Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

So Dan’s back to drinking. It’s a good thing he didn’t make public his decision not to drink for the two years of his Coordinatorship. I can’t say I’m surprised or even particularly disappointed. He did keep it up for over a month, and he didn’t just suddenly break down and go on a binge, which I more than half suspected would happen. He talked it over with me first, about the unexpected pressures and his unwillingness to alleviate them with more modern pharmaceuticals. A glass of wine with dinner and one drink at night. That’ll last a week.

He wanted sympathy rather than approval, and I gave it to him. The experts down in Counseling would probably throw me out the airlock for that. But I know how badly and how little he’s been sleeping, and have seen him come from meetings glowing with suppressed rage, which is uncharacteristic and frightening. Usually he can work it off down in the gym, but sometimes he takes it out snarling at Evy or me—knowing what he’s doing and not liking himself for it. (Well, leadership doesn’t build character, at least not at the top. Must remember that, and prepare myself for disintegration.)

I did force him to discuss the pattern, several times repeated, of working himself to exhaustion in a new job and then rewarding himself for his dedication by going on a bender and sleeping it off. No weekends in this job; somebody would be bound to notice. He acknowledged the problem and said he was sure he could control it. Arguably, the last job change, from New New Liaison to Coordinator-elect, was a lot more dramatic than this one, and he handled that okay. I believed him.

There’s also my own selfish thirst, since I’ve been joining him in abstinence. Two unopened boxes of wine in my office cupboard; I’ll admit I’ve thought about them a few times. Who would know? I would, and my cybernetic conscience Prime. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. How much does she affect my behavior?

Sandra Purcell O’Hara’s seventh birthday was on 12 August 2106 [8 Galileo 311]. This event was celebrated with a couple of hundred cookies (flavored with peppermint from her mother’s garden) and a barely measurable increase of the chaos level, which was growing monotonically every year.

Sandra was one of the youngest of what the creche parents called the Old Guard, the ninety-five surviving children who were quickened around 2098, in response to a morale crisis and a larger-than-expected number of deaths. The real crisis, of course, came five years later, with the crop failure that put most of Newhome into suspended animation.

The year after that, 2104, forty-two children were born, to offset deaths and eventually replace the inevitable population loss during cryptobiosis. In 2105, it was thirty-nine. This year there were forty-one new infants. The creche was rapidly becoming overcrowded.

The original plan had been for neat generations of a hundred children each, born together, growing up together, leaving in time for the next generation. More than twice that number were bouncing off the walls now.

The creche was being expanded, of course, and volunteer mothers and fathers were learning their trade. The din of construction and inevitable disasters in the course of parenttraining added to the pandemonium. The demographic profile helped the noise level, too: the Old Guard were at an age where they were fascinated with babies, and trampling each other in their efforts to help out, and the ones born in 2104 were now two years old, and into everything. Whereas the eighty infants would normally be enough to take up all of the creche’s time and the parents’ knowledge and patience.

Robin was not quite as reluctant as she used to be in the matter of letting O’Hara take her child home at the age of eight. Would you like a few more? Would you like to switch jobs?

One of the creche mothers-in-training, an angelic slender young thing with long ash-blond hair, stayed blissfully calm in the midst of the bedlam, smiling evenly, reacting to any outrage with clemency, to any disaster with slow serenity. O’Hara noticed her and asked Robin whether she was brain-damaged or just deaf?

Robin confided that it was the woman’s third and last day. She was all right with the little ones, but her bovine imperturbability was eroding the discipline they had over the Old Guard. The kids would play seven-year-old practical jokes on her, tests—thumbtack on the chair, wall Sticktite reversed—and she would smile and pat them on the head rather than scold them, which would result in an epidemic of deranged seven-year-old laughter. And then another little test.

The problem was her religion, the Church of the Eternal Now. O’Hara had never heard of it, which was not surprising, since at that time it had only five or six adherents. In another year it would have sixty, and begin to be a real problem.

The Church of the Eternal Now began as a conversation between Robert Lowell Devon and Nadia Szebehely. They convinced themselves, and then others, that past and future alike were nonexistent: that all the universe existed in one eternal instant of God’s love.

The logic was unassailable, at least for those who were vulnerable to its charm. It evolved from an old Christian Fundamentalist argument against scientific evidence that the Earth was more than a few thousand years old, which was what their holy book claimed. You point to carbon-dated fossils, for instance, and they say God created them in place, old carbon atoms and all, at the same time he created everything else, 5,014 years ago. Can you prove otherwise?

What Saint Robert and Saint Nadia claimed is that everything around you, from the floor under your feet all the way out to the Hubble Limit, sprang into creation the moment you began to believe. Even the memory that you have believed for some seconds or hours or years—that was just created, too, as part of God’s mysterious loving purpose.

If you pointed out the small paradox that their religion only allowed one person to actually exist—everyone else being just part of the divinely created miseen-scene—the believer would either nod and smile or shake his head and smile.

One advantage of this religion is that there is no sin; only the divinely created memory of nonreal sins. And of course a true believer will never die, although he may have these remarkably intense memories of other people dying. God’s will is obscure and not to be questioned, though your memories of questioning God’s will are acceptable, since they are themselves part of God’s will.

One disadvantage of the religion is that believers turn into smiling lumps. They were not a lot of fun to have around, since they rarely spoke, and when they did, it was just about their own private ecstasy. Some of them would copulate in public, or worse. Why not?

There haven’t been many cultures where the Church of the Eternal Now could have taken hold and swiftly made converts, but the isolated, cloistered environment of Newhome was ideal for the existential fantasy it required, and also provided adequate living conditions. You wouldn’t starve if you could wander smiling into the cafeteria once or twice a day, and when fatigue finally overtook you, you could lie down wherever you were, and people would just walk around you—until you woke up smiling to another perfect instant of God’s love.

At the September Cabinet meeting, Eliot Smith said he was tired of maneuvering around them, and made the modest proposal that we steer them all into one big room and lock it from the outside, and try to remember to throw them some food once a day. He added some details, and his gifts for scatology and maledicta lightened up a boring meeting.

A year later, no one was laughing.