Read Worlds Enough and Time for Free Online

known her that well. But I’d never known anyone before who had died. It made me feel oddly important.
    “So yes, I’ve been following your career since then. For twelve years your successes have been a constant small irritant. I always have to think of Margaret and what she might have done. Not rational.” He put his hand on mine, unexpectedly, cold. “That’s how they make pearls, though.” He squeezed. “Put an irritant into an ugly old bivalve.”
    He started pacing. “Number two. You have accumulated far too much influence and visibility for a woman your age. Not just the demographic selection work you did on Start-up, though that certainly made you ubiquitous. That book you wrote made you a kind of celebrity in New New, and celebrity has its negative side.”
    “I wasn’t exactly lusting for fame. I wanted the book to be published anonymously.”
    “I know. A pretty gesture, but pointless. Anybody who didn’t know who you were by then would have to have been asleep all the years following the war.” The book,
Three Earths
, was about my rather eventful school “year” on Earth, cut short by the war, and the two disaster-ridden return missions I participated in. It was just my diary with some of the stupidities and libels edited out.
    “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