Worlds (2 page)

In the Worlds, as on Earth, line families encouraged both nonconformity and rigidity. Over a couple of generations, experiment would become habit would become tradition—and if you don’t like it, why don’t you go start your own line; all right, I will.

For instance, the Scanlan line was made up of three-mate marriages called triunes. Triunes occasionally interlocked to form larger units, but that was considered racy. The Nabors line was less formal. In general, young men paired up with older women and young women with older men, with frequent changes of partners. That Marianne’s mother was only twelve when she gave birth did not raise any eyebrows. But when it turned out that the father not only was not a Nabors, but was a groundhog as well, mother and child were unceremoniously disowned.

To become a Scanlan, a person only had to be of proven fertility, and had either to find a compatible broken triune or to apply with two other fertile people (all three not to be of the same sex). Marianne’s mother took the latter course: she applied with two men, her current lover and Marianne’s father, who returned to his Earthside wife a week later, as had been prearranged.

Thus Marianne was a fatherless prefertile adjunct to a broken triune, with a mother young enough to be her sister (Scanlan women normally postponed children until their thirties). She was different, and the other children were not kind. The boys were unkind and bigger than she was,
which might be one reason she delayed womanhood as long as possible.

When she did become a woman she was striking, rather than beautiful, with the genes that had come from Prussia two centuries before: thick dark red hair, eyes the color of copper, skin as pale as wax. People would stare at her.

A menarche party is fun for everybody but the guest of honor. Old wine doesn’t mix well with new hormones. Smug sympathy while your girlhood is being torn bleeding from your body.

O’Hara knew she was drinking too much wine, trying to wash away the acid taste of vomit.
That
had been because of too many pain pills. The cramps were still there, gentle pressure, waiting for the medicine to wear off. If she sat still she imagined she could feel meat growing, shoving up beneath her boyish nipples. But she couldn’t sit still; no position was comfortable for long. And she couldn’t stand up without feeling nauseated. She had moved the party outside, upstairs into the park, which had helped for a minute. Now there was no place else to go. Except out the airlock. That sounded like an attractive proposition. She wasn’t even bleeding yet, raped by stiff cotton. She would not cry. If one more woman tried to put her arm around her, she’d knock the bitch’s teeth down her throat.

“My poor baby.” Can’t hit your own mother. “You’re so pale. You aren’t going to be sick again?”

“Thanks,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“You really shouldn’t drink so much wine, you know. It doesn’t help.”

“Mother. I always throw up at parties. Nerves. I’m all right now. Once always does the trick.”

She smiled uncertainly and cocked her head at her daughter. “I can never tell when you’re being serious.”

“Never serious. Morose, sometimes. Never serious.” She swallowed hard and blew her nose. “Boy. Wish we could do this every year.”

“Well, you brought it on yourself. You know what Dr. Johnson said.” The gynecologist had been after her for five years. The longer you put it off, the more it was going to hurt. Finally, approaching seventeen, she had to menarche or face real trouble with her pelvic girdle later on.

“Dr. Johnson knows as much about this as I know about peeing standing up.”

“Oh, Marianne.”

“It’s true; he’s never told me anything I didn’t know. He just likes to poke around inside little girls.”

“Don’t be crude.”

“Big girls, too.”

“He’s a nice man.”

“Sure. Keeps his instruments in the refrigerator so they’ll be nice and fresh.”

She shook her head. “Poor girl. I know what you’re going through.”

Marianne leaned back and closed her eyes. “In a goat’s gap, you do. You were twelve, weren’t you?”

“Eleven. I was twelve when I had
you
.”

“So don’t call me ‘girl.’ In another five years I’ll be twice as old as you.”

“What?”

“Just help me up, would you?” She held out a weary arm. “I have to find the john.”

“Are you going to be sick?”

“No. If you must know, I want to check and see if it’s started yet.” She minced away and muttered: “My glorious fucking womanhood.”

When she was a girl, Marianne knew she annoyed some people and frightened others. It would be years before she made any conscious effort to put people at ease; until then, she was socially something of a monster.

She was single-minded and broadly talented. Under New New’s merit-examination system, she was graduated from high school at age twelve; by fifteen she had baccalaureate certification in American Studies and World Systems. She earned medals in handball and gymnastics and played in the orchestra. Papers she wrote while a graduate student were published in academic journals in the Worlds and on Earth. New New’s Academic Council gave her the rare opportunity to go to Earth for a year of postgraduate work.

Her mother, who had dropped out of school at the tenth-grade level, thought that Marianne was using her education as an excuse for delaying menarche, and she was not completely wrong. To Marianne, dating sounded like a boring waste of time and sex sounded gruesome. She knew that wasn’t true for most people, but she also knew she wasn’t
like
most people. So she exercised her legal right to put off adulthood.

For the first couple of months after menarche, Marianne had reason to wish they still did it the old-fashioned way. She cramped constantly and lost so much blood she
had to have two transfusions. Her new breasts and hips ached from rapid growth and bumping into things. She felt clumsy and sore and messy and unnecessarily hirsute.

Once recovered from the transition, though, she went about becoming a woman with characteristic speed and thoroughness. She read all about it, of course, and asked innumerable embarrassing questions. She took a light academic load and kept an eye out for a likely-looking male. She found an unlikely one.

Students in New New, no matter how gifted, were not allowed to be passive beneficiaries of everybody else’s labor. O’Hara was required to do agricultural work on Thursdays and construction on Saturdays. It was while slapping paint on seemingly endless acres of wall that she met Charlie Increase Devon.

The Devonites were the largest line family in the Worlds, though not too many of them lived in New New. They had their own settlement, Devon’s World, which was sort of a cross between religious commune and brothel.

Like all Devonites, Charlie was a New Baptist. The only thing they had in common with old-style Baptists was that their initiation ceremony also involved water. They weren’t even Christian; their theology could be described as Unitarian-on-Quāāludes. They were nudists and body-worshipers. They had various interesting rituals—such as
semarche
, when boys became men—that formed the nucleus for a large subgenre of ribald humor in the twenty-first century. They were promiscuous and often pregnant, both by commandment.

O’Hara was fascinated by Charlie. He was about the biggest man she had ever seen, heavily muscled from years of pushing steel, but he moved with uncanny grace. He was serious and quiet and not at all intelligent. Like all Devonites, he was completely hairless and always wore white; like most of them, he was a religious fanatic, in a quiet way.

They were total opposites, O’Hara being agnostic, intelligent, small, and not quiet. He seemed like a perfect man to start out with, since she did want sexual experience but didn’t want to complicate her life with a love affair.

She might have been forewarned if her otherwise liberal education had included a few ancient Claudette Colbert movies (“you big lug”). They fell for each other, hard, even before they went to bed together, which was not long
postponed. After he had gently initiated her into the glorious mysteries of friction and spasm, they clung to one another like the opposite poles of strong magnets.

It was not going to have a happy ending. Charlie had to start fathering children by age twenty-three (he was twenty-one when they met), or sin by omission, and although O’Hara’s love was almost boundless, it could not encompass shaving her head and spending the rest of her youth manufacturing babies.

Of course, they tried to convert each other. Charlie listened to O’Hara’s arguments with grave respect, but she couldn’t penetrate his belief. O’Hara had less patience with Charlie’s arguments, but after hurting him twice, she kept her mouth shut. Eventually, she agreed to go with him to Devon’s World, even though the idea of a one-religion World gave her understandable premonitions of disaster. The only other one had suffered the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Everyone remembers what they were doing on 14 March 2082, the day Jacob’s Ladder came down.

World of Christ was an evangelical organization with a worldwide membership approaching a hundred million. In 2018, the hundredth anniversary of their founder’s birth, they hired Martin-Marietta-Boeing to build for them Jacob’s Ladder: a huge and beautiful space structure that combined the functions of church, monastery, and hotel. Most of the thousands of people who went there stayed for only a week or a month of praying in the ecstasy of weightlessness, suspended between the Earth and Heaven. A couple of hundred were especially blessed and lived there full time (which made them objects of intense curiosity for scientists concerned with the long-term effects of weightlessness, but WoX wouldn’t allow them to be examined).

For economy, Jacob’s Ladder was in low Earth-orbit, with a perigee of about 250 kilometers. This is why it came down. It had a limited capability for orbit correction, in case of atmospheric drag. A correction was applied on 13 March 2082, but somehow it was applied in exactly the wrong direction, elongating the orbit rather than circularizing it. This plunged the structure deeper into the atmosphere. It completed sixteen orbits, lower and lower, before it crashed flaming into the Indian Ocean.

If it had stayed aloft a fraction of a minute longer, the molten cathedral would have impacted on the Indian sub-continent, surely taking millions of lives. WoX spokesmen claimed this was evidence of God’s mercy. They also claimed the disaster was a warning to sinners.

Their membership fell off drastically. They collected more than enough insurance to build another Ladder, but they never got around to it.

The fourteenth was a Friday, so O’Hara was to have her weekly walk in the park with John Ogelby.

Deformed people were rare in the Worlds, but John Ogelby would not describe himself any other way: hunch-backed, bandy-legged, sticks for arms; he walked like a cartoon character and was barely a meter tall. He had come to the Worlds because low gravity was the best, safest anodyne for the constant aching in his joints, and because he suspected that a small world was like a small town: people got used to you and stopped staring.

He was well liked in the low-gravity engineering facility where he worked. He was a brilliant and careful worker, and had learned how to be affable in spite of a natural tendency to use his wit and deformity as a double-edged weapon. He did devastatingly grotesque imitations of video stars and political figures.

But he was wrong about this World being small. With more than two hundred thousand people, there was always someone seeing him for the first time, starting and staring. He got used to it, but could not stop noticing it.

So Ogelby was mildly surprised when he first met Marianne O’Hara. She didn’t jump. She looked at him without staring, the way very old people sometimes did, and then walked over with a glass of punch—the bowl was obviously too high for him to reach—and spent the rest of the afternoon talking with him, with frankness and sympathy. She came up to look at his lab the next day, and they had dinner.

What developed was not exactly a love affair. Love can be driven by pity, and it can even be fueled by curiosity and a thirst for intellectual companionship, but that was not the case here. O’Hara was in love already, with Charlie Devon, and John’s complicated strengths and weaknesses served to counterbalance Charlie’s simple ones. The two men met once and liked each other cautiously, but Charlie
privately could not understand how O’Hara could get used to looking at the hunchback, and John could not drive away the vision of Marianne lost in those strong arms. If you asked either of them, he would say that he was glad there was someone to give O’Hara what he could not (John would say “perforce”).

O’Hara spent more time with John than with Charlie: playing games, exploring New New, incessantly talking and joking. Every Friday they met for lunch and a long walk in the park. John wasn’t particularly comfortable there, but knew that if he didn’t exercise in high gravity he would suffer progressive myasthenia and eventually be unable to leave the low-gravity section where he lived and worked. He was usually rather giddy on the Friday walks, because the pain pills made him light-headed.

He hadn’t taken any pills this Friday, the fourteenth, and his knees and hips and curved spine throbbed with tiny pulses of fire while he waited at the outdoor restaurant. He was the only customer.

Marianne came briskly down the pathway, brushing out her wet hair, and started to apologize for having been held up at the pool’s dressing room, but Ogelby cut her short with a voice that surprised both of them, a harsh croak:

“Have you heard about the Ladder?”

“Jacob’s Ladder?”

“It’s coming down.” She furrowed her brow, not understanding. “It’s going to crash. They can’t save it.”

“H-how?”

On the way to the lift that would take them up to Ogelby’s flat, he told O’Hara about the incredibly botched correction maneuver; about the shuttles that had come up with emergency engines, too late. On its second pass through the atmosphere, the cross-shaped structure had picked up rotation and wobble; it couldn’t be docked with. Many of the congregation had been killed when the satellite started rotating, the artificial gravity sliding them down to the ends of the cross’s arms, then crushing them under a load of altars and statues and a boulder from Golgotha. The ones left alive first made a plea for help, then a dignified statement about the will of God, and then they cut off all communication.