Joe Haldeman: Worlds

O’Hara didn’t really want to go to Devon’s World. She and Charlie both had a week of vacation coming up, and they’d discussed the possibility of going to another World, but it was Tsiolkovski she wanted to visit, or maybe Mazeltov. She had made a joke about going to Devon’s World, and Charlie claimed he had taken her literally and bought tickets, nonreturnable. So she went along, grumbling, to experience Edward D. Devon’s dream made solid, a World dedicated to the proposition.

Devon’s World was the oldest large structure in orbit. Originally called O’Neill—a ninety-year-old oak tree planted by O’Neill himself survived—it had been home to some ten thousand workers involved in the manufacture of other large space structures. Out of minerals flung up from the Moon’s surface they built energy farms, space factories, a large zerogee hospital, and other Worlds—thirty-two large structures and scores of smaller ones. But now its original purpose had been preempted by its children.

It was New New York that had forced them out of business. Foamed steel from the interior of Paphos was cheaper, stronger, and easier to work with than the aluminum alloys that lunar soil could provide. Devon’s World still had a modest income from the manufacture of solar cells, for other Worlds, and some specialized products, such as large vapor-deposition mirrors.

But most of its workers, for generations now, had been lured to New New York. The New New York Corporation could afford generous relocation bonuses, high salaries, and profit-sharing plans, to save the cost of lifting men and women from Earth and training them to work in the hazardous conditions of space. Edward D. Devon and his New Baptists—who had seen the future and spent a decade in careful preparation—moved in as the workers moved out, in the most ambitious relocation of a religious body since Brigham Young’s trek to Utah.

For Charlie, the trip was a pilgrimage. He hadn’t been to Devon’s World since his own semarche, ten years before. Marianne was going with the attitude of an anthropologist, a slightly apprehensive anthropologist: it was one thing to be in love with a sex maniac, and quite another to be locked up in a World with ten thousand of them. She brought lots of schoolwork, figuring to stay in the hotel and work ahead on her studies while Charlie used his divining rod on female coreligionists. She gritted her teeth and told herself she was not jealous.

As she should have foreseen, Charlie had other ideas. This was his best and last opportunity to convert her. She cooperated, out of respect for his feelings and to satisfy her own considerable sexual curiosity, and got much more than she’d bargained for.

In his holy book Temple of Flesh , Edward D. Devon had provided a spiritual rationale for virtually every sexual diversion, with only brutality and male homosex proscribed. Charlie seemed determined to start at the beginning and work through to the concordance.

O’Hara had to admit that Devon’s World was comfortable, and beautiful—it had to be, considering that eighty percent of its income was from tourism (as opposed to eleven percent in New New)—but most of it was far too expensive for her and Charlie; prices reflected the small fortunes that groundhog tourists spent getting there. Charlie was able to get them space in a hotel that was a Devonite “retreat,” and therefore affordable. A room in Shangrila, one of the World’s two cities, would have eaten up all of their savings in a half hour.

Outside of the cities, the wheel-shaped World was mainly parkland, carefully manicured by an army of horticulturists. O’Hara admired its formal beauty but preferred the wildness of New New’s park. She also found it disconcerting to have to step over and around people casually copulating on the path. Charlie primly pointed out that they wouldn’t be doing it in public if they didn’t want people to share their joy. O’Hara would just as soon have had them keep their joy to themselves.

The swimming pool was the worst. Acres of couples, and larger organizations, doing what came naturally (or with some effort). After much cajoling she joined Charlie there in public bliss, and was obscurely annoyed that nobody watched.

A bigger step was having sex with other people, which Charlie insisted was necessary. The people were invariably gentle and polite—once you got used to total strangers asking you to do things you’d never done even in your imagination—but she was surprised to find most of the experiences boring, because most of the people were boring. They seemed appallingly ignorant and smug. They had no curiosity about New New or even Earth, but could drone on forever about family, religion, sex, and jobs, in roughly that order. At least there was never any weather.

She gamely tried almost everything that Charlie suggested, and learned more from the failures than the successes. Some of the knowledge troubled her deeply.

The padded ropes. Charlie explained it to her and showed her the scriptural passage about it, about helplessness and trust. It seemed innocuous, if somewhat silly, but when Charlie started to tie her up she began to struggle, seized with mindless terror; she even bit him while he was trying to release her. She saw then that a large part of her love was self-love, pride in taming the beast, and the other side of the tarnished coin was fear of his huge strength.

Charlie made light of it, and even showed off the wound his “red Devil” had given him. But things changed, rapidly. Charlie was hard to find during the day and fell into deep sleep at night; O’Hara spent more time with her books, studying ahead of the assignments she had brought along. By the time they got aboard the shuttle for New New, they were distantly polite with one another. Two months later, Charlie emigrated to Devon’s World, leaving her with confused memories and a disturbing fund of experience, some of which could get her a good job in Las Vegas, a city she had never planned to visit.

(From Sons of Prometheus: An Informal History of the Deucalion and Janus Projects , by John Ogelby et al., copyright © 2119 by Gulf/Western Corporation, New New York)

I’m John Ogelby and I was the one who introduced Marianne O’Hara to Daniel Anderson. Dan and I are both mudballers, though I was permanently committed to living in New New, and Dan had every intention of eventually returning to Earth.

Dan was on a research grant from Cyanamid International. He was a specialist in oil-shale chemistry, which made him quite valuable to the CC Section, where I was the token strength-of-materials man.

The CC stood for “carbonaceous chondrite,” and to most Worlds people those two words spelled freedom. Our section must have been one of the most exciting—and excited—places to work in the eighties. Every test tube and caliper was heavy with destiny, yes, and the atmosphere was so clogged with Significance that Dan and I, the only mudballers, had to flee every now and then, to regain perspective. Talk about Earth and remember that there was more to the human condition than could be perceived inside a spinning rock full of slightly wonky people. Nice people, but wonky.

In retrospect, I can see that my attitude was shortsighted. But since nobody now will admit to having had that attitude, let me set it down here briefly. I could never resist a joke at my own expense.

Between the lunar mines and the bowels of New New, the Worlds would have had raw materials enough to increase their number a thousandfold or more, if all you needed for a World was a pressure vessel full of oxygen, shielded from radiation. But you also need organic material and water, and we suffered from a marked deficiency of those.