So Dan’s back to drinking. It’s a good thing he didn’t make public his decision not to drink for the two years of his Coordinatorship. I can’t say I’m surprised or even particularly disappointed. He did keep it up for over a month, and he didn’t just suddenly break down and go on a binge, which I more than half suspected would happen. He talked it over with me first, about the unexpected pressures and his unwillingness to alleviate them with more modern pharmaceuticals. A glass of wine with dinner and one drink at night. That’ll last a week.

He wanted sympathy rather than approval, and I gave it to him. The experts down in Counseling would probably throw me out the airlock for that. But I know how badly and how little he’s been sleeping, and have seen him come from meetings glowing with suppressed rage, which is uncharacteristic and frightening. Usually he can work it off down in the gym, but sometimes he takes it out snarling at Evy or me—knowing what he’s doing and not liking himself for it. (Well, leadership doesn’t build character, at least not at the top. Must remember that, and prepare myself for disintegration.)

I did force him to discuss the pattern, several times repeated, of working himself to exhaustion in a new job and then rewarding himself for his dedication by going on a bender and sleeping it off. No weekends in this job; somebody would be bound to notice. He acknowledged the problem and said he was sure he could control it. Arguably, the last job change, from New New Liaison to Coordinator-elect, was a lot more dramatic than this one, and he handled that okay. I believed him.

There’s also my own selfish thirst, since I’ve been joining him in abstinence. Two unopened boxes of wine in my office cupboard; I’ll admit I’ve thought about them a few times. Who would know? I would, and my cybernetic conscience Prime. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. How much does she affect my behavior?

POPULATION EXPLOSION

PRIME

Sandra Purcell O’Hara’s seventh birthday was on 12 August 2106 [8 Galileo 311]. This event was celebrated with a couple of hundred cookies (flavored with peppermint from her mother’s garden) and a barely measurable increase of the chaos level, which was growing monotonically every year.

Sandra was one of the youngest of what the creche parents called the Old Guard, the ninety-five surviving children who were quickened around 2098, in response to a morale crisis and a larger-than-expected number of deaths. The real crisis, of course, came five years later, with the crop failure that put most of Newhome into suspended animation.

The year after that, 2104, forty-two children were born, to offset deaths and eventually replace the inevitable population loss during cryptobiosis. In 2105, it was thirty-nine. This year there were forty-one new infants. The creche was rapidly becoming overcrowded.