Worlds Apart (27 page)

Work was a little hard at first because sitting is an unnatural posture in zerogee, and the chair in front of my console is permanently welded in place. I was holding on to the chair with one hand and typing with the other, a slow process. Finally I improvised a seat belt by sacrificing two head bands, and my problems became more properly abstract.

A disproportionate number of the people who lost heart were “singles,” people with no counterparts in New New. I could eventually get most of their profiles through HI, assuming New New would cooperate and beam the information to me, but some would be lost forever. About one person in five can’t handle the process, and of those that could, some were going to die before they would get a turn on the machine.

I didn’t know any of the people who died in the sabotage, though of course I had communicated briefly with all of them during Start-up. All but three had been down in the two-gee area for exercise; physical fitness extremists. Ironically, most of them were Reform Devonites (who, like their orthodox brothers, seem hellbent on carrying a huge set of muscles to an early grave).

4

With one month to go, I was suddenly deluged—more than five hundred people changed their minds and decided they’d rather go back to New New.

“We could force them to stay,” Daniel said. All four of us were together, a fairly rare thing, picking at box lunches in John’s room. “They did sign a contract.”

“Sure they did,” I said. No request to leave had ever been refused. Who would want to spend a century with people there against their will?

“What is the breakdown like?” John asked. “Losing a lot of singles?”

“Not this time. A lot of lowechelon engineers, unfortunately; maintenance people.”

“No training problem, at least,” Daniel said.

“Take your research cronies and make them do some useful work,” Evelyn said.

Dan shook his head. “Some of them. We’ll spare the m/a research, anyhow. I want to live to see Epsilon.” This was something the scientists had been mum about until last week. We might be able to get considerably more speed out of the ship than its original design allowed for. The m/a drive worked out to an overall efficiency of only fifteen percent of emceesquared. But there was very little practical research on the propulsion system; nobody had ever seen a full-scale one until S-1 used it for the return trip from Janus. Now, we were going to have one blasting constantly for over a year, with an army of scientists and engineers scrutinizing it—followed by unlimited time to mull over their observations.

Some hoped we might be able to double or even quadruple the overall efficiency of the system. If they got it up to sixty percent, the trip would take less than half the planned-for time. I’d be an old woman when we got to Epsilon, but still alive. It was an exciting prospect.

After lunch I got my staff together, all five of us, and we spent a pleasant hour agreeing about how hopeless the situation was. The desertions after the Devonite sabotage had left
Newhome
incurably under strength, by nearly a thousand people. Now we had half again that many places to fill.

There were still plenty of volunteers in New New. But they were people who had already been passed over for one reason or another. Our delicate job was to balance
their individual deficiencies against Newhome
’s
specific needs. We could have spent years scratching our heads over the problem. We had twenty-seven days.

I’m not good at delegating authority. Over the past five years I had exercised nearly absolute veto power over ten thousand personnel decisions. That was impossible now. I had the computer break down the vacancies in terms of occupational specialty, and group them in six areas of congruency. Each of us took an area, and a pot of coffee, and set to racing against the calendar. I had “miscellaneous,” the largest area but probably the most interesting.

The last month was so busy I didn’t have time for much reflection or sentimentality about leaving. On my last trip to New New I did go to say good-bye to my family, which was not a particularly emotional scene, and to Sandra, which was a little damp. Other than Sandra, all of my close friends were aboard
Newhome
.

On the shuttle ride back, New New was lost in the sun’s glare, so I couldn’t have gazed wistfully at it even if I were so disposed.
Newhome
looked very dramatic, the black rock of its shielding glittering brighter than the stars behind it. All of the antimatter was in place, a huge transparent sphere outlined by coruscating specks of light as stray molecules wandered to their doom. Every now and then a larger particle would drift in and etch a short bright line. It was quite beautiful. Studying it kept me from looking at Earth.

I hadn’t expected to be caught up in the formal celebration on Launch Day. I could admit the social necessity for it but have never had much patience for ceremony myself. Months before, I had declined to be in on the planning for it, figuring I would just be spoiling everybody else’s party, since I felt that anything more spectacular than a good-bye telegram was a waste of resources that neither we nor New New could spare.

But it was very moving. Jules Hammond’s writers actually achieved literacy and even inched toward eloquence. Sandra also gave a fine speech, in a ceremony that involved the formal opening of the thousand-channel link between New New and ’Home. A brilliant display of fireworks coruscated for several minutes during the countdown.

But the most spectacular and most affecting sight, New New had reserved for the day after launch. Once we were noticeably above the plane of the ecliptic—most of us looking “down” on New New for the first time in our lives—they opened up six water jets, spaced evenly around the satellite. The water immediately froze into brilliant crystal clouds that spread out in a glittering St. Catherine’s Wheel as New New rotated. Thousands of hardwon liters squandered in a final farewell salute. That was when I
cried, partly at the rare beauty.

There was no noise when we launched, of course; just a sudden twinge of disorientation, something like what you would feel if you stepped on a surface you thought was level and it was slightly tilted. Most of us got used to it in a minute or two. Good thing, since we were going to have fourteen months of it.

A hundredth of a gee isn’t much acceleration, but it’s enough to be annoying. Light things slide off desks. If you put a ball on the floor it will slowly roll away.

We had a real terminology problem at first. Our “gravity” from rotation was perpendicular to the ship’s line of flight, and that gave us our references for up and down. The direction the ball rolls is “toward the sternward wall,” which was initially confusing, because I’d lived aboard the ship for most of a year without giving any thought as to which direction the stern was. After a while it was obvious. Just look for the wall where all the pencils and scraps of papers and dustballs accumulate,

It’s also odd not to have true zerogee at the hub. You keep drifting down to the wall. Water in the gymnasium swimming pools sits at an odd angle and tends to splash out over the sternward edge.

Like everybody, I spent quite a bit of time the first couple of days down in Shell One, looking through the floor windows at the shrinking Earth. (They are mirror systems rather than true windows, to shield viewers from radiation, but they look like windows, and so are more satisfying than looking at a screen or cube showing the same thing.) In less than a day we were about the Moon’s distance from the Earth, but we were seeing an aspect of it that nobody could ever see from the Moon, since we were moving straight up, out of the plane of the ecliptic. That was when they fired the steering engines; we could feel the low-pitched vibration all through the ship. They fired them again about an hour later. We were pointed at Epsilon. Only ninety-eight years of gin rummy to go.

That night the four of us shared my jar of caviar and one of John’s four hoarded bottles of French wine. We watched the flatscreen as the astronomers trained their telescope on various parts of Earth. New York and, later, London and Paris. We were already too far away to distinguish individual buildings, but the street patterns were clear. John and Daniel and I reminisced about the places we’d been. It was a melancholy time, but I think Evy was the saddest of us all. At least we three had memories.

I wasn’t the only one who had been working twenty-hour days the last month in orbit. Almost everyone had been running around trying to take advantage of New New being physically close. Now that we were under way, a lot of them found they had time on their hands. Nothing better to do than pester the Entertainment Director.

1 have to admit I enjoyed it. Helping people fill up their spare time was a lot easier on the nerves than telling them how they were going to spend the rest of their lives. I became a great Appointer—it was easy to delegate authority for trivial things—and before long the place was crawling with teams and committees and special interest groups. I kept control of cinema programming, so I could commandeer the big theater for anthologies of Naroni and Bogart, Hawks and Spielberg. (I did get some noise about being old-fashioned, but those of us who showed up enjoyed them.) I let the Arts people take care of drama and concert programming, but nuisanced them on general principles.

And every morning before work I went downstairs to watch Earth shrink away. After a week it was just a bright double star. In another week it was not even bright After a month it was lost in the Sun’s glare. I stopped going. The computer was right.

Einstein 28th, 290

What a year it has been. We’re going to torch again, they say seventy-two percent efficiency. I’ll see Epsilon.

My baby girl is sprouting breasts and nagging me about menarche. Don’t do it, girl. Put a cork in it. It’s nothing but trouble. She won’t listen to me.

Incredibly, I heard from old Jeff Hawkings. He looks like Moses. An apt comparison, too; he’s leading children out of the wilderness. He got down to Key West, which was relatively intact, and proceeded to rebuild civilization. Not bad for an ex-cop. He managed to defuse the Manson business and build up a sort of primitive democracy, town-hall scale, all through southern Florida. They’re in contact with Europe and South America, and before long there will be commerce and politics. And maybe not wars. I wished him luck. Hard to carry on a conversation from a light-year away, two years between responses. Earth years.

Hard to recapture how I felt about him. The years between Earth and Torch he was in my mind constantly. Even after I had given him up for dead. But so much has gone on since.

Watching Jeff, and sending my message back, I realized it’s been some time since I actually missed Earth. Or New New. I’m curious about them, and wish them well,
but we have our own concerns.

There was something I wanted to say to Jeff but couldn’t find the words, sitting there in front of the camera, under Hammond’s avuncular gaze. How strange it all turned out. Two completely different people; gender, religion, profession, age—born on different planets in wildly contrasting environments—that we should touch once and love, and be wrenched apart and so separated by circumstance and physical distance; that through all the improbable twists and turns we should wind up twelve light years apart but faced with the same responsibility. Building new worlds.

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