Joe Haldeman: Worlds Enough and Time

They tell me that I reappeared in Dennison’s office just an instant after I had disappeared. At first, they weren’t even sure what sort of weird apparition I was, skinless, smoking—not even bipedal; my legs had fused together.

Doc Bishop saved my life with an emergency tracheotomy, slitting my throat with Dan’s knife and inserting a plastic drinking straw that was one of Dennison’s quirks. It would be some months before I could feel grateful for his action.

They could do emergency procedures on Epsilon, massive painkillers and fluid replacements. Surgeons came down from ’Home to install temporary plumbing to empty my bladder and bowels, and they set up a gel bath to keep gravity from killing me. Time crawled by in one long scream of pain.

By the time I had any sense of days passing, it was a month later and I was in ’Home’s zero-gee surgery, new skin being grafted on a patch at a time, eyes starting to work. Something like a face being constructed. My ears were just holes but they built convincing copies. ‘Home had a large file of cadavers to choose from, since crypto failures were not thrown away unless their will so specified.

Everything personal and feminine had to be rebuilt. My breasts had been seared off. Buttocks and the lips of my sex melted into seamless scar tissue. I actually came out of it looking a little better than before, breasts not sagging and a couple of kilograms less in the rear. I don’t think it will catch on as a beauty treatment, though.

Sandra was at my side all the time, as soon as her own treatment allowed her out of bed. She did experience those seconds of dangling terror, and intuited what I had done but didn’t know how it had happened. Me neither, kid. Once I had hands with skin, she held my hands and told me how well I was doing, made little jokes, kept me up on hospital gossip. There were no mirrors in my room, but from other people’s expressions I knew how dreadful I looked. Never from Sandra, though; nothing but chatty optimism and encouragement. I know what it cost her to look at me and smile, day after changeless day. I was proud that she was my daughter.

And I was proud of Evy, who had retired a month before, but came back on duty to shoo Sandra away and do the ugly and painful things that someone regularly had to do. The woman I never admitted hating when she was young became one I had to love when she was old.

For more than a hundred-day year, Daniel never came when he knew I was awake. Six times that I know of, he sat by my hammock in the darkness and wept. He and John were close as brothers and I know that daily confronting the disastrous wreck that John had become was grinding him down. And now this. His wife turned into a waxen monster. Later I found out that he had stopped drinking for the duration of my treatment, or until I died. That was both brave and smart of him.

After three hundred days they brought me a mirror and allowed me to be amazed at their handiwork. My face was like a scrupulously accurate sculpture, minus a few wrinkles and a mole. It felt a little like a mask, and not just from the slight physical awkwardness. They left the mirror with me and I stared at it for a long time before I realized what was wrong: we look at our own face and we don’t find just the features that anyone sees. We see a history reflected, joy and sorrow, love and loss. This face was missing the memory of one second of death agony and three years of necessary torture. Perhaps just as well.

Speaking of torture, my physical therapy increased, and month by month I moved down through quarter gee and half gee to where I could eventually be trusted to walk around on Epsilon and occasionally pick up something light. Dan and I resumed making love, and there were happy surprises there. Every woman should have her nervous system rewired after menopause.

I spent an hour or so every day with John. He seemed as alert as ever, though weaker. I talked with him, or at him, a lot about the strange adventure, the testing, whatever, I’d been through. I had never missed so much his ability to talk. Of all the people I’ve known, he would be the one most likely to help me understand. That was partly his wisdom, both worldly and abstract, and partly the universe of pain we shared now.

He would be involved, soon enough. Maybe I felt that. I don’t believe in the supernatural, or tell myself that I don’t, but those creatures (the eveloi, as they told us to call them) obviously have some control over time. Maybe I was forewarned in some way.

In another year I was well enough to return to the surface. It was hard to say good-bye to John, after seeing him every day. I had my old Liaison job back, so I would see him periodically, but it was going to be the way it had been before. Afraid that each parting would be the last. He was only eighty, Earth-years-minus-cryptobiosis, but he looked and obviously felt a lot older. Besides, as we’d been warned, a person who’s had one serious stroke usually dies of another one.

But it was glorious to step out of the shuttle and into the warm breeze. I’d spent a lot more time in orbit, in hospital, then I had on the planet, but emotionally this was home. It was spring, and the perfume of blossoms was intoxicating, a mixture of transplanted Earth smells and alien ones. The lift door was an open gate now; I could look out past Hilltop and see how Lakeside had grown. Crop and orchard land had more than tripled, but it was laid out carefully with respect to the natural forest line, in accordance with the eveloi’s wishes.

Most of the eveloi had moved to an island on the other side of the planet, asking that we stay away from them for the time being. Two had remained behind with us, though, so I wasn’t surprised to see one of them among the welcoming committee at the loading dock. After my tearful embraces with Sandra and Charlee, and less emotional hellos for Odenwald, Dennison, and Doc Bishop, I saw the creature float forward and extend its pink feeler toward my head. I closed my eyes and cringed, ready for the slight pain.

It stung and there was a brief instant, a memory of the terrible blackness, but then it just left a nonverbal Welcome home and withdrew.

A lot had changed in the years I had been away. Some of the changes were decorative, like the orderly flower beds that lined the roads, but there were more functional alterations, too. The place was large enough to make vehicles convenient now. There were bicycles propped up or lying down everywhere, and a few power carts for the lazy or load-bearing. Sandra picked up a random bike and went back to work. Dan and I kept walking; I was still a little unbalanced for pedaling. Wouldn’t want to undo all that careful surgery by crashing into a tree. Wouldn’t want to redo it!

Dennison’s cobbled-together office had become an Administrative Center, a climate-controlled brick building about a hundred meters by fifty. An identical building across the street served as a hospital. They also stored meat there, which seemed bizarre and appropriate at the same time.

At least there aren’t any shops yet, or banks or insurance buildings. They do have what they call a “market,” though no money changes hands. It’s just a central place for people to bring fruit and vegetables for general distribution. People who eat meat pick it up at the hospital. Makes you feel like becoming a vegetarian. Or at least a careful meat inspector.

People cook their own meals. Seems primitive and inefficient, but I guess it’s worth the work for being able to choose a menu for yourself. Though ’Home’s weekly Chinese meal was unappetizing enough to save me a couple of thousand calories a month. If Dan cooks something awful, I guess I have to eat it.

I’ll probably learn how to cook myself. Some people on Earth thought that was funny, that I could live to the ripe old age of twenty-one and not know how to cook. Here I am almost sixty, and if you handed me an egg, I wouldn’t know which end to break.