by Joe Haldeman
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 the 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.
2. 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 onl
y 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 the 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.”
“Well put, Eliot,” Sato said. “A few people could stay for as long as ten years before going into cryptobiosis.”
“It may be moot,” Nagasaki said. “We may be hard pressed to find two thousand who wish to stay awake. To what extent do we make it voluntary? As Dr. Mandell said, certain people must stay, to keep the ship running smoothly and safely.”
“They have to stay at least long enough to train replacements,” Sato said. “Morales, this might be your domain. It falls somewhere between public health and propaganda. You see what I mean?”
Indicio Morales was in charge of Health Care. “I think so. You’ve got these two classes of people—the ones we want to go and the ones we want to keep awake. But each class is divided into those who themselves want to go or stay. So you want us to come up with some approach whereby everybody thinks they’re being heroes by doing what we want them to do. To sleep or not to sleep.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, we have psychologists. People who know about motivation, people who know about crowd psychology. But if anybody has propagandists, it’s Kamal.”
“We don’t have any propagandists,” Kamal Muhammed said. He was in charge of Interior Communications. “We have ‘public opinion engineers.’” Some people did laugh. “You get your shrinks together and I’ll get my manipulators and let’s meet for lunch.” He checked his watch. “Studio One, eleven-thirty?” Morales nodded.
“Good,” Nagasaki said. “In the meantime—right now, I guess—you take Mandell and Hagen down to prepare a brief public explanation. Just the plain truth about the crops and the need for swift action. Sato and I will be along in a few minutes.”
The three of them went to the door, which opened on a small murmuring crowd, including two police officers and two of Muhammed’s reporters. He made shooing motions. “Later, boys. Public statement down in One.”
The door closed on eerie quiet. “Well,” Sato said, “we have to come up with criteria, go or stay. Within our own specialties and in general.”
O’Hara spoke up. “Women with children should be allowed to stay. Men, too. The idea of waking up and having your child suddenly older than you are—it’s grotesque.” Daniel looked at her and nodded slowly, perhaps deciding.
3. A WOMAN OF DISCRIMINATION
10 September 2103 [9 Confucius 304]—So ends one of the most hectic days of my life, of everyone’s life. I had until noon today to divide my staff into sleepers and wakers, trying for a four-to-one ratio. I canvassed them yesterday morning, and this is what I got (I’ll just copy in the memo):
Intercabinet Memo
Marianne O’Hara, Entertainment10: 36, 10 Sept 03 (9 Confucius 304)
TO: Sylvine
RE: The list
Okay, you said you wanted a preliminary list. Mine is nothing but trouble. This is what I have for raw material—
The guidelines allow me to keep seven people, including myself. I especially don’t want to lose Hermosa, Lebovski, and Saijo, and especially don’t want to spend the next half-century with Taylor and Grady. So I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon juggling people, and hope to give you a final list by tonight.
When all this dies down, let’s get together for a luscious yeastburger. Still play handball?When I was sixteen (and Sylvine twenty-six), she taught me handball at gym. That was not a sport that translated well to Earth. If you learn it in a rotating frame of reference, you expect the ball to drift consistently to the right or left. The one time I played it on Earth, I almost broke my wrist, overcompensating.
So I spent all day cajoling, and finally laying down the law. Of course I couldn’t force anyone who wanted cryptobiosis to stay awake, no matter how much I wanted their company, but I was able to invoke the common good to put Taylor and Grady safely to sleep.
It occurs to me that Taylor and Grady are going to outlive me, and if this diary is published they may read it, and have their feelings hurt. Okay… Taylor, you are the laziest person I’ve ever met. You would scheme for ten hours to get out of one hour’s work. Grady, you are a meanspirited, conniving bitch. A lot of women have slept with my husband, but I think you’re the only one who ever did it just to try to break up our marriage. For laughs, as far as I could tell, and with lies. I saw you do it to Shelly Cato and the Borsini triangle. But Daniel knows me too well to believe what you said about me.
What a feeling of power. Molesting people from the grave.
It was sad to let go of Hermosa. He’s a brilliant musician and a good teacher. But I did talk Saijo, Gunter, and Lebovski into staying. From among the volunteers, I chose Bell, Lewis, and Zdenek. They’re all readers, and all but Lewis and Saijo are musical. We’re going to have
more time on our hands, with only two thousand people to take care of, all of them presumably having less free time for our services. At least we won’t have to sit around the office playing darts. (That’s one thing you’re good at, Taylor; darts. Drive me nuts with that thunk… thunk… thunk.)
After I made my selections and notified everybody, I supervised the collection of all the sleepers’ personal belongings, which we stored in three of the auxiliary lockers in the net room. Then I herded them up to 2115 to turn them over to Sylvine’s technicians, and say our good-byes, some of them tearful. Chul’ kissed me on both cheeks and said that when I was an old woman he would play for me every day. But he couldn’t pass up a chance at the future, at being still young when we went down to tackle Epsilon.
I had a terrible premonition that he will be one of the 20 percent who don’t wake up.
4. THAT TIME OF YEAR THOU MAYE5T IN ME BEHOLD
21 September 2103 [23 Confucius 304]—At first it didn’t seem so different, when I got up this morning and walked around. That’s because there were a lot of people walking around, getting the feel of the place, who would not normally have strayed far from their keyboard or whatever.
The lack of people will be more obvious after a few days, I suppose. At noon I went to the park and it was absolutely crowded—crowded with strangers, looking for people they knew.
Two thirds of us are asleep, with another thousand just wrapping up their affairs. Twice today, I’ve tried to punch people up and found that they were no longer among the living. That will happen for a while.
My own emotional and social connections are fairly intact. John and Dan and Evy. Charlee stayed behind, too; she’s as afraid of going into that box as I am. Most of my Dixieland gang is still here, with the sad exception of Hermosa. Most of them are too old for cryptobiosis.
