Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

12 August 07 [3 Tsai Lun 313]—We had Sandra’s eighth birthday celebration up in John’s room, so he could be comfortable. The low gravity made Sandra frisky, but agreeably so. John, especially, had fun playing with her. (She asked him about his hump and he said it was magical; if you rub it you get your wish—sometimes. She accepted that.)

I was able to buy a flask of apple juice—which would still be rare for a couple of years—and two small cakes made with wheat flour, one soaked with honey and the other with “rhum,” a mixture of boo and some brown chemical. Sandra ate most of the honey cake. Dan took one bite of the other and asked for a straw. (It was so saturated that a deep breath of it made you giddy; I think it would have burned if you lit it.)

Evy got off shift an hour early, 1900, and brought Sandra a present, a bracelet she had woven out of three different colors of wire. That impressed her a lot more than my gift of food and drink, though after an exuberant hug and kiss, she restrained her enthusiasm—whether through shyness or childish calculation, I’m not sure. She was fascinated with Evy’s springy hair. Three of the creche mothers and two of the fathers are black, but they wear their hair cropped fashionably short.

Sandra had appropriated a well-worn deck of cards from Creche and taught us all how to play Planets. It was a surprisingly complex trading game, in which the first person to collect a whole Epsilon System wins. She displayed a good memory for other people’s hands. Talking to her afterward, I found that she hadn’t used any mnemonic device, but just has very solid native powers of concentration and retention. She amused John and Dan by reciting the value of pi to fifteen places; as far as I knew, she could have been bluffing for the last thirteen.

She was disappointed to find out, from John, that the actual planets probably wouldn’t look much like the pictures on the cards. We knew how big the planets were and something about their atmospheres, but would have to be a lot closer before we could take actual pictures of them. I wondered whether her teachers knew that.

I had never dealt cards in quarter gee before. With five people, you can easily go around more than twice before the first card hits the bed. This led to an obvious game, Sandra and Evy and I seeing how long we could keep a card afloat nohands, blowing it back and forth, while John and Dan kept out of the way and carried on a conversation in differential equations or something. It turns out you can keep the card going until the smallest member of the team becomes giddy from hyperventilation.

She went from giddiness to drooping in about thirty seconds, so I passed her around to kiss everybody goodnight, and we tottered up toward the Boston lift.

Her teachers, and the creche, would still have her in the daytime, from 0800 to 1600. She would have dinner and sleep and breakfast with me, so long as her academic and social development didn’t suffer. We were both on probation, theoretically, but the creche is so crowded now I don’t think they would take her back full time for anything short of an ax murder. “And who was this person you hacked to pieces, Dr. O’Hara? Did he or did he not actually deserve it?”

My neighbor in Uchūden, Ondrej Costache, kindly moved three doors around to a vacant office so I could make up an adjoining room for Sandra. She’s going through a dinosaur phase now, so I put some appropriately ferocious prints up on the wall. They contrast agreeably with the coverlet the laundry gave me for her bed, little piggies and sheep.

I keyed her monitor for some standard restrictions, as the creche advised. That’s not to keep her from learning “adult” things, but to protect her from hopeless confusion, swamped by detail. It essentially restricts her database to one about twice as large as the one that she has access to at school. That will theoretically encourage her to do homework, showing off special knowledge.

She is a little bit privileged, since only about two thirds of her classmates have parents who opted to bring them home. A few years ago I would never have dreamed of it, myself. I don’t know whether I would do it now, if we both had to live in my office, since I’m liable to be working until midnight or later.

As we were walking back to Uchūden, I explained to her that some nights I would be sleeping with Uncle John or Uncle Dan, but that her monitor would beep me automatically if she needed something. She got a very serious look on her face and asked why Uncle John and Uncle Dan didn’t come up to Uchūden to fuck. I reminded her that Uncle John is hurt by normal gravity, and besides, my bunk was too narrow for two grown-ups.

I asked her whether she had ever done that with the boys at Creche, and she said no, they weren’t allowed to until menarche, not “serious.” I let it go at that.

She admired the dinosaurs on the wall, identifying them by name, and was fascinated by the luxury of having a toilet and monitor to herself. She was nervous about sleeping alone, though; at Creche she was in a room with eleven others. I told her she could spend the first night with me.

I didn’t get much sleep, only partly because eight-year-olds have more elbows than normal people. I was intoxicated by her closeness, the sweet smell of her hair and breath, the small noises she made in her sleep. The thought that she was mine.

O’Hara probably knew better than any other ’Home official what the population of the Church of the Eternal Now, the “Nowers,” had grown to at any given time. She had to physically remove each of them from the VR machines—but usually only once. In their new enlightenment, they found virtual reality confusing, even more so than normal reality, and didn’t come back for more.

Sometimes she had to call Howard Bell, all 120 muscle-bound kilograms of him, to help wrestle the slack lumps out of their couches. Some of them had put on a lot of weight, eating three meals a day and spending the rest of their time and energy keeping their eyes unfocused. By the last day of 2107, they had dragged eighty-eight of the faithful from the dream room.

Newhome ’s charter allowed complete freedom of religious expression so long as that expression did not violate civil law. There was no law against being a useless consumer. The police could incarcerate a Nower for being a “public nuisance,” if he or she did something particularly outrageous, but the faithful didn’t mind jail. It just meant that somebody else brought them their meals. Trials were an exasperating farce.

Actually, the ones who sat around vegetating, communing with their inner truth, weren’t as much of a problem as the proselytizers. One of O’Hara’s helpers, Julio Eberhara, fell for the church’s arguments. His sphere of influence was limited to the Game Room door, but for a while everybody who wanted to check out a game had to take a ration of inane theology along with it. Then he stopped answering the door with any reliability, sitting at his table humming, staring at an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of an idyllic mountain scene. O’Hara moved him and the puzzle to the storeroom, where at least his humming wouldn’t bother anybody.

She tried to explain this business to Sandra, without much success. Sandra had had a little careful religious instruction in Creche—this is what some people believe, this is what others believe, and you will develop your own beliefs as you grow—but at third form, they hadn’t yet been exposed to the excesses of religion. To Sandra and most other children, the Nowers were scary. A lot of what adults did was enigmatic or even silly, but in general they followed reassuringly predictable patterns. The Nowers were adults whose behavior was mysteriously infantile, and this regressiveness threatened the security of the children’s world.