Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

Hardly recognize the place. There’s a style for garish color combinations that make my teeth hurt. That could be partly a sensory hangover from those weird visions in the can. Pink and black, though, for walls and ceiling? Orange and purple clothing?

But there are improvements. The central park has been almost doubled in size, and they’ve force-grown trees there of many pleasing varieties. Even a banyan like a big puzzle house of wooden fingers. The ag level is being used to its maximum acreage, half again what’s necessary for food, and there are plots of exotic hybrid vegetables and a small sea of flowers. They showed me a popular melon with flesh that’s dark blue shot through with orange veins and smells like fried chicken— Kentucky Fried Chicken, from the longlost US of A. Will I ever be adventurous enough, or hungry enough, to try it? Maybe they’ve made a chicken that tastes like canteloupe.

There certainly is a sufficiency of chickens, dozens of the smelly little things, not to mention small herds of goats and bunnies and pigs. About a quarter of the ag area has been made over into a sort of combination petting zoo/ farm school, so all the kids will be used to handling animals.

I haven’t seen so many children since Earth. Never a dull moment—never a quiet one, either, at least in public places. Kids nowadays, grumble, grumble. I can’t wait to see Sandra. Right now she’s not scheduled to come out until the third wave, a year or more after Epsilon orbit. Maybe I can pull some strings and move her and Jakob up to the first wave, where they wanted to be. Though it’s not clear how much real authority we Pool denizens are going to have.

Maybe I don’t want my daughter in the first wave.

The Cabinet member in charge of Entertainment (now called Sports and Entertainment) was born the year after I went crypto. He knows all about me and is very respectful. And very protective of his territory. I don’t want to meddle, but anyone with an ear can tell the harpsichord is out of tune. I want it to be ready when Chul’ comes out.

They told me to take it easy for a week, get oriented. Which kind of week? How about a month or two? The new months are short, twenty-six or twenty-seven of the puny days.

I don’t know whether to feel cheated or honored. I was going to wake up a couple of years after planetfall, let everybody else take care of the headache of setting things up. Now I get to be part of the great adventure. One year to Epsilon, one Earth year. About two of the new flavor.

I’m just tired. They say I’ll sleep a lot at first. That sounds like a great idea.

(Later, same day, somewhat refreshed) I knew it would take a while to get used to the new calendar. It’s not the physical strain we’d expected, since they have this drug Tempozine (sounds like a journal for jazz enthusiasts) that resets your various biological rhythms. ‘Home’s day-and-night cycle is set now on Epsilon’s short ten-hour day, which comes to about eighteen and a half REAL HUMAN hours.

A person who, like me, used to need six hours—REAL HUMAN hours—of sleep every night now needs a little over four and a half. But Epsilon hours are about ninety REAL HUMAN minutes. So I’ll only sleep a little over three hours, ship time. But that’s all I need, honest.

It remains to be seen what effect this is going to have on working, playing, eating, and so forth, I used to work a nine-hour day, at least in terms of being routinely accessible to other people. That’s six new-style hours, fine. But then add the three hours’ sleep, and hold it! There’s only one hour left for eating, drinking, sex, reading, exercise, VR, cube, hobbies, moonlit walks, and plotting to overthrow the government. Don’t forget two minutes for clarinet practice and forty-five seconds of quiet meditation.

So I have to cut down on the daily work hours. The simple fraction, 9 out of 24, gives me a 3.75-hour work cycle per 10-hour Epsilon day. Which would mean checking in to the office less than six Earth hours per day. I’ve spent that much time getting the rest of the day organized!

Guess I’ll study how other people have adapted, especially the oldsters. They switched fourteen years ago and seem to be doing okay; not especially rushed or disorganized. They’re more spread around the clock than we used to be, but our regularity was largely a vestigial holdover from Earth business practices. Shutting down labs and offices and classrooms while everybody rests is wasteful of space.

I wonder what will happen when we get to the planet, though. Almost nobody alive has experienced actual night. It does make you want to close your eyes.

Think I’ll like this new way of eating, one big meal and a lot of little nibbles. Like the tapas in Spain. See how fast I gain back the twelve kilos I lost in crypto.

Maybe not at all. I like wearing Medium again. I’ll like being youngest wife in the family, too.

I don’t know how to feel about Evy; how to act around her. She’s still pretty active for 82, working a regular shift in the Geriatrics ward. She could have gone on half-shift at 80 (or 180, Epsilon years), but likes keeping busy.

She looks so ancient . I can’t help feeling a perverse kind of triumph. She seduced my husbands when she was a child of eighteen. How are they going to feel about her now?

Maybe I will have two husbands again. The medical people say they can do microsurgery—not nanosurgery—on John that might fix him up. They don’t want to wait much longer before reviving him.

I missed a fairly uneventful forty years. We still haven’t made contact with New New, though several times a week we broadcast and receive time-lagged exchanges with Key West and New York in the States, and Oxford and Melbourne in England and Australia. No one on Earth has been able to unlock a general database yet, so we’re all relaying partially reconstructed data lumps and old-fashioned stuff from paper books, helping one another rebuild. Literature and art are now way ahead of science and engineering, for obvious reasons.

Key West. Jeff died about sixteen years ago. He left me a comforting farewell message that I could half believe. At least death is the end of pain. He was hurting a lot toward the end, not even able to raise his head from the pillow.

(I’d hoped to be able to “visit” him by way of VR data exchange, even postmortem. But they still haven’t reached that level of technology in Key West.)

I lost him so many times, in different ways. When I went into the can I knew it was for ever this time. But still. I wish I felt more.

O’Hara was one of fifty cryptos selected for “the Pool,” the Planetfall Consultant Pool, people awakened early to help plan the transition from flight to colonization.

A cynic might see the Pool as a way of conferring status without the nuisance of granting authority. Everybody had to be awakened sooner or later, after all. What to do with the dozens who had been Cabinet members and Coordinators? Some of them would expect to step right back into positions of authority—but all those positions were filled. This way their talents could be recognized and used with a minimum of damage to the actual decision-making process.

They thawed out people in groups of ten, one group per week. All but one of the people in O’Hara’s group survived, which was better than expected, there being a high proportion of elderly people in the Pool.

There was no set itinerary for the first few weeks; just wander around and get your bearings. Charlee Boyle came out in the same group as O’Hara, so they explored the familiaryet-strange world together.

There were children everywhere, which was no surprise. The original plan had allowed for Newhome’ s population to nearly double in the last ten years of flight. None under three years old, though, so planetfall wouldn’t be complicated by infants.