by Joe Haldeman
Hilltop’s pattern of growth was eccentric. The original experimental farms were still being planted, even though they were surrounded by buildings and there was better acreage in the low land. Perhaps that was conscious planning. In my mind’s eye I could see them becoming parkland in a few decades; islands of green in the bustle of a planet’s capital city.
I still had another half of a life to look forward to. How long would it be before I remembered this primitive scene with nostalgic longing?
I’d been back three days when Dennison asked me to “give a little talk” about the experience with the eveloi. I wasn’t thrilled, but at least it was an opportunity to set the record straight.
The administration building had a whitewashed meeting room big enough to seat five hundred people on benches; half again that number showed up, lining the walls and sitting on the floor. I supposed they were starved for novelty.
The night before, I had written out descriptions of the places the creature had taken me and what it had said, mostly from my diary, adding some things the analysts got through hypnosis. (I didn’t trust those notes as much as simple memory, though what you “reveal” under hypnosis depends a lot on how the question is worded. It’s not the shortcut to truth that some people think it is, or want it to be.) I had to be vague about what the creature said, since it so rarely used actual words.
I gave an unornamented description of the experience and asked if there were any questions. There were plenty of hands raised.
“If it wasn’t a ‘test,’” Kisti Seven asked, “what would you call it? An ordeal?”
“I think it was a series of experiments. The thing was emphatic about it not being a test in the sense of something you pass or fail. But I think it may have been a test in the objective way engineers sometimes apply the word: take a piece of metal and see what happens when you stretch it, heat it, dip it in acid—you’re not judging the metal; you’re just trying to find out things about it. When you’ve learned enough, you stop. They haven’t bothered anybody else, have they?”
There was a general murmur, no, and Dennison added, “They’ve asked us questions about human nature, usually pretty direct. But nothing like what happened to you—no transporting to other worlds or shape-changing, and no pain.”
“Maybe it never actually happened,” I said, “no matter how real it felt. It could have been something like VR, but more advanced. The objective evidence, the frozen clothing and wounds I experienced, could have been caused by some agency less astounding than instantaneous starflight.”
“But you don’t feel that way,” someone said. “It was real to you.”
“Absolutely. But I wonder what would happen if you put a naive primitive into a VR template. He or she wouldn’t keep the slight link back to objective reality that you and I retain. It would be just like going to another world.”
Suddenly an eveloi appeared in front of me. “It is real, real,” the thing rasped. “Come with me.” The pink tendril floated out; I closed my eyes and accepted the sting.
I opened my eyes at the sound of screams, a huge concrete lion. After a moment I recognized it, one of the guardians of the New York Public Library. Hundreds of people were stampeding in fright from this weird apparition that had suddenly appeared, woman and unearthly creature linked. It is real to them.
I said that I was convinced. The city scene faded to a weightless pearly gray. I asked it why it hadn’t transported anybody else.
We will do that soon. One more thing.
I was suddenly back in the total black nullity that had preceded the terrible choice with Sandra. After a moment, the rough rope was in my hands again.
I said that I can’t do this. You can’t make me go through this twice.
It’s not the same. Hold on.
I gripped it and was swinging in the fiery glare, the molten river rushing below again, its heat blistering even from ten meters.
You have twenty seconds.
This time it was John’s crippled body swinging there, thick hawser bound around pipestem wrists. He stared down in wide-eyed terror.
I asked if the same thing would happen if I let go.
Yes. He will live. You may live if you can survive the experience again. If he drops he will certainly die… but then he does not have a long time to live in any case.
I asked how long.
That is not important. What you do in the next five seconds is important.
I read somewhere that the two most common last words are “Mother” and “shit.” I guess I was never that close to Mother.
AGE 100
6 January 2204 [4 Columbus 527]—Today I’m officially one hundred Earth years old, not counting cryptobiosis. Prime notes helpfully that I was born 313 actual Epsilon years ago. Thanks, Prime. Don’t feel a day over 312.
The odd thing about it is that I don’t feel all that old, if I just close my eyes and don’t try to move—or touch or hear or smell anything. Here in the cave of my mind I can still be a gawky twelve or a cocksure twenty.
By twenty-one, I was less sure of how the world worked, after leaving New New and visiting an actual planet. Full of revolutionaries and rapists.
My favorite revolutionary was Benny, the poet “benjaarons.” The first man I loved who died. As of course they all have, though not usually slain in an epiphany of injustice. Being murdered would be interesting, compared to being slowly or swiftly traduced by one’s own body. I don’t suppose at this late date I could get anyone that angry at me.
What fraction of this body is actually mine is open to debate. After the second dip in that fiery river all of my transplants had to be replaced with new transplants. And then more switchouts over the years. I do miss having a heart that beats. Sometimes the cheerful clickety-hum drives me crazy. I love the painless mechanical kidney, though, and these hard plastic teeth. It’s funny to think about your teeth outlasting you. I wonder if they’ll pass them on to someone else. They could probably get a good price. “Used by a little old lady who never got to eat anything interesting.”
I vaguely remember some poet, maybe Shakespeare, bemoaning “the calamity of so long life.” Maybe it is a calamity if you have to hang on to one set of kidneys. I see it more as a cosmic kind of whimsy, a joke not told too well.
It’s sort of like visiting an unfriendly exotic planet, this state of being older than old. Too much gravity, the air so thick it’s hard to see and hear. Your mind is quite clear, but the alien humanoids dashing around you are on a different wavelength. You are in the grip of a sinister mind force that makes you pee when you sneeze.
(The thing about the alien humanoids is a joke, you generations yet unborn. When I grew up we didn’t have actual alien humanoids everywhere.)
But it’s still worth hanging around. There have been times when I was in enough agony of one sort or another to wish myself dead. That has always been only a reaction to an overload of pain, though, rather than a decision of great existential significance. Even when the pain was emotional. I remember Raskolnikov in that Russian novel, who in all his terrible Russian misery, of which there can be no variety worse, said that if he could have only a square meter of earth to stand on, with nothing around him but impenetrable fog, forever, that would be preferable to death. I would have to agree, if only by force of logic. Death is probably restful and boring, but maybe it’s a fiery river. Maybe the old Christians were right, and I’m going to sizzle for every one of those hundred limber teenage dicks, more or less a century ago.
I guess curiosity about religion is a disease of age. I read the Jewish tale of Job the other day, not for the first time. What it seems to boil down to, so to speak, is that God makes you suffer for reasons of his own, which you (not being godlike) could never understand, so suffer and shut up. Be glad he cares enough to take an interest in your life. I should relate the tale to the eveloi the next time I contact one; I think they would find it eminently sensible. A handy guide for dealing with merely mortal creatures.
> They’re still aloof about their own affairs, although they’ve been transshifting people ever since my second test-which-was-not-a-test. Last I heard, we’d visited fifty-three planets with their help, not counting Earth and New New. We’ve exchanged envoys, or spies or whatever, with eight of those planets. In each case I’ve had to hobble ceremonially down to the Capitol and say Hello, you don’t smell bad at all, although you look like a mental disorder personified. Actually I say something less honest.
I do like the two I’ve gotten to know, especially Scriber, whom I wrote about at some length years ago. She’s also an old female biped oxygen-breathing widow. I visited her planet, a barren muddy rock going around the dim star BD 50 (BD + 50° 1725, to be formal), and can see why she enjoys her job, since it does take her away from home so much.
(Actually, of course, she hates the sun here, and rarely goes outside unless it’s raining.)
Scriber’s attitude toward aging is necessarily different from mine, since she will be transferred, literally, to a new body in a few years, a sort of brainless clone produced from one of her cells, which is how I sometimes used to feel about Sandra. Scriber’s done this nine times already, and will keep doing it until she gets assassinated, or bitten on the head by a flying viper, or struck by lightning—all of which are major worries on her lovely world. She says the record for transferrals, although it may be myth, is held by a female who supposedly went through thirty-three clones—by which time she was so befuddled she fell asleep with her face in a mud puddle and drowned. I asked her whether the story was supposed to have a moral. She said it was “Don’t fall asleep face down in a mud puddle. You will die.” I’m not sure whether she was joking.
My other alien friend is not old, at least for its kind, nor female, nor strictly bipedal, but can breathe oxygen when its diplomatic duties require the sacrifice. It doesn’t have a name, just a smell signature, something like an old sock. Oxygen makes it cough blue flames, but it controls the coughing and turns it into an approximation of human speech. This makes for a lot of give-and-take in conversation, since it has to breathe for three minutes in order to talk for one—and it does have to talk after three minutes! Otherwise the flames seek a less polite avenue of egress.
It asks a lot of questions about Earth, which it visited in its extreme youth, sometime around A.D. 1837. It was not able to establish communication, unless you consider scaring the living shit out of everybody a form of communication. It looks sort of like a metallic winged demon with horns, and breathing fire at people just wasn’t condoned in those unenlightened times.
Of course my favorite alien is Prime, more vampire than demon. We talked for a while this birthday. I asked her to appear as she used to, unclothed. For the past half-century or so, she has generally materialized wearing some modest, perhaps nostalgia-provoking, attire, I suppose to protect my feelings. I wanted to check her appearance against my memory. Thought I looked better than that—sorry, old girl. You’re pretty sexy for a cybernetic simulation.
Speaking of such things, let me go on record as admitting that I miss VR as much as anything supposedly “real.” They’ve forbidden me use of the machine ever since I had that fit a few years ago. It was the only way I could feel the world, the worlds, the way they actually are. Even when the eveloi transshift me to another planet, I have to see and hear it filtered through these dim old portals.
I really think that after 100 years, or 313, they should give you more time in the dream room, not less, not none. It clarifies your memories; helps you sort through them. After a century, you have a sufficiency of memories.
I used to visit Daniel there, dead now forty-two short years, and Sandra, gone almost fifty. His death was a hammer blow but hers was like a beheading, somehow survived. His was cancer, a few weeks of pain but time to put some things aright. Sandra was taken by the planet, a sudden volcanic eruption in the Northerlies, where she had gone with a number of her students to research, of course, vulcanism.
Oh well. Visiting dead people in VR records just keeps ghosts alive. Maybe it’s best to let them go.
It helps that I’ve been writing a diary for eighty-nine long years, off and on. But somewhere along the line I should have realized that I might live long enough to have a hundredth-birthday entry to write, and worked out something elegiac and wise to insert here. But it’s been a long time since I thought I was wise, as opposed to smart.
What I am now is still a kind of smart, but slow. When you take a long time to come up with an answer, people think it’s grave deliberation. It’s actually molasses of the synapses.
Prime reminded me that I once observed that some people age like wine, becoming complex and mellow; some age like cheese, turning sharp and finally disagreeable. Some just dry out like grass. She asked what I was. I said what I was, was too old to make generalizations like that anymore.
But it did make me think of the last taste of Earth wine I had, the bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 2075 that John saved for Launch Day. Bottled when I was twelve years old, just at its peak twenty-two years later. When did I peak?
As far as the rest of the world, worlds, are concerned, that would have been the second eveloi encounter, which had such interesting consequences. But that wasn’t me, capital Me, trading pain for pain. It was just a shared humanity, perhaps a tinge of womanhood, specifically. Though I’ve always known that if the thing had given John the choice, instead, he would have let go first. He always saw the right thing to do, and did it.
I was never given a chance to ask him about the experience. He died while I was still in a coma.
That last bottle of wine. Sam Wasserman explained it to me once, the way tastes and smells are branded in your memory, stronger than sights and sounds. Something about bypassing the hypothalamus. You could smell the intricate fruitiness of it a moment after he popped the cork, and the cool complex savor as we sipped it was beyond description. It was a magical time anyhow. Humanity leaving the womb of Earth. In that small room with John and Dan and Evelyn. It glowed with purpose, love, comradeship.
Maybe friendship bypasses the hypothalamus, too. I could measure out this long life in terms of friends, who were sometimes lovers. Who were sometimes adversaries at first, like Dennison and Purcell, which gave a special closeness later.
No one left from my generation but Charlee. We meet down at the whirlpool every afternoon, let the water lave the stiffness out while we trade gossip, sometimes about the living. And sometimes talk about serious things, although at this age it’s more important to keep each other laughing.
I fight the selfish wish to die first, because I dread the disconnection, the isolation, that her death is going to bring. But my death would leave her even more alone. She doesn’t have anyone like Prime to keep her company.
What can you say about a person whose most constant friend is a mirror? A trick mirror, of herself when young. Prime argues that that’s nonsense. She’s been a mature individual for much longer than me, since she started at twenty-nine and didn’t spend forty years as a TV dinner. (That term would be obscure even on Earth now; a primitive kind of frozen food.)
If she were less kind she might also point out that her synapses don’t have to slog through a century’s worth of accumulated toxins, so she is in fact at the same time older and younger than I am, both of those in the positive senses.
Of course there are things she can never know, because of the things that she could never do. I wouldn’t trade.
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Also by Joe Haldeman
Forever War
1. The Forever War (1974)
2. Forever Peace (1997)
3. Forever Free (1999)
Worlds
1. Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future (1981)
2. Worlds Apart (1983)
3. Worlds Enough and Time (1992)
Marsbound
1. Marsbound (2008)
2. Starbound (2010)
3. Earthbound (forthcoming)
Novels
Mindbridge (1976)
Tool of the Trade (1987)
The Long Habit of Living (1989) (aka Buying Time)
The Hemingway Hoax (1990)
The Coming (2000)
Guardian (2002)
Camouflage (2004)
Old Twentieth (2005)
The Accidental Time Machine (2007)
Collections
All My Sins Remembered (1977)
Infinite Dreams (1978)
Dealing in Futures (1985)
Dedication
These three books are for Gay.
EPILOGUE
PRIME
O’Hara lived for another fourteen Earth years (thirty-one, Epsilon) after this entry, and they were reasonably happy and fruitful years, even after Charlee died. She wrote another volume of autobiography that was popular on several worlds, and for eleven years did an almost daily nostalgia-and-advice column called “Ask O’Hara,” which became a series of books.
It’s ironic that after her death, the income from her publications was willed to Skepsis, an organization devoted to debunking the supernatural—ironic because those same writings formed the basis for what has to be called a religion, Modern Numinism, that is still thriving, no longer modern, after two thousand years. It has several hundred million adherents, less than half of them human.
(Numinism is the reason that I myself faded into cyberspace a thousand years ago, and will disappear again as soon as this story is told. Adherents called me the “discarnation” of O’Hara and took up all my time with silly and embarrassing questions and demands.)