World Enough (And Time)

by Edmund Jorgensen

  “Just glasses and water. I haven’t played in a long time.”

  “Then you’d better practice up,” said Jeremiah. “Who’s number two?”

  “That’s me,” said Mr. Drinkwater, hardly giving Mrs. Biltmore a chance to vacate the chair before he occupied it. “Look,” said Drinkwater, changing to a loud whisper, “don’t you think the last day is a bit late for the show? I mean, what with the seduction and all?”

  “Trust me,” Jeremiah whispered back, “the anticipation will only heighten the excitement. And you know how people get emotional at the end of things—cast parties, goodbye dinners, etc.”

  “If you’re sure,” said Mr. Drinkwater, in a tone that showed he was not.

  “Talent, Mr. Drinkwater?” asked Jeremiah full-voiced and briskly, with a significant glance at the other passengers—some of whom were starting to show too much interest in their conversation.

  “Have you forgotten?”

  Jeremiah cleared his throat and pointed out the still-gathering crowd with his pen.

  “Appearances, Mr. Drinkwater,” he whispered.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Drinkwater. Then, too loudly: “I’m a mime.”

  “What level of expertise?”

  Mr. Drinkwater looked around at his fellow guests—he seemed to be losing his nerve.

  “Professional, amateur, or semi-professional?” asked Jeremiah.

  “Those are my only choices?”

  “Yes,” said Jeremiah, adding under his breath: “Remember, you’re going to impress her.”

  “I guess—semi-professional?”

  “Very modest, Mr. Drinkwater. You’ll be anchoring our show.”

  “My goodness,” said Mr. Drinkwater, starting to sweat, “that’s a lot of responsibility.”

  “I’m sure you’ll knock it out of the park.”

  “Now serving number … THREE.”

  * * *

  “Talent?”

  “What’s the policy on open flame?”

  Jeremiah looked up, hoping that Mr. Porter was joking, but the sight of his face—flushed and earnest, eyes blazing with espresso-fueled excitement—dashed any such hopes.

  “I think,” said Jeremiah, flipping through the playbook to buy himself some time, “the official policy is that it’s—”

  Jeremiah looked up, but the answer was not to be found on the ceiling, either.

  “Yes?”

  Now Jeremiah shuffled through the roster for the talent show, where he still found nothing about Golden Worldlines’ policy on open flame.

  “Discouraged,” he said.

  “Does discouraged mean discouraged?” asked Mr. Porter, looking hopeful if not Highly Satisfied. “Or does discouraged mean not allowed?” At the consideration of that possibility, his expression fell to a level that Jeremiah would have rated at least a Somewhat Dissatisfied.

  “I think it means—” Jeremiah said. The air between them veritably crackled with suspense. “Strongly discouraged.”

  Mr. Porter beamed.

  “Message received,” he said, “loud and clear.”

  He stood up and saluted before offering Jeremiah his trembling hand.

  “Wait, Mr. Porter—you still haven’t told me what your talent is.”

  “Just put ‘novelty act,’” said Mr. Porter. “I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  * * *

  “Talent?”

  “Extinct bird calls.”

  * * *

  “Talent?”

  “I perform popular songs of the 2100’s on the spoons.”

  * * *

  “Talent?”

  “Tap dance. Just kidding: comedy. The stage will be wheelchair accessible?”

  “Of course, Mr. Withers,” said Jeremiah, and jotted a note to himself on the roster: Stage?

  * * *

  “Hello Mr. Wendstrom,” said Jeremiah. “Talent?”

  “Have you located that green item we talked about yesterday?” Mr. Wendstrom asked.

  “I haven’t had a chance,” Jeremiah whispered. With his pen he pointed to the other guests as subtly as he could.

  Mr. Wendstrom frowned and stood up.

  “I’m going to give one of my talks,” he said, “for which I usually charge quite a bit of credit. It’s called ‘Winner or Loser? The Clock is Ticking.’”

  * * *

  By lunchtime the office was empty, nearly half the guests were on the list as performers, and Jeremiah was both exhausted and the tiniest bit proud of himself. He’d cracked the books, rallied the troops, and ridden the whirlwind, and he was almost looking forward to planning the logistics of the show.

  “Good morning,” said someone from inside the doorway.

  Jeremiah could not recall ever having seen the lady who was behind this salutation—a state of affairs which was unusual on a ship with 54—now technically 53, due to one imminent default—passengers. And she was definitely of the passenger class, this lady: marching through her early 70s with low-heel pumps and a cartwheel hat, each of which would have looked right at home on an encased mannequin in the Smithsonian. The string of pearls arranged on her smart tweed suit, if offered on the open market, could have made a serious dent in Jeremiah’s imminently defaulted ticket. Against this fashionable background her handbag stood out in sharp relief—an oversized, misshapen blob of black cloth with padded handles. The shape and size of the bag was just right to hold a giant tortoise and all wrong to conceal a PED, and something about that fact—combined with the novelty of her acquaintance—put Jeremiah in a fight or flight mood.

  “We’re just closing up for lunch,” he said, opting for flight. “We open again at one.”

  “It’s 11:59,” said the lady, “or I would have said ‘good afternoon.’ I have come to sign up for the talent show.”

  Jeremiah looked up at the clock, which—traitor—took the lady’s side.

  “All right,” he said. “Ms.—?”

  “Mayflower,” said the lady, sitting down and smoothing her tweed skirt over her knees. “Mrs. Mayflower. In my day marriage was a union to be taken seriously—not a casual arrangement to be tossed overboard as soon as one partner got the seven-year itch or had been dead for decades.”

  “Mayflower like the ship?”

  “Precisely like the ship, on which my late husband’s ancestors, the Rosethorpes, were passengers. Their name was later corrupted by a clerical error at Ellis Island.”

  “But if his ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, why did they have to go through Ellis Island?” Jeremiah asked.

  “They left and came back—a situation they were trying to explain to an immigration officer of less than average intelligence.”

  “I see,” said Jeremiah. “Talent?”

  “I will be singing and accompanying myself upon the bandora.”

  “The Pandora, did you say?”

  “Not Pandora—bandora, with a bee. It’s a type of lute.”

  “You’ll be singing and playing the flute?”

  “Not flute. Lute. Eh-lute. In my day we enunciated clearly, which aided others in not acquiring the bad habit of mishearing. In a world without mishearers, my family name would still be Rosethorpe, and I would already be signed up for the talent show and on my way.”

  “I see,” Jeremiah said through gritted teeth. “Eh-lute. Will you require any special materials for your performance, Mrs. Mayflower?”

  A rectal stick removal kit, perhaps? he thought, confirming en passant that Mrs. Mayflower was not an eh-telepath as well as an eh-lutenist.

  “My bandora requires light servicing to be performance ready,” she said, unzipping the handbag (which Jeremiah now recognized as a soft instrument case, like the one in which he never actually bothered to keep his poor banjo back in his rambling musician days) and extracting the giant tortoise, which turned out not to be a tortoise but the aforementioned bandora. Mrs. Mayflower held it out across the desk with exquisite delicacy, then withdrew it as soon as Jeremiah reached out.

&nbs
p; “Do you know how many bandoras there are in the world, young man?”

  Jeremiah admitted that he did not.

  “One. This one. John Rose invented the instrument circa 1560. The bandora remained in vogue for almost 100 years, until grosser tastes prevailed against its soft and subtle sound. The bandora is a delicate and temperamental instrument, and time has not been kind to them. In the late 21st century, it was thought they had all returned to dust. Until this one—”

  She finally handed it to him, as if it were a baby.

  “—was discovered in a church basement in the English countryside. It was in abysmal condition—much time and money has gone into restoring the glory you now hold in your hands.”

  Jeremiah had an inherent love of musical instruments, and an inherent fascination with the past, but the bandora he now cradled in his hands struggled heroically against these tender sympathies. The body was irregularly pinched and curved, as if the luthier who had built it had let his two-year-old son draw the line on the wood for him. The neck was infested with cherubs whose rolled-up eyes gave them the appearance of choking to death on a final oversized bite of whatever delicacy was responsible for the rolls of fat on their arms and legs. Painted on the front panel a stout shepherd stood with hat in hand, covering his privates like a schoolboy while he professed his love to an even stouter shepherdess, who was doing her level best meanwhile to look dainty.

  “There is a slight buzz in the lowest string,” said Mrs. Mayflower. “You will remove it. The buzz, not the string,” she added, remembering the level of intellect she was dealing with.

  “Mrs. Mayflower,” said Jeremiah, “I don’t know the first thing about bandoras—or even lutes in general. I’m afraid I can’t service this for you.”

  He tried to hand it back to her, but she folded her hands deliberately in her lap.

  “You don’t know about lutes, young man, but do you know about money?” Mrs. Mayflower asked.

  “You mean credit? I know of it more than I know it, if you know what I mean. You know what they say—credit makes credit, people make people.”

  Mrs. Mayflower wrinkled her nose, as if she had just caught a whiff of something unsavory.

  “In my day,” she said, “we called it money. Do you know what it’s for?”

  “To buy things?”

  “That’s a naive and simplistic view. Money is gift wrap for problems.”

  Mrs. Mayflower’s smile at finding a chance to use this phrase—Jeremiah suspected it was a favorite of her own invention—began to fade as she realized that Jeremiah had not fully absorbed its significance.

  “I take a problem of mine,” she said. “For example, I need my bandora serviced so that I can accompany my vocals in the upcoming talent show, and my man Theodore, who normally performs this function for me, has made the poor decision to acquire some sort of palsy that renders him unfit. I wrap this problem in money—”

  She pantomimed the action in deference to her young student’s obvious deficiencies, folding imaginary paper and tying an imaginary ribbon with her white-gloved hands in a show of mime worthy of Mr. Drinkwater.

  “—and I give it to you. Can you guess whose problem it is now?”

  “Mine?” guessed Jeremiah.

  Mrs. Mayflower smiled in approval.

  “I find people rise to challenges when they are properly gift wrapped.”

  “You’re not actually proposing to pay me, though, are you?” said Jeremiah.

  She stopped smiling.

  “I’ve paid Golden Worldlines enough that the problem of paying you has become theirs. I suspect that Mr. Grubel would agree. One way or another, I’ll make sure that he hears about my experience at the Guest Services desk, and believe me, young man: if I get my bandora back in anything less than concert-ready condition—or with so much as a single scratch on it—I shall be far, far from satisfied.”

  “I believe you,” said Jeremiah.

  7

  Strawberries, Keycards, and Rekindled Fires

  Still Saturday (8 days until arrival)

  To say that during his two years aboard the E4 Jeremiah had lost the knack of multitasking would have been a grave injustice to the innate and utter inability to juggle tasks with which God had blessed Jeremiah from the moment of his birth. In fact, during the thirty odd years of life Jeremiah had spent on Earth and off it, he had only occasionally, with strenuous effort and a little luck, been able to work himself up to tasking at all—and those were specialized circumstances, generally related to the focused production, enjoyment, or study of music, which had not prepared him well for tackling his current set of diverse and overlapping challenges, or even keeping the list of said challenges in good working order.

  Luckily Fate—perhaps feeling the slightest twinge of guilt for the obstacles it planned one day to hurl Jeremiah’s way—had sent him help, though in a form Jeremiah had not recognized at the time. To his seventh-grade self, Ms. Domenico and her seminar on “Personal Tools and Development” had represented nothing more than a low-impact elective with which to fill fifth period. But as present-day Jeremiah wrestled with the list of unpleasant projects sitting on his metaphorical desk, the ancient Ms. Domenico and her advice came to his mind.

  “When I have a lot of problems I have to manage and prioritize,” she was saying as she stood in front of the class, “I imagine them as cats in my living room.

  “The small problems are fuzzy little kittens hiding behind the sofa or playing with the curtains: for example, they canceled my favorite wave or I need to remember to pick up a prescription.

  “The big, urgent problems are nasty old tomcats ripping up cushions and marking their territory: the rent check bounced again, or he hasn’t come home or even called in two days.

  “The very worst problems are like tigers spread across the floor, baring their teeth: he finally called and says he wants a divorce.

  “I choose cats because I love cats—more than I love people, according to him—but you can choose anything you want.”

  An image came to Jeremiah’s mind: the Guest Services Office, empty of human presence, but filled with reptilian. There on the desk sat an iguana of ordinary size, a patch of deep red on his throat. This was Carolus the Bold, representing—in self-referential fashion—his own self and Jeremiah’s search for him. A monitor lizard paced slowly across the room, the embodiment of Mr. Drinkwater’s unrequited love for Mrs. Abdurov, and his expectation that Jeremiah would cause it to be requited by means of a talent show. Around the head of the monitor lizard crawled a red salamander, tiny but not to be forgotten: the need for a stage in said talent show. Mrs. Mayflower’s bandora and the repair thereof—having incarnated as a Gila monster—perched stiffly atop the back of the desk chair. And at the back of the room, his soft snores so great that they caused the floor to tremble, a lightly sleeping dragon lay curled up, his own tail acting as his pillow: the Somewhat Satisfaction of every passenger on board, and Jeremiah’s responsibility to maintain it.

  The mere act of cataloging and ranking these insane tasks made Jeremiah feel the tiniest bit better. It gave him the illusion of control—which, he reflected as he walked to lunch, might be the only form of control any of us really had in this absurd and chaotic universe.

  * * *

  At lunch Jeremiah found that Luis had saved him a seat again, and the table had grown bolder with their questions.

  “The pretty waitress, she is your lady?” Luis translated.

  “Katherine?” said Jeremiah. “Far, far from it. She can’t stand the sight of me.”

  “But you sleep in her room, no?”

  “Yes, which is one reason she can’t stand the sight of me.”

  “So why you sleep there?”

  “That’s a long story,” said Jeremiah. “Why did Carlos just push up his nose like that?”

  “He wants to know, isn’t she a little strawberry?”

  “What?”

  “Strawberry? Fresa?” Luis pushed the tip of his nos
e up into a shape that was arguably closer to a strawberry than when he wasn’t pushing it up. “How do you say—stick up?”

  “Stuck up?”

  “That’s it—stuck up.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jeremiah said. “I think she’s just lonely—and maybe a little sad.”

  “So why you not make her happy?”

  “Let’s talk about something else. What about all of you—what do you do on the E4?”

  “We are maintaining,” Luis said. “Carpentering and plumbing and working with the metal, you know.”

  “Why did you take jobs on the Einstein IV? What are your plans when you all get home?”

  Luis laughed and translated.

  “Why is everyone smiling like that?” asked Jeremiah.

  “Because, my friend, you are asking question for rich people. Choices, reasons, plans? Manny was in prison when he was joven, so he can’t get no good job. But no one wants this job, so they no check many records. Watch it!”

  This last remark Luis shouted not at Jeremiah, but the sweeping Canadian who had just clipped Luis’s shoe with a broom. Luis waved off the Canadian’s apology, rolled his eyes, and returned to the tale of his fellows.

  “Carlos First has a little girl and no credit, this way she gets a little credit. Carlos Second can’t work on roofs no more—he fell and hurt his back. What are jobs for hurt roofer? Héctor is here because he is Carlos Second’s cousin and Carlos Second’s mother wanted that he have some family with him in the future. Adelfo’s family is gone in accident, so why stay? Humberto sends credit home to his family. And Heriberto—Heriberto is just crazy. Loco. No one knows why he does nothing.”

  Heriberto, hearing his name and loco in the same vicinity, grinned like a demon and puffed up his chest with pride.

  “Carlos Third, they were going to deport him, he is friends with Carlos Second and thought ‘Why not?’ And Jesús, his mother was sick, this way she can pay some bills for the hospital. Sure she is dead by now.”