Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

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.

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.

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.

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 miscarriage.

“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.”