The Worlds Trilogy by Joe Haldeman

Author:Joe Haldeman [HALDEMAN, JOE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3891-1
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2011-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

3 Daniel Anderson

Slightly excruciating dinner last night, with Marianne’s family. Her mother is scarcely older than me—she gave birth to Marianne at thirteen—but we have absolutely nothing in common, except Marianne.

(Interesting that such a dull and silly woman could produce such a daughter. The father was a groundhog engineer, though; that must explain it.)

Marianne’s little sister was entertaining, and very smart for an eight-year-old. Predictably spoiled. I’m glad we won’t be having any children until after acceleration. Life is complicated enough.

Start-up is pressing me to be Engineering Liaison between Janus and New New. I couldn’t refuse outright, but I’m searching—rather, Marianne and I are—somewhat frantically for someone who could be talked into volunteering for the job. With more than four hundred track-grade engineers aboard, you’d think there would be one with some political ambition. But I guess all those are staying behind.

Not that it’s such a difficult job. But hell, the main reason I wanted to go was to get out from behind this desk and back in the lab. Or so I keep telling myself.

John would be willing to take it—he’ll be the highest-ranking engineer aboard—but he’s ineligible on account of not being able to use a spacesuit. One lovely part of the job will be supervising EVA drills. You do have to be reasonably good with a suit to work on the hull of an accelerating vessel, even at a small fraction of a gee. If you fall off you’re just gone.

I don’t mind doubling up on jobs; we’ll all have to do that for a few years. I asked for food service; cooking was my hobby on Earth. But they didn’t want to waste all those years of administration experience. I feel like a prisoner whose sentence has been extended because he was so good at being incarcerated.

Complaining to Sandra Berrigan didn’t help much. She said my feelings had been taken into consideration, but that it was a fact of life that most scientists and engineers who are good administrators are good in spite of not liking the job.

Marianne’s second job is Entertainment Director. That makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose. She has a lot of experience in music and is one of those freaks with an eidetic memory for movies and plays. She was a little disappointed, though, hoping for something less frivolous. Seems like a pretty important job to me. There’ll be an awful lot of people just twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their replacements to grow up and be trained.

The architects are going crazy, trying to design a star-ship that is also a dwelling for a population that stays stable for seventy-eight years and then grows like a yeast culture. I think the real problem is eleven egos all conscious of the fact that this is the most important project they will ever work on.

I wouldn’t like to be in Berrigan’s shoes. When she okays the design she’ll make one friend for life—and ten enemies. That’s another thing that makes administration so attractive.

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