Worlds Apart Page 6

She patted his hand. “Watch the girl, Dan. She’s winking at you.”

  The basic idea behind the starship was even older than the Worlds. A generation ship: hundreds or even thousands of people aboard a vessel that would crawl out to the stars on a voyage of centuries. Their n-times-great-grandchildren would land on another world.

  By the twenty-first century it was not such a preposterous idea. People who lived in the Worlds might as well be aboard such a ship; an incurious person, or one who didn’t care for the zerogee at New New’s only observation dome, could live his entire life without seeing Earth, Sun, or stars. If you have to live in a hollow rock anyhow, it might as well be going somewhere.

  Furthermore—as had not been true in the previous century—the generation ship would have a definite target. A lunar observatory had discovered several earthlike planets orbiting “nearby” stars; one was only eleven light years away.

  The main problem was energy. Not just the enormous push it would take to move a World-sized spaceship, but also the energy necessary to maintain life. The Worlds had been possible in the first place only because of the abundant free energy from the Sun. The generation ship would have to carry its own sunlike power source, with fuel enough for centuries.

  In theory, the power could be supplied by conventional fusion. The deuterium could be mined either from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere or the frozen surface of Callisto. But the scale involved was vast.

  A more elegant, but necessarily untested, power source was the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter. Antimatter could be contained in a magnetic bottle and fed out a few particles at a time, and the result was pure E =mc squared. It had never been done on a large scale because antimatter was tremendously expensive, in terms of energy, to produce: like burning down a forest to warm your hands. To manufacture enough antimatter to fuel the ship would require a solar collector the size of a planet; a synchrotron the size of the Moon.

  Fortunately, the antimatter didn’t have to be manufactured. It could just possibly be mined. In A.D. 2012 astronomers had discovered the tiny double star Janus, tagging along with the Sun a mere tenth of a light year away. The stars were both black dwarfs, barely hot enough to be considered stars. But one of them, Alfvén, was made of antimatter.

  O’Hara belonged to a discussion group, where bright young people met one evening each week to talk over current issues with one or both Coordinators. For the past couple of weeks they had been talking about the administrative and engineering problems associated with a possible starship project. O’Hara was not fascinated by engineering, but she was intelligent enough to understand and be awed by the scope of the undertaking.

  The outline was simple enough: two overlapping stages. With raw materials supplied both from Deucalion and the salvage from various wrecked Worlds, they would build two starships. S-1 was just a fuel-gathering vessel, hardly a proper starship at all. It would take a small crew out to Alfvén, to collect antimatter sufficient for the actual long voyage.

  Meanwhile, S-2 would be a-building—a smaller version of New New York, large enough to support ten thousand people. It should be finished by the time S-1 came back. They’d gas up and head for Epsilon Eridani, a ninety-eight-year voyage.

  The projected expense in dollars was staggering, more than ten times what it had cost to build New New. But money was only a bookkeeping convenience in New New’s closed economy. The main counterargument was that the same sort of effort applied at home could rebuild the Worlds and do it right—not only a choice of utopias, dozens of different social and physical settings, but a guarantee of a safe future. The new Worlds, built without groundhog money or interference, could be built with unbreakable defenses against aggression from Earth.

  This was the nagging worry partly motivating both the starship project and plans for reconstruction. Earth was a shambles now, but its industrial establishment was still there, dormant, orders of magnitude larger than New New’s. If the plague ran its course, or if a cure were found, they might rebuild within a generation or so—and then what would become of the Worlds? Groundhogs were a little crazy under the best of circumstances. What would happen if they were crazy for revenge?

  The Coordinators told O’Hara’s group something that wasn’t yet generally known: New New was having its own epidemic, one of suicide. Suicides were the leading cause of death in all adult age groups, and there were enough of them almost to counterbalance the Devonite population increase.

  There were other indications of an alarming sag in New New’s morale. Productivity lower than ever before; absenteeism at a record high. Drug addiction and alcoholism were growing, in spite of the difficulties involved in feeding the habits.

  During her conversation with John, Daniel had quietly fallen asleep, slumped in his chair. Did one blowout a week make him an alcoholic? He was putting in twelve-and fourteen-hour days at the lab, with Deucalion less than a year away. He was the only specialist in oil shale chemistry in New New—the only one anywhere—and was group leader for the entire applied chemistry section, always on call. Maybe he needed getting away. But she worried about him.

  “Guess I’d better be taking the hero home,” she said. “Okay if I sleep with him tonight?”

  “Somebody’s got to look out for him.” John peered into the gin bottle and shook it. “Better take this along. Breakfast of champions.”

  “Champions?”

  “Used to mean something.”

  2

  While she was getting ready for work the next morning, O’Hara’s cube beeped. She pulled a brush through her hair a couple of times and answered it.

  It was the newscaster, Jules Hammond. “Marianne O’Hara?”

  She just stared at his image and nodded. She had talked with him two years before, after the Zaire raid, but had never expected to see him again, outside of the nightly broadcast.

  “Can you come down to the studio, Bellcom Studio One, this morning?”

  “Wh—whatever for? Something about Zaire?”

  He leaned forward, peering into his own cube. “That’s right, you were on that.” He shook his head. “Interesting. But this is something else, what we call a reaction story. Can you come down?”

  “Sure…I’ll, uh, call in late.” Hammond nodded and rang off. She called the office and left a message for her assistant, asking him to cover a meeting for her if she didn’t get away in time. Reaction story? She almost woke up Daniel, who was snoring open-mouthed, but decided not to complicate his hangover.

  At the studio, an effeminate young man greeted her like an old friend, took her by the arm, and steered her into a side room. He sat her in one of two overstuffed swivel chairs facing a bank of six cubes and some complicated electronic equipment.

  “Now, dear, we do want you to look pretty.” He unfolded a case and took out two combs; whistled through his teeth while he worked on her hair. He stood back and surveyed his work critically, head cocked, then applied a little powder to her face and neck. “We don’t want to shine.” Finger under her chin. “Tilt up just a wee… that’s it. Hold it. Sammy, you can calibrate now.”

  She felt a warm laser spot on her cheek. “I feel like I’m having an X-ray taken,” she said with her mouth closed.

  “Oh, we see through a lot of people here. That’s fine; you can move now. Mr. Hammond.”

  The man left, slightly flouncing, and Jules Hammond came through the same door. He gave O’Hara a strange look and sat down next to her.

  “We want you to listen to something.” He sat and pushed a button under the arm of his chair. “Ready on Four.”

  One of the cubes lit up, but it was just a white block, no picture. Then there was a faint voice, metallic, crackling with static. She didn’t recognize it:

  “This probably can’t work but it’s worth a try. I checked and the antenna is pointed at New New. Found a fuel cell with a little juice and plugged it into the ‘DC Emergency In’ slot. It moves the power needle a little bit.”

  That night a quarter of
a million people would see her gasp and burst into sudden tears. “This is Jeffrey Hawkings calling New New York, specifically calling Marianne O’Hara, root line Scanlan. Marianne? I hope you got home all right. For some reason I’m alive. The plague didn’t touch me.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s my acromegaly. You know I had to take NGH every day. After the war I couldn’t find any; it’s a pretty rare disease.

  “Well, I’ve met two other adults who survived the plague, and they were both acromegalic. One’s an idiot who runs a tribe north of here, in Disney World. The other I just met on the road. He was mentally retarded, too; I guess neither of them got proper treatment when they were young.

  “If anybody up there is interested in finding a cure for this thing, then there’s your main clue. Something to do with the pituitary gland. That’s what’s wrong with acromegalics, they put out too much growth hormone. My own physical profile should be in your records somewhere, since I applied for immigration just before the war.

  “Things are pretty grim here, Marianne, as you can imagine. I understand it’s even worse up north. Not too bad for me personally—I’m in a place called Plant City, at the St. Theresa Pediatrics Hospital. I found the key to a civil defense vault here, full of medicine. I fill my sad-dlebags with it and pedal from town to town, playing doctor. They treat me as sort of a demigod…there’s a lot of violence, a lot of ritual killing from this damned Family business, but nobody lays a finger on me. My long white beard protects me. I’m glad it grew in white.”

  There was a long crash of static. “—sure there isn’t enough power for me to receive. But I’ll keep looking for fuel cells, maybe figure out how to make one.

  “I don’t have any way of keeping track of the date. But I’ll be back here, St. Theresa’s Pediatrics Hospital in Plant City, Florida, at every full moon, about midnight, to broadcast and try to receive an answer.

  “Things must be tough up there, too… if you’re there at all. If the plague got carried up I guess I’m wasting my time. But I hope, Marianne, you made it okay and got to marry Daniel. It seems like another life, a lifetime ago, when you were—” Static took over and when it quieted there was no more transmission.

  Charlie’s Will

  He turned off the radio transmitter and stared at his large hands. Maybe he shouldn’t have said midnight. That meant either traveling at night or holing up in this hospital for hours. The place was a boneyard. But he remembered his police radio used to receive best at night. He picked up his full saddlebags and his scattergun and followed a large cockroach down the hospital corridor to the fire stairs. Funny how you changed. One time, he would have chased the cockroach down and crushed it. Today he was obscurely glad that something else in the hospital was alive. Maybe it was affecting his brain, the growth hormone. It was affecting his hands and feet and other joints, aching like arthritis. He would treat himself to more aspirin, first stop.

  On the ground floor he retrieved his wagon from its closet hiding place and put the saddlebags on top of the canvas bag that held his various possessions. He rolled the wagon out and wired it to the back fender of his bicycle, unlocked the bicycle and pedaled away, in search of customers.

  The town was pretty well deserted, as all towns were once the shelves had been emptied. There was usually someone to trade with, some group of scavengers willing to dig deeper than the last group. But the house he’d stopped at a month earlier was deserted now. He pedaled on for an hour, quartering the downtown area, and had just about decided to break into his emergency rations when he finally heard voices. He turned down an alley and saw a group of little girls playing a complicated hopping game. They were singing badly:

  Mary was a virgin but she had a baby boy.

  Jesus died upon the cross to give us peace and joy.

  Charlie had a vision but they put him out of sight.

  Helter-Skelter saved us from a hundred years of night.

  Death is the Redeemer; only death can make you well—

  They stopped singing when they heard him rattling up the alleyway. One ran away but the other four stood and stared at him.

  “I need food and water. Where is your family?” One girl, then all of them, pointed in the direction the other was running. He walked his bike slowly after her, scattergun pointed forward. The girls resumed their game, finished the rhyme:

  Life on Earth is nothing more than twenty years of hell.

  She ran through an open door, yelling for her daddy. He leaned on his bike and waited, gun casually aimed at the door.

  A rifle barrel pointed at him from a dark window. “Whaddayawant?”

  “I’m Healer.”

  “We heard about you.”

  “So I want to trade. Is there anybody in your family needs healing?”

  “A woman. What you need?”

  “A fully charged fuel cell.”

  “No got.”

  “Food and water, then.”

  “We got some of that. You come in but leave the gun outside.”

  “Piss on that. She goes where I go.” And the two concealed pistols and the boot knife and the spraystick.

  There was some muted conversation inside. “All right But you know we got you covered all the time.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He locked the bike and gathered the saddlebags and the canvas bag in his left arm. On the way to the door he passed a garbage pile. On top of the pile was a teenaged girl only a few hours dead, head crushed and body covered with purple bruises. He thought she had been disemboweled but saw that it was a placenta, partially expelled, and what was left of an infant.

  “Monster birth?” he said, passing through the door.

  “No eyes,” said the man with the rifle.

  “Should have let the woman live.”

  “It was her second. Family rules. The first was twins with just one head between them.”

  He stood just inside, getting used to the dim light “How long have you had this rule?”

  “It’s a rule. It’s signtific.”

  “Sure it is. What about the father?”

  He shrugged. “That’s all of us. We just take turns.”

  “Sounds scientific. Where’s the sick woman?”

  They led him into a dark bedroom. It stank. He could barely make out a small form on the double bed, twitching and moaning incoherently. He went to the window and slid the knob to unpolarize it, flooding the room with sunlight. The girl cried out.

  “The light hurts her eyes,” the leader said. The girl was twelve or thirteen, breasts juvenile. She was about six months pregnant. All she wore was a pair of filthy bandages wrapped around her upper thighs.

  “Boil some water.”

  “You want some coffee?”

  “For washing. Boil a big pot.” The girl was flushed, her skin hot and dry. She had four degrees of fever. He gave her some children’s aspirin dissolved in water. The leader came back, with most of the others crowding around the door.

  They had to hold her down while he cut away the bandages. She was a mess. “How long has she been sick?”

  “She got a rash last week. It’s only been bad for couple of days.” He’d never seen anything quite like it. On the inside of both thighs, from the crotch down about fifteen centimeters, was a growth of gray fungus. The flesh under the fungus was angry red and discharging pus. There were three prominent syphilis chancres on the lips of her vagina, which was probably associated, since the fungus was spreading up over the pubic mound.

  “She gonna die?”

  “Charlie knows when,” Healer said with only a little sarcasm.

  “Charlie’s will,” the others muttered in ragged chorus.

  He poured hydrogen peroxide on the infected areas and they foamed impressively. He rinsed with water from his canteen and applied the peroxide again, then rinsed again and patted the mess dry with a clean gauze pad. He turned her over and shot her full of wide-spectrum antibiotics.

  “Here is what you do. Take this filthy sheet and burn it. Keep so
mething clean under her. Don’t bandage it; let it breathe. Make her drink a lot of water. Anybody who touches her wash up afterwards with hot water and soap. Can you remember that?”

  The leader nodded. “If she does die, you bury her. Or at least take the body far away. Don’t just chuck it out the door like that other one—and bury it too. You can get real sick, having dead people around.”

  “We was going to. Two guys’re still out hunting, they gotta get their throws in. For luck.”

  “Yeah, luck. I suppose all of you have syphilis, don’t you?” They looked at him blankly. He pointed to the chancres. “Sores like this.”

  “’Course we get them, all the grownups,” the leader said.

  “Except for Jimmy,” a girl said, and giggled. “He’s got hair but all he does is pull himself.”

  “Jimmy’s scared to fight me,” the leader said proudly. “You don’t fight, you don’t fuck. That’s signtific. Natural selection.”

  “Where did you get all this ‘scientific’ shit?”

  “Old Tony taught us. He lived to be twenty-one, he could read really good.”

  He tugged on his white beard. “You listen to me. I’m older than Tony ever was, and I’ve been reading since before any of you were born. Now, you’ve had children born blind, haven’t you.”

  “Two or three,” the leader admitted.

  “How do you suppose I knew that?”

  “You’re pretty old.”

  “That’s what happens when people have syphilis. They have babies born blind and stupid. It’s a disease. You don’t have to get it.”

  “Sure,” the giggling girl said, “like you don’t have to get babies. Just don’t fuck.” The others giggled along with her.

  “This is serious business. If you don’t get this syphilis cured, you’ll all go crazy before your time.” He looked at the leader. “You won’t be able to get it up any more. It’ll hurt too much.”

  He was pale under the grime. “What do we have to do?”

  “I’ll give you each a shot. Then I’ll leave a bottle of pills. Everybody takes one each morning; you watch and make sure they do. And no fucking for ten days.”