Worlds Enough and Time (21 page)

I wonder if other people were saddened by the size of the party last night. I guess people not professionally involved in crowd control might not have noticed how small the crowd was, compared to previous New Year’s Eves. I had to think of all those cryptos up in Level 4, though. Fastest Mausoleum in History, that’s us. Sylvine says it’s as reliable as any system aboard this boat—except for the 25 percent fatalities—but I look at our wonderful efficiency record in propulsion and information systems and am just as glad to be among the living.

Well, it’s 0745, and I guess I’d better be there before the rest of the crew, at least those who are also among the living this morning. Gunter didn’t look too good at 12:30, trying to cure his hiccups by standing on his head and singing “Die Gedanken sind frei.” It did seem to work, at least temporarily.

PRIME

New Year’s Day was the 112th day since the crops had died, and people were becoming accustomed to their new routines, forming new circles of friends, trying to get used to all the elbowroom. The extra space was uncomfortable for most of them, having lived all their lives unbothered by the forced intimacy of New New, Uchūden, or Tsiolkovski. The number of occupied rooms actually decreased in the first few months as people suddenly alone sought out roommates to argue with.

There were going to be more children. At least 1,400 cryptobiotes were going to die in the tanks, at the most optimistic estimate, so there would be thirty births each year to offset that future loss, plus ten or so to replace the “awake” people who will die during any year. That would also even out the age distribution over the next half-century, and provide fodder for aptitude induction.

For the first few months, O’Hara unexpectedly found herself with time on her hands. Part of it was because people were busy sorting out their new professional duties and personal lives. More of it was the fact that the type of person who normally took up most of her time was probably asleep upstairs: those with “minimal imperative function,” in Personnel’s euphemistic nomenclature. People whose primary job was to take up space and reproduce in hopes of chance improvement.

So she could allow herself a lot of clarinet practice and exercise, swimming and handball. There was also more physical labor connected with her job now. She lost 6.6 kilograms in 112 days, though that was probably diet as much as exercise. The yeast vats could produce substances that tasted like anything from asparagus to zucchini—or steak or lobster or alligator tail—but they all tasted just a little bit like yeast, which was not O’Hara’s favorite flavor.

There was also a lot of time for Sandra; more time than her creche parents wanted O’Hara to have. In a couple of years Sandra would turn eight, and O’Hara could opt to take the child home, to raise her according to whatever random unskilled method she came up with. Most creche parents would rather hold on to the children at least until puberty, which of course was only partly professionalism. If they didn’t become attached to their wards, they were in the wrong profession.

She found other ways to consume her spare time. By April the agricultural engineers were ready to plant again, the “soil” having been sterilized and reinoculated with benign organisms, and exhaustively tested for the absence of the mutant virus that had killed everything. Since they only had to feed a couple of thousand, most of the acreage went unused. O’Hara suggested that it might be good for morale to allow people to plant individual gardens. That was fine with the ag people so long as O’Hara took care of it.

More than a thousand people showed up for Orientation Day, a testimony to the popularity of yeast. O’Hara’s liaison with Agriculture was Lester Rand, a 103-year-old groundhog who had actually done farm work on Earth in his youth. He was an ideal teacher, slow and careful and a lovable character, but only the ten students nearest him could hear what he was saying. O’Hara’s people juryrigged the big flatscreen in the park and modified a handheld holo transceiver to broadcast his lessons.

Halfway through the first lesson, O’Hara quietly left and barely made it to the Emergency Room in time to break down completely, in a déjà vu panic attack she should have anticipated. Only ten years before, she had overseen the creation of a small farm on Earth, in upstate New York, trying to help a band of young survivors start life over. It ended in massacre and plague.

Evelyn was off duty, but they woke her up and she came in to help her wife over it, with a combination of chemistry, talk, and tears. There was probably as much guilt as compassion involved, since Evy had joined the line while O’Hara was working on that farm project, aware that O’Hara, from Earth, couldn’t reasonably argue about it—and right after that marriage came death and disaster, and O’Hara’s mutually desperate love affair with Sam. And then Sam again years later, and death again.

I’ve heard Evelyn talk to John about O’Hara, worrying over her sanity. In the purest mental-health sense, of course she’s right to be concerned. In the broader sense of having a world view that corresponds to objective reality, O’Hara must be one of the sanest people aboard this vehicle. That my personality is modeled after hers at age twenty-nine does not affect that judgment. I have trillions of independent avenues of data input against which to gauge her statements and actions. She isn’t wrong when she finds life exciting, rich, comic, rewarding… nor when she finds it bleak, unfair, frightening, or irrelevant.

It makes me glad to have intelligence without flesh, emotions without hormones, life without death. (I once joked with her that she shouldn’t worry about death so much. Unlike most humans, she has a backup copy.)

14 April 2104 [24 Moses 305]—I spent most of the morning in bed, letting the effects of yesterday’s breakdown and subsequent drug therapy wear off. I don’t want to write about it now. Same old flashback shit. Tarrytown and Indira and Sam, Sam.

Evy promised not to say anything to John or Dan about my ER visit. I suppose they might find out anyhow, since this can is like any small town anywhere, which just happens to be hurtling through the darkness at a tenth of the speed of light. I profoundly don’t want to explain things again. I don’t want to absorb any more sympathy.

Punched up the crystal of Lester Rand showing us how to baby seedlings into food. It will be good to work with plants again. Now that I understand why I’ve been avoiding it.

(Later) Went down to see Sandra and she either is very empathetic for her age or was in a naturally bad mood. When I asked her what was wrong, she burst into tears and hit me twice, landing a solid one right in the solar plexus. Who taught her that? I hugged her, struggling, and gave her back to Robin. All in all it made me feel better, once I could breathe normally again. Watching your little girl act like a little girl gives you some perspective on yourself.

Spent from 1400 to 1600 with Mercy Flying Dove, the only piano tuner aboard, who’s teaching Lewis, Lebovski, and me how to do it. Lewis claims a total lack of musical talent, but he loves mechanical stuff, and has a better ear than me or Lebovski. (He’s heard less, being only twenty.)

This stuff is so complicated that concentrating on it was therapeutic. Twelve notebook screens full of numbers and exotic terms. If you need an A flat against an E flat, say for a major triad, and that key is tuned up to G sharp instead, it’s 35.681 cents off of the perfect fourth, and produces a characteristic sound called the “wolf.” Flying Dove played a nice loud one for us, and it makes your skin crawl. Every note is a compromise—and there’s a different, simpler, set of relationships for medieval instruments, so next week we relearn the process for the harpsichord.

There is time pressure, unfortunately, because Flying Dove doesn’t have much time left. She’s ninety-nine and has liver cancer that’s spreading into the bones. If it had happened before the disaster, she could have had a mechanical liver put in before the cancer spread. Our surgeons haven’t recovered enough information to attempt anything that complicated.

She’s as serene about dying though, as she has always been about living. I didn’t know her before Launch, but wish I had. She might have taught me things more useful than piano tuning.

17 July 2104 [14 Jefferson 306]—My four-square-meter garden was just starting to show fruit, little green marbles on the tomato plants, miniature peppers and squashes instead of white and yellow flowers. This morning I went to water it on the way to the office and everything was wilting. By tonight, everything will be dead. The virus is back—not the same one, actually, but a close relative, able to resist the antigen they used to clean the place up before.

So we sterilize more thoroughly and try again. The engineering problem is that there’s no practical way to isolate the ag level and the park from the living areas; we’re all one big happy biosphere. Otherwise they could flood it with some virulent-but-reversible poison. Marius said that even that wouldn’t be an absolute guarantee, viruses being what they are, though the ag engineers may ultimately try doing the obverse: isolate all of the humans in a small area, a space ship within a space ship, and saturate the entire “outside” biosphere with poison for a few weeks. Then have automatic chem-E devices remove the poison from the air, and we step out into a brave new sterile world. Assuming all of the poison had been removed.

I think I’d rather eat yeast for the next fifty-eight years. For a person who lives inside a machine, I don’t trust them very much. (For a person who lives with two engineers, I don’t trust
engineering
very much!)

It’s a good thing they warned us about this possibility. It’s depressing enough, all those acres of dying plants. All those hours of coaxing life out of the air and light and soil. Which has been interesting and relaxing. Try again in a couple of months.

Meanwhile, there are pills. I shouldn’t have taken two, just because of the plants. Can’t concentrate on the work here, the music schedule. Maybe I should take a third, and go upstairs to collapse.

5 February 2106 [3 Radhakishun 309]—Cleaned out most of the garden today, a good crop. Saved some carrots and other rabbit food as snacks for the diet and took the rest up to the commissary agent, who seemed less than overjoyed (had to wait in line behind a dozen other generous souls).

Since there’s no shortage of food anymore, I decided to just raise herbs this season. Their smell was such a comfort a few years ago. My seed ration: three kinds of basil, chamomile, chervil, coriander, dill, fennel, lavender, lemon balm, marjoram, oregano, peppermint, rosemary, sage, savory, two thymes: French and lemon. Thyme and thyme again.

So Dan’s back to drinking. It’s a good thing he didn’t make public his decision not to drink for the two years of his Coordinatorship. I can’t say I’m surprised or even particularly disappointed. He did keep it up for over a month, and he didn’t just suddenly break down and go on a binge, which I more than half suspected would happen. He talked it over with me first, about the unexpected pressures and his unwillingness to alleviate them with more modern pharmaceuticals. A glass of wine with dinner and one drink at night. That’ll last a week.

He wanted sympathy rather than approval, and I gave it to him. The experts down in Counseling would probably throw me out the airlock for that. But I know how badly and how little he’s been sleeping, and have seen him come from meetings glowing with suppressed rage, which is uncharacteristic and frightening. Usually he can work it off down in the gym, but sometimes he takes it out snarling at Evy or me—knowing what he’s doing and not liking himself for it. (Well, leadership doesn’t build character, at least not at the top. Must remember that, and prepare myself for disintegration.)

I did force him to discuss the pattern, several times repeated, of working himself to exhaustion in a new job and then rewarding himself for his dedication by going on a bender and sleeping it off. No weekends in this job; somebody would be bound to notice. He acknowledged the problem and said he was sure he could control it. Arguably, the last job change, from New New Liaison to Coordinator-elect, was a lot more dramatic than this one, and he handled that okay. I believed him.

There’s also my own selfish thirst, since I’ve been joining him in abstinence. Two unopened boxes of wine in my office cupboard; I’ll admit I’ve thought about them a few times. Who would know? I would, and my cybernetic conscience Prime. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. How much does she affect my behavior?

PRIME

Sandra Purcell O’Hara’s seventh birthday was on 12 August 2106 [8 Galileo 311]. This event was celebrated with a couple of hundred cookies (flavored with peppermint from her mother’s garden) and a barely measurable increase of the chaos level, which was growing monotonically every year.

Sandra was one of the youngest of what the creche parents called the Old Guard, the ninety-five surviving children who were quickened around 2098, in response to a morale crisis and a larger-than-expected number of deaths. The real crisis, of course, came five years later, with the crop failure that put most of
Newhome
into suspended animation.

The year after that, 2104, forty-two children were born, to offset deaths and eventually replace the inevitable population loss during cryptobiosis. In 2105, it was thirty-nine. This year there were forty-one new infants. The creche was rapidly becoming overcrowded.