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.

Sigfrid says gently, “Rob. When you masturbated, did you ever have fantasies about Dane?”

“I hated it,” I say.

He waits.

“I hated myself for it. I mean, not hated, exactly. More like despised. Poor goddamn son of a bitch, me, all kinky and awful, beating his meat and thinking about being screwed by his girl’s lover.”

Sigfrid waits me out for a while. Then he says, “I think you really want to cry, Rob.”

He’s right, but I don’t say anything.

“Would you like to cry?” he invites.

“I’d love it,” I say.

“Then why don’t you go ahead and cry, Rob?”

“I wish I could,” I say. “Unfortunately, I just don’t know how.”

Chapter 24

I was just turning over, making up my mind to go to sleep, when I noticed that the colors on the Heechee guidance system were breaking up. It was the fifty-fifth day of my trip, the twenty seventh since turnover. The colors had been shocking pink for the whole fifty-five days. Now whorls of pure white formed, grew, flowed together.

I was arriving! Wherever it was going to turn out to be when I got there, I was arriving.

My little old ship — the smelly, hurtful, tedious coffin I had banging around in for nearly two months by myself, talking to myself, playing games with myself, tired of myself — was well below lightspeed. I leaned over to look at the viewscreen, now related “down” to me because I had been decelerating, and saw nothing that looked very exciting. Oh, there was a star, yes. There lots of stars in a scattering of groupings that in no way looked familiar; half a dozen blues ranging from bright to hurt-the-eye. One red one that stood out more for intensity of hue than luminosity was an angry-looking red coal, not much brighter than Mars from Earth, but a deeper, uglier red.

I made myself take an interest.

That was not really easy. After two months of rejecting close to everything around me because it was boring or threatening, it was tough for me to switch over to a welcoming, vulnerable mode. I switched on the spherical scan and peered out as the ship began to rotate its scanning pattern, slicing orange-peel strips of sky to capture for the cameras and analyzers.

And almost at once I got a huge, bright, nearby signal. Fifty-five days of boredom and exhaustion went right out of my mind. There was something either very big or very close. I forgot about being sleepy. I crouched over the viewscreen, holding onto it with hands and knees, and then I saw it: a squared-off object marching into the screen. Glowing all over. Pure Heechee metal. It was irregularly slab-sided, with rounded pimples studding it on the flat sides.