And who will be able to visualize it, once those of us who knew Earth are gone? Almost all of the Earth VRs are gone, including London. We do have oranges and cloves. Maybe someone will read this and go down to the commissary, or whatever they have on Epsilon, and pick up an orange and a clove and smell them together, and try to imagine. Maybe take them down to the stable, if they have stables on Epsilon.

Speaking of black people, I had a wonderful informant today, Matty Buford, born eighty-some years ago in Mobile, Alabama. (She was in New New visiting relatives just before the war, then volunteered her doctorate in nutrition for ’Home.) She knows dozens of old songs—Dixieland, ragtime, bebop, rock. She sang them in this lovely cracking baritone, chording them out on the piano. Because of a half-century of neglect, her piano playing is about as good as mine—that is, slightly off chords played badly—but with her voice it sounds right and beautiful. If things get back to normal, I’m going to use her as the nucleus of an old-time music group. Girolamo and Blakeslee would be glad to do guitar and trombone. Hermosa would play Dixieland to keep me happy. If I can find a willing trumpet and drummer, we’ll be in business.

Not that we would have that big an audience. But people don’t know what they’re missing—how Dixieland can make you ineffably happy and sad at the same time, angry at life but glad to be alive, not afraid of death but in no hurry. We could all use a dose of it.

YEAR 1.33

LONG-RANGE PLANS

PRIME

After a week of public debate in December, the referendum yielded results surprisingly similar to the foreordained 20/76 proportion. The actual numbers were 21 percent in favor of returning, and 72 percent in favor of Epsilon. (The assumption was that most of the remainder was made up of cynical people who didn’t vote because they thought it was a farce; the Coordinators would do whatever they wanted to.)

By early January the engineers thought they had recovered enough data to implement their changes and turn on the drive again, doubling the acceleration. In line with O’Hara’s suggestion, no public announcement was made; only about a thousand people knew that they were ready. They threw the switch on 14 January 2099.

Nothing happened.

Knowledge of the failure was pretty well confined to the Propulsion section at first. Eliot Smith and Tania Seven knew, but didn’t pass it on to the Cabinet. After they failed to ignite again on the sixteenth, and again on the eighteenth, the word began to percolate out: maybe we should have left well enough alone.