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.
(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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Also by Joe Haldeman
Forever War
1. The Forever War (1974)
2. Forever Peace (1997)
3. Forever Free (1999)
Worlds
1. Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future (1981)
2. Worlds Apart (1983)
3. Worlds Enough and Time (1992)
Marsbound
1. Marsbound (2008)
2. Starbound (2010)
3. Earthbound (forthcoming)
Novels
Mindbridge (1976)
Tool of the Trade (1987)
The Long Habit of Living (1989) (aka
Buying Time)
The Hemingway Hoax (1990)
The Coming (2000)
Guardian (2002)
Camouflage (2004)
Old Twentieth (2005)
The Accidental Time Machine (2007)
Collections
All My Sins Remembered (1977)
Infinite Dreams (1978)
Dealing in Futures (1985)
Dedication
These three books are for Gay.
EPILOGUE
PRIME
O’Hara lived for another fourteen Earth years (thirty-one, Epsilon) after this entry, and they were reasonably happy and fruitful years, even after Charlee died. She wrote another volume of autobiography that was popular on several worlds, and for eleven years did an almost daily nostalgia-and-advice column called “Ask O’Hara,” which became a series of books.
It’s ironic that after her death, the income from her publications was willed to Skepsis, an organization devoted to debunking the supernatural—ironic because those same writings formed the basis for what has to be called a religion, Modern Numinism, that is still thriving, no longer modern, after two thousand years. It has several hundred million adherents, less than half of them human.
(Numinism is the reason that I myself faded into cyberspace a thousand years ago, and will disappear again as soon as this story is told. Adherents called me the “discarnation” of O’Hara and took up all my time with silly and embarrassing questions and demands.)
She might not have been too uncomfortable with Numinism, since it doesn’t require belief in gods, or even in her, though it accepts some things as transcendental, including certain aspects of her memory.
Not that she is worshipped, or considered infallible. She was wrong about fundamental things, though Numinists disagree over which things they were, which seems to make for a healthy religion. No one has yet been burned at the stake over a question of doctrine.
Along with everyone else during her lifetime, she was wrong about the basic nature of the eveloi. She had an inkling of the truth when she wrote this:
“The coincidence that the eveloi happened to be the dominant life form on the first planet we came to cannot be a coincidence. They are too central to the commerce/ intercourse/politics of all the hundreds of species in this corner of the Galaxy. It would be like landing on Earth at random and stepping out on the White House lawn or Ngoma Square.
“Epsilon Eridani was one of dozens of targets within range of Newhome. Some of the ones with reasonably comfortable planets, like BD 50, would have been real disasters because of the native life forms. If we had stopped there, we couldn’t have stayed. And we would not have had fuel to go on.
“We were steered here, somehow. The eveloi somehow were able to manipulate the mission planners long before the war, when the first drone probe was sent. When you confront them with that idea, though, they answer with evasive coyness.”
Like everybody, O’Hara had initially assumed that the eveloi were native to the planet because there were so many other, lesser, creatures that were obviously related to them. We know now that the predatory gasbags themselves had no more natural intelligence than an earthly squid, and just served as hosts for the eveloi, who are almost invisible nervous-system parasites—nomads that travel from world to world, borrowing appropriate bodies when necessary.
They had been spying on Earth for centuries, ever since the first radio wave announced civilization. They did steer humanity toward Epsilon, by invading the minds of the planners, because every other inhabitable world within Newhome’s range was already taken.
Their manipulation of spacetime still represents a challenge, or an affront, to the Grand Unification Theory. The eveloi are no help with that, claiming to be millennia beyond interest in mere physics. They also lie.
Every species that travels away from its home star encounters them, sooner rather than later. They claim to have destroyed four such species, for the protection of all others, and have taken individuals to view the blasted ruins of their home planets—always conveniently far away, so the worlds can’t be visited except on the eveloi’s terms.
What keeps everybody politely on their toes, or tentacles, is that the eveloi are vague about what criteria protect a race from their wrath, or make them call down doom. This is not an inability to communicate abstractions; they can be clear and specific when they want to be. Sometimes it seems almost a ghastly playfulness, or, as O’Hara said, coyness. “Just keep cooperating with one another,” they say, then “Maintain a healthy competitive relationship.”
They never discussed O’Hara’s inquisition while she was still alive. Centuries later, though, I was in communication with one of them on an unrelated matter, and it recognized who I was.
By this time we knew that the river of fire had not been an actual place; it was generated in O’Hara’s mind, out of her deepest fears. When she disappeared to the people around her, she was still there, simply displaced a molecule’s width through the dimension the eveloi use for space travel. The injuries she sustained there were also manufactured from her fears, carefully adjusted to maximize pain while still allowing her to survive.
The individual I was talking to remarked that O’Hara’s response in the second instance, when John Ogelby’s life was at stake, was in a sense “wrong,” though the evaluation was never a test, in the sense that you passed or failed it. The (c)valuator would have been in favor of her sacrificing her husband, since she did know that he wanted to die. Of course he wanted to avoid pain, too, but she knew better than anyone how short his pain would be. He was so fragile he wouldn’t have lived through a second of that terrible sensory overload.
So she traded the possibility of her own death, and the certainty of months of suffering, to spare herself the burden of a small guilt. The evaluator was not impressed.
The eveloi and I concluded our business and it went off to wherever it is they go. I found the experience immensely clarifying, and wished that O’Hara had lived long enough to share it.
I must tread carefully here, and not judge. I am human, after all, even if inorganic, and O’Hara’s response to that crisis has always seemed to me consistent with what I know about love, courage, self-sacrifice—and fear and guilt. I perforce had to admire her for it, especially after learning that she generated the terrible experience herself, as her own personal hell, but have always recognized that my approval was largely self-congratulation, and therefore trivial.
But the sacrifice was not illogical. O’Hara was never unaware of the ambiguity in simply rational terms, of her action. She had gone through it once before, with her daughter, and understood that surrendering to the pain was ultimately selfish, the way many or even most courageous acts must be: facing death or pain rather than face the prospect of living with the memory of your own cowardice.
I don’t suppose a race that effects social homeostasis via the planetwide extermination of species can afford this sort of moral delicacy, ambiguity. They can never be wrong. So their “evaluation” of O’Hara’s propriety, no matter how important to the survival of the human race, does not weigh heavily on me as her sister, or daughter, or only living relative. I have to agree with O’Hara: she was, later in life, both amused and appalled by the eveloi, because they were such a literal personification, almost a cartoon, of the gods that graced six thousand years of human history: omnipotent, capricious, bloodthirsty. And thickheaded.
It was belief that had destroyed the earth, the collision of incompatible political faiths, and a specific kind of religious fanaticism that strangled New New and thus almost destroyed Newhome en route. (A clan called the Devonites precipitated a “Ten-Minute War” that left half the population dead and systematically destroyed all of the satellite’s technology that was not related to life support.) Neither catastrophe was inconsistent with O’Hara’s sentiments about religious belief.
O’Hara had been brought up indifferent to religion, but experimented with its comforts when young. By menarche,
sixteen, she was impatient with it, and was actively hostile to it by the time she got her first degree, four years later. Her senior thesis, “Public and Private Religions of the American ‘Founding Fathers,’” was cynical and pragmatic, and incidentally gave her a start in politics. Sandra Berrigan read it and asked her to be a Privy Council intern. That experience did nothing to mellow her. Most of New New’s administrative class saw religion as something between a nuisance and a weakness to be exploited.
O’Hara spent a century pulled in one direction by a perceived intellectual necessity for atheism and in another, not quite opposite, direction by the emotional necessity to recognize that there was more to the universe than was presented by the evidence of the senses and the operations of logic. The experience with the eveloi helped her reconcile the two intuitions. She wrote about that in one of her last columns, a month before she died:
“They decided to let us live. Otherwise, what was the most important gift we received from the eveloi? Not admission to a community of strange-looking creatures from various planets; we would have discovered one another soon enough. Not even transshifting, since we’re allowed to use that only at their whim.
“What the eveloi did was give us an actual physical manifestation of God, an It rather than a Him, that demonstrably did have our fate in its hands—or its tentacles, anyhow—but which did not desire worship or even attention. Having allowed us to survive, it became benign and aloof; we are free to love it or hate it or ignore it.
“I confess to being surprised, and obscurely disappointed, that no one has yet cranked up a religion to celebrate the goodness and mercy of these cosmically vicious fiends. Maybe people are reluctant to draw their attention. The history of religion would have been shorter and simpler if God kept materializing and poking a finger into your brain.