Worlds Enough and Time (2 page)

(Only two months after this interview, O’Hara did allow another woman into their line, Evelyn Ten, who was beautiful but not dumb. Also twelve years younger than O’Hara, which bothered both of them for a time.)

My name is O’Hara Prime, just plain Prime to my friends, and although I am human I am not flesh and blood. I have lived for many centuries but will be twenty-nine years old forever.

This document is “my” story only by default: none of the other people in it is cybernetic, so none of them could have lived through the entire span. Marianne O’Hara once called me a vampire, I think playfully. It’s true that I have never been exposed to the light of day, and that I live in a box, and will not die; do not age. But from people I consume only data, not blood.

Marianne O’Hara was the flesh-human template for my personality, and we had frequent conversations after my initial programming. At first she only talked to me on birthdays and special times, like Launch Day. As she grew older, though, we would have rather long conversations regularly. She claimed that I, being forever young, helped keep her attitudes from completely ossifying.

“Forever young.” By the age of fifty she had forgotten how old you can feel at twenty-nine.

I could tell this story to another machine, if it were also human, in a few seconds of direct data transfer (and have done), but of course to tell it to “soft” humans I must resort to more complicated artifice. For your ease I will attempt to tell most of it in O’Hara’s words, in her style, at least up to the time of her death. The rest of the story is still hers in a real sense, as I hope will be made clear, but perforce I shall tell that part as seen through other eyes. She did not believe in ghosts, except for me.

(The style you are reading here is my own; that is to say, O’Hara might have written this way if she had had my standards and resources of logic, vocabulary, and so forth. She was admittedly less formal. When I begin her story I shall attempt to recreate that quality.

(Parts of her story will be in her own words, literally. She went through sporadic periods of almost compulsive journal- keeping, especially in times of trouble. She was a good diarist but obviously wrote with the eventuality of publication in mind. Her Earth diary was published before ’Home left orbit.)

I was “born,” or became self-aware, on 29 December 2092 [27 O’Neill 280], but when my programming was complete, a few weeks later, I felt not quite thirty, the same age as O’Hara. She was born 6 June 2063 [2 Freud 214], which was twenty-two Earth years before the war; thirty-four years before the starship
Newhome
would leave the ruins of Earth behind.

The program that created me was called “immersion,” or Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion. It is essentially a method of storing and transferring certain aspects of human personalities.
Newhome
needed to carry a broad cross-section of humanity in order to make a new start at Epsilon, but many of the people we needed either could not or would not leave the relative comfort and security of their satellite home, New New York. So we would make cybernetic copies of them, eventually to impose their aptitudes on willing volunteers, when colonization began. (Predictably few people would volunteer, of course—no matter how useless or redundant their own capabilities might be—and that is part of the story.)

Marianne O’Hara was in charge of the Demographics Committee in
Newhome’s
later planning stages, so she had to decide who to take along and who to plug into the machine if they could not or would not go. Unwilling to ask people to put up with something she hadn’t herself undergone, she was the first colonist to submit to the induction process. The prologue to this document, above, is a transcript

of part of her induction interview. (The other voice is my own, at the age of one day.)

As she remarks, it is not comfortable. The subject is put into deep hypnosis, usually with the help of drugs, and the body is wired up to have forty-three physiological parameters monitored. Some of them are readable with noninvasive procedures—pulse, blood pressure, brain waves—but measuring such things as sphincter tension and the viscosity of vaginal mucosa requires the insertion of probes.

Then, over the course of ten or so days, the subject is interrogated rapidly and thoroughly by the machine. Physiology recapitulates emotion; thus, the subject’s reaction to various stimuli serves to build up a quantitative map of her personality. These data are then integrated into a standard Turing macro-algorithm, to create a cybernetic person whose attitudes are similar to the subject’s. More than “similar.”

Talking about this makes me feel strange. Like describing the process of conception, pregnancy, and birth might be for you: you could describe it accurately without mentioning love, or caring, or mystery. The mystery, we have in common.

Going through the inverse procedure—taking a volunteer and forcing new aptitudes onto her personality—is even less comfortable, and to O’Hara’s relief, she was forbidden to try it. The volunteer is wired with several hundred implants. Similar questions are asked, but they are presented as hypnotic suggestions, with the proper answers being the one the “inductor” would have given. Physiological responses are induced in the volunteer, to mimic the inductor’s state of mind/body at the time of her response, which can be disturbing at a deep level. But it can successfully inject “talent” where there has been none.

O’Hara was forbidden induction because she was already crammed full of talent. Four degrees, two of them doctorates, and the tenth highest tested intelligence in
Newhome
. A few people liked her in spite of that. Rather more were waiting for her to stumble, I see now.

Which seems unfair. No one knows better than I what she had to live with, what she had to hold in. Although she enjoyed life, by and large, almost every morning she woke up in a cold sweat, or woke up screaming in the grip of vivid memory. Her first twenty-one years were unremarkable except for scholarly achievement; then she went to Earth, and in the course of a few months there was assaulted, kidnapped, raped. She was close to one man who was then murdered; fell in love with another and had to abandon him. The day she left Earth was the day the bombs fell, and history stopped.

She was mother to me, and twin sister, which is why I suppose I am doing this. But it’s important for other reasons.

23 September 2097 [13 Bobrovnikov 290]—Two days after launch day; I guess that will be “Launch Day” from now on. Less than an hour into the second day, actually. Left both husbands and my wife in a snoring pile in John’s low-gee flat. I have a whole cot to myself and a measure of privacy, in exchange for tolerating a little more gravity. What’s a little gravity, when you’re lying down? Though of course I’m sitting now, typing.

I will miss the touch of pen on paper. I didn’t type my journal very often in New New, even though the handwritten pages would eventually be read into the computer and the paper recycled. No sentimental anachronisms aboard
Newhome
, like paper for casual personal use. I even left behind the diary of my year on Earth, the year cut short at seven months. A leatherbound book from Bloomingdale’s.

Bloomingdale’s. I just ate the last caviar I will have in all my life. We divided my small jar up four ways and each had two crackers’ worth. John opened a priceless bottle of Chateau d’Yquem, which also went four ways. Daniel followed with a mundane but effective liter of 200-proof chemically pure alcohol from the labs, which we mixed, variously, with Evy’s tomato juice and orange juice and Dan’s hot pepper sauce. John put all four together, saying it reminded him of the way they drank tequila in Guadalajara, a custom I had not embraced when I visited there. We had the telescope seek it out but, unsurprisingly, there was no sign of life, though we could see buildings and streets clearly. It would have been impenetrable smog a few years ago.

We watched the sun set on Los Angeles and rise over London. Then on to midmorning in New York, one of the few places with a large number of people. You could see them on the sidewalks. Some of the slidewalks were actually rolling again.

Evy has never been to Earth, of course. Of the ten thousand people aboard this crate, only a few hundred have.

I guess writing that down is a tacit admission that I’m writing this for other people to read. But not for a long time. Hello, reader, up there in the future. I’m dead now. And will feel worse in the morning.

I think it’s a good thing this starship is automated. Many key personnel are functioning at a low level of efficiency, if functioning at all. Including yours truly, Entertainment Director. The entertainment program for tomorrow, this morning rather, will be quiet music and contemplation of the sequelae of overindulgence.

If I’d drunk less or more I would be sleepy. At this level I’m edgy, and too stimulated to read or rest and too stupid to stop writing. At least by typing it out on the machine, I can erase the evidence tomorrow. Unless Prime makes a copy. She’s everywhere.

Are you listening, Prime? No answer. So you’re a liar as well as a soulless machine.

Since this is indeed the first entry in the Diary of the Rest of My Life, which is of course true every time one makes any entry in a diary, I will include some background data for you generations yet unborn. Perhaps you are mumbling these words around a guttering fire in a cave on Epsilon, this starship a legend a million years gone to dust. Perhaps you are one of my husbands reading it tomorrow. You think I don’t know I don’t have any secrets. Hah. Marry computer experts and give up any hope of privacy. I saw John break Tulip Seven’s thumbprint code the day after she died. (He didn’t do it for any trivial reason; the tribunal wanted him to have her files scanned for evidence. She drank poison but it might have been murder. Nothing conclusive.)

As I was saying. Two days ago we left the planet Earth forever. Actually what we left was the satellite world New New York, which has been orbiting the Earth since before my grandmother was born. The Earth itself has been a mess since 2085, as you must know or can read about somewhere else. Almost everybody killed in a war. I started to write “senseless” war. Do you have sensible ones, up there in the future? That’s something we never worked out, not to everyone’s satisfaction.

One reason the ten thousand of us are embarked on this one-way fling into the darkness is that Earth does seem to be recovering, and the next time they decide to Kill Everybody they might be more successful.

Another reason is that there doesn’t seem to be anyplace else to go. We could inhabit settlements on the Moon or Mars, or wherever, but they would just be extensions of New New; suburbs. This is the real thing. ‘Bye, Mom. No turning back.

As a matter of fact, my mother isn’t aboard. Nor my sister. Just as glad Mother stayed back but wish she had let Joyce come along. Old enough to be a good companion and still young enough to renew things for you as she discovers them.

I guess two husbands and a wife comprise enough family for anyone. God knows how many cousins I have scattered around. When the Nabors line kicked my mother out it was a mutual see-you-inhell parting, and as I was only five days old, I had not yet formed any lasting relationships. There are a few Scanlans aboard, my formal line family, but I feel more kinship with some of the food animals.

Oh yes, you generations yet unborn. You do know what a starship is, don’t you, mumbling around the guttering campfire? It is like a great bird with ten thousand people in its gullet and a matter/antimatter engine stuck up its huge birdy ass.

Up in the front, instead of a beak, there is a doughnut-shaped structure, with three spokes and a hub, which used to be Uchūden, a small world that also escaped destruction during the war, originally designed to be home for several hundred Japanese engineers. (Japan was an island nation on Earth, the most wealthy.) Now it functions as the control center for all of ’Home, the civil government as well as the thrilling engineering stuff.

Behind Uchūden, or “sternward,” as they want us to say, are all the living quarters, offices, farms, factories, laboratories—you name it, even a market where you can spend all of your hard-earned fake money.

A simplified diagram of the ship would be six concentric cylinders, shells; the acreage per shell and apparent gravity increasing as the number goes down. Most people live and work on Shells 1, 2, and 3; the inner ones reserved for processes that require lower gravity, such as metallurgy and free-fall sex. There are also some living quarters up there for the elderly and infirm, such as my husband John Ogelby, who has an uncorrectable curvature of the spine that makes even three-quarters gee painful. He also has a lot of political pull (“friends in high places” has a strong literal meaning here) and so rates a rather large bedroom/office/galley combination on Shell 6. The family tends to gather there.

I’m writing this in my small office cubicle in Uchūden, which is by definition Shell 1. As perquisites of rank I do have a cot that folds down from the wall and an actual window to the outside—on the floor, of course. I can either watch the stars wheel by once each thirty-three seconds or flip on a revolving mirror that keeps the stars stationary for fifteen seconds at a time. I like to watch them roll.

That concentric-cylinder model is just a theoretical idealization. You’d go crazy, living in a metal hive like that. So the walls and ceilings are knocked down and conjoined in various ways to give a variety of volumes and lines of sight. Most people still spend a certain amount of time hopelessly lost, since only a few hundred of us lived here while it was being built, and have had time to get used to it. New New was laid out logically, the corridors a simple grid on each level, and it was impossible to get lost. ‘Home is deliberately chaotic, even whimsical, and is supposed to be constantly changing. Only time will tell whether this will keep us sane or drive us mad.