The Pleasure of Their Company

by Robert Silverberg

He was the only man aboard the ship, one man inside a sleek shining cylinder heading away from Bradley’s World at ten thousand miles a second, and yet he was far from alone. He had wife, father, daughter, son for company, and plenty of others, Ovid and Hemingway and Plato, and Shakespeare and Goethe, Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great, a stack of fancy cubes to go with the family ones. And his old friend Juan was along, too, the man who had shared his dream, his utopian fantasy, Juan who had been with him at the beginning and almost until the end. He had a dozen fellow voyagers in all. He wouldn’t be lonely, though he had three years of solitary travel ahead of him before he reached his landfall, his place of exile.

It was the third hour of his voyage. He was growing calm, now, after the frenzy of his escape. Aboard ship he had showered, changed, rested. The sweat and grime of that wild dash through the safety tunnel were gone, now, though he wouldn’t quickly shake from his mind the smell of that passageway, like rotting teeth, nor the memory of his terrifying fumbling with the security gate’s copper arms as the junta’s storm-troopers trotted toward him. But the gate had opened, and the ship had been there, and he had escaped, and he was safe. And he was safe.

I’ll try some cubes, he thought.

The receptor slots in the control room held six cubes at once. He picked six at random, slipped them into place, actuated the evoker. Then he went into the ship’s garden. There were screens and speakers all over the ship.

The air was moist and sweet in the garden. A plump, toga-clad man, clean-shaven, big-nosed, blossomed on one screen and said, “What a lovely garden! How I adore plants! You must have a gift for making things grow.”

“Everything grows by itself. You’re—”

“Publius Ovidius Naso.”

“Thomas Voigtland. Former President of the Citizens’ Council on Bradley’s World. Now president-in-exile, I guess. A coup d’etat by the military.”

“My sympathies. Tragic, tragic!”

“I was lucky to escape alive. I may never be able to return. They’ve probably got a price on my head.”

“I know how terrible it is to be sundered from your homeland. Were you able to bring your wife?”

“I’m over here,” Lydia said. “Tom? Tom, introduce me to Mr. Naso.”

“I didn’t have time to bring her,” Voigtland said. “But at least I took a cube of her with me.”

Lydia was three screens down from Ovid, just above a clump of glistening ferns. She looked glorious, her auburn hair a little too deep in tone but otherwise quite a convincing replica. He had cubed her two years before; her face showed none of the lines that the recent troubles had engraved on it. Voigtland said to her, “Not Mr. Naso, dear. Ovid. The poet Ovid.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. How did you happen to choose him?”

“Because he’s charming and civilized. And he understands what exile is like.”

Ovid said softly, “Ten years by the Black Sea. Smelly barbarians my only companions. Yet one learns to adapt. My wife remained in Rome to manage my property and to intercede for me—”

“And mine remains on Bradley’s World,” said Voigtland. “Along with—along with—”

Lydia said, “What’s this about exile, Tom? What happened?”

He began to explain about McAllister and the junta. He hadn’t told her, back when he was having her cubed, why he wanted a cube of her. He had seen the coup coming. She hadn’t.

As he spoke, a screen brightened between Ovid and Lydia and the seamed, leathery face of old Juan appeared. They had redrafted the constitution of Bradley’s World together, twenty years earlier.

“It happened, then,” Juan said instantly. “Well, we both knew it would. Did they kill very many?”

“I don’t know. I got out fast once they started to—” He faltered. “It was a perfectly executed coup. You’re still there. I suppose you’re organizing the underground resistance by now. And I—And I—”

Needles of fire sprouted in his brain.

And I ran away, he said silently.

The other screens were alive now. On the fourth, someone with white robes, gentle eyes, dark curling hair. Voigtland guessed him to be Plato. On the fifth, Shakespeare, instantly recognizable, for the cube-makers had modeled him after the First Folio portrait: high forehead, long hair, pursed quizzical lips. On the sixth, a fierce, demonic-looking little man. Attila the Hun? They were all talking, activating themselves at random, introducing themselves to one another and to him. Their voices danced along the top of his skull. He could not follow their words. Restless, he moved among the plants, touching their leaves, inhaling the perfume of their flowers.

Out of the chaos came Lydia’s voice.

“Where are you heading now, Tom?”

“Rigel XIX. I’ll wait out the revolution there. It was my only option once hell broke loose. Get in the ship and—”

“It’s so far,” she said. “You’re traveling alone?”

“I have you, don’t I? And Mark and Lynx, and Juan, and Dad, and all these others.”

“Cubes, that’s all.”

“Cubes will have to do,” Voigtland said. Suddenly the fragrance of the garden seemed to be choking him. He went out, into the viewing salon next door, where the black splendor of space glistened through a wide port. Screens were mounted opposite the window. Juan and Attila seemed to be getting along marvelously well; Plato and Ovid were bickering; Shakespeare brooded silently; Lydia, looking worried, stared out of her screen at him. He studied the sweep of the stars.

“Which is our world?” Lydia asked.

“This,” he said.

“So small. So far away.”

“I’ve only been traveling a few hours. It’ll get smaller.”

He hadn’t had time to take anyone with him. The members of his family had been scattered all over the planet when the alarm came, not one of them within five hours of home—Lydia and Lynx holidaying in the South Polar Sea, Mark archaeologizing on the Westerland Plateau. The integrator net told him it was a Contingency C situation: get offplanet within ninety minutes, or get ready to die. The forces of the junta had reached the capital and were on their way to pick him up. The escape ship had been ready, gathering dust in its buried vault. He hadn’t been able to reach Juan. He hadn’t been able to reach anybody. He used up sixty of his ninety minutes trying to get in touch with people, and then, with stunner shells already hissing overhead, he had gone into the ship and taken off. Alone.

But he had the cubes.

Cunning things. A whole personality encapsulated in a shimmering plastic box a couple of centimeters high. Over the past few years, as the likelihood of Contingency C had grown steadily greater, Voigtland had cubed everyone who was really close to him and stored the cubes aboard the escape ship, just in case.

It took an hour to get yourself cubed; and at the end of it, they had your soul in the box, your motion habits, your speech patterns, your way of thinking, your entire package of standard reactions. Plug your cube into a receptor slot and you came to life on the screen, smiling as you would smile, moving as you would move, sounding as you would sound, saying things you would say. Of course, the thing on the screen was unreal, a computer-actuated mockup, but it was programmed to respond to conversation, to absorb new data and change its outlook in the light of what it learned, to generate questions without the need of previous inputs; in short, to behave as a real person would.

The cube-makers also could supply a cube of anyone who had ever lived, or, for that matter, any character of fiction. Why not? It wasn’t necessary to draw a cube’s program from a living subject. How hard was it to tabulate and synthesize a collection of responses, typical phrases, and attitudes, feed them into a cube, and call what came out Plato or Shakespeare or Attila? Naturally a custom-made synthesized cube of some historical figure ran high, because of the man-hours of research and programming involved, and a cube of someone’s own departed great-aunt was even more costly, since there wasn’t much chance that it could be used as a manufacturer’s prototype for further sales. But there was a wide array of standard-model historicals in the catalog when he was stocking his getaway ship; Voigtland had chosen eight of them.

Fellow voyagers. Companions on the long solitary journey into exile that he knew that he might someday have to take. Great thinkers. Heroes and villains. He flattered himself that he was worthy of their company. He had picked a mix of personality types, to keep him from losing his mind on his trip. There wasn’t another habitable planet within a light-year of Bradley’s World. If he ever had to flee, he would have to flee far.

He walked from the viewing salon to the sleeping cabin, and from there to the galley, and on into the control room. The voices of his companions followed him from room to room. He paid little attention to what they were saying, but they didn’t seem to mind. They were talking to each other. Lydia and Shakespeare, Ovid and Plato, Juan and Attila, like old friends at a cosmic cocktail party.

“—not for its own sake, no but I’d say it’s necessary to encourage mass killing and looting in order to keep your people from losing momentum, I guess, when—”

“—such a sad moment, when Prince Hal says he doesn’t know Falstaff. I cry every time—”

“—when I said what I did about poets and musicians in an ideal Republic, it was not, I assure you, with the intent that I should have to live in such a Republic myself—”

“—the short sword, such as the Romans use, that’s best, but—”

“—a throng of men and women in the brain, and one must let them find their freedom on the page—”

“—a slender young lad is fine, but yet I always had a leaning toward the ladies, you understand—”

“—massacre as a technique of political manipulation—”

“—Tom and I read your plays aloud to one another—”

“—good thick red wine, hardly watered—”

“—I loved Hamlet the dearest, my true son he was—”

“—the axe, ah, the axe!—”

Voigtland closed his throbbing eyes. He realized that it was soon in his voyage for company, too soon, too soon. Only the first day of his escape, it was. He had lost his world in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. He needed time to come to terms with that, time and solitude, while he examined his soul. Later he could talk to his fellow voyagers. Later he could play with his cubed playmates.

He began pulling the cubes from the slots, Attila first, then Plato, Ovid, Shakespeare. One by one the screens went dark. Juan winked at him as he vanished, Lydia dabbed at her eyes. Voigtland pulled her cube too.

When they were all gone, he felt as if he had killed them.

For three days he roamed the ship in silence. There was nothing for him to do except read, think, watch, eat, sleep, and try to relax. The ship was self-programmed and entirely homeostatic; it ran without need of him, and indeed he had no notion of how to operate it. He knew how to program a takeoff, a landing, and a change of course, and the ship did all the rest. Sometimes he spent hours in front of his viewing port, watching Bradley’s World disappear into the maze of the heavens. Sometimes he took his cubes out and arranged them in little stacks, four stacks of three, then three stacks of four, then six of two. But he did not play any of them. Goethe and Plato and Lydia and Lynx and Mark remained silent. They were his opiates against loneliness; very well, he would wait until the loneliness became intolerable.

He considered starting to write his memoirs. He decided to let them wait a while, too, until time had given him a clearer perspective on his downfall.

He thought a great deal about what might be taking place on Bradley’s World just now. The jailings, the kangaroo trials, the purges. Lydia in prison? His son and daughter? Juan? Were those whom he had left behind cursing him for a coward, running off to Rigel this way in his plush little escape vessel? Did you desert your planet, Voigtland. Did you run out?

No. No. No. No.

Better to live in exile than to join the glorious company of martyrs. This way you can send inspiring messages to the underground, you can serve as a symbol of resistance, you can go back someday and guide the oppressed fatherland toward freedom, you can lead the counterrevolution and return to the capital with everybody cheering…Can a martyr do any of that?

So he had saved himself. So he had stayed alive to fight another day.

It sounded good. He was almost convinced.

He wanted desperately to know what was going on back there on Bradley’s World, though.

The trouble with fleeing to another star system was that it wasn’t the same thing as fleeing to a mountain-top hideout or some remote island on your own world. It would take so long to get to the other system, so long to make the triumphant return. His ship was a pleasure cruiser, not really meant for big interstellar hops. It wasn’t capable of heavy acceleration, and its top velocity, which it reached only after a buildup of many weeks, was less than .50 lights. If he went all the way to the Rigel system and headed right back home, six years would have elapsed on Bradley’s World between his departure and his return. What would happen in those six years?

What was happening there now?

His ship had a tachyon-beam ultrawave communicator. He could reach with it any world within a sphere ten light-years in radius, in a matter of minutes. If he chose, he could call clear across the galaxy, right to the limits of man’s expansion, and get an answer in less than an hour.

He could call Bradley’s World and find out how all those he loved had fared in the first hours of the dictatorship.

If he did, though, he’d paint a tachyon trail like a blazing line across the cosmos. And they could track him and come after him in their ramjet fighters at .75 lights, and there was about one chance in three that they could locate him with only a single point-source coordinate, and overtake him, and pick him up. He didn’t want to risk it, not yet, not while he was still this close to home.

But what if the junta had been crushed at the outset? What if the coup had failed? What if he spent the next three years foolishly fleeing toward Rigel, when all was well at home, and a single call could tell him that?

He stared at the ultrawave set. He nearly turned it on.

A thousand times during those three days he reached toward it, hesitated, halted.

Don’t. Don’t. They’ll detect you and come after you.

But what if I don’t need to keep running?

It was Contingency C. The cause was lost.

That’s what our integrator net said. But machines can be wrong. Suppose our side managed to stay on top? I want to talk to Juan. I want to talk to Mark. I want to talk to Lydia.

That’s why you brought the cubes along. Keep away from the ultrawave.

On the fourth day, he picked out six cubes and put them in the receptor slots.

Screens glowed. He saw his father, his son, his oldest friend. He also saw Hemingway, Goethe, Alexander the Great.

“I have to know what’s happening at home,” Voigtland said. “I want to call them.”

“I’ll tell you.” It was Juan who spoke, the man who was closer to him than any brother. The old revolutionary, the student of conspiracies. “The junta is rounding up everyone who might have dangerous ideas and locking them away. It’s telling everybody else not to worry, stability is here at last. McAllister is in full control; calling himself provisional president or something similar.”

“Maybe not. Maybe it’s safe for me to turn and go back.”

“What happened?” Voigtland’s son asked. His cube hadn’t been activated before. He knew nothing of events since he had been cubed, ten months earlier. “Were you overthrown?”

Juan started to explain about the coup to Mark. Voigtland turned to his father. At least the old man was safe from the rebellious colonels; he had died two years ago, in his eighties, just after making the cube. The cube was all that was left of him. “I’m glad this didn’t happen in your time,” Voigtland said. “Do you remember, when I was a boy, and you were President of the Council, how you told me about the uprisings on other colonies? And I said, No, Bradley’s World is different, we all work together here.”

The old man smiled. He looked pale and waxy, an echo of the man he had been. “No world is different, Tom. Political entities go through similar cycles everywhere, and part of the cycle involves an impatience with democracy. I’m sorry that the impatience had to strike while you were in charge, son.”

“Homer tells us that men would rather have their fill of sleep, love, singing, and dancing than of war,” Goethe offered, smooth-voiced, courtly, civilized. “But there will always be some who love war above all else. Who can say why the gods gave us Achilles?”

“I can,” Hemingway growled. “You define man by looking at the opposites inside him. Love and hate. War and peace. Kissing and killing. That’s where his borders are. What’s wrong with that? Every man’s a bundle of opposites. So is every society. And sometimes the killers get the upper hand on the kissers. Besides, how do you know the fellows who overthrew you were so wrong?”

“Let me speak of Achilles,” said Alexander, tossing his ringlets, holding his hands high. “I know him better than any of you, for I carry his spirit within me. And I tell you that warriors are best fit to rule, so long as they have wisdom as well as strength, for they have given their lives as pledges in return for the power they hold. Achilles—”

Voigtland was not interested in Achilles. To Juan he said, “I have to call. It’s four days, now. I can’t just sit in this ship and remain cut off.”

“If you call, they’re likely to catch you.”

“I know that. But what if the coup failed?” Voigtland was trembling. He moved closer to the ultrawave set.

Mark said, “Dad, if the coup failed, Juan will be sending a ship to intercept you. They won’t let you just ride all the way to Rigel for nothing.”

Yes, Voigtland thought, dazed with relief. Yes, yes, of course. How simple. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

“You hear that?” Juan asked. “You won’t call?”

“I won’t call,” Voigtland promised.

The days passed. He played all twelve cubes, chatted with Mark and Lynx, Lydia, Juan. Idle chatter, talk of old holidays, friends, growing up. He loved the sight of his cool elegant daughter and his rugged long-limbed son, and wondered how he could have sired them, he who was short and thick-bodied, with blunt features and massive bones. He talked with his father about government, with Juan about revolution. He talked with Ovid about exile, and with Plato about the nature of injustice, and with Hemingway about the definition of courage. They helped him through some of the difficult moments. Each day had its difficult moments.

The nights were much worse.

He ran screaming and ablaze down the tunnels of his own soul. He saw faces looming like huge white lamps above him. Men in black uniforms and mirror-bright boots paraded in somber phalanxes over his fallen body. Citizens lined up to jeer him. ENEMY OF THE STATE. ENEMY OF THE STATE. ENEMY OF THE STATE. They brought Juan to him in his dreams. COWARD. COWARD. COWARD. Juan’s lean bony body was ridged and gouged; he had been. put through the tortures, the wires in the skull, the lights in the eyes, the truncheons in the ribs. I STAYED. YOU FLED. I STAYED. YOU FLED. I STAYED. YOU FLED. They showed him his own face in a mirror, a jackal’s face, with long yellow teeth and little twitching eyes. ARE YOU PROUD OF YOURSELF? ARE YOU PLEASED? ARE YOU HAPPY TO BE ALIVE?

He asked the ship for help. The ship wrapped him in a cradle of silvery fibers and slid snouts against his skin that filled his veins with cold droplets of unknown drugs. He slipped into a deeper sleep, and underneath the sleep, burrowing up, came dragons and gorgons and serpents and basilisks, whispering mockery as he slept. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. HOW CAN YOU HOPE TO SLEEP SOUNDLY, HAVING DONE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?

“Look,” he said to Lydia, “they would have killed me within the hour. There wasn’t any possible way of finding you, Mark, Juan, anybody. What sense was there in waiting longer?”

“No sense at all, Tom. You did the smartest thing.”

“But was it the right thing, Lydia?”

Lynx said, “Father, you had no choice. It was run or die.”

He wandered through the ship, making an unending circuit. How soft the walls were, how beautifully upholstered! The lighting was gentle. Restful images flowed and coalesced and transformed themselves on the sloping ceilings. The little garden was a vale of beauty. He had music, fine food, books, cubes. What was it like in the sewers of the underground now?

“We didn’t need more martyrs,” he told Plato. “The junta was making enough martyrs as it was. We needed leaders. What good is a dead leader?”

“Very wise, my friend. You have made yourself a symbol of heroism, distant, idealized, untouchable, while your colleagues carry on the struggle in your name,” Plato said silkily. “And yet you are able to return and serve your people in the future. The service a martyr gives is limited, finite, locked to a single point in time. Eh?”

“I have to disagree,” said Ovid. “If a man wants to be a hero, he ought to hold his ground and take what comes. Of course, what sane man wants to be a hero? You did well, friend Voigtland! Give yourself over to feasting and love, and live longer and more happily.”

“You’re mocking me,” he said to Ovid.

“I do not mock. I console. I amuse. I do not mock.”

In the night came tinkling sounds, faint bells, crystalline laughter. Figures capered through his brain, demons, jesters, witches, ghouls. He tumbled down into mustiness and decay, into a realm of spiders, where empty husks hung on vast arching webs. THIS IS WHERE THE HEROES GO. Hags embraced him. WELCOME TO VALHALLA. Gnarled midgets offered him horns of mead, and the mead was bitter, leaving a coating of ash on his lips. ALL HAIL. ALL HAIL. ALL HAIL.

“Help me,” he said hoarsely to the cubes. “What did I bring you along for, if not to help me?”

“We’re trying to help,” Hemingway said. “We agree that you did the sensible thing.”

“You’re saying it to make me happy, You aren’t sincere.”

“You bastard, call me a liar again and I’ll step out of this screen and—”

“Maybe I can put it another way,” Juan said craftily. “Tom, you had an obligation to save yourself. Saving yourself was the most valuable thing you could have done for the cause. Listen, for all you knew the rest of us had already been wiped out, right?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Then what would you accomplish by staying and being wiped out too? Outside of some phony heroics, what?” Juan shook his head. “A leader in exile is better than a leader in the grave. You can direct the resistance from Rigel, if the rest of us are gone. Do you see the dynamics of it, Tom?”

“I see. I see. You make it sound so reasonable, Juan.”

Juan winked. “We always understood each other.”

He activated the cube of his father. “What do you say? Should I have stayed or gone?”

“Maybe stay, maybe go. How can I speak for you? Certainly taking the ship was more practical. Staying would have been more dramatic. Tom, Tom, how can I speak for you?”

“Mark?”

“I would have stayed and fought right to the end. Teeth, nails, everything. But that’s me. I think maybe you did the right thing, Dad. The way Juan explains it. The right thing for you, that is.”

Voigtland frowned. “Stop talking in circles. Just tell me this: do you despise me for going?”

“You know I don’t,” Mark said.

The cubes consoled him. He began to sleep more soundly, after a while. He stopped fretting about the morality of his flight. He remembered how to relax.

He talked military tactics with Attila, and was surprised to find a complex human being behind the one-dimensional ferocity. He tried to discuss the nature of tragedy with Shakespeare, but Shakespeare seemed more interested in talking about taverns, politics, and the problems of a playwright’s finances. He spoke to Goethe about the second part of Faust, asking if Goethe really felt that the highest kind of redemption came through governing well, and Goethe said, yes, yes, of course. And when Voigtland wearied of matching wits with his cubed great ones, he set them going against one another, Attila and Alexander, Shakespeare and Goethe, Hemingway and Plato, and sat back, listening to such talk as mortal man had never heard. And there were humbler sessions with Juan and his family. He blessed the cubes; he blessed their makers.

“You seem much happier these days,” Lydia said.

“All that nasty guilt washed away,” said Lynx.

“It was just a matter of looking at the logic of the situation,” Juan observed.

Mark said, “And cutting out all the masochism, the self-flagellation.”

“Wait a second,” said Voigtland. “Let’s not hit below the belt, young man.”

“But it was masochism, Dad. Weren’t you wallowing in your guilt? Admit it.”

“I suppose I—”

“And looking to us to pull you out,” Lynx said. “Which we did.”

“Yes. You did.”

“And it’s all clear to you now, eh?’ Juan asked. “Maybe you thought you were afraid, thought you were running out, but you were actually performing a service to the republic. Eh?”

Voigtland grinned. “Doing the right thing for the wrong reason.”

“Exactly. Exactly.”

“The important thing is the contribution you still can make to Bradley’s World,” his father’s voice said. “You’re still young. There’s time to rebuild what we used to have there.”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“Instead of dying a futile but heroic death,” said Juan.

“On the other hand,” Lynx said, “what did Eliot write? ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.’”

Voigtland frowned. “Are you trying to say—”

“And it is true,” Mark cut in, “that you were planning your escape far in advance. I mean, making the cubes and all, picking out the famous men you wanted to take—”

“As though you had decided that at the first sign of trouble you were going to skip out,” said Lynx.

“They’ve got a point,” his father said. “Rational self-protection is one thing, but an excessive concern for your mode of safety in case of emergency is another.”

“I don’t say you should have stayed and died,” Lydia said. “I never would say that. But all the same—”

“Hold on!” Voigtland said. The cubes were turning against him suddenly. “What kind of talk is this?”

Juan said, “And strictly as a pragmatic point, if the people were to find out how far in advance you engineered your way out, and how comfortable you are as you head for exile—”

“You’re supposed to help me,” Voigtland shouted. “Why are you starting this? What are you trying to do?”

“You know we all love you,” said Lydia.

“We hate to see you not thinking clearly, Father,” Lynx said.

“Weren’t you planning to run out all along?” said Mark.

“Wait! Stop! Wait!”

“Strictly as a matter of—”

Voigtland rushed into the control room and pulled the Juan-cube from the slot.

“We’re trying to explain to you, dear—”

He pulled the Lydia-cube, the Mark-cube, the Lynx-cube, the father-cube.

The ship was silent.

He crouched, gasping, sweat-soaked, face rigid, eyes clenched tight shut, waiting for the shouting in his skull to die away.

An hour later, when he was calm again, he began setting up his ultrawave call, tapping out the frequency that the underground would probably be using, if any underground existed. The tachyon beam sprang across the void, an all but instantaneous carrier wave, and he heard cracklings, and then a guarded voice saying, “Four Nine Eight Three, we read your signal, do you read me? This is Four Nine Eight Three, come in, come in, who are you?”

“Voigtland,” he said. “President Voigtland, calling Juan. Can you get Juan on the line?”

“Give me your numbers, and—”

“What numbers? This is Voigtland. I’m I don’t know how many billion miles out in space, and I want to talk to Juan. Get me Juan. Get me Juan.”

“You wait,” the voice said.

Voigtland waited, while the ultrawave spewed energy wantonly into the void. He heard clickings, scrapings, clatterings. “You still there?” the voice said, after a while. “We’re patching him in. But be quick. He’s busy.”

“Well? Who is it?” Juan’s voice, beyond doubt.

“Tom here. Tom Voigtland, Juan!”

“It’s really you?” Coldly. From a billion parsecs away, from some other universe. “Enjoying your trip, Tom?”

“I had to call. To find out—to find out—how it was going, how everybody is. How Mark—Lydia—you—”

“Mark’s dead. Killed the second week, trying to blow up McAllister in a parade.”

“Oh. Oh.”

“Lydia and Lynx are in prison somewhere. Most of the others are dead. Maybe ten of us left, and they’ll get us soon, too. Of course, there’s you.”

“Yes.”

“You bastard,” Juan said quietly. “You rotten bastard. All of us getting rounded up and shot, and you get into your ship and fly away!”

“They would have killed me too, Juan. They were coming after me. I only just made it.”

“You should have stayed,” Juan said.

“No. No. That isn’t what you just said to me! You told me I did the right thing, that I’d serve as a symbol of resistance, inspiring everybody from my place of exile, a living symbol of the overthrown government—”

“I said this?”

“You, yes,” Voigtland told him. “Your cube, anyway.”

“Go to hell,” said Juan. “You lunatic bastard.”

“Your cube—we discussed it, you explained—”

“Are you crazy, Tom? Listen, those cubes are programmed to tell you whatever you want to hear. Don’t you know that? You want to feel like a hero for running away, they tell you you’re a hero. It’s that simple. How can you sit there and quote what my cube said to you, and make me believe that I said it?”

“But I—you—”

“Have a nice flight, Tom. Give my love to everybody, wherever you’re going.”

“I couldn’t just stay there to be killed. What good would it have been? Help me, Juan! What shall I do now? Help me!”

“I don’t give a damn what you do,” Juan said. “Ask your cubes for help. So long, Tom.”

“Juan—”

“So long, you bastard.”

Contact broke.

Voigtland sat quietly for a while, pressing his knuckles together. Listen, those cubes are programmed to tell you whatever you want to hear. Don’t you know that? You want to feel like a hero for running away, they tell you you’re a hero. And if you want to feel like a villain? They tell you that too. They meet all needs. They aren’t people. They’re cubes.

He put Goethe in the slot. “Tell me about martyrdom,” he said.

Goethe said, “It has its tempting side. One may be covered with sins, scaly and rough-skinned with them, and in a single fiery moment of self-immolation one wins redemption and absolution, and one’s name is forever cherished.”

He put Juan in the slot. “Tell me about the symbolic impact of getting killed in the line of duty.”

“It can transform a mediocre public official into a magnificent historical figure,” Juan said.

He put Mark in the slot. “Which is a better father to have: a live coward or a dead hero?”

“Go down fighting, Dad.”

He put Hemingway in the slot. “What would you do if someone called you a rotten bastard?”

“I’d stop to think if he was right or wrong. If he was wrong, I’d give him to the sharks. If he was right, well, maybe the sharks would get fed anyway.”

He put Lydia in the slot. Lynx. His father. Alexander. Attila. Shakespeare. Plato. Ovid.

lit In their various ways they were all quite eloquent. They spoke of bravery, self-sacrifice, nobility, redemption.

He picked up the Mark-cube. “You’re dead,” he said. “Just like your grandfather. There isn’t any Mark anymore. What comes out of this cube isn’t Mark. It’s me, speaking with Mark’s voice, talking through Mark’s mind. You’re just a dummy.”

He put the Mark-cube in the ship’s converter input, and it tumbled down the slideway to become reaction mass. He put the Lydia-cube in next. Lynx. His father. Alexander. Attila. Shakespeare. Plato. Ovid. Goethe.

He picked up the Juan-cube. He put it in a slot again. “Tell me the truth,” he yelled. “What’ll happen to me if I go back to Bradley’s World?”

“You’ll make your way safely to the underground and take charge, Tom. You’ll help us throw McAllister out: We can win with you, Tom.”

“Crap,” Voigtland said. “I’ll tell you what’ll really happen. I’ll be intercepted before I go into my landing orbit. I’ll be taken down and put on trial. And then I’ll be shot. Right? Right? Tell me the truth, for once. Tell me I’ll be shot!”

“You misunderstand the dynamics of the situation, Tom. The impact of your return will be so great that—”

He took the Juan-cube from the slot and put it into the chute that went to the converter.

“Hello?” Voigtland said. “Anyone here?”

The ship was silent.

“I’ll miss all that scintillating conversation,” he said. “I miss you already. Yes. Yes. But I’m glad you’re gone.”

He countermanded the ship’s navigational instructions and tapped out the program headed RETURN TO POINT OF DEPARTURE. His hands were shaking, just a little, but the message went through. The instruments showed him the change of course as the ship began to turn around. As it began to take him home.

Alone.

Content

The Pleasure of Their Company
by Robert Silverberg