by Joe Haldeman
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.
3. 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.
4. 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?
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.
5. 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, a
nd 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 off.
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.