Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future Read online

“Big girls, too.”

  “He’s a nice man.”

  “Sure. Keeps his instruments in the refrigerator so they’ll be nice and fresh.”

  She shook her head. “Poor girl. I know what you’re going through.”

  Marianne leaned back and closed her eyes. “In a goat’s gap, you do. You were twelve, weren’t you?”

  “Eleven. I was twelve when I had you”

  “So don’t call me ‘girl.’ In another five years I’ll be twice as old as you.”

  “What?”

  “Just help me up, would you?” She held out a weary arm. “I have to find the john.”

  “Are you going to be sick?”

  “No. If you must know, I want to check and see if it’s started yet.” She minced away and muttered: “My glorious fucking womanhood.”

  Her misspent youth

  When she was a girl, Marianne knew she annoyed some people and frightened others. It would be years before she made any conscious effort to put people at ease; until then, she was socially something of a monster.

  She was single-minded and broadly talented. Under New New’s merit-examination system, she was graduated from high school at age twelve; by fifteen she had baccalaureate certification in American Studies and World Systems. She earned medals in handball and gymnastics and played in the orchestra. Papers she wrote while a graduate student were published in academic journals in the Worlds and on Earth. New New’s Academic Council gave her the rare opportunity to go to Earth for a year of postgraduate work.

  Her mother, who had dropped out of school at the tenth-grade level, thought that Marianne was using her education as an excuse for delaying menarche, and she was not completely wrong. To Marianne, dating sounded like a boring waste of time and sex sounded gruesome. She knew that wasn’t true for most people, but she also knew she wasn’t like most people. So she exercised her legal right to put off adulthood.

  For the first couple of months after menarche, Marianne had reason to wish they still did it the old-fashioned way. She cramped constantly and lost so much blood she had to have two transfusions. Her new breasts and hips ached from rapid growth and bumping into things. She felt clumsy and sore and messy and unnecessarily hirsute.

  Once recovered from the transition, though, she went about becoming a woman with characteristic speed and thoroughness. She read all about it, of course, and asked innumerable embarrassing questions. She took a light academic load and kept an eye out for a likely-looking male. She found an unlikely one.

  Students in New New, no matter how gifted, were not allowed to be passive beneficiaries of everybody else’s labor. O’Hara was required to do agricultural work on Thursdays and construction on Saturdays. It was while slapping paint on seemingly endless acres of wall that she met Charlie Increase Devon.

  The Devonites were the largest line family in the Worlds, though not too many of them lived in New New. They had their own settlement, Devon’s World, which was sort of a cross between religious commune and brothel.

  Like all Devonites, Charlie was a New Baptist. The only thing they had in common with old-style Baptists was that their initiation ceremony also involved water. They weren’t even Christian; their theology could be described as Unitarian-on-Quāāludes. They were nudists and body-worshipers. They had various interesting rituals—such as semarche, when boys became men—that formed the nucleus for a large subgenre of ribald humor in the twenty-first century. They were promiscuous and often pregnant, both by commandment.

  O’Hara was fascinated by Charlie. He was about the biggest man she had ever seen, heavily muscled from years of pushing steel, but he moved with uncanny grace. He was serious and quiet and not at all intelligent. Like all Devonites, he was completely hairless and always wore white; like most of them, he was a religious fanatic, in a quiet way.

  They were total opposites, O’Hara being agnostic, intelligent, small, and not quiet. He seemed like a perfect man to start out with, since she did want sexual experience but didn’t want to complicate her life with a love affair.

  She might have been forewarned if her otherwise liberal education had included a few ancient Claudette Colbert movies (“you big lug”). They fell for each other, hard, even before they went to bed together, which was not long postponed. After he had gently initiated her into the glorious mysteries of friction and spasm, they dung to one another like the opposite poles of strong magnets.

  It was not going to have a happy ending. Charlie had to start fathering children by age twenty-three (he was twenty-one when they met), or sin by omission, and although O’Hara’s love was almost boundless, it could not encompass shaving her head and spending the rest of her youth manufacturing babies.

  Of course, they tried to convert each other. Charlie listened to O’Hara’s arguments with grave respect, but she couldn’t penetrate his belief. O’Hara had less patience with Charlie’s arguments, but after hurting him twice, she kept her mouth shut. Eventually, she agreed to go with him to Devon’s World, even though the idea of a one-religion World gave her understandable premonitions of disaster. The only other one had suffered the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Jacob’s Ladder

  Everyone remembers what they were doing on 14 March 2082, the day Jacob’s Ladder came down.

  World of Christ was an evangelical organization with a worldwide membership approaching a hundred million. In 2018, the hundredth anniversary of their founder’s birth, they hired Martin-Marietta-Boeing to build for them Jacob’s Ladder: a huge and beautiful space structure that combined the functions of church, monastery, and hotel. Most of the thousands of people who went there stayed for only a week or a month of praying in the ecstasy of weightlessness, suspended between the Earth and Heaven. A couple of hundred were especially blessed and lived there full time (which made them objects of intense curiosity for scientists concerned with the long-term effects of weightlessness, but WoX wouldn’t allow them to be examined).

  For economy, Jacob’s Ladder was in low Earth-orbit, with a perigee of about 250 kilometers. This is why it came down. It had a limited capability for orbit correction, in case of atmospheric drag. A correction was applied on 13 March 2082, but somehow it was applied in exactly the wrong direction, elongating the orbit rather than circularizing it. This plunged the structure deeper into the atmosphere. It completed sixteen orbits, lower and lower, before it crashed flaming into the Indian Ocean.

  If it had stayed aloft a fraction of a minute longer, the molten cathedral would have impacted on the Indian sub-continent, surely taking millions of lives. WoX spokesmen claimed this was evidence of God’s mercy. They also claimed the disaster was a warning to sinners.

  Their membership fell off drastically. They collected more than enough insurance to build another Ladder, but they never got around to it.

  The fourteenth was a Friday, so O’Hara was to have her weekly walk in the park with John Ogelby.

  Deformed people were rare in the Worlds, but John Ogelby would not describe himself any other way: hunch-backed, bandy-legged, sticks for arms; he walked like a cartoon character and was barely a meter tall. He had come to the Worlds because low gravity was the best, safest anodyne for the constant aching in his joints, and because he suspected that a small world was like a small town: people got used to you and stopped staring.

  He was well liked in the low-gravity engineering facility where he worked. He was a brilliant and careful worker, and had learned how to be affable in spite of a natural tendency to use his wit and deformity as a double-edged weapon. He did devastatingly grotesque imitations of video stars and political figures.

  But he was wrong about this World being small. With more than two hundred thousand people, there was always someone seeing him for the first time, starting and staring. He got used to it, but could not stop noticing it.

  So Ogelby was mildly surprised when he first met Marianne O’Hara. She didn’t jump. She looked at him without staring, the way very old people sometimes did, and then walked over wi
th a glass of punch—the bowl was obviously too high for him to reach—and spent the rest of the afternoon talking with him, with frankness and sympathy. She came up to look at his lab the next day, and they had dinner.

  What developed was not exactly a love affair. Love can be driven by pity, and it can even be fueled by curiosity and a thirst for intellectual companionship, but that was not the case here. O’Hara was in love already, with Charlie Devon, and John’s complicated strengths and weaknesses served to counterbalance Charlie’s simple ones. The two men met once and liked each other cautiously, but Charlie privately could not understand how O’Hara could get used to looking at the hunchback, and John could not drive away the vision of Marianne lost in those strong arms. If you asked either of them, he would say that he was glad there was someone to give O’Hara what he could not (John would say “perforce”).

  O’Hara spent more time with John than with Charlie: playing games, exploring New New, incessantly talking and joking. Every Friday they met for lunch and a long walk in the park. John wasn’t particularly comfortable there, but knew that if he didn’t exercise in high gravity he would suffer progressive myasthenia and eventually be unable to leave the low-gravity section where he lived and worked. He was usually rather giddy on the Friday walks, because the pain pills made him light-headed.

  He hadn’t taken any pills this Friday, the fourteenth, and his knees and hips and curved spine throbbed with tiny pulses of fire while he waited at the outdoor restaurant. He was the only customer.

  Marianne came briskly down the pathway, brushing out her wet hair, and started to apologize for having been held up at the pool’s dressing room, but Ogelby cut her short with a voice that surprised both of them, a harsh croak:

  “Have you heard about the Ladder?”

  “Jacob’s Ladder?”

  “It’s coming down.” She furrowed her brow, not understanding. “It’s going to crash. They can’t save it.”

  “H-how?”

  On the way to the lift that would take them up to Ogelby’s flat, he told O’Hara about the incredibly botched correction maneuver; about the shuttles that had come up with emergency engines, too late. On its second pass through the atmosphere, the cross-shaped structure had picked up rotation and wobble; it couldn’t be docked with. Many of the congregation had been killed when the satellite started rotating, the artificial gravity sliding them down to the ends of the cross’s arms, then crushing them under a load of altars and statues and a boulder from Golgotha. The ones left alive first made a plea for help, then a dignified statement about the will of God, and then they cut off all communication.

  While the world and the Worlds watched helplessly, Jacob’s Ladder fell closer to the Earth each ninety minutes. The United States, Common Europe, and the Supreme Socialist Union argued over the morality of blasting the thing out of the sky.

  Marianne and John sat silently, sipping coffee all day and into the night, watching his video cube and a jury-rigged flatscreen. The cube brought them Earth newscasts, and the flatscreen picked up signals from Worlds telescopes, tracking the Ladder as it spun and yawed over familiar continents and oceans.

  On the fifteenth pass, it glowed cherry-red and made charcoal of two thousand martyrs. Calculations showed that it would come down next time, landing safely in the ocean. Missilemen locked up their systems and sat back in relief.

  It was a terrifying sight, the spinning incandescent cross lighting up the night of Africa. Skimming in over the Laccadive Islands, its sonic boom broke every window and eardrum in its path. None survived long enough to notice the deafness. The Ladder hit the water at four miles per second, and detonated with ten thousand times the force of a nuclear weapon, and sent a high surge of steam-backed water rolling across the lowlands of Kerala. All but a few hundred thousand had managed to get to high land.

  They watched the cube for several hours after the crash, as the true magnitude of the disaster slowly unfolded. Sometimes they were awkwardly arm in arm, Marianne holding John with uncertain delicacy.

  “John,” she said finally, “I’ve never asked. Do you believe in God?”

  “No,” he said. He looked at one ugly large hand and pipestem wrist. “Sometimes I believe in a Devil.”

  After briefly discussing the possibility of failure, they tried to make love, and it was the night’s second disaster. After a year or so they could talk and even joke about it, and they remained fast friends long after Charlie had gone off to join a baby machine (his place in O’Hara’s life was taken over by a rapid succession of men more characterized by variety than quality, Ogelby thought), and when she was on Earth O’Hara wrote more often to Ogelby than to anyone else, so long as she could write.

  Licorice stick

  O’Hara loved to play the clarinet. She had a thorough classical grounding—had played every boring note in Klosé—because the clarinet had been her solo instrument for her music degree. She even played in the New York orchestra because she enjoyed losing herself in the complex harmonies and rhythms of symphonic music and liked to be around other musicians. But her real love was jazz: primitive American jazz—Dixieland, especially.

  Her music library was dominated by tapes, flat-screen or plain audio, of twentieth-century American jazzmen. She often played along with them, and could do a dead-on pastiche of, say, Goodman’s solo in “Sing, Sing” or Fountain’s in “Swing Low.” A friend who was good with electronics had made her a copy of “Rhapsody in Blue” with the clarinet part filtered out; learning it had taken three hundred hours out of her seventeenth year.

  An objective critic, and O’Hara was one by the time she was twenty, would note that her playing was mechanically competent and sometimes even brilliant, but she had no particular personal style and no real gift for improvisation. It might have been different if she had had other people to play with, but no jazz musicians in New York were interested in historic forms. The Ajimbo school, with its sixteenth-note phrasing and weird clapping chorus, had dominated jazz for a generation, in the Worlds as well as on Earth. O’Hara thought it was degenerate, obvious, and unnecessarily complex. Other people might say the same of Dixieland, if they ever listened to it.

  That was another reason to go to Earth. Chicago, San Francisco, old New York; they all sounded fascinating. But the place she most wanted to visit was New Orleans. To walk the streets they’d named songs after: Bourbon, Basin, Rampart. To sit on a hard chair in Preservation Hall, or nurse expensive drinks in crumbling old bars, or just stand on the sidewalk or in the French Quarter park and listen to old black men try to keep alive this two-century-old music. John Ogelby had been there (he was English but had taken a degree at Baton Rouge), and she made him talk about it all the time. She would go to New Orleans even if she could somehow foretell what was waiting for her there.

  O brave new world/ That has such people in’t

  O’Hara didn’t really want to go to Devon’s World. She and Charlie both had a week of vacation coming up, and they’d discussed the possibility of going to another World, but it was Tsiolkovski she wanted to visit, or maybe Mazeltov. She had made a joke about going to Devon’s World, and Charlie claimed he had taken her literally and bought tickets, nonreturnable. So she went along, grumbling, to experience Edward D. Devon’s dream made solid, a World dedicated to the proposition.

  Devon’s World was the oldest large structure in orbit. Originally called O’Neill—a ninety-year-old oak tree planted by O’Neill himself survived—it had been home to some ten thousand workers involved in the manufacture of other large space structures. Out of minerals flung up from the Moon’s surface they built energy farms, space factories, a large zerogee hospital, and other Worlds—thirty-two large structures and scores of smaller ones. But now its original purpose had been preempted by its children.

  It was New New York that had forced them out of business. Foamed steel from the interior of Paphos was cheaper, stronger, and easier to work with than the aluminum alloys that lunar soil could provide. Devon’
s World still had a modest income from the manufacture of solar cells, for other Worlds, and some specialized products, such as large vapor-deposition mirrors.

  But most of its workers, for generations now, had been lured to New New York. The New New York Corporation could afford generous relocation bonuses, high salaries, and profit-sharing plans, to save the cost of lifting men and women from Earth and training them to work in the hazardous conditions of space. Edward D. Devon and his New Baptists—who had seen the future and spent a decade in careful preparation—moved in as the workers moved out, in the most ambitious relocation of a religious body since Brigham Young’s trek to Utah.

  For Charlie, the trip was a pilgrimage. He hadn’t been to Devon’s World since his own semarche, ten years before. Marianne was going with the attitude of an anthropologist, a slightly apprehensive anthropologist: it was one thing to be in love with a sex maniac, and quite another to be locked up in a World with ten thousand of them. She brought lots of schoolwork, figuring to stay in the hotel and work ahead on her studies while Charlie used his divining rod on female coreligionists. She gritted her teeth and told herself she was not jealous.

  As she should have foreseen, Charlie had other ideas. This was his best and last opportunity to convert her. She cooperated, out of respect for his feelings and to satisfy her own considerable sexual curiosity, and got much more than she’d bargained for.

  In his holy book Temple of Flesh, Edward D. Devon had provided a spiritual rationale for virtually every sexual diversion, with only brutality and male homosex proscribed. Charlie seemed determined to start at the beginning and work through to the concordance.

  O’Hara had to admit that Devon’s World was comfortable, and beautiful—it had to be, considering that eighty percent of its income was from tourism (as opposed to eleven percent in New New)—but most of it was far too expensive for her and Charlie; prices reflected the small fortunes that groundhog tourists spent getting there. Charlie was able to get them space in a hotel that was a Devonite “retreat,” and therefore affordable. A room in Shangrila, one of the World’s two cities, would have eaten up all of their savings in a half hour.