Worlds Enough and Time (9 page)

I’ll talk to Mother about her stubbornness, but don’t think it’ll make much difference. (The reason for the particular stubbornness is immaterial, as you know. Changing her mind is like putting your shoulder to a planet.)

You also know that I’ll try to talk you out of this. For most of the rest of your life men are going to be whining at you to please please let them stick their precious dicks into one place or another. It can be fun but it can also be worse than algebra, believe me.

You do need the school, and once your hormones start moaning you spend half your time and energy attending to them. You’re not a natural student like I was, and even I had a harder time of it after menarche.

To continue in this nagging vein, you know they won’t be sending people to Earth unless they have some special ability. (I can picture myself as a school counselor, shaking my finger at you, but it’s true.) Even if it’s not an academic specialty, it’s probably going to be something they measure through tests—and, unfortunately, the only way you’ll get better at test-taking is practice.

To get back to the point, don’t forget that when Mother was your age she was pregnant with me. I think she’s always resented losing a few precious years of childhood. (Though as you well know, this is an illusion people come up with when they get old and their memories start to go. Being a kid isn’t so much fun while you’re actually being one.)

I’ll plead your case with her, not because I think you’re right, but because you’re old enough to make the decision.

The work here is still interesting, though some of the people I have to deal with are walking hemorrhoids. Never a dull moment. Beeper woke me up at five-thirty this morning because a nine o’clock meeting had been moved to ten. Still trying to figure that one out.

Yesterday we had something new. A lawsuit. A middle-aged citizen who spends all of his free time building muscles so he won’t look so middle-aged (it doesn’t work) had an accident. He was working out on the parallel bars and one of them hadn’t been properly tightened. He did some sort of impressive flip that turned into a crash. He missed the mat and hit the floor face-first; it fractured his neck.

So we had to go down to the hospital with an arbitration team, the poor victim looking all pathetic with his plastic brace and kind of wall-eyed with pain drugs. Emily Martino didn’t help any—she’s the woman in charge of the gymnastic equipment, and technically responsible. She got all teary and wanted to give the guy everything. Well, hell. I work out on those bars, too, but I have the sense to always have someone spotting for me. If it had happened to me, I wouldn’t have gotten a broken neck. I would just have felt embarrassed at being stupid enough not to check out the goddamned equipment before I put my weight on it! But try to tell that to arbitrators. They’re always advocates for the individual, against “the system.” If this is a system, we’re all in trouble.

So they fined the department $250 and Emily $250, to go into an escrow account that Mr. Muscles can use whenever he has a yen for chocolate cake or weird sex. It’s actually five hundred bucks from the department, with Emily kicking over half of her hourly pay for the next 167 hours. We really can’t spare it.

But Mr. Muscles is a nice guy compared to Gwen Stevick. Back in Start-up, I asked her to volunteer for Aptitude Induction (she wanted to be aboard ’Home but didn’t have any skill we wanted). She chose Veterinary Technician and now evidently hates it, and not incidentally hates yours truly. So she spends all of her spare time making my life difficult. She studies Entertainment like a scientist, and whenever she finds anything not to her liking she files a complaint.

The complaints go over my head, straight to Policy. They’re as tired of her as I am, but there’s not much we can legitimately do. We fix the trivial thing that she’s bitching about, and file a correction report, and even write her a little thank-you note.

I see her nosing around all the time. She’s fat and red-faced and always looks angry. Maybe she’ll have a heart attack down here, and we’ll all tip-toe off to lunch.

Oh well, life in the ruling class. Sure is exciting.

Evy, John, and Dan are doing fine, settling into their various routines, and send their love along with mine.

Marianne

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

(Which is twice illogical. The actual containment is done by a powerful magnetic field. If the power failed, all that carbon would be mc
²
worth of gamma rays. The civil engineers would be vaporized, ionized, about one nanosecond before yours truly, up at the other end of the ship.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Marianne O’Hara.”

He looked at John. “You know her?”

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

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

“Fair enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps not unnecessarily.”

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

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

“No. Never heard of it.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh … not really.”

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

“Which would throw us off course?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That would be fine.”

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

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

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

“I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

“A harp—?”

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

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

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

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

“Are you all right, Dr. O’Hara?”

“Sorry. I was thinking.”

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