The Coordinators supplied us with a list of questions:
1. There are two shuttles plus one backup, each carrying thirty passengers and two crewmembers, and a tonne of supplies, or about three tonnes of supplies and no people. How many people should go down for the first, exploratory landing? How many flights?
My first response would be to send thirty brave, smart, but highly expendable people, along with a second shuttle full of tools and weapons. If they survive for a few weeks, we can send a larger, slightly less intrepid, bunch.
Kena Russel pointed out that all we know about the planet so far is that it’s a water/oxygen world of such-andsuch mass and diameter and average surface temperature. From orbit we’ll be able to tell what the terrain is like, whether there are large animals—or perhaps superhighways and immigration officials!—to contend with. Will we need lasers or linguistics texts? Passports? No way to know until we get there. All the advance planning is tentative.
2. The shuttles are presumably dangerous. They were designed to operate within an intricate maintenance pattern of testing and tweaking that we’ve only partly reconstructed. Estimates for “time till first failure” for each one go from ten flights to two hundred. Who goes on the early ones?
That’s just an inverted way of asking who is most expendable, of course. If anybody were truly indispensable because of what they know, they shouldn’t go near the shuttle in the first place, because ground and orbit will be in constant communication. No one has to be “on the spot” at all, in order to impart information.
Some people are important because of what they can do, though, rather than what they know, or in addition to that. Mechanics, carpenters, surveyors, equipment operators. The most intelligent and strong manual laborers. People with proven leadership skills and organizational ability—especially with planetside experience. That’s me. (Actually, there are quite a few of us, but I’m by far the youngest, at 55.05, or a spry 122, Epsilon years.)
3. Should anybody be asked to go against their will? To stay aboard?
To the first, I’d say absolutely not. It would be a nightmarish invasion of their rights and also impractical. You wouldn’t get any efficient work out of them, and they’d screw up morale.
I’d like to say no for the second one, too, but there’s a practical aspect to it. Suppose each shuttle fails on its tenth flight? Nine times 30 times 3 is 810 people. The last survey, combining cryptos and those of us among the warm, totaled eight thousand who want to go planetside and three thousand who want to stay aboard. A lot of people will have to wait. I suspect the numbers will become more manageable after the first shuttle wipeout, though.
(I wonder how the statistics will change once we start settlement. Some people undoubtedly will step out of the airlock, take one look at how far away the horizon is, and jump back into the shuttle. That happened to about one out of fifteen New New tourists who went to Earth, deepseated agoraphobia.
On the other hand, if the people working planetside are successful and happy, the more timid, but not agoraphobic, may change their minds.)
4. Should we concentrate on developing one site, or try several small settlements in different areas?
I was almost alone in opting for the latter. But then most of these people have lived in one biome all their lives (two, if you count subzero desiccation!) and don’t see any virtue in a variety of locations. I pointed out that some local danger might wipe out one place and not affect the rest—like Roanoke Island, the first British colony in America, which disappeared and left not a trace while its ship was on a resupply passage to Britain. Probably plague or a raid by autochthones. (French and Spanish settlements to the north and south were unaffected.)
Of course nothing so mysterious would happen to our pioneers. They’d have an audience.
It’s another one of those questions that’s not answerable until we see what the planet looks like. There may not be that much variety. Which leads to:
5. What do we do if Epsilon turns out to be uninhabitable?
Well, we could ram it out of spite. I didn’t suggest this.
Some of the scientists got huffy and said it was a nonquestion; if we hadn’t been sure that Epsilon was Earthlike, the mission wouldn’t have been launched. Son Van Duong pointed out that “Earthlike” circa spring 2085 would include a mutated virus wafting around that killed everybody within a few years. To the response “that was because of a war,” Son shrugged. So the war became part of the ecology.
The real question is, how much would we tell the people, how soon? Some before the others?
I think on general principles we ought to tell everybody everything, and just brace ourselves for a lot of unhappiness. A few thousand would probably be relieved, of course. (And what would the others do, leave?)
We could live indefinitely in orbit, eventually augmenting and then supplanting the matter/antimatter power source with “solar” power (epsilonic power?); just be a smaller New New York. Or maybe shift our base of operations to the planet’s moon, which is about the size of Earth’s.
Of course the possibility of planetwide ecological engineering, terraforming, came up. The experts were divided on whether it was a practical option, working from an incomplete database—and even if we knew exactly what to do to the poor planet, could we spare enough energy and materials from ’Home to even make a dent?
I have the obvious moral problem with going in and making over a planet just to suit us, though arguably that’s what we did to Earth. It could have been worse. If the Industrial Revolution had continued another century, powered by burning petroleum and coal, Earth might have been on its way toward looking like Venus. I suppose it would have been pleasant in the air-conditioning. Spectacular scenery, too.
It would be frustrating to have gone through all this trouble and danger just to set up shop in orbit again, in reduced circumstances. We couldn’t simply scratch this one off our list and go on to the next likely candidate. Unlike the Solar System, Epsilon doesn’t have an antimatter brown-dwarf companion to tap for fuel. I suppose that in a few centuries they could come up with some other way to go from star to star.
I don’t have a few centuries. Just a hundred of these short years left, more or less, and it would please me to end them on that planet, surrounded by a roomful of greatgrandchildren. Who would shrug, maybe raise a glass in my direction, and then go on with planet building.
The everydayness of it, of making a new world. Some people don’t get excited about that. I don’t know what to say to them.
INTERIM REPORT
Age 55.35 [25 Polo 427]—So they have a rough sort of map now. Looks like gills would come in handy.
Well, better too much water than too little. It looks a lot like New Zealand, that one big island. I never got there. Nice to have a variety of climates, from tropic to arctic. Don’t like it here? Keep walking; it’ll change.
Actually, it’s bigger than the East Coast of the United States, and covers as much latitude as South America. And such imaginative names! I assume the people who have to live there will get around to changing them.
I find myself staring at the map and daydreaming. Whatever is it going to be like? Most of those specks are “artifacts,” electronic noise, but some of them are islands. I was never on an island I didn’t like, from Britain to Fiji.
Tropica is on the equator, and Iceland is below the Arctic Circle (there are permanent icepacks, north and south, that aren’t on the map). The rest could be desert or jungle or paved from coast to coast. We won’t know much more, except for better outlines, until about three weeks before we arrive. Three weeks!
Coordinator-elect Dznowski asked me to cobble together a VR simulation of the planet so that people could “start getting used to it.” Hully golly gee. I asked her whether she’d rather I made it a rain forest or a metropolis. She said well, use your imagination, dear. Dear! I’m older than her father, who used to work for Dan. It will be a few generations before this crypto confusion wears of
f.
It will wear off when the last one of us dies.
So I asked around and wound up in conference with Robert Tyree, a planetary astronomer with a bushy beard and prehensile eyebrows. Very nice man, actually, but he’s so damned intense about astronomy that he can back you across a room talking about atmospheric gradients.
He did sympathize with my problem: the odds of coming up with a simulation that actually resembled Epsilon were right up there with being dealt a perfect bridge hand. Trees that look like bright red broccoli sprouts oozing orange marmalade, why not? Wingless birds that fly with carefully controlled and highly poisonous farts. So what we had to come up with was a cartoon planet, a template with the right gravity, temperature, color, and brightness of sunlight. Let people go in and close their eyes and use their own imaginations.
It was odd being in VR conjunction with a man I hardly knew. His dick hangs to the right, unlike Dan’s or John’s, I guess because he’s lefthanded. His beard feels funny. When he looks at his feet, it touches his throat.
He’s done a lot of VR in surreal modes, more even than I have, so he was really good at holding one aspect fixed while shifting another. We had the gravity as a given constant. Everything else we could fiddle with: hold the illumination level while changing the color mix; hold the air temperature while changing the humidity. I came up with one of those somatic flashes you sometimes have, and was able to make the feel of the air exactly what it had been on the beach, Guam, winter 2085. Salty, sultry, thick. Probably full of pheromones.
I got an odd feedback from him on that, something resembling awe. He was many generations removed from anyone who’d actually stood on a planetary surface, and planets were his life work, his passion. Yet he’d never even seen one.
I tried to give him the sense of total surround, the way Earth’s spirit, you have to say spirit, quietly dominates you, not at all like Newhome or even New New York. These are just rocks that men and women carved into houses. A planet sits patiently for billions of years, and people come by for the flicker of a moment. You don’t have to be a mystic to feel it.
We had sex while I was trying to get this across, the first extramarital sex I’ve had since thawing out, though I’m not sure it’s adultery when you’re separated by several meters, just connected by wires and thoughts. Whatever it was, it was very agreeable and very confusing. He’s less than a year older than Sandra, one of the Old Guard, gray hair and all. They’d certainly met, but he didn’t remember her particularly. He wasn’t all that interested in women. Not that he had many boyfriends, either—you communicate the most embarrassing things in VR—usually he had sex with himself, with a cybernetic image of himself, here in VR. He could flicker back and forth between the active and passive roles, postures. He gave me a ghost of a memory of that, but it doesn’t really come across well. When I have a penis in VR I’m “wearing” it, like a funny hat. The other part was familiar, of course.
So the template we came up with was about what you would experience on Earth if you were sitting in a room with unadorned white walls, open to the outside, near a beach. We kept the sultry Guam air, since Epsilon is mostly water, but I suspect it won’t be accurate. People describe that as “salt” air, but salt doesn’t have any smell. I think it’s a whiff of decomposing marine vegetation, how romantic, and I don’t know whether it’s likely that Epsilon’s seaweed will resemble Earth’s.
Dznowski probably won’t like it. I think she had in mind something fantastic but specific, like a disney. That would have exactly the wrong effect. I think she’s kind of thick, and I think we aren’t going to get along, and I wonder who she had to suck to become Coordinator. Probably the whole Cabinet. My assessment is not affected by her youth and beauty—I don’t even think she’s all that pretty, with the overdeveloped breasts and big innocent eyes and phony hair. Some men fall for that, or rise to it. Daniel turned into a preening erection the moment she walked into the conference room. Put that thing away, Dan. She’s young enough to be your granddaughter.
Not that I have any room to criticize. When we were washing up after finishing the template, I asked Robert whether he would like to have actual sex sometime. He turned beet red in various odd places (I’ve never seen a naked man blush before) and I backpedaled fast, saying I knew I was out of line, I didn’t mean to put him in an embarrassing position, but my mouth gets ahead of my brain sometimes.
His reaction was interesting, and what happened afterward was very interesting. He said he was pretty sure he couldn’t have sex with a woman, but he did want to be intimate with me, without having the machine between us. Talking and touching. It was night at the ag level, so we took an air mattress down to the flower beds and lay there holding each other, whispering. At first he held me so tightly I had difficulty breathing, but he got over that phase, and we talked, trading private memories of joy and sadness the way you sometimes will when you know a person is there for you totally. We stroked and rubbed, but I stayed away from his sex, figuring he would signal me if he wanted that, and he stayed away from mine, perhaps to avoid sending the wrong message. I could have used it.
Daniel was startled, later, when I woke him up with my mouth and then ravaged him.
CHANCES
PRIME
They had to make a decision about John. Nanosurgery was just a memory still, even though the information part of it might be reclaimed in a week or a year or a decade. But there was plain neurosurgery, microsurgery, and ’Home had three doctors who were willing to attempt the tricky cleaning and patching that might bring John’s brain back to normal function, or at least close.
The Triage Council notified John’s family that the surgery should be done now, in the last year before Epsilon. It was a recommendation, not an order, but their argument was strong. John would never be able to land on Epsilon, which is where most of the medical facilities would be in the future, and in any case his operation would have relatively low priority in what they expected to be a heavily overworked couple of decades.
They couldn’t assign a percentage probability to his chances of surviving the operation until he had been out of crypto long enough for the fluids in his body to regain normal electrolyte balance. He might not even survive the shock of thawing out, of course, but that particular risk was not going to change in the near future.
Only Daniel was against it. He didn’t like the idea of the nature of their family life being dictated by some doctors’ schedules—by some doctors’ advance perceptions of their schedules, that could be wildly inaccurate. But Evy had the greatest stake in the question, since she was the only one planning to stay aboard ’Home after orbit, and she wanted to give the surgeons the go-ahead.
O’Hara was on the fence, nervous about okaying a life-threatening procedure, wanting the best for John, and selfishly wanting the whole mess to be settled one way or the other. How many husbands did she actually have—one, two, or one-and-a-fraction?
All three of them did agree that John’s attitude had been unambiguous. He would rather die than hang on alive but bound in the straitjacket of dumb paralysis.
O’Hara finally cast her vote with Evy, and they brought John out. At first it looked bad. His eyes opened, but he made no sign of recognizing his family, or anybody. The third morning, though, his eyes tracked O’Hara. She explained the situation to him and he nodded.
The operation took nine hours. Evy was not a surgical nurse, but she was allowed to attend as a supernumerary fetch-and-carry. She told O’Hara about an odd minute when she had to crouch under the table and hold a urinal for the senior surgeon, young enough to be her granddaughter, to straddle. It was scary: that child is trying to concentrate on brain surgery, my husband’s life literally in her hands, and at the same time convince her urogenital sphincter to overcome a lifetime of training and habit. But brain surgeons are used to long operations, even if Evy was not.
They had been warned that the results of the operation might not be apparent for some time, so nobody was
alarmed when John didn’t show any immediate improvement. Within a week he had his yes-no-shit vocabulary back, and could also count up to ten. He was able to leave the hospital for his quarter-gee sickroom.
But he stayed at that level of verbal ability. After a month, the doctors conducted a series of tests and had to admit that the operation probably wasn’t going to make any difference. His brain was getting plenty of oxygen. It just wasn’t doing any good.
BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE
Age 55.43 [11 Theresa 428]—Actually, this starts about ten days ago. Too busy to write, molding young minds, perverting the will of die people, whatever.
They’ve put me in charge of the Induction section—Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion—on the reasonable basis that nobody else wants to touch it. Also, I was in charge of it back in Earth orbit, and actually went through the first half of the procedure myself, in the process of creating Prime.
That was 26 years ago, though, by my personal reckoning, and 66 years “real” time, or 147 Epsilon years. Most of half my lifetime, anyhow. I recall the process as sort of a vague bad dream; the administration of it, a waking nightmare.
But that’s not the problem now. There are a lot fewer people and I’m a better administrator than I was then. One problem is that more than three quarters of the Induction files are gone. Nine tenths were destroyed by New New’s information sabotage, and only a few replaced. Another problem is a lack of motivation.
Which is putting it mildly. It’s more like a consensus of rebellion. Induction is most effective on the young, and of course the best candidates are people who haven’t yet demonstrated a lot of talent in any useful field. So when you offer Induction to them, they get defensive. “I don’t want to be a welder, I want to be Myself!” Even though the only skill so far exhibited by Myself has been turning rations into compost.