Worlds Enough and Time Page 19

  During O’Hara’s last year in office, Sandra announced that she wanted to marry Jakob. O’Hara thought that a simple one-to-one relationship would be awfully confining, and she managed to talk them into making the marriage formally open. They did it only to humor her, both of them sure they would never have room for anyone else in their lives.

  Then they announced their other little surprise.

  THE NOVEL OF O’HARA MAINTAINING

  O’Hara had given up Jeff Hawkings for dead almost twenty years before. On Earth they had been adversaries and then lovers—and for a few days husband and wife, in an attempt to secure New New York emigration for Jeff, as the United States and then the world collapsed into total war. With strength and luck and cleverness, he got them down to the Cape in time for the last shuttles before the bombs started to fall, but by then no groundhogs, to whomever related, however valuable, could get a berth into orbit.

  He made it through the war, though, and the chaos following, and a few years later he improvised a radio link with New New. They talked a few times and then the radio station was destroyed, and O’Hara had no reason to believe that he had survived.

  So she lost him twice, and here he was again, though they were worlds and years apart. External Communications, suddenly a real committee again, let her broadcast the first reply to Key West. It was a short and stilted speech, too many eavesdroppers, followed by an hour of Jules Hammond relaying to Jeff and his people everything that was known, or could be surmised, about what had happened from the time they last were in contact until New New fell silent. The similarity of their predicaments was interesting; they could trade.

  Then the technical people talked for some hours about the sorts of knowledge they could transmit, and the sorts of things they eventually could use in return. They set up a schedule, starting five days hence, for people from each discipline to begin teaching. It was easy to calculate at what time of day we would be above Key West’s horizon, and we would broadcast constantly whenever they could hear us.

  O’Hara well understood the Machiavellian angle behind this generous giveaway of knowledge. We wanted to put them in our debt, and fast. Sooner or later the groundhogs would uncover a treasure-trove library and be able to unlock it. Then, if they were so disposed, they could transfer the data to ’Home in a few days or years, depending on their level of technology, and undo a large part of the damage New New had caused.

  If they felt they had some reason to withhold data from us, though, there was nothing we could do. We would be back where we started, with the prospect of slowly evolving mathematics, the sciences, and engineering, but with most of history, literature, and music forever lost.

  O’Hara’s first assignment in this grand dissemination of data was to teach the rules of games. That seemed less than grand, compared to the responsibilities of people delivering learned disquisitions about trigonometry or ethics, but it was arguably one of the most useful early lessons, relatively easy to follow and associated with pleasure. She brainstormed with Gunter, Lebovski, and Saijo, eliminating games with complicated pieces or rules, starting with children’s play and moving up through more elaborate games of skill and chance.

  The short transmission from Earth hadn’t given them any useful clues. Teaching children how to play jacks and marbles would be sort of cruel if there were no jacks or marbles. What simple games could they be sure had survived the cataclysm—should they teach kids how to play tag, hide-and-go-seek? (They decided against that genre, so as not to appear too ridiculous.) They gambled that durable accessories like horseshoes and balls would be available, though their demonstrations of such pastimes would look strange from a groundhog viewpoint. In a rotating frame, every pitch is a curve ball. A horseshoe’s path is a sideways-twisted parabola.

  The first dozen or so transmissions were fairly easy to set up, since they involved only simple introductions to selected pastimes. Once past the obvious, though, they had to decide between depth and breadth. They had demonstrated the basic moves and rules of chess, for instance. You could spend hundreds of hours explaining various strategies, but given only one hour of transmission each three days, would it be more constructive to spend it discussing a few classic chess openings or to start something new, relatively obscure—sketch out the rules of Parcheesi, or Texas Hold’-Em? The four of them spent much more time deciding what to teach than teaching.

  They had almost three hundred hours of fun-and-games broadcasting scheduled before they could expect the first feedback from their audience; before they found out which of their hours had been valuable and which had fruitlessly duplicated things the groundhogs already knew. There was an advantage to the lack of feedback, though, since once they had their basic plan agreed upon, it only took a few months to set up and record all of the lessons. So in January of 2109, O’Hara delivered the last lesson to External Communications and went back to business as usual.

  It was Dan’s last year in office and her last year before running. They’d long planned for her to announce her candidacy for 2112 the day after he stepped down. She would spend this last “nonpolitical” year making good impressions, mending fences, doing favors that could be called in. Of course, the political community in Newhome was so small that there was no secret as to what she was doing and why; it was a rite of passage, a genteel excruciation ritual. This was a game, as Purcell had taught her, with unwritten but not very flexible rules.

  She spent as much time with Sandra as possible, knowing that once she became Coordinator (losing the election was not an option she wanted to consider) the time wouldn’t be there. By then Sandra would be fairly independent, anyhow, at thirteen. The age her mother had become a mother!

  She took Sandra on trips to Earth and New New via the dream room. They were standard tourist matrices, but she could walk alongside her daughter and say, this bar, the Light Head, is where I met Uncle Dan; I lived down that street in New York; that statue, there weren’t so many pigeons on it when we were there, because it was winter, snow drifting into the Seine, can you smell the chestnuts? No, of course not. Nor feel the snowflakes kissing your face.

  Sandra was old enough, at ten-going-on-eleven, to recognize the dual nature of these outings, to see how important it was to her mother both to revisit and to share the places. So although she was bored most of the time, she never complained, even though she was using up VR time that could be going for games with the other kids. That wasn’t so important; like her mother at her age, she was a loner, and not completely by choice.

  O’Hara was also going through menopause at the time, a change that she tried to welcome but couldn’t. With all her ova fried away in liquid nitrogen, the monthly cycle had always been an anachronism. She could have had it stopped at any time, and presumably could have it restarted if she cared to go through the trouble of convincing a doctor that it would be salubrious. But she wasn’t sure. Besides, there was a symmetry to the timing, her stopping when her daughter started, passing the torch, blood sisters.

  They threw a wild party for Dan and the other outgoing Senior Coordinator, Ondrej Costache, on New Year’s Eve, when their terms expired. It was the first time Dan had been actually blind drunk in six years, and although O’Hara didn’t begrudge him the binge, she wrote in her diary that she hoped it wouldn’t become a regular feature of life again. It would.

  O’Hara excused herself from the park cleanup detail the next day long enough to announce her candidacy. There was no opposition, which surprised no one, though Leona Burdine agreed to be the pro forma stalking horse. She would temporarily take over the candidacy if O’Hara died or ran off with the treasury.

  (The position rightly made Burdine a little nervous, since it was possible she could wind up solely in charge of the whole starship if the right kind of disaster occurred. Nine other people would have to die, but it was a spaceship, and accidents happen.)

  O’Hara’s diary entry for the second day of the year is informative.

  2 January 10 [16 Hippocrat
es 319]—It occurs to me that I have never described for you generations yet unborn exactly what sort of government, or administration, we have. A fish wouldn’t describe water. (Oh, you don’t have fish? Never mind.)

  Behind everything is an Evaluation Board, comprising every present and past Coordinator and a handful of psychometric specialists. The Coordinators make recommendations for people to enter the administration at the Cabinet level. The psychometric evaluators have absolute veto power if they can demonstrate that the candidate has certain antisocial characteristics—most obviously, an emotional hunger to exert control over strangers, though less obvious defects abound, such as a need for approval through martyrdom, or a perverse will to fail in a public way. Anybody who is turned down by the Board can be reevaluated annually, but its word is final for that year.

  It makes for less than colorful history, not having any Stalins or Nixons. But you wouldn’t want interesting lunatics in charge if you lived in a pressurized vessel surrounded by light-years of vacuum.

  There are twenty-four Cabinet positions divided between Engineering and Policy, “Policy” being anything that doesn’t have to do with grommets and electrons and so forth. A Cabinet member stays in power until he or she decides to step down or the Evaluation Board becomes dissatisfied and names a replacement.

  Everybody in Newhome is defined as Engineering or Policy track for the sake of voting. A person with a sufficiently ambiguous job, such as demographics analyst, has to choose one or the other and stay with it. A new pair of leaders, one for each track, is chosen every two years. For both of them, it’s a six-year term: two as Coordinator-elect, two as Coordinator, and two as Senior Coordinator. The actual Coordinator has three votes; the others have two each.

  The Coordinators’ most visible function is to decide which problems can be resolved at the committee/Cabinet level, and which must be put to a general referendum. But most of their day-today work is budget-arguing and keeping the peace among the various special interests represented by the Cabinet members and outside groups.

  That’s the official story. The unofficial is much more interesting, but I’m sworn to secrecy—even to you generations yet unborn. Though I’m sure the secret will be out long before we get to Epsilon. Too many people know; too many others suspect.

  In fact, the secret—that the referendum process was a cynical sham—lasted until it was irrelevant. O’Hara hated the deception but accepted it as a condition for employment, and even grudgingly admitted that there had been times in the past when the electorate had been disastrously wrong, and had to be lied to for their own survival.

  That O’Hara was allowed into the Cabinet at all was a testimony to the accuracy of the Evaluation Board’s psychometrics, and the assessments of Sandra Berrigan and Harry Purcell. Ten years younger, she would have reacted to the truth with indignation, and gone disastrously public with it. Repeated exposure to human nature had reduced her confidence in people’s ability to control their own destiny.

  Still, she was no cynic; like Berrigan (and unlike Purcell) she saw the fakery as a temporary necessity that would be abandoned on Epsilon. Life aboard ’Home, like life in New New, had the illusion of comfort, stability, and safety, but only by virtue of hundreds of complicated inter-relating systems. It could no more be run by democratic consensus than a floater could be driven by committee. Dangerous things happen too fast. Planets were more forgiving.

  (Whether leaders would be willing to radically change a system that had worked for generations was another matter.)

  Ever since childhood, O’Hara had been conscious of a sense of “destiny” that she knew most other people didn’t have. Remarkable things happened to her on Earth and afterward that did seem to be setting her up as a sort of pivot, a historical nexus. Daniel tried to convince her that it was irrational foolishness, superstition, a small cognitive defect in a brain that was otherwise more than adequate.

  Her six years in office tended to confirm Daniel’s interpretation. Everybody else who had been in charge of ’Home had experienced some serious crisis during their terms. O’Hara spent six years waiting for something to happen.

  There was plenty to keep her busy, but most of it just required attention to detail and careful delegation. She enjoyed the work, but it wasn’t exciting enough to raise her blood pressure. There was a huge amount of data transfer and analysis going on continually with Key West, which took up a lot of the starship’s time and energy resources, but the day-by-day management of that was the province of various specialists.

  During those six years, she was still nominally in charge of Entertainment, but Gunter was actually running most of it.

  She had more time than she’d expected to spend on being wife and mother. The loss of John had at first been like losing one leg off a table, but she and Evy and Dan were slowly getting used to the new balance, Dan actually cutting down on his extracurricular affairs. O’Hara and Evy half-joked about finding another fourth, but they never talked about it seriously; never when Dan wasn’t present.

  As Evy grew older, she became closer to O’Hara; they had been married fifteen years when she took office. In that time Evy had gone from ravishingly beautiful to merely attractive, even slightly plump, which hadn’t hurt their relationship. She also loved Sandra, the way she loved most children—they were wonderful creatures so long as you could give them back to a parent sooner or later—and was a big help with her, especially after John’s stroke.

  (Evelyn came from the Ten line, which had a tradition of marrying young and having children young. She was all for the first but not the second, which had been fine with John and Dan.)

  It was no coincidence that Evy’s grandfather, Ahmed Ten, took office at the same time as O’Hara, on Engineering track. She had asked him to put his name up and, like her, he was well enough respected to run unopposed. They worked well together; they had both been on the first two postwar rescue missions to Earth, Zaire and New York. Those had been grim, dramatic episodes; both O’Hara and Ten had been toughened by them. They were ready for anything.

  So nothing much happened. Except the first year.

  14 July 2112 [19 Wright 323]—Witta Marckese delivered a report today from Cryptobiology that at first seemed like unalloyed good news: the sleep period can now be shortened to as little as twenty years or extended to as much as one hundred, maybe more, without increasing the risk. So John can stay under until nanosurgery is routine again, and there were dozens in similar situations.

  Unfortunately, there were hundreds of other people we Powers-That-Be would just as soon not be given that kind of choice. And there is no question of keeping the report secret. Almost everybody in Crypto knows.

  The timing is an unfortunate coincidence, since we’re now a little less than forty-eight years away from Epsilon, which until today was the one inflexible period for cryptos. So back in January we thought it was a nowor-never proposition, and we allowed a lot of borderline cases to go in the cans, people still more than marginally useful in the Key West project. Now we could call them back, but twenty years from now, who knows? At the present rate, transferring data visually a page at a time, we’ll still need them. But Ahmed’s confident that we’ll have a dataflow breakthrough any time now.

  The next few days and weeks are going to be interesting. Joint Cabinet powwow first thing in the morning to discuss new crypto rules. Morale is not high, a lot of people complaining about busywork and probably wishing they had gone into the can while they were still young enough for it not to be a bad gamble. You can’t really blame them. Trained for science or engineering and now putting in long hours on work any fairly well-educated clerk could do. A lot of them will want to say the hell with it for twenty, thirty, forty years. How many can we afford to lose? Which individuals would we be better off without?

  I personally don’t think we need any new rules. The current principle, that anybody be allowed to go crypto unless we can demonstrate that we need him or her, will do.

  We j
ust have to adjust the criteria to a level low enough that we need everybody.

  That was essentially what the Cabinet and Coordinators decreed: you’re welcome to it if you qualify, but you probably won’t qualify. There were appeals through the legal system, usually based on mitigating family circumstances—“I want to join my husband after all”—and most of them were resolved by the extrajudicial, unconstitutional, use of discreet psychometrics: would keeping her here make her so miserable that it would be counterpro-ductive? Or will she get over it like the rest of us?

  There was a vocal minority who claimed, with some justification, that their civil rights were being ignored; that the ship could be run with a skeleton crew of a few hundred. So anybody not crucial to maintaining life support or propulsion should be allowed to do as they wished. Key West would still be there in forty-some years.

  The counterargument was speculative but powerful: we can’t risk another information disaster. What if something did happen to Key West? What if our end of the system broke down? It wasn’t just a matter of losing cultural continuity or even technical information. The people in Key West are living on a planet, which is something 97 percent of us have never done. They might know a lot of things useful for starting out on Epsilon; things not in books.

  The difficulties expected in developing Epsilon also made one class of people automatically eligible for cryptobiosis: the young. Anyone born aboard ’Home would be allowed, even encouraged, to go crypto as soon as they were old enough, an insurance against the pioneer population being too heavily weighted toward the middle-aged and elderly. Nobody foresaw any problem in quickening a couple of thousand embryos in the last two decades of flight. But ’Home’s leaders were becoming cautious about unforeseen problems.