Worlds Enough and Time (39 page)

“I never wanted to believe that awe in the presence of beauty was simply a response to cultural programming, or that all love could be traced to the gonads, or that truth was meaningless outside of social context. But I would take all three bleak simplifications before I would accept beauty and love and truth as gifts from a sometimes be-nevolent God. Without the white-bearded authority figure hovering in the wings, mystery is as comfortable and prosaic and wonderful as science—and as useful, when you get around to sorting out really basic whys and where-fores. At my age, you find yourself doing a lot of that.”

O’Hara died peacefully, suddenly, having a cerebral embolism in midstride during her morning walk—her “dawn hobble”—around the park lake. She had asked that there be no memorial service and no real estate wasted on a monument, but that her ashes be incorporated into the soil of an anonymous flower bed. Of course the result of this was that there are now 149 flower beds on the planet with monuments proclaiming that she was
really
buried here.

They are all right, in a way—precisely in a way that she was once wrong. When she was young, she thought that no one born on a planet could ever be at home in the Worlds, as they called their community of orbiting vessels, and that no one born in space could ever really make a home on a planet.

This one became her home. They named it after her.

Joe Haldeman (1943 - )

Joe William Haldeman was born in Oklahoma City in 1943. He holds degrees in physics and astronomy, and served as a combat engineer in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded and earned a Purple Heart. This experience informed his best known work, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning
The Forever War
. He is one of SF’s most decorated authors, boasting 5 Hugos, 5 Nebulas, the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial and James Tiptree, Jr Awards and the SFWA Grand Master Award amongst many others. In addition to continuing to produce top quality SF, Joe Haldeman teaches writing at MIT.

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Joe Haldeman 1992

All rights reserved.

The right of Joe Haldeman to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz

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5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11151 6

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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