(Whether leaders would be willing to radically change a system that had worked for generations was another matter.)
Ever since childhood, O’Hara had been conscious of a sense of “destiny” that she knew most other people didn’t have. Remarkable things happened to her on Earth and afterward that did seem to be setting her up as a sort of pivot, a historical nexus. Daniel tried to convince her that it was irrational foolishness, superstition, a small cognitive defect in a brain that was otherwise more than adequate.
Her six years in office tended to confirm Daniel’s interpretation. Everybody else who had been in charge of ’Home had experienced some serious crisis during their terms. O’Hara spent six years waiting for something to happen.
There was plenty to keep her busy, but most of it just required attention to detail and careful delegation. She enjoyed the work, but it wasn’t exciting enough to raise her blood pressure. There was a huge amount of data transfer and analysis going on continually with Key West, which took up a lot of the starship’s time and energy resources, but the day-by-day management of that was the province of various specialists.
During those six years, she was still nominally in charge of Entertainment, but Gunter was actually running most of it.
She had more time than she’d expected to spend on being wife and mother. The loss of John had at first been like losing one leg off a table, but she and Evy and Dan were slowly getting used to the new balance, Dan actually cutting down on his extracurricular affairs. O’Hara and Evy half-joked about finding another fourth, but they never talked about it seriously; never when Dan wasn’t present.
As Evy grew older, she became closer to O’Hara; they had been married fifteen years when she took office. In that time Evy had gone from ravishingly beautiful to merely attractive, even slightly plump, which hadn’t hurt their relationship. She also loved Sandra, the way she loved most children—they were wonderful creatures so long as you could give them back to a parent sooner or later—and was a big help with her, especially after John’s stroke.
(Evelyn came from the Ten line, which had a tradition of marrying young and having children young. She was all for the first but not the second, which had been fine with John and Dan.)
It was no coincidence that Evy’s grandfather, Ahmed Ten, took office at the same time as O’Hara, on Engineering track. She had asked him to put his name up and, like her, he was well enough respected to run unopposed. They worked well together; they had both been on the first two postwar rescue missions to Earth, Zaire and New York. Those had been grim, dramatic episodes; both O’Hara and Ten had been toughened by them. They were ready for anything.
So nothing much happened. Except the first year.
14 July 2112 [19 Wright 323]—Witta Marckese delivered a report today from Cryptobiology that at first seemed like unalloyed good news: the sleep period can now be shortened to as little as twenty years or extended to as much as one hundred, maybe more, without increasing the risk. So John can stay under until nanosurgery is routine again, and there were dozens in similar situations.
Unfortunately, there were hundreds of other people we Powers-That-Be would just as soon not be given that kind of choice. And there is no question of keeping the report secret. Almost everybody in Crypto knows.
The timing is an unfortunate coincidence, since we’re now a little less than forty-eight years away from Epsilon, which until today was the one inflexible period for cryptos. So back in January we thought it was a nowor-never proposition, and we allowed a lot of borderline cases to go in the cans, people still more than marginally useful in the Key West project. Now we could call them back, but twenty years from now, who knows? At the present rate, transferring data visually a page at a time, we’ll still need them. But Ahmed’s confident that we’ll have a dataflow breakthrough any time now.
The next few days and weeks are going to be interesting. Joint Cabinet powwow first thing in the morning to discuss new crypto rules. Morale is not high, a lot of people complaining about busywork and probably wishing they had gone into the can while they were still young enough for it not to be a bad gamble. You can’t really blame them. Trained for science or engineering and now putting in long hours on work any fairly well-educated clerk could do. A lot of them will want to say the hell with it for twenty, thirty, forty years. How many can we afford to lose? Which individuals would we be better off without?
I personally don’t think we need any new rules. The current principle, that anybody be allowed to go crypto unless we can demonstrate that we need him or her, will do.
We just have to adjust the criteria to a level low enough that we need everybody.
That was essentially what the Cabinet and Coordinators decreed: you’re welcome to it if you qualify, but you probably won’t qualify. There were appeals through the legal system, usually based on mitigating family circumstances—“I want to join my husband after all”—and most of them were resolved by the extrajudicial, unconstitutional, use of discreet psychometrics: would keeping her here make her so miserable that it would be counterpro-ductive? Or will she get over it like the rest of us?
There was a vocal minority who claimed, with some justification, that their civil rights were being ignored; that the ship could be run with a skeleton crew of a few hundred. So anybody not crucial to maintaining life support or propulsion should be allowed to do as they wished. Key West would still be there in forty-some years.
The counterargument was speculative but powerfuclass="underline" we can’t risk another information disaster. What if something did happen to Key West? What if our end of the system broke down? It wasn’t just a matter of losing cultural continuity or even technical information. The people in Key West are living on a planet, which is something 97 percent of us have never done. They might know a lot of things useful for starting out on Epsilon; things not in books.
The difficulties expected in developing Epsilon also made one class of people automatically eligible for cryptobiosis: the young. Anyone born aboard ’Home would be allowed, even encouraged, to go crypto as soon as they were old enough, an insurance against the pioneer population being too heavily weighted toward the middle-aged and elderly. Nobody foresaw any problem in quickening a couple of thousand embryos in the last two decades of flight. But ’Home’s leaders were becoming cautious about unforeseen problems.
O’Hara didn’t see the policy ever affecting her. When Sandra was a little girl, she shared wholeheartedly her mother’s revulsion toward cryptobiosis. But people change.
11 August 2116 [5 Handy 332]—You lose one, you win one, you lose one… I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming. Daughters are little surprise machines.
Sandra declaring her love for Jakob was no surprise. That she wanted to marry at seventeen was a little bit of a shock, but her crowd are doing everything young. At least I talked them out of making it an exclusive bond—though they obviously consented just to humor my old-fashioned sexual attitudes. How could I ever want to do that with anyone else? Stick around, darlings.
And now she says that next year, as soon as she’s old enough, they’re going into the can together. Face the brave new world of Epsilon as young pioneers, ready to fight whatever dinosaurs or Martians are waiting on the other side of the airlock.