Joe Haldeman: Worlds Enough and Time

They’d met at Athens lift because that allowed John to do most of his walking up on Level 6. But it did make their route to the meeting room rather complicated. They descended an escalator to the humid brightness of Level 1, the “ag” level, which in this section was a dense interplanting of corn and beans. The stalks were already a meter high, and they made a silken whisper in the ventilator breeze, and a rich complex smell. They walked and swung less than a hundred meters to another escalator that took them up to Level 4. O’Hara guided them through the maze of rights and lefts, ups and downs, that made the Arts and Crafts Mall so architecturally whimsical, and they wound up back on Level 2, in a corridor decorated with holos from European museums, somber classical paintings, leading to Studio 1.

“Should I wait outside and listen?” Evy asked.

“I don’t think it’s going to amount to much,” Daniel said. They were headed for the first full Cabinet meeting since Launch. “Some rhetoric from Harry and a situation report from Eliot. Maybe Jules Hammond smiling benevolently over the proceedings. Then they turn off the cameras and we all go huddle around the coffee urns and it’s like any Thursday meeting.”

“Except you have everyone in the same room,” O’Hara said.

“Handier than calling them up,” John said. “Though there may be some you would just as soon not feast your eyes upon.”

“Who could that be?”

“You’ll have to get used to working with him.” They were talking about Harry Purcell, Policy Coordinator and O’Hara’s ultimate superior. Sixteen years before, Purcell had been her economics professor, and they had argued energetically over some pretty basic points—personality as much as theory. He made it clear he hadn’t forgotten. She was trying to learn not to cringe whenever he opened his mouth.

28 September 2097 [13 Bobrovnikov 290]—I don’t know why I’d envisioned a round table for the Cabinet meeting. We did that in New New for my Demographics Committee, no chiefs and no Indians, but with thirty-some Cabinet members it would be an unwieldy circle.

Still, I don’t like formal hierarchal structures, least of all when they’re set up with me at the bottom. A regular classroom would have been bad enough, the Coordinators up front dispensing wisdom, but instead we co-opted the small theater. That way Harry Purcell and Eliot Smith got to sit on the stage, head and shoulder (and torso and ass and leg, at least in Purcell’s case) above us mere mortals.

The theater seats had slips of plastic with names on them. I helped John to his, in the front row, and then went to mine, in the rearmost. There was a definite pattern. Engineers and other grown-ups toward the front. I shared the back row with Tom Smith, Education; Carlos Cruz, Humanities; Janet Sharkey, Fine Arts; and our historian, Sam Wasserman.

I hadn’t seen Sam since Launch. He gave me a shy grin and blush. We’d been lovers for a short intense time a few years ago, although he is exactly young enough to be my son, if I had followed my mother’s example and become pregnant at the gray old age of twelve.

“Lovers” is too strong a word, or too polite a one. When Evy joined the line, which made me feel somewhat plain and middle-aged and dumpy, he was there for me. It was more complicated than that, and still is. I knew he would be at the meeting, but when I saw him I got a nice glow of physical surprise, or physical something. Maybe someday again.

(Prime says that she can keep this diary secure from prying eyes by shunting it over into her own cyberspace. I guess so, since she’s supposedly self-aware, whatever that actually means.

(Do I really care whether Dan or John knows I get a little damp in the jeans, thinking about Sam? I’m not sure. I remember how he tastes, different. Kosher, I guess.)

Once everyone was in the proper place we had to sit still for a minute of camera registration. This was so the archives could properly record our gasps of admiration at Purcell’s inspiring rhetoric. The sparkling wit that used to almost keep us awake in class.

He actually didn’t start out too badly. With a mild joke he apologized for the necessarily ceremonial nature of this first joint meeting, and asked us all to introduce ourselves, for the record, then turned the proceedings over to Eliot.

That did make it interesting since we don’t normally have joint meetings with the Engineering side. I like Eliot anyhow; he stood up for me back when old Casey tried to limit my powers in the demographics part of pre-Launch. He’s also a funny guy.

Most amputees I’ve met opted for realisticlooking waldos (and of course we’ve all met people we couldn’t tell were amputees), but Eliot goes in the opposite direction. His left arm and hand are usually a metal-and-composite skeletal framework with all the bearings and wires exposed, though sometimes he screws in a special-purpose tool. His legs clank against things, and he doesn’t bother to wear shoes over his metal feet.

One night at the Light Head bar with Daniel and me, he pointed out the creepily obvious: the arm and legs were engineered better than he was. After he died they would cut off the arm and legs and file them away for the next clumsy person. He wondered if there was a library of prostheses somewhere in the hospital. He’d never tried to find out.

(Evy later told me there was such a collection, and there had been a battle royal with New New as to how many we were allowed to take along.)

For the meeting he wore an actual realistic hand, but kept the Meccano arm, looking intentionally ludicrous in a short-sleeved shirt. First he had Dan and Lenwood Zylius report in their capacities as New New Liaisons. Nothing significant on the Engineering side (Dan had told me he could give an hour of boring figures or a half-second shrug) and Zylius, Policy, could report only that putting one light-minute of vacuum between us and New New had not materially changed the amount of red tape involved in relations between the two structures.

Ito Nagasaki, Criminal Law, reported that her men and women were all working twenty-five-hour shifts and falling behind; she desperately needed police and counseling volunteers. A lot of people were reacting to the stress of parting by punching or pulling the hair of the person nearest to them; sometimes dearest.

I had known that Evy was working overtime, too; Indicio Morales, in charge of Health Care facilities, confirmed that out of ten thousand people, fifteen hundred had fallen ill with something—mostly homesickness, anxiety, angst, and the aforementioned black eyes and contusions. They’d predicted it was going to happen, but were surprised at the volume of complaints.

Morales rolled pills and Nagasaki handed out fines and counseling appointments; both of them figured that their troubles would slack off in another week or so. (If not, we’d have to turn around and go back!) There were short business-as-usual reports from Agriculture, Ecosystems, Life Support, Maintenance, and so forth. My own report was almost a nonreport, since people were still so busy figuring out what they were going to do for the next ninety years that they weren’t checking out a lot of volleyballs and clarinet reeds. The zero-gee “saunas,” a euphemism rarely used, were occupied round the clock, which I suppose is entertainment, though few people have to check out extra equipment for the sport.

Then Purcell took the floor again, for his bombshell. “This is very bad timing,” he began, “but obviously it isn’t the sort of thing one apologizes for.” He looked at Eliot thoughtfully, and shook his head. “I’m afraid… well, my physician has informed me that I am the victim of a rare disorder called Murchinson’s Syndrome.” I was sitting close enough to Morales to hear her sudden intake of breath.