Worlds Apart

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 and 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.

“It was different when they had a whole World to themselves,” Anderson said slowly. “They could feed themselves or starve.”

Ogelby came to their defense. “But they will be feeding themselves. They have a thousand people out there building extra farms, all volunteers.”

“It won’t work,” O’Hara said. “I’ve seen the projections. You know how long it takes to make soil from scratch. More time than it takes to make babies.”

“I thought they were mining Devon’s World.”

“What’s left of it. We’ll be lucky if they reclaim ten percent of the topsoil, and that’s been sitting exposed to space for two years. Sterilized and desiccated. We have to supply water, worms, microorganisms.”

“And nitrogen,” Anderson cut in, “and carbon—that’s it, ultimately. The same old story.” It was a problem as old as the Worlds themselves. Metals they had in plenty, and oxygen, from the lunar surface and the interior of New New, which was a hollowed-out mountain of steel. But you can’t grow food without carbon, nitrogen, and water, and although every molecule of these precious substances was meticulously recycled, no such process is perfect. Because of inevitable steady losses, closed-cycle agriculture can’t even sustain a stable population, let alone a growing one. Before the war there had been active commerce between the Earth and the Worlds, Earth trading hydrogen (which the Worlds burned to make water), carbon, and nitrogen for energy and exotic manufacturing materials and pharmaceuticals that could only be produced in zero gravity. So the Worlds’ population could steadily grow.

“No more,” Ogelby said to the duck, who was pacing nervously in front of him. “I guess we lose perspective in the lab. As if Deucalion were coming in tomorrow.” Deucalion was the name of a CC (“carbonaceous chondritic”) asteroid that was being slowly moved toward New New. They would be able to mine it for nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and other useful things, but it was still five years away. Ogelby was involved in designing and setting up the factories that would eventually take the asteroid apart. Right now, though, they just had a pilot plant, working on small amounts of CC material sent up from the Moon. It didn’t manufacture enough to offset any population growth.

“If they could only wait a few years,” Anderson said. “We’ll be rebuilding Devon’s World. Right now Deucalion has to take precedence.” Originally, the towing job had been a very long-term project, twenty-eight years from Deucalion’s original orbit to New New. After the war they knew they had to speed it up. This was why so much amateur talent had been pressed into repairing the farms: most of the regular construction crews were frantically building mass-driver engines and solar-powered tugs to haul them out to intercept Deucalion. If things went according to schedule, they would cut down the remaining transit time for the asteroid from nineteen years to five.

“It’s just happening too fast,” O’Hara said. “If two thousand women have two-point-eight babies a year for five years, that’s twenty-eight thousand new mouths to feed. With six or seven hundred deaths per year, overall, that’s a population increase of about ten percent.

“And if they all grow up to be Devonites, we have a regular yeast culture on our hands. In a couple of generations, every other person is going to be bald and holy and fucking anything that moves.” O’Hara skimmed a flat pebble out over the lake; it skipped twice, curving to the right. “I wouldn’t like to be Coordinator.”

“Change of heart?” Ogelby said. That was her ambition.

“I don’t know anymore. I may just sit and watch.”

2

When O’Hara returned to work there was a message at her console telling her to go to Level 6, Room 6000, and talk to Saul Kramer. The woman she was working for didn’t know anything about it, but a quick directory check showed that Kramer was in charge of personnel at the Department of Emergency Planning. That was pretty exciting, as was the unusual request for a face-to-face meeting—you expect a Ranking Bureaucrat to talk to you through memos, or at most on the cube.

Her excitement took an anxious twist as she approached Room 6000. A man about her age, vaguely familiar, came out the door and walked swiftly by without greeting her, his face pale and grim.

A white-haired woman in the stark anteroom glanced at a console and asked whether she was Marianne O’Hara, and said that Mr. Kramer would see her. As O’Hara pushed open his door she remembered where she had seen the young man. Module 9B, the quarantine—a surge of adrenaline shocked her and she stopped halfway through the door, took a breath, and realized it couldn’t be. She didn’t have the plague; if that were it she wouldn’t be walking around free.

Kramer’s desk was littered with paper, a rare sight. He even had a recycler in the corner, with a stack of new paper beside it. A dramatic-looking man, completely bald, large and muscular, with pale gray eyes. He looked up at her with concern. “O’Hara? Are you all right?”

She laughed nervously. “I just frightened myself with a thought—that man who just left…”

“Lewis Franconia.” He gestured. “Have a seat.”

“We were together in the quarantine.”

He nodded vigorously. “No coincidence.”

She sat down and clasped her hands together, to stop the shaking. “Something showed up?”

“What-no, nothing like that, nothing medical. It’s just no coincidence that you were both on Earth recently. That’s true of almost everybody who’s come in here today.”

When O’Hara didn’t say anything, he continued. “We have a favor to ask of you. A very big favor.”

“For Emergency Planning?”

“We’re implementing it. But the request comes straight from the Coordinators.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“We need a group of people to go back to Earth.”

“Earth?” She leaned forward. “Now? What about the plague?”

“You’ll be isolated in spacesuits. Sterilized by vacuum before you get out of them.” He shuffled some papers. “This is absolutely secret. Whether you say yes or no, you can’t tell anybody about it. Not even your husbands.”

“All right.”

“You know why New New survived the war.”

“Sure. You can’t hurt a mountain with a shotgun.”

He nodded. “The missiles that got the Worlds were designed, built, and put to bed more than eighty years ago. They were set afloat by the Americans to use against Socialist military satellites, but they weren’t deactivated after the Treaty of 2021. Just retargeted, in case the Worlds did something the States didn’t like. Fortunately for us, they were designed for use against relatively small, fragile targets. To destroy New New would take a direct hit from a large hydrogen bomb.”

“I understand.”

“Well, that’s just what we’re faced with. They have a hydrogen bomb and they plan to use it on us.” He waved at the cube on the wall, which was showing a map of Africa. “From Zaire.”

She stared at him. “Who has a hydrogen bomb? How could they get it here?”

He sorted through papers and handed her two sheets. “Read this. It’s utterly fantastic.”

It was no secret that many of the survivors on Earth thought the Worlds were responsible for the war. An energy boycott against the United States had precipitated the revolution that within hours escalated into nuclear war.

So here was a group that had decided to do something about it: revenge. Die Schwerter Gott, the Swords of God, a group of young Germans who had managed to remove the warhead from a missile that hadn’t fired. They were moving it to the spaceport in Zaire, one of two launch facilities that had survived the war. There was a shuttle on the pad; they planned to load the bomb into the cargo hold and launch a suicide mission.

“But that’s not possible, is it? There aren’t any engineers left, no pilots.”

“It is barely possible. That shuttle is one of the luxury designs from Mercedes. Very fast, very wasteful of fuel, but it can take twenty or so people from Earth to high orbit in one go, two days’ flight. It’s automated to a fare-thee-well; anyone who can read the manual and punch a computer could get it here. They couldn’t dock safely, not without a skilled pilot, but that’s immaterial to them.”

She handed back the papers. “You want us to go to Earth and stop them?”

“Actually, what we hope is that you’ll get to Zaire before they do. They’re having trouble transporting the bomb; there’s no air transport left in Europe. They’re moving it overland to Spain, where they’ll get a boat to Magreb. That’s how we found out about them, intercepting radio messages while they were arranging for the boat.”

“What if we get there too late?”

“You’re stuck. Our shuttle will get you there, but you have to take theirs to get back.”

“Is there anybody there, at the spaceport?”

“The telescope shows a few people wandering around. No organized activity; no communications we’ve been able to monitor.”

“But they aren’t likely to let us just walk in and hijack their shuttle.”

“Who can say? You might scare them all off when you land.”

“I suppose.” She shook her head. “I have to make a decision right away, can’t talk to anybody?”

“Just to me. You have to decide before you leave this room.”

“When would we be taking off?”

He looked at his watch. “About seven hours from now. You go from here straight to the hub.”

O’Hara stood up and crossed the room. She stared at the cube for a minute. “I just don’t understand. Why me? Just because I’ve been to the Zaire spaceport?”

“Partly because you’ve been there. Partly because…there may be violence. Not many people in New New have any experience with that.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” she said evenly. “Who gave you that bit of information? One of my husbands?”

“Says here… it’s from a transcript, um, of the therapy sessions you had last year.”

“How the hell could you get your hands on that?”

“I couldn’t. But if the Coordinators want something, they can generally get it.”

“You want me to believe that one of the Coordinators sat down and went through confidential medical records, just in case something useful might show up?”

“Of course not; it was done by someone in my office. But under the Coordinators’ authority. It was a simple computer search, semantic association—and we didn’t single you out. Everybody’s records were searched.”

“That’s nice to know. Nobody has civil rights.”

“It’s temporary. You have to admit that the situation—”

“I guess we don’t have time to argue about it. But if you want me because I can supposedly handle violence, you didn’t read that record very thoroughly. That’s why I was in therapy.”

“All I personally know is what’s on this piece of paper. That you’ve carried guns and fired them—”

“No plural. Once. I carried a gun once, in my lap, trying to get to the Cape when the war started. I also fired it only once.”

“That’s one more time than the rest of us.”

She looked back at the cube. “You mainly want people who’ve been on Earth.”

“That’s right; the more recently, the better. There won’t be any time to get accustomed to it.” He paused and leaned forward.

“You fit other criteria: we need people who are young and physically strong, who have experience working in spacesuits. And people without children.”

“That’s encouraging.” She returned to the chair and slumped into it. “I suppose you also want people who are relatively useless, who won’t be missed.”

He shook his head. “That’s not a factor at all. In fact, the expedition’s leader is the Engineering Coordinator.”

“That’s not very smart.”

“It was her decision.” He crumpled up the piece of paper with O’Hara’s data on it and tossed it into the recycler. “What’s yours?”

“Oh…I suppose I have to do it.”

“No one’s forcing you.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean.”

3

She wasn’t even allowed to say good-bye. They taped a message for her to leave for Daniel and John, that she and several others were going back into isolation, but not to worry, it wasn’t the plague.

The lift to the hub was empty. O’Hara put on her sticky slippers and pushed the middle button, marked “0.”

The sensation of weight decreased as the lift rose, or fell, toward the hub. When it stopped she was weightless, which of course was no novelty. The doors slid open and a man walked in upside-down and stood on the ceiling, also with Velcro slippers. They nodded and O’Hara walked down the short corridor, making a little ripping sound each time she lifted a foot. A sign said it would be more natural to use handholds and float through the corridor, but you were liable to collide with somebody coming around a corner or through a door.

She went into the locker room and checked out the spacesuit she’d been assigned last year, and a bundle of those damned diapers, and floated into the Operations Room.

There were four men there, her age or younger, and one woman, Coordinator Sandra Berrigan. Their space-suits were hanging in midair by the opposite wall; O’Hara pushed hers gently in that direction.

O’Hara swam over and introduced herself. She already knew one of them, Ahmed Ten, but hadn’t recognized him at first. A short black man, back on Earth he’d worn his gray hair long, in a huge frizzy cloud; now he was shaven bald. It made him look younger.

“Two more to come,” Berrigan told her. “We’ll hold off the actual briefing until we’re aboard the shuttle. Good-man, you want to show O’Hara how the guns work?” She’d wondered about that; by statute, there were no weapons in New New.

Goodman was a beefy youngster with a quick grin. He beckoned for O’Hara to follow him through the airlock door.

The shuttle floated huge in the pressurized bay. There was a strange smell in the air, burnt metal, like the smell around a welder.

“What they done,” Goodman said, “was take an oxy gun and put a fuel feed on her, then put a sparker at the nozzle. Fuel’s a mixture of vegetable oil and powdered aluminum.” He brought her an oxy gun with an extra tank and a ceramic extension on the nozzle. “Point her down there and give the trigger a quick one.”

She aimed down the long dimension of the bay and pinched the trigger. A squirt of bright flame roared out twenty or thirty meters, orange shot through with blinding blue-white. The noise of it echoed around the chamber. Recoil from the blast pushed O’Hara gently back against the airlock door.

“We all have these?”

“You and me and two others. They wasn’t time to make more.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to use them. That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, awful,” Goodman said, without too much conviction. “Remember, it won’t go in a straight line on Earth. You got to aim high, for the gravity.”

“Right.” O’Hara wondered what virtue the computer had divined in Goodman.

The airlock opened and Berrigan peered in. “Everybody’s here. O’Hara, come give us a hand. Goodman, you have two more customers.”

All that was left to be loaded were the spacesuits and some paper crates of food. They put them in nets and hooked the nets one at a time to a centrifuge device, to weigh them. Berrigan entered their masses into a console inside the shuttle.

There was nothing dramatic about taking off. Pumps hammered, fading away as they drew air from the chamber. Then the outer lock irised open, there was a tiny push of acceleration, and they drifted, slower than a walk, out into space.

“Change orbit in an hour and twenty minutes,” Berrigan said. “Let’s go over our plan, such as it is.”

She switched on a cube and tapped in some instructions. A flat map of the Zaire spaceport came up. “All we really have to do is leave this ship here,” she said, pointing to the end of the runway, “disabling it so that it can’t be refueled and used against us. Then we just walk down this track to where the shuttle’s waiting.

“That’s where it gets a little complicated. If it looks like there’ll be any trouble, we get aboard in a hurry and leave. Assuming the ship does work.

“If we have free run of the place, though, there are some interesting things we might do. First, Goodman and O’Hara run up to the operations center, here, and burn anything that looks important. We don’t want to leave them with any launch capability at all.”

“What about us?” Ahmed Ten asked. “Can this Mercedes take off without any launch support?”

She laughed. “With a trained monkey at the controls. Everybody’ll get a chance to study the manual for it, but basically all you have to do is ask the computer for a catalog, punch in your destination and launch time, and strap yourself in.

“While you two are having fun, the rest will be down in this building here. That’s a cryogenic storage area, and it appears to be intact. Cryogenics means nitrogen; we’ll take as much as we can. Goodman and O’Hara will keep their eyes open for a vehicle. But even if we have to hand-carry it, we should be able to move a few tonnes, to bring back to the farms.

“I’ll go straight to the shuttle and do a systems check on it. It should only take a few minutes to find out whether it’s still working.”

“If it isn’t, we’re all dead?” O’Hara said.

“There’s a chance not. This isn’t a suicide mission.

“We have enough air, tank switching, to stay in our suits for forty hours. And we can probably find compatible air tanks at the spaceport, though that’s not certain. Standard German ones won’t fit.

“Still, we could probably make time, perhaps indefinitely. Find or make a hyperbaric chamber, keep the inside of it sterile. If the shuttle is down but repairable, Michaels and Washington and I might be able to fix it.

“If that doesn’t work, we still have a slim chance. Antarctica.” New New was in regular contact with the scientists trapped there. “The Mercedes can land on its tail, though it takes a level surface and a steady hand. Even if we can’t get into orbit, we might be able to fly it like a floater. Or actually find a floater that could get us there.”

“I thought there weren’t any working floaters in Europe or Africa,” Ten said.

“There aren’t, but that’s because the power net’s been destroyed. With three good engineers we should be able to jury-rig a portable power source.”

“What happens when we get down there?” Goodman asked. “Take the place over from the scientists?”

“No; we’ve made a deal with them. They’ll share their supplies with us until a rescue mission can be staged. That probably wouldn’t be until Deucalion comes in. But we could make it. Then they’d come back with us.”

“Five years,” O’Hara said.

“They say the penguins are fascinating,” Berrigan said. “Never get tired of watching them.” She turned off the cube. “That’s it. Any questions?”

“This is all happening so fast,” O’Hara said. “Nobody’s explained why we have to go down there in the first place. I’m no engineer, but it seems to me there must be a dozen ways we could stop them from up here—I mean, that bomb has to be in actual contact with New New, doesn’t it?”

“That’s right. If we could make it detonate even a kilometer or two away, it would just be so much extra sunshine.”

Goodman scratched his head. “So why don’t we just shoot the goddamn thing with a laser?”

“That would work if they came in slowly enough. A mining laser would at least scramble their electronics, maybe detonate the bomb prematurely, or defuse it. But they’ll be coming in at as much as thirty kilometers per second; we can’t get enough energy flux on target. That’ll be tried, of course, if we fail in Africa. We can also put a wall of dust and rock in their way, using a mass driver, which would be even more effective, if they’re stupid enough not to make evasive maneuvers. But even if we fill the ship with holes, kill them all, the bomb might still make it through. And it’s not just the bomb; when it goes off it’ll ignite all the deuterium and tritium in the ship’s fuel tanks. That’s enough to blow New New into gravel.

And melt the gravel.”

Nothing eventful happened during the five days it took them to spiral in to low Earth orbit. They did a lot of calisthenics, enjoyed unusually good food, read the Mercedes manual with some interest. Twice they took jolts of amphetamine, so they would be ready for the drug’s effects when they landed.

O’Hara got fairly close to Coordinator Berrigan, not just because they were the only women. Berrigan had also been given a year on Earth, to study, twenty years before, and like O’Hara she had chosen NYU in New York City. They hadn’t had any academic work in common, since O’Hara was in American Studies and Berrigan pursued systems analysis. But they’d both had the City—fabulous, sinister, challenging.

They got into their spacesuits just before the ship started biting air, to brake for its final approach. O’Hara was vaguely annoyed to see that Berrigan’s spacesuit was the catheter type.

4

It was a bumpy ride, screaming in over the African jungle, and there was a bad moment when they came down onto the concrete strip, perhaps a shade too fast, the strip still wet from the morning rain. The shuttle started to fishtail, and Berrigan slapped a button that released an emergency parachute. It probably saved them from slithering off the runway, but they were all slammed painfully forward into their restraining straps. Michaels hit the inside of his helmet hard enough to knock himself out for a few moments; O’Hara felt like one blue bruise from shoulders to hips.

Then they were rolling calmly along, engines throbbing a high-pitched whine. About a kilometer from the end of the runway, the Mercedes shimmered in the hot damp air.

“Well, it hasn’t left yet,” Berrigan said, over the helmet intercom. Before they entered the atmosphere, New New had told them that it was still on the pad. They didn’t know how close the Germans were, though; the telescope had lost track of them soon after they got to North Africa.

“Might as well unbuckle. You four with guns get ready to jump out as soon as we stop.” The engines quit and they rolled silently to a halt. “Go!”

The inner door of the airlock was open. Goodman spun the wheel on the outer one and a crack of bright sunlight appeared; then a solid hard square of it. The exit ladder slid out and unfolded with agonizing slowness.

Goodman was the first out, scrambling down the ladder, pointing his gun this way and that. “Nobody here,” he said when he got to the ground.

O’Hara followed close behind him. The area did look deserted, and the jungle was reclaiming it. Thick under-growth lapped over the edges of the runway, and here and there the concrete had cracked, grass muscling up through it.

She had never used a spacesuit in gravity before. It felt like being wrapped up in stiff heavy bindings. She hoped they wouldn’t have to move fast.

It took twenty minutes to get to the Mercedes shuttle. By that time O’Hara was breathing hard, cold with evaporated sweat. The air conditioner was working unevenly, with cold spots on her chest and under her chin, but her back was warm and clammy.

“Trouble,” Berrigan said, pointing into the jungle beyond the Mercedes. “People in there.” Her amplified voice boomed out. “We mean you no harm. Just stay away from us.”

A single arrow arced toward them, falling far short. Goodman raised his gun but Berrigan pushed the nozzle down. “No. Not yet—Ten, you repeat what I said.”

Ten shouted a loud string of Swahili. A high-pitched voice answered him. “He says they know we’re from the Worlds; they know we’re the ones who killed their parents. If we don’t leave they’ll kill us.”

“Tell them we’ll leave when we’re ready to. Then all four of you fire into the air.”

While Ten was talking, two more arrows sailed in, falling only a few meters short One skidded along the concrete and came to rest almost at Ten’s feet. When he stopped talking he picked up the arrow and broke it. Then the guns roared and he spoke again.

“I told them to throw their weapons on the ground and leave. That if they hinder us we’ll burn down the jungle with them in it.”

“Good. I hope they believe it.” After a minute seven or eight children, one of them conspicuously tall, stepped out of the bush and threw down a collection of bows, arrows, and spears. The little ones ducked immediately back into shelter, but the tall one shook a spear at them, shouting, and then buried the spear in the ground. He stood with his back to them for a minute and walked slowly into the bush.

“Some sort of a curse?” Berrigan asked.

“I imagine. Some dialect I don’t know.”

“Well… everybody keep a lookout while I do the systems check.”

At the entrance to the lift there was a human skull and crossed femurs. She kicked them away and slapped a red button. The lift hummed and the doors began to slide open. “Well, at least…my God. Look at this.”

A black cloud of flies swarmed out. Inside the lift were dozens of clean-picked skeletons and three fresher bodies, busy with insect life. Spacesuits have a provision for vomiting, an emergency aspirator, and several of them were put to use. O’Hara was surprised the sight didn’t make her sick, and decided that was because it was too Grand Guignol—so revolting she couldn’t really accept its reality. But she didn’t look twice.

“Somebody help me clear this out. But keep watching.”

O’Hara scanned the edge of the jungle intently for a few minutes, but there was no motion. “Ahmed…this was one of the most civilized places on Earth, when I was here. How could they revert to savagery so quickly?”

“Oh, I don’t think you can say they’ve reverted. Not in the sense that they’ve forgotten civilization. I think what we see here is partly a game—they are children, after all—and partly an attempt at social organization.” In normal times, Ahmed taught anthropology. “Before the war, most of them got some tribal lore at home and studied precolonial history in school. The popular folk heroes dated back to tribal times, and so did a lot of mass entertainment. They’re just acting out a pattern that’s reassuringly familiar.”

“Living in the jungle, hunting wild game?” O’Hara said.

“I don’t know. More likely, they’re living in the city and stalking supermarkets. There’s probably not much game around here, and it takes years to become a good hunter. It would be fascinating to study them.”

A sudden thought chilled O’Hara. “What if they have guns?”

“I was thinking about that. Private ownership of fire-arms was strictly forbidden in the Pan-African Union; I think even the police were only armed with tanglers.”

“We’re lucky it’s not America.”

“We are…they’re acting out their own tribal rituals over there.”

O’Hara suddenly tensed. “Did you see that?”

“No,” Ahmed said.

“I did,” Goodman said. “The big one’s still in there. We oughta start a fire.”

“Better check with Berrigan,” O’Hara said.

“Go ahead,” she said over their intercom. “But use Ten’s weapon, or Jackson’s. Goodman and O’Hara should save fuel.”

“He was over by that big tree with the pink flowers,” Goodman said.

“All right,” Ten said, and fired a burst into a thicket about fifty meters to the left of the tree. “We just want to scare them away.” He let the thicket smolder for a minute and then gave it a sustained blast. It burst into bright flame and the flame began to spread.

“I wonder,” Marianne said. “When I was here we visited a game preserve about a hundred kilometers south. The man who showed us around did have a gun, an air rifle that shot tranquilizer darts. I guess something that could pierce a rhino’s hide would punch through a space-suit pretty easily.”

“And if it could put a rhino to sleep, it’d probably kill a human being,” Ten said. “But there can’t be too many of those guns.”

“Besides,” Jackson put in, “if they had anything like a rifle we’d sure know about it by now.”

“Or they mighta gone to get it,” Goodman said. “How far can one of those things shoot, I wonder.”

“Probably farther than we can,” Jackson said.

“Why don’t you stop making each other nervous,” Berrigan suggested. “We’re going up now.” The doors squealed shut and the lift rose smoothly, up a hundred meters to the control-room hatch.

Nobody talked while they eavesdropped on Berrigan and the other two engineers, muttering numbers and arcane jargon. Over the buzz of the feeding flies they could hear clicks and whirs from inside the gleaming machine.

“Seems to check out,” Berrigan said finally. “Marianne, Jimmy, you go mess up the op center. Then meet the others at the cryogenics area. I’m going to stay here, just in case.”

They started down the crumbling sidewalk as fast as the suits allowed. Goodman switched to a private channel. “I don’t like that much. She can take off without us.”

“She wouldn’t. She just wants to make sure the children don’t come aboard.”

“They ain’t gonna come aboard. They had two years to go inside there and they didn’t.” Berrigan had had to break an inspection seal to get into the control room.

“It might have been taboo, with all the dead people in the lift. Everything’s different now.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Let’s just get this job done as quickly as possible.” They passed by a long black window and mounted marble steps that were slick with green growth. The sliding doors of the entrance were frozen shut, the shatterproof glass crazed from a hundred impacts. A sustained blast melted one of the doors and set off a yammering alarm.

Inside, there was another hindrance. It was a once-comfortable reception foyer, now gone to dust and mil-dew. There were prominent signs directing you to various places, but they were all in German and Swahili. Two years before, O’Hara had been rushed through the building on a tour, but she couldn’t remember which direction they’d gone.

“Maybe we should call Ahmed,” O’Hara said.

“Nah… we couldn’t pronounce that Swahili, or spell it. Let’s just you go one way and I go the other, and we burn anything that looks important.”

“We ought to go together. We don’t want to get trapped if the building catches on fire.”

“Okay, that makes sense. This way?”

“Good as any.” They went down a corridor marked ZEITUNGSWESEN BEREICH. They encountered another stuck door, and Goodman kicked it open.

“Well, I’ll be God damned. Would you look at that.”

O’Hara’s glove slapped against her helmet as she instinctively tried to cover her mouth. Instead of screaming, she squeaked.

They were in an observation area over a large room full of muted sunshine. There were forty or fifty consoles in neat rows, and forty or fifty bodies slumped over the consoles or sprawled on the floor. They wore identical white uniforms, stained, and their faces and hands were mummified, shrunken around bone, skin dark gray with a white dusting of mold.

“What the hell happened to them, I wonder.”

O’Hara leaned against a rail for support. “They-they’ve been sealed in here since they died. And they must all have died at the same time. Probably poison gas in the air conditioning. Or radiation, like a neutron bomb. I wonder who did it.”

“Well, it must be the place we’re looking for. Let’s burn it up.”

“Sort of hate to.”

“Yeah.” They clumped down the stairs together. “Break the window first,” Goodman said. There was a bay window of polarized plastic, overlooking the landing strip and launch pads. He melted a hole in it and the Sun glared through.

“Careful,” O’Hara warned. “We don’t want to be standing too close to those consoles when the picture tubes blow out.”

“Don’t think they’re cubes. Look like flatscreens to me.” But he aimed carefully and sent a squirt of flame all the way across the room, enveloping the two farthest consoles. He was right; the screens just melted down. The bodies burned passively at first, and then their limbs started to stir.

“Christ that’s ugly. Let’s get this shit over with.” He fanned the flame in a sustained roar over half the room, and O’Hara added hers to the inferno. They backed up the stairs together, spraying fire. The tile floor caught, burning bright orange with greasy black smoke.

Something pinged against O’Hara’s tanks, and she saw a shiny needle spin off into the fire. She whirled around. “Jimmy!”

It all happened in less than a second. At the top of the stairs were four boys, tall boys in their teens, naked except for body paint. Three of them held spears, and one had a large rifle with a wooden stock. He was working the bolt of it.

O’Hara shot high and to the right, flame splashing against the wall behind the boys. The one with the rifle fired; his dart and the fire from Goodman’s gun crossed in midflight. All four boys were suddenly covered with burning oil. Two fell and two ran screaming.

Goodman’s firestream tilted up, spraying the ceiling. O’Hara turned and saw him topple backwards down the stairs, a metal spike in his chest.

He lay on his back on the burning floor. O’Hara started down to help him, saw the flames licking around the tanks of oxygen and fuel, hesitated, called herself a coward, grabbed his foot, and pulled with all her strength. Halfway up the stairs, she heard a terrible rattling groan. She looked at him through the helmet and he was dead, his face dark purple with eyes bulging, swollen tongue forcing his jaws apart. She let go with a cry and his body bumped down the stairs as she backed away. She almost tripped over one of the bodies at the top of the stairs, then turned and ran. She passed two more smoldering bodies in the hall. As she stepped outside there was a tremendous explosion, Goodman’s tanks, and the black window popped out in one piece, sailing through the air with ponderous grace in a rain of smoking human fragments.

She stopped dead and sat down and tried to put her head between her knees. Then she remembered the drug pack on her wrist, tore it open, and pressed the tranquilizer button.

Her teeth ached when her jaws unclenched. The pulse stopped hammering in her ears. The muscles in her arms and legs deliciously relaxed. A spear clattered on the steps next to her.

She looked up and a small boy was running away. Languidly she aimed in his direction, thought about it, and fired deliberately high. His hair caught on fire and he ran on even faster, beating at it.

“Poor child,” she said. “I ought to do you a favor.” She stood up and resisted the impulse to brush herself off. Someone was shouting at her.

“Goodman! O’Hara! What happened down there?”

“Goodman’s dead now. I’m coming back.” She switched off the intercom for a while and started walking back up the runway. Every now and then she fired a random burst into the brush. That seemed prudent.

Funny how the jungle had taken over. Two years before, these grounds were all carefully landscaped. She remembered the fat funny woman who had shown them around the place, stream of wisecracks in her lovely lilting accent. They’d each been given a flower, a lily red as blood. You come back some time now.

From the cryogenic warehouse to the Mercedes, the jungle was a solid sheet of flame. The paint on one side of the warehouse was starting to blister and smoke. Jackson and Ahmed were standing guard. She turned on her intercom and went inside.

They had found a forklift and were loading it with long gray cylinders. There was a large vault door beside the racked cylinders. O’Hara didn’t care to think about what was behind the door. Heads.

This was a storage area for Immortality Unlimited, the only one in Africa. Dying people would have their heads separated from their bodies, the blood replaced with some more lasting fluid, and then have the head quickly frozen to the temperature of liquid nitrogen and sent here for storage. The idea was that a new body could eventually be cloned from a cell, and the brain recharged with some memories intact. No one knew how much. When they did it with dogs the dogs would remember some tricks. O’Hara thought it was ghoulish—and so much like groundhogs, to stockpile millions of new mouths to feed someday, when half the world was starving already.

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. If 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.