Worlds Enough and Time

1. LABOR-SAVING DEVICE

The womb was a dark glass cylinder named O’Hara, a meter high by a half-meter round. There were a hundred such cylinders in the room, most of them with nameplates. All but a few were evidently empty, their tops hinged open.

All of the family were there, scrubbed down and wearing hospital gowns. O’Hara nervously glanced at her wrist, but she’d had to leave her watch in the scrub room. “He ought to be here by now.”

“It’s not as big an occasion to him,” Dan said.

Double doors banged open and Dr. Kaiser came in with a young male assistant, wheeling a cart with a large transparent tank filled with sloshing liquid. They both wore plastic aprons. “Sorry we’re late. The solution wasn’t warm enough.”

They parked the tank under the O’Hara womb. “Take a look.” He clicked a switch on the cylinder and the baby appeared, floating serenely in red murk. “Enjoy yourself, kid. It’s later than you think.” He reached for the switch.

“Just a minute,” O’Hara said. “I want to remember this.” The baby was smaller than she’d expected. She floated upright, small fist curled against her mouth, knees up almost touching elbows. Short halo of feathery hair. Between her knees snaked a plastic umbilical cord. Her right side twitched slightly and she bobbed in the fluid, turning around to face them.

“Look familiar?” John said.

O’Hara laughed. “I knew she… it’s still uncanny. She looks exactly like me at birth.”

“All babies look alike,” Dan said.

“She ought to be a perfect copy of your younger self for a few years,” the doctor said, “barring extreme differences in nutrition. Or scars, tattoos. But as her personality develops, she’ll diverge.”

“She looks so peaceful,” Evy said slowly. “It’s almost a shame.”

“Let’s do it.” Dr. Kaiser turned off the switch, then he and the assistant carefully lifted the womb and rotated it to lie sideways on the bottom of the water tank, wires and tubes trailing. He opened a couple of latches and the top swung open. He pulled out a sac of transparent tissue or plastic with the baby inside, then took a pair of curved scissors and cut the sac down one side, releasing a pink cloud. He guided the baby gently out, drawing the umbilical tube after it.

“This may be disturbing. When I withdraw the umbilical it generates a neural stimulus that triggers the breathing reflex. Sometimes they just cough politely and start to breathe. Usually they raise holy hell. Towels ready.” The assistant opened a box on the side of the cart and a wisp of steam escaped. He took out a folded towel and snapped it open.

The doctor raised the baby so that her head and shoulders were out of the water, and then gave the umbilical tube a twist and a pull. Her eyes snapped open, startling blue, and she coughed a surprising amount of pink stuff all over the doctor’s chest and face. Then she started bellowing.

“Normal.” He handed the baby to the assistant, who wrapped her up in the warm towel and began dabbing at her, drying. There was a moment of silence, but that was just for air. “I could use one of those, too,” the doctor shouted over the din. The assistant deftly tossed him a towel and he scrubbed his face with it.

The room spoke with a female voice. “Birth at 09:48 12 August 2099; 21 Muhammed 295. Birth name Sandra Purcell O’Hara.”

“I didn’t know about the metal belly button,” O’Hara said.

“New thing. Makes the unplugging easier. It’ll come out in a couple of days.” He tossed the towel into a bin.

“Can I hold… Sandra?”

“Promise not to drop her.” He nodded at the assistant, who wrapped the baby in a fresh towel and brought her around to O’Hara. The creature was still screaming indignantly.

O’Hara cradled the child and softly brushed the side of her face. “Now, now. It’s all right.” She held her closer and the crying suddenly stopped, when the waving arm found a breast.

The baby grasped and squirmed around and sucked on the fabric. O’Hara almost did drop her.

“Strong instinct,” the doctor said.

“I’ll say.” She cleared her throat. “Could you induce, uh, lactation? If it was—”

“Physically, it would be no problem, just some hormones. But we can’t let the infant bond to you. It would make things difficult in the creche. It would make things difficult for you.”

“Of course. I know.”

“Better get her to Neonatal,” the assistant said. O’Hara handed him the baby and he swaddled her in another warm towel. She favored O’Hara with a sour old man’s frown, but didn’t cry.

O’Hara watched them take her through the double doors and rubbed the wet spot on her breast, thoughtful.

“Maternal instincts?” John said.

“Not really. Maybe a little. I appreciate the whys and wherefores of it. Bonding to the creche mother.”

“You had one yourself,” Dan said.

She looked at him curiously. “You didn’t. You had a real mother.” Dan was from Earth, from Pennsylvania.

“Wet nurse., So they tell me. I guess I never got the chance to meet her when I was old enough to remember.”

“I was suckled at me mither’s breast,” John said with his stagy Irish voice, “and sure you can see how much good it did me.”

2. FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE TO THE CRADLE

Two days after witnessing the birth, or decantation, O’Hara attended a “specialty presentation” meeting that wasn’t really of much interest to her, but the woman leading it was a friend, and she didn’t want her embarrassed by underattendance. Twenty people did show up, including Dan, whose position as Earth/New New Liaison left him with a lot of time on his hands.

The specialty presentation meetings were informal get-togethers where one Cabinet member was given two hours to talk about his or her department, and elicit advice or at least sympathy from whomever showed up. This particular meeting was run by and for Sylvine Hagen, who was in charge of Cryptobiology.

“I don’t know how many of you have visited our facility,” she said, “there’s not really much to see.” Behind her was the picture of a bent-around rectangle, like a squared-off section of a doughnut, cross-hatched into thousands of tiny squares. In one corner, eighteen of the squares were lit.

“The storage tanks themselves aren’t open to the public. They occupy the sector 2105 to 2345. Research and administration are in front of them—excuse me, forward of them—in 2115 to 2355. You could walk around the ship for weeks before you stumbled on us.

“It might seem remarkable that you could store ten thousand people in so small a space. But we really don’t take up much room, stacked up in… well, coffins.” She pointed to the diagram. “These lit spaces, our current customers… three of them actually are dead, and have gone into cryonics mode, frozen solid. We’ve had some objections to that.”

“That they ought to be recycled like anybody else?” someone said.

“That’s it. But it’s not a personal-privilege issue; they’re part of an ongoing experiment, as far as we’re concerned. Like the other fifteen, they entered suspended animation because they were dying of diseases that currently can’t be treated—in half of them, the doctors were unable to diagnose what was wrong with them, but there was no doubt they were about to die.”

She pushed a button and a few dozen squares lit up blue in the opposite corner of the diagram. “These are animal experiments, goats and rabbits and chickens. We’re working to improve the efficiency of the suspended-animation process. It’s up to ninety-eight percent survival in chickens. Rabbits and goats are about ninety-five and ninety percent. It goes roughly by the natural lifespan of the creature, unfortunately. It’s probably no better than eighty percent for people; maybe seventy-five percent. Which is why we aren’t all in there, waiting for Epsilon.”

“I don’t see how you can come up with such exact figures,” Dan said. “You must have lost as much information in the sabotage as the rest of us.”

“The process is completely automated; seventy-five to eighty percent was the figure before we had to start over from scratch. We haven’t made any system changes yet, and won’t until we’re certain we know what we’re doing.”

“Even at seventy-five percent, you wouldn’t have any shortage of volunteers,” O’Hara said.

“That’s true. It’s a rare day when we don’t get a call from somebody who just can’t take it anymore and wants to sleep for the next half-century. We explain the policy to them and refer them to therapy.”

“The policy is ‘nobody but the terminally ill’?”

“Yes, and then only if they’re not too old or too young—it would be certain death to someone who was still growing—and only if their cardiovascular and pulmonary systems can handle the shock of the slowdown. There are easier avenues to euthanasia available.

“We are directed to preserve the intent of the original designers, which was for the cryptobiosis unit to serve as an emergency lifeboat for all of us, in case something drastic happened. Maybe it will be different if we can eventually do as well on humans as we can on chickens. For now, no exceptions.”

She turned off the image and sat down. “If it were up to me, I would make exceptions. You know how it is. Too many of us are finding out this isn’t the cruise we signed up for. It isn’t like living in New New at all. A lot of the people I turn down for cryptobiosis are going to wind up in the mental ward or kill themselves.”

“But there’s no way for you to tell which,” Sam Wasserman said.

“And I wouldn’t want the responsibility of making the evaluation. But a person on the verge of suicide is terminally ill! The Psych people could selectively, secretly, offer us as an avenue of last resort.

“There are a few objections to allowing that, though; sticky ones. Sooner or later, it would become general knowledge. Cynics would claim we were using the patients as human experimental animals, and there would be some truth in that. And at the current state of the art, we would be offering them a kind of Russian roulette, a four-to-one chance of suicide, technically deferred.

“Then there’s the basic human rights problem. If we were to allow cryptobiosis to everybody who declared intent to suicide—which arguably we would have to do if we allowed the first one—we could wind up with a large fraction of the population out of commission. Some of them might be absolutely vital to us in an emergency.”

“And you can’t just thaw them out at will,” Dan said.

“No; it’s a continuous process, a gradual slowdown of metabolism and an even more gradual revivification. Currently it takes at least forty-eight years. And unless we come up with a totally different approach, that number’s not going to change much.”

“I remember the interview with those volunteers in New New,” O’Hara said. “I was about ten years old when they came out of it. That was pretty strange, like people suddenly appearing from your grandparents’ time. Are any of them aboard?”

“Only one, and he works for us. A GP named Horatio Horatio. All the others are dead or were too old to make the trip.”

A man O’Hara didn’t know raised his hand. “Anything unusual about their mortality? Causes, rates?”

“Well, you wouldn’t want to generalize from such a small sample—twelve went in and nine survived—unless they all had died of the same thing, which wasn’t the case. All of them but Double-H were pretty old at the start, which in retrospect was a mistake. But I’m sure all but one lived to be at least ninety, not counting the forty-eight years’ cryptobiosis. One died on Earth, murdered.”

“Did they have any sensation of passing time while they were in the tanks?” Sam asked. “Dreams?”

“It’s hard to separate fact from fancy. A lot of them had more elaborate recollections after they’d had time to think about it and talk to one another.”

“Elaborate?” Sam said.

“One man was very upset. He claimed he could remember every minute of the forty-eight years.”

“I remember him,” O’Hara said. “But it wasn’t true.”

“He was fantasizing, trying to get attention. After a few months he admitted it. But we’d made the mistake of not isolating them from each other—it seemed to make sense to keep them all in the same ward; compare their recovery signs.”

“And this guy’s craziness was infectious?” Sam said.

Hagen nodded. “Or maybe it just jogged people’s memories, to be fair. But people who had initially said it was like a dreamless sleep later came up with descriptions of dreams, even nightmares, that came and went for a half-century.

“It doesn’t seem likely at all, since during suspension there’s almost no electrical activity in the brain. Any normal patient who came up with the signs of a cryptobiote would go straight to the recycle chute. Waking them up is like reviving the dead, except that these are dead people who’ve been specially prepared.”

“I heard they can even survive exposure to vacuum,” O’Hara said.

“The animals have; we never did the experiment on humans. And they can handle ten thousand times as much hard radiation as we can. They’re basically inert. Dried-out mummies.”

“How were they mentally when they came out?” Sam said. “Besides the crazy one.”

“Of course we gave them standardized tests, before and after. They all came in within the predicted standard deviation—even the crazy one. His problem was emotional, not mental. And I’m sure that problem was firmly in place before he volunteered. Getting freeze-dried didn’t cause it.”

Dan checked his watch. “So what would you like us to do for you? Don’t be realistic—if we had all the power people seem to think we have, what could we do?”

Hagen smiled politely, tiredly. “Like everyone, we need more information specialist help. Reconstructing our library. Beyond that… I guess the main thing would be to move us up the totem pole of priorities. Both Engineering and Policy. We’re treated like some exotic biotech specialty—which was true enough before Launch. Now we’re actually more a part of Life Support.”

“I’d go along with that,” said Aaron Busch, Marius Viejo’s assistant director. “If you want, I’ll talk to Marius about a connection at some level—not so close as to give all of us one vote instead of two, but at least some way we could lend you more visibility. Everybody’s always worried about Life Support.”

She hesitated. “I’d appreciate that.”

“Call you tonight after I talk to him.”

Coordinators rarely showed up for these presentations, since they had plenty opportunities to rain on people’s parades without volunteering for more, but there was one woman from Eliot Smith’s office, Kara Lang. “I wish we could help you with the information people,” she said, “but you really are pretty low on the totem pole. Not because we think your work is unimportant. It’s just that in terms of functionality…” She paused, groping for jargon. “The part of your program that’s really important to us overall is that practical lifeboat function. The technology supporting that is completely automated, as you say, and the fact that it’s seventy or eighty years old just increases our confidence in it.”

“But it isn’t adequate! If some emergency forced us into the tanks right now, seventy-five percent of the ones who went in would probably survive—but thousands of people wouldn’t be able to go in; the young and the old. Some of the elderly are our most valuable resources. Your own boss would be a borderline case.”

“I’ll point that out to him. But I know what he’ll say.”

“Women and children first,” Dan said. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

“Something like that.” She pointed at O’Hara. “Marianne, how many information people have you seen in the past two weeks, the past month?”

“None. None since July.”

“See? Now I personally put a high priority on reclaiming Shakespeare and Mozart and Dickens. But we do want to have an audience around to enjoy them. That means that all but a handful of the information people are sweating it out in Engineering. Once all the repair manuals are reclaimed, we can push in other directions.”

It went on like this for some time. O’Hara followed the bickering with interest, but she was more interested in the bickering—good and bad techniques—than the subject matter.’ It wasn’t especially relevant to her personally. Those cryptobiotes that had frightened her as a child, emerging from a half-century’s darkness wrinkled, wet, confused; they had made up her mind about suspended animation.

She would rather take a deep breath and step out the airlock.

3. A MODEST PROPOSAL

15 August 99 [25 Muhammed 295]—I’m not often at a loss for words, but when Sam gave me a present today, I really didn’t know what to say. A beautiful gift.

I should note for you generations yet unborn that gift giving is necessarily rare in this pseudoeconomy, at least gifts of objects. We were allowed to bring aboard only two kilograms of personal items. Otherwise, everybody owns everything equally.

You can make things, though. The computer keeps a running list of objects scheduled for recycling; if you can find a use for something that’s broken, you can petition to intercept it. So Sam collected bits and pieces over the months and pieced together a musical instrument, a kind of harp. It’s an arched trapezoid, the sides and bottom made of shiny metal stock. The curved top is a piece of golden wood, from Earth. From New York, where in a desperate time we had been lovers.

I supposed we would be again, another thing that left me temporarily speechless. We had been working together for most of a year on the literature project, and he had never hinted at anything romantic—though I had, at least to the extent of making sure he knew I was not unavailable. He was always reticent about sex, though, even when we were doing it.

He wanted more than that. He wanted to marry me; join the line.

I told him I had to think about it, and then talk to him, and then ask the others. It had to be unanimous, and I wasn’t sure that Dan or even John would go along with it. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted it, as dear as Sam is to me.

He kissed me and left me alone there in the editing room. I came up here to think into the keyboard.

So much of the literature we’ve been trying to reclaim or recall has to do with love. Old-Fashioned romantic love, often, with its sinister subtexts of ownership, male superiority, female manipulation. A sexual and emotional union that not incidentally reinforced the power of the church and the state over individuals and families.

I guess my first love, with Charlie Increase Devon, involved a strong element of that. Maybe he also cured me of it. Or maybe it was like other childhood diseases, that you contract once and then become immune. Even as I wrote that down, I saw how silly it was—some people never experience romance and some never grow out of it—but I’ll leave it. I’m going to erase all this anyhow.

Could I love a third man without diminishing what I have with the other two? I wish we had more precise words for love, dozens of them, like the Eskimos supposedly had for snow. I do already love all three of them, in three distinctly different ways. Daniel needs me and I need to nurture him, protect him. John is my comforter, and still my mentor. (People who don’t know us well would probably assume that the relationships went the other way, because of John’s deformity. But I don’t even see it anymore, except as a sign of the patient strength, the calm acceptance, that drew me to the man in the first place.) And what about Sam?

On Earth, where we were working with groundhog survivors, he saw how upset I was when Daniel and John called down to ask me to allow Evelyn to join our line. I knew and liked Evy but resented the timing, the handicap of not being there to physically confront them. I would have said yes anyhow, so I gave permission as gracefully as I could. As soon as the comm link was broken, though, I started to mope and growl and bitch. Sam offered himself and I jumped his lanky bones.

We grew pretty close pretty fast. We have the same kind of intelligence, shallow but broad, and therefore many enthusiasms in common. We make each other laugh. The sex wasn’t all that great, but he had youthful enthusiasm and recuperative power.

Then the project turned into a disaster, a bloodbath and plague that we barely escaped. A grisly nightmare the reward for months of backbreaking labor. During the week of quarantine outside New New, Sam and I kept making love with frantic desperation. (There wasn’t much privacy, and some people were scandalized. They were people I didn’t mind scandalizing, though.)

I thought then of asking him to join the line. It would have made an interesting symmetry, since he was the same age as Evy, nineteen. Twelve years younger than me—and a damn sight younger than my lecherous husbands! Sorry, Evy. I do love you like a sister but still sometimes get angry at them. Even thoughtful hunchbacked philosophers get pulled around by their dicks sometimes.

Dramatic memories aside, how do I feel about Sam now? Admittedly, I’ve been a little annoyed that he didn’t respond to my gentle hints with instant lust. But his proposal puts that into perspective. He’s the kind of man who makes timetables and sticks to them. When he worked for me on Earth, for all his wacky humor, he was about the most dependable person I had. He was also physically brave and showed infinite patience and compassion with the Earth children, who could be real monsters.

Okay, I’m trying to talk myself into this. It didn’t help that I dropped by Creche to look at the baby this morning. Her little hand curled around my finger.

I have a bad case of softheartedness. Prime, I have to talk to you.

4. ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN

Prime appeared in the usual corner, leaning back comfortably in a nonexistent chair. Sometimes she was unsettlingly nude; this time she was wearing the gray labor fatigues that Sam and O’Hara had worn on Earth. Since Prime looked only six months younger than O’Hara had been at the time, the effect was as startling as she had intended.

“I thought you’d never ask,” the image said.

“So talk me out of it, Use that binary brain of yours.”

“First you ask for a favor and then you insult me. If my brain is simply binary then yours is a lump of jelly.”

“Should I do it?”

“Yes and no and maybe. Should I elaborate?”

“I’ve got time and you’ve got electricity.”

“Take ‘no’ first. Daniel is having a real uselessness problem. He has a title that makes him technically part of the ruling class, but the thing he’s in charge of doesn’t exist anymore. Your declaring interest in another man is not going to help his image of himself.”

“He gets a certain amount of solace from you, and even more from Evelyn—”

“Really?”

“The ratio is one point three to one. Now you propose to bring into the relationship a man the same age as Evelyn. He will see this as an act of sexual aggression.”

“Hold it. All these years you’ve known how often Dan has sex with me and with Evelyn?”

“And with other women, yes. Only women, in case you’re interested.”

“I think you know a lot that I would rather not know.”

“Everything the ship knows, I know. I only brought this up because it’s important to the discussion you initiated.”

“What’s the ratio with John?”

The machine paused. “That’s complicated, as you know. He has been intimate with you two point eight times more often than with Evelyn, since Launch.”

“That’s an interesting locution, ‘intimate with.’ You’re protecting my feelings.”

“It’s not my job to make you feel bad. The question you’re not asking is one you already know the answer to.”

“He’s more likely to have actual sex with her.”

“He loves you fiercely, and has since you were married. His attraction to Evelyn is obviously physical. If by ‘actual sex’ you mean a contact that includes ejaculation…”

“What else would I mean?”

“With her it seems to be always.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“You knew that.” The image sat forward. “Which brings us to the ‘yes’ part. If you bring Sam into the line, John may relax. He may see it as spreading out the responsibility for keeping you happy, and so when he does come to you, it will be with less anxiety, and he will be more likely to… complete the sexual act.”

“You know a hell of a lot about sex for somebody who’s never done it.”

“Through the ship’s sensors, I monitor the sexual function of over nine thousand people. Patterns emerge.”

“You once described to me that privacy thing in your algorithm. If I asked you how often Harry Purcell had had sex with Tania Seven, you wouldn’t be able to tell me.”

“I could if it was necessary for your welfare. These things about Evelyn and John, it hurts me to say them, in the only way that I can feel pain. But this is a context you established. And that context, along with my estimation of your response, determines what I am allowed to say to you.”

“Give me some more of the ‘yes’ part.”

“The one who would benefit most from the marriage would be Sam. At twenty-four, he’s under a lot of personal and social pressure to join a line. The other two women he’s involved with are only sexual partners.”

“That’s another thing I needed to know?”

“You’ve met them both. Did you think he played chess with them?”

“At the pool, I remember, those two. With the breasts.”

“The first time he had sex with you, before he could get up the nerve to ask, you did play chess. You played fairy chess and he spotted you a barrel queen.”

“I’d forgotten that.”

“I never forget anything. That’s one advantage you have over me.”

“You don’t think he’s really interested in either of them?”

“You are the one he asked to marry. He does love you. But you have to be clearheaded about it. He’s certainly aware that your line allows casual sex with people outside the line. It’s an important factor.”

O’Hara looked at her twin for a long moment. “Now there’s something else you’re not telling me.”

“It’s not something you need to know.”

“If it’s about Sam I need to know it.”

The image picked at nonexistent threads. “When I was hooked up to you during our initial orientation, we talked in some detail about your experiences with Charlie Devon, on Devon’s World. When I asked about one particular sex act, your fear response was instant and strong: respiration and pulse increased, you sweated profusely. Your adrenal medulla squirted norepinephrine. Your anus clamped shut like a trap.”

“The ropes.”

“That’s right.”

“Sam… ties up those women?”

“One of them, Lilac. Sometimes she ties him up.”

“Sam?”

“It’s a common enough practice. More common here than in New New.”

“Sam?”

“You were very young and afraid of Charlie’s hugeness and physical strength. He could have ripped your head off with one hand. One reason you fell for him was that he was so mysterious and scary. With Sam, the ropes would be different. But I don’t think he would ever ask you. He would rather continue doing it with Lilac.”

“Maybe I’ll ask him. Shock him out of his shorts.”

“That’s the spirit. He would never harm you.” The image crossed and uncrossed its legs, actually looking nervous. “Marianne. Be realistic. So far in this life you’ve fallen in love with two giant foreigners, two alcoholic intellectuals, and an Irish hunchbacked philosopher. So Sam is an introverted Jewish polymath who sometimes likes to combine restraints with oral sex. He’s probably the most normal person you’ll ever be interested in.”

5. ONE PART HARMONY

The harp was easy to play, though of course it would take years to be able to play it well. Sam had put a daub of color at the top of each string, linking major triads, so O’Hara was able to strum simple melodies after only a few minutes’ experimentation. There were knobs on the base that gave the instrument an electronic dimension, so you could add vibrato and echo effects, but O’Hara liked it better plain, unplugged. It was just the right size for her to set the base in her lap and rest her chin on top of the vertical arm, so the chords sang inside her head, amplified by bone conduction.

She was sitting on the bed she shared with Daniel, playing a blues progression over and over, eyes closed, memorizing and didn’t hear the quiet door slide open.

“Taking up the harp?” Daniel said.

She started; almost dropped it. “Scared me!”

“Sounds pretty.”

“Yeah.” She strummed across the strings. “Sam made it for me.”

“Sam?”

“Wasserman. The historian. Remember? We were lovers, back in the New York rescue thing.”

He nodded silently and stepped over to the sink for a glass. Looking at her in the mirror: “Lovers again, then?”

“No.” She watched his face give away nothing. “It’s more serious than that.”

Daniel poured two centimeters of boo into the glass and diluted it with an equal amount of water. “Go on.”

“Why don’t you guess.”

“No games, Marianne. It’s been a bad day.” He took a sip and leaned against the wall. “Eliot had a real hair up his ass about TE&S allocations. I’m gonna get TE&S’ed out of existence.”

“Sam wants to marry me. Us.”

“Join the line.”

“Of course.”

Dan put the drink down and sat on the bed, his back to O’Hara. “Jesus. Everything happens at once, doesn’t it?”

“I’m sorry about the timing. Could I have some of that?”

Without speaking, he prepared her an identical drink and brought it around the bed and sat next to her, not touching. “You love him?”

“If you want a simple answer, yes.”

“But you haven’t been…”

“No; he’s funny that way. Shy. And you know I wouldn’t have kept anything like that secret from you.”

“I know. I’m just… it’s sudden.”

“It was sudden for me, too. Let’s both just think on it for a while.” She drank half the drink in a gulp and coughed. “So what’s the TE&S problem?”

“Have you talked to John and Ev about him?”

“Not yet. Ev’s not off till 1800; John’s probably napping. Meeting for dinner anyhow, remember?”

“I remember.” He looked at the wall for a long moment. “Eliot’s working from an unassailable position, of course. I need less TE&S than anybody in the Cabinet. I need less than half the people in this can need.” TE&S was the three-dimensional budget unit “Time, Energy, and Supplies,” time meaning manpower.

“You need a certain amount just to keep things going.”

“That’s been my argument. Keep a skeleton staff in case we do come back on line with New New. Of course I’d never say ‘in case’ in front of Eliot or Tania; it’s always when.

“So Eliot in his wisdom has said that I don’t need any staff at all. When we do hear from New New we’ll automatically acknowledge the signal, and then it’ll be at least a week before we can have any kind of back-and-forth conversation. Plenty of time for me to recall my staff from wherever they’ve been ‘temporarily reassigned.’ It’s logical, at least from Eliot’s point of view.”

“You don’t think those assignments would be temporary.”

“Exactly—or even worse, they’d be selectively temporary. Suppose it’s a couple of years? The only people I’d get back would be people who hadn’t been able to advance in their new positions. All my most talented would be better off in their new jobs, reluctant to come back and start over.”

He was growing animated, reliving the argument he’d had with Eliot. “And goddamnit, it’s not as if we sit around on our hands all day! We have to have strategies for all kinds of scenarios! What if New New comes back on just to slap us with another cybervirus? All the incoming data have to be isolated, analyzed, filtered. What if they come on for only a week or a month or a day? There’s a hierarchy of data we have to ask for, and that hierarchy changes every hour!”

“He should be able to see that. All those thousands of people working to reconstruct things. Why ask for stuff we already know?”

“Eliot sees what he wants to see.” Daniel finished off his drink and went around to fix another.

“That’s the problem. You and Eliot have different world views. He’s basically a cheerful pessimist.”

Dan laughed. “And I’m a morose optimist.”

“In a way. Eliot knows in his heart that we’ll never get back on line with New New. They’re all dead. Whereas you think—”

“What do you think?”

“Me? About New New?”

“Yeah. Am I wasting my time, and everybody else’s? Waiting for ghosts to come on line?”

“No. Even if it were only a thousand-to-one chance. We have to be prepared.”

“Thanks. Somebody else thinks I’m not useless.” He looked at the glass of boo and poured it back into the bottle. “Look, I’ve got to… go do something. See you at John’s.”

“Okay.” She watched him hurry off. Dan was truly upset, for him not to drink. Or maybe he was headed for a woman, which didn’t seem likely. But who could figure out men? She picked out a simple melody over and over and recalled what they had said. Maybe she could’ve broken it to him more gently. No. Maybe she should have asked him to stay, and talk it out. No. Don’t push him. Maybe she should have said nothing; waited until they were all together tonight. No, he’d say why didn’t you tell me earlier? Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Papa gonna buy you a mockin’ bird. If that mockin’ bird don’t sing, Papa gonna buy you a diamond ring…

6. TWO PARTS DISCORD

16 August 99 [27 Muhammed 295]—It was the worst thing I could do, emotionally, but she drew me like a magnet. Before I went to talk Sam over with everybody, I went down to Creche and watched the baby. From behind glass, invisible.

I understand the rationale for not touching; you can only touch the baby while she’s also in contact with the creche mother. So as not to confuse her bonding. But part of me needs bonding, too.

It would be different if I hadn’t had the miscarriage. With him I had worked out the whole emotional scenario. He would grow in my body and grow, until I was ready to burst, and then I would push him out in blood and pain and they would cut the cord, but the connection would still be there, and as he grew into boy and man he would still be me, flesh of my flesh as they say. This one and I have only two cells in common, one of them altered and one of them fooled, but in genetic terms she is more me than any natural child could be, and so how am I supposed to feel toward her? I love her with an irrational intensity. I know a lot of the love is referred pain, for the boy who died without a name, with only a hint of life, more or less reverently recycled. They asked me whether I wanted a ceremony and in my stupid rage I said no. It might have put him to rest. Given me some peace.

Night before last I sat down by the herb garden in the darkness, and I realized that with every breath I was breathing him. A few molecules of him, cycling through the air, and I tried to take some comfort in that, but you follow it to its logical conclusion and it becomes grotesque. Next season I’ll eat a piece of cabbage or goat and it will be partly him, which is to say partly me, and it will pass through and become soil again, or nutrient solution, and I realized that he and I and all of us aboard this can are trivially immortal, through the noble agency of shit. In and out of these temporary bodies.

I was late, having gone back to the office for the button recorder. The three of them were halfway through their meal, a pasta primavera. I opened my box and it was still warm.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Sam is fine with me,” Evelyn said. “I don’t know him all that well, but I’ve always thought he was nice. Trust your judgment anyhow.”

“I don’t know whether to trust my own judgment. Dan? You’ve had some time to think about it.”

He pushed the food around on his plate. “I wouldn’t object. Anything that makes you happy.” John nodded without saying anything.

“Thanks.” I took a bite. “Pasta with guilt sauce.”

“I do mean it. This is a hard time for you.”

“Let me be the devil’s advocate,” Evy said. “Why do you want to marry him? Why can’t you just be like me and Larry? Or Dan and what’s-her-name.”

“I forget,” Daniel said. “Changes every week.”

“It wasn’t my idea. He’s the one who wants to get married; I’d just as soon keep it informal.”

“That might be a good reason for you to say no,” John said. “You, not us.”

“But I love him.” I pushed the food away too hard; some of it drifted off the plate in lazy spirals, toward my lap. “I love him.”

“Of course you do,” John said. “But look at it with some detachment. You gave each other emotional support at a time of almost unimaginable stress. Hopes crushed, helpless children dying left and right, all your work and caring gone to nothing; worse than nothing. You needed each other—or someone, at least—more than you needed oxygen.”

“I’ll concede that.” Not to mention the stress, twelve days earlier, of my husbands taking another wife.

“So is it possible that what you love is not Sam himself, but what Sam did for you?”

“This isn’t a Cabinet meeting, John. Let’s leave analysis out of it for a minute. How does it make you feel?”

“I don’t know enough to know how to feel. If you’re asking whether I’m jealous, the answer is no. Hurt, maybe; guilty, maybe. If you want Sam because of something we should be giving you.”

“It’s not that.” I guess I said that fast enough for them, or at least him, to know it wasn’t completely true. Give me some of what you’re giving Evelyn.

“There’s one thing I thought of,” Daniel said. “It is analytical, though.”

“I can handle it.”

“It doesn’t have to do with you or us, but with other people’s perceptions: if Sam joins the line, we’re going to have four Cabinet members in one five-person family.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” O’Hara admitted, and laughed nervously. “Ten percent of the Cabinet in bed together.”

“With a spy from the working class,” Evy said.

“At least we’d be evenly split between Engineering and Policy,” John said, smiling. “Not a voting bloc. There are a lot more significant coalitions around.”

We looked at each other in silence. I guess I knew all along that they’d throw the ball back to me. I resolved the problem with typical Alexandrian decisiveness: “Well… I’ll tell Sam we just have to wait. It’s too sudden; we have to think about it, talk about it. If he wants to be my lover in the meantime, that’s fine; if not… it won’t be the end of the world.”

“We should all talk to him tomorrow,” Evy said. “Make sure he knows he’s welcome.”

John and Dan agreed, but an interesting look passed between them.