Worlds Enough and Time w-3

by Joe Haldeman

  The obvious third option, cryptobiosis until nanosurgery was possible again, seemed too risky. The brain was the most delicate organ preserved, and was the locus of almost all fatalities on restoration. Sylvine Hagen said she might give John a 10 percent chance of surviving, though even if he lived, he might not have enough cerebral organization left to make nanosurgery useful. They didn’t tell John.

  What they finally did was take John back to his quartergee office, which they had converted into a sickroom. It wasn’t difficult to care for him, once he mastered the bedpan and urinal and was able to feed himself after a fashion. They rigged up an “answer board” that had the numbers from 0 to 9 and YES, NO, and MAYBE. They all had beepers that he could call with a button by his bedside, and they split up responsibility for answering his calls.

  O’Hara wound up on duty more often than Evelyn or Daniel, which was not unreasonable, since she could do most of her work from John’s console. Dan was busier than he had ever been as Coordinator, since he’d gone back to his old Earth Liaison/Engineering post when they’d begun talking to Key West, and was busy all day meeting with various specialists, working out the right way to phrase questions so that the marginally educated Earthlings could find the right answers in their old-fashioned books.

  Sandra finally overcame her sadness and fear enough to come play checkers with John. Everyone was relieved to see that he played a vicious and intelligent game. He initially refused to play Owari, because he didn’t have good enough left-hand coordination to count out the pebbles, but she pleaded and wheedled until he did it, which gave her a much better success rate than the physical therapist, whom John saw as a dangerous adversary.

  The end of John’s novel is also a beginning, which is not an unusual contrivance. It was one of those times when all three relatives were at work, so O’Hara got the beeper by default. She was annoyed, because it was an important meeting with Coordinator Montagu and the Education Committee. She said she’d be back in a few minutes.

  When there was nobody else with him, John watched a lot of cube, setting it to Random Walk until something of interest showed up. When O’Hara came in, the cube was stop-framed on a documentary about cryptobiosis, a naked man being prepped on a rolling slab. John pointed at the cube and then stabbed his answer board YES.

  O’Hara had known that this would come up sooner or later. “We looked into that, John. It would be simple murder. Or euthanasia, or suicide—you wouldn’t have a ten percent chance—”

  “Shit!” John said, and stabbed YES.

  “Even if you survived, you’d be mentally worse off—”

  He pounded YES YES YES YES. “Shit-shit!”

  O’Hara sighed. “Let me call Dr. Hagen.”

  Sylvine Hagen came down, armed with statistics and lab results and truly gruesome cube footage. John would not be convinced. O’Hara said they would have a family conference about it.

  A novelist’s prerogative would be to go inside John’s mind, and demonstrate that he was well aware of all of the conflicting factors, including the rather complex one that O’Hara and Evy and Dan and Sandra would all be greatly relieved if he were safely installed up on 2105, and their guilt at that foreknowledge of relief was the main thing standing in his way. The novelist would have John screaming silently at them Anything is better than this! I only have a tiny chance of ever functioning again, and your peasant rectitude is the only thing standing in my way!—but all I can really say is that John said the same word over and over, and kept pounding YES, no matter what they said to him.

  The solution was undramatic: recourse to law. O’Hara discussed the situation with Thomana Urey, an expert in constitutional law, and she said there was no question. John was capable of making the decision for himself, and was presumably aware of the subtleties, even though he couldn’t discuss them. He didn’t have any more “right” to cryptobiosis than anyone else did, but in standard practice the only thing that prevented a person from exercising the option had been his or her usefulness to the maintenance of Newhome. John was not currently useful to anyone—including, apparently, himself. Let him go.

  With a little guilt and a lot of relief, they did.

  THE NOVEL OF SANDRA’S SEX LIFE

  Uncle John’s stroke was one of two hard blows that marred Sandra’s eleventh year, the first being a painful and premature loss of virginity.

  O’Hara had reluctantly given Sandra permission for an early “forced” menarche, so she wouldn’t be left behind by the other girls. Predictably, a combination of natural curiosity and peer pressure had resulted in a classwide orgy of sexual experimentation, and Sandra wanted to join the party.

  It was a couple of years too early. She was small, she couldn’t relax the appropriate muscles, and her hymen was tough. The first two boys she asked were unable to penetrate her before ejaculating. The third, unusually large and strong for a twelve-year-old, succeeded, but in his enthusiasm caused a lot of pain and bleeding. Sandra withdrew from the sexual marathon the same day she entered it, hurt and bewildered, distrustful of males.

  Her mother took her to a gynecologist, who tried to comfort her with case histories, and used a little camera to show her that she wasn’t badly hurt inside. Both women urged that it would be a good idea for her to wait awhile, to heal emotionally more than physically. It might also give the boys in her peer group time to learn something about girls, so they wouldn’t be such blunt instruments. They were both supportive and nonjudgmental and made her feel like shit.

  She took her pain to Uncle John, and he said well, you did something stupid and got hurt and it hurts twice as much because you knew it was stupid when you did it, right? The creche mothers and O’Hara all wanted you to wait, but you went ahead because your desire for other kids’ approval overrode both common sense and the desire to please adults. Besides, it’s your body, et cetera, but it might not be a bad time to reflect that it’s actually two cells from your mother’s body that got loose and have sort of been going their own way, and aren’t you glad there’s no father in there to complicate things? But if you only do one stupid thing this week, it’ll be better than most of my weeks. Let’s play checkers.

  She hugged him and cried on his shoulder, and it is not just novelistic speculation to imagine that this made him feel uncomfortably nonavuncular feelings toward the little girl. He had discussed it a few days before with Daniel, while they were splitting a box of wine in the south lounge after dinner.

  JOHN: So Sandra’s going to start, um, making love next week.

  DAN: Fucking.

  JOHN: It bothers you, too.

  DAN: Like Marianne says. God, eleven? I don’t think I had pubic hair at eleven.

  JOHN: But you thought about sex.

  DAN: I don’t know. Just to wonder about it.

  JOHN: I still wonder about it. (Long pause) She’s getting to look an awful lot like Marianne.

  DAN: Surprise.

  JOHN: I mean, that bothers me sometimes. Marianne was still in her teens when we met.

  DAN: Dirty old Irishman. Incest.

  JOHN: Well, it wouldn’t really be incest—

  DAN: No, it’d be suicide. Marianne would come after you with a meat cleaver. (Pause) But I know what you mean. She’s going to break a few hearts.

  Daniel predicted wrong. Sandra’s pattern was about the same as her mother’s as a young teenager: having been introduced to sex, she decided she liked books better. She became a model student, doing assignments on time with care, volunteering for extra work, speaking up in class but not dominating. She built models and studied keyboard—including harpsichord, to her mother’s delight, once her hands were big enough. But her sex life, for several years, was nonexistent or solitary.

  For about a year when she was fourteen, she had an all-consuming crush on Hong-Loan Kim, her chess partner and swimming buddy. O’Hara was sure they were having sex (and she was right) but was too uncomfortable about lesbianism to counsel her one way or the other. Kim eventually left Sa
ndra for a man twice her age, and once Sandra got over her helpless anger, she went back to her books. But not to boys.

  Sandra was as plain-looking as her mother had been when she was young (and, like her mother, would be striking when she was older), but there was no shortage of boys vying for her attention. She knew this was just because she was a conquest, reputedly the only girl in the Old Guard who wasn’t having regular sex with at least one person, and that popularity-by-default did not boost her opinion of boys. She knew they kept lists, and heard that some of them had everybody but her on theirs. She was determined to keep it that way.

  The boy who finally won her was Jakob Ayoub, homely, short, tongue-tied, and very smart. At some level he probably evoked a memory of Uncle John. They watched each other grow up, as everybody did everybody, but didn’t become friends until they were fifteen and sixteen, when chance threw them together as lab partners in beginning chemistry class. He was clumsy with glassware but graceful with algebra, and she was the opposite, so working in tandem they were able to excel.

  All this time, O’Hara had not been exactly a doting mother, though that was due to lack of time more than a shortage of desire or ability. When Sandra was nine, O’Hara announced her candidacy for Policy Coordinator. She ran unopposed, and so became Coordinator-elect when her daughter was eleven, and stayed in office until she was seventeen. They were busy years for everybody, handling the information explosion from Key West and the sudden bombshell that the cryptobiology people handed them in 2112: with a simple alteration in technique, the period of suspended animation could be shortened to as little as twenty years, or lengthened to over one hundred, without affecting the probability of survival. This gave people a lot of options, and with the options came the need for regulation, and with regulation came dissent.

  During O’Hara’s last year in office, Sandra announced that she wanted to marry Jakob. O’Hara thought that a simple one-to-one relationship would be awfully confining, and she managed to talk them into making the marriage formally open. They did it only to humor her, both of them sure they would never have room for anyone else in their lives.

  Then they announced their other little surprise.

  THE NOVEL OF O’HARA MAINTAINING

  O’Hara had given up Jeff Hawkings for dead almost twenty years before. On Earth they had been adversaries and then lovers—and for a few days husband and wife, in an attempt to secure New New York emigration for Jeff, as the United States and then the world collapsed into total war. With strength and luck and cleverness, he got them down to the Cape in time for the last shuttles before the bombs started to fall, but by then no groundhogs, to whomever related, however valuable, could get a berth into orbit.

  He made it through the war, though, and the chaos following, and a few years later he improvised a radio link with New New. They talked a few times and then the radio station was destroyed, and O’Hara had no reason to believe that he had survived.

  So she lost him twice, and here he was again, though they were worlds and years apart. External Communications, suddenly a real committee again, let her broadcast the first reply to Key West. It was a short and stilted speech, too many eavesdroppers, followed by an hour of Jules Hammond relaying to Jeff and his people everything that was known, or could be surmised, about what had happened from the time they last were in contact until New New fell silent. The similarity of their predicaments was interesting; they could trade.

  Then the technical people talked for some hours about the sorts of knowledge they could transmit, and the sorts of things they eventually could use in return. They set up a schedule, starting five days hence, for people from each discipline to begin teaching. It was easy to calculate at what time of day we would be above Key West’s horizon, and we would broadcast constantly whenever they could hear us.

  O’Hara well understood the Machiavellian angle behind this generous giveaway of knowledge. We wanted to put them in our debt, and fast. Sooner or later the groundhogs would uncover a treasure-trove library and be able to unlock it. Then, if they were so disposed, they could transfer the data to ’Home in a few days or years, depending on their level of technology, and undo a large part of the damage New New had caused.

  If they felt they had some reason to withhold data from us, though, there was nothing we could do. We would be back where we started, with the prospect of slowly evolving mathematics, the sciences, and engineering, but with most of history, literature, and music forever lost.

  O’Hara’s first assignment in this grand dissemination of data was to teach the rules of games. That seemed less than grand, compared to the responsibilities of people delivering learned disquisitions about trigonometry or ethics, but it was arguably one of the most useful early lessons, relatively easy to follow and associated with pleasure. She brainstormed with Gunter, Lebovski, and Saijo, eliminating games with complicated pieces or rules, starting with children’s play and moving up through more elaborate games of skill and chance.

  The short transmission from Earth hadn’t given them any useful clues. Teaching children how to play jacks and marbles would be sort of cruel if there were no jacks or marbles. What simple games could they be sure had survived the cataclysm—should they teach kids how to play tag, hide-and-go-seek? (They decided against that genre, so as not to appear too ridiculous.) They gambled that durable accessories like horseshoes and balls would be available, though their demonstrations of such pastimes would look strange from a groundhog viewpoint. In a rotating frame, every pitch is a curve ball. A horseshoe’s path is a sideways-twisted parabola.

  The first dozen or so transmissions were fairly easy to set up, since they involved only simple introductions to selected pastimes. Once past the obvious, though, they had to decide between depth and breadth. They had demonstrated the basic moves and rules of chess, for instance. You could spend hundreds of hours explaining various strategies, but given only one hour of transmission each three days, would it be more constructive to spend it discussing a few classic chess openings or to start something new, relatively obscure—sketch out the rules of Parcheesi, or Texas Hold’-Em? The four of them spent much more time deciding what to teach than teaching.

  They had almost three hundred hours of fun-and-games broadcasting scheduled before they could expect the first feedback from their audience; before they found out which of their hours had been valuable and which had fruitlessly duplicated things the groundhogs already knew. There was an advantage to the lack of feedback, though, since once they had their basic plan agreed upon, it only took a few months to set up and record all of the lessons. So in January of 2109, O’Hara delivered the last lesson to External Communications and went back to business as usual.

  It was Dan’s last year in office and her last year before running. They’d long planned for her to announce her candidacy for 2112 the day after he stepped down. She would spend this last “nonpolitical” year making good impressions, mending fences, doing favors that could be called in. Of course, the political community in Newhome was so small that there was no secret as to what she was doing and why; it was a rite of passage, a genteel excruciation ritual. This was a game, as Purcell had taught her, with unwritten but not very flexible rules.

  She spent as much time with Sandra as possible, knowing that once she became Coordinator (losing the election was not an option she wanted to consider) the time wouldn’t be there. By then Sandra would be fairly independent, anyhow, at thirteen. The age her mother had become a mother!

  She took Sandra on trips to Earth and New New via the dream room. They were standard tourist matrices, but she could walk alongside her daughter and say, this bar, the Light Head, is where I met Uncle Dan; I lived down that street in New York; that statue, there weren’t so many pigeons on it when we were there, because it was winter, snow drifting into the Seine, can you smell the chestnuts? No, of course not. Nor feel the snowflakes kissing your face.

  Sandra was old enough, at ten-going-on-eleven, to recognize the dual nature of
these outings, to see how important it was to her mother both to revisit and to share the places. So although she was bored most of the time, she never complained, even though she was using up VR time that could be going for games with the other kids. That wasn’t so important; like her mother at her age, she was a loner, and not completely by choice.

  O’Hara was also going through menopause at the time, a change that she tried to welcome but couldn’t. With all her ova fried away in liquid nitrogen, the monthly cycle had always been an anachronism. She could have had it stopped at any time, and presumably could have it restarted if she cared to go through the trouble of convincing a doctor that it would be salubrious. But she wasn’t sure. Besides, there was a symmetry to the timing, her stopping when her daughter started, passing the torch, blood sisters.

  They threw a wild party for Dan and the other outgoing Senior Coordinator, Ondrej Costache, on New Year’s Eve, when their terms expired. It was the first time Dan had been actually blind drunk in six years, and although O’Hara didn’t begrudge him the binge, she wrote in her diary that she hoped it wouldn’t become a regular feature of life again. It would.

  O’Hara excused herself from the park cleanup detail the next day long enough to announce her candidacy. There was no opposition, which surprised no one, though Leona Burdine agreed to be the pro forma stalking horse. She would temporarily take over the candidacy if O’Hara died or ran off with the treasury.