Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

It’s too soon to say much about climate or weather. Obviously there will be a great variety of conditions, since Mainland stretches from the Arctic Circle almost to the equator. Tides will be four times as high as on Earth, which of course will affect living conditions on the coasts and especially on small islands.

We’re tentatively planning to establish the first settlement near the large inland lake in the temperate zone, though robot drones and, selectively, survey teams will range all over Mainland and Tropica. The polar ice caps and the four other large islands will also be surveyed, but probably won’t be settled in the near future, unless they have some special virtues.

This map will be updated every day at noon.

Age 55.99 [8 King 429]—Coming into orbit. I opened up the window in my floor to watch Epsilon drift by every fifty seconds, twice a minute. Finally getting used to this time system. Dan says it’s like living a linear transformation, which I think is a highly emotional observation, for an engineer.

I perversely miss being head of Entertainment. They’re letting me help with the big party, but it’s a pale shadow of the satisfaction you get from orchestrating the whole thing. (I know I could look back through this diary and see how much I enjoyed it while it was happening. That’s the nature of the beast.) I’m in charge of the scaffolding crew. The same complicated system we’ve used since we left New New, now rather sagging and worn. Aren’t we all. Complicated systems.

I want to throw myself into work to stop thinking about Sandra. If anything happens to her, it’s my fault. I knew that she and Jakob wanted to be on the first shuttle, but when I put in the early-thaw request I was sure it wouldn’t be fulfilled. I just didn’t want her bitching at me for not having tried. So now while I’m bolting together bleachers, she’s studying maps and practicing pistol shooting. Pistols! What do they think they’re going to run into? Revolutionaries? Mobsters?

Well, we know there are large animals, herds of them, or at least large groups of objects that don’t stay put. They might be dangerous. But all my earthside experience with guns was awful. I asked the mesomorphic hero who’s leading the expedition why they couldn’t just use tranquilizing darts like those rifles in Africa, and in answer got a roll of the eyes and a condescending explanation that we don’t know anything about the creatures’ metabolism, so we don’t know what would put them to sleep. Okay, so I guess anything that gets blown apart does stay blown apart, regardless of its metabolism. But it seems like the wrong way to approach a new world. And yet I want my girl to be safe, and if that means shooting straight, so be it. Some American writer said that it was a sign of intellectual maturity to be able to hold two opposing opinions in your mind at the same time. It also makes you a nervous wreck.

The tranquilizing darts aren’t that benign. That poor silly boy Goodman was killed by one in Africa, though he was struck in the heart and it was probably an elephant’s dose. There’s still an itchy spot on my throat from a trank dart where that shitbag rapist shot me in New Orleans. “Shitbag” was what his partner called him.

A numb patch on my arm from the razor wire. A numbness like a light finger-touch from the deep stab wound in my butt, and twinges still from my nose and the teeth they had to install after that animal beat my face against the sidewalk in New York. And the one time I used a gun, the man staring unbelieving at the mangled stump spraying blood, maybe we had to kill him but the memory makes me swallow hard or vomit. If I had a God to pray to I would pray that Sandra should please live in less interesting times. Adventure is something you want to read about, not do.

Babies should come with a warning label ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO THIS CREATURE IS YOUR FAULT. Up to a Certain age, I guess. I wonder what age that is, and whether it’s the child’s or the parent’s.

(I would have made a hell of a creche mother. Spend my declining years brooding over the fates of a thousand people who don’t even remember my name.)

I tried to have myself assigned to the first shuttle, too, but there was no chance. There are people my age, or almost, but they’re either scientists or the kind of fanatics who wouldn’t let mere pneumonia keep them from putting in a couple of hours at the gym every day. Nobody over fifty should be allowed to have a flat stomach. It’s undignified.

(I still am putting in an hour or so, three days a week, swimming. That looks like a practical skill for Epsilon. It may be the way we commute to work.)

So the earliest I can be assigned is “secondary” stage. They won’t say, can’t yet say, how far away that is and exactly how many people it will entail. Hundreds. Sandra’s primary stage is one shuttle of scientists and one of people like her—“Engineer Pioneers,” young and strong and smart enough to know which end of a shovel works best for transporting dirt. Along with a shuttle of tools and weapons. The shuttles will come back two more times with more tools and supplies. Then, if things go according to Plan A, Sandra and her cohorts will build a small settlement there by the lake. When that’s done, we secondary types will come down in ten to twenty flights, and set up housekeeping and systematic exploration. Get crops started. The tertiaries, the actual colonists in the usual sense of the word, have to wait at least a year.

Before the primaries go down, starting tomorrow, they’ll have robot drones buzzing around sniffing the air, sending back pictures. Hope they don’t find anything too interesting.

This is the short conversation exchanged between O’Hara and her daughter on the evening of First Day:

[10 King 429]

O’HARA: Hello? Okay, I’m here.

SANDRA: Mair! I got you! We only have a hundred seconds—look at this!

(The camera does a jerky pan around 360 degrees, showing lake, grassy swamp, an oddlooking forest with snow-capped mountains in the background, and a shuttle, sitting on its tail, lurched slightly out of plumb.)

O’HARA: Good grief! What happened to the shuttle?

SANDRA: Oh, the ground’s soft. It’s no problem.

O’HARA: No problem? What if it’d fallen over?

SANDRA: Oh, mother. You worry too much. Can you believe those trees?

O’HARA: They look like hands. Claws.

SANDRA: Don’t they? Even with fingernails. Close up, they’re covered with little red things, bugs. Some kind of symbiote, they figure, since all of the trees have them. Did you hear about the helium creatures?

O’HARA: The little balloons. They showed them on the cube.

SANDRA: We found a bigger one, too, about ten centimeters wide. They’re driving the biologists crazy! They can’t figure out where the helium comes from.

O’HARA: That’s what Dan said. It can’t be part of their metabolism because it doesn’t combine with anything.

SANDRA: It looks like they do photosynthesis. Any-how, this big one had kind of green hair all over inside it.

O’HARA: Are you okay, honey? I mean, do you feel all right?