Worlds Apart

1 O’Hara

I was databasing without too much enthusiasm, trying to decide whether we wanted a cultural anthropologist who plays handball or a physical anthropologist who plays chess, when the SAVE light started blinking. I put everything on the holding crystal and opened the channel.

It was Sandra. “Hello there.”

“Hello yourself. What’s on?”

“I need a fast personnel selection job.” She studied her thumbnail. “Twenty people to go to New York City.”

“What?”

“Self-help team. We’re in contact with some survivors.”

“Contact?”

“Need farmers and doctors and mechanics—I’ll show you the cube. Young, strong people who’ve been to Earth. One track generalist to be in charge. Interested?” I just stared at her. “I’ll assign a pilot for the Mercedes. Let me have the list about 1400. Leave day after tomorrow.”

“Hold it,” I said. “This is too fast. Go to Earth with a bunch of farmers?”

“That’s right. You’re far and away the best qualified.”

“What do you mean? I can’t farm. I couldn’t grow a weed without help.”

“I don’t mean farming; I mean leading. You have the mix of Policy and Engineering experience and you’ve spent a lot of time on Earth.”

It was starting to sink in. “Go back to New York City.”

“That’s right. Nothing like Zaire. No plague, no violence.”

“Okay. I’ll do it.” I had to, even though it made life suddenly complicated.

“Good, I knew you would. You have a blank cube in the recorder?” I put one in and she transferred the message from Earth. “See you at 1400.”

The cube was a five-minute broadcast from a commercial studio in New York City. Like Jeff, they’d found an antenna that was aimed at New New and pushed some juice through it.

It was a group of about a dozen people in their teens and early twenties. They’d been living out of a Civil Defense shelter in Tarrytown, which was starting to run out of food. They’d found our vaccine months ago—fished the box out of the Hudson—and had been trying to get in touch with us ever since.

There was plenty of farmland, but they hadn’t been able to do much with it. Did we have anybody who knew dirt farming, or was it all hydroponics up there?

Dirt farmers, we have. Even before the war, there were plenty of crops that didn’t do too well in zerogee hydroponics. A lot of people had ornamental gardens or grew exotic fruits and vegetables for the gray market. It wasn’t the same as gardening on Earth, since you didn’t have to contend with weather or pests, but that sort of thing would be in books. I hoped.

Mechanics and doctors were easy. I started calling people and had a complete roster by noon.

I cancelled my lunch date with Dan, figuring it would be better to go into the inevitable argument with a fait accompli. Too excited to eat, anyhow. With a couple of hours to kill I reran all the recordings of conversations with Jeff, making notes. With any luck, most of it would be irrelevant; he thought the sanguinary Family business was restricted to Florida and Georgia.

I had to confront the remote possibility that he might be alive. What if there was a way to get to Florida? How would I look for him if I got there? “Healer” would probably be easier to track down than almost anyone else in the state; Jeff’s survival had depended on his reputation spreading.

But if he was alive he surely would have found some way to contact us over the last two years. To pretend otherwise was simple fantasy. Still, I couldn’t put it out of my mind.

And the first thing Sandra said when I sat down at her desk was, “No side-trips to Florida, right?”

“I did think about it. Be chasing ghosts, though.”

“Wind up a ghost, too. Those maniacs would make Zaire look like a walk through the park.” She took the list I offered and scanned it. “Not that you’re going to New York unarmed. You’ll have the same sort of weapon we used in Africa.”

“The people who talked to us weren’t armed.”

“Not obviously. That wouldn’t be very smart. You want to take Ahmed Ten? He’s pretty old.”

“He’s a good medic. Good thinker, too.”

She nodded slowly, reading. “Well…since you have these regular doctors, too, I suppose he’s a reasonable choice. One of the few people with experience in this sort of thing.”

“The anthropology won’t hurt, either.”

“Sure.” She smiled. “You don’t have to justify your selections to me, Marianne. You’re project head; I just have this incurable nose problem. Who’s Jack Rocke-feller?”

“He lived in upstate New York as a boy. Had a garden.

Also tinkers with electronics.”

“Any relation to the president?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Great-grand-uncle or something.”

“Rich kid.”

I shrugged. “He was here on vacation when the Cape closed down.”

“He might want to use another name dirtside. No telling who’s being blamed for what.”

“Good idea.” I wondered how many were still blaming us for the war. For starting the strike that triggered the blackout that caused the collapse that started the war.

“So.” She leaned back. “Have you discussed this with your husbands yet?”

“There won’t be any discussion,” I said slowly. “Not in the sense of debate.”

“You haven’t asked me how long the project is supposed to last.”

“No. I…guess I assumed that was up to me.”

“More or less. There are external factors. Our immunology people don’t think you should eat the food, except for prewar packaged goods. We can send along six months’ rations. Maybe a year’s worth, if you feel strongly about it.”

“I think I do. Yes. We might be stranded.” She scribbled a note. “Will we have to work in suits?”

“No, just masks and gloves. You’ll have shots, but we really don’t know what you’ll be up against. There might be any number of weird germs floating around; mutant strains of common diseases if not biowar agents. There’s an element of risk.”

“Worth it,” I said automatically.

“I’m not so sure. Hope so.” She looked thoughtful. “You’re taking quite a gamble…physical danger aside, I mean.”

“My position with Janus,” I said. “One husband, perhaps. Perhaps both. We’ve discussed the possibility before, in the abstract. It is what my training and experience point to.”

“They said they’d leave you?”

“Not in so many words. But I don’t think Dan would give up his starship. John would, but he can’t go to Earth.”

“Well, even if it becomes a permanent thing, you’ll be spending a lot of your time up here.”

“That’s what I was going to tell them. True or not.”

2

I wanted to drop it on both of them together, and in public, so Dan would be less likely to blow up. Our schedules didn’t match for dinner, but we were all free at 2200. We met at the Light Head for a glass of wine and some music.

Dan didn’t say anything at first. He just listened, chewing on his lower lip. John only smiled and nodded. “You aren’t surprised?” I said.

“Not really. One of my women was commandeered by Shuttle Division this morning. They wanted to test out the Mercedes, see about modifying it to be hyperbaric at earth-normal pressure. Sounded rather like a trip to Earth was in the works. I’d have been surprised only if you weren’t going to be aboard.”

“You didn’t want to ask us first,” Dan finally said.

“We’ve talked about it before.”

“Not as a certainty; not as a real choice.”

“She doesn’t really have a choice,” John said. “Do you.”

I took Dan’s hand. “No, not really. Can’t you see?”

“You’re throwing away Janus.” He was looking at a point somewhere over my left shoulder. “The chance to be Policy Coordinator aboard.”

“You know that was never my main ambition. Head stewardess.” Then I thought of something that hadn’t occurred to me earlier. “Besides, I can still spend some time on the project; keep my hand in. It doesn’t make any difference whether my terminal is here or in New York.”

“That’s true,” John said. “Once you get the self-help operation under way, you could start dividing your time. Cover all your bets.” We both looked at Dan expectantly.

“What happens when the ship leaves? And you’re still on Earth?”

“I’ll only be gone six months.”

“This time. If it works you know it won’t be the last.”

No percentage in being evasive. “If it works…well, I’ll have a new job. Most likely here, rather than dirtside. But no, I won’t be aboard Newhome. Will you, if I’m here?”

“I—” He bit off what he was going to say and stood abruptly. “I need time to think.” He tried to stalk out, but in a quarter gee all you can do is mince. He left behind half a glass of wine, which was unusual.

I divided his wine between us and waited for John to say something. “Maybe I should talk to him,” he said. “Keep him from being impulsive.”

“No. I want to see what he decides on his own.”

“It might well be divorce. Or at least a ninety-eight-year trial separation.”

“We’ll see. What about you?”

John shrugged with the glass in his hand; some wine flowed out and he carefully moved the glass underneath to catch it. “I’ll stay, of course. I don’t know whether I love you more than Dan does,” he said quietly, “but I need you more. I need you a lot more than I need the diversion of Janus.”

A telling word choice, diversion. Dan and John were equal in authority in the project, but to John it was ultimately just something to do. Increasingly, Dan lived for it.

We finished our wine and John invited me up to his flat, even though Thursday was usually Daniel’s. I really wanted to go with him, tenderness as well as cowardice, but that would have made things worse.

The lights were off in our room. I eased the door shut even though I could tell, with the extra sense married people evolve, that Dan wasn’t sleeping. Left my clothes in a pile on the floor and slipped in beside him.

After a minute he rolled over, turning his back to me. “Still thinking?” I said.

“You know I never could argue with you. Anything I say is going to sound selfish.”

“And anything I say, what? Betrayal?”

The sheet rustled as he shifted. I could feel him staring at the ceiling. “That’s your word.” He held his breath for a moment. “No. I just…I really don’t know how to say what I feel.”

I touched his arm; he didn’t respond. “Just talk.”

“You know how John and I felt when you went down to Africa? How you just disappeared and the next thing we knew…”

“I didn’t have any choice. We weren’t allowed to tell anyone.”

“I know, I know; that’s not it. And before, with the quarantine, the strange years you were talking with… Earth—and even before, before we were married, when you first went dirtside. Oh hell. I don’t know how to put it.”

I’d never heard him talk like this, odd soft monotone. “I don’t think I see what you’re getting at. You were worried—”

“Worried, yes, but that’s not it.” He suddenly sat up; I could feel him draw his feet up so he was hugging his knees. “One of the last letters you wrote me before the war—no, it was a letter to John—you said that sometimes you had an intuition that—what was it?—that you were somehow fated. You talked about times of change, about Franklin and the American colonies. That from your study of history you saw a consistent pattern, individuals who were caught up by some… inexorable historical force. Who didn’t make history so much as serve it.”

“I remember. But that was just a girl’s fantasy, an egotistical—”

“And mystical claptrap besides. So I said. It seems nevertheless to be coming true, year by year. If something happens, you’re there.”

“I haven’t tried to reconcile the colonies with the home country. I haven’t even invented the lightning rod.”

“That’s not the point. You haven’t been in a position of power, not yet. But you’re a locus, a nexus. Things happen around you.”

I laughed, maybe nervously. “I can’t believe this is my rationalist husband talking.”

“It’s not something that comes easily. Not something that just occurred to me, either.”

“Have you discussed this fantasy with John?”

“Not with anyone. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“If it’s bothering you—”

“It’s not that exactly. I’m just trying to get a handle on…whatever it is. It’s related. Hard to express.”

“Because it’s complicated? Or because it’s hurtful.”

He was silent for a minute; smoldering, I guess. “You jump at this damned thing as if it were the greatest gift in the world—instead of what it is, a golden opportunity to go down to the surface of a poisoned planet and risk your life teaching ignorant savages how to grow crops.”

“Someone has to do it, Dan.”

“Not my wife! But you accept it without question because of this damned sense of personal destiny. Don’t you?”

Caught me off balance. “That may be part of it. I also want to…to do well—”

“You’re doing fine right here. You’ve got the Engineering Board wrapped around your finger; you have more day-to-day influence than I have, in Start-up. And you don’t think twice about throwing it away because this stunt is more in line with your destiny.”

“Don’t shout.”

“All right. How am I wrong?”

“It’s not a ‘stunt.’ Normalization of our relations with Earth has to start somewhere. There’s no United Nations.”

“Still doesn’t mean that you have to do it.”

“I’m the best qualified.”

“That could be… if so, why risk our best on another Zaire-type mission? What if what they really want is hostages? What if they plan to kill you all and take the shuttle?”

“We’ve taken care of that. If anyone else tried to start it they’d turn JFK Interplanetary into a radioactive hole.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Oh, I know.” I wished I could see his face. “I’ll concede that there’s some danger. But we’re well prepared. Better prepared than you are for Newhome. After all…a craft of unproven design using a brand-new propulsion system for a century-long trip to an unexplored planet. I’m just going to New York City. I’ve been there before.”

“Sure. Give my regards to Broadway.” He rolled over again.

3

We left it at that, neither open break nor accommodation. An uneasy kind of truce. I suppose I should have done some deep soul-searching, straighten out how I felt about Daniel, but there was no time in the busy two days that followed. Perhaps I made sure there was no time.

The Mercedes had room for twenty people besides myself and the pilot. I’d approached over sixty before I got the right mixture of people who were not only properly qualified but also crazy enough to go:

Anzel, Murray

28

dentist

Byer, Clifford

27

horticulturist

Devon, Ran

30

mechanic, folk arts

Dore, Louise

21

mechanic

Guideau, Suzanne

32

farmer, paramedic

Friedman, Steven

37

native, military engineer

Itoh, Son

40

MD, nutritionist

Long, Albert

30

MD, farming

Mandell, Maria

22

animal husbandry

Marchand, Carrie

48

systems analysis, farming

Munkelt, Ingred

30

communications, security

O’Brien, Sara

27

backup pilot, security

Richards, Robert

33

mechanic, engineer

Rockefeller, Jack

23

native, farming, tinkerer

Smith, Thomas

41

education

Ten, Ahmed

51

paramedic, anthro., exp.

Tishkyevich, Galina

40

biologist

Thiele, Martin

22

farming, security

Volker, Harry

27

med. technician

Wasserman, Sam

18

security, genius

We had flatscreen shots of the Westchester area in various wavelengths that told our agricultural people what would grow best there. In two days they cloned and forcegrew thousands of seedlings, enough to get a balanced farm going. They immunized mating pairs of appropriate breeds of rabbits, goats, chickens, and several kinds of fish. We were going to be a kind of reverse Ark.

A large part of our preparation for the trip was learning how to keep these beasts and plants alive during the two-day transfer to braking orbit. I took the training along with all of the farmer types. I also spent a few hours with the security people, while the police trained them in various degrees of mayhem control, and organized and attended hasty seminars in immunology, psychology of adolescence, first aid, and so forth. But it was obvious that what we all needed was years of specific and intensive study. We should have foreseen this and begun training a long time ago.

The day we left I got to be a Personality, interviewed by Jules Hammond. That was bad. He had to overdra-matize the thing, and in trying to mitigate that I wound up looking like a self-effacing heroine. Watching it on the news was excruciating. John and I made love in the morning and later Daniel and I fucked out of a sense of necessity, and at midnight I boarded the Mercedes with a minimum of enthusiasm.

We didn’t drop at a steady rate, which for some reason would have been wasteful of fuel. Instead there were “burn intervals,” various times when we suddenly went from zerogee to 1.5 or two gees. The computer usually timed these for periods when I was trying to sleep, so I could be entertained by nightmares of falling.

The landing was interesting, too interesting. The “interplanetary” in JFK Interplanetary meant that it had one automated landing pad for Class I ships like the Mercedes. (Unlike Zaire, it didn’t have a runway long enough for a conventional landing.) Of course the automation was long since dead. So our pilot had to bring the ship in on its tail, using instruments that had last been calibrated two years before the war. We hit very hard. The humans were all right, strapped into soft acceleration couches, but both the rabbits were killed, and the goats suffered eight broken legs. Maria Mandell stayed aboard, tending to the poor creatures, while most of us went outside to meet the groundhogs.

We were no doubt an imposing sight, all wearing identical gray coveralls with plastic breathers and surgical gloves, five of us carrying flamethrowers. At any rate, most of the groundhogs stayed hidden, with just one brave representative coming down the tarmac with his hands in the air.

As he approached, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t planned what to say on this historic occasion. What I came up with was, “Hello?”

“Can I put my hands down?” he said.

“We aren’t going to hurt you,” I said. “Where are the others?”

“Watching.” He hesitated and then turned around and waved. “They’ll be down in a minute.”

“I don’t like it,” Steve Friedman said. He had been a professional soldier before the war. “We’re really exposed.”

“We don’t have any weapons,” the man said.

“Sure.” Steve’s eyes were focused beyond him, searching from place to place. The building we faced was mainly tiers of opaque black glass windows, enough to hide an army of snipers. The ground was cluttered with hulks of rusting machinery, which I supposed we could hide behind if we had to. But then a door opened with a loud squeak and the rest of the groundhogs came out, looking very scared and not at all dangerous.

Their leader was a black woman in her early twenties, probably one of the only people left alive with a high school education (she had skipped four grades by “testing out”). Her name was Indira Twelve. She liked Ahmed because he was black, and Sam Wasserman because he was brilliant, and the rest of us she tolerated in a friendly but weary way. With the other black people in her group—six of the thirteen—she spoke an impenetrable patois, oddly slurred and clipped, with curious rhyming substitutions for some words (“gland” for “man” and “fright” for “white”), but with the rest of us she used standard English with icy clarity and a professorial vocabulary.

They had made a kind of camp inside the terminal building. At one end they’d broken out a bank of windows for ventilation, and had a fire going. The fire was ringed with sleeping pallets and knapsacks. There was a pile of wood and yellowed newspapers for fuel.

We sat around the fire and she offered us a drink from an improbably large jug of bourbon. I declined, explaining that we’d been advised not to take any local food or drink.

“Typical bureaucratic half-logic,” she said. “Nothing could live in this stuff.” She measured out drinks for her companions (probably glad that it didn’t have to go around), and things slowly got more relaxed.

There were logistical problems to be hammered out. The spaceport was sixty kilometers from their bomb-shelter home base, and we had several tonnes of supplies to move out there. Richards and Rocky and a couple of groundhogs went out to the parking lot to try to find a working floater compatible with the fuel cells we’d brought.

I spread out my worksheet timetable and went over it with Indira. We were going to wait three weeks before planting anything, in case of a late frost, but there was plenty to do in the meantime. We had to take an inventory of their agricultural equipment and either scavenge or improvise what was missing. There was a lot of technique to be taught before a single seedling went in the ground, and a lot of plowing and hoeing. The doctors had a two-week program of tests and inoculations set up, and it was obvious that the dentist had his work cut out for him—the children born after the war had never been vaccinated against caries, and some had already lost permanent teeth.

Assuming we would find a working floater, the plan was to leave five people aboard the Mercedes as guards, rotating at least weekly. The pilot agreed to stay with the ship permanently, since under some circumstances the only defense would be to take off. Sara O’Brien was a qualified pilot but admitted that, under the circumstances, she’d rather not try to land it; we might lose more than a couple of rabbits.

Rocky and Richards came back with the good news that not only had they found a floater, but it was a big one, a school bus. They looked a little gray, though. I later found out that the bus had been full of small skeletons.

We loaded a supply of food onto the floater and took everybody home. Some of them were fascinated by flying; some, predictably, were terrified. The going was a little bumpy at first. Friedman was the only one of us who’d ever flown a large floater, and he was out of practice. (That was the first of many rather important things I’d over-looked. I hadn’t thought to select for floater experience. When I was on Earth before, Jeff had let me take the stick now and then, and it was really quite simple—except for the matters of taking off and landing, which he had always done himself.)

Their base of operations was a YMCA building in Tarrytown, which had functioned as a civil defense repository. The CD part was in the basement, damp and midnight black. We went in with the first bright light it had seen in eight years, and were treated to a festival of rats and cockroaches. The roaches scuttled away to hide, but some of the rats stood their ground, studying us. We tried to ignore them while taking inventory. I was rattled by the fauna, but probably less upset than Suzanne and Harry, who had never been to Earth before and so had limited experience with bugs and rodents. They were game about it, but by the time we had finished our lists they were both shivering and sweating. It was good to get back into light.

They had enough food to last through summer. By then they’d be eating food from the garden, barring catastrophe. We decided to turn the Y’s baseball diamond into a garden, since it had plenty of sun and was fenced. Once food started coming up the place would need a twenty-four-hour armed guard.

In the matter of armaments they were a little short: two shotguns with four shells each. Unlike Jeff’s Florida, New York had outlawed private gun ownership decades before the war. I reluctantly put a high priority on finding a source of weapons and ammunition. I checked with New New and found that the nearest state where guns had been legal was Connecticut. Indira overheard the conversation and told me there was a National Guard armory in the next town south, with a vault they hadn’t been able to crack. Friedman said he’d take some explosives to it.

Wearing the mask and gloves got uncomfortable very fast. I asked Galina, who was an immunologist, whether they were all that effective. After all, we couldn’t help having some exposure to the environment. We couldn’t go back to the ship every time we had to eat or eliminate. (Though the idea didn’t seem too unreasonable after I got my first whiff of their latrine facility.) She said it probably was a good idea, for the groundhogs’ protection as well as our own, to minimize skin-to-skin contact and sharing one another’s exhalations. It was like an exaggerated sickbed procedure; neither ineffective nor an absolute guarantee.

Rocky turned out to have an invaluable primitive skill: carpentry. I should have considered that lumber was as ubiquitous here as foamsteel was at home. Nobody but Rocky and Friedman knew which end of a hammer to apply to the nail. Rocky offered to give a class for the kids every morning. I decided I’d take it too—and wasn’t too surprised when Sara and Maria and Ingred and Suzanne made the same decision. Rocky was just a kid himself, but the instinct he aroused in us was not exactly maternal.

Does gravity make you horny?

Friedman got into the armory vault and came back with an embarrassment of riches: four busloads of weapons, enough to wage a small war. He couldn’t leave anything there, of course, once the vault was open. So we filled the basement up with lasers, mortars, rifles, mines, ammunition, grenades, pistols, rockets. Didn’t scare the rats away.

One thing that would be handy once we had enough power to use it was a neurotangler field. We could bury a wire around the compound that would effectively keep any vertebrate outside. Approaching it caused mental confusion and (at least in humans) a painful sense of unfocused anguish, depression. Friedman had been exposed to it once in his training, and said the memory of it still woke him up some nights.

A few of the weapons could be put to nonviolent purpose. We dismantled all but two of the lasers for their powerful fuel cells. The vibroblade bayonets sliced through wood like a warm knife through margarine, though there was no way of telling how long they would stay charged. The mines, “shaped charges,” could be used upside down for digging holes, but we decided not to set any off, to avoid attracting attention. For the same reason Friedman demonstrated the weapons without ammunition, and had the children practice that way. Later he would take them a few at a time to practice actual shooting, a safe twenty or thirty kilometers away. The children practically sali-vated at the prospect.

We had a long list of construction supplies, hardware, and so forth, that we had to accumulate before rebuilding could start in earnest. It was a good excuse to go into the city. Indira hadn’t been downtown in five or six years. When she’d been there as a child it was almost deserted, no food left, but they had seen two other bands of scavengers at safe distances.

I had to go there even though I knew it would be sad. My memories of New York were still vivid, still precious. I had to see what was left to rebuild on.

It wasn’t promising, flying in along the Hudson. The Bronx was all but leveled by fire. Indira remembered that from before, though, and said it had been as bad down-town. The police and firemen had been more effective there, the night before the bombs started to fall. (I wondered whether New York had been spared nuclear destruction because the enemy wanted to save it, or because of automatic defenses like the ones that had protected the Cape long enough for our shuttles to escape.)

We dropped down to water level as we approached Manhattan. It still looked impressive—more impressive, in faict, than it had in the old days. With no pollution, you could see how tall the skyscrapers actually were, even the five-kilometer-high Trade Center twins. I suggested to Friedman that we might want to go up to the top of some of those buildings and work our way down. Without elevators, not many looters would have made it that high. He agreed but pointed out that we wouldn’t find any hardware stores up there.

We got almost as far as Chelsea without seeing anyone. Around Twenty-sixth Street we flew by four children walking on a dock. Three ran for cover and one dove into the water. We slowed down and turned inland at Twenty-third Street. Friedman remembered a large hardware-and-hobby emporium down by Second Avenue.

The city was a dead ruin. The street was clogged with burned-out hulks of delivery vans and robot cabs. Very few intact windows up to the third story, and the side-walks were heaped with glittering fragments of glass. After a couple of blocks we started to see skeletons; in midtown they were everywhere. Most of them were partly hidden inside brightly colored clothes of indestructible fabric. I noticed that there were more scattered bones than complete skeletons. “Dogs,” Indira said.

We passed the old Flatiron Building, which had been my favorite. It looked pathetic. Windows all out, stone facade blackened by fire. The park across from it, where I used to have lunch with Benny, was treeless and shoul-der-high in weeds. A terrible feeling of loss and hopelessness surged up; I bit my lip to keep from crying out. I walked back down the aisle to an open window and put my face into the wind. The air smelled of the sea and old smoke.

Friedman found an empty piece of street close to the hardware store and expertly floated down onto it. He checked our weapons as we left the bus. Indira and I had the lasers; the three boys had assault pistols. Friedman himself carried something he called a “meatgrinder,” and a belt of grenades. If any of those skeletons tried anything they’d be goners.

Glass crackled under our feet and a desolate wind sighed. The sun went behind a cloud. My whole body was one tense nerve, waiting for the first shot. Nothing happened.

We stepped through the shattered door. The store was dark and dusty and rank with mildew. One of the boys sneezed; then I did. Somehow that made the place suddenly less sinister.

I clicked on my flashlight and checked the list. “First we ought to try to find a wheelbarrow or cart or something.” I played the light around but didn’t see anything with wheels.

“I’ll check upstairs,” Friedman said. He and I probably had the only two working flashlights in the state.

“Here’s an axe,” the younger black boy, Timmy, called out. “Din’t we want a axe?”

“Yeah.” I took the light over to him. It was a fire axe, in a box on the wall. Somebody had broken the glass covering but for some reason left the axe in place.

Timmy tugged on it and it came free with a slow rusty creak. “Prob’ly set off a bell when he break the glass, he puke out an’ run.” He tested the edge with his thumb and smiled. It occurred to me that the children had only an abstract, second-hand, notion of the destructive power of the weapons they were carrying. But Timmy knew what an axe could do.

Friedman found a child’s wagon and a wheelbarrow upstairs. The boys helped him carry them down, then they went back up to raid the garden supplies.

There wasn’t much on the shelves downstairs. Indira and Timmy and I went up and down the rows without finding anything more useful than plastic kitchenware and spray paint. The bins that used to contain the hardware we needed had been thoroughly empt ied.

For once I used my brain. Underneath the display bins there were locked cabinets. I had Timmy bash open one of them, and lo: dozens of boxes of nails and screws. Inventory control. We stacked them up in the wagon and broke into the next cabinet. Screwdrivers of every description. Then hammers and drill bits and tape measures and levels and curious varieties of saw. We were laughing over our good fortune and I almost didn’t hear the faint sound, a throaty rasp.

“What was that?”

Timmy pointed toward the front of the store. “Fuckin’ dogs.”

There were ten or twelve of them, big ones, emaciated, teeth bared, staring in at us. One slipped through the broken glass door.

“Get down!” Friedman shouted from the top of the stairs. There was a quiet pop and the heavy sound of a grenade hitting the floor, rolling, then an impossibly loud explosion.

“Jesus Christ,” Indira said. Her voice was a barely audible whisper under the roaring in my ears. Most of the dogs lay about in bloody rags. One limped painfully away, yelping.

We got to our feet, brushing off dust. “I’ve never—”

“There’s one!” Timmy said. A big muscular hound was loping silently down the corridor toward us. I dropped the flashlight, fumbled, found the laser’s trigger and fired blindly. The floor burst into yellow flame that immediately went out, leaving thick black smoke, and then the dog ran into the beam and fell down with a thud.

I picked up the flashlight and aimed it at his howling. I had severed both the animal’s front legs. It was still trying to get to us, jaws snapping, hind legs scrabbling for purchase.

“I get it,” Timmy said quietly, then stepped forward and split the dog’s skull. I tore off my mask and spun away just in time to keep from vomiting all over Indira.

I’m not too clear on what happened after that, but I wound up sitting on the curb outside, Indira helping me wash up with an oily rag and canteen water. She patted my head and cooed reassuring nonsense. Great White Savior of the Groundhogs, that’s me. (Predictably, though, she was on my side from then on. Most good people would rather give help than receive it.)

We overloaded the bus so much that its failsafes refused to let us take off. We had to leave behind five bags of fertilizer, just inside the door. Friedman was in favor of taking it home and then coming right back, though it would mean working after sundown. He was afraid that the grenade blast had attracted attention, and other people would be waiting to take advantage of our market research.

Here was my opportunity to redeem myself: I said I would stand guard here while they dropped the stuff off. Timmy and an older boy, Oliver, volunteered to stay with me. We loaded two bags back on and watched them float away.

I supposed our best vantage point would have been inside, upstairs, hidden by the darkness but able to cover the door. But that was too much like being in a corner, and besides, the place smelled of vomit and gore and burnt plastic. Instead we walked down the street to where a floater had collided with a ground van. The V of wreckage hid us well and gave us protection from the wind, but afforded a good view of the store. The afternoon sun had gone down behind buildings, and it was getting chilly. We sat close together, hands in pockets, and talked quietly.

“What’s it like up there,” Oliver asked, “up there in the sky?”

“Smells better. What do you mean?”

“I mean, people get along? All you old people?”

“We have to get along,” I said. “It’s like living on an island, with no place else to go.”

“You stuck in the same place all you life?” Timmy said.

“More or less. It’s a big place. And some people are talking about leaving, going to another star.”

“That’s real far away, isn’t it?” Oliver said.

“It’ll take years.” And husbands.

“Why they don’t jus’ come down here?” Timmy said. “You come down here.”

“We’ve always lived up in the sky. We’re used to it.”

For a minute they were quiet, assimilating that. Timmy hit a piece of glass with his heel until it broke. “Indira say you live inside a ball o’ dirt, like worms.”

“Sort of. It’s a hollow rock.”

“God damn,” Oliver said. “You live inside?”

“It’s just like living inside a building. But we have a nice park, full of trees, and we can look out the windows at the stars. And there aren’t any dogs.”

“That’s somethin’,” he conceded. “You got plenty to eat an’ all?”

“Now we do. It was hard for a few years after the war.”

“Still hard here. Hard as a fuckin’ rock, it is.”

“I know.” I put my arm around his thin shoulders and Timmy leaned up against my knee. I had to clear my throat. “It’ll be better now. The worst part is over.”

We sat like that for a couple of minutes, without speaking, which may have saved our lives. Two boys snuck in front of us, creeping, intent on the emporium floor.

They had large backpacks and shotguns.

We leveled our weapons on them. “Drop the guns!” I shouted, and steeled myself to pull the trigger.

They froze. “Do it, mu’fuck,” Timmy said, his voice an incongruous chirp. But they set the guns down and turned, hands clasped behind their heads.

“Are you alone?” I said.

“Raht,” the taller one said. “Jus’ passin’ through.” He had a heavy Southern accent “Heard the ‘splosion.”

“Gonna hear another one,” Oliver said. “You not alone, you dead meat.”

“Talk big shit, boy,” the shorter one said. “We didn’t do nothin’ to you.”

“Button it, Horace,” the other said. “Horace, he’s a little dumb. Sorry.”

“Too dumb to live, man,” Oliver said.

“What’s your name?” I asked. “Where’re you from?”

“Ah’m Jommy Fromme. Horace my brother. We come up from Clearwater, Flo’da.”

“Florida!”

“Ten months walkin’, come up the App’lachian Trail. Flo’da ain’t no place to be now. Lotta people leavin’.”

“Did you ever meet someone named Healer?”

“Ole guy? Sure. He give us shots once.”

“How long ago?”

Jommy and Horace looked at each other and shrugged. “Couple years.” Jommy stared at me. “You an ole one too. That how you known ‘im?”

“She from the sky,” Timmy said. “They all get old there.”

“You from the Worlds?” He pronounced it “whirls.”

“New New York. It’s the only one left.” Actually, Uchuden was still intact. But nobody lived there.

“That don’t beat all.”

“Oliver, pick up the guns.” I gestured toward the curb. “You two can sit. We have to figure out what to do with you.”

Jommy sat and cautiously lowered his hands to his lap. Horace kept his behind his head, staring with an unreadable blank expression. I suddenly realized he was braced to die. “You can put your hands down, Horace. Just don’t try anything.”

“He won’t do nothin’. All we want is to git along.”

“Wanna trade?” Horace said.

“Got any gold or silver?” Oliver asked.

“Nah,” Jommy said, “don’t use that shit anymore down South. Got plenny ammunition.”

Timmy laughed. “Big fuckin’ deal.”

“We really do,” Horace said, looking hurt. “We got slugs an’ shells for the shotguns and a couple boxes of.45s.”

“That won’t getcha a can of beans,” Oliver said. “We got a room full of ammo.”

“A room full?”

“Oliver,” I said, “be careful what you tell them, okay?”

You could almost hear the wheels turning in Jommy’s brain. “Look. What we really like to do is jine up with you. Couple niggers an’ a girl, you need somebody.”

“What can you do?” I asked. “Do you have any skills other than diplomacy?”

“Huh?”

“Do you know how to build things, or handle live-stock, or grow vegetables? Any useful skill?”

“I’m a hell of a good shot. Horace, he gen’rally hits what he aims at, too. Only way we could stay alive comin’ up the Trail.”

“You know how to dress game, then.”

“Oh, yeah—hell, yeah. An’ make leather, too, with jus’ piss.”

“Thrilling.” I set the laser down but kept my hand near it. Horace visibly relaxed. “We’ll see what the others say.”

“You got more of you?”

I nodded. “An army. Maybe we could use a couple of scouts.”

4

We let them join us. They were big and strong and relatively old; Jommy was twenty and his brother two years younger. Jeff had probably given them the plague vaccine but we administered it again, to be sure. They accepted the notion that they might live another hundred years with skeptical caution.

Their Family down in Clearwater had been rabid Mansonites. Their leader, who called himself Charlie, had reached the age of twenty-three before killing himself out of remorse at not getting the death. He took the two next oldest with him, to the general approval of the rest of the Family. Jommy and Horace got understandably nervous at that, and snuck out the next night.

I decided not to tell them, or anybody, about Jeff, and passed the word to the other Worlds people. If he was still alive he probably was still keeping the vaccine secret.

They had walked two thousand kilometers without seeing another soul, though several times they heard people coming down the Trail and hid away. New York was the first city they’d gone into. They had heard that it survived the war and was thriving, like in the old days. They didn’t seem too disappointed, though, to find the rumor untrue. They had only a vague idea of what people actually used to do in a city, and seemed glad to be able to apply their hunting and tracking skills. The children loved them, probably not for any positive quality. When they went hunting I let them have one weapon and three rounds apiece; otherwise I kept them locked out of the armory. They said they understood about being on probation. I wondered if I ever would quite trust them.

Apparently they forgot about my knowing Healer; at least, they never brought it up again. I struggled against the fantasy of mounting a one-woman rescue operation. It was barely possible. Friedman taught me how to fly; we had an extra floater-sized fuel cell that could get me to Florida and back. But it was quixotic nonsense. Florida and half of Georgia comprised a trigger-happy xenophobic lunatic asylum. Even if Jeff was alive and I knew exactly where to go, I’d be shot out of the sky before I got to him.

We went into the city every day for more than a week. Searching through various hospitals, we finally found in Bellevue an unopened storage area, a vault that Friedman blew open easily. It took more than a day to transfer all the pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, probably enough to keep a small town healthy for a generation.

Setting up school was a challenging problem. Tom Smith was a brilliant educator and administrator, but what we really needed was a specialist in the history of education—no one in New New had ever taught children out of books. For several generations we had all grown up taking for granted the database terminal as the primary tool of elementary education, infinitely patient and automatically individualized by feedback algorithms. I was in tenth form before I ever saw a text that simply presented information, without interacting. And I had to go to Earth, postdoctoral, before I ever had a textbook printed on paper. (We had a stroke of luck in that, finding an antiquarian book store in Greenwich Village that specialized in old schoolbooks.)

I taught English, mostly reading and writing, three days a week. It was not an overwhelming success. I’ve been able to read a couple of thousand words a minute for as long as I can remember; teaching the children to read word-by-word was excruciating. And my natural handwriting is a barely legible childish scrawl, so I had to relearn copybook script and laboriously demonstrate it The children were enthusiastic at first but soon got bored. I had to spank them to keep them awake. The people teaching practical things had better luck.

The temperature never fell below freezing, but we followed prescribed caution and didn’t plant anything for three weeks. We got the baseball diamond all plowed and fertilized and brought the seedlings from the ship. It was a festive day. Everyone was assigned one part of the garden as his personal responsibility, though of course there were overall chores for the ones specializing in farming. (One girl said she didn’t think she could eat anything that came out of the dirt. Most of the others laughed at her, but a couple were obviously thinking about it for the first time.)

We had a remote terminal from the ship, and I began spending an hour every evening patching through to work on the start-up demographics. It was actually rather pleasant to return to familiar work, and of course I felt virtuous, keeping Daniel somewhat happy. I talked to him or John for a few minutes every day, before relinquishing the terminal for other people’s calls.

The terminal was just a standard communicator, without the feedback touchboard, so we couldn’t use it for elementary teaching (it would only accommodate one student at a time anyhow). But I taught Indira how to use it for data access, and she was captivated. She knew how to type, though she hadn’t done it in years, and soon was using New New’s library as effectively as anyone her age who’d grown up with it.

We started calling the place “the farm” and a noisy farm it was. The chickens kept up a constant dialog and the goats, still hobbling around with their legs in casts, complained to anyone who would listen. The Frommes caught a small deer and penned it. The children were charmed, but the goats waxed even more existential. Before long we had baby chicks, and the seedlings were starting to look like vegetables.

There was a general feeling of happiness, of relief. For some reason I couldn’t share it. Things were going too well.

Charlie’s Will

Jeff and Tad had been on the Island for several months before the question came up. They were sitting with Storm, watching the sun go down over the weathered hulks of the vessels that lolled in the harbor.

“You know, I been feelin’ real useless,” Storm said. “Don’t know how long it’s been since somebody got the death.”

“Only one since we got here,” Jeff said. “How often do you expect it to come?”

“Three or four a year, anyhow. Last year we got ‘em almost every month.” He threw a shell at the water, trying to make it skip. “I’m gettin’ sure as hell tired of fish.”

“Some places don’t get it nearly as often.”

“Yeah,” Tad said. “I’ve heard there’s places up north that don’t get it at all.”

“Sure. Where are all the oldies, then?”

“Stayin’ up north, maybe. Where they don’t get it.”

“Shit.” He threw another shell, harder, and this time it did skip once. “Who’d want to go on that long? Feel like I’ve lived forever already.” There was a note of bra-vado in his voice.

“Come on,” Jeff said. “You wouldn’t mind a few more years.”

“Shet that up.” He brooded, looking out over the glaring water, mouth set. “Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t. Sometime I’m curious ‘bout you, ‘bout how it feels. You know a hell of a lot.”

“I was still in school when the bombs fell. I was thirty-one.”

“Boy howdy,” he said softly, and thought for a minute. “But you hurt all the time. You can’t hardly walk when you git up in the morning. That’s another thing you git for gettin’ old.”

“No, that’s the thing I was born with. I used to know really old people, like a hundred years old, who didn’t hurt at all.”

“I did too,” Tad said. “You’re not that young, Storm. Didn’t you have grandparents and all?”

“Naw. I mean I had ‘em, I guess, like anybody. But I was raised up in a home, you know, up Tampa. Said my mother was a whore, she got killed when I was still a baby. That’s what they said, anyhow.” He tried another shell. “Guess I saw old people, yeah, outside. On the street. Didn’t know any.”

“I think maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with Charlie,” Jeff said carefully. “I think the death might be just a disease, and maybe people aren’t getting it anymore.”

Surprisingly, Storm nodded. “I’ve thought about that myself. Be hell to pay.” He looked sharply at Tad and Jeff. “Don’t you tell nobody. But I figure it that way.”

“Yeah,” Tad said. “It’s what I’ve been thinking, too. I didn’t want to say anything.”

“People I been waitin’ to see get it,” Storm said savagely. “People I really want to cut into. And now what?”

“Have to learn to like fish,” Jeff said.

Storm made a retching sound. “Maybe not. General’s talkin’ about goin’ inland, hunting trip. Bring back some pedros to smoke.”

“All this talk about food,” Jeff said, getting up. “Think I’ll go get some soup.” Tad stood up too.

“You guys go on,” Storm said. “I have to get hungrier.”

They walked toward the kitchen through deepening twilight. Sticky perfume of magnolias and jasmine in the thick still air. “Maybe we should keep our traps shut,” Tad said.

“No, we did right. It’d look more suspicious if we avoid talking about it”

“What’ll we do when someone puts two and two together?”

“God, I don’t know. Just deny it.”

“I sure as hell don’t want to get eaten.”

“Ah…what’s the difference?” He laughed. “Tell you what, though. If they come after us, I’ve got some arsenic. They try to eat us afterwards, we’ll get revenge.”

Tad nodded soberly. “That’s a good idea.” He scuffed at a pebble and it skittered on ahead of them. “You know, I been thinkin’ about the boat again.”

“Speaking of suicide.” There were several sailboats around the island. They’d talked about trying to get to the English-speaking Bahamas, to the east. But neither of them had ever sailed.

“Well, hell. What if it came to that? Sail or be someone’s lunch?”

“Sail, I guess. Be some shark’s lunch.”

“All we have to do is get General mad at us. And he’s the craziest asshole I’ve ever met.”

“I wouldn’t worry about him. When I treated his herpes I told him he had to get shots twice a year. Or his dick’d fall off.”

“That keeps you safe, maybe. Hey, though.” He stopped suddenly and whispered. “Why don’t you give him a shot of something else? Why don’t you kill ‘im? He’s so old, nobody’d think anything.”

Jeff shook his head. “I don’t think I could do that.”

“You’ve killed plenty.”

“Yeah, but not murder.”

“Hell, that wouldn’t be murder. He’s just a fuckin’ animal.”

“You think whoever took his place would be any better?”

“It could be you.” He shook Jeff’s arm. “Half the family thinks you’re some kind of god.”

Jeff started walking again. “The other half wants to see me on a cross. No thanks.”

The soup was a bland chowder of fish and bean curd. They took their bowls outside; the cafeteria’s air conditioning was set too high for Jeff’s joints.

“You don’t want to go back north because it’s too cold. Sure as hell ain’t goin’ any other direction without a boat We stay here, our luck’s gonna run out.”

“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “We may have plenty of time. And things could change.”

“Haven’t seen much change.” Tad went back inside to scrape himself some salt.

“You ever think about the Worlds?” Jeff said when he returned.

“Aw, they’re all dead. Saw it on the cube the day of the war.”

“What if that was a lie? Suppose they aren’t all dead.”

“So what? They ain’t comin’ down here and we ain’t goin’ up there.”

“You think they caused the war?”

“Huh? Sure, them and the Easter Bunny. It was the fuckin’ Soshies. Maybe us, who cares anymore?”

Jeff finished his soup in thoughtful silence. “They are still there. That’s where I got the vaccine.”

“You’re shittin’ me. How the hell you get up there?”

“I didn’t go there. They sent it down, in a robot rocket. From New New York.”

“You feel all right?”

“It’s true. That’s why I needed the fuel cell from you, so I could talk to them, let them know where to send it.”

“New New York, that’s where the girl was from. That Newsman showed us the picture of.”

“Yes, and I…I’ve talked to her, from the hospital in Plant City. She helped with the vaccine. She’s even been back to Earth, since the war, to Africa.”

“This is really straight? You’re not yankin’ me off?”

“It’s true.”

“So what, you think she’s comin’ here? Gonna come get you?”

“I don’t think she can. They went to Africa because it was the only place left with a spaceport.” He set down the bowl and stared out into the darkness.

“I’d just like to get back in touch with her. Let her know I’m alive. That’s why I’ve been hanging around the library with Newsman, thinking maybe I could fix up the dish and talk to them up there.”

“The dish antenna, there’s nothin’ wrong with that.”

“Not outside. All the-gear inside’s been pretty well smashed. I think I can learn enough electronics to rig up a simple transmitter, though. We have all the raw materials here and plenty of power.”

“Okay,” Tad said slowly, “so you get to talk with your girl. But that don’t solve anything. We’re still takin’ a big chance stayin’ here. Bigger every day.”

“Maybe not, maybe not. It could be the key.” The door opened behind them, and they both looked up to see Elsie the Cow squeeze through. She was taller than Jeff and weighed twice as much. Her features were large and coarse and she had a downy growth of beard.

“Warm night,” she said, and settled ponderously between them on the steps. She balanced a pail of soup on her lap and stirred it noisily with a large kitchen spoon.

“Come on, Elsie,” Jeff said, “we’re talking man talk.”

“You’re a man,” she said, and slurped at the ladle. “He just a boy. All of ‘em boys.”

“We’re talking,” Tad said. “You want me to hit you?”

“This ain’t your step. You wanna talk, you go talk someplace.”

Jeff stood up. “I’ve had as much of this stuff as I want, anyhow.”

“Yeah.” They took their bowls back inside and went out the back door, heading toward the deserted southern part of the Island, the abandoned naval base.

“You got some kind of a plan?” Tad said.

“Not definite. Just a few notions.” They picked their way along the broken sidewalk. There was no moon, and all the street lights were out in this part of town. “Look at it this way. The oldest people around were thirteen or fourteen when the war came. That’s old enough to have been following politics.”

“Some people, yeah. It’s Florida, though.”

“If we just came right out and explained about the war, about the death being caused by biological warfare, a lot of them would agree with us… most would at least understand, even if they didn’t—”

“But hell. One wrong person says the word and we’re fresh meat. No way around that.”

“The thing to do is to get to those people first. The people in power.”

“General and Major and Hotbox? They’re all buggy. Hungry, too—start talkin’ against Charlie and we’re the menu, sure as shit.”

“There’s Storm. He’s obviously ready.”

“Yeah, but you never see him go against any of them. He’s got a safe place and aims to keep it.”

“It’s a tough problem,” Jeff admitted. “Another reason to get in touch with the spacers. There are lots of people who have special training, dealing with adolescents and crazy people. Psychiatrists, maybe they could give us an angle.”

“What are they gonna come up with that you can’t? Hell, you spent most of your life in school.”

“Mostly criminology, a little business administration. These dingos are murderers, cannibals, and sadists, but they aren’t criminals. They’re normal, by the standards of those around them. Most of what I know about dealing with people just doesn’t apply.”

“I still think we oughta fade. Another couple of months with nobody gettin’ the death, hell. They’re dumb, but they ain’t that dumb.” He stumbled, cursed. “There’s anybody dumb around, it’s you. Why’d you give the vaccine to General and Major? They’d be the first ones to go.”

“That’d be the same as murder.”

“Shit. I don’t understand you at all.” There was a pale flickering light down at the Navy docks. They steered toward it. “Now, Hotbox, I can see keepin’ her. I’d like to pork her myself.”

Jeff laughed. “Just ask.”

“Think I haven’t? Christ and Charlie.” They walked over to the dim pool of light. It was a creepy place, the mountainous warships indistinct shadows looming over them, creaking, smell of greasy rust. It was a mothball fleet; some of the ships had been out of service for most of a century.

“Too bad we can’t take one of these,” Tad said. “We could—”

“Take it where?” Storm stepped quietly out of the darkness, barefoot, holding a pistol. “I been behind you since Duval Street. You guys got some real explainin’ to do.”

5

I do admit to a number of personality defects, none serious, but I never thought jealousy was in my repertoire. Least of all sexual jealousy, since my husbands and I established at the outset, conventionally, that we were all free to do whatever we wanted with whomever. But when I got the news I was suddenly overcome with this alien emotion.

Daniel asked to marry Evelyn Ten. John wouldn’t veto it. I told him I had to think about it, snapped off the monitor, and shocked Sam Wasserman with my vocabulary. I went out into the garden to think. To fume.

I’ve known Evelyn since she was a child. She’s Ahmed’s granddaughter, a born charmer, talented but modest. Also young and quite beautiful, which I had to admit was the problem. I’m no longer one and never was the other.

Leave the coop for six weeks and the goddamned rooster goes on the prowl. Well, I knew it was deeper than that; it had been building for a couple of years. I did spend more time with John, and enjoyed sex with him more, though Daniel had better technique and raw material. The sex itself probably wasn’t that important. I hadn’t given him much affection lately, either, nor asked for much from him. If I needed a shoulder it was always John’s I would go to.

I really had only two choices. I could allow Evelyn to join the line, or ask Daniel to leave it. I didn’t see how I could refuse Evelyn and keep Daniel. So it was really a question of whether I loved Daniel enough to share him. Or little enough not to care. I looked myself straight in the heart for a long time over that. Finally I went back to the monitor and called Evelyn and welcomed her to our family. Asked her to relay my consent to Daniel and give him my love; I couldn’t hog the monitor. I could, of course.

Instead I went back out into the garden, dark now, and sat on the damp earth and listened to things growing. There was a hint of wild honeysuckle on the air, that somehow disgusted me. I didn’t feel much like springtime. Evelyn was twelve years younger than I. Under other circumstances she could be my own child (not as pretty and somewhat lighter in complexion). I think the jealousy faded away there in the garden, but what replaced it was a hollow and cold feeling of mortality. Finally I did cry, but I don’t think it was over Daniel. I think it was over everything dying eventually.

I had a desperate desire, not especially erotic, to go find myself a limber young penis. Rocky or Sam. I even got up and walked toward the cottage where Rocky was sleeping. But at the brick footpath I turned away. He might have company. Or he might say no.

The next day was shift change. Ahmed had been out at the Mercedes for the past week. He came back to the farm and we stretched the foodisolation policy to the extent of one small bottle of gin. It’s not every day that you get a new in-law.

He was cautiously happy but a little concerned about her age. Also, it was odd for a Ten to marry outside of the line, which claimed to trace groundhog roots back to seventeenth-century Africa. He himself was all for it, especially since the war had effectively frozen New New’s gene pool.

(The marriage made me obliquely related to the single postwar addition to that gene pool: Insila, the girl we had brought back from Zaire. Ahmed had adopted her as soon as she came out of isolation.)

By the time we saw the bottom of the bottle he had taught me a half-dozen outrageous phrases in Swahili to surprise Evelyn with. Then he wandered off to bed. I was on night duty, so I had Dr. Long give me a shot of toloxinamide, which compresses all the joys of a. hangover into ten minutes of concentrated woe, followed by remorseful clarity.

I shared the shift with Sam again. He was always good company. I’d chosen him to come along as sort of a wild card. At eighteen he had a certificate in mathematics and most of a second one in historiography. He composed music, popular ballads, and last summer had written a young people’s introduction to calculus. He didn’t have much ambition in the conventional sense; he’d been offered a line apprenticeship and refused it, saying he’d rather stay in school until Janus took off. (That’s how we’d met originally; his name percolated to the top when I was databasing for a parttime ship’s historian.)

There wasn’t really anything to do at night but stay awake. The farm’s “nerve center” was originally a groundskeeper’s office, situated on a slight rise, giving us a view of the whole area. We had the monitor there and a sound-only communications system that Ingred Munkelt had jury-rigged. If anything suspicious happened, we could throw a switch that flooded the area with light. Another switch sent a wake-up buzz to every bedroom and dormitory floor, and unlocked the armory. We had a laser and a scattergun by the door. Otherwise, only Friedman had a weapon; we’d decided on a strict lock-up policy to prevent accidents and keep the murder rate down near zero.

We talked about history and historiography for a couple of hours and played a game of fairy chess. He spotted me a barrel queen and still won in fifteen minutes. Then, while I was putting the pieces away, he demonstrated yet another talent: mental telepathy.

“Uh, you know I overheard your conversation with your husband yesterday. You were pretty upset.”

“Surprised. Yes, upset. I still am, a little.”

“I don’t blame you. I wondered, um, whether you might want, whether your line permits, uh…” He started to make the polite finger sign but instead put his hand lightly on my forearm. His palm was wet and cold. “Would you want to have sex with me as a friend?” he said quickly. “I thought it might help.”

“It would help, a lot.” I put my hand over his. “You do know how old I am.”

“Sure.” He laughed nervously. “I like that. Women my age, we just don’t have anything real to talk about.” He looked around quickly. “Should I put the shades down?”

I tried to stifle a laugh. “Let’s wait until the shift is over, okay? Only another hour and a half.” He agreed, with a winsome look of real pain.

Boys that age should wear loose clothing. Galina and Ingred, who replaced us, could hardly have missed his erection. They were poker-faced, but Galina gave me a roguish wink as we went out the door.

Back at my place, the first iteration was predictably brief. But Sam’s refractory powers were impressive even for a youngster. After the fourth he fell asleep beside me, still inside. It was my first deep, untroubled sleep in a month.

(Sam was curiously ignorant of female geography. He confessed he’d only discovered girls a year before, having spent several years loving an older man, one of his teachers. Such a waste of natural resources.)

The next day we began working on a program of recruitment. Our efforts here would be spectacularly trivial if only sixteen people benefited. We decided it would be best to find loners and people living in twos and threes. If we tried to assimilate a large group, it might lead to an organized power struggle after we left.

I saw the farm as eventually growing into a small town, thousands of people, agriculturally self-sufficient and still close enough to New York to take advantage of the city and serve as a nucleus of power for rebuilding it. Some day I wanted to come back to the city and see it crackling with energy again.

There was some dissension over this ultimate goal, led by Carrie Marchand. A lot of people believed that cities were obsolete; that living in cities contributed to the mental disease that made war possible. A strange point of view to come from someone who grew up inside an oversized tin can. But she had never been to New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, as they had been before the war. As I was stating this argument, I realized that only a handful of adult people ever had been to a real city, let alone every one of the major cities in the non-Socialist world. It made me feel lonely rather than unique. And I did have to admit that the experience colored my judgment profoundly. Carrie made a good case, but my side prevailed. Being boss does simplify the process of debate.

The first stage of recruitment had to be quite selective. We made a couple of hundred flyers describing what we were and how to get in touch with us, and left them in prominent places in book stores and print libraries. We didn’t tell exactly where the farm was, but said we would pick people up at noon outside the Ossining tube station, every clear day.

We distributed the flyer over several hundred square kilometers, but for almost a week it looked like a wasted effort. Every noon Friedman or I would take the school bus inland a few kilometers, then circle around to the south of Ossining and sneak up on the tube station. On the fifth day three recruits, as cautious as we were, came out of the bushes after we landed.

We got two or three a day for the next eleven days. On March 16, the eighth anniversary of the war, it backfired.

One of the new recruits disappeared during the night. He came back about an hour before dawn, with a couple of dozen heavily armed comrades.

The shots woke me up an instant before the buzzer went off. Harry Volker and Albert Long were on duty; one of them managed to get to the emergency switch before dying. The invaders had burst in through both doors, shooting.

Evidently they hadn’t known where the armory was. That kept the bloodbath from being too one-sided. Friedman kept them away with his laser while weapons were being passed through the dormitory. Then there was a terrible free-for-all, our children and their children blasting away at each other right through the golden dawn. I looked on helplessly from my cottage window, along with Sam. Neither of us was foolhardy enough to try crossing over to the armory. We moved a dresser in front of the door and peered through the blinds at the war being fought.

Then we spent the morning picking up and burying bodies and pieces of bodies. There were twenty-three of them and eleven of us—eight children, the two on night shift, and Sara O’Brien.

Sara’s body was the last one we found, which was probably a good thing, since we were numb by then. We followed the sound of flies. Behind some bushes, irrelevantly naked, her body at first looked like a pile of raw meat. They had hacked off her head and limbs and breasts and stacked everything up. They’d split her torso open from the womb to the heart, and spread things around. She didn’t look real. She looked like a montage a gruesome child might make, taking scissors to an anatomy diagram.

That was when the guilt really came home. Sara had been such a sweet person. She loved children with total soppy abandon. She was the best teacher we had for the very young, because her love infected the children and they would do anything to keep from disappointing her. She had three daughters and a son in New New. What the hell could I tell them? I chose your mother as backup pilot because her psych profile showed she was really great with children. I’m really sorry she wound up a bloody heap. Next time I’ll build a fence, first thing.

In a way, the ones who were less obviously dead were the worst. Some who were killed by laser just had a charred spot on their clothing. They looked asleep, except for the feet. For some reason dead people seem to crank their feet around into uncomfortable positions.

6

Nobody blamed me for the carnage. Maybe I blamed myself: I should have expected the worst and given highest priority to defense. Of all the adults, I had the most experience with this particular kind of insanity—Friedman knew more about war but he had never been in one except, like all the others, as a target. No use wasting energy in self-recrimination, I knew. But I had to start taking medicine to get to sleep.

We spent the next two weeks in furious activity, turning the farm into an armed camp. We surrounded the area with two concentric circles of sturdy posts and wound a complicated maze of taut razor wire between them. It was difficult and dangerous stuff to work with; only two of the children were physically strong enough to help, which might have been just as well. Three people severed fingers in moments of carelessness. Dr. Itoh was able to do emergency bone grafts and rejoin the digits, but they would have to be redone in New New if the victims were to ever use the fingers normally. I brushed against the stuff myself, reaching up to scratch my nose, and skinned off a flap of forearm the size of a sausage patty. There was an impressive amount of blood. Itoh glued it back, but now I can’t feel anything there but prickly numbness.

While we were doing that, the children dug sixteen bunkers, equally spaced around the perimeter, and with some trepidation I allowed the holes to be stocked with weapons and ammunition. The bloodbath had had a so-bering effect, though, and the children treated the weapons with exaggerated caution.

There was no break in the wire. The only way in or out of the farm, for the time being, would be by floater. We found another workable one, a utility pickup, and taught Indira and two others how to fly, after a fashion. They took the Fromme brothers out on daily hunting sorties that were also reconnaissance, trying to find large groups of children before they found us.

Friedman, always full of good news, pointed out that though the wire would protect us from another attack of the same kind, it wouldn’t be much of an obstacle if somebody else had managed to break into an armory. A few seconds of concentrated laser fire would melt a hole in the fence, or it could be breached by explosives.

I wondered whether our situation was a microcosm of the near future—a few people living well but in anxious isolation. Perhaps this was unavoidable for a time, but I could hope that it would prove to be only a period of transition, not a grisly New Order.

The ferocity of the attack and the way the children seemed indifferent toward dying made me wonder whether Jeff had been wrong in thinking that Charlie’s Country only extended into Georgia. None of the children on the farm had ever heard of it until the Fromme boys came. But maybe it was a behavior pattern that cropped up independent of Manson’s crazy writings. I talked to Dr. Long, who had specialized in child psychology before the war, and he wasn’t too much help. After all, not even the most desperate of prewar cultures had anything like the background of helpless despair these children endured. His practice had been limited to children who had grown up in New New, with an occasional immigrant for variety. More bedwetting than mass murder.

When the new trouble first began, we thought it was a reaction to stress, to the isolation and tension of living inside the razor wall. We increased the amount of time each person spent outside, making up search missions to give the kids something to do. But they became increasingly irritable and hard to control, and the doctors spent long days treating vague complaints.

And then Indira got sick. One morning she didn’t get out of bed, and when we shook her awake she mumbled incoherent nonsense. She was incontinent and wouldn’t eat. We turned my cabin into a sickroom and fed her intravenously while the doctors and Harry Volker ran tests. They were in constant communication with medical people in New New, who could only confirm the obvious: It was the death. There was nothing anyone could do.

We had reinoculated everyone with the vaccine our first day here, to be on the safe side. Either Indira was somehow unaffected by the vaccine, or the vaccine didn’t work. Which meant we were all doomed.

Tishkyevich found the answer. We didn’t have anything like a complete medical laboratory, but she was able to take blood samples from Indira, the other children, and us, and compare forcegrown disease cultures from each. Indira and the children had a mutated form of the death, but none of us had it. That was a relief, but perplexing. Then Galina deduced the truth: We had given it to them. Except for Rocky, Friedman, Ahmed, and me, none of the party had ever been to Earth; most of them represented several generations of biological isolation from the home planet. When the virus settled into our lungs it found a strange new ecology. In the process of trying to adapt to one or all of us, it changed.

We were evidently protected the same way we were protected from other Earth diseases. The virus couldn’t survive our beefed-up immune systems. But before it perished some of it got back out, and reinfected the children.

The scientists at New New confirmed Galina’s explanation. They also said it would be easy to produce an antigen specific to the mutation, if we would bring up a blood sample.

No children were around while this was going on. That was good. We had to leave, and quickly, and preferably not in a hail of bullets.

Irrationally, I wanted to stay until Indira died. It felt like we were deserting her. But there was really nothing we could do, and she might hold on for a week or more. So at two in the morning, cold rain misting down, we met at the school bus and drifted away.

We left the monitor so we could call from the Mercedes and explain what had happened, and that a new vaccine would be coming in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the first person to hear the beeping and come into the sick-room was Horace Fromme. He just stared sullenly while I talked, and before I could finish, his image tilted and slid away and then the screen went dead. He’d turned over the table that held the monitor.

There was nothing more we could do, and staying longer might be dangerous. It was getting light; the other floater could reach Kennedy in a half hour, with enough armament to reduce the Mercedes to small bits of scrap metal. We strapped in and blasted off. Everything had happened so fast. It wasn’t till we were in orbit that it hit me: This part of my life was over. I would never go to Earth again. Even if Jeff was alive, I would never see him.

Charlie’s Will

Storm listened without comment for several minutes while Jeff explained how the vaccine worked, where it came from, and how he had been administering it through southern Florida. Storm kept the gun dangling loosely at his side.

“Supposing things are like you say,” he said slowly. “There’s something I don’t get. How come the spacers would go to that trouble? How come you go to all that trouble?”

“The Worlds need us back on our feet,” Jeff said. “They have a hard time getting along without the Earth.”

“No skin off you. You could just stay in a safe place and doctor people.”

“He couldn’t take the cold,” Tad said. “Had to get as far south as he could.”

He frowned and scratched his chin. “Still didn’t have to use the vaccine on anybody. Why you take the chance?”

“Loneliness,” Jeff said. “I might live another eighty years. I want company.”

Storm shook his head. “Well, hell.” He put the shot-gun-pistol away in his shirt pouch. “Guess I’ll believe you for the time being. I gotta keep it secret, though?”

“For as long as possible,” Jeff said. “When everybody starts getting gray hair, they’ll probably figure it out.”

The next day General left with a war party to head toward Ciudad Miami—the crater that used to be Miami—on a meat-gathering expedition. Jeff held sick call as usual, then sequestered himself in the University of the Media library.

Studying electronics didn’t present the practical problems he’d encountered years before, trying to learn some medicine. The university had a working database system; he didn’t have to rely on antique books. His main problem was an absolute lack of talent. He’d enrolled in a physics survey course his second year of college, but dropped it and transferred to chemistry before the first test.

Now he was doggedly worrying through the mysteries of resistors and capacitors, vaguely aware of how much work was ahead before he got to the quantum electronics he’d need to repair the transceiver. Not being able to make hard copies of the texts was frustrating. He did have a comprehensive wiring diagram for the transceiver, over a hundred pages of hieroglyphics, and whenever he learned a new symbol he would go through the booklet and circle everything that looked like it. He hoped that eventually he would develop some sort of gestalt understanding of the thing’s structure, but so far it was still a random assortment of gibberish.

Tad and Storm were no help, of course, and Newsman was a definite liability. He would come down to the carrel to watch Jeff work, muttering silly questions and non sequiturs. Jeff’s ruse was that he was working on understanding the medical machines at the hospital, so he had to make up a line of moderately convincing nonsense while he worked, which didn’t help his concentration.

Newsman always napped in the afternoon, though, which gave Jeff time to sneak down to the dish installation occasionally, and try to coordinate what he was learning with the actual devices there. Whole blocks of circuit boards were still intact, and he’d managed to match up nearly half of them with pages in the booklet. The smashed-up equipment that littered the floor no doubt had a lot that could be salvaged, and there was a closet full of spare parts. A competent electronics engineer could probably go in with a screwdriver and make some sort of working transmitter in an afternoon. Jeff hoped he’d be able to do it sometime before the turn of the century.

Jeff and Tad were in the library, Jeff studying circuits and Tad with Newsman, watching an old animalporn movie, when a runner came and said the two of them and Storm were supposed to come downtown right away. General was back and he needed some advice.

So Jeff painfully mounted a bicycle, cursing for the thousandth time the memory of old Holy Joe, who had decreed floaters blasphemous and sent them all pilotless out over the horizon. They stopped by at the jail/church and woke up Storm.

General was sitting on the steps of City Hall with Hotbox lying next to him, her head in his lap. As they approached, he disengaged her and stood up.

“Come on inside,” he said, smiling. “Someone you wanta meet.”

Standing alone in the foyer, feet hobbled, was Mary Sue, the eldest of the family Tad had left behind. Her face was bruised and swollen. “That’s him,” she said, pointing. “Healer. He’s the one keeps people from gettin’ the death.”

“Storm,” General said, “take him.”

Storm put his hand on Jeff’s arm. “Hold on,” he said. “Who is this slit?”

“She used to belong to him,” he said, nodding at Tad. “He gets it, too.”

“Met some people come down from Atlanta,” she said. “They don’ get the death there no more, said it was shots they got from the sky people, the spacers. He’s one of ‘em. We followed the way you two went. Nobody’s got the death anyplace you went, not since you give ‘em shots. Typhoid shots.”

“I’ve never been off the Earth,” Jeff said. “I’m not a spacer.”

“But you’re in with ‘em,” she said. “That medicine come down in a rocket. People seen it.”

“It’s true, isn’t it,” General said.

Jeff hesitated. “Substantially. But Tad doesn’t have anything to do with it. New New York sent me the medicine, and I’ve given it to thousands of people. No one here is going to get the death. You can live a normal life span if you want.”

“What’s normal?”

“Hundred twenty, more or less.”

General made a strained growling noise in his throat. “Kill him.”

Storm didn’t move. “Maybe we better—”

“You kill him. Right here.”

The priest pulled his shotgun-pistol out of his shirt pouch and pushed Jeff roughly to his knees. He held the gun to his head. “You want to pray to Christ and Charlie?” he said in a quavering voice.

Jeff’s eyes were squeezed shut, teeth clenched. “Fuck them both,” he said clearly.

“You—” General stepped forward to kick. Storm swung the pistol up and fired point-blank, ripping a large hole out of the center of General’s chest. He staggered backwards a couple of steps, slipped in his own blood, and fell heavily. Mary Sue was covered with gore but didn’t react.

Storm heard a noise and spun around. Hotbox was trying to open the door and cock a pistol simultaneously. He fired and she fell back down the stars in a shower of glass and blood.

“Get up, get up!” Storm put a hand under Jeff’s arm and hoisted him to his feet. “We gotta find guns for you two—go get Major. We get him, I think we’re okay, we’re in charge.”

“You don’t gotta,” Mary Sue said calmly. “He’s in back there, dressed out and smoked.”

“What he do?”

“Up in Islamorada. He told General most of the boys didn’ want Healer killed. So General killed him.”

“Was it true?” Jeff asked. “About the others?”

“Guess so. Most of ‘em run away.” She licked the blood on her lips. “Christ and Charlie. It just don’ make sense.”

7

People weren’t as paranoid about infection as they used to be, but we still spent a week in isolation, watching the cucumbers and tomatoes grow. It only took two days to synthesize the new antigen, since the scientists knew what they were looking for, and a small drone carrying the medicine got to the children before we left isolation.

We watched it on flatscreen. The magnification wasn’t quite enough to make out individual people, but we could see there were still some children at the compound. They had evidently opened part of the razor wire; one person went out and retrieved the medicine. I hoped they had the sense to use it.

Some of the ones who attacked the farm, certainly the ones who mutilated Sara O’Brien, would also have been exposed. They would die, which bothered me not at all, but I was afraid they might first become carriers for this new version of the death. Our epidemiologists said it wouldn’t happen; the population was too spread out. If it did happen, we’d have to start over, sending another hundred million doses dirtside. If the Yorkers would stand for it—there was no end of grumbling about the original project, which had been by far the most expensive public health undertaking in the history of the Worlds.

I got my old job back with Start-up and put in a full week’s work while we were sequestered. The transition back to “normal” family life was a little more complicated.

It was partly my fault. I had gotten really sweet on Sam, shared troubles and so forth, and since the medics were kind enough to provide us a little privacy, individual tents, I took it upon myself to extend his sexual education into the realm of free fall. At least twice a day.

My emotions toward him should have been simple, but they weren’t. Sometimes he made me feel like a girl again. Sometimes I felt frankly maternal toward him. And all sorts of states in between.

It was obvious to the others what was going on. Most of them, I think, were amused, and most conventionally minded their own business, but some were quite scan-dalized. After all, we were “home,” even though hundreds of meters of hard vacuum separated me from my husbands’ bedrooms. Some, like Maria Mandell and Louise Dore (and Martin Thiele, I think) wanted a fling at that lean long body themselves, and resented the old hag pulling rank on them. That was part of Sam’s attraction, too. I hadn’t made anybody jealous, or shocked anybody, in years.

After the week was up, though, I had to face the problem of what I was going to do with him, and with myself. I was tempted to ask him to marry us, but I didn’t really know him well enough—and it would be too much like getting back at Daniel.

I remembered the term “shipboard romance” from old novels, and I suppose the smart thing would have been to treat it just like that, kiss him good-bye before we came through the airlock, and then walk away, back to my normal life. I couldn’t quite do it.

We had a small reunion party, necessarily cramped, up in John’s flat. Evelyn was shy and deferential. I didn’t think it was the right time to discuss Sam (perversely, I didn’t want to shock Evelyn). We talked about the New York adventure, and I caught up on Janus gossip.

They’ve started building S-2, Newhome, using Uchūden as a nucleus. They ‘ve moved the Japanese satellite to a position between New New and Deucalion. It’s a pretty thing, an old-fashioned doughnut design with a delicate landscape painted around the outside. It was undamaged during the war, but the people inside all relocated here. Theoretically it could support one hundred twenty people, but they’d have to be awfully fond of algae. In the prewar days it was periodically resupplied with “real” food, by the Japanese corporations that put it into orbit.

Eventually Uchūden will be the control center of Newhome, the top of a cylindrical column of rock. I’ll probably live there, on top. It’s a strange feeling to watch it, spinning slowly against the stars, knowing that in a couple of years we may move there and never come back.

I’m going to have some trouble from a group that calls itself God’s Armada, of all things. It’s mostly Devonites, with a few other evangelical types involved. They managed to access my roster and break it down according to religious belief. There are no fundamentalist Devonites among the seven thousand people I’ve chosen so far, and only a few hundred Reform Devonites. Only eighteen percent of the colonists profess religious belief, less than half the percentage that prevails in New New. The Armada served notice they’ll be taking me to court. I’ll try to look on it as an educational experience.

S-1 took off the day after our farm was attacked. If it had been a clear night, it would have looked like the brightest star in the sky. You can still see it now, a bright blue spark in Gemini. (I asked what S-2 will look like when it takes off. Oddly enough, it will be almost invisible. You wouldn’t want to be looking at the exhaust any-way—the gamma radiation would be strong enough to kill at a million kilometers’ distance. We’ll be launching straight “up,” out of the plane of the ecliptic, to get safely away from Earth and New New before we tip over and head for Epsilon.)

On the way back from Earth I’d had a depressed, resigned feeling about Janus. Now I was starting to look forward to it, catching the enthusiasm Dan and Evelyn projected. Even John seemed somewhat excited. With S-1 gone and Uchūden growing, the project was a reality.

About midnight Dan and Evy went back to Dan’s flat. I stayed with John and we made slow love. Afterwards, I broached the subject of Sam.

He was amused. “Butterflying at your age? Next it’ll be acne.”

“Be serious, John. It’s more complex than that.”

“Of course it is.” He drew me into the crook of his arm and with a finger traced aimless patterns in the perspiration on my chest. “Of course it is.”

“And it’s not just a reaction to Evy. I like her.”

He smiled. “That sounds defensive. The timing is suspicious.”

“All right, she was part of it at first. Not any more, I think.”

“When did you ask him? Right after—”

“I didn’t ask him. He asked me.”

“A boy of rare discrimination.”

“It was right after Evy joined us. He saw I was upset. But it went beyond therapy pretty quickly.” I explained to him as much as I understood.

He got up and poured us a glass of wine while I was talking. “All right, he’s clever and pretty and you went through a lot together. What do you want me to do? Give my blessing? You’ve got it.”

“I want not to hurt you. Have I?”

He sat cross-legged on the bed, a posture that accentuated his deformity. Normally I didn’t even see it any more. “No, you haven’t hurt me. When we were first together, remember, you were having three different men a day, with an eye out for new recruits. I wasn’t jealous then, and I haven’t changed.”

“But I have changed, is what you’re saying. I should act my age.”

“No, no.” He took a sip and offered me the glass. “I’m not saying that. Others will, though.”

“What I do with my plumbing is my own business.”

“A noble principle. You know it’s not true. You’re coming up for review in another month, and there are a couple of people on the Board who would jump at any chance to hold you back. A pity you couldn’t have kept it secret.”

“We were living in each other’s pockets. It would be against my nature anyhow.”

“I know. I wouldn’t try to make you a politician at this late date. But you are going to get some noise about it.” He cleared his throat and looked away. “Unless we marry him.”

“Some year, maybe. I’m not going to be rushed into anything.”

He nodded slowly. “I have to say…I’m glad to hear you say that. I would feel like the odd man out, you and Daniel with your young lovers.”

“You mean you haven’t made love with Evy?”

“Yes, twice. We are married.” He looked uncomfortable. “It didn’t work out. Very dry and tight. I don’t think her heart was in it. Though she tried hard ”

“She’s inexperienced.”

“That may be it.” He drank off most of the wine and handed it to me to finish, then got under the cover.

“I’ll have a girl-to-girl talk with her.”

He put his hand on my thigh. “Don’t intercede on my behalf. I’m satisfied with the way things are, now that you’re back.”

I turned off the light and sipped wine in the darkness, sitting up in bed. I couldn’t help feeling somewhat manipulated. John had probably acquiesced in Evy’s joining our line so he would have more time with me, though I suspect he would be surprised and hurt if I accused him of it. But then there was undeniably an element of manipulation in my relationship with Sam—mixed with honest lust; thinking about him gave me a prickly surge of desire.

My mother once counseled me that sexual relations grew more complicated in proportion to the square of the number of people involved. So this quintet was twenty-five times more complicated than masturbation. That seemed conservative.

The next month was a tiresome waste. The second day home I got a summons from God’s Armada. On Sandra’s advice I retained Taylor Harrison, an expert on constitutional law and a good trial lawyer as well.

Selecting the jury took more time than the trial itself. They came up with forty hand-picked Devonites, of course, and I found forty free-thinkers pretty easily. But then we both had veto power over the remaining twenty. We went through nearly a thousand before agreeing on them.

Harrison rejected out-of-hand my desire to consider the case on practical merits: the plain fact that the star-ship’s population had to remain stable for eighty years, and just a handful of Devonites would reproduce everybody into starvation. (I also asked the GA representative whether he had considered that little problem. He just smiled sadly and said God would provide.) By the screwy logic of the courts, that fact of certain disaster was irrelevant The case had to be decided in terms of technicalities of precedent and interpretation.

They droned on and on. It bothered me somewhat that GA’s lawyer, also an expert on constitutional law, was herself a hidebound atheist I supposed the two of them could switch sides and argue with equal passion either way. Maybe justice is best served with that kind of professionalism. It still bothered me. But not as much as the bombshell Harrison dropped halfway through the trial.

We were having lunch together, reviewing his notes, when he said, “O’Hara, do you know what a ‘front organization’ is?”

“Sure,” I said. I’d studied the history of the Lobbies in American government.

“Well, that’s what your God’s Armada is. They’re fronting for a conservative coalition headed up by old Marcus. They don’t really give a damn about equal representation.”

“What are they up to, then?”

“Just want to stop Newhome. They will, too, if they can compel you to take eight percent fundamentalist Devonites. Might as well put a time bomb aboard.”

“They should have moved earlier. With S-1 gone—”

“But that’s just it. They want S-1 to come back with the antimatter. They just don’t want to use it in a starship.”

“Power generation? Sunlight must be cheaper.”

“That’s not exactly the kind of power they’re interested in.” He put down his chopsticks and looked at me. “They want to use it on Earth.”

“My god!”

“The idea is to set up about a dozen magnetic containment devices, holding antimatter, in the largest cities. Like the Sword of Damocles. They do something we don’t approve of, we turn off the power. Boom.”

“Or if the power fails. Or the magnet runs down.”

“That’s right. Or if someone who doesn’t like, say, Los Angeles gets hold of the button. It’s a spectacularly unstable system.”

“How do they think they could do it? It’d never get past the Coordinators.”

“Well, Marcus was a Coordinator once. The thing is, if the starship gets vetoed and S-l comes back, we’ve got all that antimatter sitting in our own back yard. A lot of people would rather have it somewhere else.”

“Have you told Judge Delany about this?”

“Hardly. Delany was the one who told me. Of course it’s irrelevant, a side issue.”

“Of course.” I wished I had something stronger than orange juice.

As it turned out, it was irrelevant, or immaterial. We won the case, sixty-one to thirty-nine, even getting a few of the Devonites on our side.

In retrospect, the month was a useful lesson. I had already chosen ninety-two lawyers to go with Newhome. I reinterviewed them, and about a hundred more, in terms of the desirability of setting up a new system of jurisprudence. Surprisingly, I wound up with more old lawyers—including Harrison—than young ones. Fed up with the system, I suppose.

I also spent the month more or less losing Sam. Having discovered the female race, he started butterflying. The trial soaked up all my spare time, and he had plenty of girls his own age to divert him. It’s possible he was intimidated by John and Daniel, too, since he would be aboard Newhome on Engineering track, and one or both of them would sooner or later be his boss. I don’t really think he had that Machiavellian, or practical, a mind, though. One reason I was so fond of him.

My own mind being reasonably practical, even Ma-chiavellian, I let him go gracefully. I’ll be on the starship, too. In another ten years our age difference won’t be so significant.

Charlie’s Will

After the violence at City Hall, the transition went fairly smoothly. Most of the Island’s weapons were locked up in the jail; Storm’s deputies were armed but loyal.

The Islanders were probably more amenable to the prospect of long life than any other group in Charlie’s country. They lived comfortably amid the only working remnant of prewar civilization south of New York and north of Antarctica; the only city in the hemisphere that had survived the war relatively unchanged. It wasn’t hard to convince them that the gift of the death was no blessing.

It was harder to talk them out of cannibalism. Jeff got no help from Storm on this matter, nor from Tad, who still wouldn’t eat human flesh but didn’t want to make an issue about it. Most of them had only vague memories of any other kind of meat.

Oddly enough, it was Mary Sue who came up with a solution. She wanted to go back to the farm anyhow, and suggested that the two groups might trade. An armed guard could escort her up and come back with mating pairs of rabbits and chickens, maybe pigs if they had enough. The farm could use a refrigerator in return. Their old one had died, and they hadn’t been able to find one that worked.

Mary Sue’s bunch could just go down into Tampa and raid an appliance store, and find one still in a packing crate, but Jeff didn’t suggest it. Instead he solemnly picked out a nice expensive model from a mansion on Duval Street and had it loaded aboard the mule cart he’d come down in. He sent a party of four volunteers along with her, armed with accurate maps and lots of artillery, and started dreaming about fried chicken.

Storm hadn’t wanted to take over General’s leadership, opting for the safer position of being Jeff’s right-hand man. Jeff knew that for his own safety he had to go about civilizing this bunch of savages. But he wasn’t sure how to start.

The existing social organization was so loose as to be almost nonexistent. People had had duties assigned, and they did just enough work to keep General and Storm off their backs. One problem was that Key West was a Garden of Eden. It was set up to provide food, water, shelter, and power for a hundred thousand people, and though some of the machines had broken down, the city would still take care of ten times their number. Most of the time they spent watching the cube or “hanging,” talking endlessly about the same things with the same people. Excess energy was dissipated in fights, sometimes fatal, and sex, sometimes heterosexual.

Fortunately, there weren’t many who were true Mansonite believers. There was no other religion, though, that Jeff might exploit to keep them in line. His own American Taoism was too gentle and subtle to have much effect on them. He toyed with the idea of making up a religion, a notion that had occurred to him before. His white hair and beard grown long and wild, he did look like an Old Testament prophet, and a lot of the younger ones treated him with tonguetied awe. He couldn’t marshal enough cynicism for it, though.

Finally he settled on just getting things somewhat organized. He picked a dozen boys and girls who seemed to have leadership potential, and made them “house leaders,” naming their houses after signs of the zodiac. Then he took Storm’s census and assigned each house twenty-three or twenty-four people, more or less randomly, preserving the two-to-one male/female ratio. He instructed the house leaders to select four people out of their groups to be assistants, each responsible for a “unit” of five or six people. It was simple military-style organization, company-platoon-squad, but he didn’t want to use the military names.

As a test of his authority, it was successful. People grumbled about being separated from friends and sex partners, but they went along with it. (The separation wasn’t profound, anyhow; houses only got together physically for meetings, and people continued to live wherever they’d cleared a space.)

There were four others besides Jeff and Storm and Tad who could read and write fairly well. They were made teachers and taken outside of the loose power structure, and freed of work details. Jeff set up a class schedule by house, requiring everybody who was old enough to spend two hours a day learning fundamentals. Skipping class meant four hours of extra work; malingering at work put you in Storm’s jail for a day, with no food.

Jeff knew enough about child psychology not to be too surprised at the initial enthusiasm they showed, but he wasn’t sure what to do next, when the novelty wore off. Tad suggested they reinvent money. People would be rewarded for good performance in class, and with their money they could buy their way out of work details. Jeff could see the sense of it, but he hesitated, having known since childhood that money was intrinsically evil. It seemed a pity, since they were in a small way rebuilding society, to knowingly corrupt it from the very beginning. But he finally gave in. They had already begun commerce, trading a worthless refrigerator for priceless animals. As the people to the north grew older, there would be more and more contact. Better trade than war.

He brought together all of the teachers and house leaders and explained the setup. They worked out a table of various equivalences between class credits and work credits—watching a fishing line was not worth as much as scraping paint—and, foreseeing trouble, set up a review system, so that people who thought they had been unfairly treated could bring their case to Healer or Storm.

It took quite a while. Tad drew a couple of hundred credit bills, which Storm and Jeff signed. They locked them up in the jail’s armory.

In six days he created school, jobs, money, courts, and banks. On the seventh day he went fishing.