Worlds Enough and Time (3 page)

Still, the longest line of sight is only a couple of hundred meters, looking across the park. It’s a good thing that almost all of us grew up in satellite Worlds. Someone used to the wide open spaces of Earth would probably feel trapped by ’Home’s claustrophobic architecture. In most corridors, for obvious instance, the floor curves up in two directions, cut off by the low ceiling in twenty meters or less—a lot less, up in 5 and 6. Of course you can look out for zillions of light-years if you have a window like mine, but for some reason some people don’t find that relaxing.

Both of my husbands were born on Earth, but spent enough years in New New to have lost the need for long lines of sight; distant horizons.

I do miss horizons, vistas, from my three visits to Earth. The first couple of weeks I spent there I had a hard time adjusting to the long lines of sight, even though I was in New York City, which most groundhogs would consider crowded. I would look up from the sidewalk and see a building impossibly far away and lose my balance.

I remember flying over kilometer after kilometer of forest, ocean, farmland, city. The Pyramids and the Rockies and Angkor Wat and even Las Vegas. We live inside one of the largest structures ever built, surely the largest vehicle—but we’ll never
see
anything big for the rest of our lives.

At least Dan and John and I have memories. Evy and nine thousand others just moved from one hollow rock into a newer one. Maybe they’re the lucky ones, I have to say, conventionally. I wouldn’t trade places.

Well, the rigors of composition seem to have sobered and tired me enough for sleep. Fold up the keyboard and unfold the cot. If the gravity gives me trouble I can always rejoin the hamster pile upstairs.

PRIME

O’Hara and her staff of twenty-six had more than a thousand diversions to offer
Newhome’
s population. Most of the activities required very little in the way of administration other than keeping track of what went where: If you wanted to play chess, you went to the Game Room door and a person of adequate intelligence would figure out what day it would be one week hence, and loan you a set until then. If you didn’t bring it back in a week, you would be called automatically every hour until you did bring it back—and it better not be missing a pawn; there was no way to send for a replacement. (On the other hand, the piece was bound to be
somewhere
. If someone had accidentally or perversely thrown it away, the recycler would identify it and buzz Entertainment.)

Some activities were more complicated because they required people or equipment primarily assigned to other departments. Religion had a claim on yoga, hamblin, and t’ai chi, but O’Hara’s people also offered them, in a neutral secular context. Education had a hand in music, drama, and gymnastics. Communication was involved with social networking, and possibly New New Liaison as well, if your friend had stayed behind.

By far the most complicated was the Escape Room, a room with ten VR, virtual reality, installations. Every adult accumulated one minute per day of time on these machines. Five minutes was the minimum; some people wanted to come in every five days for a quick blast. Others saved up sixty days for the maximum hour of dream tripping. Some people wanted to come in wit friends and be wired in parallel, simultaneously wandering through an imaginary or remembered world.

Children were allowed to use certain game programs, and restricted travelogues that were really only an elaborate form of interactive cube. Usually nine at a time would visit some earthly locale, along with a teacher, to answer questions.

It was a scheduling nightmare, but that was only the beginning. VR was a powerful drug to some people, and had to be administered with care. Everyone had been carefully tested in New New at the age of eighteen, or would be examined at that age aboard ship. Some people would be disallowed the random abstraction or feedback modes, either of which could be terrifying. Others were cut off at ten or fifteen minutes because they were particularly susceptible to the machine’s effects: staying in too long could put them in a “VR loop,” a vegetative state that was usually irreversible (though some people who had recovered from it wanted to dive right back in).

Most users were not too adventurous; for them, the VR was a whole-body, whole-mind go-anywhere machine. It was the only contact most people would ever have with Earth, vicariously traveling to arctic wastes or the Grand Canyon, the busy hives of Calcutta or Tokyo; soaring over fields of grain or through coral reefs. There were stock fantasy scenarios, too—harems and battlefields and laboriously reconstructed historical events—and the possibility of virtual time travel, since there were crude VR recordings nearly a century old. Of course most of the Earth cubes represented an equally irretrievable past. Calcutta and Tokyo, like Paris and London, were now inhabited only by handfuls of doomed children.

O’Hara found the Earth cubes unbearably depressing. The Luna and Mars ones were interesting visually but not sensually, since a space suit was no novelty. She liked the feedback mode, spectacularly confusing in its synesthesia—smelling colors, tasting sounds, muscles bunching into surreal impossible distortions, the body everting itself through mouth or anus and reverting slippery back again—and though she could see why some people would find it a nightmare, she emerged from the state completely relaxed, wrung out.

John had never tried VR and had no desire for it, but Dan shared her inclination toward the weird random abstraction mode, and they’d often schedule a half hour in parallel, wandering together through a shifting turmoil of light and sound that would crystallize into nearly real, or at least solid, landscapes, and then melt into chaos again. Mirror lands and cloud islands and flaming icescapes. One time Dan let O’Hara join him in a visit to the harem, where they learned something about the limitations of parallel wiring. O’Hara found the viewpoint interesting but her projected penis had no more feeling than a dildo; she participated in his orgasm but felt it only from her ankles to the soles of her feet. For an hour afterward she couldn’t walk without giggling, her toes curling up.

O’Hara was supposed to meet John and Dan at the Athens lift fifteen minutes before the meeting. A little nervous, she was early. Evy came down and said the men would be late, as usual. The women went back up one level to get coffee and tea from the dispenser, which overcharged Evy by a dollar.

“This is a bad sign.” She showed O’Hara the card. “Our lives are in the hands of people who can’t keep a coffee machine working for one week?”

“Just inflation,” O’Hara said. “A little experiment designed to make us more productive.”

“I’ll call Maintenance.” She started to sip the tea but blew over it instead. “You are kidding, aren’t you?”

“Hope so. With an economist in charge, anything could happen.”

Evy nodded seriously. “You shouldn’t have voted for him.”

“Right.” She looked around. “I haven’t been up here since they put down the flooring. Makes your eyes hurt.”

“It’s different.” Black and pearl checkerboard.

“Everything’s different.” She pushed the lift button twice. “Everything’s the same.”

“A philosopher this morning.”

“Just crabby about the goddamn meeting.” The door opened and they shared a short ride with two men in coveralls who stared sideways at Evelyn.

There was a bench built into the wall by the lift on Level 1. They sat down and watched the two men walk away muttering. “You with Dan last night?” O’Hara asked.

“Yes and no. I was asleep before he came in and he got up and left before I woke up.”

“Could have been anybody, then.”

“He needs a lot more sleep than he’s been getting. I don’t think it’s been more than four or five hours a night since we left.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve seen him go through it a dozen times before.”

“Wise old momma. Really?”

O’Hara nodded. “Every job change. Another couple of weeks and he’ll break loose, get real drunk, sleep around the clock, and then go back to normal. Maybe a day off for moaning through a hangover.”

“Job
change.”

“You know him. The job change is more profound than the planet change.”

“Just like you?”

“You’ve got me there.” O’Hara smiled but suddenly looked away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”

“I know what you meant.” She patted the younger woman’s arm. “John’s the only sensible one in the family, you included. He doesn’t let work take over his life.”

The lift opened and the sensible one swung out on his crutches. “Jesus. One of you ladies turn down the gravity?” Dan held the door and followed him out.

“Only a couple of blocks,” O’Hara said.

“Could have held the meeting in the gym. Eliot doesn’t like gravity any more than I do.” Eliot Smith, Engineering Coordinator, was hugely overweight and had only one flesh limb, his right arm; the rest of them lost in a mining accident when he was a teenager. “You do know the way, don’t you?”

“Nothing to it.” O’Hara did know her way around the ship better than most adults. The designers had done a good job of providing special “interest,” structural variety, but for some months most conversations between strangers would start out “Where the hell am I?”

They’d met at Athens lift because that allowed John to do most of his walking up on Level 6. But it did make their route to the meeting room rather complicated. They descended an escalator to the humid brightness of Level 1, the “ag” level, which in this section was a dense interplanting of corn and beans. The stalks were already a meter high, and they made a silken whisper in the ventilator breeze, and a rich complex smell. They walked and swung less than a hundred meters to another escalator that took them up to Level 4. O’Hara guided them through the maze of rights and lefts, ups and downs, that made the Arts and Crafts Mall so architecturally whimsical, and they wound up back on Level 2, in a corridor decorated with holos from European museums, somber classical paintings, leading to Studio 1.

“Should I wait outside and listen?” Evy asked.

“I don’t think it’s going to amount to much,” Daniel said. They were headed for the first full Cabinet meeting since Launch. “Some rhetoric from Harry and a situation report from Eliot. Maybe Jules Hammond smiling benevolently over the proceedings. Then they turn off the cameras and we all go huddle around the coffee urns and it’s like any Thursday meeting.”

“Except you have everyone in the same room,” O’Hara said.

“Handier than calling them up,” John said. “Though there may be some you would just as soon not feast your eyes upon.”

“Who could that be?”

“You’ll have to get used to working with him.” They were talking about Harry Purcell, Policy Coordinator and O’Hara’s ultimate superior. Sixteen years before, Purcell had been her economics professor, and they had argued energetically over some pretty basic points—personality as much as theory. He made it clear he hadn’t forgotten. She was trying to learn not to cringe whenever he opened his mouth.

28 September 2097 [13 Bobrovnikov 290]—I don’t know why I’d envisioned a round table for the Cabinet meeting. We did that in New New for my Demographics Committee, no chiefs and no Indians, but with thirty-some Cabinet members it would be an unwieldy circle.

Still, I don’t like formal hierarchal structures, least of all when they’re set up with me at the bottom. A regular classroom would have been bad enough, the Coordinators up front dispensing wisdom, but instead we co-opted the small theater. That way Harry Purcell and Eliot Smith got to sit on the stage, head and shoulder (and torso and ass and leg, at least in Purcell’s case) above us mere mortals.

The theater seats had slips of plastic with names on them. I helped John to his, in the front row, and then went to mine, in the rearmost. There was a definite pattern. Engineers and other grown-ups toward the front. I shared the back row with Tom Smith, Education; Carlos Cruz, Humanities; Janet Sharkey, Fine Arts; and our historian, Sam Wasserman.

I hadn’t seen Sam since Launch. He gave me a shy grin and blush. We’d been lovers for a short intense time a few years ago, although he is exactly young enough to be my son, if I had followed my mother’s example and become pregnant at the gray old age of twelve.

“Lovers” is too strong a word, or too polite a one. When Evy joined the line, which made me feel somewhat plain and middle-aged and dumpy, he was there for me. It was more complicated than that, and still is. I knew he would be at the meeting, but when I saw him I got a nice glow of physical surprise, or physical something. Maybe someday again.

(Prime says that she can keep this diary secure from prying eyes by shunting it over into her own cyberspace. I guess so, since she’s supposedly self-aware, whatever that actually means.

(Do I really care whether Dan or John knows I get a little damp in the jeans, thinking about Sam? I’m not sure. I remember how he tastes, different. Kosher, I guess.)

Once everyone was in the proper place we had to sit still for a minute of camera registration. This was so the archives could properly record our gasps of admiration at Purcell’s inspiring rhetoric. The sparkling wit that used to almost keep us awake in class.