Staunt supposed it was unreasonable of him to expect his Guide to devote all his time to him. But Bollinger might at least have stayed around for the first night. Unless the idea was to have the Departing One make his own adaptation to life in the House of Leavetaking.
He toyed with his data terminal, testing its resources. For a while he amused himself by pulling obscure music from the machine: medieval organs, Hummel sonatas, eighteenth-century German opera, odd electronic things from the middle of the twentieth century. But it was impossible to win that game; apparently, if the music had ever been recorded, the computer had access to it. Staunt turned next to books, asking for Hobbes and Hallam, Montaigne and Jonson—not screenings but actual print-out copies of his own, and within minutes after he placed the requisitions, the fresh crisp sheaves of pages began arriving on the same conveyor that had brought his dinner. He put the books aside without looking through them. Perhaps some telephone calls, he thought: my daughter, maybe, or a friend or two. But everyone he knew seemed to live in the East or in Europe, and it was some miserable early hour of the morning there. Staunt gave up the idea of talking to anyone. He dropped into a dull leaden mood. Why had he come to these three little plastic rooms in the desert, giving up his fine well-tended house, his treasures of art, his dogwoods, his books? Surrendering everything for this sterile halfway station on the road to death? I could call Dr. James, I suppose, and tell him I’d like to Go right now. Save the staff some trouble, save the taxpayers some money, save my family the bother of going through the Farewell rituals. How is Going managed, anyway? He believed it was a drug. Something sweet and pleasant, and then the body goes to sleep. A tranquil death, like Socrates’, just a chill climbing quickly through the legs toward the heart. Tonight. Tonight. To Go tonight.
No.
I must play the game properly. I must do my Going with style.
He turned to the terminal and said, “I’d like someone to show me down to the recreation center.”
Miss Elliot, the nurse, appeared, as though she had been stored waiting in a box just outside his suite. So far as Staunt still had the capacity to tell, she was a handsome girl, golden-haired and buxom, with fine clear skin and large glossy blue eyes, but there was something remote and impersonal and mechanical about her; she could almost have been a robot. “The recreation center? Certainly, Mr. Staunt.” She offered her arm. He gestured as if to refuse it, but then, remembering his earlier struggle to walk, took it anyway, and leaned heavily on her as they went out. Thus I accept my mortality. Thus I speed my final decline.
A dropshaft took them into an immense, brightly lit area somewhere far underground. There was a moving slidewalk here; Miss Elliot guided him onto it and they trundled along a few hundred yards, to a step-off turntable that fed him smoothly into the recreation center.
It was a good-sized room, divided chapel-fashion at its far end into smaller rooms. Staunt saw screens, data terminals, playback units, and other access equipment, all of it duplicating what every Departing One had in his own suite. But of course they came here out of loneliness; it might be more comforting to do one’s reading or listening in public, he thought. There also were games of various kinds suitable for the very old, nothing that required any great degree of stamina or coordination: stochastic chess, polyrhythmers, double-orbit, things like that. We slide into childhood on our way to the grave.
There were about fifty Departing Ones in the center, he guessed. Most of them looked as old as the four who had met his copter earlier in the day; a few, frighteningly, seemed even older. Some looked much younger, no more than seventy or eighty. Staunt thought at first they might be Guides, but he saw on their faces a certain placid slackness that seemed common to all these Departing Ones, a look of dim mindless content, of resignation, of death-in-life. Evidently, one did not have to be heavily stricken in years to feel the readiness to Go.
“Shall I introduce you to some of the other Departing Ones?” Miss Elliot asked.
“Please. Yes.”
She took him around. This is Henry Staunt, she said again and again. The famous composer. And she told him their names. He recognized none of them. David Golding, Michael Green, Ella Freeman, Seymour Church, Katherine Parks. Names. Withered faces. Miss Elliot supplied no identifying tags for any of them, as she had done for him; no “Ella Freeman, the famous actress,” no “David Golding, the famous astronaut,” no “Seymour Church, the famous financier.” They had not been actresses or astronauts or financiers. God alone knew what they had been; Miss Elliot wasn’t saying, and Staunt found himself without the energy to ask. Accountants, stockbrokers, housewives, teachers, programmers. Anything. Nothing. Just people. Ordinary people. Survivors from previous geological epochs. So old, so old, so old. In hardly any of them could Staunt detect the glimmer of life, and he saw for the first time how fortunate he had been to reach this great old age of his intact. The walking dead. Seymour Church, the famous zombie. Katherine Parks, the famous somnambulist. None of them seemed ever to have heard of him. Staunt was not surprised at that; even a famous composer learns early in life that he will be famous only among a minority of his countrymen. But still, those blank looks, those unfocused eyes. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Stout. How d’ye do, Mr. Stint. Hello. Hello. Hello.
“Have you met some interesting people?” Miss Elliot said, passing close to Staunt half an hour later.
“I’m more tired than I thought,” Staunt said. “Perhaps you should take me back to my suite.”
Already the names of the other Departing Ones were slipping from his mind. He had had brief, fragmentary conversations with six or seven of them, but they could not keep their minds on what they were saying, and neither, he discovered, could he. A terrible fatigue that he had never known before was settling over him. Senility must be contagious, he decided. Thirty minutes among the Departing Ones and I am as they are. I must get away.
Miss Elliot guided him to his room. Mr. Falkenbridge, the orderly, appeared unbidden, helped him undress, and put him to bed. Staunt lay awake a long time in the unfamiliar bed, his tense mind ticking relentlessly. A time-zone problem, he thought. He was tempted to ask for a sedative, but as he searched for the strength to sit up and ring for Miss Elliot, sleep suddenly captured him and drew him down into a pit of darkness.
Seven
In the next few days he managed to get to know some of the others. It was a task he imposed on himself. Throughout his life Staunt had negotiated, sometimes with difficulty, the narrow boundary between reserve and snobbery, trying to keep to himself without seeming to reject the company of others, and he was particularly eager not to withdraw into self-sufficiency at this time of all times. So he sought out his fellow Departing Ones and did what he could to scale the barriers separating them from him.
It was late in life to be making new friends, though. He found it hard to communicate much about himself to them, or to draw from them anything of consequence beyond the bare facts of their lives. As he suspected, they were a dull lot, people who had never achieved anything in particular except longevity. Staunt did not hold that against them: he saw no reason why everyone had to bubble with creativity, and he had deeply loved many whose only gifts had been gifts of friendship. But these people, coming now to the end of their days, were hollowed by time’s erosions, and there was so little left of them that even ordinary human warmth had been worn away. They answered his questions perfunctorily and rarely responded with questions of their own. “A composer? How nice. I used to listen to music sometimes.” He succeeded in discovering that Seymour Church had been living in the House of Leavetaking for eight months at his son’s insistence but did not want to Go; that Ella Freeman had had (or believed she had had) a love affair, more than a century ago, with a man who later became President; that David Golding had been married six times and was inordinately proud of it; that each of these Departing Ones clung to some such trifling biographical datum that gave him a morsel of individual identity. But Staunt was unable to penetrate beyond that one identifying datum; either nothing else was in them, or they could not or would not reveal themselves to him. A dull lot, but Staunt was no longer in a position to choose his companions for their merits.