She went from giddiness to drooping in about thirty seconds, so I passed her around to kiss everybody goodnight, and we tottered up toward the Boston lift.
Her teachers, and the creche, would still have her in the daytime, from 0800 to 1600. She would have dinner and sleep and breakfast with me, so long as her academic and social development didn’t suffer. We were both on probation, theoretically, but the creche is so crowded now I don’t think they would take her back full time for anything short of an ax murder. “And who was this person you hacked to pieces, Dr. O’Hara? Did he or did he not actually deserve it?”
My neighbor in Uchūden, Ondrej Costache, kindly moved three doors around to a vacant office so I could make up an adjoining room for Sandra. She’s going through a dinosaur phase now, so I put some appropriately ferocious prints up on the wall. They contrast agreeably with the coverlet the laundry gave me for her bed, little piggies and sheep.
I keyed her monitor for some standard restrictions, as the creche advised. That’s not to keep her from learning “adult” things, but to protect her from hopeless confusion, swamped by detail. It essentially restricts her database to one about twice as large as the one that she has access to at school. That will theoretically encourage her to do homework, showing off special knowledge.
She is a little bit privileged, since only about two thirds of her classmates have parents who opted to bring them home. A few years ago I would never have dreamed of it, myself. I don’t know whether I would do it now, if we both had to live in my office, since I’m liable to be working until midnight or later.
As we were walking back to Uchūden, I explained to her that some nights I would be sleeping with Uncle John or Uncle Dan, but that her monitor would beep me automatically if she needed something. She got a very serious look on her face and asked why Uncle John and Uncle Dan didn’t come up to Uchūden to fuck. I reminded her that Uncle John is hurt by normal gravity, and besides, my bunk was too narrow for two grown-ups.
I asked her whether she had ever done that with the boys at Creche, and she said no, they weren’t allowed to until menarche, not “serious.” I let it go at that.
She admired the dinosaurs on the wall, identifying them by name, and was fascinated by the luxury of having a toilet and monitor to herself. She was nervous about sleeping alone, though; at Creche she was in a room with eleven others. I told her she could spend the first night with me.
I didn’t get much sleep, only partly because eight-year-olds have more elbows than normal people. I was intoxicated by her closeness, the sweet smell of her hair and breath, the small noises she made in her sleep. The thought that she was mine.
2. THE BURDENS OF FAITH
O’Hara probably knew better than any other ’Home official what the population of the Church of the Eternal Now, the “Nowers,” had grown to at any given time. She had to physically remove each of them from the VR machines—but usually only once. In their new enlightenment, they found virtual reality confusing, even more so than normal reality, and didn’t come back for more.
Sometimes she had to call Howard Bell, all 120 muscle-bound kilograms of him, to help wrestle the slack lumps out of their couches. Some of them had put on a lot of weight, eating three meals a day and spending the rest of their time and energy keeping their eyes unfocused. By the last day of 2107, they had dragged eighty-eight of the faithful from the dream room.
Newhome’s charter allowed complete freedom of religious expression so long as that expression did not violate civil law. There was no law against being a useless consumer. The police could incarcerate a Nower for being a “public nuisance,” if he or she did something particularly outrageous, but the faithful didn’t mind jail. It just meant that somebody else brought them their meals. Trials were an exasperating farce.
Actually, the ones who sat around vegetating, communing with their inner truth, weren’t as much of a problem as the proselytizers. One of O’Hara’s helpers, Julio Eberhara, fell for the church’s arguments. His sphere of influence was limited to the Game Room door, but for a while everybody who wanted to check out a game had to take a ration of inane theology along with it. Then he stopped answering the door with any reliability, sitting at his table humming, staring at an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of an idyllic mountain scene. O’Hara moved him and the puzzle to the storeroom, where at least his humming wouldn’t bother anybody.
She tried to explain this business to Sandra, without much success. Sandra had had a little careful religious instruction in Creche—this is what some people believe, this is what others believe, and you will develop your own beliefs as you grow—but at third form, they hadn’t yet been exposed to the excesses of religion. To Sandra and most other children, the Nowers were scary. A lot of what adults did was enigmatic or even silly, but in general they followed reassuringly predictable patterns. The Nowers were adults whose behavior was mysteriously infantile, and this regressiveness threatened the security of the children’s world.
In talking with her daughter, O’Hara came to realize that there was a component of fear in her own feelings toward those people. Susceptible to this kind of weird behavior, what other kinds of behavior might they be capable of? Could inexplicable passivity explode into inexplicable violence? The Psych people she talked to cautiously said no. But on the other hand, they were at a loss to explain why so many aboard were vulnerable to this specific variety of dissociation. It was like a kind of existential virus. Could a normal person catch it? Could O’Hara?
It didn’t seem likely. Though Psych no longer had extensive profiles of everybody, they were able to interview acquaintances and sometimes family relations of the people possessed by the Church of the Eternal Now, and it seemed that certain patterns of personality were favored. Coworkers used terms like scatterbrained, sullen, hard to train, unimaginative, lazy. Family members tended to preface their interviews with a sigh, and then work on some variation of “He was such a nice little boy.” Most of them had been in and out of various religions, tending toward the wholist and fundamentalist. Seven Nowers had once been proselytizing atheists, a combination both odd and annoying, since almost three quarters of ’Home’s population already adhered to unbelief in some degree. (John had worked with one of the antifaithful in the Deucalion reclamation project, almost twenty years before, and had confounded him by claiming to be a “fundamentalist Syncretic,” borrowing from various friends jewelry presenting cross, crescent, flower, and Star of David, switching from week to week, enlivening the lunch hour with haphazard but passionate pronouncements about the pope, Muhammed, Baha’u’llah, and Moses. John didn’t know much about religion, but the fanatic knew less.)
The net result was that ’Home experienced no significant decline in work accomplished by losing them. The eighty-eight people gone off to wherever the Church of the Eternal Now was had added to and subtracted from productivity in about equal measure.
YEAR 11.07
1. GROWING PAINS
15 October 2108 [1 Lao Tse 315]—What do they feed those children, sex hormones? Sandra’s starting to sprout breasts. Talking about menarche. Put a cork in it, girl. She hasn’t even had time to be a girl!
Of course she’s anxious about being the youngest. The oldest of the Old Guard are ancient crones of ten. But how could worrying about that cause her to grow breasts? (Evy says the record age is eight, so I guess I should be thankful for small favors.)