Worlds Enough and Time

1. GROWING PAINS

15 October 2108 [1 Lao Tse 315]—What do they feed those children, sex hormones? Sandra’s starting to sprout breasts. Talking about menarche. Put a cork in it, girl. She hasn’t even had time to be a girl!

Of course she’s anxious about being the youngest. The oldest of the Old Guard are ancient crones of ten. But how could worrying about that cause her to grow breasts? (Evy says the record age is eight, so I guess I should be thankful for small favors.)

Mother was such a bitch about the way I delayed menarche. Trying not to overcompensate. Sure, honey, if you want to go from blocks to cocks in seven years, what business is it of mine?

Let’s separate this out into factors:

1. Concern about my own age. I’m not old enough to have a pubescent daughter. Me a potential grandmother? (And what if Sandra elects for parthenogenesis? A hall of mirrors.)

2. Concern about her emotional maturity. She’s so moody now, quick to laugh or cry. I think a boy could hurt her deeply without knowing it, without meaning to.

3. Concern about her studies. She’s not all that interested in academics, and will be much less so once she starts with boys. (Footnote—a constant and increasing disappointment, but be fair. She might be as bookish as I was, if she had as many books.)

4. It’s perverse. It really is, little girls and little boys. If everybody’s doing it, then everybody’s perverse!

5. Selfishness. I don’t want to share her love more than I already do. Bad enough that she loves Uncle John more than me. But who wouldn’t?

Maybe it’s mortality rather than age as such. I don’t think I mind being older. It makes a lot of things easier. But as she moves toward the marriage bed, I move toward the grave.

How poetical. I’ll leave it, though.

2. LONG-DISTANCE CALL

Newhome continually checked a wide range of frequencies sternward, hoping for a message or even some manmade electronic noise from New New. On 19 October 2108 [6 Lao Tse 315], they got a sudden strong message at the 25.7-centimeter line (which was the standard 21-centimeter line, redshifted by their velocity relative to Earth), but not from New New.

Sixty seconds of warbling carrier wave, then this message repeated ten times:

When the flatscreen flickered to life, it showed a cadaverous balding man, staring nervously into the camera. Behind him, palm trees swayed in a light breeze, seagulls floated.

The camera pans around jerkily to a big man in his late fifties, sunbaked skin dark against a shock of white beard and long, flowing white hair. There’s a radio telescope dish in the background.

3. FOUR NOVELS

The ten years that followed renewed contact with Earth were very interesting for O’Hara and for Newhome in general, but I must necessarily present them here in concentrated form. When I relate this story to other machine intelligences, these ten years are given about the same amount of attention as any other ten in O’Hara’s centuryplus. This document, however, is limited by various storytelling constraints having to do with unity and balance.

In fact, one could compose several interlocking novels covering this ten-year span, and each one would be a worthy chronicle. But to put them inside another novel would be a topological impossibility. So I will relate them in abbreviated form, each one illuminated by an entry from O’Hara’s diary, or a similar document.

John Ogelby was surprised to find out how much he enjoyed being a father, or uncle, or grandfather-figure. Nineteen years older than O’Hara, he was sixty-three when Sandra left the creche and moved into their lives.

Like Daniel, he had assumed that Sandra was going to be O’Hara’s project, with himself a more or less inactive bystander. The little girl saw things differently, though.

Children usually were fascinated by John, since they were fascinated by the strange, and John looked like a creature out of a fairy tale. He’d grown used to their stares and questions long before he emigrated from Ireland to New New, seeking low gravity to ease the pain of his twisted back. Birth defects were rare in New New, but deformation was not, since space is unforgiving, and will repay a moment’s inattention with a limb torn off, or a face. So children were always asking him what did he do to get like that?

It was a question he had asked, himself, when he was young. His parent’s assurances that God had done it to test his faith did not leave him well disposed toward God. John gave up on religion long before he went off to Trinity, to Cambridge, to the Cape and space.

Sandra hadn’t asked him that question, since her mother had prepared her. She did have other questions, as they got to know each other: can’t they fix it? (They could have, when he was young, if there had been money.) Why’d they let him be born? (Abortion was illegal at the time and place of his birth.) Did he have brothers or sisters with bad backs? (No, his father had practiced a time-honored form of birth control: leaving with another woman.) Did he ever wish he hadn’t been born? (Everybody does, sometimes, if they live long enough.)

John wasn’t sure how to act around children. His own childhood had not given him any reason to like the little bastards, so he had avoided them all his life, which had required small effort in New New and none at all in the starship, at least until they geared up the baby factory. As Sandra approached the age of eight, he resigned himself to the occasional interference with his orderly life. But nothing prepared him for falling in love.

It was a mutual chemistry of discovery and fascination. The adult males in Sandra’s life, her creche fathers, were all cast from the same mold: self-assured, endlessly patient, mildly but consistently authoritarian. Uncle John was like a different species. He never told her what to do. He was likely to answer a question with another question, or a paradox. He was sarcastic, oblique, darkly humorous but always serious.

Usually when Sandra talked to adults she rightly sensed they were only partly there. Uncle John gave her all of his attention, as if studying her, and talked to her carefully but without condescension. He was real to her in a constant way that no other grown-up, not even her mother, had ever been.

John didn’t try to analyze his fascination with her beyond the obvious fact that she was a genetic duplicate of the woman he loved most, the woman who had rescued him from a life of disconnection, alienation, self-destruction. She had novelty value, too, and presented a learning experience, since he had never watched a child grow. She seemed unusually alert and creative, but he admitted to a lack of comparative data.

They met after dinner, without O’Hara, every Monday and Thursday. John would drill her on the week’s arithmetic lesson and they would play a game of checkers or Owari. He promised to teach her chess when she turned twelve—and knew from O’Hara that she was secretly studying it on her own.

She never had the chance to surprise him.

12 July 2110 [27 Hippocrates 2110]—John had a stroke day before yesterday. Sygoda called me asking if something was wrong; he’d missed a staff conference and didn’t respond to his keyboard, though it was busy. I thought he had probably left it on and, forgetting about the conference, had taken a nap. The beeper won’t wake him if he’s really sawing wood.

I was up in zero gee anyhow, staying out of the engineers’ way while they were measuring for a new murderball court, so I ducked down to his flat.

He was lying by the toilet, where he had vomited. His eyes were open, but all he could say was my name and “shit,” over and over. I called the ER and got him a drink of water, on which he almost choked. He was waving his left arm around initially, but had calmed down by the time the medics got there. They both said they thought it was a stroke, but wanted a doctor’s opinion. They attached three diagnostic telltales, and the physician on ER duty confirmed that it was a “cerebrovascular incident,” and told them to take him to the lowgee ward without passing through high gee. I went along with them, holding his left hand. His right was stiff and cool.

They put him in bed with an IV drip and scanned his head. They showed me a picture of a large area in his brain that was suffused with blood.

It doesn’t look very good. In the old days he would have gone straight to nanosurgery, where an army of tiny machines would be directed to go in there and clean up, restore synapses. But nobody now can do it; we don’t even know exactly how to get the machines in and out of the brain, which has to be done with high precision.

He’s been stable now for two days. It’s always possible that the missing nanosurgery information will come in from Key West next week or next year. There’s also a chance that he will recover some or most or all of his faculties spontaneously, as the brain reorganizes its wiring. There’s a larger chance that he’ll have another stroke and die.

Every hour without change makes spontaneous recovery less likely. He still can’t move his right arm or leg and there is no expression on the right side of his face. He still has only two words.

A speech therapist spent a couple of hours with him, but he just looked at her. I got him to try a keyboard once, but after half a line of gibberish, he gave up. He can’t or won’t read.

Sandra is inconsolable. She comes to the door but can’t get any closer without bursting into tears.

I’m close to tears most of the time myself, but haven’t cried in his presence. I know he’s conscious of that effort and appreciates it. We communicate in small ways. Most of the medical people treat him like a vegetable, but they haven’t been married to him for twenty-four years. He’s still all there, or mostly there, in some sense, at least emotion if not intellect. It’s so sad, so unfair. A fine reward for a lifetime of brave coping.

Daniel and Evelyn and I take turns staying by his side. They want one of us there all the time for a few days, to talk to him when he wants to listen, and to report any sudden change.

After about two weeks of no change, O’Hara was given the option of either taking John home with her or having him transferred to the Extended Care Facility. The ECF was primarily an old folks’ home, with a few younger people like John, who didn’t need a lot of medical help but did need to be fed and changed. Even if it hadn’t been at the 0.6-gee level, the ECF would have been out of the question because of the indignities O’Hara witnessed there. It was crowded and understaffed and smelled of stale urine and gastric juices. People mumbled and cried and the cube was on all the time.

The obvious third option, cryptobiosis until nanosurgery was possible again, seemed too risky. The brain was the most delicate organ preserved, and was the locus of almost all fatalities on restoration. Sylvine Hagen said she might give John a 10 percent chance of surviving, though even if he lived, he might not have enough cerebral organization left to make nanosurgery useful. They didn’t tell John.

What they finally did was take John back to his quartergee office, which they had converted into a sickroom. It wasn’t difficult to care for him, once he mastered the bedpan and urinal and was able to feed himself after a fashion. They rigged up an “answer board” that had the numbers from 0 to 9 and YES, NO, and MAYBE. They all had beepers that he could call with a button by his bedside, and they split up responsibility for answering his calls.

O’Hara wound up on duty more often than Evelyn or Daniel, which was not unreasonable, since she could do most of her work from John’s console. Dan was busier than he had ever been as Coordinator, since he’d gone back to his old Earth Liaison/Engineering post when they’d begun talking to Key West, and was busy all day meeting with various specialists, working out the right way to phrase questions so that the marginally educated Earthlings could find the right answers in their old-fashioned books.

Sandra finally overcame her sadness and fear enough to come play checkers with John. Everyone was relieved to see that he played a vicious and intelligent game. He initially refused to play Owari, because he didn’t have good enough left-hand coordination to count out the pebbles, but she pleaded and wheedled until he did it, which gave her a much better success rate than the physical therapist, whom John saw as a dangerous adversary.

The end of John’s novel is also a beginning, which is not an unusual contrivance. It was one of those times when all three relatives were at work, so O’Hara got the beeper by default. She was annoyed, because it was an important meeting with Coordinator Montagu and the Education Committee. She said she’d be back in a few minutes.

When there was nobody else with him, John watched a lot of cube, setting it to Random Walk until something of interest showed up. When O’Hara came in, the cube was stop-framed on a documentary about cryptobiosis, a naked man being prepped on a rolling slab. John pointed at the cube and then stabbed his answer board YES.

O’Hara had known that this would come up sooner or later. “We looked into that, John. It would be simple murder. Or euthanasia, or suicide—you wouldn’t have a ten percent chance—”

“Shit!” John said, and stabbed YES.

“Even if you survived, you’d be mentally worse off—”

He pounded YES YES YES YES. “Shit-shit!”

O’Hara sighed. “Let me call Dr. Hagen.”

Sylvine Hagen came down, armed with statistics and lab results and truly gruesome cube footage. John would not be convinced. O’Hara said they would have a family conference about it.

A novelist’s prerogative would be to go inside John’s mind, and demonstrate that he was well aware of all of the conflicting factors, including the rather complex one that O’Hara and Evy and Dan and Sandra would all be greatly relieved if he were safely installed up on 2105, and their guilt at that foreknowledge of relief was the main thing standing in his way. The novelist would have John screaming silently at them Anything is better than this! I only have a tiny chance of ever functioning again, and your peasant rectitude is the only thing standing in my way!—but all I can really say is that John said the same word over and over, and kept pounding YES, no matter what they said to him.

The solution was undramatic: recourse to law. O’Hara discussed the situation with Thomana Urey, an expert in constitutional law, and she said there was no question. John was capable of making the decision for himself, and was presumably aware of the subtleties, even though he couldn’t discuss them. He didn’t have any more “right” to cryptobiosis than anyone else did, but in standard practice the only thing that prevented a person from exercising the option had been his or her usefulness to the maintenance of Newhome. John was not currently useful to anyone—including, apparently, himself. Let him go.

With a little guilt and a lot of relief, they did.

Uncle John’s stroke was one of two hard blows that marred Sandra’s eleventh year, the first being a painful and premature loss of virginity.

O’Hara had reluctantly given Sandra permission for an early “forced” menarche, so she wouldn’t be left behind by the other girls. Predictably, a combination of natural curiosity and peer pressure had resulted in a classwide orgy of sexual experimentation, and Sandra wanted to join the party.

It was a couple of years too early. She was small, she couldn’t relax the appropriate muscles, and her hymen was tough. The first two boys she asked were unable to penetrate her before ejaculating. The third, unusually large and strong for a twelve-year-old, succeeded, but in his enthusiasm caused a lot of pain and bleeding. Sandra withdrew from the sexual marathon the same day she entered it, hurt and bewildered, distrustful of males.

Her mother took her to a gynecologist, who tried to comfort her with case histories, and used a little camera to show her that she wasn’t badly hurt inside. Both women urged that it would be a good idea for her to wait awhile, to heal emotionally more than physically. It might also give the boys in her peer group time to learn something about girls, so they wouldn’t be such blunt instruments. They were both supportive and nonjudgmental and made her feel like shit.

She took her pain to Uncle John, and he said well, you did something stupid and got hurt and it hurts twice as much because you knew it was stupid when you did it, right? The creche mothers and O’Hara all wanted you to wait, but you went ahead because your desire for other kids’ approval overrode both common sense and the desire to please adults. Besides, it’s your body, et cetera, but it might not be a bad time to reflect that it’s actually two cells from your mother’s body that got loose and have sort of been going their own way, and aren’t you glad there’s no father in there to complicate things? But if you only do one stupid thing this week, it’ll be better than most of my weeks. Let’s play checkers.

She hugged him and cried on his shoulder, and it is not just novelistic speculation to imagine that this made him feel uncomfortably nonavuncular feelings toward the little girl. He had discussed it a few days before with Daniel, while they were splitting a box of wine in the south lounge after dinner.

Daniel predicted wrong. Sandra’s pattern was about the same as her mother’s as a young teenager: having been introduced to sex, she decided she liked books better. She became a model student, doing assignments on time with care, volunteering for extra work, speaking up in class but not dominating. She built models and studied keyboard—including harpsichord, to her mother’s delight, once her hands were big enough. But her sex life, for several years, was nonexistent or solitary.

For about a year when she was fourteen, she had an all-consuming crush on Hong-Loan Kim, her chess partner and swimming buddy. O’Hara was sure they were having sex (and she was right) but was too uncomfortable about lesbianism to counsel her one way or the other. Kim eventually left Sandra for a man twice her age, and once Sandra got over her helpless anger, she went back to her books. But not to boys.

Sandra was as plain-looking as her mother had been when she was young (and, like her mother, would be striking when she was older), but there was no shortage of boys vying for her attention. She knew this was just because she was a conquest, reputedly the only girl in the Old Guard who wasn’t having regular sex with at least one person, and that popularity-by-default did not boost her opinion of boys. She knew they kept lists, and heard that some of them had everybody but her on theirs. She was determined to keep it that way.

The boy who finally won her was Jakob Ayoub, homely, short, tongue-tied, and very smart. At some level he probably evoked a memory of Uncle John. They watched each other grow up, as everybody did everybody, but didn’t become friends until they were fifteen and sixteen, when chance threw them together as lab partners in beginning chemistry class. He was clumsy with glassware but graceful with algebra, and she was the opposite, so working in tandem they were able to excel.

All this time, O’Hara had not been exactly a doting mother, though that was due to lack of time more than a shortage of desire or ability. When Sandra was nine, O’Hara announced her candidacy for Policy Coordinator. She ran unopposed, and so became Coordinator-elect when her daughter was eleven, and stayed in office until she was seventeen. They were busy years for everybody, handling the information explosion from Key West and the sudden bombshell that the cryptobiology people handed them in 2112: with a simple alteration in technique, the period of suspended animation could be shortened to as little as twenty years, or lengthened to over one hundred, without affecting the probability of survival. This gave people a lot of options, and with the options came the need for regulation, and with regulation came dissent.

During O’Hara’s last year in office, Sandra announced that she wanted to marry Jakob. O’Hara thought that a simple one-to-one relationship would be awfully confining, and she managed to talk them into making the marriage formally open. They did it only to humor her, both of them sure they would never have room for anyone else in their lives.

Then they announced their other little surprise.

O’Hara had given up Jeff Hawkings for dead almost twenty years before. On Earth they had been adversaries and then lovers—and for a few days husband and wife, in an attempt to secure New New York emigration for Jeff, as the United States and then the world collapsed into total war. With strength and luck and cleverness, he got them down to the Cape in time for the last shuttles before the bombs started to fall, but by then no groundhogs, to whomever related, however valuable, could get a berth into orbit.

He made it through the war, though, and the chaos following, and a few years later he improvised a radio link with New New. They talked a few times and then the radio station was destroyed, and O’Hara had no reason to believe that he had survived.

So she lost him twice, and here he was again, though they were worlds and years apart. External Communications, suddenly a real committee again, let her broadcast the first reply to Key West. It was a short and stilted speech, too many eavesdroppers, followed by an hour of Jules Hammond relaying to Jeff and his people everything that was known, or could be surmised, about what had happened from the time they last were in contact until New New fell silent. The similarity of their predicaments was interesting; they could trade.

Then the technical people talked for some hours about the sorts of knowledge they could transmit, and the sorts of things they eventually could use in return. They set up a schedule, starting five days hence, for people from each discipline to begin teaching. It was easy to calculate at what time of day we would be above Key West’s horizon, and we would broadcast constantly whenever they could hear us.

O’Hara well understood the Machiavellian angle behind this generous giveaway of knowledge. We wanted to put them in our debt, and fast. Sooner or later the groundhogs would uncover a treasure-trove library and be able to unlock it. Then, if they were so disposed, they could transfer the data to ’Home in a few days or years, depending on their level of technology, and undo a large part of the damage New New had caused.

If they felt they had some reason to withhold data from us, though, there was nothing we could do. We would be back where we started, with the prospect of slowly evolving mathematics, the sciences, and engineering, but with most of history, literature, and music forever lost.

O’Hara’s first assignment in this grand dissemination of data was to teach the rules of games. That seemed less than grand, compared to the responsibilities of people delivering learned disquisitions about trigonometry or ethics, but it was arguably one of the most useful early lessons, relatively easy to follow and associated with pleasure. She brainstormed with Gunter, Lebovski, and Saijo, eliminating games with complicated pieces or rules, starting with children’s play and moving up through more elaborate games of skill and chance.

The short transmission from Earth hadn’t given them any useful clues. Teaching children how to play jacks and marbles would be sort of cruel if there were no jacks or marbles. What simple games could they be sure had survived the cataclysm—should they teach kids how to play tag, hide-and-go-seek? (They decided against that genre, so as not to appear too ridiculous.) They gambled that durable accessories like horseshoes and balls would be available, though their demonstrations of such pastimes would look strange from a groundhog viewpoint. In a rotating frame, every pitch is a curve ball. A horseshoe’s path is a sideways-twisted parabola.

The first dozen or so transmissions were fairly easy to set up, since they involved only simple introductions to selected pastimes. Once past the obvious, though, they had to decide between depth and breadth. They had demonstrated the basic moves and rules of chess, for instance. You could spend hundreds of hours explaining various strategies, but given only one hour of transmission each three days, would it be more constructive to spend it discussing a few classic chess openings or to start something new, relatively obscure—sketch out the rules of Parcheesi, or Texas Hold’-Em? The four of them spent much more time deciding what to teach than teaching.

They had almost three hundred hours of fun-and-games broadcasting scheduled before they could expect the first feedback from their audience; before they found out which of their hours had been valuable and which had fruitlessly duplicated things the groundhogs already knew. There was an advantage to the lack of feedback, though, since once they had their basic plan agreed upon, it only took a few months to set up and record all of the lessons. So in January of 2109, O’Hara delivered the last lesson to External Communications and went back to business as usual.

It was Dan’s last year in office and her last year before running. They’d long planned for her to announce her candidacy for 2112 the day after he stepped down. She would spend this last “nonpolitical” year making good impressions, mending fences, doing favors that could be called in. Of course, the political community in Newhome was so small that there was no secret as to what she was doing and why; it was a rite of passage, a genteel excruciation ritual. This was a game, as Purcell had taught her, with unwritten but not very flexible rules.

She spent as much time with Sandra as possible, knowing that once she became Coordinator (losing the election was not an option she wanted to consider) the time wouldn’t be there. By then Sandra would be fairly independent, anyhow, at thirteen. The age her mother had become a mother!

She took Sandra on trips to Earth and New New via the dream room. They were standard tourist matrices, but she could walk alongside her daughter and say, this bar, the Light Head, is where I met Uncle Dan; I lived down that street in New York; that statue, there weren’t so many pigeons on it when we were there, because it was winter, snow drifting into the Seine, can you smell the chestnuts? No, of course not. Nor feel the snowflakes kissing your face.

Sandra was old enough, at ten-going-on-eleven, to recognize the dual nature of these outings, to see how important it was to her mother both to revisit and to share the places. So although she was bored most of the time, she never complained, even though she was using up VR time that could be going for games with the other kids. That wasn’t so important; like her mother at her age, she was a loner, and not completely by choice.

O’Hara was also going through menopause at the time, a change that she tried to welcome but couldn’t. With all her ova fried away in liquid nitrogen, the monthly cycle had always been an anachronism. She could have had it stopped at any time, and presumably could have it restarted if she cared to go through the trouble of convincing a doctor that it would be salubrious. But she wasn’t sure. Besides, there was a symmetry to the timing, her stopping when her daughter started, passing the torch, blood sisters.

They threw a wild party for Dan and the other outgoing Senior Coordinator, Ondrej Costache, on New Year’s Eve, when their terms expired. It was the first time Dan had been actually blind drunk in six years, and although O’Hara didn’t begrudge him the binge, she wrote in her diary that she hoped it wouldn’t become a regular feature of life again. It would.

O’Hara excused herself from the park cleanup detail the next day long enough to announce her candidacy. There was no opposition, which surprised no one, though Leona Burdine agreed to be the pro forma stalking horse. She would temporarily take over the candidacy if O’Hara died or ran off with the treasury.

(The position rightly made Burdine a little nervous, since it was possible she could wind up solely in charge of the whole starship if the right kind of disaster occurred. Nine other people would have to die, but it was a spaceship, and accidents happen.)

O’Hara’s diary entry for the second day of the year is informative.

2 January 10 [16 Hippocrates 319]—It occurs to me that I have never described for you generations yet unborn exactly what sort of government, or administration, we have. A fish wouldn’t describe water. (Oh, you don’t have fish? Never mind.)

Behind everything is an Evaluation Board, comprising every present and past Coordinator and a handful of psychometric specialists. The Coordinators make recommendations for people to enter the administration at the Cabinet level. The psychometric evaluators have absolute veto power if they can demonstrate that the candidate has certain antisocial characteristics—most obviously, an emotional hunger to exert control over strangers, though less obvious defects abound, such as a need for approval through martyrdom, or a perverse will to fail in a public way. Anybody who is turned down by the Board can be reevaluated annually, but its word is final for that year.

It makes for less than colorful history, not having any Stalins or Nixons. But you wouldn’t want interesting lunatics in charge if you lived in a pressurized vessel surrounded by light-years of vacuum.

There are twenty-four Cabinet positions divided between Engineering and Policy, “Policy” being anything that doesn’t have to do with grommets and electrons and so forth. A Cabinet member stays in power until he or she decides to step down or the Evaluation Board becomes dissatisfied and names a replacement.

Everybody in Newhome is defined as Engineering or Policy track for the sake of voting. A person with a sufficiently ambiguous job, such as demographics analyst, has to choose one or the other and stay with it. A new pair of leaders, one for each track, is chosen every two years. For both of them, it’s a six-year term: two as Coordinator-elect, two as Coordinator, and two as Senior Coordinator. The actual Coordinator has three votes; the others have two each.

The Coordinators’ most visible function is to decide which problems can be resolved at the committee/Cabinet level, and which must be put to a general referendum. But most of their day-today work is budget-arguing and keeping the peace among the various special interests represented by the Cabinet members and outside groups.

That’s the official story. The unofficial is much more interesting, but I’m sworn to secrecy—even to you generations yet unborn. Though I’m sure the secret will be out long before we get to Epsilon. Too many people know; too many others suspect.

In fact, the secret—that the referendum process was a cynical sham—lasted until it was irrelevant. O’Hara hated the deception but accepted it as a condition for employment, and even grudgingly admitted that there had been times in the past when the electorate had been disastrously wrong, and had to be lied to for their own survival.

That O’Hara was allowed into the Cabinet at all was a testimony to the accuracy of the Evaluation Board’s psychometrics, and the assessments of Sandra Berrigan and Harry Purcell. Ten years younger, she would have reacted to the truth with indignation, and gone disastrously public with it. Repeated exposure to human nature had reduced her confidence in people’s ability to control their own destiny.

Still, she was no cynic; like Berrigan (and unlike Purcell) she saw the fakery as a temporary necessity that would be abandoned on Epsilon. Life aboard ’Home, like life in New New, had the illusion of comfort, stability, and safety, but only by virtue of hundreds of complicated inter-relating systems. It could no more be run by democratic consensus than a floater could be driven by committee. Dangerous things happen too fast. Planets were more forgiving.

(Whether leaders would be willing to radically change a system that had worked for generations was another matter.)

Ever since childhood, O’Hara had been conscious of a sense of “destiny” that she knew most other people didn’t have. Remarkable things happened to her on Earth and afterward that did seem to be setting her up as a sort of pivot, a historical nexus. Daniel tried to convince her that it was irrational foolishness, superstition, a small cognitive defect in a brain that was otherwise more than adequate.

Her six years in office tended to confirm Daniel’s interpretation. Everybody else who had been in charge of ’Home had experienced some serious crisis during their terms. O’Hara spent six years waiting for something to happen.

There was plenty to keep her busy, but most of it just required attention to detail and careful delegation. She enjoyed the work, but it wasn’t exciting enough to raise her blood pressure. There was a huge amount of data transfer and analysis going on continually with Key West, which took up a lot of the starship’s time and energy resources, but the day-by-day management of that was the province of various specialists.

During those six years, she was still nominally in charge of Entertainment, but Gunter was actually running most of it.

She had more time than she’d expected to spend on being wife and mother. The loss of John had at first been like losing one leg off a table, but she and Evy and Dan were slowly getting used to the new balance, Dan actually cutting down on his extracurricular affairs. O’Hara and Evy half-joked about finding another fourth, but they never talked about it seriously; never when Dan wasn’t present.

As Evy grew older, she became closer to O’Hara; they had been married fifteen years when she took office. In that time Evy had gone from ravishingly beautiful to merely attractive, even slightly plump, which hadn’t hurt their relationship. She also loved Sandra, the way she loved most children—they were wonderful creatures so long as you could give them back to a parent sooner or later—and was a big help with her, especially after John’s stroke.

(Evelyn came from the Ten line, which had a tradition of marrying young and having children young. She was all for the first but not the second, which had been fine with John and Dan.)

It was no coincidence that Evy’s grandfather, Ahmed Ten, took office at the same time as O’Hara, on Engineering track. She had asked him to put his name up and, like her, he was well enough respected to run unopposed. They worked well together; they had both been on the first two postwar rescue missions to Earth, Zaire and New York. Those had been grim, dramatic episodes; both O’Hara and Ten had been toughened by them. They were ready for anything.

So nothing much happened. Except the first year.

14 July 2112 [19 Wright 323]—Witta Marckese delivered a report today from Cryptobiology that at first seemed like unalloyed good news: the sleep period can now be shortened to as little as twenty years or extended to as much as one hundred, maybe more, without increasing the risk. So John can stay under until nanosurgery is routine again, and there were dozens in similar situations.

Unfortunately, there were hundreds of other people we Powers-That-Be would just as soon not be given that kind of choice. And there is no question of keeping the report secret. Almost everybody in Crypto knows.

The timing is an unfortunate coincidence, since we’re now a little less than forty-eight years away from Epsilon, which until today was the one inflexible period for cryptos. So back in January we thought it was a nowor-never proposition, and we allowed a lot of borderline cases to go in the cans, people still more than marginally useful in the Key West project. Now we could call them back, but twenty years from now, who knows? At the present rate, transferring data visually a page at a time, we’ll still need them. But Ahmed’s confident that we’ll have a dataflow breakthrough any time now.

The next few days and weeks are going to be interesting. Joint Cabinet powwow first thing in the morning to discuss new crypto rules. Morale is not high, a lot of people complaining about busywork and probably wishing they had gone into the can while they were still young enough for it not to be a bad gamble. You can’t really blame them. Trained for science or engineering and now putting in long hours on work any fairly well-educated clerk could do. A lot of them will want to say the hell with it for twenty, thirty, forty years. How many can we afford to lose? Which individuals would we be better off without?

I personally don’t think we need any new rules. The current principle, that anybody be allowed to go crypto unless we can demonstrate that we need him or her, will do.

We just have to adjust the criteria to a level low enough that we need everybody.

That was essentially what the Cabinet and Coordinators decreed: you’re welcome to it if you qualify, but you probably won’t qualify. There were appeals through the legal system, usually based on mitigating family circumstances—“I want to join my husband after all”—and most of them were resolved by the extrajudicial, unconstitutional, use of discreet psychometrics: would keeping her here make her so miserable that it would be counterpro-ductive? Or will she get over it like the rest of us?

There was a vocal minority who claimed, with some justification, that their civil rights were being ignored; that the ship could be run with a skeleton crew of a few hundred. So anybody not crucial to maintaining life support or propulsion should be allowed to do as they wished. Key West would still be there in forty-some years.

The counterargument was speculative but powerful: we can’t risk another information disaster. What if something did happen to Key West? What if our end of the system broke down? It wasn’t just a matter of losing cultural continuity or even technical information. The people in Key West are living on a planet, which is something 97 percent of us have never done. They might know a lot of things useful for starting out on Epsilon; things not in books.

The difficulties expected in developing Epsilon also made one class of people automatically eligible for cryptobiosis: the young. Anyone born aboard ’Home would be allowed, even encouraged, to go crypto as soon as they were old enough, an insurance against the pioneer population being too heavily weighted toward the middle-aged and elderly. Nobody foresaw any problem in quickening a couple of thousand embryos in the last two decades of flight. But ’Home’s leaders were becoming cautious about unforeseen problems.

O’Hara didn’t see the policy ever affecting her. When Sandra was a little girl, she shared wholeheartedly her mother’s revulsion toward cryptobiosis. But people change.

11 August 2116 [5 Handy 332]—You lose one, you win one, you lose one… I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming. Daughters are little surprise machines.

Sandra declaring her love for Jakob was no surprise. That she wanted to marry at seventeen was a little bit of a shock, but her crowd are doing everything young. At least I talked them out of making it an exclusive bond—though they obviously consented just to humor my old-fashioned sexual attitudes. How could I ever want to do that with anyone else? Stick around, darlings.

And now she says that next year, as soon as she’s old enough, they’re going into the can together. Face the brave new world of Epsilon as young pioneers, ready to fight whatever dinosaurs or Martians are waiting on the other side of the airlock.

I really was caught off guard. She knows how I feel about it, anyhow. It would be stupid of me to try to talk her out of going.

I feel so old. Prime, come talk.

On 10 August 2117, Sandra and Jakob went into cryptobiosis. As soon as her term was over, O’Hara pulled strings and followed them.