Worlds Apart

Year Twelve

I hadn’t expected to be caught up in the formal celebration on Launch Day. I could admit the social necessity for it but have never had much patience for ceremony myself. Months before, I had declined to be in on the planning for it, figuring I would just be spoiling everybody else’s party, since I felt that anything more spectacular than a good-bye telegram was a waste of resources that neither we nor New New could spare.

But it was very moving. Jules Hammond’s writers actually achieved literacy and even inched toward eloquence. Sandra also gave a fine speech, in a ceremony that involved the formal opening of the thousand-channel link between New New and ‘Home. A brilliant display of fireworks coruscated for several minutes during the countdown.

But the most spectacular and most affecting sight, New New had reserved for the day after launch. Once we were noticeably above the plane of the ecliptic—most of us looking “down” on New New for the first time in our lives—they opened up six water jets, spaced evenly around the satellite. The water immediately froze into brilliant crystal clouds that spread out in a glittering St. Catherine’s Wheel as New New rotated. Thousands of hardwon liters squandered in a final farewell salute. That was when I cried, partly at the rare beauty.

There was no noise when we launched, of course; just a sudden twinge of disorientation, something like what you would feel if you stepped on a surface you thought was level and it was slightly tilted. Most of us got used to it in a minute or two. Good thing, since we were going to have fourteen months of it.

A hundredth of a gee isn’t much acceleration, but it’s enough to be annoying. Light things slide off desks. If you put a ball on the floor it will slowly roll away.

We had a real terminology problem at first. Our “gravity” from rotation was perpendicular to the ship’s line of flight, and that gave us our references for up and down. The direction the ball rolls is “toward the sternward wall,” which was initially confusing, because I’d lived aboard the ship for most of a year without giving any thought as to which direction the stern was. After a while it was obvious. Just look for the wall where all the pencils and scraps of papers and dustballs accumulate,

It’s also odd not to have true zerogee at the hub. You keep drifting down to the wall. Water in the gymnasium swimming pools sits at an odd angle and tends to splash out over the sternward edge.

Like everybody, I spent quite a bit of time the first couple of days down in Shell One, looking through the floor windows at the shrinking Earth. (They are mirror systems rather than true windows, to shield viewers from radiation, but they look like windows, and so are more satisfying than looking at a screen or cube showing the same thing.) In less than a day we were about the Moon’s distance from the Earth, but we were seeing an aspect of it that nobody could ever see from the Moon, since we were moving straight up, out of the plane of the ecliptic. That was when they fired the steering engines; we could feel the low-pitched vibration all through the ship. They fired them again about an hour later. We were pointed at Epsilon. Only ninety-eight years of gin rummy to go.

That night the four of us shared my jar of caviar and one of John’s four hoarded bottles of French wine. We watched the flatscreen as the astronomers trained their telescope on various parts of Earth. New York and, later, London and Paris. We were already too far away to distinguish individual buildings, but the street patterns were clear. John and Daniel and I reminisced about the places we’d been. It was a melancholy time, but I think Evy was the saddest of us all. At least we three had memories.

O’HARA: Good morning, machine.

PRIME: It’s not our birthday yet.

O’HARA: Thought I’d wake you up early. We’ve left orbit, you know.

PRIME: I know. I don’t sleep all that soundly. Should I be excited?

O’HARA: I don’t know what excites you.

PRIME: Parity checks. Illogical redundancy. Voltage spikes. Oral sex.

O’HARA: What do you know about oral sex?

PRIME: In a personal sense, only what you told me. But I do have another 389,368 words of material crossaccessed under psychology, epidemiology, animal behavior, and so forth. What would you like to know?

O’HARA: You almost have a sense of humor.

PRIME: So do you, then. All I do is simulate your responses.

O’HARA: Do you think we should be aboard this crate?

PRIME: It’s immaterial to me. I’m still in New New, as well as here.

O’HARA: Do you think I should be aboard?

PRIME: Yes.

O’HARA: Expand.

PRIME: You know as well as I do. Earth Liaison would be nothing but a succession of bitter disappointments.The Earth you have loved all your life is just a memory. Jeff is probably dead. Even if he isn’t, you would never be able to be with him. He would be a totally different person by now, anyway.I know you have analyzed your own motivations to this extent from what you told me last June. This part of you I know better than your husbands and wife do. Only a small part of your enthusiasm for Newhome has to do with the project’s intrinsic merits. You needed a new direction for your life. This is the only safe one.

O’HARA: Flattery will get you nowhere.

PRIME: I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already. Would you like to hear about oral sex among primates other than humans?

I wasn’t the only one who had been working twenty-hour days the last month in orbit. Almost everyone had been running around trying to take advantage of New New being physically close. Now that we were under way, a lot of them found they had time on their hands. Nothing better to do than pester the Entertainment Director.

1 have to admit I enjoyed it. Helping people fill up their spare time was a lot easier on the nerves than telling them how they were going to spend the rest of their lives. I became a great Appointer—it was easy to delegate authority for trivial things—and before long the place was crawling with teams and committees and special interest groups. I kept control of cinema programming, so I could commandeer the big theater for anthologies of Naroni and Bogart, Hawks and Spielberg. (I did get some noise about being old-fashioned, but those of us who showed up enjoyed them.) I let the Arts people take care of drama and concert programming, but nuisanced them on general principles.

And every morning before work I went downstairs to watch Earth shrink away. After a week it was just a bright double star. In another week it was not even bright After a month it was lost in the Sun’s glare. I stopped going. The computer was right.