Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

“I wouldn’t even go on the Hammond show to publicize it.”

“I know that, too. Annoying, isn’t it?”

“Oh no; it’s flattering. An actual O’Hara-ologist.”

“Only Sandra and your husbands and wife know as much about you.” He left out my cybernetic sister. Prime knows a lot of things I would never tell a flesh human. “Someone who didn’t have access to your psychological profile might think that you were unfit to be a leader, because of your obvious ambitious nature.”

“It’s not that kind of ambition. I don’t want to boss anyone around.” Like New New, ‘Home disqualified from public office people who had certain easily measurable, and potentially dangerous, psychological handicaps, such as an emotional hunger to have power over others, or to be a martyr. So no Hitlers, but no Gandhis, either.

“Then what do you think you want?”

“Learn the secrets of the universe. Do everything at least once. Bring peace to our time. Have more time to play the clarinet. What a question.”

“What an answer. Of course only simple people could give a straightforward answer.” He resumed his slow pacing, which might have looked dignified down on Level 1. In this gravity there was a certain sprightliness to it.

“A lot of people who are older than you think you have come too far, too fast. I trust I don’t have to name any.”

“No.”

“Among the people who will eventually be your rivals for my present job, there are very few who are not jealous of, or even afraid of, your charisma.”

“I’ve seen that. But nobody who really knew me would ever accuse me of charisma. I’ve just had a lot of things happen to me.”

He held up a finger. “That’s it. They are things that can never happen to anyone else. Nobody else aboard this isolated can will ever experience revolution, nuclear war, plague. Nobody will be kidnapped and flown to Las Vegas. Nobody—”

“I understand the direction you’re headed.”

“What you have to do is spend several years being deliberately quiet and well behaved.”

“Oh, come on. I can behave myself.”

“You can when you want to. You were a little angel at the meeting today—”

“I’ll try to do better.”

“You see? One word and you react.”

“We’re not in public.”

“But we are. You are. I may be the most important audience you’ll ever have.” He paused to let that sink in. He was right. Part of his legacy could be a vote of no confidence that I would drag around for a long time. “Your presentation today lasted only forty-two seconds and used the pronoun ‘I’ only once. I know you could have gone into more detail with no more substance, as Smith and Mancini did, or could have made your presentation more entertaining, more memorable. That you did neither shows a good level of political survival instinct. What I want to do is help you refine your instincts into a calculated strategy”

“A dishonest one?”

“Only in that it won’t be the course your ‘natural’ self would choose. You’re going to lose that self, at least as a public persona. You’re going to put your shoulders in the harness and for some years work on being a meek and helpful toiler in the political vineyard. Taking stupid orders from people you don’t respect. Learning to compromise so that stupidity appears to have been served, without sacrificing your eventual goal. Learning patience.”

“Learning to be a political animal.”

“You must.”

“As you said, though, I could probably win an election just by being myself. I could probably win this one.”

“That’s right. Which brings us to the other part of number three.”

“The rational part, I assume.”

“You’re paying attention, good. You hardly need that recorder.”

“You… don’t know. You’re guessing.”

“Not anymore.” He almost smiled. “Sandra and I disagreed on a number of things—some very basic, such as the right to accumulate wealth, to own property—”

“I can understand that.”

“But one thing we did agree on was you.”

“In what sense?” Sandra liked me, I thought.

“A general assessment of your abilities, your potential; that’s something anyone with any administrative experience would agree on. Including yourself; you can be objective. The most important thing, though, and one you’re almost certainly blind to, is that you are potentially the most dangerous individual aboard this vessel.”

I laughed out loud. “Yeah. I was about to have myself locked up.”

“Be serious and listen. We think of ’Home as being a kind of New New York in microcosm. It’s a heuristic convenience and a dangerous fallacy.”

“Well, we’re no Mayflower .”

“What flower?”

“It was a colony ship that brought people from Puritan England to America. They didn’t have an Entertainment Director.”

“I remember. That rock, the Ford Rock, the Plymouth. It’s not too good a comparison. They could breathe the air outside their ship, for instance; they could throw out fishing lines for food. If they didn’t like America, they could sail back home.”

“All points well taken. Sorry to interrupt.”

“Points salient to the problem at hand. You.

“Think of New New York as an island, surrounded by other islands. There’s a mainland, Earth, that they can reach only with difficulty, and it’s a dangerous, uncomfortable place. But their island is pretty self-sufficient, and nearby islands—the Moon, the Deucalian remnants, and other asteroids—can provide all their needs. They’re stable.

“By comparison, we’re a submarine. We’re incredibly well stocked with supplies, and even a surplus of materials for the creation of new supplies. We even have an Entertainment Director. But we can’t surface until we reach our destination, by which time most of us will be dead.”

“We talked about all this years ago, even before Start-up.”

“We have more data now. For instance, when Morales gave his Health Care report, he neglected to mention the hundred and twenty-seven suicides we’ve had since Launch Day.”

Sudden feeling like a ball of ice in my stomach. “More than one percent.”

“That’s right. If this rate continued, by the time we left the Solar System more than half of us would be dead.” He shook his head. “It’s happened before, a suicide epidemic. In New New, just after the war. We juggled the statistics as best we could. If there were no witnesses to the act, the death wound up in some other classification. We’re doing that here, but it’s more difficult, since quarters are more cramped.”

“They expected a few suicides, didn’t they? Lot of stress.”

“Between ten and twenty, going on no data, of course. Certainly not a hundred.”

“It’ll probably go down rapidly. The people who were most unstable in that direction are mostly gone now, I guess.”

“Guessing is all anybody can do. And you must not tell anybody. Morales gave the number only to me and Eliot. Certainly other people in Health must know that it’s a big problem. They’ll keep quiet.”

, “I won’t tell anybody. I’m familiar with the dynamics involved, the etiology.” I’d read about how families, communities, and whole cultures could become infected with the “meme” of suicide—once you know people who’ve done it, it becomes a possibility. A solution.

“You still don’t see how it applies to you.”

“Not by any stretch.”

“This… submarine is probably the most unstable large society ever thrown together. Hand picked, of course—largely by you—and taken from a pool of people who are accustomed to living in close quarters, essentially underground. Nevertheless unstable.”