Joe Haldeman: Worlds Enough and Time

(Actually, of course, she hates the sun here, and rarely goes outside unless it’s raining.)

Scriber’s attitude toward aging is necessarily different from mine, since she will be transferred, literally, to a new body in a few years, a sort of brainless clone produced from one of her cells, which is how I sometimes used to feel about Sandra. Scriber’s done this nine times already, and will keep doing it until she gets assassinated, or bitten on the head by a flying viper, or struck by lightning—all of which are major worries on her lovely world. She says the record for transferrals, although it may be myth, is held by a female who supposedly went through thirty-three clones—by which time she was so befuddled she fell asleep with her face in a mud puddle and drowned. I asked her whether the story was supposed to have a moral. She said it was “Don’t fall asleep face down in a mud puddle. You will die.” I’m not sure whether she was joking.

My other alien friend is not old, at least for its kind, nor female, nor strictly bipedal, but can breathe oxygen when its diplomatic duties require the sacrifice. It doesn’t have a name, just a smell signature, something like an old sock. Oxygen makes it cough blue flames, but it controls the coughing and turns it into an approximation of human speech. This makes for a lot of give-and-take in conversation, since it has to breathe for three minutes in order to talk for one—and it does have to talk after three minutes! Otherwise the flames seek a less polite avenue of egress.

It asks a lot of questions about Earth, which it visited in its extreme youth, sometime around A.D. 1837. It was not able to establish communication, unless you consider scaring the living shit out of everybody a form of communication. It looks sort of like a metallic winged demon with horns, and breathing fire at people just wasn’t condoned in those unenlightened times.

Of course my favorite alien is Prime, more vampire than demon. We talked for a while this birthday. I asked her to appear as she used to, unclothed. For the past half-century or so, she has generally materialized wearing some modest, perhaps nostalgia-provoking, attire, I suppose to protect my feelings. I wanted to check her appearance against my memory. Thought I looked better than that—sorry, old girl. You’re pretty sexy for a cybernetic simulation.

Speaking of such things, let me go on record as admitting that I miss VR as much as anything supposedly “real.” They’ve forbidden me use of the machine ever since I had that fit a few years ago. It was the only way I could feel the world, the worlds, the way they actually are. Even when the eveloi transshift me to another planet, I have to see and hear it filtered through these dim old portals.

I really think that after 100 years, or 313, they should give you more time in the dream room, not less, not none. It clarifies your memories; helps you sort through them. After a century, you have a sufficiency of memories.

I used to visit Daniel there, dead now forty-two short years, and Sandra, gone almost fifty. His death was a hammer blow but hers was like a beheading, somehow survived. His was cancer, a few weeks of pain but time to put some things aright. Sandra was taken by the planet, a sudden volcanic eruption in the Northerlies, where she had gone with a number of her students to research, of course, vulcanism.

Oh well. Visiting dead people in VR records just keeps ghosts alive. Maybe it’s best to let them go.

It helps that I’ve been writing a diary for eighty-nine long years, off and on. But somewhere along the line I should have realized that I might live long enough to have a hundredth-birthday entry to write, and worked out something elegiac and wise to insert here. But it’s been a long time since I thought I was wise, as opposed to smart.

What I am now is still a kind of smart, but slow. When you take a long time to come up with an answer, people think it’s grave deliberation. It’s actually molasses of the synapses.

Prime reminded me that I once observed that some people age like wine, becoming complex and mellow; some age like cheese, turning sharp and finally disagreeable. Some just dry out like grass. She asked what I was. I said what I was, was too old to make generalizations like that anymore.

But it did make me think of the last taste of Earth wine I had, the bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 2075 that John saved for Launch Day. Bottled when I was twelve years old, just at its peak twenty-two years later. When did I peak?

As far as the rest of the world, worlds, are concerned, that would have been the second eveloi encounter, which had such interesting consequences. But that wasn’t me, capital Me, trading pain for pain. It was just a shared humanity, perhaps a tinge of womanhood, specifically. Though I’ve always known that if the thing had given John the choice, instead, he would have let go first. He always saw the right thing to do, and did it.

I was never given a chance to ask him about the experience. He died while I was still in a coma.

That last bottle of wine. Sam Wasserman explained it to me once, the way tastes and smells are branded in your memory, stronger than sights and sounds. Something about bypassing the hypothalamus. You could smell the intricate fruitiness of it a moment after he popped the cork, and the cool complex savor as we sipped it was beyond description. It was a magical time anyhow. Humanity leaving the womb of Earth. In that small room with John and Dan and Evelyn. It glowed with purpose, love, comradeship.

Maybe friendship bypasses the hypothalamus, too. I could measure out this long life in terms of friends, who were sometimes lovers. Who were sometimes adversaries at first, like Dennison and Purcell, which gave a special closeness later.

No one left from my generation but Charlee. We meet down at the whirlpool every afternoon, let the water lave the stiffness out while we trade gossip, sometimes about the living. And sometimes talk about serious things, although at this age it’s more important to keep each other laughing.

I fight the selfish wish to die first, because I dread the disconnection, the isolation, that her death is going to bring. But my death would leave her even more alone. She doesn’t have anyone like Prime to keep her company.

What can you say about a person whose most constant friend is a mirror? A trick mirror, of herself when young. Prime argues that that’s nonsense. She’s been a mature individual for much longer than me, since she started at twenty-nine and didn’t spend forty years as a TV dinner. (That term would be obscure even on Earth now; a primitive kind of frozen food.)

If she were less kind she might also point out that her synapses don’t have to slog through a century’s worth of accumulated toxins, so she is in fact at the same time older and younger than I am, both of those in the positive senses.

Of course there are things she can never know, because of the things that she could never do. I wouldn’t trade.

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1. The Forever War (1974)

2. Forever Peace (1997)

3. Forever Free (1999)

1. Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future (1981)

2. Worlds Apart (1983)

3. Worlds Enough and Time (1992)