Worlds Enough and Time Page 7

  “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.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard. The computer must know where just about everything is.”

  “The computer knows where things are supposed to be. I have to know where they actually are. You have GP auxiliaries?”

  That was Personnel jargon for laborers. “Four of them, plus a medium ‘bot. I could get a heavy one from Silke Kleber with a little notice.” As soon as I said her name, I knew I shouldn’t have. Implying personal relationships with both his supervisors.

  He just nodded, though. “You might prefer to requisition it through me. Same robot, one less layer of bureaucracy.

  “At any rate, once I have the information from you and Mr. Smith, and perhaps a hundred others who will be moved fairly soon, I can put it through a scheduling algorithm.”

  “A year wouldn’t be too bad. Thank you, Dr. Seven.” He gravely shook hands with me and then returned his attention to the screen. He typed something and the six levels rolled back upon themselves to become concentric cylinders, rotating realistically, twice as fast as a clock’s second hand. The dizziness started to come back. I closed my eyes long enough for the sensation to go away, and then turned and carefully walked back to the door.

  John was waiting for me, sitting on a folding chair, looking exhausted. “Let’s get you home.”

  He gave me a wan smile. “That’s why I scheduled my raid for 1300, of course. Thought I might seduce you into a backrub.”

  “Sure. I’m clear to 1530.” We walked and hobbled to the Toronto lift and went straight to Level 6. It was most of a kilometer back to his place. I practically floated, ligh
t as a cloud, but for him it was an effort. By the time we got there, his face was brick red and he was panting.

  “You’re not getting as much exercise as you did in New New,” I said.

  “To belabor the obvious, no, I’m not. I’m not taking as much medication for pain, either. The scientist in me suspects a cause-and-effect relationship.”

  “Taking pills makes you exercise?”

  “Sure.” We got to his door and he unlocked it with his thumb. Groundhog habit. What did he have that anybody would steal? There is vandalism though. Maybe I should start doing it.

  He checked his message queue, sighed, and returned a call from Tania Seven, who just needed two numbers and a date. He said the others could wait, then painfully slipped off his shirt and collapsed onto his side on the bed. Even in a quarter gee, he couldn’t comfortably lie on his back or stomach.

  I got a tube of oil from over the sink and rubbed some into his knotted shoulders. The oil’s vaguely tropical aroma always reminded me of sex, which under the circumstances made me uncomfortable. Middle of the workday and all. But John did not visibly make the same association. He groaned luxuriously and relaxed almost to the point of coma.

  He was thinking, though, not sleeping. After about ten minutes, I stopped to rest my fingers, and he rolled over to look at me. “Sorry my timing was bad. I realized after you got there that you probably didn’t want my presence complicating things.”

  “It was no problem. I don’t think Sandor notices that sort of thing.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Well, he didn’t roll over and play dead. The transfer might stretch out for a year. Tom and I can live with that, though; we’d been ready to cope with outright rejection.”

  “It wouldn’t come to that. I could’ve done something.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” He stiffened and I went back to massaging. “Really. Purcell is right. I have to tread lightly for a couple of years.”

  He stretched hard and something in his shoulder made a loud pop. “I wouldn’t worry overmuch about it. Harry’s a good administrator, but he’s too calculating.”

  “He is that.” I started to knuckle the vertebrae, gently, down one side and up the other. It was painful for him, but recommended by the “Massage for Scoliosis” article Evy had found. He suffered in silence until it was over; then sighed and mumbled something about how good it felt when it stopped. I worked on his scalp and arms for a few minutes and left him to sleep.

  I was worried about John. I knew he was trying to reduce his dependence on the pills, but he was paying for it doubly, in loss of sleep and restricted mobility.

  Dan’s lack of sleep was adding up, too. Maybe they’d both collapse on the same day. Then Evy and I could hand them over to the professionals and get some rest ourselves.

  Still a couple of hours until the meeting with the net games people. Feeling a little guilty, I went down to the music rooms instead of the office, and checked out a clarinet and a practice room. Still thinking of Chul’ and the harpsichord, I punched up Mozart’s Concerto in A—so profoundly sad you can hardly believe it’s in a major key—and played until my cheeks were wet and I could taste salt blood from my lips.

  YEAR 1.00

  ABOUT TIME

  PRIME

  The first year aboard ’Home was fairly uneventful. For a month or two, people who derive satisfaction out of expecting the worst did walk around braced for disaster. Their anxieties, it turned out, were not unfounded. Just premature.

  Harry Purcell died, but not until after he had successfully orchestrated his retirement. O’Hara pursued the meek and Machiavellian course he had mapped out for her. Dan went on his binge on schedule, and recovered on schedule. John’s decline stabilized. Evy fought being transferred from Geriatrics to Emergency, and lost.

  New New faded in importance as they accelerated away from it. Partly this was the result of increasing confidence in their own institutions and methods; partly it was the increasing difficulty in communication. Every three hundred thousand kilometers meant another second of time lag between New New and ’Home. By the time they were ready to celebrate their first year in flight, New New was forty-four hours behind them.

  So when should they celebrate the anniversary? A reactionary few wanted to wait and share the celebration with New New, but they never had a chance, and knew it; they were just arguing because arguing was the national sport.

  In fact, there had been a lot of arguing over time matters. They weren’t going fast enough for Einsteinian relativity to affect everyday things, but they still had to deal with the time difference between them and New New. They could have slowed their clocks down by a fraction of an instant each minute, no problem for us computers, but that would have been pointless except as a symbolic link. It would still take four days between “How’s the weather down there?” and “Same as always.”

  A more meaningful debate over time had to do with their destination planet, Epsilon Eridani 3 (or Epsilon 3, or Epsilon, or, most commonly, “the planet”): Its day was eighteen hours, thirty-two minutes long. Ultimately, their clocks would have to reflect this reality, and probably not by resetting each clock to midnight at half-past six. (John Ogelby wrote a tongue-in-cheek article defending that idea, which some people took at face value.)

  Traditionalists wanted to keep the sixty-minute/twenty-four hour clock, which you could do if you cut the duration of a second down to 0.77222 of a “real” second—it would be confusing at first, but it would certainly make the day go by faster.

  Most of the scientists were “Decimalists,” arguing that as long as you were redefining the second, you might as well redefine everything. If you made your second about two thirds of an Earth second, you could have a day of ten 100-minute hours, each minute a hundred of those quick little seconds. The advantage of this was obvious to scientist, though it would be a little hard to draw clocks freehand.

  Of course common sense, and inertia, prevailed, and the time continued to be what the clock said it was. New New was just shifting time zones and Epsilon was, after all, a century away. A century of incessant bickering.

  HAPPY NEW YEAR

  Almost everybody took at least two days off for the Launch Day anniversary, one for partying and one for recovering, but of course O’Hara and her co-workers were not allowed that luxury. A daylong picnic for ten thousand people is no picnic for the people in charge of its logistics. Food and drink, music and games, places for people to sit, barriers to keep them from sitting on the daisies. Jury-rigged portable toilets to protect the daisies from excessive fertilization. First-aid stations attended by nondrinking doctors and nurses. A place for the coordinators to stand and publicly reveal that yes, by George, it has been a whole year.

  She enjoyed the challenge and liked the way the park took shape under her direction, but was not looking forward to the cleanup. She remembered the celebration a year before, and knew that half the people she needed would be off sleeping under something, or someone, and the ones who showed up would not be in top form.

  TORN BETWEEN TWO LOVERS

  22 September 2098 [26 Aumann 293]—Trying to be honest with this diary, not sin by omission. Not omit any sins.

  Start out with adultery. (Have I ever typed that word before? It looks funny, as if it were the opposite of childishness.) A man I’ve known all my life made an interesting and specific proposition, and I turned him down, and then I took him up on it.

  It’s odd how a couple of weeks of frantic work led up to a sudden shortage of it. I guess that means we did it right. Once the anniversary party got started, I just sort of walked around the park enjoying the sight of other people having fun. My caller never beeped.

  I felt conspicuous. A sartorial genius back in Start-up had come up with the bright idea of providing special white outfits for the Coordinators and Cabinet to wear during ceremonial occasions. Some of us feel like Moby Dick wearing white. (Usually when I go to the laundry I select black or bluej
ean, lavender if I’m in a frisky mood. Twenty years ago someone said it looked good with my hair color.)

  I was watching a tetherball game, mildly resentful of the players’ teenage exuberance. The annoyance was partly professional—if you break that cord, do you think we can send out for a new one?—but mostly it was an irrational longing to be young and confused and seething with hormones. And who should present himself but good old nothis-realname Tom.

  I vaguely remembered having had sex a few times with Tom back in my butterfly days. That’s a distinction he probably shared with a third of the males in my age group in New New. For about a year and a half, between losing Charlie Devon and meeting Daniel, I’d go along with anybody who had a pointable penis and didn’t smell too revolting.

  We chatted for a while, watching the kids. Then, without any sexual preamble, he asked whether I remembered the time he had shared me with another man, and how about doing it again?

  I did remember, and the memory gave me a special pang of longing. It can be awkward and uncomfortable and hilarious, two on one, but it certainly does make you feel wanted. I hadn’t done it since I got married.

  (People will make assumptions when they find out you have two husbands and a wife. John and Dan are both groundhogs, though, very conservative sexually, and as far as I know, Evy doesn’t have any lesbian itches. I’m not sure what I would do if she asked. I had sex with women a few times when I was eighteen, to keep Charlie happy, but never showed any real talent for it. John and Dan would be uncomfortable about Evy and me getting together, anyhow.)

  So I told Tom that I was flattered—no lie, since I was feeling so unattractive—but that my emotional life was too complicated already. His answer to that was “Who’s talking about emotions?” I dismissed him with a kiss and a squeeze, and he wandered off, looking, I assumed, for some more willing two-holed relic from school days. But the seed was planted, so to speak.