Worlds Enough and Time

1. IN DREAMS AWAKE

For time beyond time it was nothing but dark gray shot through with black stars the black stars slowly moving sparkling she could smell them move hear the burning cold as the stars sucked heat tinkling out of space space with the feel of stiff velvet folding

Then colors whistling soft harmonies indistinct shapes smelling no looking fuzzy sharpening up pictures this is not a dream not quite you don’t watch your dreams

Walking with Jeff through the snow outside Paris the Seine cleaner here not so clogged with houseboats old men huddled with dogs and long fishing poles lots of young walkers out in the bright melting snow stop to warm our hands at the vendor’s brazier hot crisp & greasy sausages with a cold stab of mustard foam cup of spicy mulled cider

Eight years old old enough to fly perching terrified on the edge of the platform New New York spinning slowly underneath gentle push between the shoulder blades falling falling but straight out instructor alongside shouting just spread ’em just spread ’em then gliding flapping rolling if I had the wings of an angel over these prison bars would I fly

Painting wall with Charlie after the first time his juice leaking out of my soreness I sweep the roller in a crude cartoon of his big dick he blushes but laughs it was so big in my mouth I panicked but he was gentle and knew what to do to make it easy God knows he didn’t know much else

Watching Sandra’s birth strange stuff she coughed up before the first shriek smell of babypuke and solvent acetone, John said then her soft mouth searching on my breast sucking fabric the cold spot there after they took her away

Fingerpaints on cool smooth plastic new creche mother pressing my hand down in it then again and again then trace stems for the flowers use knuckles to make grass funny every color tastes the same

Sandra rushing in with bright red blood pulsing from torn lip she didn’t want to tell me that tall bitch Harni Stevens I couldn’t stop it blood all over my console had to take her and coldseal it at the ER I talked to Harni’s line parents but they just laughed girls will be girls yeah but some girls will be animals too

New York City ruins crouching out of the wind behind a wrecked van waiting watching the little black boy whispering “Indira say you live inside a ball of dirt, like worms” and then the white boys with the guns

First solo the O’Neill Day concert when I was eleven that stupid simplified Mozart medley had to drop the middle part down an octave to keep from squeaking look on old Kurlov’s face

Snorkeling in the warm water fairy grace of the coral anemones a cloud of tiny bright yellow fish following the squids until they got tired of us the big brown shark harmless scary shivering on the hot sand I already had my dormitory key out he must have been behind the shrubs hand over mouth knife at throat pressed up behind me I could feel he didn’t have an erection just a robbery but when I dropped my purse he cut the waistband and pulled my pants down I bit he stabbed I screamed he banged my head against the sidewalk twice hard then people everywhere kicking him sirens fading

Actually seeing them the paintings you’ve seen all your life ten eleven hours in die Louvre so tired knees are shaking you will never see this again never but the Mona Lisa was in Pittsburgh

Awkward hour with my father small cubicle neat but dusty glass of harsh cheap wine sad little man felt good afterwards the biting blowing snow I think I would have hated him if he had been happy

The pool in Devon’s World all those people earnestly fucking and sucking in the dim red light with the music locker room smell with chlorine and pheromones stepping around the foursome me giggling Charlie mortified at my disrespect

Florida pinewoods ripping sound look up at exhaust trail Jeff says Christ I hope that’s not nuclear it was

the light hurts my eyes

2. UP TEMPO

8 January 59 or 18 Dostoevski 427 or whatever. I’m ninety-six years old? This “week,” whatever a week is now:

Yeah, happy nineday. I mean Nineday.

Age 55.00 [18 Dostoevski 427]—Prime says I might want to keep this diary in terms of my age in real honestto-god Earth years, rather than exotic dates, at least for a while. She’ll compute it for me as I need it. To preserve what’s left of my freeze-dried sanity.

When I first came fully awake, this body was very frightening. Having been warned, having seen pictures of others, only helped a little. White and slimy like a fish’s belly, but dreadfully slack; anywhere on my body I could pinch the skin and pull up a rubbery membrane the size of my palm. Pale blue veins everywhere.

After a couple of hours of fluid dripping into the arm, though, I was close to normal except for the pallor. It was odd to watch my breasts inflate from flaccid wrinkles up to their normal unimpressiveness. Maybe I should have stayed hooked up a while longer.

They fed us some neutral gruel and had us go through a careful hour of stretching exercises. Then a doctor and a crypto technician checked us one by one for doneness, then showed us to a pile of clothes and said we were on our own. I found a lavender shift and some slippers that looked like real leather, and thus armored went out to greet the brave new world.

Hardly recognize the place. There’s a style for garish color combinations that make my teeth hurt. That could be partly a sensory hangover from those weird visions in the can. Pink and black, though, for walls and ceiling? Orange and purple clothing?

But there are improvements. The central park has been almost doubled in size, and they’ve force-grown trees there of many pleasing varieties. Even a banyan like a big puzzle house of wooden fingers. The ag level is being used to its maximum acreage, half again what’s necessary for food, and there are plots of exotic hybrid vegetables and a small sea of flowers. They showed me a popular melon with flesh that’s dark blue shot through with orange veins and smells like fried chicken—Kentucky Fried Chicken, from the longlost US of A. Will I ever be adventurous enough, or hungry enough, to try it? Maybe they’ve made a chicken that tastes like canteloupe.

There certainly is a sufficiency of chickens, dozens of the smelly little things, not to mention small herds of goats and bunnies and pigs. About a quarter of the ag area has been made over into a sort of combination petting zoo/ farm school, so all the kids will be used to handling animals.

I haven’t seen so many children since Earth. Never a dull moment—never a quiet one, either, at least in public places. Kids nowadays, grumble, grumble. I can’t wait to see Sandra. Right now she’s not scheduled to come out until the third wave, a year or more after Epsilon orbit. Maybe I can pull some strings and move her and Jakob up to the first wave, where they wanted to be. Though it’s not clear how much real authority we Pool denizens are going to have.

Maybe I don’t want my daughter in the first wave.

The Cabinet member in charge of Entertainment (now called Sports and Entertainment) was born the year after I went crypto. He knows all about me and is very respectful. And very protective of his territory. I don’t want to meddle, but anyone with an ear can tell the harpsichord is out of tune. I want it to be ready when Chul’ comes out.

They told me to take it easy for a week, get oriented. Which kind of week? How about a month or two? The new months are short, twenty-six or twenty-seven of the puny days.

I don’t know whether to feel cheated or honored. I was going to wake up a couple of years after planetfall, let everybody else take care of the headache of setting things up. Now I get to be part of the great adventure. One year to Epsilon, one Earth year. About two of the new flavor.

I’m just tired. They say I’ll sleep a lot at first. That sounds like a great idea.

(Later, same day, somewhat refreshed) I knew it would take a while to get used to the new calendar. It’s not the physical strain we’d expected, since they have this drug Tempozine (sounds like a journal for jazz enthusiasts) that resets your various biological rhythms. ‘Home’s day-and-night cycle is set now on Epsilon’s short ten-hour day, which comes to about eighteen and a half REAL HUMAN hours.

A person who, like me, used to need six hours—REAL HUMAN hours—of sleep every night now needs a little over four and a half. But Epsilon hours are about ninety REAL HUMAN minutes. So I’ll only sleep a little over three hours, ship time. But that’s all I need, honest.

It remains to be seen what effect this is going to have on working, playing, eating, and so forth, I used to work a nine-hour day, at least in terms of being routinely accessible to other people. That’s six new-style hours, fine. But then add the three hours’ sleep, and hold it! There’s only one hour left for eating, drinking, sex, reading, exercise, VR, cube, hobbies, moonlit walks, and plotting to overthrow the government. Don’t forget two minutes for clarinet practice and forty-five seconds of quiet meditation.

So I have to cut down on the daily work hours. The simple fraction, 9 out of 24, gives me a 3.75-hour work cycle per 10-hour Epsilon day. Which would mean checking in to the office less than six Earth hours per day. I’ve spent that much time getting the rest of the day organized!

Guess I’ll study how other people have adapted, especially the oldsters. They switched fourteen years ago and seem to be doing okay; not especially rushed or disorganized. They’re more spread around the clock than we used to be, but our regularity was largely a vestigial holdover from Earth business practices. Shutting down labs and offices and classrooms while everybody rests is wasteful of space.

I wonder what will happen when we get to the planet, though. Almost nobody alive has experienced actual night. It does make you want to close your eyes.

Think I’ll like this new way of eating, one big meal and a lot of little nibbles. Like the tapas in Spain. See how fast I gain back the twelve kilos I lost in crypto.

Maybe not at all. I like wearing Medium again. I’ll like being youngest wife in the family, too.

I don’t know how to feel about Evy; how to act around her. She’s still pretty active for 82, working a regular shift in the Geriatrics ward. She could have gone on half-shift at 80 (or 180, Epsilon years), but likes keeping busy.

She looks so ancient. I can’t help feeling a perverse kind of triumph. She seduced my husbands when she was a child of eighteen. How are they going to feel about her now?

Maybe I will have two husbands again. The medical people say they can do microsurgery—not nanosurgery—on John that might fix him up. They don’t want to wait much longer before reviving him.

I missed a fairly uneventful forty years. We still haven’t made contact with New New, though several times a week we broadcast and receive time-lagged exchanges with Key West and New York in the States, and Oxford and Melbourne in England and Australia. No one on Earth has been able to unlock a general database yet, so we’re all relaying partially reconstructed data lumps and old-fashioned stuff from paper books, helping one another rebuild. Literature and art are now way ahead of science and engineering, for obvious reasons.

Key West. Jeff died about sixteen years ago. He left me a comforting farewell message that I could half believe. At least death is the end of pain. He was hurting a lot toward the end, not even able to raise his head from the pillow.

(I’d hoped to be able to “visit” him by way of VR data exchange, even postmortem. But they still haven’t reached that level of technology in Key West.)

I lost him so many times, in different ways. When I went into the can I knew it was for ever this time. But still. I wish I felt more.

3. JUVENILIA

O’Hara was one of fifty cryptos selected for “the Pool,” the Planetfall Consultant Pool, people awakened early to help plan the transition from flight to colonization.

A cynic might see the Pool as a way of conferring status without the nuisance of granting authority. Everybody had to be awakened sooner or later, after all. What to do with the dozens who had been Cabinet members and Coordinators? Some of them would expect to step right back into positions of authority—but all those positions were filled. This way their talents could be recognized and used with a minimum of damage to the actual decision-making process.

They thawed out people in groups of ten, one group per week. All but one of the people in O’Hara’s group survived, which was better than expected, there being a high proportion of elderly people in the Pool.

There was no set itinerary for the first few weeks; just wander around and get your bearings. Charlee Boyle came out in the same group as O’Hara, so they explored the familiaryet-strange world together.

There were children everywhere, which was no surprise. The original plan had allowed for Newhome’s population to nearly double in the last ten years of flight. None under three years old, though, so planetfall wouldn’t be complicated by infants.

It was less orderly than the original plan, people born in neat blocks of proper ages, with proper genetic combinations, the creche carefully preparing them to take over their proper roles in the colonization of Epsilon.

Instead, the creche system had been in chaos for a generation; not one child in four was raised conventionally. Some children were not even conceived conventionally, their parents having refused sterilization, reverting to the atavism of semihaphazard fertility. (There was still a measure of control, though. The amendment that allowed fertility also set a limit on the number of children per woman, adjustable according to the current demographic climate.) Most children lived with their parents most of the time, going to Creche a few hours a day for numbers and letters. Only about a tenth followed the traditional Crecheto-ageeight pattern.

There was a drastic shortage of teachers above the level of simple writing and computation skills, most of which were provided by computer instruction anyhow, the programs imported from Earth. From seventh form up, most of the teaching was catch-as-catch-can, done by professionals taking time off from their regular duties, who might or might not have any skill in communicating to young people.

O’Hara’s degrees in literature and music would oblige her to teach at least part time in those subjects. She looked forward to music, but wasn’t happy about the prospect of teaching literature—let alone trying to do it when most of the books she’d studied in school weren’t available. Her doctorates in American Studies and Management covered material too obscure or esoteric to be useful, and her practical experience in managing people was one skill that wasn’t rare.

They wanted to tap Charlee, too. She was a chemist, but was uncertain about how well she could teach it at the elementary level. She hadn’t put on a lab coat in twenty years. She could lecture for hours about arcane aspects of piezochemistry, but she wasn’t sure whether you were supposed to pour sulfuric acid into water, or vice versa. She did know that one or the other was liable to explode.

4. POOL PARTY

Age 55.05 [15 Columbus 427]—It’s a revealing way of dating a diary. So I’ve spent one thousandth of my life wandering through this interesting chaos. Well, hully gee, Mr. Crane. Time sure flies when you’re having fun.

First meeting of the Planetfall Consultant Pool was a circus. The latest bunch of Poolees, including Daniel, have only been out of the can for two days, still kind of disoriented. The first twenty or so are extremely impatient to get things moving. Charlee and I wander somewhere in the middle: will you please stop shouting? Will you please focus your eyes?

The Coordinators supplied us with a list of questions:

My first response would be to send thirty brave, smart, but highly expendable people, along with a second shuttle full of tools and weapons. If they survive for a few weeks, we can send a larger, slightly less intrepid, bunch.

Kena Russel pointed out that all we know about the planet so far is that it’s a water/oxygen world of such-andsuch mass and diameter and average surface temperature. From orbit we’ll be able to tell what the terrain is like, whether there are large animals—or perhaps superhighways and immigration officials!—to contend with. Will we need lasers or linguistics texts? Passports? No way to know until we get there. All the advance planning is tentative.

That’s just an inverted way of asking who is most expendable, of course. If anybody were truly indispensable because of what they know, they shouldn’t go near the shuttle in the first place, because ground and orbit will be in constant communication. No one has to be “on the spot” at all, in order to impart information.

Some people are important because of what they can do, though, rather than what they know, or in addition to that. Mechanics, carpenters, surveyors, equipment operators. The most intelligent and strong manual laborers. People with proven leadership skills and organizational ability—especially with planetside experience. That’s me. (Actually, there are quite a few of us, but I’m by far the youngest, at 55.05, or a spry 122, Epsilon years.)

To the first, I’d say absolutely not. It would be a nightmarish invasion of their rights and also impractical. You wouldn’t get any efficient work out of them, and they’d screw up morale.

I’d like to say no for the second one, too, but there’s a practical aspect to it. Suppose each shuttle fails on its tenth flight? Nine times 30 times 3 is 810 people. The last survey, combining cryptos and those of us among the warm, totaled eight thousand who want to go planetside and three thousand who want to stay aboard. A lot of people will have to wait. I suspect the numbers will become more manageable after the first shuttle wipeout, though.

(I wonder how the statistics will change once we start settlement. Some people undoubtedly will step out of the airlock, take one look at how far away the horizon is, and jump back into the shuttle. That happened to about one out of fifteen New New tourists who went to Earth, deepseated agoraphobia.

On the other hand, if the people working planetside are successful and happy, the more timid, but not agoraphobic, may change their minds.)

I was almost alone in opting for the latter. But then most of these people have lived in one biome all their lives (two, if you count subzero desiccation!) and don’t see any virtue in a variety of locations. I pointed out that some local danger might wipe out one place and not affect the rest—like Roanoke Island, the first British colony in America, which disappeared and left not a trace while its ship was on a resupply passage to Britain. Probably plague or a raid by autochthones. (French and Spanish settlements to the north and south were unaffected.)

Of course nothing so mysterious would happen to our pioneers. They’d have an audience.

It’s another one of those questions that’s not answerable until we see what the planet looks like. There may not be that much variety. Which leads to:

Well, we could ram it out of spite. I didn’t suggest this.

Some of the scientists got huffy and said it was a nonquestion; if we hadn’t been sure that Epsilon was Earthlike, the mission wouldn’t have been launched. Son Van Duong pointed out that “Earthlike” circa spring 2085 would include a mutated virus wafting around that killed everybody within a few years. To the response “that was because of a war,” Son shrugged. So the war became part of the ecology.

The real question is, how much would we tell the people, how soon? Some before the others?

I think on general principles we ought to tell everybody everything, and just brace ourselves for a lot of unhappiness. A few thousand would probably be relieved, of course. (And what would the others do, leave?)

We could live indefinitely in orbit, eventually augmenting and then supplanting the matter/antimatter power source with “solar” power (epsilonic power?); just be a smaller New New York. Or maybe shift our base of operations to the planet’s moon, which is about the size of Earth’s.

Of course the possibility of planetwide ecological engineering, terraforming, came up. The experts were divided on whether it was a practical option, working from an incomplete database—and even if we knew exactly what to do to the poor planet, could we spare enough energy and materials from ’Home to even make a dent?

I have the obvious moral problem with going in and making over a planet just to suit us, though arguably that’s what we did to Earth. It could have been worse. If the Industrial Revolution had continued another century, powered by burning petroleum and coal, Earth might have been on its way toward looking like Venus. I suppose it would have been pleasant in the air-conditioning. Spectacular scenery, too.

It would be frustrating to have gone through all this trouble and danger just to set up shop in orbit again, in reduced circumstances. We couldn’t simply scratch this one off our list and go on to the next likely candidate. Unlike the Solar System, Epsilon doesn’t have an antimatter brown-dwarf companion to tap for fuel. I suppose that in a few centuries they could come up with some other way to go from star to star.

I don’t have a few centuries. Just a hundred of these short years left, more or less, and it would please me to end them on that planet, surrounded by a roomful of greatgrandchildren. Who would shrug, maybe raise a glass in my direction, and then go on with planet building.

The everydayness of it, of making a new world. Some people don’t get excited about that. I don’t know what to say to them.

5. INTERIM REPORT

Age 55.35 [25 Polo 427]—So they have a rough sort of map now. Looks like gills would come in handy.

Well, better too much water than too little. It looks a lot like New Zealand, that one big island. I never got there. Nice to have a variety of climates, from tropic to arctic. Don’t like it here? Keep walking; it’ll change.

Actually, it’s bigger than the East Coast of the United States, and covers as much latitude as South America. And such imaginative names! I assume the people who have to live there will get around to changing them.

I find myself staring at the map and daydreaming. Whatever is it going to be like? Most of those specks are “artifacts,” electronic noise, but some of them are islands. I was never on an island I didn’t like, from Britain to Fiji.

Tropica is on the equator, and Iceland is below the Arctic Circle (there are permanent icepacks, north and south, that aren’t on the map). The rest could be desert or jungle or paved from coast to coast. We won’t know much more, except for better outlines, until about three weeks before we arrive. Three weeks!

Coordinator-elect Dznowski asked me to cobble together a VR simulation of the planet so that people could “start getting used to it.” Hully golly gee. I asked her whether she’d rather I made it a rain forest or a metropolis. She said well, use your imagination, dear. Dear! I’m older than her father, who used to work for Dan. It will be a few generations before this crypto confusion wears off.

It will wear off when the last one of us dies.

So I asked around and wound up in conference with Robert Tyree, a planetary astronomer with a bushy beard and prehensile eyebrows. Very nice man, actually, but he’s so damned intense about astronomy that he can back you across a room talking about atmospheric gradients.

He did sympathize with my problem: the odds of coming up with a simulation that actually resembled Epsilon were right up there with being dealt a perfect bridge hand. Trees that look like bright red broccoli sprouts oozing orange marmalade, why not? Wingless birds that fly with carefully controlled and highly poisonous farts. So what we had to come up with was a cartoon planet, a template with the right gravity, temperature, color, and brightness of sunlight. Let people go in and close their eyes and use their own imaginations.

It was odd being in VR conjunction with a man I hardly knew. His dick hangs to the right, unlike Dan’s or John’s, I guess because he’s lefthanded. His beard feels funny. When he looks at his feet, it touches his throat.

He’s done a lot of VR in surreal modes, more even than I have, so he was really good at holding one aspect fixed while shifting another. We had the gravity as a given constant. Everything else we could fiddle with: hold the illumination level while changing the color mix; hold the air temperature while changing the humidity. I came up with one of those somatic flashes you sometimes have, and was able to make the feel of the air exactly what it had been on the beach, Guam, winter 2085. Salty, sultry, thick. Probably full of pheromones.

I got an odd feedback from him on that, something resembling awe. He was many generations removed from anyone who’d actually stood on a planetary surface, and planets were his life work, his passion. Yet he’d never even seen one.

I tried to give him the sense of total surround, the way Earth’s spirit, you have to say spirit, quietly dominates you, not at all like Newhome or even New New York. These are just rocks that men and women carved into houses. A planet sits patiently for billions of years, and people come by for the flicker of a moment. You don’t have to be a mystic to feel it.

We had sex while I was trying to get this across, the first extramarital sex I’ve had since thawing out, though I’m not sure it’s adultery when you’re separated by several meters, just connected by wires and thoughts. Whatever it was, it was very agreeable and very confusing. He’s less than a year older than Sandra, one of the Old Guard, gray hair and all. They’d certainly met, but he didn’t remember her particularly. He wasn’t all that interested in women. Not that he had many boyfriends, either—you communicate the most embarrassing things in VR—usually he had sex with himself, with a cybernetic image of himself, here in VR. He could flicker back and forth between the active and passive roles, postures. He gave me a ghost of a memory of that, but it doesn’t really come across well. When I have a penis in VR I’m “wearing” it, like a funny hat. The other part was familiar, of course.

So the template we came up with was about what you would experience on Earth if you were sitting in a room with unadorned white walls, open to the outside, near a beach. We kept the sultry Guam air, since Epsilon is mostly water, but I suspect it won’t be accurate. People describe that as “salt” air, but salt doesn’t have any smell. I think it’s a whiff of decomposing marine vegetation, how romantic, and I don’t know whether it’s likely that Epsilon’s seaweed will resemble Earth’s.

Dznowski probably won’t like it. I think she had in mind something fantastic but specific, like a disney. That would have exactly the wrong effect. I think she’s kind of thick, and I think we aren’t going to get along, and I wonder who she had to suck to become Coordinator. Probably the whole Cabinet. My assessment is not affected by her youth and beauty—I don’t even think she’s all that pretty, with the overdeveloped breasts and big innocent eyes and phony hair. Some men fall for that, or rise to it. Daniel turned into a preening erection the moment she walked into the conference room. Put that thing away, Dan. She’s young enough to be your granddaughter.

Not that I have any room to criticize. When we were washing up after finishing the template, I asked Robert whether he would like to have actual sex sometime. He turned beet red in various odd places (I’ve never seen a naked man blush before) and I backpedaled fast, saying I knew I was out of line, I didn’t mean to put him in an embarrassing position, but my mouth gets ahead of my brain sometimes.

His reaction was interesting, and what happened afterward was very interesting. He said he was pretty sure he couldn’t have sex with a woman, but he did want to be intimate with me, without having the machine between us. Talking and touching. It was night at the ag level, so we took an air mattress down to the flower beds and lay there holding each other, whispering. At first he held me so tightly I had difficulty breathing, but he got over that phase, and we talked, trading private memories of joy and sadness the way you sometimes will when you know a person is there for you totally. We stroked and rubbed, but I stayed away from his sex, figuring he would signal me if he wanted that, and he stayed away from mine, perhaps to avoid sending the wrong message. I could have used it.

Daniel was startled, later, when I woke him up with my mouth and then ravaged him.

6. CHANCES

They had to make a decision about John. Nanosurgery was just a memory still, even though the information part of it might be reclaimed in a week or a year or a decade. But there was plain neurosurgery, microsurgery, and ’Home had three doctors who were willing to attempt the tricky cleaning and patching that might bring John’s brain back to normal function, or at least close.

The Triage Council notified John’s family that the surgery should be done now, in the last year before Epsilon. It was a recommendation, not an order, but their argument was strong. John would never be able to land on Epsilon, which is where most of the medical facilities would be in the future, and in any case his operation would have relatively low priority in what they expected to be a heavily overworked couple of decades.

They couldn’t assign a percentage probability to his chances of surviving the operation until he had been out of crypto long enough for the fluids in his body to regain normal electrolyte balance. He might not even survive the shock of thawing out, of course, but that particular risk was not going to change in the near future.

Only Daniel was against it. He didn’t like the idea of the nature of their family life being dictated by some doctors’ schedules—by some doctors’ advance perceptions of their schedules, that could be wildly inaccurate. But Evy had the greatest stake in the question, since she was the only one planning to stay aboard ’Home after orbit, and she wanted to give the surgeons the go-ahead.

O’Hara was on the fence, nervous about okaying a life-threatening procedure, wanting the best for John, and selfishly wanting the whole mess to be settled one way or the other. How many husbands did she actually have—one, two, or one-and-a-fraction?

All three of them did agree that John’s attitude had been unambiguous. He would rather die than hang on alive but bound in the straitjacket of dumb paralysis.

O’Hara finally cast her vote with Evy, and they brought John out. At first it looked bad. His eyes opened, but he made no sign of recognizing his family, or anybody. The third morning, though, his eyes tracked O’Hara. She explained the situation to him and he nodded.

The operation took nine hours. Evy was not a surgical nurse, but she was allowed to attend as a supernumerary fetch-and-carry. She told O’Hara about an odd minute when she had to crouch under the table and hold a urinal for the senior surgeon, young enough to be her granddaughter, to straddle. It was scary: that child is trying to concentrate on brain surgery, my husband’s life literally in her hands, and at the same time convince her urogenital sphincter to overcome a lifetime of training and habit. But brain surgeons are used to long operations, even if Evy was not.

They had been warned that the results of the operation might not be apparent for some time, so nobody was alarmed when John didn’t show any immediate improvement. Within a week he had his yes-no-shit vocabulary back, and could also count up to ten. He was able to leave the hospital for his quarter-gee sickroom.

But he stayed at that level of verbal ability. After a month, the doctors conducted a series of tests and had to admit that the operation probably wasn’t going to make any difference. His brain was getting plenty of oxygen. It just wasn’t doing any good.

7. BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE

Age 55.43 [11 Theresa 428]—Actually, this starts about ten days ago. Too busy to write, molding young minds, perverting the will of die people, whatever.

They’ve put me in charge of the Induction section—Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion—on the reasonable basis that nobody else wants to touch it. Also, I was in charge of it back in Earth orbit, and actually went through the first half of the procedure myself, in the process of creating Prime.

That was 26 years ago, though, by my personal reckoning, and 66 years “real” time, or 147 Epsilon years. Most of half my lifetime, anyhow. I recall the process as sort of a vague bad dream; the administration of it, a waking nightmare.

But that’s not the problem now. There are a lot fewer people and I’m a better administrator than I was then. One problem is that more than three quarters of the Induction files are gone. Nine tenths were destroyed by New New’s information sabotage, and only a few replaced. Another problem is a lack of motivation.

Which is putting it mildly. It’s more like a consensus of rebellion. Induction is most effective on the young, and of course the best candidates are people who haven’t yet demonstrated a lot of talent in any useful field. So when you offer Induction to them, they get defensive. “I don’t want to be a welder, I want to be Myself!” Even though the only skill so far exhibited by Myself has been turning rations into compost.

One person who was not a problem, to my considerable relief, was Sandra’s husband Jakob. He doesn’t have any skills particularly useful for a primary settler—perfect pitch being irrelevant for the time being—so I showed him a list and he said plumbing looked interesting. He finished breakfast and kissed us both goodbye and went down to get reamed by the AI monster for two weeks.

Then there’s the problem of the Nowers, who actually are just compost machines. You could probably take one by the hand and wander along off to the machine, and he or she would smilingly obey, since everything is just now happening and is an expression of God’s will. But even those lumps have civil rights. The psychometricos call it “profound volitional incompetence,” which I think is a profound euphemism for lump. If they went through Induction, they might be able to rejoin the human race. But it’s more important, at least to some people, that they be allowed to worship in the quagmire of their choice.

Kamal Muhammed, the opinion engineer who helped us convince people to accept cryptobiosis for the common good, didn’t himself go into the can. He’s been in retirement for a long time, aged 105 in old years (233, Epsilon), but he still helps out now and then. I went to him for advice.

He must have one of the oddest-looking rooms in ’Home. For decades he has immersed himself in oriental arts and crafts. There are about fifty potted dwarf trees, bonsai, in a miniature forest that takes up all of the floor space except for narrow paths. The bunk where Muhammed sat was littered with worn paper folded and refolded into origami shapes. Set in the wall where most people would have a console and cube, he had an open square painted solid white. A vase with four flowers stood artfully offcenter, balanced in the space by a smooth stone, the size of a fist, mottled pink and gray.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The stone’s from Earth?”

He nodded. “Very perceptive. Japan. A friend has loaned it to me.” The rocks we used for landscaping in the park were from a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid; I didn’t remember ever seeing a pink one. “Let me demonstrate my own prescience: you have come to me because people are quite reasonably not doing what you want them to do. You want my skills to help you subvert them. For the good of the community of course.”

“Yes. But I would have come to you to see the trees, if I’d known about them.”

“You’ve been in crypto, or you would have known.” He pointed. “I place you. You served a term as Policy Coordinator.”

“Just shy of a hundred years ago. Epsilon years.”

“Of course.” He nodded thoughtfully. “And before that, in New New York, you were some sort of enfant terrible in Project Start-up. O’Casey, no, O’Hara, Marianne. You wrote a book. They put you in charge of Demographics for Newhome, a female Saint Peter at the Gate. Deciding who will ascend to the heavens.”

“You have a remarkable memory. I didn’t have the only say in Demographics, of course.”

“And you also worked with that terrible personality template machine. The one that puts wires through the eyeballs.”

“Not wires. Little sensors you can hardly feel.”

“And a tiny little probe up the rectum, one can hardly feel, I’m sure. Cozy catheters. And a comfortable tube down one’s throat. Exquisitely pleasing needles stuck in the arms. I have a feeling that this is what you want me to help you sell.”

“At least I’m not asking you to volunteer for the process yourself. Though I’m not sure whether we have templates for bonsai and origami.”

“There are books.”

“We’re mostly interested in less subtle talents, anyhow. Running heavy machinery, masonry, carpentry, metalworking. Skills that will condemn a person to a lifetime of hard labor on Epsilon.”

“Ah. ‘Skills that will reward a person with a lifetime of solid satisfaction, rebuilding civilization from the ground up.’ Or ‘Let the lazybones who stay in orbit live out their lives in a four-walled prison—give yourself a job that will give you freedom!’”

I had to laugh. “Did you just make those up?”

“It is a skill.” He smiled slightly. “One that guarantees I will spend all my days in a four-walled prison, which is what I vastly prefer.” He picked squares of paper off the bunk and stacked them neatly on a clear patch of floor. “Please sit. Let us investigate this problem.”

He was very helpful. The basic procedure for motivating somebody to do something unpleasant or dangerous was to separate out the various ways a person would benefit from doing it—sexual appeal, enhanced self-image, prospect of future comfort or security… all the way up to purely altruistic benefits such as the approval of God or to serve you generations yet unborn. He wrote down twenty-three separate areas of reward. The basic technique of opinion engineering was to figure out which of these areas would be most effective for your target population, and pack as many of them as practical into a single memorable statement. Pictorial associations at least as much as words; we’re not working with logic here.

I made a series of recorded appeals, using sexy young things of both and indeterminate genders, for lumberjacking and welding and so forth, which went on the Random Walk cube. But the “advertisements” weren’t scheduled at random.

People tend to watch cube at the same time each day, if they watch it. Most of the people I was seeking were more or less addicted to it. So I set them up several days in a row before each ad. I “primed” them, using Prime to help me search through the millions of small scenes in the Random Walk library. We came up with hundreds of pretty specific episodes extolling the pleasures of physical labor in the good old outdoors. Almost all of them in good weather. Maybe Epsilon does have good weather all the time.

None of the kids I’m after has ever experienced weather. Better remind them to take hats.

I should feel guilty about all this. But it’s fun, and ultimately to everyone’s benefit. As whoever invented television probably said.

8. FINAL APPROACH

O’Hara talked it over with Evy and agreed that she would do most of John’s care-and-feeding during the months remaining until Epsilon. Evy would have him for years or decades after that. (Daniel was willing to help, but John resisted, sometimes violently; he obviously didn’t want another man to minister to him.)

She tried not to resent it as John eroded her time, assaulted her emotions. Moods were one thing he could communicate: for days he would alternate between rage and depression, and then there would be days of contrition, weeks of cooperation. Sometimes, in bittersweet silent communion, she felt she loved him as much as she ever had; other times—as she told me but not her diary—enslaved by his vulnerability, she helplessly wanted him to die. Years before, he had asked her to spare him a lingering painful death by providing him some means to end it. A handful of CNS depressants and a liter of boo; an intravenous pop of potassium chloride. She agreed in principle but, even then, wasn’t sure she would have the courage to do it.

She confessed to me that she thought of that sometimes, but he wasn’t in actual pain, and besides, if a quick death was what he wanted, he communicated well enough with expression and gesture to get across that simple idea. Maybe he felt that even a dim spark of life was worth living. Maybe he just wanted to spare her the awful decision.

Dr. Shawn suggested to her that John might be enjoying his enforced freedom from responsibility, and might even be feeling less physical pain than he had suffered all his life. Elderly patients with degenerative bone diseases often reported less pain, or even a complete cessation of pain, after a stroke or accident caused paralysis. It might not be a trade-off anyone would choose, but it was some compensation.

John had some use of his left hand, though all his life he’d been clumsy with it. He could manipulate the cube remote, but refused to have anything to do with the keyboard or any of the rehabilitative crafts projects that O’Hara brought him. He could read, but very slowly, and seemed to have a limited span of attention. He gave up on technical papers, with one exception: at the time of his stroke, John had almost finished writing his book-length history of the Deucalion project, Sons of Prometheus. O’Hara fleshed out his notes to complete the last two chapters, with John looking over her shoulder, sentence by sentence.

She found out that you could do a lot of editing with three words, if they were yes, no, and shit.

Three weeks out, they had the first fairly accurate chart of their water world. The Planetfall Committee released this map and sketchy description:

Better pictures are going to be available almost hourly, but this seems like a good time to start.

The smallest details we can see here are about ten kilometers wide; the tiniest island visible in the Reef is bigger than all of ’Home’s floor levels put together. The Mainland’s central lake has a greater area than Earth’s Lake Chad or Lake Superior.

The atmosphere is slightly less dense than Earth’s but richer in oxygen, which argues for a lot of plant life, if only phytoplankton. Nitrogen is the main inert element. There is a puzzling concentration of helium, over a thousand times the terran trace, but that shouldn’t have any effect on daily life, other than making balloon travel easy.

(Hotspot has a large active volcano, which could be a source of helium, though there’s no analog on Earth.)

It’s too soon to say much about climate or weather. Obviously there will be a great variety of conditions, since Mainland stretches from the Arctic Circle almost to the equator. Tides will be four times as high as on Earth, which of course will affect living conditions on the coasts and especially on small islands.

We’re tentatively planning to establish the first settlement near the large inland lake in the temperate zone, though robot drones and, selectively, survey teams will range all over Mainland and Tropica. The polar ice caps and the four other large islands will also be surveyed, but probably won’t be settled in the near future, unless they have some special virtues.

This map will be updated every day at noon.