In talking with her daughter, O’Hara came to realize that there was a component of fear in her own feelings toward those people. Susceptible to this kind of weird behavior, what other kinds of behavior might they be capable of? Could inexplicable passivity explode into inexplicable violence? The Psych people she talked to cautiously said no. But on the other hand, they were at a loss to explain why so many aboard were vulnerable to this specific variety of dissociation. It was like a kind of existential virus. Could a normal person catch it? Could O’Hara?

It didn’t seem likely. Though Psych no longer had extensive profiles of everybody, they were able to interview acquaintances and sometimes family relations of the people possessed by the Church of the Eternal Now, and it seemed that certain patterns of personality were favored. Coworkers used terms like scatterbrained, sullen, hard to train, unimaginative, lazy. Family members tended to preface their interviews with a sigh, and then work on some variation of “He was such a nice little boy.” Most of them had been in and out of various religions, tending toward the wholist and fundamentalist. Seven Nowers had once been proselytizing atheists, a combination both odd and annoying, since almost three quarters of ’Home’s population already adhered to unbelief in some degree. (John had worked with one of the antifaithful in the Deucalion reclamation project, almost twenty years before, and had confounded him by claiming to be a “fundamentalist Syncretic,” borrowing from various friends jewelry presenting cross, crescent, flower, and Star of David, switching from week to week, enlivening the lunch hour with haphazard but passionate pronouncements about the pope, Muhammed, Baha’u’llah, and Moses. John didn’t know much about religion, but the fanatic knew less.)

The net result was that ’Home experienced no significant decline in work accomplished by losing them. The eighty-eight people gone off to wherever the Church of the Eternal Now was had added to and subtracted from productivity in about equal measure.

YEAR 11.07

GROWING PAINS

15 October 2108 [1 Lao Tse 315]—What do they feed those children, sex hormones? Sandra’s starting to sprout breasts. Talking about menarche. Put a cork in it, girl. She hasn’t even had time to be a girl!

Of course she’s anxious about being the youngest. The oldest of the Old Guard are ancient crones of ten. But how could worrying about that cause her to grow breasts? (Evy says the record age is eight, so I guess I should be thankful for small favors.)

Mother was such a bitch about the way I delayed menarche. Trying not to overcompensate. Sure, honey, if you want to go from blocks to cocks in seven years, what business is it of mine?

Let’s separate this out into factors:

1. Concern about my own age. I’m not old enough to have a pubescent daughter. Me a potential grandmother? (And what if Sandra elects for parthenogenesis? A hall of mirrors.)