Stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, and she with a clarinet reed softening on her tongue, heart slamming at the prospect of exposing her inexpertise to this crowd of laughing black men, some women, manic drunk, shouting stylized insults back and forth. Fat Charlie’s. Scales and intervals, warming up in the kitchen, the ice-cold stab of sour-mash bourbon, then Charlie’s pistol-shot finger snaps and the crowd loving it, loving it, formal backups and improvisations in turn, the soft sweet thirds and fifths under Bad Tom’s cornet, trading jazz jokes with Jimmy on the banjo, Hairball on the piano, and between sets rubbing the sides of her mouth desperately to ease the cramps, holding crushed ice under the bruised bitten lips and swallowing salt, blood with sweet mint and cold bourbon, knowing it could never happen again. Not knowing that in four days all those sweet and sinning men would be dead, New Orleans a radioactive crater, the Mississippi seeking the stratosphere in a column of superheated steam.

There were only three other people aboard this starship who had been on Earth the last week, she knew, the week that Earth’s politics became an irrational beast, lunging out of control, and there was no one else who was there the last day, no one but her who had been on one of the last four shuttles that leaped into the morning Florida sky just before the nuclear paroxysm.

And if there was no one left alive in New New, then she was probably the only living human link to the day the world ended. It was not a distinction you wanted to carry to the new world; she could imagine what an object of curiosity and pity she would be in a couple of generations. What a gold mine of information for graduate degrees, if they were still doing that. Or perhaps she could start a religion.

Seriously, she thought, it would be a good idea to get together with the other three survivors of that time. They’re probably having problems, too.

They were. She went back to her office and tried to contact them. One refused to speak to her. One was confined to the mental ward. The third had committed suicide a day after they lost New New.

She took a tranquilizer and went up to John’s room to try to sleep.

YEAR 1.88

LABOR-SAVING DEVICE

The womb was a dark glass cylinder named O’Hara, a meter high by a half-meter round. There were a hundred such cylinders in the room, most of them with nameplates. All but a few were evidently empty, their tops hinged open.

All of the family were there, scrubbed down and wearing hospital gowns. O’Hara nervously glanced at her wrist, but she’d had to leave her watch in the scrub room. “He ought to be here by now.”

“It’s not as big an occasion to him,” Dan said.