Worlds Enough and Time w-3

by Joe Haldeman

  The net result was that ’Home experienced no significant decline in work accomplished by losing them. The eighty-eight people gone off to wherever the Church of the Eternal Now was had added to and subtracted from productivity in about equal measure.

  YEAR 11.07

  1. GROWING PAINS

  15 October 2108 [1 Lao Tse 315]—What do they feed those children, sex hormones? Sandra’s starting to sprout breasts. Talking about menarche. Put a cork in it, girl. She hasn’t even had time to be a girl!

  Of course she’s anxious about being the youngest. The oldest of the Old Guard are ancient crones of ten. But how could worrying about that cause her to grow breasts? (Evy says the record age is eight, so I guess I should be thankful for small favors.)

  Mother was such a bitch about the way I delayed menarche. Trying not to overcompensate. Sure, honey, if you want to go from blocks to cocks in seven years, what business is it of mine?

  Let’s separate this out into factors:

  1. Concern about my own age. I’m not old enough to have a pubescent daughter. Me a potential grandmother? (And what if Sandra elects for parthenogenesis? A hall of mirrors.)

  2. Concern about her emotional maturity. She’s so moody now, quick to laugh or cry. I think a boy could hurt her deeply without knowing it, without meaning to.

  3. Concern about her studies. She’s not all that interested in academics, and will be much less so once she starts with boys. (Footnote—a constant and increasing disappointment, but be fair. She might be as bookish as I was, if she had as many books.)

  4. It’s perverse. It really is, little girls and little boys. If everybody’s doing it, then everybody’s perverse!

  5. Selfishness. I don’t want to share her love more than I already do. Bad enough that she loves Uncle John more than me. But who wouldn’t?

  Maybe it’s mortality rather than age as such. I don’t think I mind being older. It makes a lot of things easier. But as she moves toward the marriage bed, I move toward the grave.

  How poetical. I’ll leave it, though.

  2. LONG-DISTANCE CALL

  Newhome continually checked a wide range of frequencies sternward, hoping for a message or even some manmade electronic noise from New New. On 19 October 2108 [6 Lao Tse 315], they got a sudden strong message at the 25.7-centimeter line (which was the standard 21-centimeter line, redshifted by their velocity relative to Earth), but not from New New.

  Sixty seconds of warbling carrier wave, then this message repeated ten times:

  Earth calling the starship. Earth calling the starship. This is Key West, Florida, station WROK, broadcasting at a frequency they call the water hole, 1420 megahertz, 21 centimeters. This message will be repeated ten times, and then we will switch to tightbeam video flatscreen on a composite signal from 54 to 60 megahertz, audio backup at 1420. We’ll repeat the whole thing for a couple of weeks, and will expect a reply in a couple of years, same frequencies.Earth calling the starship…

  When the flatscreen flickered to life, it showed a cadaverous balding man, staring nervously into the camera. Behind him, palm trees swayed in a light breeze, seagulls floated.

  STORM: I hope you all are getting this. We don’t know how much power it takes to get out there or how good we’re focused on you.

  My name’s Storm. I’m the mayor of Key West and the governor of Dixie. That’s basically Florida and what used to be Georgia and Miss’ippi.

  (Nods to somebody OFF)

  Yeah, and part of Lou’siana too, but we ain’t heard from them in months. They were gettin’ flooded.

  This is sometime in October 2107. It’s a long story as to why we don’t know exactly what the date is.

  Anyhow, more about that later. We got things pretty much up and running. Even power to spare for this kinda thing, though most people don’t think there’s no one up there.

  What the hell happened to New New York? If you know. They stopped broadcasting here about ten, eleven years ago—

  (Someone OFF speaks; Storm says, “Yeah, yeah.”) Exactly one year after you left, if we were counting right. So it must of had something to do with you. Maybe you did it, somehow. Hope not. Anyhow, we could sure use their help now, so if you know anything about it, let us know.

  Anyhow, this here’s Healer. He’s the one who started this whole thing.

  The camera pans around jerkily to a big man in his late fifties, sunbaked skin dark against a shock of white beard and long, flowing white hair. There’s a radio telescope dish in the background.

  HAWKINGS: My actual name is Jeff Hawkings. With any luck, I should know one of you. Hi, Marianne. Long time no see.

  Key West was an oasis after the war, with water, food, and power independent of the American mainland. The ubiquitous biological agent, what we called the “death,” was here as everywhere, until New New York sent us the antigen that wiped it out. I brought it down south; that’s why they call me Healer.

  Not that simple, actually. There was unrest, a power struggle, a bizarre belief system that took over most of Dixie and still has its adherents. Guess I told you about them back in ’90, ’91, when 1 got through to Marianne from Plant City. The Mansonites; they’re still around, but on the wane. Fortunately. Murder and cannibalism are sacraments to them. We try to stay out of their way.

  We need help. Trying to rebuild the world here; trying not to repeat too many mistakes. Reinventing the wheel several times a week, I’m sure.

  As you know, the death killed almost all adults; the only grown-ups who survived were giants like me, people with acromegaly. Most of us are mentally retarded. I may be the only person on this planet with a bachelor’s degree.

  Which is why we so desperately need you. Information. Training. We’re surrounded by technological wonders and nobody knows how they work, let alone how to fix them if they break.

  We weren’t able to get anything from New New York. We picked up a lot of radio noise from them until they stopped dead. But we were still a couple of years away from being able to broadcast then.

  That B.A. isn’t very useful: Political Science, with some graduate work in forensics and management. No real science. I can barely do algebra; calculus is just a word to me. My main function here is teaching, but I can’t teach anybody anything technical.

  There are bright kids here and they can figure out a lot on their own—one of them got this transmitter going and pointed at you—but they need to talk to real engineers and scientists, even with a twoor three-year time lag.

  There may be many other enclaves like this somewhere in the world, but so far we haven’t heard of them. We have made contact with two other radio transmitters: one in Brazil and one in Poland. So far we haven’t done much but exchange names and locations. We desperately need language texts, or at least dictionaries, in Polish and Portuguese.

  Anyhow, you can see the fix we’re in. The only books we have are old-fashioned paper ones. Most of the information in them is inapplicable or just plain wrong. We desperately need to copy things from your up-to-date library.

  I’m sure that somewhere on this planet we’ll find a large electronic library intact, like a physical backup to the Library of Congress—I know that the actual hadron matrix for something like that is about the size of a small floater, and there are dozens of copies around the country—but as things stand right now, even if we found one, we wouldn’t be able to tap it.

  Let me close off on a personal note. We saw the starship leave back in ’97. That was fast work; I have some idea of how huge a project it was, and I suspect you were in a hurry because you were afraid of another war, afraid of Earth.

  That seems ludicrous on the face of it, since we’re little more than a band of savages capering around the mysterious remnants of an advanced civilization. We lack both knowledge and context. Context is the personal part.

  (He gestures at the radio telescope behind him.) The boys and girls who fixed up that dish lived around it for years without even knowing what it was. I had to tell
them. Then they had to learn to read, and find books; eventually, books about electronics.

  People with my disorder don’t live too long. What will happen after I’m dead? What obvious things are going to be overlooked forever, because there’s nobody alive who remembers real life, life before the war?

  Assuming something terrible did happen, and New New York is dead—then you people are the only human link that Earth will have with its past. You’re going to have to supply the context, if Earth is going to be rebuilt.

  Don’t be afraid of us. The madmen, the mad governments, who started the war are memories now, less than memories. This is a planet of innocent children. They need your help to survive.

  Hope I’m not talking to empty space. We had to make various assumptions—that your target star was still Epsilon Eridani, that you would be listening to the 21-centimeter line, 1420 megahertz. That you still survive.

  Marianne… uh, what can I say? I hope to hear from you in a couple of years. (Laughs) Hope you’re enjoying your trip. Life is not bad here, considering.

  I must look awful strange. (Rubs his beard) You remember me as a young man—and in my mind you’re still my twenty-four-year-old bride, though twice that time has passed for you. Not quite twice for you, I guess, with relativity.

  I never fathered any children, of course, though I’ve raised a few. Hope you have, too.

  Love you still.

  3. FOUR NOVELS

  PRIME

  The ten years that followed renewed contact with Earth were very interesting for O’Hara and for Newhome in general, but I must necessarily present them here in concentrated form. When I relate this story to other machine intelligences, these ten years are given about the same amount of attention as any other ten in O’Hara’s centuryplus. This document, however, is limited by various storytelling constraints having to do with unity and balance.

  In fact, one could compose several interlocking novels covering this ten-year span, and each one would be a worthy chronicle. But to put them inside another novel would be a topological impossibility. So I will relate them in abbreviated form, each one illuminated by an entry from O’Hara’s diary, or a similar document.

  THE NOVEL OF JOHN’S DISASTER

  John Ogelby was surprised to find out how much he enjoyed being a father, or uncle, or grandfather-figure. Nineteen years older than O’Hara, he was sixty-three when Sandra left the creche and moved into their lives.

  Like Daniel, he had assumed that Sandra was going to be O’Hara’s project, with himself a more or less inactive bystander. The little girl saw things differently, though.

  Children usually were fascinated by John, since they were fascinated by the strange, and John looked like a creature out of a fairy tale. He’d grown used to their stares and questions long before he emigrated from Ireland to New New, seeking low gravity to ease the pain of his twisted back. Birth defects were rare in New New, but deformation was not, since space is unforgiving, and will repay a moment’s inattention with a limb torn off, or a face. So children were always asking him what did he do to get like that?

  It was a question he had asked, himself, when he was young. His parent’s assurances that God had done it to test his faith did not leave him well disposed toward God. John gave up on religion long before he went off to Trinity, to Cambridge, to the Cape and space.

  Sandra hadn’t asked him that question, since her mother had prepared her. She did have other questions, as they got to know each other: can’t they fix it? (They could have, when he was young, if there had been money.) Why’d they let him be born? (Abortion was illegal at the time and place of his birth.) Did he have brothers or sisters with bad backs? (No, his father had practiced a time-honored form of birth control: leaving with another woman.) Did he ever wish he hadn’t been born? (Everybody does, sometimes, if they live long enough.)

  John wasn’t sure how to act around children. His own childhood had not given him any reason to like the little bastards, so he had avoided them all his life, which had required small effort in New New and none at all in the starship, at least until they geared up the baby factory. As Sandra approached the age of eight, he resigned himself to the occasional interference with his orderly life. But nothing prepared him for falling in love.

  It was a mutual chemistry of discovery and fascination. The adult males in Sandra’s life, her creche fathers, were all cast from the same mold: self-assured, endlessly patient, mildly but consistently authoritarian. Uncle John was like a different species. He never told her what to do. He was likely to answer a question with another question, or a paradox. He was sarcastic, oblique, darkly humorous but always serious.

  Usually when Sandra talked to adults she rightly sensed they were only partly there. Uncle John gave her all of his attention, as if studying her, and talked to her carefully but without condescension. He was real to her in a constant way that no other grown-up, not even her mother, had ever been.

  John didn’t try to analyze his fascination with her beyond the obvious fact that she was a genetic duplicate of the woman he loved most, the woman who had rescued him from a life of disconnection, alienation, self-destruction. She had novelty value, too, and presented a learning experience, since he had never watched a child grow. She seemed unusually alert and creative, but he admitted to a lack of comparative data.

  They met after dinner, without O’Hara, every Monday and Thursday. John would drill her on the week’s arithmetic lesson and they would play a game of checkers or Owari. He promised to teach her chess when she turned twelve—and knew from O’Hara that she was secretly studying it on her own.

  She never had the chance to surprise him.

  12 July 2110 [27 Hippocrates 2110]—John had a stroke day before yesterday. Sygoda called me asking if something was wrong; he’d missed a staff conference and didn’t respond to his keyboard, though it was busy. I thought he had probably left it on and, forgetting about the conference, had taken a nap. The beeper won’t wake him if he’s really sawing wood.

  I was up in zero gee anyhow, staying out of the engineers’ way while they were measuring for a new murderball court, so I ducked down to his flat.

  He was lying by the toilet, where he had vomited. His eyes were open, but all he could say was my name and “shit,” over and over. I called the ER and got him a drink of water, on which he almost choked. He was waving his left arm around initially, but had calmed down by the time the medics got there. They both said they thought it was a stroke, but wanted a doctor’s opinion. They attached three diagnostic telltales, and the physician on ER duty confirmed that it was a “cerebrovascular incident,” and told them to take him to the lowgee ward without passing through high gee. I went along with them, holding his left hand. His right was stiff and cool.

  They put him in bed with an IV drip and scanned his head. They showed me a picture of a large area in his brain that was suffused with blood.

  It doesn’t look very good. In the old days he would have gone straight to nanosurgery, where an army of tiny machines would be directed to go in there and clean up, restore synapses. But nobody now can do it; we don’t even know exactly how to get the machines in and out of the brain, which has to be done with high precision.

  He’s been stable now for two days. It’s always possible that the missing nanosurgery information will come in from Key West next week or next year. There’s also a chance that he will recover some or most or all of his faculties spontaneously, as the brain reorganizes its wiring. There’s a larger chance that he’ll have another stroke and die.

  Every hour without change makes spontaneous recovery less likely. He still can’t move his right arm or leg and there is no expression on the right side of his face. He still has only two words.

  A speech therapist spent a couple of hours with him, but he just looked at her. I got him to try a keyboard once, but after half a line of gibberish, he gave up. He can’t or won’t read.

  Sandra is inconsolable. She comes to the door but can’
t get any closer without bursting into tears.

  I’m close to tears most of the time myself, but haven’t cried in his presence. I know he’s conscious of that effort and appreciates it. We communicate in small ways. Most of the medical people treat him like a vegetable, but they haven’t been married to him for twenty-four years. He’s still all there, or mostly there, in some sense, at least emotion if not intellect. It’s so sad, so unfair. A fine reward for a lifetime of brave coping.

  Daniel and Evelyn and I take turns staying by his side. They want one of us there all the time for a few days, to talk to him when he wants to listen, and to report any sudden change.

  After about two weeks of no change, O’Hara was given the option of either taking John home with her or having him transferred to the Extended Care Facility. The ECF was primarily an old folks’ home, with a few younger people like John, who didn’t need a lot of medical help but did need to be fed and changed. Even if it hadn’t been at the 0.6-gee level, the ECF would have been out of the question because of the indignities O’Hara witnessed there. It was crowded and understaffed and smelled of stale urine and gastric juices. People mumbled and cried and the cube was on all the time.