Joe Haldeman - For White Hill

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I am writing this memoir in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs

White Hill valued. She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines-not just thinking

machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals.

Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then,

ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going

for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.

Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always

called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was "roach," or at least that's as close as English

allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was

uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love

a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.

One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of

Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed

unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over

fifty. You can't defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between "How are you?" and "Fine."

The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located.

There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians,

religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the

domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its

unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were

submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they

would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A

person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a

dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general,

and sterilized the world.

White Hill and I were "bred" for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the

case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the

elaborate airlocks and step out onto the blasted surface unprotected.

I didn't like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.

When I worked through the final airlock cycle; for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she

was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit

she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue and green body paint.

Everything else around was grey and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a

mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of grey and black and cobalt sky.

"Welcome home," she said. "You're Water Man."

She inflected it properly, which surprised me. "You're from Petros?"

"Of course not." She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least

one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. "Galan, an island on Seldene. I've studied your cultures, a little

language."

"You don't dress like that on Seldene, either." Not anywhere I'd been on the planet.

"Only at the beach. It's so warm here."

I had to agree. Before I came out, they'd told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe

and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock,

which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.

She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. "My name is

White Hill. Zephyr Meadow-Torrent."

"Where are the others?" I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world.

The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.

"Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration."

"You've already been around?"

"No." She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. "All the

story's here, anywhere. It isn't really about history or culture."

Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. "Did you visit my

world when you were studying it?"

"No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago." She smiled at me. "It was almost as

beautiful as I'd imagined it." She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn't say it precisely in English,

which doesn't have a palindromic mood:Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.

"When you came to Seldene I was young, too young to study with you. I've learned a lot from your

sculpture, though."

"How young can you be?" To earn this honor, I did not say.

"In Earth years, about seventy awake. More than a hundred and forty-five in time-squeeze."

I struggled with the arithmetic. Petros and Seldene were twenty-two light-years apart; that's about

forty-five years' squeeze. Earth is, what, a little less than foray light-years from her planet. That leaves

enough gone time for someplace about twenty-five light-years from Petros, and back.

She tapped me on the knee, and I flinched. "Don't overheat your brain. I made a triangle; went to

ThetaKent after your world."

"Really? When I was there?"

"No, I missed you by less than a year. I was disappointed. You were why I went." She made a

palindrome in my language:Predator becomes prey becomes predator? "So here we are. Perhaps I can

still learn from you."

I didn't much care for her tone of voice, but I said the obvious: "I'm more likely to learn from you."

"Oh, I don't think so." She smiled in a measured way. "You don't have much to learn."

Or much I could, or would, learn. "Have you been down to the water?"

"Once." She slid off the rock and dusted herself, spanking. "It's interesting. Doesn't look real." I picked

up the food box and followed her down a sort of path that led us into low ruins. She drank some of my

water, apologetic; hers was hot enough to brew tea.

"first body?" I asked.

"I'm not tired of it yet." She gave me a sideways look, amused. "You must be on your fourth or fifth."

"I go through a dozen a year." She laughed. "Actually, it's still my second. I hung on to the first too long."

"I read about that, the accident. That must have been horrible."

"Comes with the medium. I should take up the flute." I had been making a "controlled" fracture in a large

boulder and set off the charges prematurely, by dropping the detonator. Part of the huge rock rolled over

onto me, crushing my body from the hips down. It was a remote area, and by the time help arrived I had

been dead for several minutes, from pain as much as anything else. "It affected all of my work, of course.

I can't even look at some of the things I did the first few years I had this body."

"They are hard to look at," she said. "Not to say they aren't well done, and beautiful, in their way."

"As what is not? In its way." We came to the first building ruins and stopped. "Not all of this is

weathering. Even in four hundred years." If you studied the rubble you could reconstruct part of the

design. Primitive but sturdy, concrete reinforced with composite rods. "Somebody came in here with

heavy equipment or explosives. They never actually fought on Earth, I thought."

"They say not." She picked up an irregular brick with a rod through it. "Rage, I suppose. Once people

knew that no one was going to live."

"It's hard to imagine." The records are chaotic. Evidently the first people died two or three days after the

nanophages were introduced, and no one on Earth was alive a week later. "Not hard to understand,

though. The need to break something." I remembered the inchoate anger I felt as I squirmed there

helpless, dying fromsculpture , of all things. Anger at the rock, the fates. Not at my own inattention and

clumsiness.

"They had a poem about that," she said. " 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' "

"Somebody actually wrote something during the nanoplague?"

"Oh, no. A thousand years before. Twelve hundred." She squatted suddenly and brushed at a fragment

that had two letters on it. "I wonder if this was some sort of official building. Or a shrine or church." She

pointed along the curved row of shattered bricks that spilled into the street. "That looks like it was some

kind of decoration, a gable over the entrance." She tiptoes through the rubble toward the far end of the

arc, studying what was written on the face-up pieces. The posture, standing on the balls of her feet, made

her slim body even more attractive, as she must have known. My own body began to respond in a way

inappropriate for a man more than three times her age. Foolish, even though that particular part is not so

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Joe Haldeman - For White Hill

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