Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

I felt conspicuous. A sartorial genius back in Start-up had come up with the bright idea of providing special white outfits for the Coordinators and Cabinet to wear during ceremonial occasions. Some of us feel like Moby Dick wearing white. (Usually when I go to the laundry I select black or bluejean, lavender if I’m in a frisky mood. Twenty years ago someone said it looked good with my hair color.)

I was watching a tetherball game, mildly resentful of the players’ teenage exuberance. The annoyance was partly professional—if you break that cord, do you think we can send out for a new one?—but mostly it was an irrational longing to be young and confused and seething with hormones. And who should present himself but good old nothis-realname Tom.

I vaguely remembered having had sex a few times with Tom back in my butterfly days. That’s a distinction he probably shared with a third of the males in my age group in New New. For about a year and a half, between losing Charlie Devon and meeting Daniel, I’d go along with anybody who had a pointable penis and didn’t smell too revolting.

We chatted for a while, watching the kids. Then, without any sexual preamble, he asked whether I remembered the time he had shared me with another man, and how about doing it again?

I did remember, and the memory gave me a special pang of longing. It can be awkward and uncomfortable and hilarious, two on one, but it certainly does make you feel wanted. I hadn’t done it since I got married.

(People will make assumptions when they find out you have two husbands and a wife. John and Dan are both groundhogs, though, very conservative sexually, and as far as I know, Evy doesn’t have any lesbian itches. I’m not sure what I would do if she asked. I had sex with women a few times when I was eighteen, to keep Charlie happy, but never showed any real talent for it. John and Dan would be uncomfortable about Evy and me getting together, anyhow.)

So I told Tom that I was flattered—no lie, since I was feeling so unattractive—but that my emotional life was too complicated already. His answer to that was “Who’s talking about emotions?” I dismissed him with a kiss and a squeeze, and he wandered off, looking, I assumed, for some more willing two-holed relic from school days. But the seed was planted, so to speak.

I hadn’t been drinking or eating because at 2130 it was my turn to play the clarinet for an hour down at the dance floor, and saliva doesn’t help your music. It was mostly mainstream stuff from the past decade, not challenging, but there were a couple of New African pieces, post-Ajimbo, that changed key signature and tempo about every other measure. Probably easier to play than to dance to. I also did alto sax on two pieces, glad not to have solos. The embouchure, the way you hold your lips, is a lot different, and I hadn’t practiced it recently.

Most of it was sight-reading, so I didn’t pay much attention to the people dancing or listening. I did notice Dan, though, loping along with wide-eyed concentration. That meant that he’d drunk too much too early, and had popped an Alcoterm to burn it off. So he’d be wide awake for at least twenty-four hours—good thinking, Dan. When everybody else wakes up, you’ll collapse.

Between pieces I saw that Dan was hovering over some librarian whose name I couldn’t remember. Small, girlish, vivacious. I wasn’t surprised when they left together during the next number, but was a little disappointed. A reliable side effect of Alcoterm is priapism, and I had been looking forward to helping him with it.

Pleasant surprise: when my shift was over, Tom was waiting for me. Good instincts. I said let’s go. On the way up to the fuckhuts, feeling deliciously wicked, I buzzed Zdenek and told him he was in charge; don’t call me unless it’s a real emergency.

The other gentleman, I’ll call him Oscar, after Wilde, was waiting impatiently for us at the Level 0 exit, with a two-hour sauna pass that was twenty minutes gone.

He was more interested in Tom than in me. A pity; he was a big slab of a guy, about twenty, handsome in that brooding self-absorbed way that doesn’t last. I would have liked to hold on to him for the duration, but he was pretty obviously not excited by vaginas. Tom was, so I got his flabby and balding personage—exactly my age, I couldn’t avoid thinking.

I was surprised to find that three people fucking don’t bounce off the padded walls as frequently as a pair does. It probably has something to do with the moment of inertia. Maybe I should ask Sandor. He wouldn’t even blink.

I felt sort of like a referee, or moderator. A not-too-passive receptacle for their simultaneous orgasms. By then I was a couple of orgasms ahead, though, so couldn’t complain.

Afterward we talked and caressed for a while, luxuriating in the zero gee and warm dim rosy glow of the small room. Oscar gave me a couple of unambiguous looks, so I said I had to go back to being ringmaster of this circus; dressed, and left them to their own two devices.

It was fun to have sex with relative strangers again. As opposed to strange relatives. Maybe I should do it every time Dan does. Get plenty of exercise.

I didn’t go straight back down to the park, but detoured through the Level 2 gym to shower and sit for a while in the whirlpool. I’ll be sitting carefully for a few days. (Definitely out of practice with that practice. John or Dan would wilt at the thought of anal intercourse, being from Earth. You can die of it there—or could die of it, when they were growing up. All of the AIDS carriers were probably killed off by the “death,” the plague left over from biological warfare.)

I was thumbed at three times in ten minutes, by men I didn’t know. Maybe it was the alert way I was sitting. I would’ve been tempted by one of them if there wasn’t so much work ahead, just to have three in one day again. Who’s getting old?

Two groups dressed and left, and, abruptly alone, I was hit by a sudden spasm of helpless anomie. Emotional exhaustion. What you need, girl, is a nice vacation. Difficult under the circumstances. If you can stick it out for another ninety-seven years, you’ll have a whole new world to explore.

I punched up the schedule and found that there was a twenty-minute VR vacancy. I had eighteen minutes’ credit, so I went down and wired up for the random abstraction mode. The first “place” was uncomfortable, walking naked through fuzzy shoulder-high bushes with thorns, breathing garlic and roses, but then it was a warm amniotic universe where blind soft things bumped up against you and explored with rubbery lips. Then a striped universe, black and white, bands of hot and cold that cut through flesh and organ and bone as you moved. Then I was sitting in the booth sweating, wishing I hadn’t done it alone. I was used to talking it over with Dan afterward.

Every animal is sad after intercourse, some old Roman said. This animal was also tired and hungry. I went on down to the park and assembled a weird sandwich out of the impoverished wreckage of the buffet table and washed it down with some toxic but resuscitating coffee. Told Zdenek that I would take charge until three, then would roust up Christensen to watch over things till six. Then at eight we would all start turning the place back into a park.

It was a quarter to midnight, and the party was pretty lively, but still under control. The wine and beer taps would dry up at twelve, so there were predictable lines of people holding two cups. A lot of horse trading with ration cards. Two colas for a beer, three? The actual alcoholics had come prepared, of course, with shine or boo or schnapps or fuel.

I didn’t expect any discipline problems until after one o’clock. In fact, it was about two, when we were down to a few hundred people determined to have fun until they dropped. Two middle-aged men started fighting, though not to much effect. They rolled around in a bleary, beery embrace, calling each other names. Other people watched with a kind of detached interest, until a police officer came over and broke it up. As prearranged, he made a big fuss (it being the first incident), upbraiding them and fining them down to zero on the spot. Another officer escorted them roughly away, supposedly to Security, though I knew that if they didn’t live together she’d just dump them in their beds and tell them to sleep it off.