Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

“These are the spaces that you and Mr. Smith control. So to speak.”

“That’s interesting. You can see how spread out they are.”

“Yes. Not for no reason, of course. Your proposal had to do with storage space.”

“Office space, too. Smith and I are practically at opposite ends of the ship. Yet Education and Entertainment share many of the same supplies. Our people are always running back and forth unnecessarily.”

“Perhaps not unnecessarily.”

“I’d be willing to give up my place in Uchūden and move back here with Tom, with Smith.”

“Very nice of you.” He leaned back in his chair and swiveled around, looking at me over steepled fingers. His face screwed up into a wrinkled prunish mask of concentration. He really could have used eyebrows. “Dr. O’Hara, do you know what moment of inertia is?”

“No. Never heard of it.”

“It has to do with the way things spin. Like an ice skater, you know? She goes around with her arms out, spinning at a certain rate.” He held his arms out and pulled them in slowly. “Then she brings them in and spins much faster.”

“Conservation of angular momentum,” I said, not completely helpless.

“Very good. Another way to look at it is that she has changed… she has changed the distribution of mass in her body, relative to the axis of spin. That is what moment of inertia is. The same amount of energy is tied up in her spinning, but because the mass is in different places, she spins faster.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at. You can’t just move weight around ’Home arbitrarily.”

“Indeed we cannot. But it isn’t a matter of simply changing the rate of spin. It is a matter of making sure the axis of spin remains the same as the ship’s geometrical axis. That is not clear.”

“Uh… not really.”

“We cannot… let me see.” He made vague circular gestures. “We can’t allow a large lump of mass on one side, not balanced by something on the other side. The ship would wobble.”

“Which would throw us off course?”

“Worse. We might begin to tumble. That would destroy the ship in seconds. We would break apart.”

I remembered seeing an old film from the early days of space flight, a rocket rising from the pad and then suddenly spinning off in crazy cartwheels and exploding. Our explosion would be more spectacular, with all that antimatter. Would they see us from New New, a brief bright star?

I’ve lived in rotating vessels about 98 percent of my life. Suddenly I felt dizzy. “What about now? Everybody walking back and forth?”

He flapped a hand. “It’s trivial, and it averages out. All the biomass in the ship isn’t a hundredth of one percent of the total. If everybody were packed into one room on Level One, and stayed there for weeks, the effect might be measurable.

“But you see, that is the problem: the effect is cumulative. You move a grand piano from one room to another, it will probably stay there for most of a century. Each thirty-three seconds it will pull the ship slightly out of line in the same direction.”

“Unless we put another piano in the opposite direction, or something.”

“Yes.” He turned and stared at the screen, leaning forward on both elbows. “I don’t want to exaggerate this problem to you. There is no real danger so long as we are reasonably careful. My personal problem, since I am in charge of this aspect of civil engineering, is that the complexity of shifting a set of objects increases quite literally with the square of the number of objects. And as Dr. Ogelby said, there are two hundred requests ahead of you.”

“So what does that mean? Weeks? Months? Years?”

“That depends on how flexible you can be. It may be years if you insist on the move being done all at once. If you can move a bit now, a bit later, then I can match you up with other work orders. Somebody who needs to move a grand piano to the other side, so to speak.”

“That would be fine.”

He stared at the diagram for a full minute without speaking. “Hum. There is an overall problem. Your Enter-tainment areas are spread out over all levels.”

“That’s true.” Full-gravity weight lifting to zero-gee sex.

“But Education is almost all on Level Two. I assume that is an optimum gravity for learning.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have any extremely concentrated masses? Things you would need a heavy ’bot to move?”

“We do have two grand pianos, a Baldwin and a Steinway.”

“From Earth?” He smiled for the first time. “We brought the oddest things.”

“They won’t be moved, though. They’re in the two concert halls. Smith and I share two upright pianos that are in his classrooms, and a harpsichord that I have in a Level Two practice room.”

“A harp—?”

“It’s an old-fashioned kind of piano.”

He shook his head, still amused. “I thought that we could duplicate any waveform with an electronic keyboard.”

“I suppose. Musicians are funny, though.” I was suddenly transported back to a couple of weeks before Launch, when I stood behind Chul’ Hermosa for an hour of Scarlatti magic, his long brown fingers hammering the ancient ivory keys with exquisitely measured passion. I could feel the bass notes in my teeth.

Would a waveform, whatever it was, do that? Would it duplicate the soft fingerpad sound when he barely stroked a high note? Not to mention the smell of wax and the hypnotic swirl of inlaid gold and mother-of-pearl. The connections with centuries past.

“Are you all right, Dr. O’Hara?”

“Sorry. I was thinking.”

His expression did not radiate confidence in my thinking ability. “This is what I want you and Mr. Smith to do. Give me a list of everything both of you are in charge of—exactly where it is and approximately how much it weighs. We’ll do a first-order analysis and decide whether it would be better to relocate your things or his. Or move both of you to a third location.”

“That shouldn’t be hard. The computer must know where just about everything is.”

“The computer knows where things are supposed to be. I have to know where they actually are. You have GP auxiliaries?”

That was Personnel jargon for laborers. “Four of them, plus a medium ‘bot. I could get a heavy one from Silke Kleber with a little notice.” As soon as I said her name, I knew I shouldn’t have. Implying personal relationships with both his supervisors.

He just nodded, though. “You might prefer to requisition it through me. Same robot, one less layer of bureaucracy.

“At any rate, once I have the information from you and Mr. Smith, and perhaps a hundred others who will be moved fairly soon, I can put it through a scheduling algorithm.”

“A year wouldn’t be too bad. Thank you, Dr. Seven.” He gravely shook hands with me and then returned his attention to the screen. He typed something and the six levels rolled back upon themselves to become concentric cylinders, rotating realistically, twice as fast as a clock’s second hand. The dizziness started to come back. I closed my eyes long enough for the sensation to go away, and then turned and carefully walked back to the door.

John was waiting for me, sitting on a folding chair, looking exhausted. “Let’s get you home.”

He gave me a wan smile. “That’s why I scheduled my raid for 1300, of course. Thought I might seduce you into a backrub.”

“Sure. I’m clear to 1530.” We walked and hobbled to the Toronto lift and went straight to Level 6. It was most of a kilometer back to his place. I practically floated, light as a cloud, but for him it was an effort. By the time we got there, his face was brick red and he was panting.

“You’re not getting as much exercise as you did in New New,” I said.