“God, Robin,” she said in disgust, “of course smoked oysters! Not to mention caviar for me and Albert, and ribs for old Julio and dim sum for his girl, and whole big bucket of crummy stuff you like so much, what is it, tuna-fish salad.” She clapped her hands. The leader of the little band on the dais at the far end of the room nodded, and they began to play that gentle nostalgic stuff our grandparents went crazy over. “Eat first or dance?” asked Essie.
I made the effort. I played up to her. “What do you think?” I asked in my sexiest and most vibrant movie-star voice, looking deeply into her eyes, with my hand cupped firm and strong on her bare shoulder, be-cause of course by then she was wearing a low-cut evening dress.
“Think eat, dear Robin,” she sighed, “but don’t forget, dance soon, and often!”
And, you know, it turned out not to be all that much of an effort. There was all the tuna-fish salad I could ever hope to eat, and the waiter piled it high on slices of rye bread and squashed it flat to make a sandwich, just the way I liked. The champagne was perfectly chilled, and the bubbles (nonexistent though they were) pleasingly tickled my (nonexistent) nose. While we were eating, Albert cavalierly waved the orchestra oft’ the stand and pulled out a violin and entertained us with a little unaccompanied Bach, a little solo Kreisler, and then, as members of the band started to come back to join him, wound up with a couple of Beethoven string quartets.
Now, you know, none of the other players that made up his chamber-music group were “real”—I mean, not even as real as we were. They were only quite limited programs taken out of Albert’s stock of surround furnishings, but for what they were, they did very well. The good food and the great champagne weren’t real either. But they tasted just as good going down. The onions in the tuna fish satisfactorily reminded me of themselves every now and then afterward, and the unreal alcohol in the simulated champagne activated my motion and sensory centers just as much and in just the same way as the real things would have done to the real things-what I’m trying to tell you is, the drinking and dancing and eating were doing their work and I was getting horny. And when Essie and I were dreamily circling the floor (the unreal sun had “set” and the “stars” were bright above the dark “mountain”) and her head was on my shoulder and my fingers were gently kneading her soft, sweet back, I could feel that she was in a real receptive mood.
As I led her off the floor in the general direction of where, I was sure, she would have provided a bedroom, Albert looked up to wave a fond good-bye. He and General Cassata were chatting by the fire, and I heard Albert say, “That little impromptu minstrel show of mine, General. I was only trying to cheer Robin up, you know. I hope I didn’t offend you.”
General Cassata looked puzzled. He scratched his chocolate-colored cheekbone, just next to his close-cropped woolly sideburn, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Albert. Why would I be offended?”
I don’t have to have a real body or real food to eat, I don’t have to have a real chair to sit. I don’t have to have any of the things you generally require to make love, either, and we did what we did with finesse, devotion, and a whole lot of fun. Simulated? Well, sure it was simulated. But it felt just as good as it ever had, which was fine, and when it was over my simulated heart was pounding a little faster and my breath was coming in simulated pants and I wrapped my arm around my love and pulled her close to soak in the simulated smell and feel and warmth of her.
“Am so glad,” said my simulated darling drowsily, “that I made our programs interactive.”
She tickled my ear with her breath. I turned my head enough to tickle hers. “My dearest Essie,” I whispered, “you write one hell of a program.”
“Could not have done it without you,” she said, and yawned sleepily into the satin pillow. (We do sleep sometimes, you know. We don’t have to. We don’t have to eat or make love, either, but there are a lot of pleasures that we don’t have to have but have anyway, and one that I have always cherished is that last few minutes when your head is on the pillow and you’re just about to drift off, warm, secure, and worrying about nothing in the universe at all.)
I was kind of sleepy, because that was part of the whole subroutine. But I knew I could shake it off if I chose, because that’s part of the subroutine, too.
And I did choose. Just for a moment, anyway, I thought, because there were, after all, a few things on my mind. I said, “I recognize the bed, honey.”
She giggled. “Nice bed,” she commented. She didn’t deny what I knew, that it was an exact, or maybe even somewhat improved, copy of the anisokinetic bed we’d had in Rotterdam years and years ago.
But that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to talk about, so I tried again. “Honey? Do you think there were just two Foe in there with me? In the room in Tahiti, I mean?”
Essie lay silent a moment. Then she gently pulled free of my arm and got up on one elbow, looking down at me.
She studied me silently for a moment before she said, “Is no real way for us to tell, is that not so? Albert says may be collective intelligence; if so, what you saw in Tahiti was only perhaps quite small detached packets of Foe stuff, numbers in that case meaningless.”
“Uh-huh.”
Essie sighed and rolled over. Through the closed door we could hear the music from the other room; they were playing old-fashioned rock now, probably for General Cassata’s benefit. She sat up, naked as the day we first made love, and clapped her fingertips together for light. Light came, gentle, amber lights from concealed fixtures in the ceiling, for Essie had spared nothing in furnishing our little haven.
“Are still upset, dear Robin,” she commented neutrally.
I thought it over. “I guess so,” I said, as a first approximation to what would be a much more emphatic description if I had chosen to give it.
“You want talk?”
“I want,” I said, suddenly wide awake, “to be happy. Why the hell does it have to be so God-damned hard?”
Essie reached over and brushed my forehead with her lips. “I see,” she said. She didn’t say anything else.
“Well, what I mean,” I went on after a moment, “is I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Have never known that, have we?”
“And maybe that,” I said, a lot louder than I had intended, and maybe a lot nastier, “is why I’ve never been happy.”
To that I got a silence. When you’re talking in the megabaud range, even a twentieth of a millisecond is a significant pause, and this was a lot longer than that. Then Essie got up, picked up a robe from beside the bed, and pulled it on.
“Dear Robin,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at me. “Think maybe this long trip is quite bad for you. Gives you too much time to be gloopy in.”
“But we didn’t have any choice, did we? And that’s part of it: I never have any choice!”
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “We get to heart of question. Fine. Open up. Tell me what is matter.”
I didn’t answer her. I gave her the electronic equivalent of a sniff of exasperation. She didn’t deserve it, of course. She had been going far Out of her way to be loving and kind, and there was no reason for me to be getting unpleasant.
But unpleasant was how I felt.