Worlds Enough and Time Read online

  Smith tapped three keys on his keyboard, and Viejo unfolded his and typed in a command. The wall screen became a page of gibberish, headed HEíØ EîCJAN&E ËYSTôMW—THPA£R PRJTBCOLí.

  “Okay. This says ‘HEAT EXCHANGE SYSTEMS—REPAIR PROTOCOLS.’ You’ve all seen similar things. Since we do have a pretty good notion of what’s in it, sooner or later we’ll be able to decipher it with some confidence. The words, anyhow; numbers will have to be recalculated. Some of them are from measurements that can’t be made while the ship is under way.

  “So supposing we could eventually restore this manual to its original status … that ‘eventually’ is a killer. A real killer. If the heat exchange systems shut down right now, we would all fry in about eight hours.”

  “Lot of repairs you could make without the manual,” Eliot said. “You are engineers.”

  “Yeah, well, this one is a good case in point. I’ve got two women in the heat exchanger subgroup who’ve been pulling heat exchange maintenance all their adult lives. If something went wrong with the heat exchange system in New New, they could fix it with a bucket over their head and somebody beatin’ Ajimbo on the bucket.

  “But this ain’t New New. My Life Support heat exchange is slaved into the primary system, which radiates waste heat from the gamma ray reflectors. It’s got to have priority over Life Support—I mean, you want to fry in eight hours or eight nanoseconds? But it’s an added complication, and one that nobody has any experience dealing with.”

  He faced the rest of the table. “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty much on Eliot’s side. Even if we did want to go back, that fourteen-month flip is a pretty extreme maneuver—must be eighteen, twenty times the propellant mass we’re designed to have at the flip. Lotta mechanical stress.”

  “So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t?” O’Hara said.

  “We’re in shit up to the pits, is what I was going to say. No matter which way we go.”

  Eliot pointed at Takashi Sato, Propulsion. “Sato. You have an opinion?”

  “Two opinions. As a man, there is no question: I knew I would die aboard this vessel when I agreed to come along. I don’t want to go back, to die in retreat.

  “As an engineer … it’s not that simple. Yes, as Mr. Viejo says, the flip at fourteen months is an emergency scenario. But if we were to power down the ship’s spin—live with zero gravity for a few days—and do the flip very slowly, there should be no problem. Possibly much safer, statistically, than continuing on.”

  Several people spoke at once. Eliot called on Silke Kleber, I.C.E. Maintenance. “I would not invoke statistics this way. The fact is that whatever happened to them at New New is likely to happen to us if we return. That would be a nice reward for our concern, don’t you think?”

  “Suppose they are alive, though, and need us?” O’Hara said. “For all we know, they just lost communication and information, as we did.”

  “Then what was Berrigan pointing at?” Viejo said. “A computer program?”

  “Might have been their monitor,” Seven said, “going blank just before ours did.”

  Eliot shook his head. “This is all guesswork. We can’t make a decision based on ‘what-if’ speculation.” He turned to Seven. “Even if they are alive and need help, what could we give them, realistically?”

  “Manpower. Brainpower. A few thousand good engineers and scientists.”

  “They’ve got plenty left over. They also have a lot more redundancy in their information systems. If they’re alive, they’ll be back in shape long before we will.”

  “You have a nice way of simplifying things, Eliot.” Carlos Cruz, Humanities, stood up. “If we don’t hear from them, they’re dead, so we should go on. If we do hear from them, they’ll be okay, so we should go on.”

  Eliot smiled broadly. “Am I wrong, though?”

  “I’m just saying that it’s not that simple. The question you’re not asking is whether we have a moral obligation to help New New.”

  “So do we?”

  “I say yes.”

  Eliot paused and chose his words slowly. “I wouldn’t say yes or no categorically. The decision will have to be tempered by practical matters. What would you do, for instance, if we got a weak message pleading that we turn around and come back—saying they needed our antimatter to fuel their life support systems?”

  “No question. We’d have to go back.”

  An engineer laughed; Eliot restrained himself. “Well, that was kind of a trick question. By the time we decelerated, then accelerated back up to speed, then flipped and decelerated again … there wouldn’t be hardly any anti-matter left. And it would be at least three years before we got back to them, blasting every inch of the way; if they could hold out that long, they could juryrig some solar energy source. That’s not even considering what I think would be the most likely scenario—that the message was a hoax, an attempt to lure us back into the arms of the people who tried to kill us. That is what they did, even if their intent was something more subtle.”

  “And we’re not out of danger yet,” Viejo said, “not by a long way. Personally, I think that if New New calls, we should ignore them.” There was a low murmur of support.

  “Let’s not spend too much time on hypothetical situations,” Seven said. “First we have to decide our best course of action if we don’t hear from them in the next two months.”

  “What if we shut down the drive now?” O’Hara said. “That would give us more than two months’ leeway.”

  “About five,” Eliot admitted. “But you gotta keep in mind this is no shuttle tug you can turn on and off. Every time we deviate from the planned program we’re inviting trouble.” He looked around. “Show of hands? How many want to turn it off now?”

  Only seven raised their hands, O’Hara and one other giving the thumb-and-finger “split-vote” sign. One of them was the propulsion engineer Sato. Eliot nodded at him. “I know what you’re going to say. Go ahead and say it.”

  “Yes. Eliot and I have argued about this. Several of us believe we can modify the drive; double its efficiency. This would increase our acceleration by the square root of two. Or even quadruple the efficiency, doubling our acceleration, which would save us thirty-four years of travel time. Many of you would still be young when you arrived at Epsilon.” Sato was over ninety.

  “But all of your research materials are gibberish.”

  “The more reason to stop accelerating now. To buy time while those materials are deciphered. If it develops that we can indeed double or quadruple the efficiency, then right now we’re wasting antimatter at an alarming rate.”

  “That’s rather interesting,” Seven said. “Eliot, you didn’t tell me about this.”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “No.” She rubbed her chin. “I think we ought to adjourn for a day, two days. Sato, you prepare a summation of your argument, and Eliot or somebody he chooses can do a rebuttal. Try to do it in English, not just math and jargon, so we mere mortals can comprehend it. Send it to all the Cabinet members. We’ll reconvene here Thursday morning, same time. Is that satisfactory, Eliot?”

  “Sure. You can try to convince me.”

  Sato inclined head and shoulders toward Eliot in a microscopic bow. “You may surprise yourself, Coordinator.”

  DRIFTING

  27 September 98 [6 Chang 293]—So this is what it feels like not to be accelerating. It’s nothing obvious, down here in full gravity; just the absence of an insistent ghost of a pull. Dan insists it’s all psychological. Except that dust balls don’t gather on the sternward wall. No doubt it’s a lot more noticeable up in zero gee. Normally, if you stay perfectly motionless in one of the fuckhuts (in which case you ought to relinquish it to someone else), you’ll drift to the sternward wall in about a minute.

  I get the feeling the engineers sort of ganged up on Eliot. John and Dan were in favor of Sato’s proposal from the start. Just about everyone I’ve talked to thought it would be worth the risk,
including, emphatically, the pilot Anke Seven. Since he’s Tania’s cousin (and rather more, I happen to know) he gets about ten votes.

  They turned the drive off at midnight, six hours ago, and we’re still here. Of course firing it up again is going to be a more dangerous proposition. I think I’ll suggest that they not tell anybody ahead of time. No need for all of us to sit around chewing our nails. It couldn’t be all that painful, anyhow, being instantly converted into a superheated puff of plasma. Unless dying always hurts.

  Better get some work done. Gynecologist appointment in three hours. Just thinking about it makes me tingle with anticipation.

  DIVIDE AND MULTIPLY

  After the routine peek and poke, O’Hara dressed and met the gynecologist in his office. “You seem to be in very good health.” He paused. “How do you like surprises?”

  “From doctors, not at all.” She sat down, braced.

  “Try this: you’re going to have a baby.”

  “What?” O’Hara stared at him. “How can I be pregnant when I don’t have any ova?”

  He smiled. “I don’t mean the old-fashioned way. I suspect a lot of women will react like that. It’s just that your name came up to be an ovum donor for the first generation. So as long as you approve, we’ll thaw one out, quicken it, and either pop it into your uterus or cook it up here.” The colonists had enough ova and sperm filed away to populate an entire solar system.

  “But I thought it was going to be five years, at least.” The plan had been to have “generations” of about two hundred people in years 5, 7, and 9, and then do it again about twenty years later. “Is this some kind of a morale thing?”

  “I don’t know; I just see directives. And hear rumors. You’re in the Cabinet, aren’t you?”

  “It hasn’t come up recently. We’ve been busy.”

  “My guess, it’s a combination of mortality and morale. We’ve had a lot more deaths than were projected. And having kids around would raise people’s spirits.”

  “Yeah, if you’re a pediatrician or a pederast. I prefer peace and quiet.” She relaxed back into the chair. “At least here, I wouldn’t have to raise the creature myself.” ‘Home had a creche with professional mothers and fathers.

  “All you have to do is sign the consent form. Decide whether you want the embryo implanted or grown ex utero:”

  “You need a decision right now?”

  “No; a couple of weeks. You might want to talk it over with your husbands.”

  “It’s not their business. Besides, we’ve already discussed it. What I have to think about is whether I want to be responsible for bringing another person into this world, which may be doomed. And then if I do, whether I want to carry the fetus.”

  “Most professional women don’t.”

  “Of course not. But I’ve always been curious about it.”

  “Well, you could carry a big melon around all day. I could find some pills to give you constipation and morning nausea. For hemorrhoids, you’d just have to use your imagination. And then the actual delivery—”

  “Hey, don’t try to talk me into it.”

  “It’s a natural conflict with us OB/GYNs. The obstetrician wants that fetus under glass, where he can just pull it out when it’s done. The gynecologist wants it in the uterus, where it belongs.” He rummaged through a drawer and brought out a holo slide. “This is a pretty evenhanded discussion of the alternatives. So did you and your husbands agree on anything?”

  “They both agreed they didn’t want a bow-legged blimp staggering around. But as I say, that’s not their decision. We all did agree on the necessity of a sperm slice. One of them has a load of birth defect genes; the other has a history of drug abuse and alcoholism.” John had made a joke about “one from column A, one from column B,” which he had to explain.

  “With a gamete splice, you probably do want to have it ex utero. Greater chance of success.”

  “That’s what the guy in New New said, Dr. Johnson. But I might want to give the other way a try anyhow. We could always start over if I miscarried.”

  “It’s not that you would run out of ova. But a miscarriage is an upsetting experience.”

  “Exactly what Johnson said, to the word. Do they program you guys at the factory?”

  He shrugged. “In a way, I guess they do. It’s your body, of course.”

  “That’s what they say.” She picked up the slide. “Call you in a few days?”

  “Yes. If you decide on having it ex utero, we’ll go ahead with the gamete splice and get in touch in about six months so you can watch the uncorking.”

  “Otherwise?”

  “Uterine, we’ll have to monitor your cycle for at most one period. We fertilize the ovum and you come in the next day, timing it so the egg has divided twice, into four cells. Night time. The implantation doesn’t hurt, but unless we can get the zero gee clinic for half a day, you’ll be on your back until the next evening.”

  “Sounds romantic.”

  “Actually, it can be. Some women bring their husbands.” O’Hara tried to visualize that—her ankles in stirrups, John and Dan sitting there while a technician worked a long syringe up into her uterus—and laughed out loud.

  With nothing on her schedule for the next three hours, O’Hara took the instructional slide back to her office and displayed it. It was rather daunting to have that corner of her room taken up by a uterus, cervix, and vagina the size of a walk-in closet, with a matching penis that was slightly translucent but functioned all too well. How did they get the camera and the laser in there? How could the couple do anything? Then there were time-lapse displays of a fetus maturing, both in the uterus and under glass, and then a close-up of the implantation procedure.

  It was all very fascinating and it saved her the trouble of going to lunch.

  DIONYSUS MEETS GODZILLA

  PRIME

  During the three months mandated for drifting, the scientists and engineers worked around the clock, retrieving and recreating knowledge. Time enough for research later. With every day of silence it seemed more and more likely that they would never hear from New New again.

  O’Hara was one of the first to articulate the difference between the seriousness of the scientists’ loss and that of the arts: “You could destroy every specific reference to calculus,” she said in a report, “and still write a calculus text, by getting together a committee of people who had studied it recently or used it in their work. Well written or not, the text would still have all the information. But the only way we could get back Crime and Punishment, for instance, is to find somebody who had memorized it word for word, preferably in Russian. Nobody had.

  “That’s a good case in point. Anybody who’s interested in fiction knows what Crime and Punishment is about, whether they’ve read it or not. But now it exists only as part of a new oral tradition—descriptions of the iost’ works—and it’s one of literally millions.”

  O’Hara was part of a six-person ad hoc committee to retrieve as much literature as was possible. She was glad not to be in charge of it—Carlos Cruz had tentatively volunteered, and everybody else took one step backward—because the organizational details were maddening. More than half of ’Home’s ten thousand people had something to offer, either a physical document like O’Hara’s The Art of War or a memorized bit of prose or verse or song. The documents had to be scanned into computer page by page (in New New there would have been a machine to do it automatically) and all of the people had to be recorded and then interviewed for reliability and information about the social context of the thing they had memorized, which was often obscure or trivial. Of course their rule was to refuse nothing as insignificant, and press every informant for another line or two from something. They got a lot of limericks.

  There were some heartening bits of luck. New New’s Shakespeare Society had put on a production of Hamlet two years before; the people who played Hamlet and Ophelia were on board and, between them, could still reel off most of the play. A sanitat
ion engineer with an uncanny trick memory spent a month reciting all of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and most of Kipling’s verse.

  But a list of the texts left undamaged by the sabotage seemed more perverse than random. Quaint science fiction that hadn’t been read in a hundred years, pornography, forgotten best-sellers, nurse novels, costume-opera fantasies, the complete works of Mickey Spillane. It seemed to O’Hara that whenever she tried to find a worthwhile piece of writing it was invariably gone, the blank spot in the index flanked by titles of aggressive worthlessness. The logic behind it was clear: with automatic data entry and its compact charmed-hadron memory system, the library in New New had consumed everything written, with no regard for anybody’s opinion of its quality. So 98 percent of the library was crap, and a random one tenth of that was still 98 percent crap.

  One thing that particularly galled O’Hara was that, because of some peculiarity of storage, every existing kinetic novel came through unscathed—including A Matter of Time, a Matter of Space, the dreadful romance upon which Evy wasted several hours every week. Kinetic novels were the blasted progeny of the amateur publishing “revolution” at the end of the twentieth century. For a small subscription fee you were not only allowed to read the novel, but could attempt to revise it. You could add a section or rewrite an existing one, and send your masterpiece in to the publisher. If the publisher gave tentative approval, the change would be reviewed by a hundred other subscribers, selected at random. If half of them liked it, it would become part of the novel, and you would be listed as coauthor. Some classics had more than a thousand co authors.

  The writers who created the original templates for these novels obviously needed a certain sense of detachment toward their craft, as well as a talent for introducing accessible infelicities, upon which the paying customer could gleefully pounce. On Earth they had been well-paid celebrities, often more interesting than their books. Marc Plowman, author of A Matter of Time, a Matter of Space and thirty others, had been a serious poet until he typed out a kinetic novel and discovered in himself an appetite for fast horses and slow women.