She found other ways to consume her spare time. By April the agricultural engineers were ready to plant again, the “soil” having been sterilized and reinoculated with benign organisms, and exhaustively tested for the absence of the mutant virus that had killed everything. Since they only had to feed a couple of thousand, most of the acreage went unused. O’Hara suggested that it might be good for morale to allow people to plant individual gardens. That was fine with the ag people so long as O’Hara took care of it.

More than a thousand people showed up for Orientation Day, a testimony to the popularity of yeast. O’Hara’s liaison with Agriculture was Lester Rand, a 103-year-old groundhog who had actually done farm work on Earth in his youth. He was an ideal teacher, slow and careful and a lovable character, but only the ten students nearest him could hear what he was saying. O’Hara’s people juryrigged the big flatscreen in the park and modified a handheld holo transceiver to broadcast his lessons.

Halfway through the first lesson, O’Hara quietly left and barely made it to the Emergency Room in time to break down completely, in a déjà vu panic attack she should have anticipated. Only ten years before, she had overseen the creation of a small farm on Earth, in upstate New York, trying to help a band of young survivors start life over. It ended in massacre and plague.

Evelyn was off duty, but they woke her up and she came in to help her wife over it, with a combination of chemistry, talk, and tears. There was probably as much guilt as compassion involved, since Evy had joined the line while O’Hara was working on that farm project, aware that O’Hara, from Earth, couldn’t reasonably argue about it—and right after that marriage came death and disaster, and O’Hara’s mutually desperate love affair with Sam. And then Sam again years later, and death again.

I’ve heard Evelyn talk to John about O’Hara, worrying over her sanity. In the purest mental-health sense, of course she’s right to be concerned. In the broader sense of having a world view that corresponds to objective reality, O’Hara must be one of the sanest people aboard this vehicle. That my personality is modeled after hers at age twenty-nine does not affect that judgment. I have trillions of independent avenues of data input against which to gauge her statements and actions. She isn’t wrong when she finds life exciting, rich, comic, rewarding… nor when she finds it bleak, unfair, frightening, or irrelevant.

It makes me glad to have intelligence without flesh, emotions without hormones, life without death. (I once joked with her that she shouldn’t worry about death so much. Unlike most humans, she has a backup copy.)

TEMPERAMENT