The power of them, the fierce resentment… Bud muttered and groaned meaningfully despite Dave's warnings. He kept needling Andy until Dave banned all questions. Dave himself was noticeably tense and read his Bible a great deal. Lorimer found his own body pointing after them like a famished hound, hoping to Christ the cubicles are as they appeared to be, unwired.
All they learn is that Myda's instructions must have been ferocious. The atmosphere has been implacably antiseptic, the discretion impenetrable. Andy politely ignored every probe. No word or act has told them what, if anything, goes on; Lorimer was irresistibly reminded of the weekend he spent at Jenny's scout camp. The men's training came presently to their rescue, and they resigned themselves to finishing their mission on a super-Sunbird, weirdly attended by a troop of Boy and Girl Scouts.
In every other way their reception couldn't be more courteous. They have been given the run of the ship and their own dayroom in a cleaned-out gravel storage pod. They visit the control room as they wish. Lady Blue and Andy give them specs and manuals and show them every circuit and device of Gloria, inside and out. Luna has bleeped up a stream of science texts and the data on all their satellites and shuttles and the Mars and Luna dome colonies.
Dave and Bud plunged into an orgy of engineering.:, Gloria is, as they suspected, powered by a fission plant, that uses a range of Lunar minerals. Her ion drive is only slightly advanced over the experimental models of their own day. The marvels of the future seem so far to consist mainly of ingenious modifications.
"It's primitive," Bud tells him. "What they've done is sacrifice everything to keep it simple and easy to maintain. Believe it, they can hand-feed fuel. And the backups, brother! They have redundant redundancy."
But Lorimer's technical interest soon flags. What he really wants is to be alone a while. He makes a desultory attempt to survey the apparently few new developments in his field, and finds he can't concentrate. What the bell, he tells himself, I stopped being a physicist three hundred years ago. Such a relief to; be out of the cell of Sunbird; he has given himself up to drifting solitary through the warren of the ship, using a their excellent 400 mm. telescope, noting the odd life of the crew.
When he finds that Lady Blue likes chess, they form 'f a routine of biweekly games. Her personality intrigues him; she has reserve and an aura of authority. But she quickly stops Bud when he calls her "Captain"
"No one here commands in your sense. I'm just the.' oldest." Bud goes back to "Ma'm."
She plays a solid positional game, somewhat more erratic than a man but with occasional elegant traps. Lorimer is astonished to find that there is only one new chess opening, an interesting queen-side gambit called N the Dagmar. One new opening in three centuries? He mentions it to the others when they wine back from helping Andy and Judy Paris overhaul a standby converter.
"They haven't done much anywhere," Dave says. "Most of your new stuff dates from the epidemic, Andy, if you'll pardon me. The program seems to be stagnating. You've been gearing up this Titan project for eighty years"
"We'll get there." Andy grins.
"C'mon, Dave," says Bud. "Judy and me are taking on you two for the next chicken dinner, we'll get a bridge team here yet. Woo-ee, I can taste that chickenl Losers get the iguana."
The food is so good. Lorimer finds himself lingering around the kitchen end, helping whoever is cooking, munching on their various seeds and chewy roots as he listens to them talk. He even likes the iguana. He begins to put on weight, in fact they all do. Dave decrees double exercise shifts.
"You going to make us climb home, Dave-o?" Bud groans. But Lorimer enjoys it, pedaling or swinging easily along the rungs while the women chat and listen to tapes. Familiar music: he identifies a strange spectrum from Handel, Brahms, Sibelius, through Strauss to ballad tunes and intricate light jazz-rock. No lyrics. But plenty of informative texts doubtless selected for his benefit.
From the promised short history he finds out more about the epidemic. It seems to have been an airborne quasi-virus escaped from Franco-Arab military labs, possibly potentiated by pollutants.
"It apparently damaged only the reproductive cells," be tells Dave and Bud. "There was little actual mortality, but almost universal sterility. Probably a molecular substitution in the gene code in the gametes. And the main effect seems to have been on the men. They mention a shortage of male births afterwards, -which suggests that the damage was on the Y-chromosome where it would be selectively lethal to the male fetus."
"Is it still dangerous, Doc?" Dave asks. "What happens to us when we get back home?"
"They can't say. The birthrate is normal now, about
two percent and rising. But the present population may: be resistant. They never achieved a vaccine."
"Only one way to tell," Bud says gravely. "I volunteer."
Dave merely glances at him. Extraordinary bow he-. still commands, Lorimer thinks. Not submission, for Pete's sake. A team.
The history also mentions the riots and fighting which swept the world when humanity found itself. sterile. Cities bombed, and burned, massacres, panics,:. mass rapes and kidnapping of women, marauding armies of biologically desperate men, bloody cults. The;. crazies. But it is all so briefly told, so long ago. Lists of honored names. "We must always be grateful to the brave people who held the Denver Medical Laboratories-2' And then on to the drama of building up the helium supply for the dirigibles.
In three centuries it's all dust, he thinks. What do-. I know of the hideous Thirty Years War that was three centuries back for me? Fighting devastated Europe for two generations. Not even names.
The description of their political and economic, structure is even briefer. They seem to be, as Myda. had said, almost ungoverned.
"It's a form of loose social credit system run by consensus," he says to Dave. "Somewhat like a permanent:' frontier period. They're building up slowly. Of course they don't need an army or air force. I'm not sure if they even use cash money or recognize private ownership of land. I did notice one favorable reference to early Chinese communalism," he adds, to see Dave's mouth set. "But they aren't tied to a community. They, travel about. When I asked Lady Blue about their police anal legal system she told me to wait and talk, real historians. This Registry seems to be just that, it's not a policy organ."
"We've run into a situation here, Lorimer," Dave ` says soberly. "Stay away from it. They're not telling` the story."
"You notice they never talk about their husbands?"Bud laughs. "I asked a couple of them what their husbands did and I swear they had to think. And they all have kids. Believe me, it's a swinging scene down there, even if old. Andy acts like he hasn't found out what it's for."
"I don't want any prying into their personal family lives while we're on this ship, Geirr. None whatsoever. That's an order."
"Maybe they don't have families. You ever hear'em mention anybody getting married? That has to be the one thing on a chick's mind. Mark my words, there's been some changes made."
"The social mores are bound to have changed to some extent," Lorimer says. "Obviously you have women doing more work outside the home, for one thing. But they have family bonds; for instance Lady Blue has a sister in an aluminum mill and another in health. Andy's mother is on Mars and his sister works in Registry. Connie has a brother or brothers on the fishing fleet near Biloxi, and her sister is coming out to replace her here next trip, she's making yeast now."
"That's the top of the iceberg."
"I doubt the rest of the iceberg is very sinister, Dave."
But somewhere along the line the blandness begins to bother Lorimer too. So much is missing. Marriage, love affairs, children's troubles, jealousy squabbles, status, possessions, money problems, sicknesses, funerals even-all the daily minutiae that occupied Ginny and her friends seems to have been edited out of these women's talk. Edited… Can Dave be right, is some big, significant aspect being deliberately kept from them?
"I'm still surprised your language hasn't changed more," he says one day to Connie during their exertions in the gym.
"Oh, we're very careful about that." She climbs at an angle beside him, not using her hands. "It would be a dreadful loss if we couldn't understand the books. All the children are taught from the same original tapes, you see. Oh, there's faddy words we use for a
while, but our communicators have to learn the old texts by heart, that keeps us together."
Judy Paris grunts from the pedicycle. "You, my dear children, will never know the oppression we suffered," she declaims mockingly.
"Judys talk too much," says Connie.
"We do, for a fact." They both laugh.
"So you still read our so-called great books, our fiction and poetry?" asks Lorimer. "Who do you read, H. G. Wells? Shakespeare? Dickens, ah, Balzac, Kipling, Brian?" He gropes; Brian had been a bestseller Ginny liked. When had he last looked at Shakespeare or the others?
"Oh, the historicals," Judy says "It's interesting, I guess. Grim. They're not very realistic. I'm sure it was to you," she adds generously.
And they turn to discussing whether the laying hens are getting too much light, leaving Lorimer to wonder how what he supposes are the eternal verities of human nature can have faded from a world's reality. Love, conflict, heroism, tragedy-all "unrealistic"? Well, flight crews are never great readers; still, women read more… Something has changed, he can sense it. Something basic enough to affect human nature. A physical development perhaps; a mutation? What is really under those floating clothes?
It is the Judys who give him part of it.
He is exercising alone with both of them, listening to them gossip about some legendary figure named Dagmar.
"The Dagmar who invented the chess opening?" he asks.
"Yes. She does anything, when she's good she's great."
"Was she bad sometimes?"
A Judy laughs. "The Dagmar problem, you can say. She has this tendency to organize everything. It's fine when it works but every so often it runs wild; she thinks she's queen or what. Then they have to get out butterfly nets." All in present tense-but Lady Blue has told him the Dagmar gambit is over a century old.
Longevity, he thinks; by god, that's what they're hiding. Say they've achieved a doubled or tripled life span, that would certainly change human psychology, affect their outlook on everything. Delayed maturity, perhaps? We were working on endocrine cell juvenescence when I left. How old are these girls, for instance?