Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

Prime says we’re 1,850,000,000,000 kilometers from Earth, about seventy-three light-days. So if somebody wished me happy birthday, it would take seventy-three days to get from there to here, by which time, Prime says, we’d have gone almost four million kilometers. That’s another three hours, forty-one minutes. I’ll bet Zeno could prove that the message would never get here.

So it’s June on Earth, a month I never experienced. I got there in September and left in March.

What else to record on this milestone birthday. Well, as remarked before, my husband Daniel will be moving into the Engineering Coordinator-elect slot in January ’04. So he’ll be Coordinator in ’06, Senior Coordinator in ’08, and history in 2110. We’ve agreed it would be prudent for me to wait until ’10 to place myself on the block for Policy Coordinator-elect, since it would be unwise to have husband and wife working together at the administrative level, or at least unseemly. I don’t agree with the logic of this, except in terms of appearances—Dan and I don’t collude all that well even on a day-today basis—but don’t mind waiting six years. It would have bothered me when I was thirty.

Am I less ambitious? I don’t think so. I guess it’s partly that what I’m doing now is plenty important. And it’s part of the lesson that Purcell and Sandra wanted me to learn, by observing the process from the Cabinet level: that being on administrative track is a six-year migraine. (Some people do get addicted to the headache, though. Eliot is stepping down this year but says he’s going to “let himself pickle” for two or four years and run again. Tania is going back to Labor/Management and says she wouldn’t run for office again as long as there were three people left alive on the ship—two of them might vote for her!)

I’m getting better at delegating authority, not hanging all over my subordinates all the time. That’s partly a matter of sorting out who’s good at what and who enjoys what kind of work. If only the two factors would match up. But trusting other people to do their jobs gives me more time for the lit project and for my music.

That’s mostly clarinet and a little keyboard for theory. It will still be a while before I can play the harp again.

But it’s been more than two years. Think I’ll take it out now, and tune it, and see.

It was seven in the morning, 10 September 2103. O’Hara was asleep in John’s bed; John had been up reading for about an hour. Suddenly his console went blank and a loud buzzer sounded.

O’Hara sat up and rubbed her eyes. “What is it?”

“Trouble.” She unwound herself from the sheet and crawled sideways to read over his shoulder. The screen was blinking orange letters on a blue background:

10 Sept 03 | 9 Conf 304

“Oh shit. What’s it going to be this time?”

“Good news, I’m sure.”

“You don’t have any idea?” She drifted over to the sink.

“You’re sleeping with the wrong guy for inside information.” He typed four digits and Dan’s image appeared, unshaven, blinking, groggy. “What’s up, bright eyes? You expect this?”

“No couple of things… but no. Look. I’m not alone.” He looked to the right and nodded. A woman’s faint voice said, “I won’t tell anyone,” and he watched, evidently until the door shut.

O’Hara pulled a brush through her hair with more force than was necessary.

“All right,” Dan said. “There’s two things. That labor organizer Barrett, she told Mitrione yesterday that she could pull off a general strike in the GPs.”

“Of course she could. I could do that. Half of them act like they’re on strike while they’re on the job. What else?”

“Well, there’s the rice shortage. Talk about rationing if they can’t get up to quota. But I thought that wasn’t for another month.”

“Yeah. Look, I’ll try a standard overall sys-check down through all the engineering departments; I do that most mornings anyhow. If I spot any anomalies I’ll call you back.”

“Okay.” He signed off and John pushed a button and said, “Sys-check.” The screen filled with acronyms and numbers.

O’Hara finished washing and stepped into a rumpled lavender jumpsuit. “Looks like no breakfast. I’m going down to 202; you want a roll?”

“Please, chocolate. Use my card; I’ll get the water going in a minute.”

“I’ll do it. You keep checking those old systems.”

“Love it when you talk dirty,” he said, without looking up or smiling.

She came back in five minutes with a couple of rolls and a box of orange juice. He was going through the data a second time. “Haven’t caught anything. It’s nothing obvious. Only this.” He stabbed a button five or six times, the data paging backward.

“They didn’t have chocolate. You can have cherry or apple filling.”

“Either one.” He took the roll and pointed at the screen with it. “The yeast farms asked for a fifty percent increase in both water and power allotment. That’s not really an anomaly, since we know there’s been a rice shortfall.”

“Oh goody. More fake tofu.”

“Rather have that than rice, myself.” He accepted a glass of juice. “If I’d known they were going to force-feed us rice for a century I would’ve stayed behind. Or eaten steak until I died of cholesterol poisoning.”

While John washed up, O’Hara went down to the laundry to get them fresh clothes. Half the Cabinet was waiting in line; so much for secrecy.

The year 2103 was the beginning of a two-year “Japanese takeover”; the Coordinators were Ito Nagasaki (Criminal Law) and Takashi Sato (Propulsion). They came into Room 4004 together, late, serious, and silent, looking tired. When the last Cabinet member had entered and found a seat, and the door hissed shut, Sato began without preamble:

“As most of you know, our rice production has been down for several months because of a persistent rust that has invaded all varieties. The ag people synthesized a virus specific to the rust, tested it in isolation for a few weeks, and it worked. So they inoculated the crop with it. That’s been a standard farming procedure for over a century.”

“Oh shit,” Eliot Smith said. “We’ve lost all the rice.”

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that, Eliot. Everything that photosynthesizes. Everything more complicated than a mushroom.”

There was a second of shocked silence. “We’re dead, then?” Anke Seven said.

“Not if we act quickly,” Nagasaki said. “Dr. Mandell?”

Maria Mandell rose. “We haven’t pinned down what happened. Some synergistic mutagen that was present in the crop but not in the lab. What happened is less important than what we’re going to do about it. I have every work crew from 0800 on, and every competent GP I can draft, at work harvesting and storing.”

“So by the time we leave this room,” Taylor Harrison said, “everybody aboard will know that the shit has hit the fan.”

“That’s right,” Mandell said. “They’d know before noon anyhow, with everything wilting.”

“What are the numbers?” Ogelby asked. “I know the yeast vats can’t keep the show going.”

“If all we had was this crop and what’s in storage, we’d have about a hundred and sixty kilo-man-days of vegetable food. That would keep the population going for eighteen days on reduced rations. Two months, on a starvation diet. There’s probably a similar amount of calories tied up in farm animals, if we slaughtered them all.

“The yeast vats produce enough food to keep about two thousand people alive indefinitely. If we could wave a magic wand and build eight more yeast vats, then the only problem would be that everyone would have to eat yeast derivatives until we were able to get the crops reestablished. But we can’t, of course. If we had the blueprints and the trained workers and the building materials all stacked up, it would be a matter of a few weeks. We don’t have any of those things.