Worlds Enough and Time Page 14

  Translation’s an interesting problem. There’s no manpower now, so we do machine translations into English and store them along with the originals. French is still studied, so these may sooner or later have a human interpreter. But there are many works, like The Red and the Black and Somewhere, Nowhere, that exist only in English translation. In a sense, they’re lost; it would be silly to back-translate them into French.

  Some things are literally recovered-yet-lost, because they’re in languages we don’t have translation programs for and no one aboard ’Home reads or speaks. There are even a few things in languages we haven’t been able to identify. Balinese folk tales? Samoan recipes? We can’t even decipher the titles.

  Of course any day now New New may call up and render the past couple of years’ work redundant. Any day now.

  YEAR 5.71

  WATERSHED, BLOODSHED

  6 June 2103 [19 Babbage 303]—So here I am a matron of forty. I took the day off to celebrate my birthday, talked with Prime for a while, went down to Creche and played with Sandra.

  Creche is a madhouse. All this generation is in their “terrible twos,” lurching around, picking up toys, throwing them at each other. Nothing stays put away unless it’s put away someplace high. Then somebody notices they’re being deprived of it and cries until a creche mother or father takes it down again.

  There are fourteen mothers and six fathers for a hundred children, and they are certainly earning their rations nowadays. Sandra’s mother, Robin, was so relieved to see me it was comical. I took Sandra and two of her associates off Robin’s hands and went to play in the mud room.

  I’m not sure the mud room is going to do much toward turning children into responsible adults. The whole point of it seems to be a contest to see who can plaster the most mud on other people the fastest; extra points for ingestion.

  They all wear diapers, to keep the mud from becoming too biologically complex. The association with shit is strong and inevitable. I kept trying to get them interested in constructing mud pies and mud houses, but all they wanted to do was squeeze it through their little fists and giggle at the pseudoturds.

  If I’d had the sense to remain standing, I would have stayed pretty unbesmirched from the navel up. But I sat down to get closer to the abstract assemblage Sandra was absorbed in, and some little bastard snuck up and scored a double handful on my head, improving my hair and filling up one ear. I smiled and told him what a big boy he was, and wondered what he would look like completely buried in the muck, with only his cute little feet showing.

  Hosing them down in the shower was fun. Everything is fun to them unless it’s an earthshaking tragedy, only solvable by adult attention. They were a handful, trying to elude the water and then luxuriating in it; I would have done them one at a time, but I was certain they’d just dive back in the mud if I didn’t keep them all together.

  They should put some toys in the stall to distract the little darlings. While I was shampooing myself, Sandra took a sudden deep interest in pubic hair, and started her collection with one painful yank. Not supposed to express anger; that’s Robin’s job. So I just told her she was going to be in for a big surprise in about ten years. Mother! Are you some kind of pervert? No, dear. Just reliving your childhood.

  I don’t know whether she’ll ever call me Mother. It’s Mair Ann now, or just Mair.

  I almost wish I could take her home with me. It would be worth the bother, to be able to watch her grow, touch her, pick her up. She changes so fast I’m afraid I’m going to miss something. But that is Robin’s job and she’s good at it. When Sandra’s eight I can have her part time. What will she be like then?

  I had lunch with Charlee down in the new picnic area they’ve opened on the ag level. They serve only raw vegetables, but it’s a bright, airy place. She’s got a birthday coming up, thirty-eight, in two weeks. We talked about milestones and such. She opted to stop cycling a couple of years ago, because for some reason the cramps got worse and worse. I’m going to let the thing run its course, even though it’s just the body fooling itself; no eggs to make the monthly journey. I told Charlee I like the sense of the body’s seasons, the womanliness of it, and will miss it. She thinks I’m a lunatic. Maybe so, given the etymology of that word.

  All of us women bringing the memory of Earth’s Moon to another world. Epsilon’s moon has a month that is less than two days shorter. I wonder if there will be some effect, over generations.

  We felt so damned healthy after eating all those carrots and turnips that we had to get a drink. The dispensary was closed, of course, but I knew Dan had some boo. I called him up at work and told him we were going to raid his supply. It wasn’t so much to get his permission as to make sure he wouldn’t be in the room with whoever that redhead is that he’s fucking now. Rhoda, Rhonda? Wanda. They sometimes use the lunch hour.

  We just had a quick toast and Charlee went back to work. I decided to leave it at the one shot and come back here to type and look up some stuff. We’ve reclaimed a few diaries of famous people; I thought I’d look up what they said on their fortieth birthdays. It was more of a milestone when you couldn’t expect to make it past seventy.

  Not too much luck with women. None. Margaret Mead, Leslie Morris, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Anaïs Nin were too busy at age forty to keep diaries. What does that say about me?

  Even the garrulous Mr. Boswell had only one line: “I hoped to live better from this day.” By God, Sir, so shall I. Chastity. Industry. Modesty. Though it’s hard to be modest when you know that you will go down in history as The Woman Who Had The Longest Fortieth-Birthday Diary Entry In What’s Left Of The English Language.

  So we’re coming up on six years aboard this hollow rock; about fifty-eight years to go, at the current rate. I’ll be not quite old enough to be useless when we get there. Of course the people down at Propulsion keep talking about further increases in efficiency, but after the scare we had last time, I’m not sure they’ll get permission to try, even from the Engineering track.

  Prime says we’re 1,850,000,000,000 kilometers from Earth, about seventy-three light-days. So if somebody wished me happy birthday, it would take seventy-three days to get from there to here, by which time, Prime says, we’d have gone almost four million kilometers. That’s another three hours, forty-one minutes. I’ll bet Zeno could prove that the message would never get here.

  So it’s June on Earth, a month I never experienced. I got there in September and left in March.

  What else to record on this milestone birthday. Well, as remarked before, my husband Daniel will be moving into the Engineering Coordinator-elect slot in January ’04. So he’ll be Coordinator in ’06, Senior Coordinator in ’08, and history in 2110. We’ve agreed it would be prudent for me to wait until ’10 to place myself on the block for Policy Coordinator-elect, since it would be unwise to have husband and wife working together at the administrative level, or at least unseemly. I don’t agree with the logic of this, except in terms of appearances—Dan and I don’t collude all that well even on a day-today basis—but don’t mind waiting six years. It would have bothered me when I was thirty.

  Am I less ambitious? I don’t think so. I guess it’s partly that what I’m doing now is plenty important. And it’s part of the lesson that Purcell and Sandra wanted me to learn, by observing the process from the Cabinet level: that being on administrative track is a six-year migraine. (Some people do get addicted to the headache, though. Eliot is stepping down this year but says he’s going to “let himself pickle” for two or four years and run again. Tania is going back to Labor/Management and says she wouldn’t run for office again as long as there were three people left alive on the ship—two of them might vote for her!)

  I’m getting better at delegating authority, not hanging all over my subordinates all the time. That’s partly a matter of sorting out who’s good at what and who enjoys what kind of work. If only the two factors would match up. But trusting other people to do their jobs gives me more time for t
he lit project and for my music.

  That’s mostly clarinet and a little keyboard for theory. It will still be a while before I can play the harp again.

  But it’s been more than two years. Think I’ll take it out now, and tune it, and see.

  NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

  It was seven in the morning, 10 September 2103. O’Hara was asleep in John’s bed; John had been up reading for about an hour. Suddenly his console went blank and a loud buzzer sounded.

  O’Hara sat up and rubbed her eyes. “What is it?”

  “Trouble.” She unwound herself from the sheet and crawled sideways to read over his shoulder. The screen was blinking orange letters on a blue background:

  10 Sept 03

  9 Conf 304

  EMERGENCY JOINT CABINET MEETING 0800

  ROOM 4004

  TELL NO ONE.

  “Oh shit. What’s it going to be this time?”

  “Good news, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t have any idea?” She drifted over to the sink.

  “You’re sleeping with the wrong guy for inside information.” He typed four digits and Dan’s image appeared, unshaven, blinking, groggy. “What’s up, bright eyes? You expect this?”

  “No couple of things… but no. Look. I’m not alone.” He looked to the right and nodded. A woman’s faint voice said, “I won’t tell anyone,” and he watched, evidently until the door shut.

  O’Hara pulled a brush through her hair with more force than was necessary.

  “All right,” Dan said. “There’s two things. That labor organizer Barrett, she told Mitrione yesterday that she could pull off a general strike in the GPs.”

  “Of course she could. I could do that. Half of them act like they’re on strike while they’re on the job. What else?”

  “Well, there’s the rice shortage. Talk about rationing if they can’t get up to quota. But I thought that wasn’t for another month.”

  “Yeah. Look, I’ll try a standard overall sys-check down through all the engineering departments; I do that most mornings anyhow. If I spot any anomalies I’ll call you back.”

  “Okay.” He signed off and John pushed a button and said, “Sys-check.” The screen filled with acronyms and numbers.

  O’Hara finished washing and stepped into a rumpled lavender jumpsuit. “Looks like no breakfast. I’m going down to 202; you want a roll?”

  “Please, chocolate. Use my card; I’ll get the water going in a minute.”

  “I’ll do it. You keep checking those old systems.”

  “Love it when you talk dirty,” he said, without looking up or smiling.

  She came back in five minutes with a couple of rolls and a box of orange juice. He was going through the data a second time. “Haven’t caught anything. It’s nothing obvious. Only this.” He stabbed a button five or six times, the data paging backward.

  “They didn’t have chocolate. You can have cherry or apple filling.”

  “Either one.” He took the roll and pointed at the screen with it. “The yeast farms asked for a fifty percent increase in both water and power allotment. That’s not really an anomaly, since we know there’s been a rice shortfall.”

  “Oh goody. More fake tofu.”

  “Rather have that than rice, myself.” He accepted a glass of juice. “If I’d known they were going to force-feed us rice for a century I would’ve stayed behind. Or eaten steak until I died of cholesterol poisoning.”

  While John washed up, O’Hara went down to the laundry to get them fresh clothes. Half the Cabinet was waiting in line; so much for secrecy.

  • • •

  The year 2103 was the beginning of a two-year “Japanese takeover”; the Coordinators were Ito Nagasaki (Criminal Law) and Takashi Sato (Propulsion). They came into Room 4004 together, late, serious, and silent, looking tired. When the last Cabinet member had entered and found a seat, and the door hissed shut, Sato began without preamble:

  “As most of you know, our rice production has been down for several months because of a persistent rust that has invaded all varieties. The ag people synthesized a virus specific to the rust, tested it in isolation for a few weeks, and it worked. So they inoculated the crop with it. That’s been a standard farming procedure for over a century.”

  “Oh shit,” Eliot Smith said. “We’ve lost all the rice.”

  “I’m afraid it’s worse than that, Eliot. Everything that photosynthesizes. Everything more complicated than a mushroom.”

  There was a second of shocked silence. “We’re dead, then?” Anke Seven said.

  “Not if we act quickly,” Nagasaki said. “Dr. Mandell?”

  Maria Mandell rose. “We haven’t pinned down what happened. Some synergistic mutagen that was present in the crop but not in the lab. What happened is less important than what we’re going to do about it. I have every work crew from 0800 on, and every competent GP I can draft, at work harvesting and storing.”

  “So by the time we leave this room,” Taylor Harrison said, “everybody aboard will know that the shit has hit the fan.”

  “That’s right,” Mandell said. “They’d know before noon anyhow, with everything wilting.”

  “What are the numbers?” Ogelby asked. “I know the yeast vats can’t keep the show going.”

  “If all we had was this crop and what’s in storage, we’d have about a hundred and sixty kilo-man-days of vegetable food. That would keep the population going for eighteen days on reduced rations. Two months, on a starvation diet. There’s probably a similar amount of calories tied up in farm animals, if we slaughtered them all.

  “The yeast vats produce enough food to keep about two thousand people alive indefinitely. If we could wave a magic wand and build eight more yeast vats, then the only problem would be that everyone would have to eat yeast derivatives until we were able to get the crops reestablished. But we can’t, of course. If we had the blueprints and the trained workers and the building materials all stacked up, it would be a matter of a few weeks. We don’t have any of those things.

  “And we can’t be sure how long it will take to get things growing and harvested again. Everything we grow, and a few thousand other plants, exist in the form of genetic information, sealed away against any possible catastrophe, for Epsilon. But we haven’t yet reclaimed the knowledge to go from there to an actual plant.

  “Food isn’t the only problem, of course. Breathing. The virus is also going to kill every plant in the park. No photosynthesis, no new oxygen, except what we manufacture ourselves. We can do it—we have to, in the process of turning carbon dioxide into nutrient solution for the yeast—but we can’t do it on a scale adequate for the whole population.

  “We do have reference seeds for all of our food crops. Once we have the hydroponic beds cleaned out, the virus sterilized, we can start over on a small scale. But it will be more than two years, probably three years, before we’re back to anything like normal production.

  “So about seven thousand of us have to volunteer for suspended animation. Perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘volunteer.’ There will be some people who will have to stay on to keep things going smoothly, or at all. First, though, about the suspended animation. Cryptobiosis. Sylvine?”

  Sylvine Hagen stood up slowly. “Uh… I wasn’t prepped for this”

  “Sorry,” Nagasaki said. “No time.”

  “Well… I gave a presentation a couple of years ago; not much has changed since. It’s on a crystal; I’ll edit it and put it on everybody’s queue, code ‘crypto.’

  “Here’s the basic fact: we have plenty of room for seven thousand people, but the recovery rate is not wonderful; seventy-five to eighty percent. We don’t have a lot of experimental data, but it looks as if the recovery rate is highest for people from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties. It rapidly declines after about sixty. It would probably kill anybody over eighty, eighty-five, and would definitely be fatal to anybody under nineteen or twenty; anybody still growing.

  “Once you go in t
he box, you won’t come out for at least forty-eight years, which is about ten years before we arrive at Epsilon, of course.”

  “There’s no way to hurry the process, or interrupt it?” Sato asked. “Assuming we can get the farms operating again.”

  “Not that we know of. We’ll continue researching it.”

  “‘We’? You don’t want to do it yourself?” Mandell said.

  She reddened. “I do want to. I’m curious about it. And I’m fifty; I don’t want to put it off for too long. But I should stick around for a few years.”

  “That’s a point,” Eliot said. “We have got some flexibility. How long does it take to get those coffins warmed up, cooled down, whatever?”

  “Just hours. It’s an emergency facility.”

  “So say we take everybody who’s somewhere between marginally helpful and certifiably useless, say five thousand people, and tuck them away this afternoon. We got enough yeast to feed half the rest. That leaves two thousand who have to go into the box sooner or later, basically living on the 160 to 321 kilo-man-days Mandell says we got. If they all ate regular rations, they could stick around for 80 to 160 days. That’s sayin’—to simplify the numbers—that the two thousand who aren’t goin’ in those coffins start eatin’ yeast tonight.

  “But what we really got is like a decay function, exponential decay. I mean, say, half those people get their shit wrapped up in a week, go in the can. That leaves a thousand people to munch on what’s left. If I can do arithmetic, that means they’ve got 146 to 306 days’ worth. Then after a month, half of them go in. The five hundred left have got 232 to 552 days. And so on. Not like those numbers are that exact, but you get the picture.”