They turned the drive off at midnight, six hours ago, and we’re still here. Of course firing it up again is going to be a more dangerous proposition. I think I’ll suggest that they not tell anybody ahead of time. No need for all of us to sit around chewing our nails. It couldn’t be all that painful, anyhow, being instantly converted into a superheated puff of plasma. Unless dying always hurts.
Better get some work done. Gynecologist appointment in three hours. Just thinking about it makes me tingle with anticipation.
8. DIVIDE AND MULTIPLY
After the routine peek and poke, O’Hara dressed and met the gynecologist in his office. “You seem to be in very good health.” He paused. “How do you like surprises?”
“From doctors, not at all.” She sat down, braced.
“Try this: you’re going to have a baby.”
“What?” O’Hara stared at him. “How can I be pregnant when I don’t have any ova?”
He smiled. “I don’t mean the old-fashioned way. I suspect a lot of women will react like that. It’s just that your name came up to be an ovum donor for the first generation. So as long as you approve, we’ll thaw one out, quicken it, and either pop it into your uterus or cook it up here.” The colonists had enough ova and sperm filed away to populate an entire solar system.
“But I thought it was going to be five years, at least.” The plan had been to have “generations” of about two hundred people in years 5, 7, and 9, and then do it again about twenty years later. “Is this some kind of a morale thing?”
“I don’t know; I just see directives. And hear rumors. You’re in the Cabinet, aren’t you?”
“It hasn’t come up recently. We’ve been busy.”
“My guess, it’s a combination of mortality and morale. We’ve had a lot more deaths than were projected. And having kids around would raise people’s spirits.”
“Yeah, if you’re a pediatrician or a pederast. I prefer peace and quiet.” She relaxed back into the chair. “At least here, I wouldn’t have to raise the creature myself.” ‘Home had a creche with professional mothers and fathers.
“All you have to do is sign the consent form. Decide whether you want the embryo implanted or grown ex utero:”
“You need a decision right now?”
“No; a couple of weeks. You might want to talk it over with your husbands.”
“It’s not their business. Besides, we’ve already discussed it. What I have to think about is whether I want to be responsible for bringing another person into this world, which may be doomed. And then if I do, whether I want to carry the fetus.”
“Most professional women don’t.”
“Of course not. But I’ve always been curious about it.”
“Well, you could carry a big melon around all day. I could find some pills to give you constipation and morning nausea. For hemorrhoids, you’d just have to use your imagination. And then the actual delivery—”
“Hey, don’t try to talk me into it.”
“It’s a natural conflict with us OB/GYNs. The obstetrician wants that fetus under glass, where he can just pull it out when it’s done. The gynecologist wants it in the uterus, where it belongs.” He rummaged through a drawer and brought out a holo slide. “This is a pretty evenhanded discussion of the alternatives. So did you and your husbands agree on anything?”
“They both agreed they didn’t want a bow-legged blimp staggering around. But as I say, that’s not their decision. We all did agree on the necessity of a sperm slice. One of them has a load of birth defect genes; the other has a history of drug abuse and alcoholism.” John had made a joke about “one from column A, one from column B,” which he had to explain.
“With a gamete splice, you probably do want to have it ex utero. Greater chance of success.”
“That’s what the guy in New New said, Dr. Johnson. But I might want to give the other way a try anyhow. We could always start over if I miscarried.”
“It’s not that you would run out of ova. But a miscarriage is an upsetting experience.”
“Exactly what Johnson said, to the word. Do they program you guys at the factory?”
He shrugged. “In a way, I guess they do. It’s your body, of course.”
“That’s what they say.” She picked up the slide. “Call you in a few days?”
“Yes. If you decide on having it ex utero, we’ll go ahead with the gamete splice and get in touch in about six months so you can watch the uncorking.”
“Otherwise?”
“Uterine, we’ll have to monitor your cycle for at most one period. We fertilize the ovum and you come in the next day, timing it so the egg has divided twice, into four cells. Night time. The implantation doesn’t hurt, but unless we can get the zero gee clinic for half a day, you’ll be on your back until the next evening.”
“Sounds romantic.”
“Actually, it can be. Some women bring their husbands.” O’Hara tried to visualize that—her ankles in stirrups, John and Dan sitting there while a technician worked a long syringe up into her uterus—and laughed out loud.
With nothing on her schedule for the next three hours, O’Hara took the instructional slide back to her office and displayed it. It was rather daunting to have that corner of her room taken up by a uterus, cervix, and vagina the size of a walk-in closet, with a matching penis that was slightly translucent but functioned all too well. How did they get the camera and the laser in there? How could the couple do anything? Then there were time-lapse displays of a fetus maturing, both in the uterus and under glass, and then a close-up of the implantation procedure.
It was all very fascinating and it saved her the trouble of going to lunch.
9. DIONYSUS MEETS GODZILLA
During the three months mandated for drifting, the scientists and engineers worked around the clock, retrieving and recreating knowledge. Time enough for research later. With every day of silence it seemed more and more likely that they would never hear from New New again.
O’Hara was one of the first to articulate the difference between the seriousness of the scientists’ loss and that of the arts: “You could destroy every specific reference to calculus,” she said in a report, “and still write a calculus text, by getting together a committee of people who had studied it recently or used it in their work. Well written or not, the text would still have all the information. But the only way we could get back Crime and Punishment, for instance, is to find somebody who had memorized it word for word, preferably in Russian. Nobody had.
“That’s a good case in point. Anybody who’s interested in fiction knows what Crime and Punishment is about, whether they’ve read it or not. But now it exists only as part of a new oral tradition—descriptions of the iost’ works—and it’s one of literally millions.”
O’Hara was part of a six-person ad hoc committee to retrieve as much literature as was possible. She was glad not to be in charge of it—Carlos Cruz had tentatively volunteered, and everybody else took one step backward—because the organizational details were maddening. More than half of ’Home’s ten thousand people had something to offer, either a physical document like O’Hara’s The Art of War or a memorized bit of prose or verse or song. The documents had to be scanned into computer page by page (in New New there would have been a machine to do it automatically) and all of the people had to be recorded and then interviewed for reliability and information about the social context of the thing they had memorized, which was often obscure or trivial. Of course their rule was to refuse nothing as insignificant, and press every informant for another line or two from something. They got a lot of limericks.