Sandra had appropriated a well-worn deck of cards from Creche and taught us all how to play Planets. It was a surprisingly complex trading game, in which the first person to collect a whole Epsilon System wins. She displayed a good memory for other people’s hands. Talking to her afterward, I found that she hadn’t used any mnemonic device, but just has very solid native powers of concentration and retention. She amused John and Dan by reciting the value of pi to fifteen places; as far as I knew, she could have been bluffing for the last thirteen.
She was disappointed to find out, from John, that the actual planets probably wouldn’t look much like the pictures on the cards. We knew how big the planets were and something about their atmospheres, but would have to be a lot closer before we could take actual pictures of them. I wondered whether her teachers knew that.
I had never dealt cards in quarter gee before. With five people, you can easily go around more than twice before the first card hits the bed. This led to an obvious game, Sandra and Evy and I seeing how long we could keep a card afloat nohands, blowing it back and forth, while John and Dan kept out of the way and carried on a conversation in differential equations or something. It turns out you can keep the card going until the smallest member of the team becomes giddy from hyperventilation.
She went from giddiness to drooping in about thirty seconds, so I passed her around to kiss everybody goodnight, and we tottered up toward the Boston lift.
Her teachers, and the creche, would still have her in the daytime, from 0800 to 1600. She would have dinner and sleep and breakfast with me, so long as her academic and social development didn’t suffer. We were both on probation, theoretically, but the creche is so crowded now I don’t think they would take her back full time for anything short of an ax murder. “And who was this person you hacked to pieces, Dr. O’Hara? Did he or did he not actually deserve it?”
My neighbor in Uchūden, Ondrej Costache, kindly moved three doors around to a vacant office so I could make up an adjoining room for Sandra. She’s going through a dinosaur phase now, so I put some appropriately ferocious prints up on the wall. They contrast agreeably with the coverlet the laundry gave me for her bed, little piggies and sheep.
I keyed her monitor for some standard restrictions, as the creche advised. That’s not to keep her from learning “adult” things, but to protect her from hopeless confusion, swamped by detail. It essentially restricts her database to one about twice as large as the one that she has access to at school. That will theoretically encourage her to do homework, showing off special knowledge.
She is a little bit privileged, since only about two thirds of her classmates have parents who opted to bring them home. A few years ago I would never have dreamed of it, myself. I don’t know whether I would do it now, if we both had to live in my office, since I’m liable to be working until midnight or later.
As we were walking back to Uchūden, I explained to her that some nights I would be sleeping with Uncle John or Uncle Dan, but that her monitor would beep me automatically if she needed something. She got a very serious look on her face and asked why Uncle John and Uncle Dan didn’t come up to Uchūden to fuck. I reminded her that Uncle John is hurt by normal gravity, and besides, my bunk was too narrow for two grown-ups.
I asked her whether she had ever done that with the boys at Creche, and she said no, they weren’t allowed to until menarche, not “serious.” I let it go at that.
She admired the dinosaurs on the wall, identifying them by name, and was fascinated by the luxury of having a toilet and monitor to herself. She was nervous about sleeping alone, though; at Creche she was in a room with eleven others. I told her she could spend the first night with me.
I didn’t get much sleep, only partly because eight-year-olds have more elbows than normal people. I was intoxicated by her closeness, the sweet smell of her hair and breath, the small noises she made in her sleep. The thought that she was mine.
THE BURDENS OF FAITH
PRIME
O’Hara probably knew better than any other ’Home official what the population of the Church of the Eternal Now, the “Nowers,” had grown to at any given time. She had to physically remove each of them from the VR machines—but usually only once. In their new enlightenment, they found virtual reality confusing, even more so than normal reality, and didn’t come back for more.
Sometimes she had to call Howard Bell, all 120 muscle-bound kilograms of him, to help wrestle the slack lumps out of their couches. Some of them had put on a lot of weight, eating three meals a day and spending the rest of their time and energy keeping their eyes unfocused. By the last day of 2107, they had dragged eighty-eight of the faithful from the dream room.
Newhome’s charter allowed complete freedom of religious expression so long as that expression did not violate civil law. There was no law against being a useless consumer. The police could incarcerate a Nower for being a “public nuisance,” if he or she did something particularly outrageous, but the faithful didn’t mind jail. It just meant that somebody else brought them their meals. Trials were an exasperating farce.
Actually, the ones who sat around vegetating, communing with their inner truth, weren’t as much of a problem as the proselytizers. One of O’Hara’s helpers, Julio Eberhara, fell for the church’s arguments. His sphere of influence was limited to the Game Room door, but for a while everybody who wanted to check out a game had to take a ration of inane theology along with it. Then he stopped answering the door with any reliability, sitting at his table humming, staring at an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of an idyllic mountain scene. O’Hara moved him and the puzzle to the storeroom, where at least his humming wouldn’t bother anybody.
She tried to explain this business to Sandra, without much success. Sandra had had a little careful religious instruction in Creche—this is what some people believe, this is what others believe, and you will develop your own beliefs as you grow—but at third form, they hadn’t yet been exposed to the excesses of religion. To Sandra and most other children, the Nowers were scary. A lot of what adults did was enigmatic or even silly, but in general they followed reassuringly predictable patterns. The Nowers were adults whose behavior was mysteriously infantile, and this regressiveness threatened the security of the children’s world.
In talking with her daughter, O’Hara came to realize that there was a component of fear in her own feelings toward those people. Susceptible to this kind of weird behavior, what other kinds of behavior might they be capable of? Could inexplicable passivity explode into inexplicable violence? The Psych people she talked to cautiously said no. But on the other hand, they were at a loss to explain why so many aboard were vulnerable to this specific variety of dissociation. It was like a kind of existential virus. Could a normal person catch it? Could O’Hara?
It didn’t seem likely. Though Psych no longer had extensive profiles of everybody, they were able to interview acquaintances and sometimes family relations of the people possessed by the Church of the Eternal Now, and it seemed that certain patterns of personality were favored. Coworkers used terms like scatterbrained, sullen, hard to train, unimaginative, lazy. Family members tended to preface their interviews with a sigh, and then work on some variation of “He was such a nice little boy.” Most of them had been in and out of various religions, tending toward the wholist and fundamentalist. Seven Nowers had once been proselytizing atheists, a combination both odd and annoying, since almost three quarters of ’Home’s population already adhered to unbelief in some degree. (John had worked with one of the antifaithful in the Deucalion reclamation project, almost twenty years before, and had confounded him by claiming to be a “fundamentalist Syncretic,” borrowing from various friends jewelry presenting cross, crescent, flower, and Star of David, switching from week to week, enlivening the lunch hour with haphazard but passionate pronouncements about the pope, Muhammed, Baha’u’llah, and Moses. John didn’t know much about religion, but the fanatic knew less.)
The net result was that ’
Home experienced no significant decline in work accomplished by losing them. The eighty-eight people gone off to wherever the Church of the Eternal Now was had added to and subtracted from productivity in about equal measure.
YEAR 11.07
GROWING PAINS
15 October 2108 [1 Lao Tse 315]—What do they feed those children, sex hormones? Sandra’s starting to sprout breasts. Talking about menarche. Put a cork in it, girl. She hasn’t even had time to be a girl!
Of course she’s anxious about being the youngest. The oldest of the Old Guard are ancient crones of ten. But how could worrying about that cause her to grow breasts? (Evy says the record age is eight, so I guess I should be thankful for small favors.)
Mother was such a bitch about the way I delayed menarche. Trying not to overcompensate. Sure, honey, if you want to go from blocks to cocks in seven years, what business is it of mine?
Let’s separate this out into factors:
1. Concern about my own age. I’m not old enough to have a pubescent daughter. Me a potential grandmother? (And what if Sandra elects for parthenogenesis? A hall of mirrors.)
2. Concern about her emotional maturity. She’s so moody now, quick to laugh or cry. I think a boy could hurt her deeply without knowing it, without meaning to.
3. Concern about her studies. She’s not all that interested in academics, and will be much less so once she starts with boys. (Footnote—a constant and increasing disappointment, but be fair. She might be as bookish as I was, if she had as many books.)
4. It’s perverse. It really is, little girls and little boys. If everybody’s doing it, then everybody’s perverse!
5. Selfishness. I don’t want to share her love more than I already do. Bad enough that she loves Uncle John more than me. But who wouldn’t?
Maybe it’s mortality rather than age as such. I don’t think I mind being older. It makes a lot of things easier. But as she moves toward the marriage bed, I move toward the grave.
How poetical. I’ll leave it, though.
LONG-DISTANCE CALL
Newhome continually checked a wide range of frequencies sternward, hoping for a message or even some manmade electronic noise from New New. On 19 October 2108 [6 Lao Tse 315], they got a sudden strong message at the 25.7-centimeter line (which was the standard 21-centimeter line, redshifted by their velocity relative to Earth), but not from New New.
Sixty seconds of warbling carrier wave, then this message repeated ten times:
Earth calling the starship. Earth calling the starship. This is Key West, Florida, station WROK, broadcasting at a frequency they call the water hole, 1420 megahertz, 21 centimeters. This message will be repeated ten times, and then we will switch to tightbeam video flatscreen on a composite signal from 54 to 60 megahertz, audio backup at 1420. We’ll repeat the whole thing for a couple of weeks, and will expect a reply in a couple of years, same frequencies.
Earth calling the starship…
When the flatscreen flickered to life, it showed a cadaverous balding man, staring nervously into the camera. Behind him, palm trees swayed in a light breeze, seagulls floated.
STORM:
I hope you all are getting this. We don’t know how much power it takes to get out there or how good we’re focused on you.
My name’s Storm. I’m the mayor of Key West and the governor of Dixie. That’s basically Florida and what used to be Georgia and Miss’ippi.
(Nods to somebody OFF)
Yeah, and part of Lou’siana too, but we ain’t heard from them in months. They were gettin’ flooded.
This is sometime in October 2107. It’s a long story as to why we don’t know exactly what the date is.
Anyhow, more about that later. We got things pretty much up and running. Even power to spare for this kinda thing, though most people don’t think there’s no one up there.
What the hell happened to New New York? If you know. They stopped broadcasting here about ten, eleven years ago—
(Someone OFF speaks; Storm says, “Yeah, yeah.”) Exactly one year after you left, if we were counting right. So it must of had something to do with you. Maybe you did it, somehow. Hope not. Anyhow, we could sure use their help now, so if you know anything about it, let us know.
Anyhow, this here’s Healer. He’s the one who started this whole thing.
The camera pans around jerkily to a big man in his late fifties, sunbaked skin dark against a shock of white beard and long, flowing white hair. There’s a radio telescope dish in the background.
HAWKINGS:
My actual name is Jeff Hawkings. With any luck, I should know one of you. Hi, Marianne. Long time no see.
Key West was an oasis after the war, with water, food, and power independent of the American mainland. The ubiquitous biological agent, what we called the “death,” was here as everywhere, until New New York sent us the antigen that wiped it out. I brought it down south; that’s why they call me Healer.
Not that simple, actually. There was unrest, a power struggle, a bizarre belief system that took over most of Dixie and still has its adherents. Guess I told you about them back in ’90, ’91, when 1 got through to Marianne from Plant City. The Mansonites; they’re still around, but on the wane. Fortunately. Murder and cannibalism are sacraments to them. We try to stay out of their way.
We need help. Trying to rebuild the world here; trying not to repeat too many mistakes. Reinventing the wheel several times a week, I’m sure.
As you know, the death killed almost all adults; the only grown-ups who survived were giants like me, people with acromegaly. Most of us are mentally retarded. I may be the only person on this planet with a bachelor’s degree.
Which is why we so desperately need you. Information. Training. We’re surrounded by technological wonders and nobody knows how they work, let alone how to fix them if they break.
We weren’t able to get anything from New New York. We picked up a lot of radio noise from them until they stopped dead. But we were still a couple of years away from being able to broadcast then.
That B.A. isn’t very useful: Political Science, with some graduate work in forensics and management. No real science. I can barely do algebra; calculus is just a word to me. My main function here is teaching, but I can’t teach anybody anything technical.
There are bright kids here and they can figure out a lot on their own—one of them got this transmitter going and pointed at you—but they need to talk to real engineers and scientists, even with a twoor three-year time lag.
There may be many other enclaves like this somewhere in the world, but so far we haven’t heard of them. We have made contact with two other radio transmitters: one in Brazil and one in Poland. So far we haven’t done much but exchange names and locations. We desperately need language texts, or at least dictionaries, in Polish and Portuguese.
Anyhow, you can see the fix we’re in. The only books we have are old-fashioned paper ones. Most of the information in them is inapplicable or just plain wrong. We desperately need to copy things from your up-to-date library.
I’m sure that somewhere on this planet we’ll find a large electronic library intact, like a physical backup to the Library of Congress—I know that the actual hadron matrix for something like that is about the size of a small floater, and there are dozens of copies around the country—but as things stand right now, even if we found one, we wouldn’t be able to tap it.
Let me close off on a personal note. We saw the starship leave back in ’97. That was fast work; I have some idea of how huge a project it was, and I suspect you were in a hurry because you were afraid of another war, afraid of Earth.
That seems ludicrous on the face of it, since we’re little more than a band of savages capering around the mysterious remnants of an advanced civilization. We lack both knowledge and context. Context is the personal part.
(He gestures at the radio telescope behind him.) The boys and girls who fixed up that dish lived around it for years without even knowing what it was. I had to
tell them. Then they had to learn to read, and find books; eventually, books about electronics.
People with my disorder don’t live too long. What will happen after I’m dead? What obvious things are going to be overlooked forever, because there’s nobody alive who remembers real life, life before the war?
Assuming something terrible did happen, and New New York is dead—then you people are the only human link that Earth will have with its past. You’re going to have to supply the context, if Earth is going to be rebuilt.
Don’t be afraid of us. The madmen, the mad governments, who started the war are memories now, less than memories. This is a planet of innocent children. They need your help to survive.
Hope I’m not talking to empty space. We had to make various assumptions—that your target star was still Epsilon Eridani, that you would be listening to the 21-centimeter line, 1420 megahertz. That you still survive.
Marianne… uh, what can I say? I hope to hear from you in a couple of years. (Laughs) Hope you’re enjoying your trip. Life is not bad here, considering.