Read Worlds Enough and Time Online
Authors: Joe Haldeman
Worlds Enough and Time (17 page)
“Sounds pretty.”
“Yeah.” She strummed across the strings. “Sam made it for me.”
“Sam?”
“Wasserman. The historian. Remember? We were lovers, back in the New York rescue thing.”
He nodded silently and stepped over to the sink for a glass. Looking at her in the mirror: “Lovers again, then?”
“No.” She watched his face give away nothing. “It’s more serious than that.”
Daniel poured two centimeters of boo into the glass and diluted it with an equal amount of water. “Go on.”
“Why don’t you guess.”
“No games, Marianne. It’s been a bad day.” He took a sip and leaned against the wall. “Eliot had a real hair up his ass about TE&S allocations. I’m gonna get TE&S’ed out of existence.”
“Sam wants to marry me. Us.”
“Join the line.”
“Of course.”
Dan put the drink down and sat on the bed, his back to O’Hara. “Jesus. Everything happens at once, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sorry about the timing. Could I have some of that?”
Without speaking, he prepared her an identical drink and brought it around the bed and sat next to her, not touching. “You love him?”
“If you want a simple answer, yes.”
“But you haven’t been …”
“No; he’s funny that way. Shy. And you know I wouldn’t have kept anything like that secret from you.”
“I know. I’m just … it’s sudden.”
“It was sudden for me, too. Let’s both just think on it for a while.” She drank half the drink in a gulp and coughed. “So what’s the TE&S problem?”
“Have you talked to John and Ev about him?”
“Not yet. Ev’s not off till 1800; John’s probably napping. Meeting for dinner anyhow, remember?”
“I remember.” He looked at the wall for a long moment. “Eliot’s working from an unassailable position, of course. I need less TE&S than anybody in the Cabinet. I need less than half the people in this can need.” TE&S was the three-dimensional budget unit “Time, Energy, and Supplies,” time meaning manpower.
“You need a certain amount just to keep things going.”
“That’s been my argument. Keep a skeleton staff in case we do come back on line with New New. Of course I’d never say ‘in case’ in front of Eliot or Tania; it’s always
when
.
“So Eliot in his wisdom has said that I don’t need any staff at all. When we do hear from New New we’ll automatically acknowledge the signal, and then it’ll be at least a week before we can have any kind of back-and-forth conversation. Plenty of time for me to recall my staff from wherever they’ve been ‘temporarily reassigned.’ It’s logical, at least from Eliot’s point of view.”
“You don’t think those assignments would be temporary.”
“Exactly—or even worse, they’d be selectively temporary. Suppose it’s a couple of years? The only people I’d get back would be people who hadn’t been able to advance in their new positions. All my most talented would be better off in their new jobs, reluctant to come back and start over.”
He was growing animated, reliving the argument he’d had with Eliot. “And goddamnit, it’s not as if we sit around on our hands all day! We have to have strategies for all kinds of scenarios! What if New New comes back on just to slap us with another cybervirus? All the incoming data have to be isolated, analyzed, filtered. What if they come on for only a week or a month or a
day?
There’s a hierarchy of data we have to ask for, and that hierarchy changes every hour!”
“He should be able to see that. All those thousands of people working to reconstruct things. Why ask for stuff we already know?”
“Eliot sees what he wants to see.” Daniel finished off his drink and went around to fix another.
“That’s the problem. You and Eliot have different world views. He’s basically a cheerful pessimist.”
Dan laughed. “And I’m a morose optimist.”
“In a way. Eliot knows in his heart that we’ll never get back on line with New New. They’re all dead. Whereas you think—”
“What do
you
think?”
“Me? About New New?”
“Yeah. Am I wasting my time, and everybody else’s? Waiting for ghosts to come on line?”
“No. Even if it were only a thousand-to-one chance. We have to be prepared.”
“Thanks. Somebody else thinks I’m not useless.” He looked at the glass of boo and poured it back into the bottle. “Look, I’ve got to … go do something. See you at John’s.”
“Okay.” She watched him hurry off. Dan was truly upset, for him
not
to drink. Or maybe he was headed for a woman, which didn’t seem likely. But who could figure out men? She picked out a simple melody over and over and recalled what they had said. Maybe she could’ve broken it to him more gently. No. Maybe she should have asked him to stay, and talk it out. No. Don’t push him. Maybe she should have said nothing; waited until they were all together tonight. No, he’d say why didn’t you tell me earlier? Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Papa gonna buy you a mockin’ bird. If that mockin’ bird don’t sing, Papa gonna buy you a diamond ring …
16 August 99 [27 Muhammed 295]—It was the worst thing I could do, emotionally, but she drew me like a magnet. Before I went to talk Sam over with everybody, I went down to Creche and watched the baby. From behind glass, invisible.
I understand the rationale for not touching; you can only touch the baby while she’s also in contact with the creche mother. So as not to confuse her bonding. But part of me needs bonding, too.
It would be different if I hadn’t had the miscarriage. With him I had worked out the whole emotional scenario. He would grow in my body and grow, until I was ready to burst, and then I would push him out in blood and pain and they would cut the cord, but the connection would still be there, and as he grew into boy and man he would still be me, flesh of my flesh as they say. This one and I have only two cells in common, one of them altered and one of them fooled, but in genetic terms she is more
me
than any natural child could be, and so how am I supposed to feel toward her? I love her with an irrational intensity. I know a lot of the love is referred pain, for the boy who died without a name, with only a hint of life, more or less reverently recycled. They asked me whether I wanted a ceremony and in my stupid rage I said no. It might have put him to rest. Given me some peace.
Night before last I sat down by the herb garden in the darkness, and I realized that with every breath I was breathing him. A few molecules of him, cycling through the air, and I tried to take some comfort in that, but you follow it to its logical conclusion and it becomes grotesque. Next season I’ll eat a piece of cabbage or goat and it will be partly him, which is to say partly me, and it will pass through and become soil again, or nutrient solution, and I realized that he and I and all of us aboard this can are trivially immortal, through the noble agency of shit. In and out of these temporary bodies.
I was late, having gone back to the office for the button recorder. The three of them were halfway through their meal, a pasta primavera. I opened my box and it was still warm.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Sam is fine with me,” Evelyn said. “I don’t know him all that well, but I’ve always thought he was nice. Trust your judgment anyhow.”
“I don’t know whether to trust my own judgment. Dan? You’ve had some time to think about it.”
He pushed the food around on his plate. “I wouldn’t object. Anything that makes you happy.” John nodded without saying anything.
“Thanks.” I took a bite. “Pasta with guilt sauce.”
“I do mean it. This is a hard time for you.”
“Let me be the devil’s advocate,” Evy said. “Why do you want to marry him? Why can’t you just be like me and Larry? Or Dan and what’s-her-name.”
“I forget,” Daniel said. “Changes every week.”
“It wasn’t my idea. He’s the one who wants to get married; I’d just as soon keep it informal.”
“That might be a good reason for you to say no,” John said. “You, not us.”
“But I love him.” I pushed the food away too hard; some of it drifted off the plate in lazy spirals, toward my lap. “I
love
him.”
“Of course you do,” John said. “But look at it with some detachment. You gave each other emotional support at a time of almost unimaginable stress. Hopes crushed, helpless children dying left and right, all your work and caring gone to nothing; worse than nothing. You needed each other—or someone, at least—more than you needed oxygen.”
“I’ll concede that.” Not to mention the stress, twelve days earlier, of my husbands taking another wife.
“So is it possible that what you love is not Sam himself, but what Sam did for you?”
“This isn’t a Cabinet meeting, John. Let’s leave analysis out of it for a minute. How does it make you
feel?
”
“I don’t know enough to know how to feel. If you’re asking whether I’m jealous, the answer is no. Hurt, maybe; guilty, maybe. If you want Sam because of something we should be giving you.”
“It’s not that.” I guess I said that fast enough for them, or at least him, to know it wasn’t completely true. Give me some of what you’re giving Evelyn.
“There’s one thing I thought of,” Daniel said. “It is analytical, though.”
“I can handle it.”
“It doesn’t have to do with you or us, but with other people’s perceptions: if Sam joins the line, we’re going to have four Cabinet members in one five-person family.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” O’Hara admitted, and laughed nervously. “Ten percent of the Cabinet in bed together.”
“With a spy from the working class,” Evy said.
“At least we’d be evenly split between Engineering and Policy,” John said, smiling. “Not a voting bloc. There are a lot more significant coalitions around.”
We looked at each other in silence. I guess I knew all along that they’d throw the ball back to me. I resolved the problem with typical Alexandrian decisiveness: “Well … I’ll tell Sam we just have to wait. It’s too sudden; we have to think about it, talk about it. If he wants to be my lover in the meantime, that’s fine; if not … it won’t be the end of the world.”
“We should all talk to him tomorrow,” Evy said. “Make sure he knows he’s welcome.”
John and Dan agreed, but an interesting look passed between them.
PRIME
O’Hara and Sam Wasserman were lovers for about sixteen months, though their relationship was only occasionally sexual. They listened to music together, and sometimes played simple duets (Sam could read music on fourteen different instruments, but was proficient with none of them). They argued about history and politics, swam together four times a week, usually met for breakfast or lunch. Sometimes he shared her cot in Uchūden, taking up less than half. They often reminisced about Earth. Along with Charity Lee Boyle, they were compiling an encyclopedia of dirty jokes, arranged by subject.
This is the transcript of a conversation, or interview, that I had with O’Hara on 12 December 2100 [14 Suca 298], in conjunction with the hospital’s counseling algorithm. O’Hara was admitted at 2:37
A.M
., unconscious from an overdose of tranquilizing drugs combined with alcohol.
(The time is 11:38.)
P | How do you feel now? |
O’H | Sleepy. I’m remembering things, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still sort of like a dream. |
P | Start at the beginning, with Sam Wasserman. |
O’H | Please no. |
P | It’s necessary, to begin healing. |
O’H | I haven’t had time to be sick yet. |
P | This is the time you have to begin healing. Sam died. |
O’H | We were the first to find out, after the emergency crew. He was electrocuted while working on a sculpture, they said he couldn’t have felt anything, I was the only name in his will so they called me up at John’s, we were eating dinner there as usual, wait. They haven’t recycled him? |
P | No. That was in his will. |
O’H | 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.) | |
P | The biomass of one human isn’t significant. |
That he be allowed the dignity of deciding is important. | |
O’H | 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. |
P | Then there was alcohol. |
O’H | 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. |
P | More. |
O’H | 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. |
P | You had a dream about Africa. |
O’H | What, was I babbling earlier? |
P | After they pumped your stomach you talked for a few minutes before you fell asleep again. A dream about Africa with dead people. |
O’H | Funny it wasn’t New York and dead people. That would be with Sam. |
P | Do you remember the dream? |
O’H | 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. |
P | Daniel came up to check on you and he found you on the floor. He couldn’t wake you. |
O’H | Wait. Would I have died? If he hadn’t come up to my room? |
P | Probably. The capsules were only partly digested, and the fraction you had metabolized had seriously affected your pulse and respiration. |
O’H | People would think I had committed suicide. |
P | Would they have been wrong? |
O’H | What? |
P | You took a potentially fatal combination of alcohol and drugs. |
O’H | I know, but I was not, uh … it’s not the |
P | That’s what we want to be sure of. |
O’H | Who the hell are “we”? You look like yourself, like me minus about five kilograms of butt. |
P | Would you rather I changed my appearance? |
O’H | For a machine, you have a funny way of not answering questions. What do you mean by “we”? You have a tapeworm? |
P | I’m currently augmented by the hospital’s counseling algorithm. |
O’H | Suicide counseling? |
P | This was not my choice. You know I am not entirely a free agent. |
O’H | Tell your fucking algorithm there is nothing in this world that could make me commit suicide. |
(After eight seconds) | |
P | 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’H | That’s still not me. You know better than anybody. I’ve been through worse than this. |
P | 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 |
O’H | I know that. But you’ve said you can feel pain, that I can cause you pain. |
P | 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’H | That’s not you talking. That’s the algorithm. |
P | 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’H | 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. | |
P | Marianne, you can’t. |
(She strips the telltales off her forehead, chest, and calf.) | |
O’H | 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.) |