They are back. Forty-six days in a tiny Heechee ship, cramped and scared and hoping for something, and they are back with nothing. No discovery. No bonus. No glory. Just a docking clamp and a medical team and the smell of a ship that has been lived in too long by too many people.
This chapter is short. Maybe the shortest therapy chapter so far. But short does not mean small. Sometimes the shortest sessions are the ones that crack things open.
Forty-six days.
That is how long Rob and his crew have been sitting inside a Heechee ship. Forty-six days of eating paste, sharing a tiny space with four other people, using a toilet with no privacy, breathing recycled air, and waiting. Just waiting for the ship to arrive wherever the pre-programmed course takes them.
Short chapter. Maybe the shortest in the book so far. But the amount of power that shifts in these few pages is wild.
Rob finally did it. He is in space. After all the waiting, the fear, the parties, the frozen paralysis, he is actually sitting inside a Heechee ship heading somewhere unknown.
You walk into your therapist’s office and everything has changed. The mat is gone. The mobiles are gone. The fake Hawaiian surf is gone. Instead there is a couch. A traditional, old-school psychoanalyst’s couch. And your therapist, who used to be a voice and some abstract shapes, is now a dummy sitting in a chair wearing dark glasses.
This is a long chapter. It is also the chapter where everything changes. Rob has been frozen since he arrived on Gateway. Trained but not launching. Afraid but not leaving. Just existing in the most expensive waiting room in the solar system.
Rob walks into therapy like a man who has not slept in three days. He is exhausted. He is angry. And he has decided, before the session even starts, that he is not going to cooperate.
This is a big chapter. A lot happens. And by the end of it, nothing happens at all. That is the whole point.
This chapter is short and it hurts in a quiet way.
We are back in the present with Rob and Sigfrid. No Gateway flashbacks this time. Just a rich man sitting in a therapist’s office, listing all the expensive things he buys. And somehow, every item on the list makes him sound more empty.