Worlds Enough and Time

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….