(The medical library itself was no problem; the star-ship would be taking along a cybernetic duplicate of New New’s entire library. Except for certain sensitive military and political materials, this contained a copy of every remotely important Earth document, printed or videoed or cubed, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to The New York Times of March 16, 2085, and everything published in New New after the war. With polarized-quark memory, the whole thing fit into a machine the size of a steamer trunk. In medicine as in every other field, it would not be a problem of lacking information—just of knowing how to find it.)
The Devonites in general were a headache. The star-ship was supposed to start out with a population of ten thousand and, ninety-eight years later, wind up with twice that number. There were a few Devonite sects that allowed birth control under unusual circumstances, but for most of them it was one of three unforgivable sins. If they allowed one percent of the starship to be Devonite, fifty females, and if each of them and each of their female descendants bore ten children, they could produce about 300,000 children in ninety-eight years.
So if the starship, as promised, did retain the respect for individual liberty that existed in New New, then orthodox Devonites—one gender of them, at least—would have to be left behind, since religious freedom would allow them to refuse the necessary vasectomy or laporos-copy. (The plan was for ova to be quickened on a strict replacement basis, one birth for each death, until twenty-five years before they reached their destination. A significant number would live through the whole voyage, barring unforeseen medical or environmental problems, since the average life span in New New was 118.)
O’Hara wasn’t convinced that the starship could actually be run along the same lines as New New. The system she’d grown up in was a crazy-quilt of electronic democracy, communalism, anarchy, bureaucracy, technocracy. She knew the anarchy was largely an illusion, a formalism that the actual power structure tolerated as a safety valve. There wouldn’t be room for it aboard the good ship New-home.
There wouldn’t be room for a lot of things that people took for granted in New New—least of all, the comforts they remembered from before the war, the state of relative ease and freedom they were slowly rebuilding. Many of the inconveniences they regarded as temporary would be unchangeable facts of life. Marianne suspected that mundane discomforts such as overcrowding and monotonous diet would ultimately prove less important than existential problems; isolation, lack of affect, undirected anxiety, boredom.
Why was she looking forward to it?
3 
They called it a “solarium,” even though the light and heat didn’t come from the sun. The zerogee swimming pool—actually just a globe of water that slowly rotated, with no bottom or sides—was fairly close to one of the four arcs that illuminated the inside of New New. On the lightward side was a transparent wall with clamps for towels; people would dry off and float there, baking.
Berrigan didn’t bother toweling, just made a turban for her hair. “You actually do want to go now?” she said to O’Hara. “I thought you were trying to talk your husbands out of it.”
“I don’t know.” O’Hara was drifting away from the wall; she did a lazy duck-and-roll and flutter kick that brought her back within reach of the clamped towel. “I’ve been weighing things. Part of it’s keeping peace in the family…keeping the family at all, actually.”
“They’d leave you?”
A man she didn’t know drifted by and made the fingersign query for sex. O’Hara smiled and shook her head at him.
“I really don’t know… a few days ago I would’ve said maybe for Dan, but definitely no for John.”
Berrigan nodded her head slowly. “The photon reflector.”
“That’s right. Before they came up with that, I don’t think John took any of it really seriously. Didn’t think it would fly.”
“Not alone in that.”
Another man drifted toward them; O’Hara tethered one ankle and wrapped the towel around her hips, a signal of unavailability. “Now, well, he’s been very withdrawn since the announcement. Thinking things over.”
“And Dan?”
“Daniel’s very happy. But he’s always assumed I’ll come to my senses and go along. Maybe he’s right.”
“You want some cheap advice?”
“I guess I do.”
“Don’t use your husbands as an excuse to run away. You’re still upset about losing Jeff Hawkings.”
“That’s part of it.”
“But Earth is still there, and all of your training and experience points toward an Earth liaison position. Probably the very top.”
“That may be fifteen, twenty years away. Maybe never.”
“In twenty years you’ll be two years younger than I am now. Anything could happen. Suppose it takes thirty, fifty years for Earth to recover? You’ll still be in a good position. If you go to Janus, where will you be fifty years from now?”
“Halfway to Epsilon Eridani. Nearly halfway.”
“If everything goes according to plan. A lot of engineers aren’t as optimistic as Daniel.”
4
The Janus Project was not humanity’s first starship, technically. Several planetary probes launched in the twentieth century were inching their way toward the stars, and after some skillions of years might actually come near one. But there had been two practical small-scale demonstrations.
The most interesting was Project Daedalus, a fusion-powered probe launched by the European Space Agency many years before the war. It was also headed for Epsilon Eridani—toward the oxygen-water world that was New-home’s destination—and if things had gone according to plan, it would have sent back a view of the target world in the first year of the new century. Daedalus would flash by the star system at nearly a fifth of the speed of light, having barely an hour to cap off its half-century mission by spying on the earth-sized planet and broadcasting back data. (It would actually fly by in 2090, the signal taking 10.8 years to travel to Earth at the speed of light.)
Unfortunately, Daedalus was lost. The carrier beam that kept Earth in touch with it had fallen silent a couple of years after the war.
The other probe had been a matter/antimatter demonstration, a small reaction drive carrying a payload that was little more than a beeper. Most scientists were more annoyed than impressed by the expensive stunt, which provided no new theoretical knowledge. It was primarily a demonstration of temporary political amity between the United States, which provided the launch vehicle and fuel containment apparatus, and the SSU, which tied up a valuable synchrotron for most of a year, manufacturing antimatter, particle by particle.
John Ogelby said that the m/a demonstration only proved that politicians can’t read equations. Saying that it was a “great step toward reaching the stars” was like successfully screwing in a light bulb and then claiming you were ready to build a power plant.
5
Much of what O’Hara did at her carrel was “freeassociation database scanning,” a sort of computer-augmented woolgathering. She would type in, for instance, “APTITUDE,” and the computer would answer “2,349,655:,” which was the number of data entries that either had the word “aptitude” in their titles, or had been cross-referenced under that word. Then she would narrow it down, say, by typing in “PUBLISHED AFTER 2060,” and the machine would say “32,436:,” still more than an after-noon’s reading. After further modifying it with WORLDS and EDUCATION, the number was down to 23. She would ask for a list of the titles, and usually wouldn’t find anything that clicked, and would start over.