Worlds Apart Read online

  The sound was clear. Her voice cracked with hysteria. “Everyone who has been to the States, or anywhere outside of Nevada, since the war started must clear out! Don’t stop to pack, just get out. Whatever this shit is, we don’t want it. The Assassins’ Guild is cooperating fully with the Public Health Syndicate…anyone who might have had contact with the plague has until midnight to be missing.

  “If you know anybody who’s been outside, report his name to any assassin. They’re gonna be busy, so don’t use this to settle old business, all right? It might be life or death for all of us—it looks like this shit spreads fast and gets everybody.

  “Likewise, if you see anybody with symptoms, go get an assassin. Or do the job yourself—but only if you have a flamer. Then report it to Public Health.

  “Symptoms are fever and sweats, and talking nonsense. Whatever it is, it hits the brain first. But they can walk around for days before they die. Don’t take any chances.”

  Jules Hammond returned in all his comforting solidity. “I have with me Coordinators Markus and Berrigan.”

  The camera rolled back to show that Hammond was seated between the two Coordinators. Weislaw Markus, the Policy Coordinator, had glossy black hair but showed his age in his eyes and the deep creases that worried his face. Sandra Berrigan, Engineering Coordinator, was new to her office and young for it, forties, but her face was also a portrait of stress, slack bruises under sad eyes.

  Markus shifted in his chair. “It’s virtually certain that this plague is the result of biological warfare, one side or the other. Our main concern is that it not spread to New New, of course. Anyone who was on Earth when the war started is a potential carrier.”

  Dan put his arm around O’Hara, but it was a stiff, self-conscious gesture.

  “We certainly don’t have sympathy for the Draconian approach Nevada is taking. But our reaction must be equally absolute, equally swift. Your department, Sandra.”

  “It may not be our problem at all,” she said. “Even if some of us were exposed to the microorganism on Earth, it’s not likely the bug would live through the prophylaxis series everyone has to complete before they come through the airlock.” O’Hara agreed; the shots were a combat assault on your body. It seemed as if everyone on the slow-boat spent half their waking hours in the john.

  “However. We do have to consider the remote possibility that some of you are carrying the plague. We’re in the process of converting Module 9B into living quarters, to quarantine and examine you. If you were on Earth within the past year—because the agent could have been released long before the nuclear exchange—you must go immediately to Module 9B. Don’t pack. Don’t even pick up your toothbrush. We don’t know at what stage of incubation this disease becomes communicable.”

  O’Hara squeezed John’s hand and kissed Daniel antiseptically on the cheek. As she made her way to the door, people gave her a lot of room.

  They had all the tomatoes and cucumbers they could ever want; that was the crop in Module 9B. Seconds after O’Hara floated through the module airlock, she knew she’d grow to hate the tomatoes’ vinous smell.

  The agricultural modules, the farms, were glassed-in bubbles that contained rigidly controlled environments, floating around New New York. They provided most of the vegetables and some of the meat for a quarter of a million people. (Only fish and chickens grew well in zero gravity; the rabbits and goats had to live inside with everybody else.)

  The module was big, since it had been built with expansion in mind, but it wasn’t big enough for 1,230 people. Besides the potential carriers, there were several dozen technicians, mostly medical, with a few engineering and agricultural workers to make sure that the people, tomatoes, and cukes all survived their period of close communion. The technicians wore spacesuits, in case somebody sneezed.

  At least it wasn’t like being cooped up with a bunch of strangers. People began to form in clusters of friends, swapping stories and speculations about Earth. O’Hara found her bunch, a group of students who used to meet every Tuesday at the River Liffey in Manhattan. Seven hadn’t made it.

  They were asked all to assemble at one end of the module, where a gruff medico told them they’d have to be quarantined for at least five days. There was a lot of predictable harrumphing about that. Only about one person in three hundred got a trip to Earth, in his lifetime; these were some of New New’s most important people.

  Someone asked about solar flares—and got the answer, “Just hope we don’t get a bad one.” A Class 3 would kill them all in minutes, without shielding, but they were rare.

  The first order of business was a thorough medical examination. Being in the middle of the alphabet, O’Hara handed in her samples and then loafed around for a couple of days. She couldn’t read, since there were only a dozen cubes in the place, each being watched by twenty or thirty people at once. She got tired of movies and plays, and wound up with a group that was laboriously filling in “the world’s largest crossword puzzle.”

  Finally she spent some hours being scanned and poked and thumped and swabbed. The doctors were fast, bored, and tired; O’Hara felt like a product on an assembly line. There was one moment that made her laugh, though, floating naked in midair behind a rack of tomato vines (for privacy), upside-down, holding on to a gynecologist’s boots so he could keep his bearings while taking smears, both of them slowly rotating in a posture that was a parody of soixante-neuf. She remembered her last conversation with Daniel and wondered what it would take to give an erection to a gynecologist, in a spacesuit or otherwise.

  The examination turned up nothing beyond an allergy to cow’s milk, which was no surprise (and no problem, since the nearest cow was 36,500 kilometers away). Neither she nor anyone else had the plague. They were kept under observation for ten days, then returned to New New.

  Very tired of the bland emergency rations they’d been fed in the module, O’Hara went straight to the cafeteria. The day’s lunch was centered around gazpacho, cold tomato and cucumber soup.

  Charlie’s Will

  Most of the weapons that roared into the sky, 16 March 2085, were antiques, fifty to a hundred years old, but one type was quite new. Experimental; inadequately tested.

  The Koralatov virus was a humane sort of weapon. It was meant to induce a lengthy period of mental confusion in-the enemy population, some months of being unable to think effectively. Better dumb than dead, if it had worked, but it hadn’t worked well at all.

  Eighteen missiles were loaded with Koralatov-31. All but two were destroyed by America’s defensive laser net. One accidentally aborted somewhere over Eastern Europe. Another had been targeted for Chicago and almost made it. A near miss from a geriatric antimissile missile cracked it open and spilled K-31 into the jet stream. The result was the same as in Europe: over the ensuing weeks and months the virus drifted down and found its human hosts quite hospitable. By the end of the year it was as ubiquitous as the common cold. But it didn’t have the effect Koralatov had planned; in fact, it was some time before any symptoms appeared anywhere. When the first victim lapsed into idiocy and died, the only humans left uninfected were a handful of desert nomads, some scientists stranded in Antarctica, and the people who lived in space.

  The ones in Antarctica could hang on for a few years, while their supplies lasted, and the nomads would survive so long as they remained out of contact with the infected population. For the rest of the Earth, the plague was swift and complete.

  Almost everyone over the age of twenty died in the first few weeks. Younger people didn’t seem to be affected. In the chaos of a world suddenly leaderless, parentless, ten times decimated, it took a while for the morbid truth to become clear: no one would live for very long. Sometime between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, everyone got sick and died.

  A couple of billion doomed children couldn’t keep the twenty-first century running. Everything didn’t grind to a halt at once, since much of the world was automated, and the systems kept working for a while. You
could go into an autobar and get a drink, or punch up a public-service number and have a dead woman pray for you. But sooner or later a crucial part would decay, or there would be vandalism, and no one left who knew how to fix things up, no one in the world.

  There was at least one group that the war did not take by surprise, neither in its timing nor its ferociousness. The Mansonites were an underground and quite illegal religion, claiming tens of thousands of members in the southern United States. They had been predicting for some years that there would be a period of “helter-skelter,” followed by the end of the world, and they figured it would happen in 2085, the hundredth anniversary of their savior’s deliverance.

  The Mansonites based their creed on the writings of Charles Manson, a charismatic loony who in the previous century had led his followers in a small orgy of mass murder. To the Family, death was a blessing and murder a sacrament. They were the only church whose membership increased dramatically after the war.

  Year Two

  1

  There had been some hope that Australia, New Zealand, and Pacifica might in their isolation be spared. But the virus drifted down everywhere. On every tiniest speck of land, if there were people, all but the very young sickened and died.

  As life on Earth sloughed into desperation and savagery, life in New New became more safe, more comfortable, at least for a while. The farms were repaired—O’Hara gratefully traded in her spacesuit and diapers for a desk—and people stopped worrying so much about their next meal and, in grim pursuit of normality, resumed worrying about which fork to use. They also worried quite a bit about who was sleeping with whom, and what went on when they weren’t sleeping, and why they didn’t at least get a document to legitimize it.

  Marriage was a pretty complicated affair in New New York. Not the civil part of it; that could be done in a couple of minutes, by computer. The problem was deciding whether to marry one person, or two, or six, or several thousand.

  There were dozens of “line families” in New New. The term was an archaic one that was now applied very loosely to any more-or-less permanent connection involving love, sometimes reproduction, cohabitation (if the group was small enough and the room was big enough), and so forth.

  As an example, Marianne O’Hara’s various families. When she was born, her mother belonged to the Nabors line. This was a conventional old-fashioned line family, several hundred people who were all husband and wife. Careful genealogical tables were kept to prevent inbreeding, but there were no inhibitions on nonreproductive sex. A pretty young girl like O’Hara’s mother spent a lot of time being nice to relatives, and even more time saying “no.” She wanted out, and she picked the quickest way: soon after menarche she got herself impregnated by an outsider. The Nabors line took care of her until the baby was born, and then kicked both of them out.

  By that time she had a Nabors lover, who quit the line to be with her. Along with Marianne’s father, they joined the Scanlan line, which was actually a loose association of three-way marriages, rather than a true line. It was a fairly cold-blooded decision on her mother’s part. Marianne’s father was a groundhog, and (as had been prearranged) a week after the marriage he returned to his Earthside wife. So mother and lover became a simple married couple, but with the housing and schooling advantages of the Scanlan line. Marianne was the only child of a broken triune, which made her an outsider to the other children, and they were vicious in their clannishness. Growing up, the only thing she knew for sure about her future was that she would never join a triune marriage.

  She was wrong. She’d been living with Daniel—as lovers again, finally—for over a year when a law was passed that forbade single people from occupying multiple dwellings. (A lot of families from other Worlds had been split up, living in dormitories, and once they had coordinated their interests, they made a substantial voting bloc.)

  For the past year, O’Hara had been resisting social pressure to get married. Girls and boys from most lines in New New were encouraged to “butterfly,” to seek a variety of sexual contacts. But as one grew older—certainly by O’Hara’s advanced age of twenty-three—one was expected to settle down. (In joining the Devon line, for instance, “settling down” meant restricting yourself to a few thousand potential sexual partners.) She knew her family and coworkers thought her relationship with Daniel was immature and even a little indecent. This annoyed her and might have delayed their marriage indefinitely, if the practical matter of housing hadn’t interfered.

  There was no line she wanted to join, which was a relief to Daniel, so she suggested they start their own, and he nervously agreed. They filed the necessary documents, patterning the line after the old-fashioned Nabors one: new members accepted only on unanimous approval; old members divorced by majority vote. She drew the long straw, and the line was named O’Hara.

  Before they’d filed, O’Hara brought up the possibility of their asking John Ogelby to join them, as a symbol of their mutual affection. Daniel thought it over for some weeks. He and John were closer than brothers, but, damn it, you can’t marry another man! Daniel’s parents had had a conventional pair-bond marriage, until-death-or-boredom-do-you-part, and nothing else really seemed right to him.

  Marianne kidded and argued with him until he finally agreed. One thing that had never entered the discussion was sex. Daniel knew that she and John had tried on one occasion, and it hadn’t worked, and the presumption that he wouldn’t be gaining a rival in that arena probably influenced his decision. It’s likely that Marianne suspected otherwise. Daniel was nine years older, but she had lit-erally worlds more experience in sex.

  At any rate, the predictable transformation occurred. John Ogelby, forty-two years old, physically deformed, Irish Catholic upbringing: besides the unsuccessful event with Marianne, and two equally frustrating youthful encounters with Dublin prostitutes, his only sexual partner in thirty years had been his own imagination. One simple ceremony and he was a different man.

  Daniel suddenly found himself with a lot of time to reflect, alone, on the ways of a maid with a man. Marianne spent the first week of their expanded marriage up in John’s quarter-gee cubicle, with occasional forays to the zerogee gymnasium, where there were small rooms with locks.

  There was no possibility of the three of them living together, since John couldn’t tolerate normal gravity for long. Eventually they settled down into an informal migratory pattern. Marianne would spend a few days up-stairs, a few days downstairs, free to change at her whim or either man’s desire. She got into the habit of carrying a toothbrush in her bag. The three of them took most of their meals together. Daniel was surprised to find himself not jealous.

  O’Hara’s advanced training had been in the areas of American Studies and administration; she’d been aiming for a liaison position between the Worlds and the U.S. That didn’t look like much of a career now.

  She had a temporary, or tentative, position as a minor administrator in Resources Allocation. Administrative trainee, actually, which turned out to be assistant to anybody junior enough not to have his own assistant. Being in Resources, though, gave her a realistic view of New New’s current situation. It was a fool’s paradise.

  She and John and Daniel were taking their slow Friday walk through the park. Ogelby had to spend a few hours a week in normal gravity, or progressive myasthenia would trap him forever in the upper levels.

  “I’m getting used to it again,” O’Hara said, “not having a horizon.” They sat down to rest on a bench beside the lake. The lake rose in front of them, a sheet of still water that curved gently away to be lost in mist. If you looked straight overhead, squinting against the brilliance of the artificial suns, you might just make out the opposite shore.

  “I never will,” Anderson said. A duck swam toward them, slightly downhill. Ogelby snapped his fingers at it.

  O’Hara frowned. “Don’t tease the poor thing.”

  “Tease?” He opened a pocket and took out a piece of rice cake. The duck waddled over a
nd snatched it. “We must share with the less fortunate.” His speech was slightly slurred, and his eyes bright, from the pain pills.

  “Time will come when you’ll wish you’d saved it,” she said. “When we’re up to our ears in Devonites.”

  “They’ll come to their senses,” Ogelby said. “The whole line’s still in a state of shock.” Two years before, the Devonites had over fifteen thousand souls in their lines. Most of them lived in Devon’s World, a toroidal settlement in the same orbit as New New, about three thousand kilometers downstream. Devon’s World had suffered a direct hit during the war, and all but a few hundred perished. They were rescued and joined the several thousand who lived in New New.

  Even in normal times, a Devonite woman was expected to have many children; their religion was a cele-bration of fertility. Now they were pregnant constantly, and taking drugs to guarantee multiple births. This put them at odds with public policy; for conservation of food and water, the administration of New New had asked for a five-year period of strict birth control.

  Most women in New New were in the same situation as O’Hara. She’d had a half-dozen ova frozen and filed when she was a girl, and then had herself sterilized. If she wanted a child she could either choose a father and have the fertilized ovum implanted in her womb, or opt for parthenogenesis—have her cell quickened by micro-surgery, then bear a daughter who would be a genetic duplicate of herself. Since neither of these procedures could be done outside of a hospital, New New’s administration had de facto control over population growth, if they wanted to exercise it. Many people, O’Hara included, did want them to shut down the conception labs for a few years, and they could do it as a simple administrative procedure (though there would be noise), since the right to bear and keep children was not guaranteed by the Declaration of Rights.

  That was the demographic rub, though. Freedom of religious expression was guaranteed, and women being baby machines was fundamental to the Devonite religion. (Sterilization, of course, was an unforgivable sin; their ova were quickened the old-fashioned sloppy way.) In five years a lucky woman might have six or seven multiple pregnancies.