Joe Haldeman: Worlds Enough and Time

I gave an unornamented description of the experience and asked if there were any questions. There were plenty of hands raised.

“If it wasn’t a ‘test,’” Kisti Seven asked, “what would you call it? An ordeal?”

“I think it was a series of experiments. The thing was emphatic about it not being a test in the sense of something you pass or fail. But I think it may have been a test in the objective way engineers sometimes apply the word: take a piece of metal and see what happens when you stretch it, heat it, dip it in acid—you’re not judging the metal; you’re just trying to find out things about it. When you’ve learned enough, you stop. They haven’t bothered anybody else, have they?”

There was a general murmur, no, and Dennison added, “They’ve asked us questions about human nature, usually pretty direct. But nothing like what happened to you—no transporting to other worlds or shape-changing, and no pain.”

“Maybe it never actually happened,” I said, “no matter how real it felt. It could have been something like VR, but more advanced. The objective evidence, the frozen clothing and wounds I experienced, could have been caused by some agency less astounding than instantaneous starflight.”

“But you don’t feel that way,” someone said. “It was real to you.”

“Absolutely. But I wonder what would happen if you put a naive primitive into a VR template. He or she wouldn’t keep the slight link back to objective reality that you and I retain. It would be just like going to another world.”

Suddenly an eveloi appeared in front of me. “It is real, real,” the thing rasped. “Come with me.” The pink tendril floated out; I closed my eyes and accepted the sting.

I opened my eyes at the sound of screams, a huge concrete lion. After a moment I recognized it, one of the guardians of the New York Public Library. Hundreds of people were stampeding in fright from this weird apparition that had suddenly appeared, woman and unearthly creature linked. It is real to them .

I said that I was convinced. The city scene faded to a weightless pearly gray. I asked it why it hadn’t transported anybody else.

We will do that soon. One more thing .

I was suddenly back in the total black nullity that had preceded the terrible choice with Sandra. After a moment, the rough rope was in my hands again.

I said that I can’t do this. You can’t make me go through this twice.

It’s not the same. Hold on .

I gripped it and was swinging in the fiery glare, the molten river rushing below again, its heat blistering even from ten meters.

You have twenty seconds .

This time it was John’s crippled body swinging there, thick hawser bound around pipestem wrists. He stared down in wide-eyed terror.

I asked if the same thing would happen if I let go.

Yes. He will live. You may live if you can survive the experience again. If he drops he will certainly die… but then he does not have a long time to live in any case .

I asked how long.

That is not important. What you do in the next five seconds is important .

I read somewhere that the two most common last words are “Mother” and “shit.” I guess I was never that close to Mother.

6 January 2204 [4 Columbus 527]—Today I’m officially one hundred Earth years old, not counting cryptobiosis. Prime notes helpfully that I was born 313 actual Epsilon years ago. Thanks, Prime. Don’t feel a day over 312.

The odd thing about it is that I don’t feel all that old, if I just close my eyes and don’t try to move—or touch or hear or smell anything. Here in the cave of my mind I can still be a gawky twelve or a cocksure twenty.

By twenty-one, I was less sure of how the world worked, after leaving New New and visiting an actual planet. Full of revolutionaries and rapists.

My favorite revolutionary was Benny, the poet “benjaarons.” The first man I loved who died. As of course they all have, though not usually slain in an epiphany of injustice. Being murdered would be interesting, compared to being slowly or swiftly traduced by one’s own body. I don’t suppose at this late date I could get anyone that angry at me.

What fraction of this body is actually mine is open to debate. After the second dip in that fiery river all of my transplants had to be replaced with new transplants. And then more switchouts over the years. I do miss having a heart that beats. Sometimes the cheerful clickety-hum drives me crazy. I love the painless mechanical kidney, though, and these hard plastic teeth. It’s funny to think about your teeth outlasting you. I wonder if they’ll pass them on to someone else. They could probably get a good price. “Used by a little old lady who never got to eat anything interesting.”

I vaguely remember some poet, maybe Shakespeare, bemoaning “the calamity of so long life.” Maybe it is a calamity if you have to hang on to one set of kidneys. I see it more as a cosmic kind of whimsy, a joke not told too well.

It’s sort of like visiting an unfriendly exotic planet, this state of being older than old. Too much gravity, the air so thick it’s hard to see and hear. Your mind is quite clear, but the alien humanoids dashing around you are on a different wavelength. You are in the grip of a sinister mind force that makes you pee when you sneeze.

(The thing about the alien humanoids is a joke, you generations yet unborn. When I grew up we didn’t have actual alien humanoids everywhere.)

But it’s still worth hanging around. There have been times when I was in enough agony of one sort or another to wish myself dead. That has always been only a reaction to an overload of pain, though, rather than a decision of great existential significance. Even when the pain was emotional. I remember Raskolnikov in that Russian novel, who in all his terrible Russian misery, of which there can be no variety worse, said that if he could have only a square meter of earth to stand on, with nothing around him but impenetrable fog, forever, that would be preferable to death. I would have to agree, if only by force of logic. Death is probably restful and boring, but maybe it’s a fiery river. Maybe the old Christians were right, and I’m going to sizzle for every one of those hundred limber teenage dicks, more or less a century ago.

I guess curiosity about religion is a disease of age. I read the Jewish tale of Job the other day, not for the first time. What it seems to boil down to, so to speak, is that God makes you suffer for reasons of his own, which you (not being godlike) could never understand, so suffer and shut up. Be glad he cares enough to take an interest in your life. I should relate the tale to the eveloi the next time I contact one; I think they would find it eminently sensible. A handy guide for dealing with merely mortal creatures.

They’re still aloof about their own affairs, although they’ve been transshifting people ever since my second test-which-was-not-a-test. Last I heard, we’d visited fifty-three planets with their help, not counting Earth and New New. We’ve exchanged envoys, or spies or whatever, with eight of those planets. In each case I’ve had to hobble ceremonially down to the Capitol and say Hello, you don’t smell bad at all, although you look like a mental disorder personified. Actually I say something less honest.

I do like the two I’ve gotten to know, especially Scriber, whom I wrote about at some length years ago. She’s also an old female biped oxygen-breathing widow. I visited her planet, a barren muddy rock going around the dim star BD 50 (BD + 50° 1725, to be formal), and can see why she enjoys her job, since it does take her away from home so much.