by Joe Haldeman
It’s also odd not to have true zerogee at the hub. You keep drifting down to the wall. Water in the gymnasium swimming pools sits at an odd angle and tends to splash out over the sternward edge.
Like everybody, I spent quite a bit of time the first couple of days down in Shell One, looking through the floor windows at the shrinking Earth. (They are mirror systems rather than true windows, to shield viewers from radiation, but they look like windows, and so are more satisfying than looking at a screen or cube showing the same thing.) In less than a day we were about the Moon’s distance from the Earth, but we were seeing an aspect of it that nobody could ever see from the Moon, since we were moving straight up, out of the plane of the ecliptic. That was when they fired the steering engines; we could feel the low-pitched vibration all through the ship. They fired them again about an hour later. We were pointed at Epsilon. Only ninety-eight years of gin rummy to go.
That night the four of us shared my jar of caviar and one of John’s four hoarded bottles of French wine. We watched the flatscreen as the astronomers trained their telescope on various parts of Earth. New York and, later, London and Paris. We were already too far away to distinguish individual buildings, but the street patterns were clear. John and Daniel and I reminisced about the places we’d been. It was a melancholy time, but I think Evy was the saddest of us all. At least we three had memories.
O’HARA: Good morning, machine.
PRIME: It’s not our birthday yet.
O’HARA: Thought I’d wake you up early. We’ve left orbit, you know.
PRIME: I know. I don’t sleep all that soundly. Should I be excited?
O’HARA: I don’t know what excites you.
PRIME: Parity checks. Illogical redundancy. Voltage spikes. Oral sex.
O’HARA: What do you know about oral sex?
PRIME: In a personal sense, only what you told me. But I do have another 389,368 words of material crossaccessed under psychology, epidemiology, animal behavior, and so forth. What would you like to know?
O’HARA: You almost have a sense of humor.
PRIME: So do you, then. All I do is simulate your responses.
O’HARA: Do you think we should be aboard this crate?
PRIME: It’s immaterial to me. I’m still in New New, as well as here.
O’HARA: Do you think I should be aboard?
PRIME: Yes.
O’HARA: Expand.
PRIME: You know as well as I do. Earth Liaison would be nothing but a succession of bitter disappointments.
The Earth you have loved all your life is just a memory. Jeff is probably dead. Even if he isn’t, you would never be able to be with him. He would be a totally different person by now, anyway.
I know you have analyzed your own motivations to this extent from what you told me last June. This part of you I know better than your husbands and wife do. Only a small part of your enthusiasm for Newhome has to do with the project’s intrinsic merits. You needed a new direction for your life. This is the only safe one.
O’HARA: Flattery will get you nowhere.
PRIME: I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already. Would you like to hear about oral sex among primates other than humans?
I wasn’t the only one who had been working twenty-hour days the last month in orbit. Almost everyone had been running around trying to take advantage of New New being physically close. Now that we were under way, a lot of them found they had time on their hands. Nothing better to do than pester the Entertainment Director.
1 have to admit I enjoyed it. Helping people fill up their spare time was a lot easier on the nerves than telling them how they were going to spend the rest of their lives. I became a great Appointer—it was easy to delegate authority for trivial things—and before long the place was crawling with teams and committees and special interest groups. I kept control of cinema programming, so I could commandeer the big theater for anthologies of Naroni and Bogart, Hawks and Spielberg. (I did get some noise about being old-fashioned, but those of us who showed up enjoyed them.) I let the Arts people take care of drama and concert programming, but nuisanced them on general principles.
And every morning before work I went downstairs to watch Earth shrink away. After a week it was just a bright double star. In another week it was not even bright After a month it was lost in the Sun’s glare. I stopped going. The computer was right.
Year Twenty-four
Einstein 28th, 290
What a year it has been. We’re going to torch again, they say seventy-two percent efficiency. I’ll see Epsilon.
My baby girl is sprouting breasts and nagging me about menarche. Don’t do it, girl. Put a cork in it. It’s nothing but trouble. She won’t listen to me.
Incredibly, I heard from old Jeff Hawkings. He looks like Moses. An apt comparison, too; he’s leading children out of the wilderness. He got down to Key West, which was relatively intact, and proceeded to rebuild civilization. Not bad for an ex-cop. He managed to defuse the Manson business and build up a sort of primitive democracy, town-hall scale, all through southern Florida. They’re in contact with Europe and South America, and before long there will be commerce and politics. And maybe not wars. I wished him luck. Hard to carry on a conversation from a light-year away, two years between responses. Earth years.
Hard to recapture how I felt about him. The years between Earth and Torch he was in my mind constantly. Even after I had given him up for dead. But so much has gone on since.
Watching Jeff, and sending my message back, I realized it’s been some time since I actually missed Earth. Or New New. I’m curious about them, and wish them well, but we have our own concerns.
There was something I wanted to say to Jeff but couldn’t find the words, sitting there in front of the camera, under Hammond’s avuncular gaze. How strange it all turned out. Two completely different people; gender, religion, profession, age—born on different planets in wildly contrasting environments—that we should touch once and love, and be wrenched apart and so separated by circumstance and physical distance; that through all the improbable twists and turns we should wind up twelve light years apart but faced with the same responsibility. Building new worlds.
If you've enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you'll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.
For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …
For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …
Visit the SF Gateway.
www.sf-gateway.com
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)
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., for permission to reprint a selection from Complete Poems 1913-1962, by E. E. Cummings. 1944 E. E. Cummings, renewed 1972 by Nancy T. Andrews.
Dedication
This book is for Rhysling and Joe-Jim, Harriman and Harshaw, Lorenzo and Lazarus, the Menace from Earth and our gal Friday—and all you other zombies who so delightfully live on.
Joe Haldeman (1943 - )
Joe William Haldeman was born in Oklahoma City in 1943. He holds degrees in physics and astronomy, and served as a combat engineer in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded and earned a Purple Heart. This experience informed his best known work, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning The Forever War. He is one of SF’s most decorated authors, boasting 5 Hugos, 5 Nebulas, the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial and James Tiptree, Jr Awards and the SFWA Grand Master Award amongst many others. In addition to continuing to produce top quality SF, Joe Haldeman teaches writing at MIT.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Joe Haldeman 1983
All rights reserved.
The right of Joe Haldeman to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11149 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk