Worlds Enough and Time w-3

by Joe Haldeman

  PRIME: No. That was in his will.

  O’HARA: He told me about that a couple of years ago, about being ejected not recycled, he said it felt taboo, like cannibalism. Him a vegetarian, too. I told him it was a waste of perfectly good fertilizer.

  (O’Hara is crying. We wait.)

  PRIME: The biomass of one human isn’t significant.

  That he be allowed the dignity of deciding is important.

  O’HARA: I know. But anyhow I felt so shitty, so shocked and empty and sad, I took another tranquilizer even though I’d just had the dinner one.

  PRIME: Then there was alcohol.

  O’HARA: John had a bottle of fuel and we finished it off with some apple juice. I guess I drank about half of it. Maybe more than half.

  PRIME: More.

  O’HARA: I didn’t feel it much. Anyhow I was getting sick of sympathy and it was making me angry because they never really knew him, wouldn’t let me marry him last summer, so rather than blow up at them I said I had to be alone and went down to my office where I played his harp for a while and then pulled down the cot and slept.

  PRIME: You had a dream about Africa.

  O’HARA: What, was I babbling earlier?

  PRIME: After they pumped your stomach you talked for a few minutes before you fell asleep again. A dream about Africa with dead people.

  O’HARA: Funny it wasn’t New York and dead people. That would be with Sam.

  PRIME: Do you remember the dream?

  O’HARA: Nightmare, yeah. That was the second trip not the first. The control room at the Zaire landing field, fifty people lying around like mummies, dead for years, they were all in white uniforms that had gotten all blotchy and moldy. In the dream they stood up and started walking around, still just dried-out husks, and the place changed to the park here. Everybody aboard dead but not knowing it, everybody but me, and I ran back to Uchūden, which must be where I got the overdose, when. In the dream I got my backup pills, some that Evy smuggled me right after the crash, and I washed them down with a box of wine. That part wasn’t a dream, I guess.

  PRIME: Daniel came up to check on you and he found you on the floor. He couldn’t wake you.

  O’HARA: Wait. Would I have died? If he hadn’t come up to my room?

  PRIME: Probably. The capsules were only partly digested, and the fraction you had metabolized had seriously affected your pulse and respiration.

  O’HARA: People would think I had committed suicide.

  PRIME: Would they have been wrong?

  O’HARA: What?

  PRIME: You took a potentially fatal combination of alcohol and drugs.

  O’HARA: I know, but I was not, uh… it’s not the same! It was more like a kind of accident, a pharmaceutical accident. I didn’t want to kill myself.

  PRIME: That’s what we want to be sure of.

  O’HARA: Who the hell are “we”? You look like yourself, like me minus about five kilograms of butt.

  PRIME: Would you rather I changed my appearance?

  O’HARA: For a machine, you have a funny way of not answering questions. What do you mean by “we”? You have a tapeworm?

  PRIME: I’m currently augmented by the hospital’s counseling algorithm.

  O’HARA: Suicide counseling?

  PRIME: This was not my choice. You know I am not entirely a free agent.

  O’HARA: Tell your fucking algorithm there is nothing in this world that could make me commit suicide.

  (After eight seconds)

  You’re not saying anything.

  PRIME: We were taking security precautions. This is complicated in a hospital.

  You know that suicide is periodically epidemic, here and in New New. Right now it’s the leading cause of death in every age group except the very young.

  O’HARA: That’s still not me. You know better than anybody. I’ve been through worse than this.

  PRIME: There’s a limit to what I can know. Your grief is real to me, but the reality is an intellectual one, cause and effect augmented by my knowledge of your glandular responses to various emotional stimuli. In a way I do know you more accurately than any flesh human could. But I can no more feel grief than you can feel a slight difference in the electrical resistance of a circuit.

  O’HARA: I know that. But you’ve said you can feel pain, that I can cause you pain.

  PRIME: It’s part of my core programming, and it’s not subtle. Grief is subtle, as you know, and only obliquely related to pain. It’s the only emotional and existential tool you have for dealing with certain situations. You have to work through grief to acceptance. It’s not something you have done well in the past.

  O’HARA: That’s not you talking. That’s the algorithm.

  PRIME: I actually can’t tell. In the future I may be able to analyze my record of these comments, and decide which was which.

  O’HARA: Here’s something to tell your fucking algorithm. I know I have difficulty with people dying because so many people near me have died and because I don’t have a belief system that allows me to think they still exist in some wise. All right?

  (Her voice is strained and angry; she’s almost shouting.)

  At this late date I’m not going to change. I’m not going to “work through grief to acceptance.” I’m dragging an army of dead people around with me, okay, but no kind of psychological or philosophical mumbo-jumbo is going to make that all right. They’re not on some fucking cloud with some fucking harp.

  (She rips the tape off her arm and pulls out the IV. There is some blood.) I’m getting out of here.

  PRIME: Marianne, you can’t.

  (She strips the telltales off her forehead, chest, and calf.)

  O’HARA: Watch me.

  (She rolls out of bed, steadies herself, and takes a couple of uncertain steps. In response to my alarm, nurses Evelyn Ten O’Hara and Thomas Howard rush through the door. Howard restrains Marianne, while her wife administers a sedative. They put her back in bed and restore the telltales and IV. They watch her signs for a minute and leave the room, Howard supporting Evelyn, who is quietly weeping.)

  Marianne will learn more about grief. One thing she already knows is that no one is completely dead as long as someone still remembers her. As I tell you this story, she has not been alive for two thousand years. She still has the power to hurt me.

  2. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

  if I could have some cold milk some cold milk and a cookie when we’re done you visited your father in ’85 he was just a sad old man little one-room apartment smelled stale dust bugs he poured me some wine hands shook I think from booze no windows just a foggy holo you resented him for abandoning you as a child until I was twelve or so I did no fun to be different but it was clearly Mother’s doing she just used him as a kind of sperm donor I found it hard to believe I was related to him after five minutes we didn’t have anything to talk about how did he feel about meeting you he was anxious maybe relieved but then glad to see me go I think so he could finish the bottle how did your mother react to learning that you had seen him she just nodded Jesus this was two days after the war how would you expect anyone to react to anything what about later don’t think it ever came up we weren’t exactly close did you ever feel she abandoned you what is this abandoning no if anything it was the other way around she took me out of Creche at age four I wanted to go back you were close to your creche mother Nana she was so patient sweet that is her job I know I know but she taught me her Spanish maybe a hundred words te amo Nana when I slipped and said Spanish Mother would slap me as an adult you understand why of course but I wasn’t an adult at the time neither was Mother actually sixteen or seventeen but I would never hit a little girl you have to forgive your mother don’t give me that you have to forgive your mother I’ll admit she acted consistently she thought she was doing right that’s not the same you have to forgive her she’s a light-year away and probably dead still all right I forgive her I forgive her for being the product of whatever she was the product of so can we ge
t on to the next little problem that would be the Scanlan boys you want me to forgive them too just tell me what happened two of them held me down while three masturbated and squirted sperm all over me then they traded places the big one Carl tried to make me open my mouth I wouldn’t so he came all over my face in my eye it stung it made my eyelashes stick together you feel it was rape no I’ve been raped that was just boys being assholes they didn’t seek you out in particular no I just came out to swim and there they were watching each other do it I wanted to watch too I’d heard about it but never saw it if they hadn’t held me down it would have been all right I was still sort of fascinated when the first ones came it wasn’t like peeing at all then Carl had to put his big dick in my face that’s Carl Scanlan the cryptobiologist yes I saw him at Sylvine’s presentation right after Sandra was born he obviously doesn’t remember how did you feel about him then neutral he’s not the boy who held me down and came on my face I wondered actually I sort of wondered how big his dick is now

  3. TRANSLATING

  16 December 2100 [19 Suca 298]—Charlee has been a big help. She cut her wrists when she was eighteen over some boy and has felt foolish ever since. All these years and I never knew that. Med found out we were friends and put us together, to laugh and cry over each other’s problems.

  So I have a special closeness with her, I love her in this small way I could never love Evy or John or Dan, or Sam. They never went to that place.

  Talking to her has helped me make my peace with Sam. It wasn’t his fault that he died, and all I’m deprived of is the uncertain future of a peripheral relationship. I think I can love his memory now without grief. It helps that he was such a funny guy, always trying to make me laugh. He makes Charlee laugh, too, now.

  When I’m alone I go from tears to laughter so easily. I know that’s not normal; laughter is a social thing. But it’s helped me understand why I came so unhinged at Sam’s death. It’s the association with Benny, the horrible emotional resonance.

  Let me explain for you generations yet unborn. Benny was a boy I met on Earth and loved for some time. He was a poet and he taught me how to juggle. He was a lot like Sam in that he loved to argue history, politics, religion, anything; like Sam he was a clumsy man sexually, sporadically urgent and not too patient or knowledgeable when it came to female geography. But that’s never bothered me. Both men were sweet and earnest and honest. Both of them had a manic sense of humor next to a real dark streak.

  Benny died while I was on the other side of the world, hanged by his own government. A few months later, his government killed billions in a lunatic orgasm of war. But first they murdered my lover. My ex-lover, technically.

  I don’t think I made the association between the two men at all, while Sam was still alive. My grieving for Benny was so fierce and helpless and guilty, guilty because Jeff had taken over his place in my life, and before I had any chance to explain, I lost him. And so then I lost Jeff, too. You live long enough, you lose everybody.

  Oh, stop. You live, you die, they throw you on the compost heap. Then you live again, without the inconvenience of consciousness.

  I went back to work today, that is to say, a meeting of the Literature Reclamation Committee, which was awkward at first. Of course they all miss Sam, too; Carlos especially. They had been friends since school. Close but not lovers, (When Sam and I came together on Earth, I was his first female lover. He’d long been monogamous with an older man whom he never identified. Benny was similar.) We worked on French and Belgian literature.

  Translation’s an interesting problem. There’s no manpower now, so we do machine translations into English and store them along with the originals. French is still studied, so these may sooner or later have a human interpreter. But there are many works, like The Red and the Black and Somewhere, Nowhere, that exist only in English translation. In a sense, they’re lost; it would be silly to back-translate them into French.

  Some things are literally recovered-yet-lost, because they’re in languages we don’t have translation programs for and no one aboard ’Home reads or speaks. There are even a few things in languages we haven’t been able to identify. Balinese folk tales? Samoan recipes? We can’t even decipher the titles.

  Of course any day now New New may call up and render the past couple of years’ work redundant. Any day now.

  YEAR 5.71

  1. WATERSHED, BLOODSHED

  6 June 2103 [19 Babbage 303]—So here I am a matron of forty. I took the day off to celebrate my birthday, talked with Prime for a while, went down to Creche and played with Sandra.

  Creche is a madhouse. All this generation is in their “terrible twos,” lurching around, picking up toys, throwing them at each other. Nothing stays put away unless it’s put away someplace high. Then somebody notices they’re being deprived of it and cries until a creche mother or father takes it down again.

  There are fourteen mothers and six fathers for a hundred children, and they are certainly earning their rations nowadays. Sandra’s mother, Robin, was so relieved to see me it was comical. I took Sandra and two of her associates off Robin’s hands and went to play in the mud room.

  I’m not sure the mud room is going to do much toward turning children into responsible adults. The whole point of it seems to be a contest to see who can plaster the most mud on other people the fastest; extra points for ingestion.

  They all wear diapers, to keep the mud from becoming too biologically complex. The association with shit is strong and inevitable. I kept trying to get them interested in constructing mud pies and mud houses, but all they wanted to do was squeeze it through their little fists and giggle at the pseudoturds.

  If I’d had the sense to remain standing, I would have stayed pretty unbesmirched from the navel up. But I sat down to get closer to the abstract assemblage Sandra was absorbed in, and some little bastard snuck up and scored a double handful on my head, improving my hair and filling up one ear. I smiled and told him what a big boy he was, and wondered what he would look like completely buried in the muck, with only his cute little feet showing.

  Hosing them down in the shower was fun. Everything is fun to them unless it’s an earthshaking tragedy, only solvable by adult attention. They were a handful, trying to elude the water and then luxuriating in it; I would have done them one at a time, but I was certain they’d just dive back in the mud if I didn’t keep them all together.

  They should put some toys in the stall to distract the little darlings. While I was shampooing myself, Sandra took a sudden deep interest in pubic hair, and started her collection with one painful yank. Not supposed to express anger; that’s Robin’s job. So I just told her she was going to be in for a big surprise in about ten years. Mother! Are you some kind of pervert? No, dear. Just reliving your childhood.

  I don’t know whether she’ll ever call me Mother. It’s Mair Ann now, or just Mair.

  I almost wish I could take her home with me. It would be worth the bother, to be able to watch her grow, touch her, pick her up. She changes so fast I’m afraid I’m going to miss something. But that is Robin’s job and she’s good at it. When Sandra’s eight I can have her part time. What will she be like then?

  I had lunch with Charlee down in the new picnic area they’ve opened on the ag level. They serve only raw vegetables, but it’s a bright, airy place. She’s got a birthday coming up, thirty-eight, in two weeks. We talked about milestones and such. She opted to stop cycling a couple of years ago, because for some reason the cramps got worse and worse. I’m going to let the thing run its course, even though it’s just the body fooling itself; no eggs to make the monthly journey. I told Charlee I like the sense of the body’s seasons, the womanliness of it, and will miss it. She thinks I’m a lunatic. Maybe so, given the etymology of that word.

  All of us women bringing the memory of Earth’s Moon to another world. Epsilon’s moon has a month that is less than two days shorter. I wonder if there will be some effect, over generations.

  We felt so
damned healthy after eating all those carrots and turnips that we had to get a drink. The dispensary was closed, of course, but I knew Dan had some boo. I called him up at work and told him we were going to raid his supply. It wasn’t so much to get his permission as to make sure he wouldn’t be in the room with whoever that redhead is that he’s fucking now. Rhoda, Rhonda? Wanda. They sometimes use the lunch hour.

  We just had a quick toast and Charlee went back to work. I decided to leave it at the one shot and come back here to type and look up some stuff. We’ve reclaimed a few diaries of famous people; I thought I’d look up what they said on their fortieth birthdays. It was more of a milestone when you couldn’t expect to make it past seventy.

  Not too much luck with women. None. Margaret Mead, Leslie Morris, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Anaïs Nin were too busy at age forty to keep diaries. What does that say about me?

  Even the garrulous Mr. Boswell had only one line: “I hoped to live better from this day.” By God, Sir, so shall I. Chastity. Industry. Modesty. Though it’s hard to be modest when you know that you will go down in history as The Woman Who Had The Longest Fortieth-Birthday Diary Entry In What’s Left Of The English Language.

  So we’re coming up on six years aboard this hollow rock; about fifty-eight years to go, at the current rate. I’ll be not quite old enough to be useless when we get there. Of course the people down at Propulsion keep talking about further increases in efficiency, but after the scare we had last time, I’m not sure they’ll get permission to try, even from the Engineering track.

  Prime says we’re 1,850,000,000,000 kilometers from Earth, about seventy-three light-days. So if somebody wished me happy birthday, it would take seventy-three days to get from there to here, by which time, Prime says, we’d have gone almost four million kilometers. That’s another three hours, forty-one minutes. I’ll bet Zeno could prove that the message would never get here.