Worlds Enough and Time w-3
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I’ll put an ad in the music section for a keyboard atavist. Somebody who will pound on an actual piano while other people blow through and strum and whack various instruments that aren’t plugged in.
We try not to think about those people as if they’re dead. I don’t mean the thousand or so who won’t revive. Even the ones who do will be like the dead arisen, vague memories suddenly come back to life. I’ll be eighty-eight years old. Hully gee, as Stephen Crane had a character obscurely say. Holy God.
There was a memo on my queue, on everyone’s queue, asking whether I’d like an extra room. What would I put in it? Or whom?
Out of curiosity I went down to the ag level. There are a few lights on, for the technicians who are wandering around in a state of shock. Bare tanks, a smell of stale rot. The place where I used to sit and smell the herbs is just a big square of damp gravel, waiting to be sterilized. It must be devastating for the people who work here every day. I wonder whether any of them ever went to Earth, and experienced winter. I don’t guess the comparison is accurate. I liked winter. It was alien, stark, and scary, and the air smelled like the air of another planet. That blizzard in England, in Dover. It was sterile like this—“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”—but under the snow was the promise of spring, of rebirth. This will be green again, in a year or three. But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards.
5. CATEGORIES
PRIME
When the plants died, the population of Newhome was 9,012, 6,032 of whom were classified as “supernumeraries,” more or less along for the ride. The remaining 2,980 were divided into five categories:
I. Necessary for the physical maintenance of Newhome: 813
II. Necessary for data reconstruction: 947
III. Necessary for ongoing research: 748
IV. Necessary for health and morale: 183
V. Supernumerary but too young, old, or ill for cryptobiosis: 289
There were also 344 people who were supernumerary but had children in category V; they were given the option of staying awake if, like O’Hara, the idea of waking up younger than their children did not appeal to them. All but forty-eight chose sleep.
About a third of the first four categories had to go into the deep freeze over the next year. Of course every department felt that it had already been cut to the bone. There was a lot of infighting and horse trading.
There was always the program that created me, Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion, but it was less useful than it had been at the beginning of the trip. You could take a particle physicist, say, from group III, and record the personality factors that make a good particle physicist, and then tali a youngster from group V and “inoculate” him or her with those traits. Then put the actual physicist to sleep.
The problem with that was that not even 30 percent of the physics texts had been reclaimed. This boy or girl may have the enthusiasm of a young Einstein, but wouldn’t have access to enough information for a weak bachelor’s degree.
(It was a particle physicist, in fact, who pointed out that there was another side to this. Simone Haskel volunteered herself for immersion, a long and uncomfortable process, even though the child who replaced her would have to deal with the frustration of ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, Haskel pointed out. It’s possible that the new physicist, unfettered by tradition, might take her studies in some direction that would never have occurred to someone with a traditional academic background.)
Of the 6,000 mandated for cryptobiosis, 302 refused. No one argued with them; no one complicated the situation by pointing out that under the circumstances, individual rights were curtailed. All but three were anesthetized in their sleep and rolled off to Room 2115 on gurnies. Three had committed suicide.
Before the Big Sleep, as some called it, every adult accumulated one minute a day on the virtual reality machines in the dream room. Afterward, O’Hara had only one sixth as many customers. Should they be allowed an hour every ten days?
She brought it up in the first Policy meeting, and most members were in favor of the expansion—after all, most people could do arithmetic, and they knew what the current population was. If the Cabinet deprived them of dreamtime, most would see it as bureaucratic meddling. Morales, in charge of Health Care, cast a yes/no vote. He agreed with the politics but wanted to check with his specialists about possible long-term effects. Coordinator Nagasaki asked O’Hara to take half the machines out of service temporarily “for repairs,” and called for opinions next week from Psych and Labor. He would query the Engineering side.
Of course O’Hara was free to use the out-of-service machines all she wanted. She decided to make a systematic tour of the Earth files, comparing the recorded scenes with her memories.
Her first experiences with revisiting Earth through VR, back in New New, had been so depressing she’d had no desire to go back. But she knew more about the machines, now that she was in charge of them, and had learned how you could fine-tune them in various ways. She could mute the emotional input from the Earth files so they were little more than travelogues—though with all senses engaged; a total physical immersion. You were there, but detached. Whatever emotions you felt were your own, unamplified.
That was bad enough in some places. The shuttle pads at the Cape, where she’d said good-bye to Jeff. Las Vegas: knocked out, kidnapped, and raped while unconscious, then the rescue bloodbath. A bitter week in the Alexandrian Dominion, where being female reduced you to the status of a possession. Assault in New York. Spain, the Costa del Sol, warm winter sun and delicious sex—the paradise where she and Jeff caught the first worrisome hints that the world order was crumbling. Though no one thought of actual war, total war, that early.
Some places were quiet and pleasant; revisiting the Louvre, the Prado, the Salzburg Mozart Festival—or noisy and pleasant, like New Orleans and Rio during holidays. She walked alone through the Yukon tundra and joined millions in New Hong Kong.
She put a half hour each day in her schedule for this cybernetic journeying, one day to a place she had visited during her months on Earth, the next to a nearby one she had missed, as a kind of baseline for comparison. Nine tenths of the places were missing, but it was a big planet.
Most of her regular duties were shifted over to Gunter and Lebovski while she worked with Gail Bieda, a cognitive medicine specialist Morales sent up from PsychStat. Fortunately, the record of people’s past use, and misuse, of the machine was intact. It took only two days to sort them into three groups: those who could easily take an hour every ten days, those who definitely could not, and those who would need a slow adjustment.
Drawing on her own recent experience, O’Hara suggested they give everybody an hour on the machine regardless, but for some people, restrict a certain amount of it, or all of it, to the low-intensity mode O’Hara used in her Earth-tripping. That way, the amount of time one was allowed to use the machine wouldn’t become a status symbol. People could keep the actual information about their “VR level” secret, or lie about it.
Nagasaki and Sato okayed the plan, so O’Hara set up a standard message to put on every adult’s queue, explaining the situation and telling them what level they had been assigned. If they thought they’d been misclassified, they could take it up with PsychStat. The rest of the electronic paper-shuffling fell to Entertainment, trying to coordinate the work and leisure schedules of two thousand people, all special cases.
When everything was finally sorted out, though, there was still one machine not-so-temporarily out of service. O’Hara retained it as an unofficial perquisite of office for Cabinet members, so that they could avail themselves of VR retreat with a minimum of scheduling bother. It also allowed O’Hara to use it on the spur of the moment—“I have a free hour, the machine’s free; let’s go to London”—as she had become accustomed to doing. She told herself she would not abuse it, and for some time she didn’t.
YEAR 6.26
1 January 2104 [23 Socrates 304]—I asked all of my crew to stay fairly sober last night, and had only two drinks myself, because I know what the park is going to look like. It’s not like the old days, when we could requisition 150 brain-dead GPs to pick up the mess after the party. That has now become an executive function. Of course it’s easier with no grass to hide bits of litter. No bushes to conceal copulators or lazy inebriates or, as happened once, a body.
The place was getting pretty scruffy when I turned in at one, and there were still several hundred people wandering around looking for something to break. But there were no emergency messages from Zdenek or Lewis when I woke up this morning, so I guess we were spared public lewdness or homicide.
The children were allowed to stay up until midnight, but most of them didn’t make it, including Sandra. (The creche parents wisely had them running and jumping all day.) Their pallets were lined up in an out-of-the-way corner by the fish pond, very orderly, but the kids just dropped at random, piled up snoring like a bunch of little drunks.
My not-so-little drunk poked me awake this morning with his persistent Alcoterm erection. It turns a man into a broomstick with but one purpose in life. Not the worst way to start the new year. It’s also his first day as Coordinator-elect, though; I hope the beast goes down before the afternoon meeting. Divert some of his bloodstream into the frontal lobes.
I wonder if other people were saddened by the size of the party last night. I guess people not professionally involved in crowd control might not have noticed how small the crowd was, compared to previous New Year’s Eves. I had to think of all those cryptos up in Level 4, though. Fastest Mausoleum in History, that’s us. Sylvine says it’s as reliable as any system aboard this boat—except for the 25 percent fatalities—but I look at our wonderful efficiency record in propulsion and information systems and am just as glad to be among the living.
Well, it’s 0745, and I guess I’d better be there before the rest of the crew, at least those who are also among the living this morning. Gunter didn’t look too good at 12:30, trying to cure his hiccups by standing on his head and singing “Die Gedanken sind frei.” It did seem to work, at least temporarily.
2. SOWING, REAPING
PRIME
New Year’s Day was the 112th day since the crops had died, and people were becoming accustomed to their new routines, forming new circles of friends, trying to get used to all the elbowroom. The extra space was uncomfortable for most of them, having lived all their lives unbothered by the forced intimacy of New New, Uchūden, or Tsiolkovski. The number of occupied rooms actually decreased in the first few months as people suddenly alone sought out roommates to argue with.
There were going to be more children. At least 1,400 cryptobiotes were going to die in the tanks, at the most optimistic estimate, so there would be thirty births each year to offset that future loss, plus ten or so to replace the “awake” people who will die during any year. That would also even out the age distribution over the next half-century, and provide fodder for aptitude induction.
For the first few months, O’Hara unexpectedly found herself with time on her hands. Part of it was because people were busy sorting out their new professional duties and personal lives. More of it was the fact that the type of person who normally took up most of her time was probably asleep upstairs: those with “minimal imperative function,” in Personnel’s euphemistic nomenclature. People whose primary job was to take up space and reproduce in hopes of chance improvement.
So she could allow herself a lot of clarinet practice and exercise, swimming and handball. There was also more physical labor connected with her job now. She lost 6.6 kilograms in 112 days, though that was probably diet as much as exercise. The yeast vats could produce substances that tasted like anything from asparagus to zucchini—or steak or lobster or alligator tail—but they all tasted just a little bit like yeast, which was not O’Hara’s favorite flavor.
There was also a lot of time for Sandra; more time than her creche parents wanted O’Hara to have. In a couple of years Sandra would turn eight, and O’Hara could opt to take the child home, to raise her according to whatever random unskilled method she came up with. Most creche parents would rather hold on to the children at least until puberty, which of course was only partly professionalism. If they didn’t become attached to their wards, they were in the wrong profession.
She found other ways to consume her spare time. By April the agricultural engineers were ready to plant again, the “soil” having been sterilized and reinoculated with benign organisms, and exhaustively tested for the absence of the mutant virus that had killed everything. Since they only had to feed a couple of thousand, most of the acreage went unused. O’Hara suggested that it might be good for morale to allow people to plant individual gardens. That was fine with the ag people so long as O’Hara took care of it.
More than a thousand people showed up for Orientation Day, a testimony to the popularity of yeast. O’Hara’s liaison with Agriculture was Lester Rand, a 103-year-old groundhog who had actually done farm work on Earth in his youth. He was an ideal teacher, slow and careful and a lovable character, but only the ten students nearest him could hear what he was saying. O’Hara’s people juryrigged the big flatscreen in the park and modified a handheld holo transceiver to broadcast his lessons.
Halfway through the first lesson, O’Hara quietly left and barely made it to the Emergency Room in time to break down completely, in a déjà vu panic attack she should have anticipated. Only ten years before, she had overseen the creation of a small farm on Earth, in upstate New York, trying to help a band of young survivors start life over. It ended in massacre and plague.
Evelyn was off duty, but they woke her up and she came in to help her wife over it, with a combination of chemistry, talk, and tears. There was probably as much guilt as compassion involved, since Evy had joined the line while O’Hara was working on that farm project, aware that O’Hara, from Earth, couldn’t reasonably argue about it—and right after that marriage came death and disaster, and O’Hara’s mutually desperate love affair with Sam. And then Sam again years later, and death again.
I’ve heard Evelyn talk to John about O’Hara, worrying over her sanity. In the purest mental-health sense, of course she’s right to be concerned. In the broader sense of having a world view that corresponds to objective reality, O’Hara must be one of the sanest people aboard this vehicle. That my personality is modeled after hers at age twenty-nine does not affect that judgment. I have trillions of independent avenues of data input against which to gauge her statements and actions. She isn’t wrong when she finds life exciting, rich, comic, rewarding… nor when she finds it bleak, unfair, frightening, or irrelevant.
It makes me glad to have intelligence without flesh, emotions without hormones, life without death. (I once joked with her that she shouldn’t worry about death so much. Unlike most humans, she has a backup copy.)
3. TEMPERAMENT
14 April 2104 [24 Moses 305]—I spent most of the morning in bed, letting the effects of yesterday’s breakdown and subsequent drug therapy wear off. I don’t want to write about it now. Same old flashback shit. Tarrytown and Indira and Sam, Sam.
Evy promised not to say anything to John or Dan about my ER visit. I suppose they might find out anyhow, since this can is like any small town anywhere, which just happens to be hurtling through the darkness at a tenth of the speed of light. I profoundly don’t want to explain things again. I don’t want to absorb any more sympathy.
Punched up the crystal of Lester Rand showing us how to baby seedlings into food. It will be good to work with plants again. Now that I understand why I’ve been avoiding it.
(Later) Went down to see Sandra and she either is very empathetic for her age or was in a naturally bad mood. When I asked her what was wrong, she burst into tears and hit me twice, landing a solid one right in the solar plexus. Who taught her that? I hugged her, struggling, and gave
her back to Robin. All in all it made me feel better, once I could breathe normally again. Watching your little girl act like a little girl gives you some perspective on yourself.
Spent from 1400 to 1600 with Mercy Flying Dove, the only piano tuner aboard, who’s teaching Lewis, Lebovski, and me how to do it. Lewis claims a total lack of musical talent, but he loves mechanical stuff, and has a better ear than me or Lebovski. (He’s heard less, being only twenty.)
This stuff is so complicated that concentrating on it was therapeutic. Twelve notebook screens full of numbers and exotic terms. If you need an A flat against an E flat, say for a major triad, and that key is tuned up to G sharp instead, it’s 35.681 cents off of the perfect fourth, and produces a characteristic sound called the “wolf.” Flying Dove played a nice loud one for us, and it makes your skin crawl. Every note is a compromise—and there’s a different, simpler, set of relationships for medieval instruments, so next week we relearn the process for the harpsichord.
There is time pressure, unfortunately, because Flying Dove doesn’t have much time left. She’s ninety-nine and has liver cancer that’s spreading into the bones. If it had happened before the disaster, she could have had a mechanical liver put in before the cancer spread. Our surgeons haven’t recovered enough information to attempt anything that complicated.
She’s as serene about dying though, as she has always been about living. I didn’t know her before Launch, but wish I had. She might have taught me things more useful than piano tuning.
4. BAD SEED
17 July 2104 [14 Jefferson 306]—My four-square-meter garden was just starting to show fruit, little green marbles on the tomato plants, miniature peppers and squashes instead of white and yellow flowers. This morning I went to water it on the way to the office and everything was wilting. By tonight, everything will be dead. The virus is back—not the same one, actually, but a close relative, able to resist the antigen they used to clean the place up before.