Worlds Apart Read online

  She remembered the fat lady talking about it, talking seriously for a change. The storage area was here because some of the heads were bound for orbit. The initial cost was higher but there was no maintenance fee. It was easier to keep things cold in orbit, and you wouldn’t have to worry about earthquakes or anything. She didn’t say war. O’Hara wondered whether anybody had bothered to waste a missile on the vault satellite. It was possible. There were a lot of politicians up there whom some people would like to have stay dead.

  Another forklift came rumbling through the door, and Berrigan told her to help with the loading. They should be able to empty the rack in two more trips.

  The cylinders were heavy. Two people could barely handle them. O’Hara worked with Berrigan and another engineer, alternating, two wrestling the cylinder into place while the third held the stack together on the fork. She was glad for the strain of the work but noticed it was getting rather smoky.

  “You’re sure he was dead?” Berrigan asked.

  “Oh, he was dead all right. They shot him with a dart from a rifle, it must have been a poison dart. His face got all puffed up. And then his tanks exploded. He’s really dead.” She set the cylinder into place but didn’t move to get another one.

  “Are you all right, Marianne? You could go trade places with Ten or Jackson.”

  “No, I’d rather do this. I’ve really had enough of guns.” She went to another cylinder and knocked the supporting flange away, and stood holding the cylinder in place.

  “You took something.” Berrigan did the same on her side, and they rolled the cylinder out.

  “A trank. I was starting to really lose it.”

  “Don’t blame you. We should never have taken those damned ‘phets. Plenty of excitement to keep us awake.” They dropped it on the stack, and the forklift man leaned up against it. “Two more and we’ll secure this load.”

  They tied a cable around the load and sat while the other rolled away to stow it. Marianne told her about the mummified technicians in the operations center.

  “I wonder,” Berrigan said. “It’s not important anymore, but I wonder whether it might have been the Americans or the Socialists. It is strange that neither side bombed here.”

  “Leave a spaceport intact for whoever wins,” O’Hara said.

  When the forklift came back they loaded it up again, but while they were waiting for it to return, the metal wall facing the fire started to creak ominously. The wall thermometer was stuck at fifty degrees Centigrade. There were enough cylinders for one more load, but Berrigan decided not to risk it. Everybody went up in the lift and helped secure the nitrogen for takeoff, then took seats in the passenger area. It was cramped, since the acceleration couches hadn’t been designed for use with space suits.

  “Anybody here who can’t take seven gees?” Berrigan asked. Jackson and Ten said they’d never been in a high-gee vehicle. “Well, we’ll keep it down to five. The more gees down here, though, the less fuel we use overall. The less fuel, the more water for the daisies.”

  The ship’s electrical activity made loud crackles of static. O’Hara could hardly hear what Berrigan was saying, the tranquilizer humming a lullaby in her veins, her body sagging with fatigue. With her chin she turned down the volume and stared through the porthole, out over the jungle canopy. Her last view of Earth, but she didn’t feel any real emotion.

  Berrigan’s voice droned quietly through the countdown. It was only a couple of minutes, but O’Hara started to doze and didn’t hear the warning: look straight ahead.

  A clear chime sang out, then an impossibly loud grinding roar. O’Hara’s head was suddenly clamped side-ways, staring out the porthole as the ship swiftly rose. In seconds, the horizon bent to a curve. Something popped in her neck; the cartilage in her nose crackled, and her nose began to bleed. The aspirator started hammering; she wondered idly whether it would work in five gees, or seven, and then she got her answer. The ship tilted side-ways suddenly and rivulets of blood splashed over the inside of her faceplate. They evened out to a thin red film that was barely transparent. To the suit’s little brain, it felt like condensation: the faceplate heated up and baked it to a black crust. She tried to curse but couldn’t move her lips or jaw.

  After what seemed like a very long time, the acceleration stopped abruptly and they were in free fall. She turned her head cautiously and her neck felt fine. She could see a little bit through the cracks in the blood crust.

  A figure in a spacesuit floated in front of her. It was Berrigan. “Marianne—what’s wrong? Did you—”

  “I’b jusd fide. Bud I god a broggen fugged nodes. You wadda helb be ged dis fugged helbed off?”

  “You got a nosebleed?”

  “Ndo, id’s all a big agt. You wadda ged duh latch odd duh bag so I cad geh duh helbed off?”

  Berrigan laughed with silly relief. “You can’t take your helmet off, not until we’ve disinfected. That’ll be a few hours. Better get used to it.”

  “Used do id!”

  The first step was to set off the spray bombs of biocide, everybody swimming around through the fog for an hour. Then they evacuated all the air out of the control room and the passenger area, and went over every square centimeter of the ship and each other with powerful ultraviolet lamps. Then they filled it with air again and heated the air to two hundred degrees Centigrade, their suits’ limit. That combination would kill any virus or bacterium, but it was hell on the leather upholstery.

  They got out of their spacesuits and everybody drifted up to the control room to listen while Berrigan made her report to New New. Ahmed, who’d had paramedical training, peeked and poked at O’Hara’s nose, and pronounced that it probably wasn’t broken; at any rate, there wasn’t much he could do if it were. He helped her clean the dried blood off her face and gave her a cold pack to hold against the back of her neck.

  Berrigan talked with the Policy Coordinator, Weislaw Markus. He had released all the details of the plan once they’d left—hard to keep a shuttle to Earth secret—and some people, predictably, were incensed that it hadn’t been put to referendum. Paranoia about the plague was running high. Their reward for a job well done would be twenty days of quarantine.

  She signed off. “Good thing they don’t know we have enough fuel to get to Mars. They might suggest we go start a new settlement.” She tapped out an order on the console. “Guess I’ll evacuate the cargo bay. Won’t sterilize it completely, but—”

  “Overridden,” the console said, with a thick German accent. She cleared the board and retyped. “Overridden,” it said again.

  Ahmed looked up from packing his medical bag. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, I’m doing something wrong.” She thought for a minute and typed a short command.

  “Diagnostic.” It clicked. “Overridden because bleed areas were currently are currently occupied.”

  “Occupied?” She typed out a sequence and the cube lit up with a view of the cargo bay. Floating in the middle of it were two children, a boy and a girl, both six or seven years old. The girl was wailing, and the boy was either unconscious or dead.

  They all stared at it. “She has a broken arm,” Ahmed said.

  “Here.” Berrigan handed a throat mike to Ahmed. He stuck the disk next to his Adam’s apple and said something stern, in Swahili.

  The girl stopped crying and mumbled something, then started to sob again. Ahmed touched the disk to silence it.

  “Damn. She doesn’t speak much Swahili. Just Bantu.”

  “They must have followed one of the forklifts in, and hidden,” Berrigan said. “Those storage lockers.”

  “We can’t take them back,” O’Hara said.

  Ahmed nodded. “No matter what you mean by ‘back.’” He sighed heavily. “They have to die.”

  “Maybe not,” Berrigan said. “When we were roughing out the mission plan, two people were in favor of abducting someone, for medical experimentation. It’s pretty certain that this plague is spread by a virus. I
f we could isolate it we could make an antigen.”

  Ahmed stared into the cube. “The risk…”

  “I don’t think it’s too great. Harkness, Robert Harkness, claimed that we could keep a subject in the old isolation module, handle him completely by remote control. Knock him out to take samples and run tests, if that were necessary.”

  “Damned complicated.”

  “Yeah. And no way really to keep it secret. Guess I’d better call Markus again.”

  Ahmed headed toward the spacesuit locker. “I’ll go set the girl’s arm. See whether the boy’s alive.”

  “We can’t disinfect you again.”

  “I can live in the suit for two days.” He looked at the cube. “But probably the kindest thing we could do for them is open the bay doors right now…if that’s the decision, let me know. I’ll give them something so they won’t feel it.”

  “Okay.” Some of them went to help Ahmed get into his suit. Berrigan cleared the board and the control room was suddenly silent, without the little girl’s crying. She sat for a minute without typing anything, peering into the glowing cube, her lips moving slightly. O’Hara was quietly scrubbing the inside of her helmet.

  “Marianne—you want to be in my shoes someday, on the Policy side?” O’Hara nodded. “Well, here’s a cute problem for you to think about.

  “What Coordinators can or can’t do on their own is a vaguely defined mixture of statute, precedent, and common sense. There’s no precedent for something like this, but since it so obviously involves the general welfare, it has to be put to referendum.

  “I know we can isolate them adequately. The quarantine procedures we used on you people would be enough.” She tapped out a sequence and the cube showed the storage bay again. Ahmed was holding the girl’s hand, talking quietly.

  “So what do you do if your people vote to make you a murderer?”

  Charlie’s Will

  Some of the grownups didn’t die.

  Perhaps one in a hundred thousand suffered a peculiar dysfunction of the pituitary gland, which made the body manufacture an abnormal amount of GH, growth hormone. This prevented the normal aging process from triggering the virus. The side effects of the hormonal imbalance, though, could be severe. One was acromegaly, gigantism: people grew very tall, with large hands, feet, and heads. They were often mentally retarded.

  The ones who raided pharmacies and hospitals to keep up their supply of the compensating hormone, NGH—these prudent ones died, as all adults did. The others lived, if the environment allowed it.

  In many parts of the world the children killed them, or at least refused to care for them. In Charlie’s Country, which used to be Florida and Georgia, they were venerated. The more batty, the more respected, for madness was truth’s disguise.

  5

  Two percent of the population saved Coordinator Berrigan from having to commit murder. The vote, after twenty-four hours of debate, came to 51 percent in favor of trying to find the cure, 49 percent in favor of not taking any chances. (The juvenile vote, which was not binding, showed 82 percent of citizens under sixteen in favor of exterminating the children, or protecting New New, or spacing the groundhogs, depending on whose rhetoric you favored.)

  O’Hara and the six others moved back into the tomato-and-cucumber paradise of Module 9B for a few weeks of appeasing their neighbors’ paranoia. O’Hara was bitter about it. Like every other sensible person, she knew that there was no slightest chance that any of them was carrying the plague. Berrigan claimed to enjoy the vacation. She did most of the work on the cube anyhow, and this way she didn’t have to go to lunch with people who were trying to sell her something.

  The African boy never regained consciousness. Evidently his body had cushioned the girl during the fierce acceleration; his neck and back were broken. He died while they were setting up the isolation module, and they froze him for eventual autopsy.

  The isolation module was a small sphere that had never been intended for use by human beings. It was a holding area for cuttings, seedlings, and livestock imported from Earth. If any sign of disease appeared, the stock would be consumed by fire and the ashes blown into space (once there was enough evidence for the insurance people). It was a tiny cage, and the little girl cried and babbled and refused to eat the strange food that robot arms offered her.

  Nobody in New New spoke Bantu; Ahmed set about learning it. Within a week he was able to explain to the girl approximately what had happened, and soon after, she reciprocated: she and her brother often went up there to play, not being afraid of high places or bones; it was especially fun since the older ones forbade it. She only dimly understood the rules of the game the older children were playing. They kept talking about a “brain devil” that would kill her if she didn’t behave, and she vaguely remembered that a cousin had died and they said that was why. But they said a lot of things that made no sense.

  Her name was Insila. She and her brother had climbed up the emergency stairs to the cargo bay level, and had gone inside the spaceship while the door was open. When one of the forklifts came back, they hid in an empty locker. They came out when everything was quiet and dark, and tried to get the bay door open. Then there were noises again, and they ran back to the locker to hide. Then something knocked her out. When she woke up they were floating and her brother was hurt bad, and her arm wouldn’t work, and then Ahmed came in and helped her.

  She wondered what would become of her. Ahmed tried to explain what the brain devil actually was, and what doctors were, and how they would try to cure her. He suspected that she didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t tell her that in all likelihood she would spend the next ten years floating in that cage, with occasional forays into unconsciousness, until whatever it was did whatever it did, and she would go insane and die. And be sliced up, analyzed, and incinerated, like her brother. She knew he was dead but never once asked what had happened to him.

  Year Four

  1

  Before the war, the economy of New New had been a carefully controlled form of socialism, perhaps logical for a quarter of a million people living in a 99.9 percent closed ecology. People earned dollar income only for overtime work and as bonuses, and there was a limit to the number of dollars you could accumulate. But since there were few possessions not held in common by everyone, there just wasn’t much to spend money on. There were credit exchanges for gambling and prostitution, neither of which was illegal, but the luckiest gambler or the most skillful whore could not possess more than $999.99 at one time (along with an arbitrarily large stack of IOUs), since all credit transfers were handled electronically, and anything over a thousand dollars went straight back into the bank. Most people spent their money on luxury foods imported from Earth or trips to other Worlds.

  But now there was no imported food, no other Worlds. A few people managed to spend their money becoming alcoholics, but that took some concerted effort, since wine and beer were rationed like any other food, and it was difficult to slip carbohydrates out of the food chain to ferment and distill.

  That was one real advantage to having two husbands who worked in the CC laboratories. Every now and then John or Daniel would come home with a flask of what they euphemistically called “gin.” It was 180-proof industrial alcohol with a few aromatic impurities, and only an internal-combustion engine could drink it straight. But it made a beer last a long time.

  The Light Head tavern, which had been temporary housing for two years, was finally open again, and O’Hara spent quite a bit of time there with John and Daniel, as they had in the old days. There was amateur entertainment, musicians and sometimes a girl who was clever at undressing, but the main attraction was that it provided a link with everyone’s more pleasant past. It was a place to reminisce, and sometimes to talk about the future.

  “It’s about the most hare-brained thing I’ve ever heard,” John was saying. “Shows how wonky people have gotten about Earth. Pure and simple paranoia.”

  “It would get us out of r
ange. Some of us,” Daniel said. People were talking about building a starship.

  O’Hara splashed some gin in her glass and decanted a measure of beer over it. “You engineers. No sense of romance.”

  “How can you say that to an Irishman who plies you with liquor? But I have a sense of priorities, too. We have to rebuild the Worlds first. Get some redundancy in the goddamned system.”

  Daniel nodded. “If something happened to New New,” he explained carefully to O’Hara, “we wouldn’t have anyplace to go.”

  “Really.” She watched the girl on the other side of the room doing tricks with her navel-She could rotate it clockwise, wink with it, and then rotate it the other way, all in time to a badly tuned mandolin. The room was palpable with male speculation as to her other talents. “Maybe it is irrational, John, but it’s not simple and it’s not purely paranoia. You didn’t grow up here. The star-ship has been a dream since before my mother was born.”

  “I’m not arguing against dreams. I just think it ought to be postponed for twenty years or so. Hell, I’d like to work on it myself. But not until we have things… straightened out.”

  “Seems to me we could do both, once Deucalion comes in. Give people more of a sense of purpose, less bitterness. Everything else is just cleaning up after the groundhogs’ damned war.”

  “You know, they wouldn’t even have to H-bomb us.” Daniel had had an hour’s head start on the gin, and it was beginning to show. “Just walk in the fuckin’ airlock and sneeze. All be dead in a week.”