Joe Haldeman: Worlds

It changed abruptly at the edge of the spaceport’s territory. Swampland and scrub, mangrove jungle laced with streams and lakes. A wide, bridged river with a queue of huge barges carrying dumbos to be launched and refilled.

They were falling lower, impossibly low, and seemed to be gaining speed. An illusion, she knew, but she tightened her throat against crying out as the ground flashed by underneath and then they hit hard, bounced, and the tires were screaming protest; then braking rockets boomed, pushing her hard against the restraining straps, hard enough to hurt her hipbones and shoulders; then they were rolling, more and more slowly, to a quiet stop. Her eyes filled with tears and she started to laugh.

John,

Where to start? You’ve been to the Cape, so I won’t give you a travelogue. It gave me a chill, though, the spaceport’s defenses. I counted ten of those offshore gigawatt lasers; there were probably more over the horizon. (Horizon! This damned planet bends the wrong way.) I wonder if they still work.

We took a subway to old New York, which only took a little over an hour, even though we stopped at Atlanta, Washington, and Philadelphia. Tempted to get out and see those places, but I guess there’s time for that later.

I called the school when we got to the station (for some reason they call it Pennsylvania Station; Pennsylvania must be over a hundred kilometers away). They sent a woman to pick me up, an older woman who had emigrated from Von Braun after the crack-up.

A lot of New York City came down in the Second Revolution, but they must have rebuilt with a vengeance. Pictures can’t do justice, can’t convey the size and intensity of it. I almost fainted when we stepped out on the street.

I suppose a lot of this wouldn’t affect you, since London is bigger and older than New York. Humor me, though (you’re so good at it).

Looking up makes me dizzy anyhow. It’s the same middle-ear problem you had when you moved to New New, but in reverse. I’m used to operating in a rotating frame of reference. But there’s so much to look up at. The tallest thing I’ve ever seen was the lift tube in Devon’s World. You could stand that up on any street here and not notice it.

We came up a long escalator and stepped out on 34th Street. I just stared (Mrs. Norris was ready for it and had me by the arm). Half the buildings are so tall their tops are above the cloud. The cloud, as Daniel warned me, is atmospheric pollution from the industries to the south. They keep it at the thousand-meter level with some sort of electrical thing, but it doesn’t work perfectly. The air is thick and has a chemical smell, not too unpleasant. I don’t even notice it anymore, after two days.

Mrs. Norris went to a stanchion on the sidewalk and pushed a button twice, calling us a cab. Do they have those in London? They’re little yellow robot vehicles, most of them two-person size, some bigger. You get in and tell it your destination, and it computes the most efficient route for the prevailing traffic conditions. Theoretically, anyhow. Some of the students think they’re programmed to maximize fares. I don’t use them anymore unless I’m lost, which I never would be if the streets made sense.

In the cab we went by a little park in the middle of town, a war memorial built around the ruins of the Empire building. Empire State. It really looks shocking, all bare rusty skeleton. It used to be the tallest building in the world, not even a kilometer high.

That would interest you, for your strength-of-materials. It’s easy to tell the post-Settlement buildings from the older ones, since they could only build so high without composites. And real estate is so dear the cheapest way to go is up.

We got to the school and my luggage wasn’t there. Turns out it went to Rome, Italy, which everybody but me thought was hilarious. Mrs. Norris said I was lucky they didn’t reshuttle it and send it back to New New. It’s happened, at least to low Earth orbit.

My medicine was in there, though, and I broke out in hives during dinner. They cleared it up in an hour or so, but it was an ugly time. Triggered my period a week early. You can imagine how that cheered me up.

They brought my bags in after midnight, without any detectable apology. You mudballers.

All of us newcomers got a guided tour of the city yesterday. We got practical advice as well as tourist stuff. There are places you don’t go at night and places you don’t go, period. The crime rate here isn’t much higher than in New New, per capita, but there’s a lot of capita. And the crimes tend to be dramatic. Did they have wasters and wolf-packs in London? The wasters scare me more, because the wolf-packs don’t operate downtown. They’re people who go berserk, usually in crowded places, and start killing indiscriminately. Sometimes just with knives or whatever they can pick up; sometimes with real weapons. You can imagine what a hand laser could do in a crowded store. Last year one killed almost two hundred people at a subway stop.

(When they told us about that I remembered hearing it on the news, but it didn’t make much of an impression at the time. I guess we expect groundhogs to do crazy things. I have a lot of prejudices to work on.)

Most of a whole street. Broadway, is nothing but a big meat market. Sex of every description, but somehow evil. Like Devon’s World turned inside out. Yet prostitution is illegal . The guide said they tolerate Broadway because it contains it, makes it easier to control. One of the students told me it’s been that way for more than a century, but he thought they tolerated it because it made payoffs easier, for politicians and police. It’s big business.

The police are frightening. They’re all men, big men. They look even bigger with the body armor, and you can’t see their faces for the mirrored helmets. They’re heavily armed. But I’ve talked to a couple of them, getting directions, and they seemed friendly enough.

So much of this place is so old (yes, I know where you went to school in Dublin was even older). The oldest thing I’d ever seen before was the sputnik in the park; maybe I’m too easily impressed. I’ve been walking around at random, usually alone, stumbling over history. I found Washington Square, where the Second Revolution started. Wall Street Tiffany’s and Macy’s.

I made the mistake of riding the subway without a native guide. I never was good at maps, and the subway map looks like a plate of sūmen. Anyhow, I crossed over when I should have crossed under, so went north instead of south, and wound up getting out at 195th Street, which is one of those places you’re not supposed to go even in daytime. I didn’t go outside the station, which is above ground, but even so it was scary. Even with a pair of policemen on each side of the platform. There were strong young men loitering all around, too well-dressed, who never took their eyes off me, but otherwise everything was filth and poverty. Horribly crippled beggars and some who seemed to be diseased, perhaps dying—though both the city and the federal government have socialized-medicine programs. (Well, it’s no secret that the hospitals are over-crowded, and it’s hard to get a berth if you don’t belong to one of the Lobbies in power.)

It is all so strange. I feel more alive than I ever have, but at the same time intimidated and frustrated that I only have a year here. I could spend a year in New York City—in the museums and libraries alone!—and not come close to seeing everything. Yet in a few months I’ll be running desperately around the world, for a 75-day course in “cultural relativism.” Then there’s the rest of the States to see, and the two independent states, if I can get safe entry into them (though most people seem to think that Nevada is just a bunch of thugs and anarchists, and Ketchikan nothing but a racist farming commune). All the while studying. At least I don’t have to write my dissertation until I get back to New New.