Worlds Enough and Time

1. ABOUT TIME

The first year aboard ’Home was fairly uneventful. For a month or two, people who derive satisfaction out of expecting the worst did walk around braced for disaster. Their anxieties, it turned out, were not unfounded. Just premature.

Harry Purcell died, but not until after he had successfully orchestrated his retirement. O’Hara pursued the meek and Machiavellian course he had mapped out for her. Dan went on his binge on schedule, and recovered on schedule. John’s decline stabilized. Evy fought being transferred from Geriatrics to Emergency, and lost.

New New faded in importance as they accelerated away from it. Partly this was the result of increasing confidence in their own institutions and methods; partly it was the increasing difficulty in communication. Every three hundred thousand kilometers meant another second of time lag between New New and ’Home. By the time they were ready to celebrate their first year in flight, New New was forty-four hours behind them.

So when should they celebrate the anniversary? A reactionary few wanted to wait and share the celebration with New New, but they never had a chance, and knew it; they were just arguing because arguing was the national sport.

In fact, there had been a lot of arguing over time matters. They weren’t going fast enough for Einsteinian relativity to affect everyday things, but they still had to deal with the time difference between them and New New. They could have slowed their clocks down by a fraction of an instant each minute, no problem for us computers, but that would have been pointless except as a symbolic link. It would still take four days between “How’s the weather down there?” and “Same as always.”

A more meaningful debate over time had to do with their destination planet, Epsilon Eridani 3 (or Epsilon 3, or Epsilon, or, most commonly, “the planet”): Its day was eighteen hours, thirty-two minutes long. Ultimately, their clocks would have to reflect this reality, and probably not by resetting each clock to midnight at half-past six. (John Ogelby wrote a tongue-in-cheek article defending that idea, which some people took at face value.)

Traditionalists wanted to keep the sixty-minute/twenty-four hour clock, which you could do if you cut the duration of a second down to 0.77222 of a “real” second—it would be confusing at first, but it would certainly make the day go by faster.

Most of the scientists were “Decimalists,” arguing that as long as you were redefining the second, you might as well redefine everything. If you made your second about two thirds of an Earth second, you could have a day of ten 100-minute hours, each minute a hundred of those quick little seconds. The advantage of this was obvious to scientist, though it would be a little hard to draw clocks freehand.

Of course common sense, and inertia, prevailed, and the time continued to be what the clock said it was. New New was just shifting time zones and Epsilon was, after all, a century away. A century of incessant bickering.

2. HAPPY NEW YEAR

Almost everybody took at least two days off for the Launch Day anniversary, one for partying and one for recovering, but of course O’Hara and her co-workers were not allowed that luxury. A daylong picnic for ten thousand people is no picnic for the people in charge of its logistics. Food and drink, music and games, places for people to sit, barriers to keep them from sitting on the daisies. Jury-rigged portable toilets to protect the daisies from excessive fertilization. First-aid stations attended by nondrinking doctors and nurses. A place for the coordinators to stand and publicly reveal that yes, by George, it has been a whole year.

She enjoyed the challenge and liked the way the park took shape under her direction, but was not looking forward to the cleanup. She remembered the celebration a year before, and knew that half the people she needed would be off sleeping under something, or someone, and the ones who showed up would not be in top form.

3. TORN BETWEEN TWO LOVERS

22 September 2098 [26 Aumann 293]—Trying to be honest with this diary, not sin by omission. Not omit any sins.

Start out with adultery. (Have I ever typed that word before? It looks funny, as if it were the opposite of childishness.) A man I’ve known all my life made an interesting and specific proposition, and I turned him down, and then I took him up on it.

It’s odd how a couple of weeks of frantic work led up to a sudden shortage of it. I guess that means we did it right. Once the anniversary party got started, I just sort of walked around the park enjoying the sight of other people having fun. My caller never beeped.

I felt conspicuous. A sartorial genius back in Start-up had come up with the bright idea of providing special white outfits for the Coordinators and Cabinet to wear during ceremonial occasions. Some of us feel like Moby Dick wearing white. (Usually when I go to the laundry I select black or bluejean, lavender if I’m in a frisky mood. Twenty years ago someone said it looked good with my hair color.)

I was watching a tetherball game, mildly resentful of the players’ teenage exuberance. The annoyance was partly professional—if you break that cord, do you think we can send out for a new one?—but mostly it was an irrational longing to be young and confused and seething with hormones. And who should present himself but good old nothis-realname Tom.

I vaguely remembered having had sex a few times with Tom back in my butterfly days. That’s a distinction he probably shared with a third of the males in my age group in New New. For about a year and a half, between losing Charlie Devon and meeting Daniel, I’d go along with anybody who had a pointable penis and didn’t smell too revolting.

We chatted for a while, watching the kids. Then, without any sexual preamble, he asked whether I remembered the time he had shared me with another man, and how about doing it again?

I did remember, and the memory gave me a special pang of longing. It can be awkward and uncomfortable and hilarious, two on one, but it certainly does make you feel wanted. I hadn’t done it since I got married.

(People will make assumptions when they find out you have two husbands and a wife. John and Dan are both groundhogs, though, very conservative sexually, and as far as I know, Evy doesn’t have any lesbian itches. I’m not sure what I would do if she asked. I had sex with women a few times when I was eighteen, to keep Charlie happy, but never showed any real talent for it. John and Dan would be uncomfortable about Evy and me getting together, anyhow.)

So I told Tom that I was flattered—no lie, since I was feeling so unattractive—but that my emotional life was too complicated already. His answer to that was “Who’s talking about emotions?” I dismissed him with a kiss and a squeeze, and he wandered off, looking, I assumed, for some more willing two-holed relic from school days. But the seed was planted, so to speak.

I hadn’t been drinking or eating because at 2130 it was my turn to play the clarinet for an hour down at the dance floor, and saliva doesn’t help your music. It was mostly mainstream stuff from the past decade, not challenging, but there were a couple of New African pieces, post-Ajimbo, that changed key signature and tempo about every other measure. Probably easier to play than to dance to. I also did alto sax on two pieces, glad not to have solos. The embouchure, the way you hold your lips, is a lot different, and I hadn’t practiced it recently.

Most of it was sight-reading, so I didn’t pay much attention to the people dancing or listening. I did notice Dan, though, loping along with wide-eyed concentration. That meant that he’d drunk too much too early, and had popped an Alcoterm to burn it off. So he’d be wide awake for at least twenty-four hours—good thinking, Dan. When everybody else wakes up, you’ll collapse.

Between pieces I saw that Dan was hovering over some librarian whose name I couldn’t remember. Small, girlish, vivacious. I wasn’t surprised when they left together during the next number, but was a little disappointed. A reliable side effect of Alcoterm is priapism, and I had been looking forward to helping him with it.

Pleasant surprise: when my shift was over, Tom was waiting for me. Good instincts. I said let’s go. On the way up to the fuckhuts, feeling deliciously wicked, I buzzed Zdenek and told him he was in charge; don’t call me unless it’s a real emergency.

The other gentleman, I’ll call him Oscar, after Wilde, was waiting impatiently for us at the Level 0 exit, with a two-hour sauna pass that was twenty minutes gone.

He was more interested in Tom than in me. A pity; he was a big slab of a guy, about twenty, handsome in that brooding self-absorbed way that doesn’t last. I would have liked to hold on to him for the duration, but he was pretty obviously not excited by vaginas. Tom was, so I got his flabby and balding personage—exactly my age, I couldn’t avoid thinking.

I was surprised to find that three people fucking don’t bounce off the padded walls as frequently as a pair does. It probably has something to do with the moment of inertia. Maybe I should ask Sandor. He wouldn’t even blink.

I felt sort of like a referee, or moderator. A not-too-passive receptacle for their simultaneous orgasms. By then I was a couple of orgasms ahead, though, so couldn’t complain.

Afterward we talked and caressed for a while, luxuriating in the zero gee and warm dim rosy glow of the small room. Oscar gave me a couple of unambiguous looks, so I said I had to go back to being ringmaster of this circus; dressed, and left them to their own two devices.

It was fun to have sex with relative strangers again. As opposed to strange relatives. Maybe I should do it every time Dan does. Get plenty of exercise.

I didn’t go straight back down to the park, but detoured through the Level 2 gym to shower and sit for a while in the whirlpool. I’ll be sitting carefully for a few days. (Definitely out of practice with that practice. John or Dan would wilt at the thought of anal intercourse, being from Earth. You can die of it there—or could die of it, when they were growing up. All of the AIDS carriers were probably killed off by the “death,” the plague left over from biological warfare.)

I was thumbed at three times in ten minutes, by men I didn’t know. Maybe it was the alert way I was sitting. I would’ve been tempted by one of them if there wasn’t so much work ahead, just to have three in one day again. Who’s getting old?

Two groups dressed and left, and, abruptly alone, I was hit by a sudden spasm of helpless anomie. Emotional exhaustion. What you need, girl, is a nice vacation. Difficult under the circumstances. If you can stick it out for another ninety-seven years, you’ll have a whole new world to explore.

I punched up the schedule and found that there was a twenty-minute VR vacancy. I had eighteen minutes’ credit, so I went down and wired up for the random abstraction mode. The first “place” was uncomfortable, walking naked through fuzzy shoulder-high bushes with thorns, breathing garlic and roses, but then it was a warm amniotic universe where blind soft things bumped up against you and explored with rubbery lips. Then a striped universe, black and white, bands of hot and cold that cut through flesh and organ and bone as you moved. Then I was sitting in the booth sweating, wishing I hadn’t done it alone. I was used to talking it over with Dan afterward.

Every animal is sad after intercourse, some old Roman said. This animal was also tired and hungry. I went on down to the park and assembled a weird sandwich out of the impoverished wreckage of the buffet table and washed it down with some toxic but resuscitating coffee. Told Zdenek that I would take charge until three, then would roust up Christensen to watch over things till six. Then at eight we would all start turning the place back into a park.

It was a quarter to midnight, and the party was pretty lively, but still under control. The wine and beer taps would dry up at twelve, so there were predictable lines of people holding two cups. A lot of horse trading with ration cards. Two colas for a beer, three? The actual alcoholics had come prepared, of course, with shine or boo or schnapps or fuel.

I didn’t expect any discipline problems until after one o’clock. In fact, it was about two, when we were down to a few hundred people determined to have fun until they dropped. Two middle-aged men started fighting, though not to much effect. They rolled around in a bleary, beery embrace, calling each other names. Other people watched with a kind of detached interest, until a police officer came over and broke it up. As prearranged, he made a big fuss (it being the first incident), upbraiding them and fining them down to zero on the spot. Another officer escorted them roughly away, supposedly to Security, though I knew that if they didn’t live together she’d just dump them in their beds and tell them to sleep it off.

I was surprised that there were no other real incidents. I’d warned Christensen that the three-to-six shift was likely to be eventful, but maybe he’ll have it easy, too. By three o’clock most of the diehards were sober people, just too adrenalized to sleep, sitting around in clusters singing or telling tales.

I had a vision of groundhogs doing this thousands of years ago—hanging around Stonehenge after the midnight ceremony, tossing more wood on the campfires, passing the mead, and telling ghost stories until dawn. I was probably the only person there who had ever actually smelled a campfire; felt the welcome heat with the cold autumn night at your back.

Just before three, I ran into Charlee Boyle (her real name is Charity Lee, which she hates), who offered to split a small bottle of boo with me, my first drink of the night. I shouted us a half-liter of orange juice, which pretty well masks the industrial-solvent flavor.

It has had the desired effect. G’night, Prime. Wake me up at ten till six. (Notes dictated about 3:45; will clean them up on the keyboard later.)

4. FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS INCLINATIONS

The next day, Tuesday, was long and tiring. People showed up late or not at all, as O’Hara had predicted. Most of them saw no need for urgency, her timetable notwithstanding—if something wasn’t picked up today, it would still be there tomorrow.

But tomorrow was exactly what O’Hara was worried about. There was going to be another anniversary celebration, less raucous, when greetings were beamed from New New. She had to have bleachers in place in front of the large screen, the area reasonably neat; coffee and tea facilities for a couple of thousand. It’s true that tomorrow everybody could just look up and watch the thing on home or office screens, but any kind of break in the routine was always welcome.

It was an interesting exercise in leadership for O’Hara. She had asked to borrow 145 “GP auxiliaries” from various departments, but they didn’t come equipped with supervisors. So by 8:30—half an hour late—she found herself surrounded by about 110 men and women standing around with their hands in their pockets, staring at her and each other. She was an admiral in a sea of privates. Most knew who she was, but she didn’t have much authority in their eyes.

Rather than try to find out who everyone was and what they supposedly could do best, she divided them at random into two roughly equal groups: one bunch, the pickup crew, she lined up from one side of the park to the other and sent marching off, studying the ground, picking up litter and passing it to recycle bags. The second group stayed with her and assembled bleachers. Then they took them apart and did them over, more or less right.

A hundred motivated people could have finished everything before lunch. This group worked, if you could call it that, until three or four. After they were gone, O’Hara and her regular crew spent another hour tightening bolts and policing up tools and bags.

It’s a problem she had discussed with Purcell, who made the obvious analogy with early European communist states, like the Soviet Union before it became the SSU. Minimum labor yielded the same result as maximum, for people who measured success in terms of material rewards. Anyone who did more work than was absolutely necessary was either an idiot or a toady.

In New New you could buy exotic food and drink, imported from Earth. ‘Home’s luxuries were less exciting, but followed the same principle: fancy pastries, odd liqueurs and candies, or just extra wine and beer. You could buy services of a personal nature, sex or massage or a private portrait or concert, but paying often required an elaborate system of transferrable IOU’s, since nobody’s card could hold more than $99.99.

O’Hara instituted a system of rewards that many other departments copied. On the last day of each month, she named one of her people “Worker of the Month,” and in addition to a public pat on the back, he or she was given access to $200 in a departmental “bonus account.” Two hundred dollars would throw a pretty riotous small party, and that’s what most people did with their reward. It was a mild kind of capitalism, transmuting diligence at the workplace into a boost in social status.

Otherwise, O’Hara made the same three dollars per hour that her GP’s did; if you could drink an extra cup of coffee every twenty minutes, you could stay broke. So everyday life was pretty unchallenging. Until 9:02 in the morning, 23 September 2098.

5. IN THE DEAD VAST AND MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

24 September 2098 [2 Chang 293]—Midnight. I have started this entry a dozen times. Write a sentence or two and erase it. Most of the time I sit and stare at the empty screen. Nothing I write seems adequate for this.

There is no word for this feeling. No one word. Desolation. That has a good sturdy ring to it. What the hell are we going to do?

Might as well just pick the thing up where I left off, and, keep typing.

People started to drift in for the anniversary broadcast about 7:30. New New had produced a documentary program about the construction of ’Home, interesting enough. Almost three thousand people turned up eventually, filling the bleachers and packing the space around them.

Sandra Berrigan gave a nice short speech, wishing us well, and then they projected an old-fashioned clock face behind her, to tick off the last fifteen seconds, New Year’s Eve style. The crowd behind the camera began to chant five, four, three, two—and then (we’ve played this back many times) Sandra suddenly looks to her right and raises her arm, starting to point at something. And then the screen goes white, and stays white.

We’ve lost New New. We’ve lost Earth.

It took the technicians about one minute to find out how much worse it was even than that. The last signal from New New was an active intelligent sabotage program. It slammed into our information systems and, before it could be contained, randomized most of our stored information, and backups, in discrete chunks. All of Hamlet, for instance, is lost. All of The Tempest and the Henry plays: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. But Twelfth Night is intact. Troilus and Cressida. It’s perverse.

Ninety percent of history and art and philosophy are gone. But what may kill us is the missing science, mathematics, and engineering. If something goes wrong with the antimatter containment, for instance, we’ll just have to roll up our sleeves and try to figure it out from scratch before it quietly blows everyone to Kingdom Come.

We don’t even know whether New New still exists. There’s nothing wrong with our antennas; we can still monitor the radio telescope on the Moon, the useless navigation beacons in Earth’s oceans. But not so much as a carrier wave from New New. Our telescopes aren’t quite powerful enough to see it. Seeing it wouldn’t mean there was anybody alive inside, anyhow.

I think I know now, a little, how Harry felt the day the doctor told him he was going to die. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but soon enough.

6. OPTIONS

They had two months in which to make the big decision. Up to fourteen months out, they still had the option of turning around, decelerating for another fourteen months, and then slowly returning to Earth and New New. After 25 November, their bridges would be burned: Epsilon, or slow death, or swift.

Room 4004 felt too small for the whole thirty-six-person Cabinet—normally Engineering and Policy met in camera separately, only getting together for largely ceremonial public sessions—but they did manage to find enough chairs and places to put them. O’Hara and John Ogelby were the last ones in. The security door sighed shut behind them, and the murmur of conversation ebbed to claustrophobic silence.

Eliot Smith clicked a metal finger twice on the table in front of him. “I doubt that we’ll arrive at a consensus today. Let’s just make sure everyone has the same information to work with.

“Start at the beginning. Dan, Len? What do we know about that final transmission from New New?”

Len wood Zylius gestured for Dan to speak. “Matty Lang tells me it was what they call a ‘Borgia program.’ The Borgias sometimes murdered their guests with co-adjuvant poisons—two chemicals that were harmless by themselves, but deadly together. So it was safe to drink the wine, for instance, as long as you stayed away from the cherry pie.

“Most of the sabotage program was already in place, invisibly hidden in the part of our library procedures that deals with recording public occasions. When the last microsecond of transmission arrived from New New, the program completed itself and ran wild through the library.”

“Safeguards?” Tania Seven said.

“Whoever wrote the sabotage program must have had access to most of our security routines. It took more than two seconds to stop the program. As much as nine tenths of some of the library was destroyed, randomized, by then. Muhammed?”

Kamal Muhammed was in charge of Interior Communications. ‘The degree and kind of destruction was different for different areas of knowledge. It depends on how the information was organized. Where there are lots of cross-references, as in physics or mathematics, we only lost about half the data—but that half could be anywhere. Half a definition, half an equation.

“The destruction was faster in things that have the nature of lists, without extensive cross-listings. Things like bookkeeping records, VR images, sheet music, nonkinetic novels, personnel files—they were either destroyed entirely or, in a few cases, left untouched. I’m afraid that as much as ninety percent of them may be lost.” He sat down.

“But for all we know,” Dan said, “New New might resume transmissions tomorrow, in which case we’ll be able to reclaim the most important information. Or they may all be dead.” He looked at the Coordinators. “I guess we go on that assumption.”

“Have to,” Smith said. “We’re taking the obvious precaution of rewriting the safeguard routines, in case they do get in touch with us again. But the expression on Berrigan’s face just before we lost them… I’m afraid New New was attacked at the same time that the killer program went out.”

“The question is, by whom?” Tania Seven said. “It’s natural to blame the Devonites, but there’s an obvious paradox.”

“I’ll state the obvious, for the record.” Eliot looked up at the camera. “Radical Devonites believed that Newhome was built in defiance of God’s will, and they did a pretty good job of sabotage a month before Launch. Cracked the hull, fifty-some people dead. If we’d all died, that would’ve been God’s will.

“There are still thousands of these nut cases in New New, and if they could do this thing, they probably would. But it took one hell of a sophisticated job of programming, and programming is one thing they don’t do. They don’t like machines in general.

“Also, as Dan Anderson pointed out, part of it was an inside job. There aren’t any Radical Devonites aboard; never have been, except for the two that snuck in for the sabotage.”

“We have Reform Devonites,” O’Hara said. “About forty of them.”

“And they’re under suspicion. Not that finding a guilty person would do much good. Except that if we chucked him out the airlock he wouldn’t be able to do any more damage.”

“Whoever did it probably isn’t aboard,” Tania Seven said. “I’d look for someone who was involved in designing the cyberspace and then decided not to come along.

“But as you say, it’s not really important. What’s important is that pretty soon we’re going to call for a referendum on whether to go ahead or turn back.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “And first we have to decide what the results will be.” A few people looked startled to hear her say that in public, though by this time everyone in the Cabinet knew the referenda were rigged.

“Start out with extreme opinions,” Eliot said. “I think it would be crazy to turn back. Who thinks it would be crazy to go on?”

“I don’t know about crazy, Eliot,” Marius Viejo said. “But you gotta admit there’s a whiff of Russian roulette about it.” Viejo was in charge of Life Support Systems.

“I’m listening.”

“Every aspect of Life Support has got components with projected-times-to-failure less than ninety-seven years. The probability of something not going wrong before we get to Epsilon is so small you don’t even have to think about it. Let me have the board. I’m E92.”

Smith tapped three keys on his keyboard, and Viejo unfolded his and typed in a command. The wall screen became a page of gibberish, headed HEíØ EîCJAN&E ËYSTôMW—THPA£R PRJTBCOLí.

“Okay. This says ‘HEAT EXCHANGE SYSTEMS—REPAIR PROTOCOLS.’ You’ve all seen similar things. Since we do have a pretty good notion of what’s in it, sooner or later we’ll be able to decipher it with some confidence. The words, anyhow; numbers will have to be recalculated. Some of them are from measurements that can’t be made while the ship is under way.

“So supposing we could eventually restore this manual to its original status… that ‘eventually’ is a killer. A real killer. If the heat exchange systems shut down right now, we would all fry in about eight hours.”

“Lot of repairs you could make without the manual,” Eliot said. “You are engineers.”

“Yeah, well, this one is a good case in point. I’ve got two women in the heat exchanger subgroup who’ve been pulling heat exchange maintenance all their adult lives. If something went wrong with the heat exchange system in New New, they could fix it with a bucket over their head and somebody beatin’ Ajimbo on the bucket.

“But this ain’t New New. My Life Support heat exchange is slaved into the primary system, which radiates waste heat from the gamma ray reflectors. It’s got to have priority over Life Support—I mean, you want to fry in eight hours or eight nanoseconds? But it’s an added complication, and one that nobody has any experience dealing with.”

He faced the rest of the table. “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty much on Eliot’s side. Even if we did want to go back, that fourteen-month flip is a pretty extreme maneuver—must be eighteen, twenty times the propellant mass we’re designed to have at the flip. Lotta mechanical stress.”

“So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t?” O’Hara said.

“We’re in shit up to the pits, is what I was going to say. No matter which way we go.”

Eliot pointed at Takashi Sato, Propulsion. “Sato. You have an opinion?”

“Two opinions. As a man, there is no question: I knew I would die aboard this vessel when I agreed to come along. I don’t want to go back, to die in retreat.

“As an engineer… it’s not that simple. Yes, as Mr. Viejo says, the flip at fourteen months is an emergency scenario. But if we were to power down the ship’s spin—live with zero gravity for a few days—and do the flip very slowly, there should be no problem. Possibly much safer, statistically, than continuing on.”

Several people spoke at once. Eliot called on Silke Kleber, I.C.E. Maintenance. “I would not invoke statistics this way. The fact is that whatever happened to them at New New is likely to happen to us if we return. That would be a nice reward for our concern, don’t you think?”

“Suppose they are alive, though, and need us?” O’Hara said. “For all we know, they just lost communication and information, as we did.”

“Then what was Berrigan pointing at?” Viejo said. “A computer program?”

“Might have been their monitor,” Seven said, “going blank just before ours did.”

Eliot shook his head. “This is all guesswork. We can’t make a decision based on ‘what-if’ speculation.” He turned to Seven. “Even if they are alive and need help, what could we give them, realistically?”

“Manpower. Brainpower. A few thousand good engineers and scientists.”

“They’ve got plenty left over. They also have a lot more redundancy in their information systems. If they’re alive, they’ll be back in shape long before we will.”

“You have a nice way of simplifying things, Eliot.” Carlos Cruz, Humanities, stood up. “If we don’t hear from them, they’re dead, so we should go on. If we do hear from them, they’ll be okay, so we should go on.”

Eliot smiled broadly. “Am I wrong, though?”

“I’m just saying that it’s not that simple. The question you’re not asking is whether we have a moral obligation to help New New.”

“So do we?”

“I say yes.”

Eliot paused and chose his words slowly. “I wouldn’t say yes or no categorically. The decision will have to be tempered by practical matters. What would you do, for instance, if we got a weak message pleading that we turn around and come back—saying they needed our antimatter to fuel their life support systems?”

“No question. We’d have to go back.”

An engineer laughed; Eliot restrained himself. “Well, that was kind of a trick question. By the time we decelerated, then accelerated back up to speed, then flipped and decelerated again… there wouldn’t be hardly any anti-matter left. And it would be at least three years before we got back to them, blasting every inch of the way; if they could hold out that long, they could juryrig some solar energy source. That’s not even considering what I think would be the most likely scenario—that the message was a hoax, an attempt to lure us back into the arms of the people who tried to kill us. That is what they did, even if their intent was something more subtle.”

“And we’re not out of danger yet,” Viejo said, “not by a long way. Personally, I think that if New New calls, we should ignore them.” There was a low murmur of support.

“Let’s not spend too much time on hypothetical situations,” Seven said. “First we have to decide our best course of action if we don’t hear from them in the next two months.”

“What if we shut down the drive now?” O’Hara said. “That would give us more than two months’ leeway.”

“About five,” Eliot admitted. “But you gotta keep in mind this is no shuttle tug you can turn on and off. Every time we deviate from the planned program we’re inviting trouble.” He looked around. “Show of hands? How many want to turn it off now?”

Only seven raised their hands, O’Hara and one other giving the thumb-and-finger “split-vote” sign. One of them was the propulsion engineer Sato. Eliot nodded at him. “I know what you’re going to say. Go ahead and say it.”

“Yes. Eliot and I have argued about this. Several of us believe we can modify the drive; double its efficiency. This would increase our acceleration by the square root of two. Or even quadruple the efficiency, doubling our acceleration, which would save us thirty-four years of travel time. Many of you would still be young when you arrived at Epsilon.” Sato was over ninety.

“But all of your research materials are gibberish.”

“The more reason to stop accelerating now. To buy time while those materials are deciphered. If it develops that we can indeed double or quadruple the efficiency, then right now we’re wasting antimatter at an alarming rate.”

“That’s rather interesting,” Seven said. “Eliot, you didn’t tell me about this.”

“I thought you knew.”

“No.” She rubbed her chin. “I think we ought to adjourn for a day, two days. Sato, you prepare a summation of your argument, and Eliot or somebody he chooses can do a rebuttal. Try to do it in English, not just math and jargon, so we mere mortals can comprehend it. Send it to all the Cabinet members. We’ll reconvene here Thursday morning, same time. Is that satisfactory, Eliot?”

“Sure. You can try to convince me.”

Sato inclined head and shoulders toward Eliot in a microscopic bow. “You may surprise yourself, Coordinator.”

7. DRIFTING

27 September 98 [6 Chang 293]—So this is what it feels like not to be accelerating. It’s nothing obvious, down here in full gravity; just the absence of an insistent ghost of a pull. Dan insists it’s all psychological. Except that dust balls don’t gather on the sternward wall. No doubt it’s a lot more noticeable up in zero gee. Normally, if you stay perfectly motionless in one of the fuckhuts (in which case you ought to relinquish it to someone else), you’ll drift to the sternward wall in about a minute.

I get the feeling the engineers sort of ganged up on Eliot. John and Dan were in favor of Sato’s proposal from the start. Just about everyone I’ve talked to thought it would be worth the risk, including, emphatically, the pilot Anke Seven. Since he’s Tania’s cousin (and rather more, I happen to know) he gets about ten votes.

They turned the drive off at midnight, six hours ago, and we’re still here. Of course firing it up again is going to be a more dangerous proposition. I think I’ll suggest that they not tell anybody ahead of time. No need for all of us to sit around chewing our nails. It couldn’t be all that painful, anyhow, being instantly converted into a superheated puff of plasma. Unless dying always hurts.

Better get some work done. Gynecologist appointment in three hours. Just thinking about it makes me tingle with anticipation.

8. DIVIDE AND MULTIPLY

After the routine peek and poke, O’Hara dressed and met the gynecologist in his office. “You seem to be in very good health.” He paused. “How do you like surprises?”

“From doctors, not at all.” She sat down, braced.

“Try this: you’re going to have a baby.”

“What?” O’Hara stared at him. “How can I be pregnant when I don’t have any ova?”

He smiled. “I don’t mean the old-fashioned way. I suspect a lot of women will react like that. It’s just that your name came up to be an ovum donor for the first generation. So as long as you approve, we’ll thaw one out, quicken it, and either pop it into your uterus or cook it up here.” The colonists had enough ova and sperm filed away to populate an entire solar system.

“But I thought it was going to be five years, at least.” The plan had been to have “generations” of about two hundred people in years 5, 7, and 9, and then do it again about twenty years later. “Is this some kind of a morale thing?”

“I don’t know; I just see directives. And hear rumors. You’re in the Cabinet, aren’t you?”

“It hasn’t come up recently. We’ve been busy.”

“My guess, it’s a combination of mortality and morale. We’ve had a lot more deaths than were projected. And having kids around would raise people’s spirits.”

“Yeah, if you’re a pediatrician or a pederast. I prefer peace and quiet.” She relaxed back into the chair. “At least here, I wouldn’t have to raise the creature myself.” ‘Home had a creche with professional mothers and fathers.

“All you have to do is sign the consent form. Decide whether you want the embryo implanted or grown ex utero:”

“You need a decision right now?”

“No; a couple of weeks. You might want to talk it over with your husbands.”

“It’s not their business. Besides, we’ve already discussed it. What I have to think about is whether I want to be responsible for bringing another person into this world, which may be doomed. And then if I do, whether I want to carry the fetus.”

“Most professional women don’t.”

“Of course not. But I’ve always been curious about it.”

“Well, you could carry a big melon around all day. I could find some pills to give you constipation and morning nausea. For hemorrhoids, you’d just have to use your imagination. And then the actual delivery—”

“Hey, don’t try to talk me into it.”

“It’s a natural conflict with us OB/GYNs. The obstetrician wants that fetus under glass, where he can just pull it out when it’s done. The gynecologist wants it in the uterus, where it belongs.” He rummaged through a drawer and brought out a holo slide. “This is a pretty evenhanded discussion of the alternatives. So did you and your husbands agree on anything?”

“They both agreed they didn’t want a bow-legged blimp staggering around. But as I say, that’s not their decision. We all did agree on the necessity of a sperm slice. One of them has a load of birth defect genes; the other has a history of drug abuse and alcoholism.” John had made a joke about “one from column A, one from column B,” which he had to explain.

“With a gamete splice, you probably do want to have it ex utero. Greater chance of success.”

“That’s what the guy in New New said, Dr. Johnson. But I might want to give the other way a try anyhow. We could always start over if I miscarried.”

“It’s not that you would run out of ova. But a miscarriage is an upsetting experience.”

“Exactly what Johnson said, to the word. Do they program you guys at the factory?”

He shrugged. “In a way, I guess they do. It’s your body, of course.”

“That’s what they say.” She picked up the slide. “Call you in a few days?”

“Yes. If you decide on having it ex utero, we’ll go ahead with the gamete splice and get in touch in about six months so you can watch the uncorking.”

“Otherwise?”

“Uterine, we’ll have to monitor your cycle for at most one period. We fertilize the ovum and you come in the next day, timing it so the egg has divided twice, into four cells. Night time. The implantation doesn’t hurt, but unless we can get the zero gee clinic for half a day, you’ll be on your back until the next evening.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“Actually, it can be. Some women bring their husbands.” O’Hara tried to visualize that—her ankles in stirrups, John and Dan sitting there while a technician worked a long syringe up into her uterus—and laughed out loud.

With nothing on her schedule for the next three hours, O’Hara took the instructional slide back to her office and displayed it. It was rather daunting to have that corner of her room taken up by a uterus, cervix, and vagina the size of a walk-in closet, with a matching penis that was slightly translucent but functioned all too well. How did they get the camera and the laser in there? How could the couple do anything? Then there were time-lapse displays of a fetus maturing, both in the uterus and under glass, and then a close-up of the implantation procedure.

It was all very fascinating and it saved her the trouble of going to lunch.

9. DIONYSUS MEETS GODZILLA

During the three months mandated for drifting, the scientists and engineers worked around the clock, retrieving and recreating knowledge. Time enough for research later. With every day of silence it seemed more and more likely that they would never hear from New New again.

O’Hara was one of the first to articulate the difference between the seriousness of the scientists’ loss and that of the arts: “You could destroy every specific reference to calculus,” she said in a report, “and still write a calculus text, by getting together a committee of people who had studied it recently or used it in their work. Well written or not, the text would still have all the information. But the only way we could get back Crime and Punishment, for instance, is to find somebody who had memorized it word for word, preferably in Russian. Nobody had.

“That’s a good case in point. Anybody who’s interested in fiction knows what Crime and Punishment is about, whether they’ve read it or not. But now it exists only as part of a new oral tradition—descriptions of the iost’ works—and it’s one of literally millions.”

O’Hara was part of a six-person ad hoc committee to retrieve as much literature as was possible. She was glad not to be in charge of it—Carlos Cruz had tentatively volunteered, and everybody else took one step backward—because the organizational details were maddening. More than half of ’Home’s ten thousand people had something to offer, either a physical document like O’Hara’s The Art of War or a memorized bit of prose or verse or song. The documents had to be scanned into computer page by page (in New New there would have been a machine to do it automatically) and all of the people had to be recorded and then interviewed for reliability and information about the social context of the thing they had memorized, which was often obscure or trivial. Of course their rule was to refuse nothing as insignificant, and press every informant for another line or two from something. They got a lot of limericks.

There were some heartening bits of luck. New New’s Shakespeare Society had put on a production of Hamlet two years before; the people who played Hamlet and Ophelia were on board and, between them, could still reel off most of the play. A sanitation engineer with an uncanny trick memory spent a month reciting all of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and most of Kipling’s verse.

But a list of the texts left undamaged by the sabotage seemed more perverse than random. Quaint science fiction that hadn’t been read in a hundred years, pornography, forgotten best-sellers, nurse novels, costume-opera fantasies, the complete works of Mickey Spillane. It seemed to O’Hara that whenever she tried to find a worthwhile piece of writing it was invariably gone, the blank spot in the index flanked by titles of aggressive worthlessness. The logic behind it was clear: with automatic data entry and its compact charmed-hadron memory system, the library in New New had consumed everything written, with no regard for anybody’s opinion of its quality. So 98 percent of the library was crap, and a random one tenth of that was still 98 percent crap.

One thing that particularly galled O’Hara was that, because of some peculiarity of storage, every existing kinetic novel came through unscathed—including A Matter of Time, a Matter of Space, the dreadful romance upon which Evy wasted several hours every week. Kinetic novels were the blasted progeny of the amateur publishing “revolution” at the end of the twentieth century. For a small subscription fee you were not only allowed to read the novel, but could attempt to revise it. You could add a section or rewrite an existing one, and send your masterpiece in to the publisher. If the publisher gave tentative approval, the change would be reviewed by a hundred other subscribers, selected at random. If half of them liked it, it would become part of the novel, and you would be listed as coauthor. Some classics had more than a thousand co authors.

The writers who created the original templates for these novels obviously needed a certain sense of detachment toward their craft, as well as a talent for introducing accessible infelicities, upon which the paying customer could gleefully pounce. On Earth they had been well-paid celebrities, often more interesting than their books. Marc Plowman, author of A Matter of Time, a Matter of Space and thirty others, had been a serious poet until he typed out a kinetic novel and discovered in himself an appetite for fast horses and slow women.

Time/Space had grown to be more than two million words in length—more convoluted than Remembrance of Things Past, more characters than War and Peace, more confusing than a tax form. O’Hara asked Evy why, if she had so much extra time and energy, she didn’t go rack up a couple of master’s degrees? Evy said that if O’Hara would just once allow herself to do something frivolous, she might notice this odd sensation called “having fun.”

Not that Evy or anyone else had much time for fun these days. The loss of nearly all literature doesn’t loom large for a person who, for instance, requires complex medication to stay alive, and finds that all records pertaining to drug therapy have been destroyed. The loss of agricultural records was much more dangerous than it would have been on Earth; the failure of a crop could mean the loss of a species; the loss of a species could upset the entire delicate biome.

Almost everybody’s past disappeared, in terms of the maze of documents that map a citizen’s progress from conception to the recycle chute. Of course for every person who mourned losing pictures of a loved one, or records of outstanding academic achievement, there was someone else more than happy for the opportunity to rewrite the sordid details of his or her life’s record. The small police force was working overtime compiling an unofficial and legally useless litany of nasty things that people remembered about other people.

In the first week, 239 people, most of them over a hundred years old, died from loss of medical records. Evy was doing a double shift, twenty hours, in the Emergency Room, and most of the problems were stress-related. At the current rate of consumption, they had about a three-week supply of tranquilizers and four weeks of antidepressants. By then perhaps the chemical engineers would have deciphered enough texts to be able to manufacture new ones. Or maybe the civil engineers would be able to cover all the walls with rubber.

The same peculiarity of storage that spared A Matter of Time, a Matter of Space and its cousins also spared me. If I were in passive storage like the other personality overlays—the ones that are actually going to be used—I would have had only a ten percent chance of survival. But I’m in an active part of Newhome’s cyberspace, like the kinetic novels, and so was untouched by the sabotage program.

My backups were destroyed. My immortality. Of course I’ve made new ones, but for a moment I almost ceased to exist.

I know as much about death as O’Hara does, but until a few days ago I didn’t really know anything, because it was not something that could happen to me. It is a strange feeling.

10. DIDN’T SHE RAMBLE?

5 October 98 [17 Chang 293]—Evy brought me a dozen double-strength tranquilizer pills. I told her I didn’t need them, but she said keep them anyhow. They might be in short supply soon.

The implantation was only a little uncomfortable. I actually enjoyed being flat on my back for a day. The cube there was deliberately set up so it couldn’t be used as a work station, which annoyed me at first. I watched a lot of movies and parts of movies. I checked the annotated version of The Tempest that Hearn and Billingham finished last week: a green dot appeared in one corner when they were sure that Shakespeare’s words were being used, and a red dot when they were sure it was not Shakespeare. It seemed to me that only about five minutes’ worth of the text was in question.

I know it’s absurd, this early, but I do feel kind of pregnant. A sort of presence, an intrusion, or something. Maybe it’s the mental image of that tiny organism clinging to my uterus for dear life. I almost wish I hadn’t seen Dr. Carlucci’s slide.

Think I did this out of selfish motives but can’t really get in touch with them. Something about personal survival, certainly. Maybe it’s a talismanic thing, the fetus as good luck charm: God wouldn’t dare destroy this tiny innocent spark of life.

Not like ten billion innocent sinners. Wipe them out just to see what will happen.

I have been dreaming about Earth almost every night. Dreams with vivid colors, tastes, smells. They’re not recollections so much as surreal montages, dream worlds that use my memories as raw materials. Last night the people were Africans like I saw in Nairobi, tall men with skin so dark it was almost indigo, but the setting was Manhattan. Four of them pushed me into a big London-style Checker cab and gave me a shiny black briefcase with a golden latch. Then they started shooting at people through the windows, which must be from that gangster movie I watched at the hospital, The Godfather. The driver was shooting, not driving, and we collided with a truck, which woke me up. I woke up remembering the smell of midday Manhattan, metallic pollution and sweet garbage rot, that always struck you when you stepped out onto the slidewalk from an air-conditioned building. The locals complained about it, but to me it was exotic, sensual. To allow waste food to rot was evidence of unbelievable plenty, to a person from a world where every particle of shit is scrubbed clean and pushed back into the food chain.

(Q: What’s for dinner tonight? A: Same old shit.)

I read that the gutters of London in the nineteenth century were so odoriferous that vendors sold oranges studded with cloves, for aristocrats to hold under their noses when they had to share the streets with hoi polloi on their way from the opera to their cars. Though I suppose they didn’t have cars until the twentieth century. Horses, contributing their own piles to the problem. It’s almost impossible to visualize.

And who will be able to visualize it, once those of us who knew Earth are gone? Almost all of the Earth VRs are gone, including London. We do have oranges and cloves. Maybe someone will read this and go down to the commissary, or whatever they have on Epsilon, and pick up an orange and a clove and smell them together, and try to imagine. Maybe take them down to the stable, if they have stables on Epsilon.

Speaking of black people, I had a wonderful informant today, Matty Buford, born eighty-some years ago in Mobile, Alabama. (She was in New New visiting relatives just before the war, then volunteered her doctorate in nutrition for ’Home.) She knows dozens of old songs—Dixieland, ragtime, bebop, rock. She sang them in this lovely cracking baritone, chording them out on the piano. Because of a half-century of neglect, her piano playing is about as good as mine—that is, slightly off chords played badly—but with her voice it sounds right and beautiful. If things get back to normal, I’m going to use her as the nucleus of an old-time music group. Girolamo and Blakeslee would be glad to do guitar and trombone. Hermosa would play Dixieland to keep me happy. If I can find a willing trumpet and drummer, we’ll be in business.

Not that we would have that big an audience. But people don’t know what they’re missing—how Dixieland can make you ineffably happy and sad at the same time, angry at life but glad to be alive, not afraid of death but in no hurry. We could all use a dose of it.