Worlds Apart Read online

  “Ten days! You can’t go ten days.”

  “You can and will. Absolutely no sexual contact; not even boy-boy girl-girl. I want you to swear on Christ and Charlie.”

  They all looked at the leader. He hesitated, then made the sign of the cross and muttered “Charlie’s will.” The others did the same.

  “Okay, call in the children. Then everybody line up in the living room and drop your pants.” He screwed a bottle of omnimycin into the hypodermic gun.

  “We don’t do it to the children,” the leader said.

  “Glad to hear it. But they can pick it up other ways, living with you.” He wasn’t sure that was true, but then neither could he be sure they actually did leave the younger children alone. That would make them an unusual family.

  Waiting for the two hunters to come home, he treated various minor complaints. For most of them, he gave aspirin or an innocuous salve. His police training, many years before, had included a few days of emergency first aid—mostly what to do if you or your partner were shot. He did know how to assist childbirth, which often came in handy now. But everything else he’d had to learn from medical texts and the little brochures that came packed with medicine.

  Medical books were rare. Before the war, a doctor could sit at a cube and punch up any text in existence, usually with three-dimensional illustrations of typical cases and techniques. Most of the books he’d found were heirlooms, their medicine a century or more out of date. The drugs prescribed no longer existed under the same brand names, since the books were written before all the manufacturers had merged into a single Pharmaceuticals Lobby.

  He had no idea, for instance, what the girl’s fungus was. Would it start cropping up everywhere? Was it actually dangerous, or had it been just the dirty bandages that caused the infection and fever? Maybe he’d find a dermatology text.

  The hunters came home triumphant, with a full case of freeze-dried beef stew. Healer took two boxes of it, a gallon of rainwater, and a bottle of old wine. He gave the hunters their shots and left. As he pedaled away he could hear wild laughter and the dull smack of rocks hitting dead flesh.

  Nothing could shock him any more, he thought; nothing could be revolting enough to get through the shell that contained his sanity. If you could call it sanity. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is weird. The people now dying of the plague had barely been teenagers when the war came. Their memories of the old days are distorted and vague. In another ten years there will be nothing but rumor and speculation. The old order changeth, he remembered from a poem; making place for new; and God fulfills himself in many ways.

  Year Five

  1

  At first Deucalion was a star, and then a bright star, moving slowly through the heavens. Soon it was definitely a shape, not a point, growing daily, and the observation dome in the hub of New New was often crowded.

  It came to rest about twenty kilometers away. From that distance it looked like a small elongated potato, but with craters. The factories had been waiting in place for months, tiny bright toys attached to outsized solar collectors.

  Now it was John Ogelby’s turn for overwork. He spent two months out at the factories, helping to supervise the interfacing of machine with rock. There was no way a spacesuit could fit his twisted body, so he worked from inside a modified emergency bubble, floating here and there, and using other people for hands. He loved zerogee work—the mobility and freedom from pain. But he did miss Marianne, and they spent many hours chatting, sometimes about inconsequential things, often about the suddenly complicated futures in store for them.

  It seemed as if everything had happened at once. Scientists working with Insila had isolated the plague virus and synthesized a cure. After much argument, a very close referendum approved the manufacture of large quantities of the antibiotic, which would be sent to Earth by robot drones.

  The starship question was finally resolved by a series of carefully worded referenda. The available work force (only a third of the population was really needed to run New New) would be split into two roughly equal groups. The stay-at-homes would work on refurbishing Devon’s World and Tsiolkovski, which together would eventually provide enough room for another 150,000 people.

  The rest of them would be Working on the starship, which would bear the name Newhome. Salvage teams were at work on the remains of Mazeltov and B’is’ma’masha’la, mining them for useful parts. The army of engineers no longer needed for Deucalion dove into the “Janus Project” with enthusiasm.

  Daniel wanted to go, and so did John. O’Hara was not sure. The idea did excite her, as an abstraction, but the actual details of it boiled down to sitting in a spaceship playing gin rummy and waiting to die of old age. She would also probably have to raise a child. Her experience with her baby sister, now five, seemed to indicate that she had no great talent in that direction.

  If she stayed in New New she would doubtless continue to advance. Having attained Grade 15 in only five years of service made her something of a prodigy, and although she was realistic about the influence of her continuing friendship with Sandra Berrigan, she didn’t doubt that she would have advanced on her own. She had access to her own psych profile and the analysis of it made by the Executive Evaluation Board.

  The people who had set up New New’s charter, more than a century before, had done their best to ensure that the World’s administrative structure stay free of the taint of politics. Nobody got “on the track”—advancing beyond Grade 12—without minute investigation of his or her past and exhaustive psychological testing. They looked for a balance of altruism with practicality; leadership ability without emotional dependence on having power over others; patience and deliberation. Nobody could insert himself into the power structure by dint of personal charisma, bribery, or influence. So New New’s history was rather dull, its leaders a succession of careful, phlegmatic people who usually retired with a great sense of relief. The Executive Evaluation Board was anonymous, but it was no secret that it consisted of a staff of professional psychologists overseen by past Coordinators and retired Justices. They had looked at Marianne and given their tentative blessing; now that she had reached Grade 15 she was subject to annual review, because power corrupts in subtle ways. A negative evaluation could mean anything from a temporary freeze in grade to demotion back to Grade 12, with no chance of appeal.

  One reason this system had worked in the old days was the safety valve of emigration. There had been forty other Worlds then, with many different political setups, and a mutual pact required any World to accept an emigrant from any other World, so long as they had room. (They might put him in sewage maintenance and make sure he stayed there, but they did have to accept him.) Without that safety valve, and with guaranteed freedom of speech, New New was getting to be a rather noisy place. People who liked the old days were anxious to get a few new Worlds open for business. Many of them were also in favor of the Janus project, figuring that it would absorb a lot of the rowdier element.

  Daniel and John, perhaps independently, both presented O’Hara with a “big fish in a small pond” argument. The social structure of Janus would parallel New New’s, with Engineering and Policy Coordinators at the top of two separate tracks, but with less than a tenth of New New’s population to draw from. So she would be much more likely to make it to the top.

  She didn’t doubt this was true, but was not sure that it was an attractive proposition. The motivation that drove her ambition was to her complicated and obscure. The Board’s analysis was that it stemmed from a need to be admired, rooted in the rejection she had received from her Scanlan playmates and the lack of appreciation her mother and stepfather had shown for her academic achievement. To O’Hara that explanation sounded facile and incomplete. It ignored the abstract pleasure she took in problem-solving, which she thought was the main driving force behind her desire to advance: the higher you got, the more important and complex the problems were, and the more satisfaction in their solution. That also made her he
sitate to accept her husbands’ argument. Janus would be a World, but it was primarily a spaceship. The Engineering Coordinator would be the captain; the highest she could aspire to would be chief stewardess.

  And there was Earth, too. Once the plague was under control, there would be a need for administrators who had experience with Earth—though how relevant her experience would be in dealing with the strange world Jeff described, she couldn’t say.

  Every month she went down to the Bellcom studios and listened to him, hoping that he would have found a new power source, so they could have a two-way conversation. (Intact fuel cells were rare because the most common variety contained a small silver bar inside; for a while after the war those bars were used as currency.) But his signal grew progressively weaker, and during the past two full moons there had been no transmission at all. The technicians said it was likely that was because the power he could generate had fallen below their antenna’s thresh-old of sensitivity. She hoped they were right.

  In the course of seven communications Jeff had given them a vivid picture of the brutal world that was Charlie’s Country. Heavily armed bands of children and teenagers, “families,” either settled on farms or roamed from city to ruined city, looting. They sometimes traded with one another and sometimes fought desperate battles for each other’s supplies. Girls were impregnated soon after menarche, and would keep on having babies until they died, usually around eighteen or nineteen. Many of the babies were born dead or were grotesque mutations. Most of the families destroyed the mutations, but some kept them around as pets.

  They had two holy books, the Christian bible and a booklet called Charlie’s Will. Jeff thought that Charlie’s Will must originally have been a heavy-handed satire against religion; now it was taken literally. A version printed about a year after the war contained an explanation for the plague—it was God’s reaction to the sin of contraception. Living a sensible twenty years or less, people had to make a lot of babies. It explained the war itself as punishment for mankind’s assault of the heavens. Thus the Worlds were responsible for all misery, both in historical “fact” and by theological fiat. Jeff had stopped trying to convince people otherwise; heresy could be very dangerous.

  The insanity of daily life was compounded by reliance on oracles. For a week or two before a person died of the plague, his brain was infected and he raved, rambling nonsense. They thought it was disguised advice from God or His avatar, Charlie.

  Jeff knew about Deucalion; he had watched it move across the sky and merge with the bright star that was New New. He said he hoped that was proof they had survived, since he was under the impression that the asteroid wasn’t due for another twenty years or so, and he assumed they had done something to speed it up. Other people had seen it too—some families used a simpleminded kind of astrology, watching the sky for omens—and their interpretations of it were interesting. God had finally destroyed the World, or Charlie’s spirit had moved into it, or aliens from outer space had taken it over and were going to invade Earth.

  2

  John was weaker than ever, coming back from two months of zerogee. When their schedules matched, O’Hara walked with him in the low-gravity sections, trying not to lope as he shuffled painfully along.

  “So how’s the promotion working out?” Ogelby looked up at her sideways.

  “Too early to tell.” She took two long steps, then caught herself and waited. “Actually, it’s a pain. I wish they’d let me stay in Resources Allocation. Everybody under me knows my job better than I do.”

  “Take it from an old hand. It’s time to be very careful.” Ogelby was Grade 20, the highest.

  “Oh, I know that. They’re testing me… my profile said ‘the subject’s main weakness is an unwillingness to delegate authority.’ So they put me in a position where I can’t do anything else.” She’d been shuffled up and sideways to become Director of Statistics in the Public Health Division. “I hadn’t even thought about statistics since I was sixteen. And that was just a basic, you know—‘if you have six black balls and four white balls—’”

  “You’re a male basketball team. Mixed—”

  “Spare me.” They stopped at a picture window that overlooked the curved expanse of parkland below them. “How soon do you think you’ll be ready for one gee?”

  “God. I don’t even want to think about it.” He put his back to the view, looping both arms through the railing, to take some weight off his feet. “That’s what you’ve been studying, nights? Statistics?”

  “Trying to get through a text. But I’m having to relearn calculus to do the proofs. It’s demoralizing, how fast you forget things.”

  “If you need help…”

  “No, thanks. I went through that with Dan. This stuff comes too naturally to you guys. When Dan tries to explain something I wind up knowing less than when I started.”

  He nodded. “I’m no teacher, either.”

  “Besides, I’m just doing it as a gesture. All this chisquare, standard deviation…all we really do is get numbers from Vital Statistics and put them down in various columns. How many workdays lost to colds last September? Shall we serve more chicken soup this September? I’m sure it would all be very fascinating to somebody else. I’ll stick with it for a year, until after the next Board review. If they give me a good evaluation I guess I can assume I’ve passed their little test. Then I can look around and ask for a transfer.”

  “Want me to get you a transfer?”

  “Into Engineering track?” She laughed. “No thanks.”

  “It would be Policy track, assigned to Engineering. At your grade or a step higher.”

  “No, it would look too fishy. With you a twenty and Dan an eighteen, and my being friends with Sandra, I don’t dare go near Engineering. The Board would see strings being pulled and freeze me forever.”

  “It would be a computer selection. No personal recommendations at all.”

  “With my husband programming the computer.”

  “Not directly. Don’t you even want to know what the job is?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’re forming a start-up team for Operation Janus—”

  “Still trying to get me aboard that goddamned star-ship.”

  “Now listen. We do legitimately need a few people from the Policy side. Especially people with broad academic backgrounds. This is nothing less than setting up a whole new World from scratch. Social system, population distribution as to age, genetic background, professional specialty, and so forth. It would be a hell of a lot more interesting than chicken soup.”

  She sighed and patted his hand, not looking at him. “It sure would. But I just can’t take the chance.”

  “Why don’t you at least ask Berrigan’s opinion? She could tell you how the Board would feel. She does know half of them.”

  “It’s the other half I’m worried about, the psychologist types. They can be pretty arbitrary. The senior administrators tend to make allowances, I guess out of empathy.”

  “Psychologists don’t have empathy?”

  She laughed. “Okay. I’m going swimming with Sandra tonight. I’ll see what she says.”

  “It would be fun to work together.”

  “All three of us?”

  “Eventually, I hope.” He shook his head. “We have to get Dan out of that pressure cooker. The original reason for making him head of the Applied section no longer exists; all the problems with tar and resin decomposition have been resolved. God knows there are enough people hungry for the job.”

  “More politics.”

  “Maybe. I suppose the people over Dan are just as happy to have a section leader with no ambition to move higher. And he is good at it.”

  She took him by the arm. “Let’s get you good at walking.”

  Charlie’s Will

  Jeff Hawkings pedaled cautiously toward the burned-out service station. In front of the station a boy sat behind a table, cases of beer stacked beside him. The boy’s scattergun tracked Jeff as he ap
proached.

  “You Healer?” the boy said.

  “That’s right. Anybody in your family sick?”

  “Nah. Just one with the death.”

  “Charlie’s Will,” Jeff said, and sketched a small cross with his thumb on the center of his chest. “How much for the beer?”

  “Let you have a case for a scattergun refill.” He pointed at the weapon that dangled on a web loop from Jeff’s shoulder.

  “Just have the one cassette,” Jeff lied, “and it’s not full.”

  “Have any silver?”

  “Huhuh. I have some loose rounds, gunpowder,.22 and.45 caliber.”

  “We got a.45. Let you have a beer for two rounds.”

  Jeff fished through a leather bag on his belt. “Two beers for one round.” He tossed the heavy cartridge on the table.

  “One for one.” The boy slid a beer across.

  Jeff shrugged, pinched it open and took a cautious sip; the stuff hadn’t been manufactured with a five-year shelf life in mind. It tasted a little stale but not spoiled. He drank it down quickly, and then bought another, and slipped it into his saddlebag. “Know of anybody nearby needs healing?”

  “Family ‘bout fifteen minutes down the road. Somebody always sick there. They keep their muties. On the left there’s a sign, says something something farm.”

  “Thanks.” Jeff mounted the bicycle and started away.

  “Hey!” He felt the familiar itch in the middle of his back, stopped, and looked back.

  “They got a sentry ‘bout halfway down the road to the farm. You don’t want to go in there after dark.”

  “Thanks, I’ll move it.” It was late afternoon, the sun reddening.

  About two kilometers along, he came to a sand road beside a faded sign that read “Forest-in-Need Farm.” The bicycle slithered too much in the sugar sand, so he got off and pushed it along. He shouted “hello” a couple of times a minute. There was thick underbrush on both sides of the road, thick enough to hide a man. Tall Australian pines sighed in the slight breeze.