O’Hara didn’t see the policy ever affecting her. When Sandra was a little girl, she shared wholeheartedly her mother’s revulsion toward cryptobiosis. But people change.
11 August 2116 [5 Handy 332]—You lose one, you win one, you lose one… I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming. Daughters are little surprise machines.
Sandra declaring her love for Jakob was no surprise. That she wanted to marry at seventeen was a little bit of a shock, but her crowd are doing everything young. At least I talked them out of making it an exclusive bond—though they obviously consented just to humor my old-fashioned sexual attitudes. How could I ever want to do that with anyone else? Stick around, darlings.
And now she says that next year, as soon as she’s old enough, they’re going into the can together. Face the brave new world of Epsilon as young pioneers, ready to fight whatever dinosaurs or Martians are waiting on the other side of the airlock.
I really was caught off guard. She knows how I feel about it, anyhow. It would be stupid of me to try to talk her out of going.
I feel so old. Prime, come talk.
• • •
On 10 August 2117, Sandra and Jakob went into cryptobiosis. As soon as her term was over, O’Hara pulled strings and followed them.
AGE 55
IN DREAMS AWAKE
For time beyond time it was nothing but dark gray shot through with black stars the black stars slowly moving sparkling she could smell them move hear the burning cold as the stars sucked heat tinkling out of space space with the feel of stiff velvet folding
Then colors whistling soft harmonies indistinct shapes smelling no looking fuzzy sharpening up pictures this is not a dream not quite you don’t watch your dreams
Walking with Jeff through the snow outside Paris the Seine cleaner here not so clogged with houseboats old men huddled with dogs and long fishing poles lots of young walkers out in the bright melting snow stop to warm our hands at the vendor’s brazier hot crisp & greasy sausages with a cold stab of mustard foam cup of spicy mulled cider
Eight years old old enough to fly perching terrified on the edge of the platform New New York spinning slowly underneath gentle push between the shoulder blades falling falling but straight out instructor alongside shouting just spread ’em just spread ’em then gliding flapping rolling if I had the wings of an angel over these prison bars would I fly
Painting wall with Charlie after the first time his juice leaking out of my soreness I sweep the roller in a crude cartoon of his big dick he blushes but laughs it was so big in my mouth I panicked but he was gentle and knew what to do to make it easy God knows he didn’t know much else
Watching Sandra’s birth strange stuff she coughed up before the first shriek smell of babypuke and solvent acetone, John said then her soft mouth searching on my breast sucking fabric the cold spot there after they took her away
Fingerpaints on cool smooth plastic new creche mother pressing my hand down in it then again and again then trace stems for the flowers use knuckles to make grass funny every color tastes the same
Sandra rushing in with bright red blood pulsing from torn lip she didn’t want to tell me that tall bitch Harni Stevens I couldn’t stop it blood all over my console had to take her and coldseal it at the ER I talked to Harni’s line parents but they just laughed girls will be girls yeah but some girls will be animals too
New York City ruins crouching out of the wind behind a wrecked van waiting watching the little black boy whispering “Indira say you live inside a ball of dirt, like worms” and then the white boys with the guns
First solo the O’Neill Day concert when I was eleven that stupid simplified Mozart medley had to drop the middle part down an octave to keep from squeaking look on old Kurlov’s face
Snorkeling in the warm water fairy grace of the coral anemones a cloud of tiny bright yellow fish following the squids until they got tired of us the big brown shark harmless scary shivering on the hot sand I already had my dormitory key out he must have been behind the shrubs hand over mouth knife at throat pressed up behind me I could feel he didn’t have an erection just a robbery but when I dropped my purse he cut the waistband and pulled my pants down I bit he stabbed I screamed he banged my head against the sidewalk twice hard then people everywhere kicking him sirens fading
Actually seeing them the paintings you’ve seen all your life ten eleven hours in die Louvre so tired knees are shaking you will never see this again never but the Mona Lisa was in Pittsburgh
Awkward hour with my father small cubicle neat but dusty glass of harsh cheap wine sad little man felt good afterwards the biting blowing snow I think I would have hated him if he had been happy
The pool in Devon’s World all those people earnestly fucking and sucking in the dim red light with the music locker room smell with chlorine and pheromones stepping around the foursome me giggling Charlie mortified at my disrespect
Florida pinewoods ripping sound look up at exhaust trail Jeff says Christ I hope that’s not nuclear it was
the light hurts my eyes
UP TEMPO
8 January 59 or 18 Dostoevski 427 or whatever. I’m ninety-six years old? This “week,” whatever a week is now:
2159
January
427
Tuesday
8
Dost
18
Nineday
Wednesday
9
19
Tenday
Thursday
10
20
Oneday
Friday
11
21
Twoday
22
Threeday
Saturday
12
23
Fourday
Sunday
13
24
Fiveday
Monday
14
25
Sixday
26
Sevenday
Columbus 1
Eightday
Yeah, happy nineday. I mean Nineday.
Age 55.00 [18 Dostoevski 427]—Prime says I might want to keep this diary in terms of my age in real honestto-god Earth years, rather than exotic dates, at least for a while. She’ll compute it for me as I need it. To preserve what’s left of my freeze-dried sanity.
When I first came fully awake, this body was very frightening. Having been warned, having seen pictures of others, only helped a little. White and slimy like a fish’s belly, but dreadfully slack; anywhere on my body I could pinch the skin and pull up a rubbery membrane the size of my palm. Pale blue veins everywhere.
After a couple of hours of fluid dripping into the arm, though, I was close to normal except for the pallor. It was odd to watch my breasts inflate from flaccid wrinkles up to their normal unimpressiveness. Maybe I should have stayed hooked up a while longer.
They fed us some neutral gruel and had us go through a careful hour of stretching exercises. Then a doctor and a crypto technician checked us one by one for doneness, then showed us to a pile of clothes and said we were on our own. I found a lavender shift and some slippers that looked like real leather, and thus armored went out to greet the brave new world.
Hardly recognize the place. There’s a style for garish color combinations that make my teeth hurt. That could be partly a sensory hangover from those weird visions in the can. Pink and black, though, for walls and ceiling? Orange and purple clothing?
But there are improvements. The central park has been almost doubled in size, and they’ve force-grown trees there of many pleasing varieties. Even a banyan like a big puzzle house of wooden fingers. The ag level is being used to its maximum acreage, half again what’s necessary for food, and there are plots of exotic hybrid vegetables and a small sea of flowers. They showed me a popular melon with flesh that’s dark blue shot through with orange veins and smells like fried chicken—Kentucky Fried Chicken, from the longlost US of A. Will I ever be adventurou
s enough, or hungry enough, to try it? Maybe they’ve made a chicken that tastes like canteloupe.
There certainly is a sufficiency of chickens, dozens of the smelly little things, not to mention small herds of goats and bunnies and pigs. About a quarter of the ag area has been made over into a sort of combination petting zoo/ farm school, so all the kids will be used to handling animals.
I haven’t seen so many children since Earth. Never a dull moment—never a quiet one, either, at least in public places. Kids nowadays, grumble, grumble. I can’t wait to see Sandra. Right now she’s not scheduled to come out until the third wave, a year or more after Epsilon orbit. Maybe I can pull some strings and move her and Jakob up to the first wave, where they wanted to be. Though it’s not clear how much real authority we Pool denizens are going to have.
Maybe I don’t want my daughter in the first wave.
The Cabinet member in charge of Entertainment (now called Sports and Entertainment) was born the year after I went crypto. He knows all about me and is very respectful. And very protective of his territory. I don’t want to meddle, but anyone with an ear can tell the harpsichord is out of tune. I want it to be ready when Chul’ comes out.
They told me to take it easy for a week, get oriented. Which kind of week? How about a month or two? The new months are short, twenty-six or twenty-seven of the puny days.
I don’t know whether to feel cheated or honored. I was going to wake up a couple of years after planetfall, let everybody else take care of the headache of setting things up. Now I get to be part of the great adventure. One year to Epsilon, one Earth year. About two of the new flavor.
I’m just tired. They say I’ll sleep a lot at first. That sounds like a great idea.
(Later, same day, somewhat refreshed) I knew it would take a while to get used to the new calendar. It’s not the physical strain we’d expected, since they have this drug Tempozine (sounds like a journal for jazz enthusiasts) that resets your various biological rhythms. ‘Home’s day-and-night cycle is set now on Epsilon’s short ten-hour day, which comes to about eighteen and a half REAL HUMAN hours.
A person who, like me, used to need six hours—REAL HUMAN hours—of sleep every night now needs a little over four and a half. But Epsilon hours are about ninety REAL HUMAN minutes. So I’ll only sleep a little over three hours, ship time. But that’s all I need, honest.
It remains to be seen what effect this is going to have on working, playing, eating, and so forth, I used to work a nine-hour day, at least in terms of being routinely accessible to other people. That’s six new-style hours, fine. But then add the three hours’ sleep, and hold it! There’s only one hour left for eating, drinking, sex, reading, exercise, VR, cube, hobbies, moonlit walks, and plotting to overthrow the government. Don’t forget two minutes for clarinet practice and forty-five seconds of quiet meditation.
So I have to cut down on the daily work hours. The simple fraction, 9 out of 24, gives me a 3.75-hour work cycle per 10-hour Epsilon day. Which would mean checking in to the office less than six Earth hours per day. I’ve spent that much time getting the rest of the day organized!
Guess I’ll study how other people have adapted, especially the oldsters. They switched fourteen years ago and seem to be doing okay; not especially rushed or disorganized. They’re more spread around the clock than we used to be, but our regularity was largely a vestigial holdover from Earth business practices. Shutting down labs and offices and classrooms while everybody rests is wasteful of space.
I wonder what will happen when we get to the planet, though. Almost nobody alive has experienced actual night. It does make you want to close your eyes.
Think I’ll like this new way of eating, one big meal and a lot of little nibbles. Like the tapas in Spain. See how fast I gain back the twelve kilos I lost in crypto.
Maybe not at all. I like wearing Medium again. I’ll like being youngest wife in the family, too.
I don’t know how to feel about Evy; how to act around her. She’s still pretty active for 82, working a regular shift in the Geriatrics ward. She could have gone on half-shift at 80 (or 180, Epsilon years), but likes keeping busy.
She looks so ancient. I can’t help feeling a perverse kind of triumph. She seduced my husbands when she was a child of eighteen. How are they going to feel about her now?
Maybe I will have two husbands again. The medical people say they can do microsurgery—not nanosurgery—on John that might fix him up. They don’t want to wait much longer before reviving him.
I missed a fairly uneventful forty years. We still haven’t made contact with New New, though several times a week we broadcast and receive time-lagged exchanges with Key West and New York in the States, and Oxford and Melbourne in England and Australia. No one on Earth has been able to unlock a general database yet, so we’re all relaying partially reconstructed data lumps and old-fashioned stuff from paper books, helping one another rebuild. Literature and art are now way ahead of science and engineering, for obvious reasons.
Key West. Jeff died about sixteen years ago. He left me a comforting farewell message that I could half believe. At least death is the end of pain. He was hurting a lot toward the end, not even able to raise his head from the pillow.
(I’d hoped to be able to “visit” him by way of VR data exchange, even postmortem. But they still haven’t reached that level of technology in Key West.)
I lost him so many times, in different ways. When I went into the can I knew it was for ever this time. But still. I wish I felt more.
JUVENILIA
PRIME
O’Hara was one of fifty cryptos selected for “the Pool,” the Planetfall Consultant Pool, people awakened early to help plan the transition from flight to colonization.
A cynic might see the Pool as a way of conferring status without the nuisance of granting authority. Everybody had to be awakened sooner or later, after all. What to do with the dozens who had been Cabinet members and Coordinators? Some of them would expect to step right back into positions of authority—but all those positions were filled. This way their talents could be recognized and used with a minimum of damage to the actual decision-making process.
They thawed out people in groups of ten, one group per week. All but one of the people in O’Hara’s group survived, which was better than expected, there being a high proportion of elderly people in the Pool.
There was no set itinerary for the first few weeks; just wander around and get your bearings. Charlee Boyle came out in the same group as O’Hara, so they explored the familiaryet-strange world together.
There were children everywhere, which was no surprise. The original plan had allowed for Newhome’s population to nearly double in the last ten years of flight. None under three years old, though, so planetfall wouldn’t be complicated by infants.
It was less orderly than the original plan, people born in neat blocks of proper ages, with proper genetic combinations, the creche carefully preparing them to take over their proper roles in the colonization of Epsilon.
Instead, the creche system had been in chaos for a generation; not one child in four was raised conventionally. Some children were not even conceived conventionally, their parents having refused sterilization, reverting to the atavism of semihaphazard fertility. (There was still a measure of control, though. The amendment that allowed fertility also set a limit on the number of children per woman, adjustable according to the current demographic climate.) Most children lived with their parents most of the time, going to Creche a few hours a day for numbers and letters. Only about a tenth followed the traditional Crecheto-ageeight pattern.
There was a drastic shortage of teachers above the level of simple writing and computation skills, most of which were provided by computer instruction anyhow, the programs imported from Earth. From seventh form up, most of the teaching was catch-as-catch-can, done by professionals taking time off from their regular duties, who might or might not have any skill in communicating to young people.
O’Hara’s degrees in literature and music would oblige her to teach at least part time in those subjects. She looked forward to music, but wasn’t happy about the prospect of teaching literature—let alone trying to do it when most of the books she’d studied in school weren’t available. Her doctorates in American Studies and Management covered material too obscure or esoteric to be useful, and her practical experience in managing people was one skill that wasn’t rare.
They wanted to tap Charlee, too. She was a chemist, but was uncertain about how well she could teach it at the elementary level. She hadn’t put on a lab coat in twenty years. She could lecture for hours about arcane aspects of piezochemistry, but she wasn’t sure whether you were supposed to pour sulfuric acid into water, or vice versa. She did know that one or the other was liable to explode.
POOL PARTY
Age 55.05 [15 Columbus 427]—It’s a revealing way of dating a diary. So I’ve spent one thousandth of my life wandering through this interesting chaos. Well, hully gee, Mr. Crane. Time sure flies when you’re having fun.
First meeting of the Planetfall Consultant Pool was a circus. The latest bunch of Poolees, including Daniel, have only been out of the can for two days, still kind of disoriented. The first twenty or so are extremely impatient to get things moving. Charlee and I wander somewhere in the middle: will you please stop shouting? Will you please focus your eyes?