Worlds Apart (14 page)

There wouldn’t be room for a lot of things that people took for granted in New New—least of all, the comforts they remembered from before the war, the state of relative
ease and freedom they were slowly rebuilding. Many of the inconveniences they regarded as temporary would be unchangeable facts of life. Marianne suspected that mundane discomforts such as overcrowding and monotonous diet would ultimately prove less important than existential problems; isolation, lack of affect, undirected anxiety, boredom.

Why was she looking forward to it?

3

They called it a “solarium,” even though the light and heat didn’t come from the sun. The zerogee swimming pool—actually just a globe of water that slowly rotated, with no bottom or sides—was fairly close to one of the four arcs that illuminated the inside of New New. On the lightward side was a transparent wall with clamps for towels; people would dry off and float there, baking.

Berrigan didn’t bother toweling, just made a turban for her hair. “You actually do want to go now?” she said to O’Hara. “I thought you were trying to talk your husbands out of it.”

“I don’t know.” O’Hara was drifting away from the wall; she did a lazy duck-and-roll and flutter kick that brought her back within reach of the clamped towel. “I’ve been weighing things. Part of it’s keeping peace in the family…keeping the family at all, actually.”

“They’d leave you?”

A man she didn’t know drifted by and made the fingersign query for sex. O’Hara smiled and shook her head at him.

“I really don’t know… a few days ago I would’ve said maybe for Dan, but definitely no for John.”

Berrigan nodded her head slowly. “The photon reflector.”

“That’s right. Before they came up with that, I don’t think John took any of it really seriously. Didn’t think it would fly.”

“Not alone in that.”

Another man drifted toward them; O’Hara tethered one ankle and wrapped the towel around her hips, a signal of unavailability. “Now, well, he’s been very withdrawn since the announcement. Thinking things over.”

“And Dan?”

“Daniel’s very happy. But he’s always assumed I’ll come to my senses and go along. Maybe he’s right.”

“You want some cheap advice?”

“I guess I do.”

“Don’t use your husbands as an excuse to run away. You’re still upset about losing Jeff Hawkings.”

“That’s part of it.”

“But Earth is still there, and all of your training and experience points toward an Earth liaison position. Probably the very top.”

“That may be fifteen, twenty years away. Maybe never.”

“In twenty years you’ll be two years younger than I am now. Anything could happen. Suppose it takes thirty, fifty years for Earth to recover? You’ll still be in a good position. If you go to Janus, where will you be fifty years from now?”

“Halfway to Epsilon Eridani. Nearly halfway.”

“If everything goes according to plan. A lot of engineers aren’t as optimistic as Daniel.”

4

The Janus Project was not humanity’s first starship, technically. Several planetary probes launched in the twentieth century were inching their way toward the stars, and
after some skillions of years might actually come near one. But there had been two practical small-scale demonstrations.

The most interesting was Project Daedalus, a fusion-powered probe launched by the European Space Agency many years before the war. It was also headed for Epsilon Eridani—toward the oxygen-water world that was New-home’s destination—and if things had gone according to plan, it would have sent back a view of the target world in the first year of the new century. Daedalus would flash by the star system at nearly a fifth of the speed of light, having barely an hour to cap off its half-century mission by spying on the earth-sized planet and broadcasting back data. (It would actually fly by in 2090, the signal taking 10.8 years to travel to Earth at the speed of light.)

Unfortunately, Daedalus was lost. The carrier beam that kept Earth in touch with it had fallen silent a couple of years after the war.

The other probe had been a matter/antimatter demonstration, a small reaction drive carrying a payload that was little more than a beeper. Most scientists were more annoyed than impressed by the expensive stunt, which provided no new theoretical knowledge. It was primarily a demonstration of temporary political amity between the United States, which provided the launch vehicle and fuel containment apparatus, and the SSU, which tied up a valuable synchrotron for most of a year, manufacturing antimatter, particle by particle.

John Ogelby said that the m/a demonstration only proved that politicians can’t read equations. Saying that it was a “great step toward reaching the stars” was like successfully screwing in a light bulb and then claiming you were ready to build a power plant.

5

Much of what O’Hara did at her carrel was “freeassociation database scanning,” a sort of computer-augmented woolgathering. She would type in, for instance, “
APTITUDE
,” and the computer would answer “2,349,655:,” which was the number of data entries that either had the word “aptitude” in their titles, or had been cross-referenced under that word. Then she would narrow it down, say, by typing in “
PUBLISHED AFTER 2060
,” and the machine would say “32,436:,” still more than an afternoon’s reading. After further modifying it with
WORLDS
and
EDUCATION
, the number was down to 23. She would ask for a list of the titles, and usually wouldn’t find anything that clicked, and would start over.

In this particular case, though, she found an article that had been published in New New a few years before the war, in a journal of applied psychology: “Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion.” She’d had a sort of morbid interest in hypnosis ever since the interview that preceded this job, so she read it.

After a couple of paragraphs, she punched up the author’s name and found that he was still alive. She finished the article and called him. He was at a seminar; she left a message and they wound up meeting after dinner at the social sciences faculty lounge.

The lounge must have been a very comfortable place once. Now half of it was partitioned off for someone’s “temporary” living quarters, and all of the couches and chairs had been crowded into the space that was left. She recognized Dr. Demerest—they hadn’t talked but she’d punched up his dossier after the computer made the appointment—standing in the corner, trying to make the beverage dispenser work. He was a short bald man in his nineties. She picked her way around the furniture and introduced herself.

“Dr. O’Hara?” A few dozen more lines appeared in
his forehead (no eyebrows to raise). “I expected, never mind what I expected, coffee?”

“Tea, please. Or anything it will surrender.”

He was shaking the machine gently. “It doesn’t respond to violence. Somebody must have hit it.” He waved O’Hara to a nest of easy chairs. “Machines do sulk. I’ve been humoring this one for thirty years.” He wiggled the T button and it agreed to produce a cup of tea. He drew another one and joined her.

He held his cup in both hands and squinted at her. “Give me a moment to adjust here. We’re the same grade but you’re evidently younger than most of my students. Janus start-up. Crazy stunt. You really think that damned thing is going to fly?”

“A lot of people do,” she said quietly.

“A lot of people think Jesus is coming in a Buick. But you. Do you think it’ll fly? You plan to go?”

“At first I didn’t…didn’t think it would work and wouldn’t go even if it did. Now I guess I’ll go if they take me. Whether it works out, they say that depends on whether they can get the neutrino coupler to work.”

He shook his head. “Going to be dull around here after all the crazy people leave. What’s a demographics coordinator and what does she want with an old interface psychologist?”

“I read the article you wrote in ’82 about aptitude transfers. It looks like a technique we could use. But there aren’t any later references. Did you ever follow it up?”

“Hm. Did and didn’t.” He rubbed his long nose, remembering. “Sort of farmed it out, set it up as a doctoral project for a couple of exchange students. One of those things. They went back to Mazeltov.” He shrugged. Nobody in Mazeltov had survived the war.

“We stayed in contact, of course. I have all their raw data and their preliminary findings. Haven’t got around to putting it into publishable form. But it does confirm
the validity of the technique. What does that have to do with demographics?”

“Well, we have a problem. We’re trying to create a sort of microcosm, a miniature replica of the human race.”

“Ah. But you only have, what is it? Ten thousand people? I see. You want a file of dopplegangers.” He shook his head in a series of short jerks. “Hm. Take forever. Might not work at all.”

“I was thinking of a more limited application, at first, anyhow. For instance…glass-blowers. Not for jewelry and such, but the people who custom-design equipment for scientists and medical people. There is only one person alive who does that. She’s over a hundred.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Before the war there were almost a half-million specifically named occupations. Less than a tenth of them have any living practitioners.”

“Hm. You can’t think that more than a thousand of them are relevant to your bunch. Mostly still available, engineer types.”

“Even so. I’ve come up with literally hundreds of instances like the glass-blower. Where the only people who have an aptitude either don’t want to go or can’t.”

“Oh, I think I see. I see your problem.” He blew on his tea and stared into it. “You understand the limitations of the induction technique?”

“I’m not sure. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“All right. I take this crotchety old glass-blower and try to talk her into spending a week or ten days living in the psych lab. Suppose she agrees—and she has to want to; if I coerce her it probably won’t work. Then I try to put her into a state of extreme hypnotic receptivity, suggestibility. Have you ever been hypnotized?”

“Once.”

“You probably know it doesn’t work with everybody. Some people, you can put into a deep trance with a few
minutes of quiet talking. Others you can shoot full of drugs and they resist you all the way.

“If your glass-blower is receptive, I put her under and then hook her up to the machine. The semantic computer part talks to her. The biologue part coordinates what she’s saying to her physical state: skin temperature, pulse, blood pressure, brain waves. Mostly brain waves, in twelve frequencies.

“It’s rather hard work. With a hundred-year-old, I’d probably want to spend a couple of weeks, not keep her under more than two or three hours a day. Eventually, though, I’d have a cybernetic profile of her attitudes toward just about everything, and incidentally a fairly complete biography. You know the Turing paradox?”

“Touring as in traveling?”

“Never mind. What it boils down to is that if you put her behind a screen, and put a voice-simulation output to the semantic computer behind another screen, and talked to them…well, you’d be hardpressed to tell which one was the human. I could tell, because I know some good trick questions…pardon me. Old men ramble.

“So you have this cybernetic glass-blower. It does you absolutely no good. No lungs. So you take an appropriate subject and run the process in reverse. This is even harder work, physically, because what you’re doing is manipulating his blood pressure and so forth, induction field for the brain waves, while you suggest he make the same response as the old glass-blower. The computer, that is, suggests it.

“When he comes out of it, he won’t know a damned thing about glass-blowing. But he will sure as hell want to learn, and he’ll learn fast and well, if he’s at all suited for the profession. You wouldn’t want to take someone with low manual dexterity, of course. There are more subtle screening criteria, too. You wouldn’t take someone who had injured himself severely with glass as a child. He’d be a nervous wreck all his life.”

“The instance you used was motivating a one-armed man to play the violin.”

“He’d kill himself. He couldn’t live with it. And the process isn’t really reversible; you could put him back under and motivate him to play some one-handed instrument, but that wouldn’t erase his wanting to play the violin.”

“That’s something I wanted to know. You could take a pianist and motivate him to study the violin—and he wouldn’t transfer all his energy to the violin? He’d still play the piano?”

“We didn’t pursue that too far. The danger’s obvious. Motivate him to play every damned instrument in the orchestra. You’ll turn him into a zombie. Indecision, depression. He’ll pick up a horn and play a few notes and then walk over to the harp and then have an irresistible urge to play the piano, and so forth. Drive him mad in a week. You’re a polymath, aren’t you?”

O’Hara nodded slowly.

“Thought I saw a gleam in your eye. How many degrees do you have?”

“Four. Two doctorates.”

“I know what you’re thinking. Disabuse yourself. You can’t tack on new specialties like ornaments. It wouldn’t be very effective and it might even be dangerous. This technique isn’t for overachievers, it’s for people who aren’t strongly motivated.”

“All right, okay.” But she looked thoughtful.

“What was it you had in mind?”

“Oh, I’ve never been strong in maths and sciences. Most of my friends are on the Engineering track, though. Both my husbands.” She smiled ruefully. “Half the time it’s as if they’re talking a foreign language. One where I know some of the words but no grammar.”

He made a little clucking sound. “Happens all the time. First woman I married was a mathematician. That’s how I wound up in this mongrel kind of specialty. Down
to cases, though. You want to do this to several hundred people? Do you know how long that would take?”

“What, are you the only person who can do it?”

“No, quite the contrary. Any nurse…hell, I could teach anyone in a day or two. Teach you, if you’re not squeamish about sticking thermometers into people. The machine does all the hard parts, but that’s just it: there’s only one machine. Ten days for a subject to program it and another ten for the induction. That’s eighteen per year. Maybe twenty, if most of them are good subjects.”