I went back to work today, that is to say, a meeting of the Literature Reclamation Committee, which was awkward at first. Of course they all miss Sam, too; Carlos especially. They had been friends since school. Close but not lovers, (When Sam and I came together on Earth, I was his first female lover. He’d long been monogamous with an older man whom he never identified. Benny was similar.) We worked on French and Belgian literature.

Translation’s an interesting problem. There’s no manpower now, so we do machine translations into English and store them along with the originals. French is still studied, so these may sooner or later have a human interpreter. But there are many works, like The Red and the Black and Somewhere, Nowhere, that exist only in English translation. In a sense, they’re lost; it would be silly to back-translate them into French.

Some things are literally recovered-yet-lost, because they’re in languages we don’t have translation programs for and no one aboard ’Home reads or speaks. There are even a few things in languages we haven’t been able to identify. Balinese folk tales? Samoan recipes? We can’t even decipher the titles.

Of course any day now New New may call up and render the past couple of years’ work redundant. Any day now.

YEAR 5.71

WATERSHED, BLOODSHED

6 June 2103 [19 Babbage 303]—So here I am a matron of forty. I took the day off to celebrate my birthday, talked with Prime for a while, went down to Creche and played with Sandra.

Creche is a madhouse. All this generation is in their “terrible twos,” lurching around, picking up toys, throwing them at each other. Nothing stays put away unless it’s put away someplace high. Then somebody notices they’re being deprived of it and cries until a creche mother or father takes it down again.

There are fourteen mothers and six fathers for a hundred children, and they are certainly earning their rations nowadays. Sandra’s mother, Robin, was so relieved to see me it was comical. I took Sandra and two of her associates off Robin’s hands and went to play in the mud room.

I’m not sure the mud room is going to do much toward turning children into responsible adults. The whole point of it seems to be a contest to see who can plaster the most mud on other people the fastest; extra points for ingestion.

They all wear diapers, to keep the mud from becoming too biologically complex. The association with shit is strong and inevitable. I kept trying to get them interested in constructing mud pies and mud houses, but all they wanted to do was squeeze it through their little fists and giggle at the pseudoturds.