BooksBarbecue
Back Worlds Enough and Time
Chapters (90)
  1. Title Page
  2. Enter the SF Gateway …
  3. Contents
  4. Author Note
  5. PROLOGUE: TRANSCRIPT
  6. IDENTITIES
  7. YEAR 0.005
  8. EARTHWATCH
  9. A CHANCE TO DREAM
  10. MEETING OF MINDS
  11. GENESIS AND REVELATION
  12. GRAVE IMAGE
  13. THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
  14. MANEUVERING
  15. BIG SISTER
  16. THE POWER TO SOOTHE
  17. YEAR 1.00
  18. ABOUT TIME
  19. HAPPY NEW YEAR
  20. TORN BETWEEN TWO LOVERS
  21. FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS INCLINATIONS
  22. IN THE DEAD VAST AND MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
  23. OPTIONS
  24. DRIFTING
  25. DIVIDE AND MULTIPLY
  26. DIONYSUS MEETS GODZILLA
  27. 10
  28. DIDN’T SHE RAMBLE?
  29. YEAR 1.33
  30. LONG-RANGE PLANS
  31. NEW BEGINNINGS
  32. UNTIMELY PLUCKED
  33. BLUES
  34. YEAR 1.88
  35. LABOR-SAVING DEVICE
  36. FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE TO THE CRADLE
  37. A MODEST PROPOSAL
  38. ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN
  39. ONE PART HARMONY
  40. TWO PARTS DISCORD
  41. YEAR 3.21
  42. LEAVINGS
  43. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
  44. TRANSLATING
  45. YEAR 5.71
  46. WATERSHED, BLOODSHED
  47. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
  48. A WOMAN OF DISCRIMINATION
  49. THAT TIME OF YEAR THOU MAYE5T IN ME BEHOLD
  50. CATEGORIES
  51. YEAR 6.26
  52. AULD ACQUAINTANCE
  53. SOWING, REAPING
  54. TEMPERAMENT
  55. BAD SEED
  56. YEAR 8.36
  57. HUSBANDRY
  58. POPULATION EXPLOSION
  59. YEAR 9.88
  60. HOMECOMING
  61. THE BURDENS OF FAITH
  62. YEAR 11.07
  63. GROWING PAINS
  64. LONG-DISTANCE CALL
  65. FOUR NOVELS
  66. AGE 55
  67. IN DREAMS AWAKE
  68. UP TEMPO
  69. JUVENILIA
  70. POOL PARTY
  71. INTERIM REPORT
  72. CHANCES
  73. BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE
  74. FINAL APPROACH
  75. AGE 56
  76. DAY ZERO
  77. FIRST CONTACT
  78. LETTER ‘HOME
  79. HOUSEKEEPING
  80. AGE 57
  81. SETTLING, UNSETTLING
  82. THE HUNT
  83. FINAL EXAM
  84. AGE 100
  85. Website
  86. Also by Joe Haldeman
  87. Dedication
  88. EPILOGUE
  89. Author Bio
  90. Copyright
MACHINE: Are you comfortable?
O’HARA: What a stupid question. I feel like a pig on a spit.
MACHINE: Relatively comfortable. Ready to continue.
O’HARA: Oh yes.
MACHINE: Why do you want to leave Earth?
O’HARA: Why do you want to ask that question?
MACHINE: It is the one I was told to ask first. Subsequent questions will be generated by your responses. Why do you want to leave Earth?
O’HARA: It’s not Earth I’m leaving. It’s New New York. This satellite?
MACHINE: The process will be faster and easier if you cooperate. Why do you want to leave Earth?
O’HARA: The Earth doesn’t exist anymore, not the Earth I knew. Savages in radioactive ruins. Clever diseases. There’s nothing left to leave. No one I knew is left alive.
MACHINE: If you were given the opportunity to go back to Earth, rather than leave on the starship, you wouldn’t go?
O’HARA: No. I tried that already.
MACHINE: Your emotional response is complicated.
O’HARA: The situation is complicated.
MACHINE: Going to Earth the first time, what was the landing like?
O’HARA: I was terrified. The sense of falling, going so fast. I knew how safe it was but my body was all confused. The gravity and the hugeness of the world outside. Horizons. We bounced landing and the straps bruised my hips and shoulders. Then I started to laugh; I’m not sure why.
MACHINE: What was full gravity like?
O’HARA: I’d had it in gym all my life, but not being able to walk out of it was depressing. It was like wearing a heavy rucksack you could never take off. Queasy all the time at first, but that was probably the strange food and the New York City air and water. What passed for air and water. My period came a week early and the flow was heavier than ever before; they said that always happens.
MACHINE: Why did you put off menarche until you were sixteen?
O’HARA: You would’ve too if you’d grown up in the Scanlan line. The boys were animals.
MACHINE: And?
O’HARA: I was afraid. As a girl, I was good at everything. I was afraid I wouldn’t be as good at being a woman.
MACHINE: And?
O’HARA: My mother had frightening cramps, sick every month like clockwork.
MACHINE: And?
O’HARA: It scared me. Sex, I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to do it. Any woman.
MACHINE: You understood why men would? Scanlan men?
O’HARA: Scanlan boys were encouraged to be aggressive. Sexually aggressive, especially. One broke my hymen with his finger on the playground when I was ten. A couple of years later five older boys held me down by the swimming pool when nobody else was there and masturbated all over me, laughing like hyenas. Beasts.
MACHINE: But they were punished?
O’HARA: No. The first one, the hymen, said it was an accident and the others denied even having been near the swimming pool. The counselor spanked me for lying. But when they tried it again, get back at me for tattling, I was ready for them, broke one boy’s finger and gave another a good bite, drew blood. I got pretty beaten up in the process, but they didn’t harm me anymore after that. Other than the damage they did to my attitude to-ward males.
MACHINE: But you were very active sexually after menarche.
O’HARA: Maybe I was relieved to find out I liked it and could be as good as anybody at it. Besides, I went with a Devonite the first couple of years; they don’t stop fucking to eat. Got in the habit.
MACHINE: And after you left him?
O’HARA: He left me. Afterwards I spent a couple of years collecting boys, butterflying, sometimes two or three a week. The girls in the dorm called me Maneater. Then I met Daniel; we were a unit until I left for Earth.
MACHINE: The Daniel who’s one of your husbands?
O’HARA: Yes, we married eventually. After the war. My other husband, John, I’ve known longer. He introduced me to Daniel.
MACHINE: Do you plan to keep it a triune?
O’HARA: I love them both. It seems stable.
MACHINE: What if Daniel or John wants another woman?
O’HARA: It has happened a few times, with Daniel not John. Casual and temporary liaisons, nothing sneaky or serious. That I know of. We all have the freedom if we choose to exercise it.
MACHINE: Have you?
O’HARA: No.
MACHINE: You hesitated then, and your physical reactions were interesting. Tell me what you were thinking.
O’HARA: A man, a nice man in Demographics. He asked me last month; I said no but thought maybe. Guess I’m still considering it.
MACHINE: Your body is. Suppose Daniel or John wanted to bring another woman into the marriage. Would you object?
O’HARA: She would have to be someone very special to all of us. That’s the line rule: one veto is all it takes. If it was one of Dan’s recurrent morsels I’d show them both the airlock. He likes them beautiful but dumb.
MACHINE: Then why do you suppose he was attracted to you?
O’HARA: Do you have a sense of humor, or what?
MACHINE: I’m going to introduce a few drops of various substances onto your tongue, one at a time. Tell me what they make you think of. …