Joe Haldeman - Worlds

All of the pedestrians were men, most of them drunk or zipped. A couple of them made me nervous, but Claire was armed and we were rarely out of sight of a police officer. (Sheryl wasn’t armed but carried a spray can of Puke-O in her bag. She says it’s a fine rape deterrent unless the wind shifts. Even then, if you have a fastidious rapist.)

Back at the dormitory I met Dolores (she was at the meeting but took the subway home) in the hall, coming back from the shower with her damp sleepmate Georges. I think it’s a mistake to take up with someone from your own dorm, let alone your own floor. Convenient, though.

13 Sept. I had it out with my advisor this morning and managed to drop the dialects class, substituting AmHist 507: “The Role of Sub-official Politics in American History.” It should be interesting, mostly a history of the Lobbies before the People’s Revolution. Spent the afternoon in the library, looking at last week’s lectures and catching up on the reading assignments.

Becoming a real social animal. Had lunch with Benny and he asked me to go to a movie tonight, part of a free series of antique classics they’re showing at the Student Activity Center. Unfortunately it conflicted with the management seminar. At the seminar I got to talking to Lou Feiffer and we discovered a mutual interest in handball, so we’re going to meet at the gym tomorrow for a couple of rounds (he’s smaller than I am and has a hard time finding partners). Big old Hawkings also plays handball, and said he might come watch. I can feel those blue eyes on my backside already.

Well, it should help get the kinks out, if I don’t break my neck.

14 Sept. My hand hurts so I can hardly hold the pen. I’ll be a mass of bruises tomorrow.

I could almost cry. I’m good at handball—but not here! In the first place, the ball won’t go where it’s supposed to. I can compensate for the extra drop for heavier gravity, but the damned thing doesn’t drift. No rotating frame of reference, no Coriolis drift. You can’t unlearn a lifetime of instinct overnight. I misjudged every damned ball, finally had to quit.

In the second place, they play handball as a competitive sport. The idea is to make the other person miss it, not to see how long you can volley. Really bizarre.

Lou was sympathetic to my frustration, after I explained about compensating for drift, and he tried serving slow ones to me. That was even worse, of course, and that’s how I got the bruises.

I was glad they have separate dressing rooms for men and women. I didn’t feel like making small talk.

Jeff Hawkings was waiting with Lou when I came out; they asked if I wanted to go find a beer. Told them I had to study. I suppose they’re both nice people, but I didn’t feel like going through the strain of being polite. Feel like a broken bone.

15 Sept. Mother wrote saying she was pregnant again. What will it be like, having a little sister or brother (she didn’t say which) who’s twenty-one years younger? Glad I’m not living at home anymore.

I wonder if she’s just doing it for the allowance? Seems more trouble than it’s worth.

Joanna Keyes, who lives down on the 36th floor, came up and visited for a few hours this afternoon. She’s an undergraduate in politics and government, and an odd person but likeable. So intense. Very bright; she took the business course I’m in, last quarter (it’s not normally open to undergrads).

She wanted to know everything about how New New is run—not just the formal business of overlapping cells and so forth, but also what goes on behind the scenes. Who runs whom, what should be voted on and isn’t, where does the real power lie. I asked her similar questions about America and got some ferocious answers.

I’ve always thought the pre-Revolutionary system was more elegant, but it did concentrate too much power in the hands of one person. Keyes says that at least you knew who the man was then. The person who represents a Lobby in Congress is never the one who makes the real decisions; the real leaders are rarely identifiable and are never held responsible for their actions. If a puppet gets in trouble they sacrifice him and haul out another.

I don’t doubt that that’s true, at least some of the time, but it’s certainly not the whole story. If a Lobby consistently acts against the public interest, its voting power dwindles away. Keyes says that’s a cynical illusion: all the polls reflect is how much money a Lobby has put into advertising.

Well, that reinforces a cliché about groundhogs, that they sit around all day zipped, staring at the cube. But then who are all those people on the street? How do they manage to maintain a complex, technology-intensive society? Somebody must have some sense!

I think she’s a bit myopic. No government works perfectly; any system attracts its share of crooks. In America and New New, at least they have realtime polling. Look at England, look at the Supreme Socialist Union. By the time the will of the people has percolated to the top, the situation may have changed radically.

But I like her. She has real fire, and asks hard questions. So many of my classmates are just hard-working drudges, in the business of getting their degrees.

She wanted to take me down to a little wine-house on Eastriver, but I have to do the class on Crane Monday (talk about drudges) and had better read some criticism or Schaumann will nail me up to dry. I told her we’d do it some time next week; she said there are always a lot of interesting people there, political types.

It occurs to me that I’m too consciously “observing” people, like an entomologist (Keyes, Joanna; 150 cm. X 40 kg., swarthy, short black hair, burning black eyes, aquiline nose, boyish figure, styleless clothes, radical, cynic, witty, intelligent—and possibly interested in me for reasons other than politics. Which side should I wear the earring on?). Do the people notice?

16 Sept. Spent all day in the library, after the entertainment lab, which was more folk music. The banjo is a queer instrument; I’d only heard it Dixieland-style, strummed. The man who played for us picked the strings individually, and very fast, though repetitive. He seemed to be day-dreaming, not paying much attention to his fingers. The other soloist played the fiddle, and he was exactly the opposite. He stared down at the instrument with a fixed expression of amazement—am I doing that? He was a big fat man, with a white beard, and his fingers were so huge you would think he couldn’t play anything smaller than a bass. He made sweet music with it, though.

Most of the management seminar was in the library’s journal room, since our assignment was to analyze a couple of dozen papers on personnel selection, and they didn’t come in until Saturday noon. The ones who could afford copyright just made copies and took them home. Hawkings and I were there all afternoon, scribbling away. So he has a saving grace: at least he’s not rich.

17 Sept. Waded through Crane and Crane criticism all day. He’s a good writer but I have to keep looking up archaic expressions, especially the dialect: “Dere was a mug come in d’ place d’ odder day wid an idear he was goin’ t’ own d’ place. Hully gee!” (It took me a long stare to figure out that last one was a euphemism for “Holy God!”)

18 Sept. I was a little nervous, but the Crane class went pretty well. Schaumann assigns each author to a student, in rotation (so I won’t have to do it again for a month). The student gives a half-hour talk about the work and the author; then Schaumann takes over. You aren’t graded on the talk. Schaumann says he teaches that way because he’s lazy, but the real reason is to give himself insurance, providing both a dialectic base for his questions and one sur victim.