The isolation module was a small sphere that had never been intended for use by human beings. It was a holding area for cuttings, seedlings, and livestock imported from Earth. If any sign of disease appeared, the stock would be consumed by fire and the ashes blown into space (once there was enough evidence for the insurance people). It was a tiny cage, and the little girl cried and babbled and refused to eat the strange food that robot arms offered her.
Nobody in New New spoke Bantu; Ahmed set about learning it. Within a week he was able to explain to the girl approximately what had happened, and soon after, she reciprocated: she and her brother often went up there to play, not being afraid of high places or bones; it was especially fun since the older ones forbade it. She only dimly understood the rules of the game the older children were playing. They kept talking about a “brain devil” that would kill her if she didn’t behave, and she vaguely remembered that a cousin had died and they said that was why. But they said a lot of things that made no sense.
Her name was Insila. She and her brother had climbed up the emergency stairs to the cargo bay level, and had gone inside the spaceship while the door was open. When one of the forklifts came back, they hid in an empty locker. They came out when everything was quiet and dark, and tried to get the bay door open. Then there were noises again, and they ran back to the locker to hide. Then something knocked her out. When she woke up they were floating and her brother was hurt bad, and her arm wouldn’t work, and then Ahmed came in and helped her.
She wondered what would become of her. Ahmed tried to explain what the brain devil actually was, and what doctors were, and how they would try to cure her. He suspected that she didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t tell her that in all likelihood she would spend the next ten years floating in that cage, with occasional forays into unconsciousness, until whatever it was did whatever it did, and she would go insane and die. And be sliced up, analyzed, and incinerated, like her brother. She knew he was dead but never once asked what had happened to him.
Year Four
1 
Before the war, the economy of New New had been a carefully controlled form of socialism, perhaps logical for a quarter of a million people living in a 99.9 percent closed ecology. People earned dollar income only for overtime work and as bonuses, and there was a limit to the number of dollars you could accumulate. But since there were few possessions not held in common by everyone, there just wasn’t much to spend money on. There were credit exchanges for gambling and prostitution, neither of which was illegal, but the luckiest gambler or the most skillful whore could not possess more than $999.99 at one time (along with an arbitrarily large stack of IOUs), since all credit transfers were handled electronically, and anything over a thousand dollars went straight back into the bank. Most people spent their money on luxury foods imported from Earth or trips to other Worlds.
But now there was no imported food, no other Worlds. A few people managed to spend their money becoming alcoholics, but that took some concerted effort, since wine and beer were rationed like any other food, and it was difficult to slip carbohydrates out of the food chain to ferment and distill.
That was one real advantage to having two husbands who worked in the CC laboratories. Every now and then John or Daniel would come home with a flask of what they euphemistically called “gin.” It was 180-proof industrial alcohol with a few aromatic impurities, and only an internal-combustion engine could drink it straight. But it made a beer last a long time.
The Light Head tavern, which had been temporary housing for two years, was finally open again, and O’Hara spent quite a bit of time there with John and Daniel, as they had in the old days. There was amateur entertainment, musicians and sometimes a girl who was clever at undressing, but the main attraction was that it provided a link with everyone’s more pleasant past. It was a place to reminisce, and sometimes to talk about the future.
“It’s about the most hare-brained thing I’ve ever heard,” John was saying. “Shows how wonky people have gotten about Earth. Pure and simple paranoia.”
“It would get us out of range. Some of us,” Daniel said. People were talking about building a starship.
O’Hara splashed some gin in her glass and decanted a measure of beer over it. “You engineers. No sense of romance.”
“How can you say that to an Irishman who plies you with liquor? But I have a sense of priorities, too. We have to rebuild the Worlds first. Get some redundancy in the goddamned system.”
Daniel nodded. “If something happened to New New,” he explained carefully to O’Hara, “we wouldn’t have anyplace to go.”
“Really.” She watched the girl on the other side of the room doing tricks with her navel-She could rotate it clockwise, wink with it, and then rotate it the other way, all in time to a badly tuned mandolin. The room was palpable with male speculation as to her other talents. “Maybe it is irrational, John, but it’s not simple and it’s not purely paranoia. You didn’t grow up here. The star-ship has been a dream since before my mother was born.”
“I’m not arguing against dreams. I just think it ought to be postponed for twenty years or so. Hell, I’d like to work on it myself. But not until we have things… straightened out.”
“Seems to me we could do both, once Deucalion comes in. Give people more of a sense of purpose, less bitterness. Everything else is just cleaning up after the groundhogs’ damned war.”
“You know, they wouldn’t even have to H-bomb us.” Daniel had had an hour’s head start on the gin, and it was beginning to show. “Just walk in the fuckin’ airlock and sneeze. All be dead in a week.”
She patted his hand. “Watch the girl, Dan. She’s winking at you.”
The basic idea behind the starship was even older than the Worlds. A generation ship: hundreds or even thousands of people aboard a vessel that would crawl out to the stars on a voyage of centuries. Their n-times-great-grandchildren would land on another world.
By the twenty-first century it was not such a preposterous idea. People who lived in the Worlds might as well be aboard such a ship; an incurious person, or one who didn’t care for the zerogee at New New’s only observation dome, could live his entire life without seeing Earth, Sun, or stars. If you have to live in a hollow rock anyhow, it might as well be going somewhere.
Furthermore—as had not been true in the previous century—the generation ship would have a definite target. A lunar observatory had discovered several earthlike planets orbiting “nearby” stars; one was only eleven light years away.
The main problem was energy. Not just the enormous push it would take to move a World-sized spaceship, but also the energy necessary to maintain life. The Worlds had been possible in the first place only because of the abundant free energy from the Sun. The generation ship would have to carry its own sunlike power source, with fuel enough for centuries.
In theory, the power could be supplied by conventional fusion. The deuterium could be mined either from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere or the frozen surface of Callisto. But the scale involved was vast.
A more elegant, but necessarily untested, power source was the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter. Antimatter could be contained in a magnetic bottle and fed out a few particles at a time, and the result was pure E =mc squared. It had never been done on a large scale because antimatter was tremendously expensive, in terms of energy, to produce: like burning down a forest to warm your hands. To manufacture enough antimatter to fuel the ship would require a solar collector the size of a planet; a synchrotron the size of the Moon.