Worlds Enough and Time w-3

by Joe Haldeman

  “A harp—?”

  “It’s an old-fashioned kind of piano.”

  He shook his head, still amused. “I thought that we could duplicate any waveform with an electronic keyboard.”

  “I suppose. Musicians are funny, though.” I was suddenly transported back to a couple of weeks before Launch, when I stood behind Chul’ Hermosa for an hour of Scarlatti magic, his long brown fingers hammering the ancient ivory keys with exquisitely measured passion. I could feel the bass notes in my teeth.

  Would a waveform, whatever it was, do that? Would it duplicate the soft fingerpad sound when he barely stroked a high note? Not to mention the smell of wax and the hypnotic swirl of inlaid gold and mother-of-pearl. The connections with centuries past.

  “Are you all right, Dr. O’Hara?”

  “Sorry. I was thinking.”

  His expression did not radiate confidence in my thinking ability. “This is what I want you and Mr. Smith to do. Give me a list of everything both of you are in charge of—exactly where it is and approximately how much it weighs. We’ll do a first-order analysis and decide whether it would be better to relocate your things or his. Or move both of you to a third location.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard. The computer must know where just about everything is.”

  “The computer knows where things are supposed to be. I have to know where they actually are. You have GP auxiliaries?”

  That was Personnel jargon for laborers. “Four of them, plus a medium ‘bot. I could get a heavy one from Silke Kleber with a little notice.” As soon as I said her name, I knew I shouldn’t have. Implying personal relationships with both his supervisors.

  He just nodded, though. “You might prefer to requisition it through me. Same robot, one less layer of bureaucracy.

  “At any rate, once I have the information from you and Mr. Smith, and perhaps a hundred others who will be moved fairly soon, I can put it through a scheduling algorithm.”

  “A year wouldn’t be too bad. Thank you, Dr. Seven.” He gravely shook hands with me and then returned his attention to the screen. He typed something and the six levels rolled back upon themselves to become concentric cylinders, rotating realistically, twice as fast as a clock’s second hand. The dizziness started to come back. I closed my eyes long enough for the sensation to go away, and then turned and carefully walked back to the door.

  John was waiting for me, sitting on a folding chair, looking exhausted. “Let’s get you home.”

  He gave me a wan smile. “That’s why I scheduled my raid for 1300, of course. Thought I might seduce you into a backrub.”

  “Sure. I’m clear to 1530.” We walked and hobbled to the Toronto lift and went straight to Level 6. It was most of a kilometer back to his place. I practically floated, light as a cloud, but for him it was an effort. By the time we got there, his face was brick red and he was panting.

  “You’re not getting as much exercise as you did in New New,” I said.

  “To belabor the obvious, no, I’m not. I’m not taking as much medication for pain, either. The scientist in me suspects a cause-and-effect relationship.”

  “Taking pills makes you exercise?”

  “Sure.” We got to his door and he unlocked it with his thumb. Groundhog habit. What did he have that anybody would steal? There is vandalism though. Maybe I should start doing it.

  He checked his message queue, sighed, and returned a call from Tania Seven, who just needed two numbers and a date. He said the others could wait, then painfully slipped off his shirt and collapsed onto his side on the bed. Even in a quarter gee, he couldn’t comfortably lie on his back or stomach.

  I got a tube of oil from over the sink and rubbed some into his knotted shoulders. The oil’s vaguely tropical aroma always reminded me of sex, which under the circumstances made me uncomfortable. Middle of the workday and all. But John did not visibly make the same association. He groaned luxuriously and relaxed almost to the point of coma.

  He was thinking, though, not sleeping. After about ten minutes, I stopped to rest my fingers, and he rolled over to look at me. “Sorry my timing was bad. I realized after you got there that you probably didn’t want my presence complicating things.”

  “It was no problem. I don’t think Sandor notices that sort of thing.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Well, he didn’t roll over and play dead. The transfer might stretch out for a year. Tom and I can live with that, though; we’d been ready to cope with outright rejection.”

  “It wouldn’t come to that. I could’ve done something.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” He stiffened and I went back to massaging. “Really. Purcell is right. I have to tread lightly for a couple of years.”

  He stretched hard and something in his shoulder made a loud pop. “I wouldn’t worry overmuch about it. Harry’s a good administrator, but he’s too calculating.”

  “He is that.” I started to knuckle the vertebrae, gently, down one side and up the other. It was painful for him, but recommended by the “Massage for Scoliosis” article Evy had found. He suffered in silence until it was over; then sighed and mumbled something about how good it felt when it stopped. I worked on his scalp and arms for a few minutes and left him to sleep.

  I was worried about John. I knew he was trying to reduce his dependence on the pills, but he was paying for it doubly, in loss of sleep and restricted mobility.

  Dan’s lack of sleep was adding up, too. Maybe they’d both collapse on the same day. Then Evy and I could hand them over to the professionals and get some rest ourselves.

  Still a couple of hours until the meeting with the net games people. Feeling a little guilty, I went down to the music rooms instead of the office, and checked out a clarinet and a practice room. Still thinking of Chul’ and the harpsichord, I punched up Mozart’s Concerto in A—so profoundly sad you can hardly believe it’s in a major key—and played until my cheeks were wet and I could taste salt blood from my lips.

  YEAR 1.00

  1. ABOUT TIME

  PRIME

  The first year aboard ’Home was fairly uneventful. For a month or two, people who derive satisfaction out of expecting the worst did walk around braced for disaster. Their anxieties, it turned out, were not unfounded. Just premature.

  Harry Purcell died, but not until after he had successfully orchestrated his retirement. O’Hara pursued the meek and Machiavellian course he had mapped out for her. Dan went on his binge on schedule, and recovered on schedule. John’s decline stabilized. Evy fought being transferred from Geriatrics to Emergency, and lost.

  New New faded in importance as they accelerated away from it. Partly this was the result of increasing confidence in their own institutions and methods; partly it was the increasing difficulty in communication. Every three hundred thousand kilometers meant another second of time lag between New New and ’Home. By the time they were ready to celebrate their first year in flight, New New was forty-four hours behind them.

  So when should they celebrate the anniversary? A reactionary few wanted to wait and share the celebration with New New, but they never had a chance, and knew it; they were just arguing because arguing was the national sport.

  In fact, there had been a lot of arguing over time matters. They weren’t going fast enough for Einsteinian relativity to affect everyday things, but they still had to deal with the time difference between them and New New. They could have slowed their clocks down by a fraction of an instant each minute, no problem for us computers, but that would have been pointless except as a symbolic link. It would still take four days between “How’s the weather down there?” and “Same as always.”

  A more meaningful debate over time had to do with their destination planet, Epsilon Eridani 3 (or Epsilon 3, or Epsilon, or, most commonly, “the planet”): Its day was eighteen hours, thirty-two minutes long. Ultimately, their clocks would have to reflect this reality, and probably not by resetting each clock to midnight at half-pas
t six. (John Ogelby wrote a tongue-in-cheek article defending that idea, which some people took at face value.)

  Traditionalists wanted to keep the sixty-minute/twenty-four hour clock, which you could do if you cut the duration of a second down to 0.77222 of a “real” second—it would be confusing at first, but it would certainly make the day go by faster.

  Most of the scientists were “Decimalists,” arguing that as long as you were redefining the second, you might as well redefine everything. If you made your second about two thirds of an Earth second, you could have a day of ten 100-minute hours, each minute a hundred of those quick little seconds. The advantage of this was obvious to scientist, though it would be a little hard to draw clocks freehand.

  Of course common sense, and inertia, prevailed, and the time continued to be what the clock said it was. New New was just shifting time zones and Epsilon was, after all, a century away. A century of incessant bickering.

  2. HAPPY NEW YEAR

  Almost everybody took at least two days off for the Launch Day anniversary, one for partying and one for recovering, but of course O’Hara and her co-workers were not allowed that luxury. A daylong picnic for ten thousand people is no picnic for the people in charge of its logistics. Food and drink, music and games, places for people to sit, barriers to keep them from sitting on the daisies. Jury-rigged portable toilets to protect the daisies from excessive fertilization. First-aid stations attended by nondrinking doctors and nurses. A place for the coordinators to stand and publicly reveal that yes, by George, it has been a whole year.

  She enjoyed the challenge and liked the way the park took shape under her direction, but was not looking forward to the cleanup. She remembered the celebration a year before, and knew that half the people she needed would be off sleeping under something, or someone, and the ones who showed up would not be in top form.

  3. TORN BETWEEN TWO LOVERS

  22 September 2098 [26 Aumann 293]—Trying to be honest with this diary, not sin by omission. Not omit any sins.

  Start out with adultery. (Have I ever typed that word before? It looks funny, as if it were the opposite of childishness.) A man I’ve known all my life made an interesting and specific proposition, and I turned him down, and then I took him up on it.

  It’s odd how a couple of weeks of frantic work led up to a sudden shortage of it. I guess that means we did it right. Once the anniversary party got started, I just sort of walked around the park enjoying the sight of other people having fun. My caller never beeped.

  I felt conspicuous. A sartorial genius back in Start-up had come up with the bright idea of providing special white outfits for the Coordinators and Cabinet to wear during ceremonial occasions. Some of us feel like Moby Dick wearing white. (Usually when I go to the laundry I select black or bluejean, lavender if I’m in a frisky mood. Twenty years ago someone said it looked good with my hair color.)

  I was watching a tetherball game, mildly resentful of the players’ teenage exuberance. The annoyance was partly professional—if you break that cord, do you think we can send out for a new one?—but mostly it was an irrational longing to be young and confused and seething with hormones. And who should present himself but good old nothis-realname Tom.

  I vaguely remembered having had sex a few times with Tom back in my butterfly days. That’s a distinction he probably shared with a third of the males in my age group in New New. For about a year and a half, between losing Charlie Devon and meeting Daniel, I’d go along with anybody who had a pointable penis and didn’t smell too revolting.

  We chatted for a while, watching the kids. Then, without any sexual preamble, he asked whether I remembered the time he had shared me with another man, and how about doing it again?

  I did remember, and the memory gave me a special pang of longing. It can be awkward and uncomfortable and hilarious, two on one, but it certainly does make you feel wanted. I hadn’t done it since I got married.

  (People will make assumptions when they find out you have two husbands and a wife. John and Dan are both groundhogs, though, very conservative sexually, and as far as I know, Evy doesn’t have any lesbian itches. I’m not sure what I would do if she asked. I had sex with women a few times when I was eighteen, to keep Charlie happy, but never showed any real talent for it. John and Dan would be uncomfortable about Evy and me getting together, anyhow.)

  So I told Tom that I was flattered—no lie, since I was feeling so unattractive—but that my emotional life was too complicated already. His answer to that was “Who’s talking about emotions?” I dismissed him with a kiss and a squeeze, and he wandered off, looking, I assumed, for some more willing two-holed relic from school days. But the seed was planted, so to speak.

  I hadn’t been drinking or eating because at 2130 it was my turn to play the clarinet for an hour down at the dance floor, and saliva doesn’t help your music. It was mostly mainstream stuff from the past decade, not challenging, but there were a couple of New African pieces, post-Ajimbo, that changed key signature and tempo about every other measure. Probably easier to play than to dance to. I also did alto sax on two pieces, glad not to have solos. The embouchure, the way you hold your lips, is a lot different, and I hadn’t practiced it recently.

  Most of it was sight-reading, so I didn’t pay much attention to the people dancing or listening. I did notice Dan, though, loping along with wide-eyed concentration. That meant that he’d drunk too much too early, and had popped an Alcoterm to burn it off. So he’d be wide awake for at least twenty-four hours—good thinking, Dan. When everybody else wakes up, you’ll collapse.

  Between pieces I saw that Dan was hovering over some librarian whose name I couldn’t remember. Small, girlish, vivacious. I wasn’t surprised when they left together during the next number, but was a little disappointed. A reliable side effect of Alcoterm is priapism, and I had been looking forward to helping him with it.

  Pleasant surprise: when my shift was over, Tom was waiting for me. Good instincts. I said let’s go. On the way up to the fuckhuts, feeling deliciously wicked, I buzzed Zdenek and told him he was in charge; don’t call me unless it’s a real emergency.

  The other gentleman, I’ll call him Oscar, after Wilde, was waiting impatiently for us at the Level 0 exit, with a two-hour sauna pass that was twenty minutes gone.

  He was more interested in Tom than in me. A pity; he was a big slab of a guy, about twenty, handsome in that brooding self-absorbed way that doesn’t last. I would have liked to hold on to him for the duration, but he was pretty obviously not excited by vaginas. Tom was, so I got his flabby and balding personage—exactly my age, I couldn’t avoid thinking.

  I was surprised to find that three people fucking don’t bounce off the padded walls as frequently as a pair does. It probably has something to do with the moment of inertia. Maybe I should ask Sandor. He wouldn’t even blink.

  I felt sort of like a referee, or moderator. A not-too-passive receptacle for their simultaneous orgasms. By then I was a couple of orgasms ahead, though, so couldn’t complain.

  Afterward we talked and caressed for a while, luxuriating in the zero gee and warm dim rosy glow of the small room. Oscar gave me a couple of unambiguous looks, so I said I had to go back to being ringmaster of this circus; dressed, and left them to their own two devices.

  It was fun to have sex with relative strangers again. As opposed to strange relatives. Maybe I should do it every time Dan does. Get plenty of exercise.

  I didn’t go straight back down to the park, but detoured through the Level 2 gym to shower and sit for a while in the whirlpool. I’ll be sitting carefully for a few days. (Definitely out of practice with that practice. John or Dan would wilt at the thought of anal intercourse, being from Earth. You can die of it there—or could die of it, when they were growing up. All of the AIDS carriers were probably killed off by the “death,” the plague left over from biological warfare.)

  I was thumbed at three times in ten minutes, by men I didn’t know. Maybe it was the alert way
I was sitting. I would’ve been tempted by one of them if there wasn’t so much work ahead, just to have three in one day again. Who’s getting old?

  Two groups dressed and left, and, abruptly alone, I was hit by a sudden spasm of helpless anomie. Emotional exhaustion. What you need, girl, is a nice vacation. Difficult under the circumstances. If you can stick it out for another ninety-seven years, you’ll have a whole new world to explore.

  I punched up the schedule and found that there was a twenty-minute VR vacancy. I had eighteen minutes’ credit, so I went down and wired up for the random abstraction mode. The first “place” was uncomfortable, walking naked through fuzzy shoulder-high bushes with thorns, breathing garlic and roses, but then it was a warm amniotic universe where blind soft things bumped up against you and explored with rubbery lips. Then a striped universe, black and white, bands of hot and cold that cut through flesh and organ and bone as you moved. Then I was sitting in the booth sweating, wishing I hadn’t done it alone. I was used to talking it over with Dan afterward.

  Every animal is sad after intercourse, some old Roman said. This animal was also tired and hungry. I went on down to the park and assembled a weird sandwich out of the impoverished wreckage of the buffet table and washed it down with some toxic but resuscitating coffee. Told Zdenek that I would take charge until three, then would roust up Christensen to watch over things till six. Then at eight we would all start turning the place back into a park.

  It was a quarter to midnight, and the party was pretty lively, but still under control. The wine and beer taps would dry up at twelve, so there were predictable lines of people holding two cups. A lot of horse trading with ration cards. Two colas for a beer, three? The actual alcoholics had come prepared, of course, with shine or boo or schnapps or fuel.