Worlds Enough and Time w-3

by Joe Haldeman

  (Q: What’s for dinner tonight? A: Same old shit.)

  I read that the gutters of London in the nineteenth century were so odoriferous that vendors sold oranges studded with cloves, for aristocrats to hold under their noses when they had to share the streets with hoi polloi on their way from the opera to their cars. Though I suppose they didn’t have cars until the twentieth century. Horses, contributing their own piles to the problem. It’s almost impossible to visualize.

  And who will be able to visualize it, once those of us who knew Earth are gone? Almost all of the Earth VRs are gone, including London. We do have oranges and cloves. Maybe someone will read this and go down to the commissary, or whatever they have on Epsilon, and pick up an orange and a clove and smell them together, and try to imagine. Maybe take them down to the stable, if they have stables on Epsilon.

  Speaking of black people, I had a wonderful informant today, Matty Buford, born eighty-some years ago in Mobile, Alabama. (She was in New New visiting relatives just before the war, then volunteered her doctorate in nutrition for ’Home.) She knows dozens of old songs—Dixieland, ragtime, bebop, rock. She sang them in this lovely cracking baritone, chording them out on the piano. Because of a half-century of neglect, her piano playing is about as good as mine—that is, slightly off chords played badly—but with her voice it sounds right and beautiful. If things get back to normal, I’m going to use her as the nucleus of an old-time music group. Girolamo and Blakeslee would be glad to do guitar and trombone. Hermosa would play Dixieland to keep me happy. If I can find a willing trumpet and drummer, we’ll be in business.

  Not that we would have that big an audience. But people don’t know what they’re missing—how Dixieland can make you ineffably happy and sad at the same time, angry at life but glad to be alive, not afraid of death but in no hurry. We could all use a dose of it.

  YEAR 1.33

  1. LONG-RANGE PLANS

  PRIME

  After a week of public debate in December, the referendum yielded results surprisingly similar to the foreordained 20/76 proportion. The actual numbers were 21 percent in favor of returning, and 72 percent in favor of Epsilon. (The assumption was that most of the remainder was made up of cynical people who didn’t vote because they thought it was a farce; the Coordinators would do whatever they wanted to.)

  By early January the engineers thought they had recovered enough data to implement their changes and turn on the drive again, doubling the acceleration. In line with O’Hara’s suggestion, no public announcement was made; only about a thousand people knew that they were ready. They threw the switch on 14 January 2099.

  Nothing happened.

  Knowledge of the failure was pretty well confined to the Propulsion section at first. Eliot Smith and Tania Seven knew, but didn’t pass it on to the Cabinet. After they failed to ignite again on the sixteenth, and again on the eighteenth, the word began to percolate out: maybe we should have left well enough alone.

  Marius Viejo pointed out that this failure didn’t actually “doom” them. The power for life support, also derived from antimatter, consumed not even one tenth of one percent of what the drive used. Thus, they could drift through space for more than 25,000 years, barring a new catastrophe or population increase. They were currently traveling at 3,670 kilometers per second, so ’Home would be in the vicinity of Epsilon in less than 900 years, though of course they’d miss by a good fraction of a light-year, and flash by at that same 3,670 kilometers per second, unless they fixed the drive in the interim. But they had forty-some generations to worry about it.

  2. NEW BEGINNINGS

  31 January 2099 [9 Edison 293]—It worked! On the seventh try, we torched. Outward bound, as they say, at the dizzying pace of one fifth of a meter per second squared.

  The problem was safety. There’s so much potential for disaster built into this powerful a propulsion system that there are automatic-shutdown safeguards built into it at several levels. It took them longer to figure out the safeguards than it had taken to figure out the drive.

  One fifth of a meter is about the width of the swelling that’s begun in my abdomen. Nice to have some evidence that this is happening other than the lack of menses and all the fun morning sickness. That seems to be gone now, but who knows. The last time was about a week ago, in zero gee—a little surprise attack, after a week of keeping breakfast down—and the mess wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered from fifteen years ago, on the slowboat to low Earth orbit. There were nine or ten of us puking for a living then, though, and only two toilets.

  I did manage to miss Daniel, which is what I was doing in zero gee. But it’s not exactly an aphrodisiac.

  The doctor scoped me yesterday and said I should be feeling the baby move in a week or so. I guess I’m looking forward to that. Start charging rent.

  So there’s going to be an “impromptu” Torch party tonight. I used to like parties. That was before it meant throwing together food and drink for about eight thousand of my dearest friends.

  So there’s more to write, but I better get down to business.

  3. UNTIMELY PLUCKED

  2 February 2099 [11 Edison 293]—Halfway through the party I started to have pains, just like mild menstrual cramps at first. Evy and Galina went with me to the Emergency Room, which was a good thing. In the lift the pain got suddenly worse. I started bleeding all over the floor, blood horribly threading through amniotic fluid, and collapsed.

  I knew I’d lost the baby, though learned later that under certain conditions they could have transferred it to an ex utero environment. In my case, it had been dead for some hours.

  In our case, he had been dead for some hours.

  I never saw him. I was under sedation when the contractions expelled the little corpse, and of course they didn’t keep him around to show me. They said he looked normal for four months, which I know would mean a slimy aquatic creature, small in the palm of your hand.

  Evy excused herself from the procedure, for which I think I’m grateful. It would feel odd if she had seen him and I had not.

  All my life I’ve had problems off and on with anxiety and depression, and I know that most of it has nothing to do with the things that happen to me. The feelings are endogenous; my glands sometimes make chemicals that are inappropriate for everyday living, so brain and body go into emergency modes of operation.

  Knowing this only helps after the fact. While the chemicals are in charge, the world is a terrifying place, or a black one.

  And sometimes there are exogenous factors. Two rapes, not counting one playground attack. Being kidnapped. A lover murdered, a better one lost. And along with everyone else I have 16 March 2085, ten billion people dead or doomed.

  So compared to all that, what is losing a problematical fetus, months away from being remotely human? It is approximately like having a planet roll over you. They cleaned me up and put me in a fresh bed with hospital-smell sheets that I couldn’t stop chewing and sucking on, and if these bodies came with an ON/OFF switch, you wouldn’t be reading this.

  So I’m better now. I wrote a lot of the Earth journal with an antique fountain pen Benny bought me on Forty-seventh Street, and right after he died I was writing and a tear fell on the wet ink and made a swirling blue exploding star. I had to laugh, thinking what his reaction would have been to the melodramatic splash. He was pretty tough, for a poet, for anybody. So now I’m crying onto an electric keyboard, which is probably against some safety rule.

  4. BLUES

  Dinner was more interesting than usual, the ag people unveiling a mutated strain of Basmati rice, served with a reasonably tender goat curry. O’Hara and Daniel exercised privilege of rank and took Evy to Dining Room A, where the tables were small enough for three to sit alone together, though the menu was the same as all over ’Home: goat curry or whatever you managed to swipe from the kitchens.

  After dinner they had coffee and a cup of sweet wine. “I went to see Dr. Carlucci today,” O’Hara said. It was a week after the misc
arriage.

  “Problems?” Dan said. He touched her hand.

  “Not really. I still feel pregnant, though, and sad. Both normal.”

  “Did he have any words of wisdom?” Evy said.

  O’Hara poured some water into her wine. Dan winced. “He wants me to try again, as soon as possible. Ex utero this time.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Dan said. It’s what he’d wanted in the first place.

  “But he doesn’t want me to use the sperm from you guys. The gamete splice isn’t an exact science, and we’d probably wind up with another… another death.”

  “So who will be the lucky guy?” His voice had the calm precision she heard at Cabinet meetings when he was trying not to show anger.

  “I thought about it. There are thousands of candidates, of course. Maybe even one all four of us could agree on. Finally I decided on myself.”

  “Parthenogenesis,” Evy said. Dan repeated the word with a question mark.

  “They take one of my ova and put a false moustache on it, or a false tail, so it looks like a sperm, and whack it into another, unsuspecting, ovum. Mitosis begins. It’s a little more complicated than that, actually.” O’Hara leaned back. “And of course then I could have the dividing cells implanted, try try again. Carlucci says there’s a good chance for another miscarriage. No thanks. I’ll go for the Petri dish.”

  “Does it take the regular nine months, ex utero?” Dan asked.

  Evy shook her head. “Five, six, seven; depends.”

  “I wonder how we’ll get along, after she grows up. Being exact genetic duplicates.”

  “Twins tend to be close,” Evy said. “They’re usually about the same age, though.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” O’Hara smiled but wiped both eyes. “A twin sister thirty-six years younger than me.” She stood up abruptly. “You know, I really feel awful.”

  Both Dan and Evy started to rise. “Let me—”

  “No. I’ll be all right.” She turned and half ran out of the dining room.

  Dan and Evy looked at each other. “I suppose she will be,” she said. “Just too many things happening all at once.”

  “Damn right,” he whispered. “Her and you and me and everybody.” He drained his wine and slid O’Hara’s cup over.

  O’Hara spent a few minutes sitting in a stall at the nearest toilet, until she was sure dinner would stay put. Then she went down to the humid darkness of the ag level and walked a maze of exactly this many steps and turns right and left, which she’d memorized in the daytime. The path led to a bench beside a tank of herbs, where you could sit blindly bathed in fragrances of basil and oregano, thyme and marjoram. She filled her lungs over and over, until she saw blue blotches and sparkles in the darkness. Then she gave herself a quiet orgasm, remembering Jeff’s largeness, remembering New Orleans.

  Stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, and she with a clarinet reed softening on her tongue, heart slamming at the prospect of exposing her inexpertise to this crowd of laughing black men, some women, manic drunk, shouting stylized insults back and forth. Fat Charlie’s. Scales and intervals, warming up in the kitchen, the ice-cold stab of sour-mash bourbon, then Charlie’s pistol-shot finger snaps and the crowd loving it, loving it, formal backups and improvisations in turn, the soft sweet thirds and fifths under Bad Tom’s cornet, trading jazz jokes with Jimmy on the banjo, Hairball on the piano, and between sets rubbing the sides of her mouth desperately to ease the cramps, holding crushed ice under the bruised bitten lips and swallowing salt, blood with sweet mint and cold bourbon, knowing it could never happen again. Not knowing that in four days all those sweet and sinning men would be dead, New Orleans a radioactive crater, the Mississippi seeking the stratosphere in a column of superheated steam.

  There were only three other people aboard this starship who had been on Earth the last week, she knew, the week that Earth’s politics became an irrational beast, lunging out of control, and there was no one else who was there the last day, no one but her who had been on one of the last four shuttles that leaped into the morning Florida sky just before the nuclear paroxysm.

  And if there was no one left alive in New New, then she was probably the only living human link to the day the world ended. It was not a distinction you wanted to carry to the new world; she could imagine what an object of curiosity and pity she would be in a couple of generations. What a gold mine of information for graduate degrees, if they were still doing that. Or perhaps she could start a religion.

  Seriously, she thought, it would be a good idea to get together with the other three survivors of that time. They’re probably having problems, too.

  They were. She went back to her office and tried to contact them. One refused to speak to her. One was confined to the mental ward. The third had committed suicide a day after they lost New New.

  She took a tranquilizer and went up to John’s room to try to sleep.

  YEAR 1.88

  1. LABOR-SAVING DEVICE

  The womb was a dark glass cylinder named O’Hara, a meter high by a half-meter round. There were a hundred such cylinders in the room, most of them with nameplates. All but a few were evidently empty, their tops hinged open.

  All of the family were there, scrubbed down and wearing hospital gowns. O’Hara nervously glanced at her wrist, but she’d had to leave her watch in the scrub room. “He ought to be here by now.”

  “It’s not as big an occasion to him,” Dan said.

  Double doors banged open and Dr. Kaiser came in with a young male assistant, wheeling a cart with a large transparent tank filled with sloshing liquid. They both wore plastic aprons. “Sorry we’re late. The solution wasn’t warm enough.”

  They parked the tank under the O’Hara womb. “Take a look.” He clicked a switch on the cylinder and the baby appeared, floating serenely in red murk. “Enjoy yourself, kid. It’s later than you think.” He reached for the switch.

  “Just a minute,” O’Hara said. “I want to remember this.” The baby was smaller than she’d expected. She floated upright, small fist curled against her mouth, knees up almost touching elbows. Short halo of feathery hair. Between her knees snaked a plastic umbilical cord. Her right side twitched slightly and she bobbed in the fluid, turning around to face them.

  “Look familiar?” John said.

  O’Hara laughed. “I knew she… it’s still uncanny. She looks exactly like me at birth.”

  “All babies look alike,” Dan said.

  “She ought to be a perfect copy of your younger self for a few years,” the doctor said, “barring extreme differences in nutrition. Or scars, tattoos. But as her personality develops, she’ll diverge.”

  “She looks so peaceful,” Evy said slowly. “It’s almost a shame.”

  “Let’s do it.” Dr. Kaiser turned off the switch, then he and the assistant carefully lifted the womb and rotated it to lie sideways on the bottom of the water tank, wires and tubes trailing. He opened a couple of latches and the top swung open. He pulled out a sac of transparent tissue or plastic with the baby inside, then took a pair of curved scissors and cut the sac down one side, releasing a pink cloud. He guided the baby gently out, drawing the umbilical tube after it.

  “This may be disturbing. When I withdraw the umbilical it generates a neural stimulus that triggers the breathing reflex. Sometimes they just cough politely and start to breathe. Usually they raise holy hell. Towels ready.” The assistant opened a box on the side of the cart and a wisp of steam escaped. He took out a folded towel and snapped it open.

  The doctor raised the baby so that her head and shoulders were out of the water, and then gave the umbilical tube a twist and a pull. Her eyes snapped open, startling blue, and she coughed a surprising amount of pink stuff all over the doctor’s chest and face. Then she started bellowing.

  “Normal.” He handed the baby to the assistant, who wrapped her up in the warm towel and began dabbing at her, drying. There was a moment of silence, but that was just for air.
“I could use one of those, too,” the doctor shouted over the din. The assistant deftly tossed him a towel and he scrubbed his face with it.

  The room spoke with a female voice. “Birth at 09:48 12 August 2099; 21 Muhammed 295. Birth name Sandra Purcell O’Hara.”

  “I didn’t know about the metal belly button,” O’Hara said.

  “New thing. Makes the unplugging easier. It’ll come out in a couple of days.” He tossed the towel into a bin.

  “Can I hold… Sandra?”

  “Promise not to drop her.” He nodded at the assistant, who wrapped the baby in a fresh towel and brought her around to O’Hara. The creature was still screaming indignantly.

  O’Hara cradled the child and softly brushed the side of her face. “Now, now. It’s all right.” She held her closer and the crying suddenly stopped, when the waving arm found a breast.

  The baby grasped and squirmed around and sucked on the fabric. O’Hara almost did drop her.

  “Strong instinct,” the doctor said.

  “I’ll say.” She cleared her throat. “Could you induce, uh, lactation? If it was—”

  “Physically, it would be no problem, just some hormones. But we can’t let the infant bond to you. It would make things difficult in the creche. It would make things difficult for you.”

  “Of course. I know.”

  “Better get her to Neonatal,” the assistant said. O’Hara handed him the baby and he swaddled her in another warm towel. She favored O’Hara with a sour old man’s frown, but didn’t cry.

  O’Hara watched them take her through the double doors and rubbed the wet spot on her breast, thoughtful.

  “Maternal instincts?” John said.

  “Not really. Maybe a little. I appreciate the whys and wherefores of it. Bonding to the creche mother.”