Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

The harp was easy to play, though of course it would take years to be able to play it well. Sam had put a daub of color at the top of each string, linking major triads, so O’Hara was able to strum simple melodies after only a few minutes’ experimentation. There were knobs on the base that gave the instrument an electronic dimension, so you could add vibrato and echo effects, but O’Hara liked it better plain, unplugged. It was just the right size for her to set the base in her lap and rest her chin on top of the vertical arm, so the chords sang inside her head, amplified by bone conduction.

She was sitting on the bed she shared with Daniel, playing a blues progression over and over, eyes closed, memorizing and didn’t hear the quiet door slide open.

“Taking up the harp?” Daniel said.

She started; almost dropped it. “Scared me!”

“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.