Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

Let me explain for you generations yet unborn. Benny was a boy I met on Earth and loved for some time. He was a poet and he taught me how to juggle. He was a lot like Sam in that he loved to argue history, politics, religion, anything; like Sam he was a clumsy man sexually, sporadically urgent and not too patient or knowledgeable when it came to female geography. But that’s never bothered me. Both men were sweet and earnest and honest. Both of them had a manic sense of humor next to a real dark streak.

Benny died while I was on the other side of the world, hanged by his own government. A few months later, his government killed billions in a lunatic orgasm of war. But first they murdered my lover. My ex-lover, technically.

I don’t think I made the association between the two men at all, while Sam was still alive. My grieving for Benny was so fierce and helpless and guilty, guilty because Jeff had taken over his place in my life, and before I had any chance to explain, I lost him. And so then I lost Jeff, too. You live long enough, you lose everybody.

Oh, stop. You live, you die, they throw you on the compost heap. Then you live again, without the inconvenience of consciousness.

I went back to work today, that is to say, a meeting of the Literature Reclamation Committee, which was awkward at first. Of course they all miss Sam, too; Carlos especially. They had been friends since school. Close but not lovers, (When Sam and I came together on Earth, I was his first female lover. He’d long been monogamous with an older man whom he never identified. Benny was similar.) We worked on French and Belgian literature.

Translation’s an interesting problem. There’s no manpower now, so we do machine translations into English and store them along with the originals. French is still studied, so these may sooner or later have a human interpreter. But there are many works, like The Red and the Black and Somewhere, Nowhere , that exist only in English translation. In a sense, they’re lost; it would be silly to back-translate them into French.

Some things are literally recovered-yet-lost, because they’re in languages we don’t have translation programs for and no one aboard ’Home reads or speaks. There are even a few things in languages we haven’t been able to identify. Balinese folk tales? Samoan recipes? We can’t even decipher the titles.

Of course any day now New New may call up and render the past couple of years’ work redundant. Any day now.

6 June 2103 [19 Babbage 303]—So here I am a matron of forty. I took the day off to celebrate my birthday, talked with Prime for a while, went down to Creche and played with Sandra.

Creche is a madhouse. All this generation is in their “terrible twos,” lurching around, picking up toys, throwing them at each other. Nothing stays put away unless it’s put away someplace high. Then somebody notices they’re being deprived of it and cries until a creche mother or father takes it down again.

There are fourteen mothers and six fathers for a hundred children, and they are certainly earning their rations nowadays. Sandra’s mother, Robin, was so relieved to see me it was comical. I took Sandra and two of her associates off Robin’s hands and went to play in the mud room.

I’m not sure the mud room is going to do much toward turning children into responsible adults. The whole point of it seems to be a contest to see who can plaster the most mud on other people the fastest; extra points for ingestion.

They all wear diapers, to keep the mud from becoming too biologically complex. The association with shit is strong and inevitable. I kept trying to get them interested in constructing mud pies and mud houses, but all they wanted to do was squeeze it through their little fists and giggle at the pseudoturds.

If I’d had the sense to remain standing, I would have stayed pretty unbesmirched from the navel up. But I sat down to get closer to the abstract assemblage Sandra was absorbed in, and some little bastard snuck up and scored a double handful on my head, improving my hair and filling up one ear. I smiled and told him what a big boy he was, and wondered what he would look like completely buried in the muck, with only his cute little feet showing.

Hosing them down in the shower was fun. Everything is fun to them unless it’s an earthshaking tragedy, only solvable by adult attention. They were a handful, trying to elude the water and then luxuriating in it; I would have done them one at a time, but I was certain they’d just dive back in the mud if I didn’t keep them all together.

They should put some toys in the stall to distract the little darlings. While I was shampooing myself, Sandra took a sudden deep interest in pubic hair, and started her collection with one painful yank. Not supposed to express anger; that’s Robin’s job. So I just told her she was going to be in for a big surprise in about ten years. Mother! Are you some kind of pervert? No, dear. Just reliving your childhood.

I don’t know whether she’ll ever call me Mother. It’s Mair Ann now, or just Mair.

I almost wish I could take her home with me. It would be worth the bother, to be able to watch her grow, touch her, pick her up. She changes so fast I’m afraid I’m going to miss something. But that is Robin’s job and she’s good at it. When Sandra’s eight I can have her part time. What will she be like then?

I had lunch with Charlee down in the new picnic area they’ve opened on the ag level. They serve only raw vegetables, but it’s a bright, airy place. She’s got a birthday coming up, thirty-eight, in two weeks. We talked about milestones and such. She opted to stop cycling a couple of years ago, because for some reason the cramps got worse and worse. I’m going to let the thing run its course, even though it’s just the body fooling itself; no eggs to make the monthly journey. I told Charlee I like the sense of the body’s seasons, the womanliness of it, and will miss it. She thinks I’m a lunatic. Maybe so, given the etymology of that word.

All of us women bringing the memory of Earth’s Moon to another world. Epsilon’s moon has a month that is less than two days shorter. I wonder if there will be some effect, over generations.

We felt so damned healthy after eating all those carrots and turnips that we had to get a drink. The dispensary was closed, of course, but I knew Dan had some boo. I called him up at work and told him we were going to raid his supply. It wasn’t so much to get his permission as to make sure he wouldn’t be in the room with whoever that redhead is that he’s fucking now. Rhoda, Rhonda? Wanda. They sometimes use the lunch hour.

We just had a quick toast and Charlee went back to work. I decided to leave it at the one shot and come back here to type and look up some stuff. We’ve reclaimed a few diaries of famous people; I thought I’d look up what they said on their fortieth birthdays. It was more of a milestone when you couldn’t expect to make it past seventy.

Not too much luck with women. None. Margaret Mead, Leslie Morris, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Anaïs Nin were too busy at age forty to keep diaries. What does that say about me?

Even the garrulous Mr. Boswell had only one line: “I hoped to live better from this day.” By God, Sir, so shall I. Chastity. Industry. Modesty. Though it’s hard to be modest when you know that you will go down in history as The Woman Who Had The Longest Fortieth-Birthday Diary Entry In What’s Left Of The English Language.

So we’re coming up on six years aboard this hollow rock; about fifty-eight years to go, at the current rate. I’ll be not quite old enough to be useless when we get there. Of course the people down at Propulsion keep talking about further increases in efficiency, but after the scare we had last time, I’m not sure they’ll get permission to try, even from the Engineering track.