architects he headed. So long as a man’s health was good and his mind was sound and he still found his career rewarding, there was no reason to retire; when mind or body failed or career lost its savor, that was the time to withdraw and make oneself ready to Go.

Staunt said, “I’m calling you from Omega Prime.”

“What’s that, Henry?”

“You’ve never heard of it? A House of Leavetaking in Arizona. It looks like a lovely place. Martin Bollinger brought me here this evening.”

Paul looked startled. “Are you thinking of Going, Henry?”

“I am.”

“You never told me you had any such thing in mind!”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Are you in poor health?”

“I feel fine,” Staunt said. “Everyone asks me that, and I say the same thing. My health is excellent.”

“Then why—”

“Do I have to justify it? I’ve lived long enough. My life is over.”

“But you’ve been so alert, so involved—”

“It’s my decision to make. It’s ungracious of you to quarrel with me over it.”

“I’m not quarreling,” Paul said. “I’m trying to adapt to it. You know, you’ve been part of my life for nine decades. I don’t give a damn what the social conventions are: I can’t simply smile and nod and say how sweet when my father announces he’s going to die.”

“To Go.”

“To Go,” Paul muttered. “Whatever. Have you told Crystal?”

“You’re the first member of the family to know. Except for your mother, that is.”

“My mother?”

“The cube,” said Staunt.

“Oh. Yes. The cube.” A thin, edgy laugh. “All right. I’ll tell the others. I suppose I’ll have to learn how to be head of the family, finally. You’re not going to be doing this immediately, are you?”

“Naturally not. Where do you get such ideas? I’ll have a proper Leavetaking. Graceful. Serene. A few weeks, a month or two—the usual thing.”

“And we can visit you?”

“I’ll expect you to,” Staunt said. “That’s part of the ritual.”

“What about—pardon me—what about the legal aspects? Disposition of property, things like that?”

“It’ll all be managed in the customary way. The Office of Fulfillment is supposed to help me. Don’t worry: you’ll get everything that’s coming to you.”

“That isn’t a kind way to phrase it, Henry.”

“I don’t have to be kind any more. I don’t even have to make sense. I’m just a crazy old man getting ready to Go.”

“Henry—Father—”

“All right. I’m sorry. Somehow this conversation hasn’t worked right at all. Shall we start it over?”

“I’d like to,” Paul said.

Staunt realized he was quivering. The muscles of his face were drawn taut. He made a deliberate attempt to relax, and after a moment, said quietly, “It’s a perfectly normal, desirable step to take. I’m old and tired and lonely and bored. I’m no use to myself or to anybody else, and there’s really no sense troubling my doctors to keep me functioning any longer. So I’m going to Go. I’d rather Go now, when I’m still reasonably healthy and clear-witted, instead of trying to hang on another few decades until I’ve slid into senility. I’ve moved to Omega Prime, and you’ll all come to visit me before my Leavetaking, and it’ll be a peaceful and beautiful Going, I hope. That’s all. There’s nothing to weep about. In forty or fifty years you’ll understand all this a lot better.”

“I understand it now,” Paul said. “You caught me by surprise when you called, but I understand. Of course. Of course. We don’t want to lose you, but that’s only our selfishness talking. You’ve lived a full life, and, well, the wheel has to turn.”

How smoothly he does it, Staunt thought. How easily he slips into the jargon. How readily he agrees with me, after his first reflexive moment of shock. Yes, Henry, certainly, Henry, it’s wise of you to Go, Henry, you’ve lived long enough. Staunt wondered which was the fraud: Paul’s initial resistance to the idea of his Going, or his philosophical acquiescence. And what difference did it make? Why, Staunt asked himself, should I be offended if my son thinks it’s right for me to Go when I was offended two minutes earlier by his trying to talk me out of it?

He was beginning to be unsure of his own ground. Perhaps he did want to be talked out of it.

I must read Hallam shortly, he told himself.

He said to Paul, “I have a great deal to do this evening. I’ll call you tomorrow. Or you call me.”

The screen went blank.

Bollinger said, “He took it rather well, I thought. The children don’t always accept the idea that a parent is Going. They accept the theory of Leavetaking, but they always assume that it’s someone else’s old folks who’ll Go.”

“They want their own parents to live forever, even if the parents don’t feel like staying around any longer?”

“That’s it.”

“What if someone does feel like staying forever?” Staunt asked.

Bollinger shrugged. “We never try to force the issue. We hint a little, as subtly as we know how, if someone is one hundred forty or one hundred fifty or so, and really a wreck, but clinging to life anyway. For that matter, if he’s eighty or ninety, even, and just going through the motions of living, held together by his doctors alone, we’ll try to encourage Going. We have gentle ways of working through doctors or friends or relatives, trying to overcome the fear of dying in the ones who linger, trying to get across the idea that it’s not only best for society for them to move on, it’s best for themselves. If they don’t take the hint, there’s nothing we can do. Involuntary euthanasia just isn’t part of our system.”

“How old,” Staunt asked, “are the oldest living people now?”

“I think the oldest ones known are something like one hundred seventy-five or one hundred eighty. Which means they were born in the early part of the twentieth century, around the time of the First World War. Anyone born before that simply spent too much of his life in the era of medieval medicine to hope for a really long span. But if you were born, say, in 1920, you were still only fifty-five or sixty when the era of organ transplants and computerized health services and laser surgery was beginning, and if you were lucky enough to be in good shape in the 1970’s, the 1980’s, why, you could be kept going just about indefinitely thereafter. Into the era of tissue regeneration and all the rest. A few from the early twentieth century did hang on into the era of total medicine, and some of them are still with us. Politely declining to Go.”

“How much longer can they last?”

“Hard to say,” Bollinger replied. “We just don’t know what the practical limits of the human life-span are. Our experience with total medicine doesn’t go back far enough. I’ve heard it said that two hundred or two hundred ten is the top figure, but in another twenty or thirty years we may have some people who’ve reached that figure, and we’ll find that we can keep them going beyond it. Maybe there is no top limit, now that we can do the things we do to rebuild a decaying body. But how hideously antisocial it is of them to hang around for century after century just to test our medical skills!”

“But if they’re making valuable contributions to society through all those hundreds of years—”

“If,” Bollinger said. “But the fact is that ninety, ninety-five percent of all people never make any contributions to society, even when they’re young. They just occupy space, do jobs that could really be done better by machines, sire children who aren’t any more gifted than they are—and hang on, living and living and living. We don’t want to lose anyone who’s valuable, Henry; I’ve been through that with you already. But most people aren’t valuable to begin with, and get less valuable as they go along, and there’s no reason in the universe why they should live past one hundred or one hundred ten, let alone to two hundred or three hundred or whatever.”

“That’s a harsh philosophy. Cynical, even.”

“I know. But read Hallam. The wheel’s got to turn. We’ve reached an average life-span that would have seemed wild fantasy as late as the time when you were a child, Henry, but that doesn’t mean we have to strive to make everyone immortal. Not unless people are willing to give up having children, and they aren’t. It’s a finite planet. If there’s inflow, there has to be outflow, and I like to think that those flowing out are the ones who have the least to offer to the rest of us. The decrepit, the feeble, the slow-witted, the mean-souled. Thank God, most old folks agree. For every one who absolutely won’t give up his grip on life, there are fifty who are glad to go once they’ve hit one hundred or so. And as the remainder get even older, they change their minds about staying, just as you’ve done lately. Not many want to go on past one hundred fifty. The few who do, well, we’ll look on them as experiments in geriatrics, and let them be.”

“How old are those four who met my copter?” Staunt asked.

“I couldn’t tell you. One hundred twenty, one hundred thirty, something like that. Most of those who arrange for Leavetaking now are people born between 1960 and 1980.”

“Of my generation, then.”

“I suppose, yes.”

“Do I look as bad as they do? They’re a bunch of walking mummies, Martin. I’d have guessed they were fifty years older than I am.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“But I’m not like them, am I? I’ve got my teeth. My hair. My real eyes. I look old, but not ancient. Or am I fooling myself, Martin? Am I really a dried-up nightmare too? Is it just that I’ve grown accustomed to the way I look, I haven’t noticed the changes, decade after decade as I get older and older?”

“There’s a mirror,” Bollinger said. “Answer your own questions.”

Staunt stared at himself. Lines and wrinkles, yes: a contour map of time, the valleys and ravines of a long life. Blotches on the skin. The glittering eyes deeply recessed; the cheeks fleshless, revealing the sharp outlines of the skull beneath. An old face, tremendously old. But yet not like their faces. He was no mummy yet. He imagined that a man of the twentieth century would guess him to be no more than eighty or eighty-five, just as a man of the twentieth century would guess Paul to be in his late sixties and Martin Bollinger in his late fifties. Those others, those four, showed their true ages. It must take all the magic at their doctors’ command to keep them together. And now, weary of cheating death, they’ve come here to Go and be over with the farce. Whereas I am still strong, whereas I could continue easily, if only I wanted to continue.

“Well?” Bollinger asked.

“I’m in pretty good shape,” Staunt said. “I’m quitting while I’m ahead. It’s the right way to do it.” He picked up the data terminal again. “I wonder if they have any of my music in storage here,” he said, and opened the access node and made a request; and the room flooded with the first chords of his Twelfth Symphony. He was pleased. He closed his eyes and listened. When the movement ended, he looked around the room, and found that Bollinger had gone.