I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. Maybe I didn’t want to look for one. Sigfrid sighed and changed position. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to basics. Tell me why you’re worried.”
“Why I’m worried?” I cried. “Don’t you think I’ve got plenty to worry about? If you don’t think the entire basic universe-wide situation is something to worry any sane person, then maybe you just haven’t caught on to what’s happening!”
He said, with visible patience, “The Foe certainly are a sufficient cause for worry, yes, but—”
“But if that isn’t enough, consider my personal situation! I’m in love with two women-three, actually, I mean,” I corrected myself, remembering Essie’s arithmetic.
He pursed his lips. “Is that a worry, Robbie? In any practical sense, I mean? For example, do you have to do anything about it-choose among them, for instance? I think not. No reason for conflict exists, really.”
And I burst out, “No, you’re God-damned right, and do you know why no reason for conflict exists? Because I don’t exist! I’m just a damned datastore in gigabit space. I’m no more real than you are!”
He said mildly, “Do you really think I don’t exist?”
“Damn straight you don’t! Some computer programmer made you up!”
Sigfrid studied his thumbnail. There was another of those long, multimicrosecond pauses, and then he said, “Tell me, Robinette, what do you mean by ‘exist’?”
“You know effing well what it means to exist! It means to be real!”
“I see. Are the Foe real?”
“Of course they’re real,” I said in disgust. “They weren’t ever anything else. They’re not copies of something that was real once.”
“Ah. All right. Is the law of inverse squares real, Robbie?”
“Call me Robinette, damn it!” I flared. He raised his eyebrows, but nodded. And just sat there, waiting for an answer. I collected my thoughts. “The law of inverse squares, yes, is real. Not in a material sense, but in its ability to describe material events. You can predict its functioning. You can see its effects.”
“But I can see your effects, Robin-Robinette,” he corrected himself hastily.
“One illusion recognizes another illusion!” I sneered.
“Yes,” he conceded, “one might say that. But others see your effects, too. Was General Beaupre Heimat an illusion? But the two of you certainly interacted, as he would not deny. Are your banks an illusion? They hold your money. The people who work in your employ, the corporations that pay you dividends-they’re all quite real, are they not?”
He’d given me time to collect my thoughts. I smiled. “I think you’re the one who’s playing games now, Sigfrid. Or else you just miss the point. You see, the trouble with you,” I said patronizingly, “is that you’ve never been real, so you don’t know the difference. Real people have real problems. Physical problems. Little ones, at least; that’s how they know they’re real. I don’t! In all the years I’ve been-discorporated-I’ve never once had to grunt and strain on the toilet because I was constipated. I’ve never had a hangover, or a runny nose, or a sunburn, or any other of the ills the flesh is heir to.”
He said in exasperation, “You don’t get sick? Is that what you’re pissing and moaning about?”
I looked at him in shock. “Sigfrid, you never used to talk to me like this in the old days.”
“You weren’t as healthy as this in the old days! Robinette, I really wonder if this conversation is doing either of us any good. Perhaps I’m not the one you should be talking to.”
“Well,” I said, beginning almost to enjoy myself, “at least I’ve heard you say-oh, Jesus, now what?” I finished, because I wasn’t talking to Sigfrid von Shrink anymore. “What the hell are you up to now?”
Albert Einstein fumbled with his pipe, leaned over to scratch his bare ankle, and said: “You see, Robin, perhaps your problem isn’t psychoanalytic after all. So perhaps I’d be a better person to handle it.”
I sank back on the bed and closed my eyes.
In those old days when Sigfrid and I went round and round every Wednesday afternoon at four, I sometimes came away thinking I’d scored points in the game I thought we were playing, but I’d never, ever had the experience of having him simply give up. That was a real victory, of a kind I had never expected-and of a kind that made me feel worse than ever. I still felt like hell. If my problem wasn’t psychoanalytic, then it was real; and “real,” I thought, translated to “insoluble.”
I opened my eyes.
Albert had been busy. We weren’t in the two-hour adultery special anymore, we were in Albert’s plain old Princeton study, with the bottle of Skrip on the desk and the blackboard full of indecipherable mathematics behind him. “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said sourly, “if we’re back to playing games again.”
“Games are real, too, Robin,” he said earnestly. “I hope you don’t mind my cutting in. If you were just going to talk about tears and traumas, Dr. von Shrink would have been your best program, but metaphysics is more my line.”
“Metaphysics!”
“But that’s what you’ve been talking about, Robin,” he said, surprised. “Didn’t you know? The nature of reality? The meaning of life? Such things are not my main line, or at least not the subjects for which my name became famous, but I think I can help you, if you don’t mind.”
“And if I do?”
“Why, then you can dismiss me whenever you like,” he said mildly. “Let’s at least try.”
I got up off the bed-it had become a worn leather couch, with the stuffing sticking out of one cushion-and walked around the study, shrugging one small shrug that meant, all right, what the hell.
“You see,” he said, “you can be as real as you want to be, Robin.”
I lifted a stack of journals off the chair by his desk and sat down to face him. “Don’t you mean I can be as good an imitation as I want to be?”
“We come to the Turing test, maybe? if you are such a good imitation that you can fool even yourself, isn’t that a kind of reality? For instance, if you really want to have things like constipation and the common cold, that’s easy enough. Dr. Lavorovna and I can easily write into your program all the minor ills you like, and monte-carlo them so that they appear at random-hemorrhoids today, perhaps, and maybe tomorrow a wart on the side of your nose. I can’t believe you’d really want that.”
“They’d still be ifiusions!”
Albert considered the matter, then conceded, “In a certain sense, yes, I suppose they would. But remember the Turing test. Forgive my impertinence, but when you and Dr. Lavorovna are together, don’t you sometimes, well, make love?”
“You know damn well we do! We just did!”
“Is it any less pleasurable because it, too, as you would say, is an illusion?”
“It is extremely pleasurable. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with it. Because, damn it, Essie can’t get pregnant.”
“Ab,” he said, just as Essie had done, “oh. Is that really what you want?”
I thought for a moment to be sure. “I don’t exactly know. It’s something I’ve thought of wanting, sometimes.”
“But it isn’t really impossible, you know, Robin. It would not even be very difficult to program. Dr. Lavorovna, if she wished, could surely write a program in which she would experience all the physical aspects of pregnancy, even coming to term. With an actual child, Robin—’actual,’ that is, in the sense that you yourself are actual,” he added hastily. “But in that same way it could be your and her child. Complete with a monte-carloed assortment of your hereditary traits, with a personality that would develop as you reared it-the product, like all human beings, of nature plus nurture, with a dash of happenstance thrown in.”