We try not to think about those people as if they’re dead. I don’t mean the thousand or so who won’t revive. Even the ones who do will be like the dead arisen, vague memories suddenly come back to life. I’ll be eighty-eight years old. Hully gee, as Stephen Crane had a character obscurely say. Holy God.
There was a memo on my queue, on everyone’s queue, asking whether I’d like an extra room. What would I put in it? Or whom?
Out of curiosity I went down to the ag level. There are a few lights on, for the technicians who are wandering around in a state of shock. Bare tanks, a smell of stale rot. The place where I used to sit and smell the herbs is just a big square of damp gravel, waiting to be sterilized. It must be devastating for the people who work here every day. I wonder whether any of them ever went to Earth, and experienced winter. I don’t guess the comparison is accurate. I liked winter. It was alien, stark, and scary, and the air smelled like the air of another planet. That blizzard in England, in Dover. It was sterile like this—“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”—but under the snow was the promise of spring, of rebirth. This will be green again, in a year or three. But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards.
5. CATEGORIES
When the plants died, the population of Newhome was 9,012, 6,032 of whom were classified as “supernumeraries,” more or less along for the ride. The remaining 2,980 were divided into five categories:
I. Necessary for the physical maintenance of Newhome: 813
II. Necessary for data reconstruction: 947
III. Necessary for ongoing research: 748
IV. Necessary for health and morale: 183
V. Supernumerary but too young, old, or ill for cryptobiosis: 289
There were also 344 people who were supernumerary but had children in category V; they were given the option of staying awake if, like O’Hara, the idea of waking up younger than their children did not appeal to them. All but forty-eight chose sleep.
About a third of the first four categories had to go into the deep freeze over the next year. Of course every department felt that it had already been cut to the bone. There was a lot of infighting and horse trading.
There was always the program that created me, Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion, but it was less useful than it had been at the beginning of the trip. You could take a particle physicist, say, from group III, and record the personality factors that make a good particle physicist, and then tali a youngster from group V and “inoculate” him or her with those traits. Then put the actual physicist to sleep.
The problem with that was that not even 30 percent of the physics texts had been reclaimed. This boy or girl may have the enthusiasm of a young Einstein, but wouldn’t have access to enough information for a weak bachelor’s degree.
(It was a particle physicist, in fact, who pointed out that there was another side to this. Simone Haskel volunteered herself for immersion, a long and uncomfortable process, even though the child who replaced her would have to deal with the frustration of ignorance. Ignorance is not stupidity, Haskel pointed out. It’s possible that the new physicist, unfettered by tradition, might take her studies in some direction that would never have occurred to someone with a traditional academic background.)
Of the 6,000 mandated for cryptobiosis, 302 refused. No one argued with them; no one complicated the situation by pointing out that under the circumstances, individual rights were curtailed. All but three were anesthetized in their sleep and rolled off to Room 2115 on gurnies. Three had committed suicide.
Before the Big Sleep, as some called it, every adult accumulated one minute a day on the virtual reality machines in the dream room. Afterward, O’Hara had only one sixth as many customers. Should they be allowed an hour every ten days?
She brought it up in the first Policy meeting, and most members were in favor of the expansion—after all, most people could do arithmetic, and they knew what the current population was. If the Cabinet deprived them of dreamtime, most would see it as bureaucratic meddling. Morales, in charge of Health Care, cast a yes/no vote. He agreed with the politics but wanted to check with his specialists about possible long-term effects. Coordinator Nagasaki asked O’Hara to take half the machines out of service temporarily “for repairs,” and called for opinions next week from Psych and Labor. He would query the Engineering side.
Of course O’Hara was free to use the out-of-service machines all she wanted. She decided to make a systematic tour of the Earth files, comparing the recorded scenes with her memories.
Her first experiences with revisiting Earth through VR, back in New New, had been so depressing she’d had no desire to go back. But she knew more about the machines, now that she was in charge of them, and had learned how you could fine-tune them in various ways. She could mute the emotional input from the Earth files so they were little more than travelogues—though with all senses engaged; a total physical immersion. You were there, but detached. Whatever emotions you felt were your own, unamplified.
That was bad enough in some places. The shuttle pads at the Cape, where she’d said good-bye to Jeff. Las Vegas: knocked out, kidnapped, and raped while unconscious, then the rescue bloodbath. A bitter week in the Alexandrian Dominion, where being female reduced you to the status of a possession. Assault in New York. Spain, the Costa del Sol, warm winter sun and delicious sex—the paradise where she and Jeff caught the first worrisome hints that the world order was crumbling. Though no one thought of actual war, total war, that early.
Some places were quiet and pleasant; revisiting the Louvre, the Prado, the Salzburg Mozart Festival—or noisy and pleasant, like New Orleans and Rio during holidays. She walked alone through the Yukon tundra and joined millions in New Hong Kong.
She put a half hour each day in her schedule for this cybernetic journeying, one day to a place she had visited during her months on Earth, the next to a nearby one she had missed, as a kind of baseline for comparison. Nine tenths of the places were missing, but it was a big planet.
Most of her regular duties were shifted over to Gunter and Lebovski while she worked with Gail Bieda, a cognitive medicine specialist Morales sent up from PsychStat. Fortunately, the record of people’s past use, and misuse, of the machine was intact. It took only two days to sort them into three groups: those who could easily take an hour every ten days, those who definitely could not, and those who would need a slow adjustment.
Drawing on her own recent experience, O’Hara suggested they give everybody an hour on the machine regardless, but for some people, restrict a certain amount of it, or all of it, to the low-intensity mode O’Hara used in her Earth-tripping. That way, the amount of time one was allowed to use the machine wouldn’t become a status symbol. People could keep the actual information about their “VR level” secret, or lie about it.
Nagasaki and Sato okayed the plan, so O’Hara set up a standard message to put on every adult’s queue, explaining the situation and telling them what level they had been assigned. If they thought they’d been misclassified, they could take it up with PsychStat. The rest of the electronic paper-shuffling fell to Entertainment, trying to coordinate the work and leisure schedules of two thousand people, all special cases.
When everything was finally sorted out, though, there was still one machine not-so-temporarily out of service. O’Hara retained it as an unofficial perquisite of office for Cabinet members, so that they could avail themselves of VR retreat with a minimum of scheduling bother. It also allowed O’Hara to use it on the spur of the moment—“I have a free hour, the machine’s free; let’s go to London”—as she had become accustomed to doing. She told herself she would not abuse it, and for some time she didn’t.