Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

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.

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.

PRIME: How do you feel now?

O’HARA: Sleepy. I’m remembering things, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still sort of like a dream.

PRIME: Start at the beginning, with Sam Wasserman.

O’HARA: Please no.

PRIME: It’s necessary, to begin healing.

O’HARA: I haven’t had time to be sick yet.

PRIME: This is the time you have to begin healing. Sam died.

O’HARA: 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?

PRIME: No. That was in his will.

O’HARA: 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.)

PRIME: The biomass of one human isn’t significant.

That he be allowed the dignity of deciding is important.

O’HARA: 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.

PRIME: Then there was alcohol.

O’HARA: 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.

PRIME: More.

O’HARA: 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.

PRIME: You had a dream about Africa.

O’HARA: What, was I babbling earlier?

PRIME: After they pumped your stomach you talked for a few minutes before you fell asleep again. A dream about Africa with dead people.

O’HARA: Funny it wasn’t New York and dead people. That would be with Sam.

PRIME: Do you remember the dream?

O’HARA: 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.

PRIME: Daniel came up to check on you and he found you on the floor. He couldn’t wake you.

O’HARA: Wait. Would I have died? If he hadn’t come up to my room?

PRIME: Probably. The capsules were only partly digested, and the fraction you had metabolized had seriously affected your pulse and respiration.

O’HARA: People would think I had committed suicide.

PRIME: Would they have been wrong?

O’HARA: What?

PRIME: You took a potentially fatal combination of alcohol and drugs.