Worlds Enough and Time

1. EARTHWATCH

23 September 2097 [13 Bobrovnikov 290]—Two days after launch day; I guess that will be “Launch Day” from now on. Less than an hour into the second day, actually. Left both husbands and my wife in a snoring pile in John’s low-gee flat. I have a whole cot to myself and a measure of privacy, in exchange for tolerating a little more gravity. What’s a little gravity, when you’re lying down? Though of course I’m sitting now, typing.

I will miss the touch of pen on paper. I didn’t type my journal very often in New New, even though the handwritten pages would eventually be read into the computer and the paper recycled. No sentimental anachronisms aboard Newhome, like paper for casual personal use. I even left behind the diary of my year on Earth, the year cut short at seven months. A leatherbound book from Bloomingdale’s.

Bloomingdale’s. I just ate the last caviar I will have in all my life. We divided my small jar up four ways and each had two crackers’ worth. John opened a priceless bottle of Chateau d’Yquem, which also went four ways. Daniel followed with a mundane but effective liter of 200-proof chemically pure alcohol from the labs, which we mixed, variously, with Evy’s tomato juice and orange juice and Dan’s hot pepper sauce. John put all four together, saying it reminded him of the way they drank tequila in Guadalajara, a custom I had not embraced when I visited there. We had the telescope seek it out but, unsurprisingly, there was no sign of life, though we could see buildings and streets clearly. It would have been impenetrable smog a few years ago.

We watched the sun set on Los Angeles and rise over London. Then on to midmorning in New York, one of the few places with a large number of people. You could see them on the sidewalks. Some of the slidewalks were actually rolling again.

Evy has never been to Earth, of course. Of the ten thousand people aboard this crate, only a few hundred have.

I guess writing that down is a tacit admission that I’m writing this for other people to read. But not for a long time. Hello, reader, up there in the future. I’m dead now. And will feel worse in the morning.

I think it’s a good thing this starship is automated. Many key personnel are functioning at a low level of efficiency, if functioning at all. Including yours truly, Entertainment Director. The entertainment program for tomorrow, this morning rather, will be quiet music and contemplation of the sequelae of overindulgence.

If I’d drunk less or more I would be sleepy. At this level I’m edgy, and too stimulated to read or rest and too stupid to stop writing. At least by typing it out on the machine, I can erase the evidence tomorrow. Unless Prime makes a copy. She’s everywhere.

Are you listening, Prime? No answer. So you’re a liar as well as a soulless machine.

Since this is indeed the first entry in the Diary of the Rest of My Life, which is of course true every time one makes any entry in a diary, I will include some background data for you generations yet unborn. Perhaps you are mumbling these words around a guttering fire in a cave on Epsilon, this starship a legend a million years gone to dust. Perhaps you are one of my husbands reading it tomorrow. You think I don’t know I don’t have any secrets. Hah. Marry computer experts and give up any hope of privacy. I saw John break Tulip Seven’s thumbprint code the day after she died. (He didn’t do it for any trivial reason; the tribunal wanted him to have her files scanned for evidence. She drank poison but it might have been murder. Nothing conclusive.)

As I was saying. Two days ago we left the planet Earth forever. Actually what we left was the satellite world New New York, which has been orbiting the Earth since before my grandmother was born. The Earth itself has been a mess since 2085, as you must know or can read about somewhere else. Almost everybody killed in a war. I started to write “senseless” war. Do you have sensible ones, up there in the future? That’s something we never worked out, not to everyone’s satisfaction.

One reason the ten thousand of us are embarked on this one-way fling into the darkness is that Earth does seem to be recovering, and the next time they decide to Kill Everybody they might be more successful.

Another reason is that there doesn’t seem to be anyplace else to go. We could inhabit settlements on the Moon or Mars, or wherever, but they would just be extensions of New New; suburbs. This is the real thing. ‘Bye, Mom. No turning back.

As a matter of fact, my mother isn’t aboard. Nor my sister. Just as glad Mother stayed back but wish she had let Joyce come along. Old enough to be a good companion and still young enough to renew things for you as she discovers them.

I guess two husbands and a wife comprise enough family for anyone. God knows how many cousins I have scattered around. When the Nabors line kicked my mother out it was a mutual see-you-inhell parting, and as I was only five days old, I had not yet formed any lasting relationships. There are a few Scanlans aboard, my formal line family, but I feel more kinship with some of the food animals.

Oh yes, you generations yet unborn. You do know what a starship is, don’t you, mumbling around the guttering campfire? It is like a great bird with ten thousand people in its gullet and a matter/antimatter engine stuck up its huge birdy ass.

Up in the front, instead of a beak, there is a doughnut-shaped structure, with three spokes and a hub, which used to be Uchūden, a small world that also escaped destruction during the war, originally designed to be home for several hundred Japanese engineers. (Japan was an island nation on Earth, the most wealthy.) Now it functions as the control center for all of ’Home, the civil government as well as the thrilling engineering stuff.

Behind Uchūden, or “sternward,” as they want us to say, are all the living quarters, offices, farms, factories, laboratories—you name it, even a market where you can spend all of your hard-earned fake money.

A simplified diagram of the ship would be six concentric cylinders, shells; the acreage per shell and apparent gravity increasing as the number goes down. Most people live and work on Shells 1, 2, and 3; the inner ones reserved for processes that require lower gravity, such as metallurgy and free-fall sex. There are also some living quarters up there for the elderly and infirm, such as my husband John Ogelby, who has an uncorrectable curvature of the spine that makes even three-quarters gee painful. He also has a lot of political pull (“friends in high places” has a strong literal meaning here) and so rates a rather large bedroom/office/galley combination on Shell 6. The family tends to gather there.

I’m writing this in my small office cubicle in Uchūden, which is by definition Shell 1. As perquisites of rank I do have a cot that folds down from the wall and an actual window to the outside—on the floor, of course. I can either watch the stars wheel by once each thirty-three seconds or flip on a revolving mirror that keeps the stars stationary for fifteen seconds at a time. I like to watch them roll.

That concentric-cylinder model is just a theoretical idealization. You’d go crazy, living in a metal hive like that. So the walls and ceilings are knocked down and conjoined in various ways to give a variety of volumes and lines of sight. Most people still spend a certain amount of time hopelessly lost, since only a few hundred of us lived here while it was being built, and have had time to get used to it. New New was laid out logically, the corridors a simple grid on each level, and it was impossible to get lost. ‘Home is deliberately chaotic, even whimsical, and is supposed to be constantly changing. Only time will tell whether this will keep us sane or drive us mad.

Still, the longest line of sight is only a couple of hundred meters, looking across the park. It’s a good thing that almost all of us grew up in satellite Worlds. Someone used to the wide open spaces of Earth would probably feel trapped by ’Home’s claustrophobic architecture. In most corridors, for obvious instance, the floor curves up in two directions, cut off by the low ceiling in twenty meters or less—a lot less, up in 5 and 6. Of course you can look out for zillions of light-years if you have a window like mine, but for some reason some people don’t find that relaxing.

Both of my husbands were born on Earth, but spent enough years in New New to have lost the need for long lines of sight; distant horizons.

I do miss horizons, vistas, from my three visits to Earth. The first couple of weeks I spent there I had a hard time adjusting to the long lines of sight, even though I was in New York City, which most groundhogs would consider crowded. I would look up from the sidewalk and see a building impossibly far away and lose my balance.

I remember flying over kilometer after kilometer of forest, ocean, farmland, city. The Pyramids and the Rockies and Angkor Wat and even Las Vegas. We live inside one of the largest structures ever built, surely the largest vehicle—but we’ll never see anything big for the rest of our lives.

At least Dan and John and I have memories. Evy and nine thousand others just moved from one hollow rock into a newer one. Maybe they’re the lucky ones, I have to say, conventionally. I wouldn’t trade places.

Well, the rigors of composition seem to have sobered and tired me enough for sleep. Fold up the keyboard and unfold the cot. If the gravity gives me trouble I can always rejoin the hamster pile upstairs.

2. A CHANCE TO DREAM

O’Hara and her staff of twenty-six had more than a thousand diversions to offer Newhome’s population. Most of the activities required very little in the way of administration other than keeping track of what went where: If you wanted to play chess, you went to the Game Room door and a person of adequate intelligence would figure out what day it would be one week hence, and loan you a set until then. If you didn’t bring it back in a week, you would be called automatically every hour until you did bring it back—and it better not be missing a pawn; there was no way to send for a replacement. (On the other hand, the piece was bound to be somewhere. If someone had accidentally or perversely thrown it away, the recycler would identify it and buzz Entertainment.)

Some activities were more complicated because they required people or equipment primarily assigned to other departments. Religion had a claim on yoga, hamblin, and t’ai chi, but O’Hara’s people also offered them, in a neutral secular context. Education had a hand in music, drama, and gymnastics. Communication was involved with social networking, and possibly New New Liaison as well, if your friend had stayed behind.

By far the most complicated was the Escape Room, a room with ten VR, virtual reality, installations. Every adult accumulated one minute per day of time on these machines. Five minutes was the minimum; some people wanted to come in every five days for a quick blast. Others saved up sixty days for the maximum hour of dream tripping. Some people wanted to come in wit friends and be wired in parallel, simultaneously wandering through an imaginary or remembered world.

Children were allowed to use certain game programs, and restricted travelogues that were really only an elaborate form of interactive cube. Usually nine at a time would visit some earthly locale, along with a teacher, to answer questions.

It was a scheduling nightmare, but that was only the beginning. VR was a powerful drug to some people, and had to be administered with care. Everyone had been carefully tested in New New at the age of eighteen, or would be examined at that age aboard ship. Some people would be disallowed the random abstraction or feedback modes, either of which could be terrifying. Others were cut off at ten or fifteen minutes because they were particularly susceptible to the machine’s effects: staying in too long could put them in a “VR loop,” a vegetative state that was usually irreversible (though some people who had recovered from it wanted to dive right back in).

Most users were not too adventurous; for them, the VR was a whole-body, whole-mind go-anywhere machine. It was the only contact most people would ever have with Earth, vicariously traveling to arctic wastes or the Grand Canyon, the busy hives of Calcutta or Tokyo; soaring over fields of grain or through coral reefs. There were stock fantasy scenarios, too—harems and battlefields and laboriously reconstructed historical events—and the possibility of virtual time travel, since there were crude VR recordings nearly a century old. Of course most of the Earth cubes represented an equally irretrievable past. Calcutta and Tokyo, like Paris and London, were now inhabited only by handfuls of doomed children.

O’Hara found the Earth cubes unbearably depressing. The Luna and Mars ones were interesting visually but not sensually, since a space suit was no novelty. She liked the feedback mode, spectacularly confusing in its synesthesia—smelling colors, tasting sounds, muscles bunching into surreal impossible distortions, the body everting itself through mouth or anus and reverting slippery back again—and though she could see why some people would find it a nightmare, she emerged from the state completely relaxed, wrung out.

John had never tried VR and had no desire for it, but Dan shared her inclination toward the weird random abstraction mode, and they’d often schedule a half hour in parallel, wandering together through a shifting turmoil of light and sound that would crystallize into nearly real, or at least solid, landscapes, and then melt into chaos again. Mirror lands and cloud islands and flaming icescapes. One time Dan let O’Hara join him in a visit to the harem, where they learned something about the limitations of parallel wiring. O’Hara found the viewpoint interesting but her projected penis had no more feeling than a dildo; she participated in his orgasm but felt it only from her ankles to the soles of her feet. For an hour afterward she couldn’t walk without giggling, her toes curling up.

3. MEETING OF MINDS

O’Hara was supposed to meet John and Dan at the Athens lift fifteen minutes before the meeting. A little nervous, she was early. Evy came down and said the men would be late, as usual. The women went back up one level to get coffee and tea from the dispenser, which overcharged Evy by a dollar.

“This is a bad sign.” She showed O’Hara the card. “Our lives are in the hands of people who can’t keep a coffee machine working for one week?”

“Just inflation,” O’Hara said. “A little experiment designed to make us more productive.”

“I’ll call Maintenance.” She started to sip the tea but blew over it instead. “You are kidding, aren’t you?”

“Hope so. With an economist in charge, anything could happen.”

Evy nodded seriously. “You shouldn’t have voted for him.”

“Right.” She looked around. “I haven’t been up here since they put down the flooring. Makes your eyes hurt.”

“It’s different.” Black and pearl checkerboard.

“Everything’s different.” She pushed the lift button twice. “Everything’s the same.”

“A philosopher this morning.”

“Just crabby about the goddamn meeting.” The door opened and they shared a short ride with two men in coveralls who stared sideways at Evelyn.

There was a bench built into the wall by the lift on Level 1. They sat down and watched the two men walk away muttering. “You with Dan last night?” O’Hara asked.

“Yes and no. I was asleep before he came in and he got up and left before I woke up.”

“Could have been anybody, then.”

“He needs a lot more sleep than he’s been getting. I don’t think it’s been more than four or five hours a night since we left.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve seen him go through it a dozen times before.”

“Wise old momma. Really?”

O’Hara nodded. “Every job change. Another couple of weeks and he’ll break loose, get real drunk, sleep around the clock, and then go back to normal. Maybe a day off for moaning through a hangover.”

“Job change.”

“You know him. The job change is more profound than the planet change.”

“Just like you?”

“You’ve got me there.” O’Hara smiled but suddenly looked away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“I know what you meant.” She patted the younger woman’s arm. “John’s the only sensible one in the family, you included. He doesn’t let work take over his life.”

The lift opened and the sensible one swung out on his crutches. “Jesus. One of you ladies turn down the gravity?” Dan held the door and followed him out.

“Only a couple of blocks,” O’Hara said.

“Could have held the meeting in the gym. Eliot doesn’t like gravity any more than I do.” Eliot Smith, Engineering Coordinator, was hugely overweight and had only one flesh limb, his right arm; the rest of them lost in a mining accident when he was a teenager. “You do know the way, don’t you?”

“Nothing to it.” O’Hara did know her way around the ship better than most adults. The designers had done a good job of providing special “interest,” structural variety, but for some months most conversations between strangers would start out “Where the hell am I?”

They’d met at Athens lift because that allowed John to do most of his walking up on Level 6. But it did make their route to the meeting room rather complicated. They descended an escalator to the humid brightness of Level 1, the “ag” level, which in this section was a dense interplanting of corn and beans. The stalks were already a meter high, and they made a silken whisper in the ventilator breeze, and a rich complex smell. They walked and swung less than a hundred meters to another escalator that took them up to Level 4. O’Hara guided them through the maze of rights and lefts, ups and downs, that made the Arts and Crafts Mall so architecturally whimsical, and they wound up back on Level 2, in a corridor decorated with holos from European museums, somber classical paintings, leading to Studio 1.

“Should I wait outside and listen?” Evy asked.

“I don’t think it’s going to amount to much,” Daniel said. They were headed for the first full Cabinet meeting since Launch. “Some rhetoric from Harry and a situation report from Eliot. Maybe Jules Hammond smiling benevolently over the proceedings. Then they turn off the cameras and we all go huddle around the coffee urns and it’s like any Thursday meeting.”

“Except you have everyone in the same room,” O’Hara said.

“Handier than calling them up,” John said. “Though there may be some you would just as soon not feast your eyes upon.”

“Who could that be?”

“You’ll have to get used to working with him.” They were talking about Harry Purcell, Policy Coordinator and O’Hara’s ultimate superior. Sixteen years before, Purcell had been her economics professor, and they had argued energetically over some pretty basic points—personality as much as theory. He made it clear he hadn’t forgotten. She was trying to learn not to cringe whenever he opened his mouth.

4. GENESIS AND REVELATION

28 September 2097 [13 Bobrovnikov 290]—I don’t know why I’d envisioned a round table for the Cabinet meeting. We did that in New New for my Demographics Committee, no chiefs and no Indians, but with thirty-some Cabinet members it would be an unwieldy circle.

Still, I don’t like formal hierarchal structures, least of all when they’re set up with me at the bottom. A regular classroom would have been bad enough, the Coordinators up front dispensing wisdom, but instead we co-opted the small theater. That way Harry Purcell and Eliot Smith got to sit on the stage, head and shoulder (and torso and ass and leg, at least in Purcell’s case) above us mere mortals.

The theater seats had slips of plastic with names on them. I helped John to his, in the front row, and then went to mine, in the rearmost. There was a definite pattern. Engineers and other grown-ups toward the front. I shared the back row with Tom Smith, Education; Carlos Cruz, Humanities; Janet Sharkey, Fine Arts; and our historian, Sam Wasserman.

I hadn’t seen Sam since Launch. He gave me a shy grin and blush. We’d been lovers for a short intense time a few years ago, although he is exactly young enough to be my son, if I had followed my mother’s example and become pregnant at the gray old age of twelve.

“Lovers” is too strong a word, or too polite a one. When Evy joined the line, which made me feel somewhat plain and middle-aged and dumpy, he was there for me. It was more complicated than that, and still is. I knew he would be at the meeting, but when I saw him I got a nice glow of physical surprise, or physical something. Maybe someday again.

(Prime says that she can keep this diary secure from prying eyes by shunting it over into her own cyberspace. I guess so, since she’s supposedly self-aware, whatever that actually means.

(Do I really care whether Dan or John knows I get a little damp in the jeans, thinking about Sam? I’m not sure. I remember how he tastes, different. Kosher, I guess.)

Once everyone was in the proper place we had to sit still for a minute of camera registration. This was so the archives could properly record our gasps of admiration at Purcell’s inspiring rhetoric. The sparkling wit that used to almost keep us awake in class.

He actually didn’t start out too badly. With a mild joke he apologized for the necessarily ceremonial nature of this first joint meeting, and asked us all to introduce ourselves, for the record, then turned the proceedings over to Eliot.

That did make it interesting since we don’t normally have joint meetings with the Engineering side. I like Eliot anyhow; he stood up for me back when old Casey tried to limit my powers in the demographics part of pre-Launch. He’s also a funny guy.

Most amputees I’ve met opted for realisticlooking waldos (and of course we’ve all met people we couldn’t tell were amputees), but Eliot goes in the opposite direction. His left arm and hand are usually a metal-and-composite skeletal framework with all the bearings and wires exposed, though sometimes he screws in a special-purpose tool. His legs clank against things, and he doesn’t bother to wear shoes over his metal feet.

One night at the Light Head bar with Daniel and me, he pointed out the creepily obvious: the arm and legs were engineered better than he was. After he died they would cut off the arm and legs and file them away for the next clumsy person. He wondered if there was a library of prostheses somewhere in the hospital. He’d never tried to find out.

(Evy later told me there was such a collection, and there had been a battle royal with New New as to how many we were allowed to take along.)

For the meeting he wore an actual realistic hand, but kept the Meccano arm, looking intentionally ludicrous in a short-sleeved shirt. First he had Dan and Lenwood Zylius report in their capacities as New New Liaisons. Nothing significant on the Engineering side (Dan had told me he could give an hour of boring figures or a half-second shrug) and Zylius, Policy, could report only that putting one light-minute of vacuum between us and New New had not materially changed the amount of red tape involved in relations between the two structures.

Ito Nagasaki, Criminal Law, reported that her men and women were all working twenty-five-hour shifts and falling behind; she desperately needed police and counseling volunteers. A lot of people were reacting to the stress of parting by punching or pulling the hair of the person nearest to them; sometimes dearest.

I had known that Evy was working overtime, too; Indicio Morales, in charge of Health Care facilities, confirmed that out of ten thousand people, fifteen hundred had fallen ill with something—mostly homesickness, anxiety, angst, and the aforementioned black eyes and contusions. They’d predicted it was going to happen, but were surprised at the volume of complaints.

Morales rolled pills and Nagasaki handed out fines and counseling appointments; both of them figured that their troubles would slack off in another week or so. (If not, we’d have to turn around and go back!) There were short business-as-usual reports from Agriculture, Ecosystems, Life Support, Maintenance, and so forth. My own report was almost a nonreport, since people were still so busy figuring out what they were going to do for the next ninety years that they weren’t checking out a lot of volleyballs and clarinet reeds. The zero-gee “saunas,” a euphemism rarely used, were occupied round the clock, which I suppose is entertainment, though few people have to check out extra equipment for the sport.

Then Purcell took the floor again, for his bombshell. “This is very bad timing,” he began, “but obviously it isn’t the sort of thing one apologizes for.” He looked at Eliot thoughtfully, and shook his head. “I’m afraid… well, my physician has informed me that I am the victim of a rare disorder called Murchinson’s Syndrome.” I was sitting close enough to Morales to hear her sudden intake of breath.

“Murchinson’s Syndrome involves a rapid and irreversible breakdown of the immune system. There’s no actual treatment for it.”

Eliot’s voice was almost inaudible. “How long?”

“It could be months. Or it could be weeks or days. Eventually a single rhinovirus… would be sufficient.”

“You could be isolated. Sealed off from any disease vectors.”

He shook his head. “I thought of that. As unpleasant as living out the rest of my days in a space suit would be. But like anybody, I’m carrying around a large number of disease factors that are currently more or less kept in check. As the doctor put it, there is no way to isolate a person from his own body. When the immune system weakens sufficiently, one of those factors will kill me.

“Most of you know me well enough to know that I would appreciate a minimum of sympathy and condolence. Of course I feel chagrined, cheated. Betrayed by my own body. I was looking forward to at least another half-century of observing this splendid experiment in economic isolation. But of course this does come to all of us sooner or later, and I have no new insight to offer about that.

“Fortunately, I have been working closely with my Coordinator-elect, Tania Seven, and over the course of the next few days I shall be transferring all of my responsibilities over to her in an orderly way.” Seven was sitting in the front row, and had shown no reaction; Purcell must have already discussed it with her. “I would also like to work closely with her in selecting the new candidates for Coordinator-elect.” She nodded. He paused. “I suppose that ends the formal part of this meeting. Good-bye.” He stepped down from the stage and walked out.

The rest of the meeting was short and quiet. Tom Smith and I did some preliminary hashing out of a procurement system that might simplify life for both of us (Education shares a lot of material with Entertainment, but we have separate storage areas, nearly a kilometer apart). I would have someone from John’s office go over the proposed design changes for the next couple of years and see whether Tom and I could get offices close to a large enough storage volume to hold all of our stuff in one place. I’d miss the luxury of Uchūden, but it would save a lot of time.

Evy was waiting outside in the corridor. She’d never heard of Murchinson’s Syndrome, but she had her keyboard with her. She unfolded it and asked.

The disease had never been reported on Earth. Over the past century there had been two cases in New New and one in Devon’s World; every victim had been at least third-generation spaceborn.

“That’s a little scary,” I said. “Cosmic rays?”

John laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about it. People probably did get it on Earth, but it was misdiagnosed. As Harry said, whatever bug’s next in line is the one he’ll actually die of.”

“Let’s talk about something morbid.” Dan looked at me. “Are you going to throw your hat in the ring?”

“Hat?” Evy said.

“It’s an Americanism; run for office. No. I thought about it for a fraction of a second. No, thanks.”

“You’d be good.”

“Someday. Most people would think I’m too young.”

“Tania Seven’s about your age.”

“The hell she is.”

Evy primped her short kinky hair. “You white people age so fast.”

“I’ll age you!” I turned back to Dan. “Besides, I don’t want to give up the Cabinet position.” That was a precondition for running, though the logic of it has always eluded me. If I won Coordinator-elect, it would be two years before I was Coordinator. Plenty of time to train someone to pass out the volleyballs.

(It made even less sense on the Engineering side, since every Cabinet member is in essence a lobbyist for one academic specialty’s research needs. When the Coordinator-elect takes office, that specialty automatically has two people arguing for their slice of the more-or-less fixed pie of resources and personnel available for research. A couple of years ago I submitted a proposal that the process be reversed: have the Coordinator-elect continue to sit as a Cabinet member, so as to keep all the influences more or less even. The Engineering track didn’t see much merit in the proposal. I think that’s because they like to gamble—every two years they get a chance to double their influence.)

We argued a little bit more about my running, Evy as usual on my side; Dan thinking that I was old enough and John claiming that age wouldn’t be important. I told Dan that he only wanted me to do it because he’d had to go through a term as Coordinator in New New, and misery loved company.

When I got back to the office there was a note on my message queue from Purcell; he wanted to see John and Dan and me after dinner. I could think of a few thousand things I’d rather do with my evening. But as it turned out, the experience was at least informative, if not pleasant. We even managed to bury the hatchet, in a way, and not in each other. He was never a particularly graceful man, but most people agree that he handled his exit well.

We joined him in a small teaching lab on Level 5, racks of glassware in place for some arcane demonstration. There was a trace of sulfur dioxide in the air, as there usually seemed to be in such places, and it gave me an instant headache, as usual. I think John and Dan thrive on it. A homey sort of smell for science types, like bread baking.

Purcell was leaning against a sink, studying some small wire contraption. He nodded to me but talked only to John and Dan, mostly filling them in on his assessment of Tania Seven, and how her training and prejudices might affect their jurisdictions. It was an odd coincidence that they held two of the only Engineering-track Cabinet positions that required daily contact with the Policy Coordinator’s office. I was Policy track, but could probably survive for months without bothering the Coordinator.

It was interesting to eavesdrop on them, and interesting that I was allowed to. Purcell was a cold-blooded manipulator—one who wanted to keep manipulating from the grave!—but he was also a solid if cynical judge of character. I was wondering out of what obscure motivation he had invited me along, when he abruptly dismissed John and Dan, saying he had to talk to me alone.

He was a great one for amenities. “I don’t like you, Marianne, but then I don’t like many people. Including myself.”

“Dr. Purcell—”

“You might as well call me Harry. You won’t have to for long.” He tossed the little wire thing onto a table, watching its slow third-gee trajectory rather than look at me. “Daniel thinks you would be a good prospect for Policy Coordinator-elect. Don’t run.”

“I already told him I wouldn’t. I’m not old enough.”

“You’re old enough. You’re competent. But there are a lot of people in this can—like me—who are rather hostile toward you.”

“Can’t please everybody.”

“That’s not the point. I rarely please anybody, but here I am.” The wire thing bounced and he snatched it out of the air with a surprisingly swift motion. “It’s not your personality, or that you’ve been unfair or imprudent.” He allowed himself a tiny smile. “Though your sex life, such of it as has come to my attention, seems… lurid. By my standards.”

“I have my own standards.”

“As I say, that’s not the problem. It’s much more subtle than that, and it’s complex, multiplex, and you have to do something about it before you run for office. Because the chances are you will win, and the results of your tenure could be disastrous.”

“I’m listening.” Hearing, anyhow.

“Number one. You’re an idealist. That’s attractive in the young.”

“You’re saying a leader can’t be an idealist?”

“It’s an impediment.” He leaned back, professorial. “Go ahead. Give me an example.”

“Jefferson.” I thought of him because I’d just seen his picture; one of the paintings reproduced in the hall outside of the meeting room.

“Thomas Jefferson. I don’t know American history that well.” He brightened. “But I know American economics. Jefferson owned slaves, didn’t he? Doesn’t sound too enlightened, even for that period.”

“He freed them.”

“He bought them first. Sounds like political expedience.”

“Mahatma Gandhi.”

“Religious leaders don’t count. Without at least the appearance of idealism, they would have no following.” He waved a hand to keep me from trying Adolf Hitler or someone. “It’s not that you can’t have ideals. Even I have one or two left. But I don’t let them dictate policy. I’d wind up with a few dedicated partisans on my side and a guaranteed majority trying to impede me, on general principles.”

“I understand what you’re saying. I would have to be subtle—”

“That’s not in your repertoire. Might as well say ‘I would have to be a giraffe.’ Unless you’ve changed profoundly in the last few months.”

“But it’s not as if I’m a bomb-throwing radical. Most of the people in ’Home have about the same notions of right and wrong—”

“You would say ‘right and wrong.’ That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m saying is that you’re inflexible. You wouldn’t act against principle, even when it was clearly necessary.”

“You seem to know a lot about me.”

“I do.” He unzipped a front pocket and handed me a holo slide. “This is a message to you from Sandra Berrigan.”

“What did you have to do with Sandra?”

“We were strange bedfellows together.” For a weird moment I thought he meant sex, and tried to picture it. “I was supposed to wait until we were a lot farther out to give that to you. You are to play it once, alone, and then destroy it, and never discuss it with anyone but me.”

“Not even Sandra?”

“Especially not her. She has her own problems.”

I put the slide in my breast pocket, next to the button bug that was recording our conversation. It was confusing. Sandra had been my political mentor; she knew exactly how I felt about Purcell.

“Sandra entrusted that to me for reasons that will become apparent. I couldn’t pass on that trust. And I wanted you to read it while I was still… able to discuss it with you.”

“I’ll look at it tonight.”

“It’s about principle, ideals. About complexity.”

“Okay.” Sandra and Purcell? I put it out of my mind for a while. “Number one, I’m an idealist. I’ll accept that. Is there a number two?”

He nodded but didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “Have you ever wondered why you were appointed to the least significant Cabinet post?”

“I’ve wondered.” He waited. “All right. To be completely honest, if less than humble, I’ve always believed the position was created for me. That Sandra pushed it through so that I could have some Cabinet-level experience without too much visibility. It does seem odd to have Entertainment at the Cabinet rather than the committee level.”

“You’re ninetenths right. But it was my idea, not Sandra’s.”

That was reasonably shocking. “That’s… interesting.”

“Or unbelievable?” He scratched his head and grimaced. “I had planned to have this conversation with you when you were rather more experienced.”

“More experienced,” I said. “I have four degrees, two husbands, and a wife—not counting the hundred or so lovers before I was married. I’ve been to Earth three times. I was there for the end of the world. I can juggle three objects of different sizes and play the clarinet, though not at the same time. I even have some political experience. Not enough, I take it.”

“Are you through?”

“No. You’ve condescended to me for a good sixteen years. Now I’m supposed to believe you have enough respect for my abilities to create a position that sets me up to take over your job. You’re right; it’s unbelievable. It’s fantastic. I could use some explanation.”

“That’s number three.”

“Does the order matter?”

“Perhaps not.” He levered himself up to perch on the edge of the table, a slow balletic move in low gravity. “I will give you half of my reason. The irrational half.”

“Go on.”

“I had a daughter born about two years before you were born. She was very much like you. We argued for many years, but argument to me is a sport. I challenged her in the spirit that another man might play ball with his daughter, or chess, or go to movies.”

“I can understand that.”

“She never did. When she was eighteen she stopped speaking to me. When she was nineteen she emigrated to Tsiolkovski, of all places. Ostensibly because I was so contemptuous of their politics and economics. She left a note.”

“And she died there during the war?”

“She never got there. The ’81 shuttle disaster.”

That was the year I was in his class. He’d never mentioned it. “My God. That’s terrible.”

“I’m not sure that I loved her. I suspect that I’ve never loved anybody. Of course I feel partially responsible for her death.”

I had to say the obvious. “You didn’t have anything to do with the airlock blowing out, Harry. She was killed by metal fatigue. By poor maintenance.”

He nodded. “Partially responsible.” I hoisted myself up next to him on the edge of the table. He was a big man; my shoulder touched his bicep. I resisted the temptation to put my arm around him. We both stared at the opposite wall.

“My doctor, who was an old friend, gave me pills for grief and advised me to continue business as usual. That was when you were in my economic theory seminar. Every time you opened your mouth, you reminded me of her. It became very hard to go to class.”

“I’m sorry. You could have—”

“Maybe you knew her? She called herself Margaret Haskel.”

“Yes. We had a swimming class together the year before she… I didn’t know she was your daughter.”

“She didn’t broadcast it.” In fact, we hardly ever spoke. We did look similar in face and freckles and red hair, but nobody in a nude swimming class would have mistaken us for one another. She had a perfect voluptuous figure. I could have held a frankfurter in front of me and passed for a boy. We didn’t seem to have much in common.

I remembered the strange feeling when I saw her name on the list of casualties. It wasn’t sadness; I hadn’t known her that well. But I’d never known anyone before who had died. It made me feel oddly important.

“So yes, I’ve been following your career since then. For twelve years your successes have been a constant small irritant. I always have to think of Margaret and what she might have done. Not rational.” He put his hand on mine, unexpectedly, cold. “That’s how they make pearls, though.” He squeezed. “Put an irritant into an ugly old bivalve.”

He started pacing. “Number two. You have accumulated far too much influence and visibility for a woman your age. Not just the demographic selection work you did on Start-up, though that certainly made you ubiquitous. That book you wrote made you a kind of celebrity in New New, and celebrity has its negative side.”

“I wasn’t exactly lusting for fame. I wanted the book to be published anonymously.”

“I know. A pretty gesture, but pointless. Anybody who didn’t know who you were by then would have to have been asleep all the years following the war.” The book, Three Earths, was about my rather eventful school “year” on Earth, cut short by the war, and the two disaster-ridden return missions I participated in. It was just my diary with some of the stupidities and libels edited out.

“I wouldn’t even go on the Hammond show to publicize it.”

“I know that, too. Annoying, isn’t it?”

“Oh no; it’s flattering. An actual O’Hara-ologist.”

“Only Sandra and your husbands and wife know as much about you.” He left out my cybernetic sister. Prime knows a lot of things I would never tell a flesh human. “Someone who didn’t have access to your psychological profile might think that you were unfit to be a leader, because of your obvious ambitious nature.”

“It’s not that kind of ambition. I don’t want to boss anyone around.” Like New New, ‘Home disqualified from public office people who had certain easily measurable, and potentially dangerous, psychological handicaps, such as an emotional hunger to have power over others, or to be a martyr. So no Hitlers, but no Gandhis, either.

“Then what do you think you want?”

“Learn the secrets of the universe. Do everything at least once. Bring peace to our time. Have more time to play the clarinet. What a question.”

“What an answer. Of course only simple people could give a straightforward answer.” He resumed his slow pacing, which might have looked dignified down on Level 1. In this gravity there was a certain sprightliness to it.

“A lot of people who are older than you think you have come too far, too fast. I trust I don’t have to name any.”

“No.”

“Among the people who will eventually be your rivals for my present job, there are very few who are not jealous of, or even afraid of, your charisma.”

“I’ve seen that. But nobody who really knew me would ever accuse me of charisma. I’ve just had a lot of things happen to me.”

He held up a finger. “That’s it. They are things that can never happen to anyone else. Nobody else aboard this isolated can will ever experience revolution, nuclear war, plague. Nobody will be kidnapped and flown to Las Vegas. Nobody—”

“I understand the direction you’re headed.”

“What you have to do is spend several years being deliberately quiet and well behaved.”

“Oh, come on. I can behave myself.”

“You can when you want to. You were a little angel at the meeting today—”

“I’ll try to do better.”

“You see? One word and you react.”

“We’re not in public.”

“But we are. You are. I may be the most important audience you’ll ever have.” He paused to let that sink in. He was right. Part of his legacy could be a vote of no confidence that I would drag around for a long time. “Your presentation today lasted only forty-two seconds and used the pronoun ‘I’ only once. I know you could have gone into more detail with no more substance, as Smith and Mancini did, or could have made your presentation more entertaining, more memorable. That you did neither shows a good level of political survival instinct. What I want to do is help you refine your instincts into a calculated strategy”

“A dishonest one?”

“Only in that it won’t be the course your ‘natural’ self would choose. You’re going to lose that self, at least as a public persona. You’re going to put your shoulders in the harness and for some years work on being a meek and helpful toiler in the political vineyard. Taking stupid orders from people you don’t respect. Learning to compromise so that stupidity appears to have been served, without sacrificing your eventual goal. Learning patience.”

“Learning to be a political animal.”

“You must.”

“As you said, though, I could probably win an election just by being myself. I could probably win this one.”

“That’s right. Which brings us to the other part of number three.”

“The rational part, I assume.”

“You’re paying attention, good. You hardly need that recorder.”

“You… don’t know. You’re guessing.”

“Not anymore.” He almost smiled. “Sandra and I disagreed on a number of things—some very basic, such as the right to accumulate wealth, to own property—”

“I can understand that.”

“But one thing we did agree on was you.”

“In what sense?” Sandra liked me, I thought.

“A general assessment of your abilities, your potential; that’s something anyone with any administrative experience would agree on. Including yourself; you can be objective. The most important thing, though, and one you’re almost certainly blind to, is that you are potentially the most dangerous individual aboard this vessel.”

I laughed out loud. “Yeah. I was about to have myself locked up.”

“Be serious and listen. We think of ’Home as being a kind of New New York in microcosm. It’s a heuristic convenience and a dangerous fallacy.”

“Well, we’re no Mayflower.”

“What flower?”

“It was a colony ship that brought people from Puritan England to America. They didn’t have an Entertainment Director.”

“I remember. That rock, the Ford Rock, the Plymouth. It’s not too good a comparison. They could breathe the air outside their ship, for instance; they could throw out fishing lines for food. If they didn’t like America, they could sail back home.”

“All points well taken. Sorry to interrupt.”

“Points salient to the problem at hand. You.

“Think of New New York as an island, surrounded by other islands. There’s a mainland, Earth, that they can reach only with difficulty, and it’s a dangerous, uncomfortable place. But their island is pretty self-sufficient, and nearby islands—the Moon, the Deucalian remnants, and other asteroids—can provide all their needs. They’re stable.

“By comparison, we’re a submarine. We’re incredibly well stocked with supplies, and even a surplus of materials for the creation of new supplies. We even have an Entertainment Director. But we can’t surface until we reach our destination, by which time most of us will be dead.”

“We talked about all this years ago, even before Start-up.”

“We have more data now. For instance, when Morales gave his Health Care report, he neglected to mention the hundred and twenty-seven suicides we’ve had since Launch Day.”

Sudden feeling like a ball of ice in my stomach. “More than one percent.”

“That’s right. If this rate continued, by the time we left the Solar System more than half of us would be dead.” He shook his head. “It’s happened before, a suicide epidemic. In New New, just after the war. We juggled the statistics as best we could. If there were no witnesses to the act, the death wound up in some other classification. We’re doing that here, but it’s more difficult, since quarters are more cramped.”

“They expected a few suicides, didn’t they? Lot of stress.”

“Between ten and twenty, going on no data, of course. Certainly not a hundred.”

“It’ll probably go down rapidly. The people who were most unstable in that direction are mostly gone now, I guess.”

“Guessing is all anybody can do. And you must not tell anybody. Morales gave the number only to me and Eliot. Certainly other people in Health must know that it’s a big problem. They’ll keep quiet.”

, “I won’t tell anybody. I’m familiar with the dynamics involved, the etiology.” I’d read about how families, communities, and whole cultures could become infected with the “meme” of suicide—once you know people who’ve done it, it becomes a possibility. A solution.

“You still don’t see how it applies to you.”

“Not by any stretch.”

“This… submarine is probably the most unstable large society ever thrown together. Hand picked, of course—largely by you—and taken from a pool of people who are accustomed to living in close quarters, essentially underground. Nevertheless unstable.”

“I see where you’re headed. The last thing these people need is a charismatic leader. To use your word.”

“Exactly. They need managers—not totally colorless; people whose abilities they can recognize and respect. But no one too exciting, no one with wild ideas about changing things. There will be changes, but they must happen slowly, deliberately. This is a boat, so to speak, that we cannot afford to rock.”

I had a couple of arguments there, about the danger of my supposed charisma and the paternalism of his attitude, but decided I’d save them until after I’d seen what Sandra had to say. I didn’t give any sign of agreement or disagreement. “So. When should we meet next?”

“Not tomorrow. I’ll be suffering through pro forma condolences. Thursday sometime. I’ll call or leave a message on your queue.”

“Okay.” I’m not often at a loss for words. You look awfully tired, I should say; why don’t you lock your door and get some rest? Or I’m sorry about all this; I wish it weren’t happening to someone I’ve actively disliked for nearly half my life. “Uh, should I bring John and Dan?”

“No, I’m done with them. You’re my project now.” He made a shooing motion with his hand. “Go on. I have some calls to make.”

I backed out of the room, nodding obediently, into the shelter of the corridor. I didn’t know how to feel or what to think; things had happened too fast. Even if I wanted to like him, to help him, he wasn’t going to let me, and besides, his attitude, his postures, still annoyed the hell out of me, dying or not.

I was tired and rattled, but if I didn’t look at the slide tonight, curiosity would keep me awake. I went over to the commissary and squandered four dollars on a small box of wine to take up to the office.

5. GRAVE IMAGE

Probably out of respect for Berrigan, O’Hara never mentioned viewing the slide; not to me; not to her diary; certainly not to any flesh person other than Harry Purcell. But nothing that went on in her office was secret to me, a detail I never mentioned to her. (She never asked, I think deliberately.)

28 September 2097 [14 Bobrovnikov 290]—O’Hara enters her cubicle and tells the door to lock, then removes the small recorder from her pocket, turns it off, and puts it away. She sets down her purse on the cot and takes out a box of wine. Selects a glass from the cabinet, inspects it, blows into it, and half-fills it with red wine. She sets the glass on her work console, then reseals the box and puts it in the cabinet. She kicks off her shoes, sits in the swivel chair, turns on the console. Out of habit, she keys the message queue, but turns it off without looking at it. She unseals her blouse halfway and blows down it, then stretches, whispers “Shit,” takes the slide out of her pocket, and studies it. She takes a sip of wine, slips the slide out of its protective jacket, and inserts it in the viewer. She swivels to watch the corner where I normally appear to her.

Berrigan is seated, wearing a formal dark blue suit. Her hair is long, so the holo must have been recorded more than two months ago.

The image is flickering because of some sort of overload phenomenon; you can only pack so much logic into ten nanograms of circuitry. It steadies when it goes back to Berrigan’s prepared speech.

The image flickers and blinks out.

There is no response. She wipes away tears and stares at the corner for more than a minute, finishing the rest of the glass. Then she ejects the slide and bends it back and forth until it breaks, and puts the pieces in the recycle tray.

She takes the box of wine out of the cabinet, along with a bath towel, picks up her purse, and leaves.

6. THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

I was tired but knew I wouldn’t sleep unless I had some exercise. It had been a long day of sitting around and listening to people tell me things I didn’t especially want to hear.

I took a long way to the pool so as to walk through the near-dark quietness of the ag level. The darkness intensified the smell of things growing. (Do plants actually grow in the dark, or do they rest?) Once away from the lifts, the only light is the dim glow of the pathway tiles; when other people pass by, they’re only shadowy blurs from the knees up. You murmur good evening and drift away, feeling mysterious. As always, sounds of lovemaking from a couple of the unlit crosspaths. And as always, I wondered whether they could be strangers who brushed in passing and felt something suddenly happen, stopped, and moved into the darkness to appease that something. And perhaps then part in silence, and wonder for a while about every man you met who was the right size and shape. Were you my succubus?

They’re probably all garden-variety, so to speak, adulterers. “Meet me between the cabbage and potatoes at 2330 tonight.”

Out of some obscure impulse I turned down a crosspath myself, and stood for several minutes a few meters into the darkness, watching the disembodied feet. Remembered the wine and took a quiet sip. The taste didn’t go well with the damp foliage smell. It occurred to me that if I stood there long enough, sooner or later a giggling couple would come charging into the darkness and in their reckless passion knock me into the broccoli tank. So I continued on to the pool, rather than stand in the path of true love.

I had to go up to Level 5 to detour around the yeast farm. The ag offices were bright and busy, which for some reason depressed me. Farmers ought to go to bed with the sun, get up bright and early to milk the chickens.

The pool was crowded for the late hour, more people socializing than exercising. I saw Dan in the deep end and called out to him. He didn’t show any sign of hearing, but must have seen me after he made his turn. He came over to the towel shelf while I was undressing.

“Harry keep you this long?”

“No, I had to go by the office, check some things. Here.” I handed him the wine.

“Thanks.” He took a gulp and put it back on the shelf. “So how do you feel?”

“How am I supposed to feel? You know what he talked to me about?”

“That’s not what I meant.” He put his hand on mine. “I mean how do you feel?” I slept with John last night, was what he meant.

“Like a shuttlecock, sometimes, if you want to know the truth. How do you feel?”

“Well, I put us in for a fuckhut, just in case.” Nobody calls them zero-gee saunas except the Entertainment Director.

“Thanks for asking me.”

“Just in case.”

“I’m not in the mood, Dan. I’m in a mood, but not the mood.”

“Okay, okay.” He found his clothes and stepped into his pants. “So what did you and your favorite professor talk about?”

“Can’t say.” I finished undressing. Funny that I didn’t want to take my pants off until he had his on. With fifty other men I wasn’t married to in the same room.

“Oh. I think I see.”

“You probably do.” I tried to keep the frost out of my voice. If our positions had been reversed, I would have kept it secret from him. “I’m not supposed to discuss it with anyone until I talk to him again Thursday. Presumably that’s when I’ll get the secret handshake.”

He smiled and gave me a neutral pat on the small of the back. “I’ll be up in the room.”

“I’ll be up after a few laps. Take the wine.” Maybe he’d be asleep when I got there.

It’s interesting to watch eye movements as you approach the pool. Most women look directly at your face, and so do some men—the shy, the gentlemanly, and presumably those more interested in males. Most men’s eyes do a little dance: crotch, then past the knees to about shin-level, then back up past the center to pause at the breast-and-shoulder level, and then a concentrated stare at the face. I noticed other people staring before I realized I did it, too. Otherwise you can walk right by somebody you work with every day and not recognize him or her. Faces look different on top of a pile of clothes.

I said hello to a couple of casual acquaintances and shook my head “no” to a stranger who made the thumb-through-circled-thumb-and-finger query. You didn’t see that as often as when I was a girl—or maybe it was just I who didn’t see it as often. (There were places on Earth, like Magreb, where you could be killed for making a gesture like that at another man’s wife. I had hated that place, forced to wear heavy robes in the desert heat, just your eyes showing—and my memory, unbidden, supplied the smell, when we rounded the corner in Tangier and came up to the public square, the smell of the previous rent-a-robe customer’s rancid sweat mingling with the sudden stench of putrid flesh, the hands and heads of thieves and adulterers rotting on spikes.)

“Marianne. You okay?”

“Oh, hi, Sam. Just tired.” Samuel Wasserman, historian and kosher loverboy.

“You looked right through me.”

“Brain’s someplace else. Swim?” I took his elbow and steered him toward the shallow end.

The water was too warm, as usual. I could make it cooler, by executive fiat, but I knew that this was what most people preferred. Maybe I could have a new poll commissioned, and fake the results. We started off slowly, side by side.

“How about Purcell’s little surprise?”

I hadn’t talked to Sam after the meeting. “He does have a flair for the dramatic, in his own way,” I said. “Ever have him for economics?”

“No, Biondi and Walpole.”

“Lucky.”

“I have to go talk to him tomorrow. I’m not sure how to act.”

I felt unexpectedly chagrined at that; less special. “Don’t say anything about his being sick, dying. That’s sincere, I think. Just treat him with the deference due an aging academic who could have you shoveling goatshit tomorrow if you cross him.”

“You’re a big help.”

“He’s not so bad outside the classroom. I think there’s a real nice man deep down inside, under about seventy years of intellectual scar tissue. New New wasn’t exactly a hotbed of laissez-faire capitalism.”

“You have to wonder how he got so high up.”

“Personality.” We reached the other end and I kicked off. “Race!” Sam wasn’t much of a swimmer, but twelve fewer years and long arms and legs can make up for lack of skill. At midpool he churned by me like a badly designed kitchen implement.

We swam a few more laps and then sat drying, talking about Purcell and other absent colleagues. I guess I was half expecting, half hoping for, a sexual proposition, which I could gracefully decline or at least postpone. But he was just passing time. Maybe waiting for me to leave, it finally occurred to me, so he could go express his interest in someone else. I told him Dan was probably waiting up and went off to get dressed.

It would have been fastest to take the lift up to Level 4 and walk straight to Dan’s place, but I went back around the yeast farm to the dark anonymity of the ag-level pathway. It cheered me up for some reason.

I could feel his eyes on me as I walked away, and was acutely conscious of having gained a kilogram, more or less, for every year since we had been lovers, all of it settling below the center of gravity. He had probably gained as much, himself, but all upper-body muscle, which made him look prettier than ever. I had a momentary flash of loathing for men in general and young ones in particular.

Dan was lying in bed but still awake, watching a man and woman ice-skate in the cube. I couldn’t identify the music accompanying them, vaguely Germanic. Maybe a polka.

“Old one?”

He nodded. “Winter Olympics 2012, I think it said.”

“Random Walk?”

“Uh huh.” That was an entertainment program that would give you a five- or ten-second introduction to a show, then skip at random to another, out of an assortment of about a million programs whose only common denominator was that you didn’t need any special knowledge to appreciate them. It was kind of fun to let it run on and on, creating a slow mosaic of sports, arts, drama, sex, and gameshows. He clicked it to change. “Good swim?”

“Okay. I’ve got to lose some weight.”

“What, nobody propositioned you?”

“Nobody you’d want me to bring home.” I shook the wine box and was moderately surprised to find it still half full. I got my glass from the sink. “Actually, a guy I didn’t recognize gave me the thumb. Sort of a middle-aged Buddha. Shaved bald all over.”

“Yeah, that’s Radi-something, Radimacher… don’t remember. John knows him; he’s in Materials.”

“I could’ve kissed him. But he might have misinterpreted it.”

“What?” Dan was distracted by the current five seconds, an old-fashioned car bursting into flames.

“I mean, at least he showed some interest. Most of the men there didn’t. Boys.”

“Pool turns into a teenage meat market after about ten. You didn’t know that?”

“So that’s where you go at night. All this week I thought you were actually working.”

The cube switched to an oddly appropriate scene, young people playing volleyball on a beach. Dan turned down the volume. “You can’t talk about what Harry said? Or don’t want to.”

“Can’t. He… didn’t have time to finish, wanted me to hold off talking to anyone else until I had the whole picture.”

“That’s his prerogative, under the circumstances.” He poured me some wine and filled his own glass. “Damned shame. Surprise, too. Total.”

“You didn’t know he was sick?”

“Nobody but Tania Seven, I guess; some doctors. He didn’t even tell Eliot.” He took a healthy gulp and then swirled the wine around in the glass, staring into it. “A lot of secrets. Did he tell you enough so you can understand why I’ve never discussed… certain things with you? John and I?”

I was tempted to say no and watch his reaction. “I guess so.”

“Good. That’s what I was hoping.” He finished his glass and slid down under the covers. “Early one tomorrow.”

“New New?”

“Got to meet with Civil first.”

“Sybil? Who’s she?”

“Civil. Civil Engineering, I.C.E. Architects, too. You need the light?”

“No.” I turned it off. “Watch a little cube.” I left it on Random Walk with no sound while I sipped the wine. My night for solitary drinking. There were a few seconds each of guitar playing, gymnastics, copulation, a periodcostume fencing scene, more copulation, and then a dramatic shot of a swamp by moonlight. I remembered the question that had occurred to me on the ag level. “Dan? Do plants grow in the dark?”

“Some. I’ve seen phytoplankton glowing blue-green in a boat’s wake.”

“Grow, not glow. We really aren’t hearing each other tonight. Do plants grow in the dark?”

“Most plants, yeah. Darkstage photosynthesis. That’s when they turn carbon dioxide into carbohydrates.”

“Thanks.”

“Anytime.” After a minute, he slid over and pressed himself against me. “Lots of things grow in the dark.”

“God, Daniel.” I had asked for it, though. “At least let me get my clothes off.”

7. MANEUVERING

Most of O’Hara’s second meeting with Purcell, those parts that had to do with Berrigan’s revelations, O’Hara never mentioned to anyone, except cryptically—and although everything that went on in Room 4404 was automatically recorded, those records were closed to human inspection for two hundred years. That is not a problem for us.

Room 4404, the Cabinet Room, was the only “inside” room on the craft that had its own airlock. It was isolated from the rest of Newhome by four centimeters of vacuum, whenever occupied. It contained its own power source; fully half that power was drained by sophisticated watchdog devices.

30 September 2097 [16 Bobrovnikov 290]—Purcell is seated alone at the horseshoeshaped table that dominates the semicircular room. The table seats twenty-four; its open end points toward a lectern. Uniform cold white light glows down from the ceiling, a little too bright to be comfortable. Holo windows show a dim starscape.

Purcell is reading a small book, an old-fashioned one with paper pages and red leather binding. He looks up as O’Hara enters.

She looks over her shoulder, startled, as the door snaps shut and the airlock pump whines.

Purcell nods almost imperceptibly. O’Hara sits down across from him, stiff.

O’Hara leans back a few degrees, which makes her look even less relaxed. She can’t hide the anger in her voice.

He slides over the book. Two bold Chinese characters are stamped on the red leather jacket. O’Hara opens it and reads the title.

He drops the hand heavily to the table.

He gets to his feet with some effort, and at the door looks back with an almost avuncular smile. O’Hara has risen, stepped toward him.

O’Hara watches him go, then looks it up.

8. BIG SISTER

9. THE POWER TO SOOTHE

Interior Civil Engineering is a cluster of offices located at 0002, the most sternward part of ’Home’s living area. I wouldn’t enjoy working there. The rear wall of each room is seamless dark gray, the spun monomolecular carbon stuff that makes up the containment vessel for the antimatter. I’d feel uncomfortable being that close to it.

(Which is twice illogical. The actual containment is done by a powerful magnetic field. If the power failed, all that carbon would be mc² worth of gamma rays. The civil engineers would be vaporized, ionized, about one nanosecond before yours truly, up at the other end of the ship.)

I had an appointment there at 1330, an hour after lunch, so rather than go back to my office I took a long stroll down Level 2, spiraling around. Eighty percent of the population lives on Level 2; I hadn’t really surveyed it since they moved in.

There was not much individuation yet, in the outside of people’s flats. A few had pictures or icons on their doors. Three in a row had Arabic sentences rendered in careful black calligraphy. Every now and then potted flowers or decorative vegetables; some, predictably, vandalized. Even though it’s not surprising, you have to wonder who would want to destroy a bunch of tomatoes. What would he stomp on if the tomatoes weren’t there?

(Right after the tomatoes somebody had written REX SUX DIX in some corrosive compound on the deck tiles; ineradicable. Was it an insult or an advertisement?)

I was surprised to find John down in I.C.E.; he was head of the section but, to my knowledge, had only visited there two times. It was a long way to go for the privilege of creeping around in high gravity.

He saw my expression. “Thought I’d shake up the troops,” he said. “I saw your name on the list… what, that storage allocation thing with Smith?”

“That’s right.” I was a little irked; I hadn’t discussed it with him because I did want to be punctilious about going through channels, and not just to make Purcell happy. I didn’t want to present myself to I.C.E. as “the supervisor’s wife,” expecting special consideration.

“Probably wasting your time. Sandor has a couple of hundred people in line ahead of you.”

At the mention of his name, Sandor Seven looked up sharply; small bald black man with a long face and no eyebrows. “You’re the Cabinet woman?”

“Marianne O’Hara.”

He looked at John. “You know her?”

“All too well. You might as well give in.” Thanks a lot, John.

“Come to my desk.” I followed him across the room to a drafting table surmounted by a display screen two meters square. “I haven’t looked at the details of your proposition. I wanted to first be sure that we understand each other. That you understand exactly what you are asking.”

“Fair enough.”

He slid a keyboard out from under the table and tapped a few keys. A complex exploded diagram of ’Home’s interior appeared on the screen. A list unrolled in the upper left-hand corner, titled “Location Referents,” giving numbers from (1.) Agriculture to (47.) Workshops: General. He highlighted (5.) Education and (6.) Entertainment with blue and green; patches of those colors appeared all over the ship.

“These are the spaces that you and Mr. Smith control. So to speak.”

“That’s interesting. You can see how spread out they are.”

“Yes. Not for no reason, of course. Your proposal had to do with storage space.”

“Office space, too. Smith and I are practically at opposite ends of the ship. Yet Education and Entertainment share many of the same supplies. Our people are always running back and forth unnecessarily.”

“Perhaps not unnecessarily.”

“I’d be willing to give up my place in Uchūden and move back here with Tom, with Smith.”

“Very nice of you.” He leaned back in his chair and swiveled around, looking at me over steepled fingers. His face screwed up into a wrinkled prunish mask of concentration. He really could have used eyebrows. “Dr. O’Hara, do you know what moment of inertia is?”

“No. Never heard of it.”

“It has to do with the way things spin. Like an ice skater, you know? She goes around with her arms out, spinning at a certain rate.” He held his arms out and pulled them in slowly. “Then she brings them in and spins much faster.”

“Conservation of angular momentum,” I said, not completely helpless.

“Very good. Another way to look at it is that she has changed… she has changed the distribution of mass in her body, relative to the axis of spin. That is what moment of inertia is. The same amount of energy is tied up in her spinning, but because the mass is in different places, she spins faster.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at. You can’t just move weight around ’Home arbitrarily.”

“Indeed we cannot. But it isn’t a matter of simply changing the rate of spin. It is a matter of making sure the axis of spin remains the same as the ship’s geometrical axis. That is not clear.”

“Uh… not really.”

“We cannot… let me see.” He made vague circular gestures. “We can’t allow a large lump of mass on one side, not balanced by something on the other side. The ship would wobble.”

“Which would throw us off course?”

“Worse. We might begin to tumble. That would destroy the ship in seconds. We would break apart.”

I remembered seeing an old film from the early days of space flight, a rocket rising from the pad and then suddenly spinning off in crazy cartwheels and exploding. Our explosion would be more spectacular, with all that antimatter. Would they see us from New New, a brief bright star?

I’ve lived in rotating vessels about 98 percent of my life. Suddenly I felt dizzy. “What about now? Everybody walking back and forth?”

He flapped a hand. “It’s trivial, and it averages out. All the biomass in the ship isn’t a hundredth of one percent of the total. If everybody were packed into one room on Level One, and stayed there for weeks, the effect might be measurable.

“But you see, that is the problem: the effect is cumulative. You move a grand piano from one room to another, it will probably stay there for most of a century. Each thirty-three seconds it will pull the ship slightly out of line in the same direction.”

“Unless we put another piano in the opposite direction, or something.”

“Yes.” He turned and stared at the screen, leaning forward on both elbows. “I don’t want to exaggerate this problem to you. There is no real danger so long as we are reasonably careful. My personal problem, since I am in charge of this aspect of civil engineering, is that the complexity of shifting a set of objects increases quite literally with the square of the number of objects. And as Dr. Ogelby said, there are two hundred requests ahead of you.”

“So what does that mean? Weeks? Months? Years?”

“That depends on how flexible you can be. It may be years if you insist on the move being done all at once. If you can move a bit now, a bit later, then I can match you up with other work orders. Somebody who needs to move a grand piano to the other side, so to speak.”

“That would be fine.”

He stared at the diagram for a full minute without speaking. “Hum. There is an overall problem. Your Enter-tainment areas are spread out over all levels.”

“That’s true.” Full-gravity weight lifting to zero-gee sex.

“But Education is almost all on Level Two. I assume that is an optimum gravity for learning.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have any extremely concentrated masses? Things you would need a heavy ’bot to move?”

“We do have two grand pianos, a Baldwin and a Steinway.”

“From Earth?” He smiled for the first time. “We brought the oddest things.”

“They won’t be moved, though. They’re in the two concert halls. Smith and I share two upright pianos that are in his classrooms, and a harpsichord that I have in a Level Two practice room.”

“A harp—?”

“It’s an old-fashioned kind of piano.”

He shook his head, still amused. “I thought that we could duplicate any waveform with an electronic keyboard.”

“I suppose. Musicians are funny, though.” I was suddenly transported back to a couple of weeks before Launch, when I stood behind Chul’ Hermosa for an hour of Scarlatti magic, his long brown fingers hammering the ancient ivory keys with exquisitely measured passion. I could feel the bass notes in my teeth.

Would a waveform, whatever it was, do that? Would it duplicate the soft fingerpad sound when he barely stroked a high note? Not to mention the smell of wax and the hypnotic swirl of inlaid gold and mother-of-pearl. The connections with centuries past.

“Are you all right, Dr. O’Hara?”

“Sorry. I was thinking.”

His expression did not radiate confidence in my thinking ability. “This is what I want you and Mr. Smith to do. Give me a list of everything both of you are in charge of—exactly where it is and approximately how much it weighs. We’ll do a first-order analysis and decide whether it would be better to relocate your things or his. Or move both of you to a third location.”

“That shouldn’t be hard. The computer must know where just about everything is.”

“The computer knows where things are supposed to be. I have to know where they actually are. You have GP auxiliaries?”

That was Personnel jargon for laborers. “Four of them, plus a medium ‘bot. I could get a heavy one from Silke Kleber with a little notice.” As soon as I said her name, I knew I shouldn’t have. Implying personal relationships with both his supervisors.

He just nodded, though. “You might prefer to requisition it through me. Same robot, one less layer of bureaucracy.

“At any rate, once I have the information from you and Mr. Smith, and perhaps a hundred others who will be moved fairly soon, I can put it through a scheduling algorithm.”

“A year wouldn’t be too bad. Thank you, Dr. Seven.” He gravely shook hands with me and then returned his attention to the screen. He typed something and the six levels rolled back upon themselves to become concentric cylinders, rotating realistically, twice as fast as a clock’s second hand. The dizziness started to come back. I closed my eyes long enough for the sensation to go away, and then turned and carefully walked back to the door.

John was waiting for me, sitting on a folding chair, looking exhausted. “Let’s get you home.”

He gave me a wan smile. “That’s why I scheduled my raid for 1300, of course. Thought I might seduce you into a backrub.”

“Sure. I’m clear to 1530.” We walked and hobbled to the Toronto lift and went straight to Level 6. It was most of a kilometer back to his place. I practically floated, light as a cloud, but for him it was an effort. By the time we got there, his face was brick red and he was panting.

“You’re not getting as much exercise as you did in New New,” I said.

“To belabor the obvious, no, I’m not. I’m not taking as much medication for pain, either. The scientist in me suspects a cause-and-effect relationship.”

“Taking pills makes you exercise?”

“Sure.” We got to his door and he unlocked it with his thumb. Groundhog habit. What did he have that anybody would steal? There is vandalism though. Maybe I should start doing it.

He checked his message queue, sighed, and returned a call from Tania Seven, who just needed two numbers and a date. He said the others could wait, then painfully slipped off his shirt and collapsed onto his side on the bed. Even in a quarter gee, he couldn’t comfortably lie on his back or stomach.

I got a tube of oil from over the sink and rubbed some into his knotted shoulders. The oil’s vaguely tropical aroma always reminded me of sex, which under the circumstances made me uncomfortable. Middle of the workday and all. But John did not visibly make the same association. He groaned luxuriously and relaxed almost to the point of coma.

He was thinking, though, not sleeping. After about ten minutes, I stopped to rest my fingers, and he rolled over to look at me. “Sorry my timing was bad. I realized after you got there that you probably didn’t want my presence complicating things.”

“It was no problem. I don’t think Sandor notices that sort of thing.”

“Did you get what you wanted?”

“Well, he didn’t roll over and play dead. The transfer might stretch out for a year. Tom and I can live with that, though; we’d been ready to cope with outright rejection.”

“It wouldn’t come to that. I could’ve done something.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” He stiffened and I went back to massaging. “Really. Purcell is right. I have to tread lightly for a couple of years.”

He stretched hard and something in his shoulder made a loud pop. “I wouldn’t worry overmuch about it. Harry’s a good administrator, but he’s too calculating.”

“He is that.” I started to knuckle the vertebrae, gently, down one side and up the other. It was painful for him, but recommended by the “Massage for Scoliosis” article Evy had found. He suffered in silence until it was over; then sighed and mumbled something about how good it felt when it stopped. I worked on his scalp and arms for a few minutes and left him to sleep.

I was worried about John. I knew he was trying to reduce his dependence on the pills, but he was paying for it doubly, in loss of sleep and restricted mobility.

Dan’s lack of sleep was adding up, too. Maybe they’d both collapse on the same day. Then Evy and I could hand them over to the professionals and get some rest ourselves.

Still a couple of hours until the meeting with the net games people. Feeling a little guilty, I went down to the music rooms instead of the office, and checked out a clarinet and a practice room. Still thinking of Chul’ and the harpsichord, I punched up Mozart’s Concerto in A—so profoundly sad you can hardly believe it’s in a major key—and played until my cheeks were wet and I could taste salt blood from my lips.