Worlds (29 page)

I woke up in the back seat of the RV, my head on Jeff’s lap. The sky was getting bright “What time?”

“Almost seven,” he said. “I’ll have to go soon.”

My neck was tight and sore from the stitches. I pulled
myself up to a sitting position and closed my eyes until the dizziness went away. “I’m coming with you,” I said. “I can’t abandon you here.”

After a long silence, he whispered “Bullshit,” and kissed me. He opened the door. “Think you can stand up?”

“I’m serious, Jeff.”

“I know you are. I’ve had more time to think about it, though.” He helped me out onto the crushed grass. The swamp air was cool and musty. We were less than a kilometer from where the nearest shuttles were waiting.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “The war can’t go on very much longer. I have weapons, transportation, a uniform; chances are I’ll make it through.

“Let me keep the gold. As soon as possible, I’ll get to Tokyo Bay, Zaire, Novosibirsk—wherever they’re still launching. And I’ll buy passage.”

“It may be years before they let anyone up.”

“Now suppose you did come along with me,” he continued. “We wouldn’t get into orbit any faster—and the two of us together would be a lot less likely to survive the next couple of weeks, than I would be, by myself. ‘He travels swiftest who travels alone.’”

“You’ve got it all figured out.”

“Pretty much.”

“Except how I’m supposed to live with myself, letting you—”

“Don’t be sentimental. Melodramatic. We have to be practical.”

It wasn’t a setting conducive to practicality, the space ships poised against an impossible magenta sunrise, my mind a confusion of gratitude, fear, guilt, and hope. I knew he was right but my will was paralyzed.

“Here.” He took me by the arm and turned me around; opened the RV’s front door. My trunk was on the seat. “I got your things while you were sleeping. Can you choose out seven kilograms’ worth?”

“Already have.” I unlocked it and lifted out a plastic bag. “Last day I was in New York.” Almost nothing practical: a carton of French cigarettes and six bottles of Guinness, a clarinet with two dozen bamboo reeds, a diary, a drawing. A shamrock frozen in clear plastic, that Jeff had given me on New Year’s Day.

He closed the trunk and heaved it into the back. “Better get you aboard. I’ve got a long way to go in two hours.” He
did over to the driver’s seat and switched on the motor. “Come on.”

I sat down and eased the door shut “Don’t we have to find out which one…”

“You’re going in Number Four, the low-gee one. Because you’re injured.” The vehicle bumped across the uneven grassland. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and passed over a folded sheet of paper. “They let me do your manifest for you.”

I stared at it without reading it “How far do you have to be?”

“I don’t really know. Some of those old missiles have a blast radius some tens of kilometers. Just want to get as far away as possible and be behind something solid, at nine-ten.”

We lurched up onto the tarmac and Jeff sped toward Number Four. There were a few dozen people waiting at the lift entrance at the base of the shuttle, many of them propped up on crutches or sitting in wheelchairs, clustered around a small fire.

He eased the RV to a stop a little beyond the crowd and leaned over and kissed me. He was gentle but his arms were hard and trembling. “No words,” he whispered hoarsely. “Just go.”

It’s been more than twenty years now and I still remember so vividly how lonesome, how guilty I felt at that moment, Jeff’s car shrinking away down the tarmac, the smell of ozone from its motor dissipating, the people talking behind me. The silly sound of beer bottles clanking together in my bag, when I went to join them.

Even stronger is the memory of hearing his voice again, a few years later, barely audible through crashing static. He not only lived through the bombs but was one of the few people with the glandular quirk necessary to survive the plague. The acromegaly that made him so big. So he lived, at least for a while, though from what we know about life on Earth now he might have been happier dead.

My husbands and I were talking about Earth at dinner; about Earth and food. There was no city where all three of us went, since Daniel rarely left New York and John never visited there when he was in the States. Daniel mentioned a place in the Village, the New New Delhi Deli, where Benny and I occasionally went for lunch. Kosher and Indian take-out, spicy and cheap. And now thoroughly lost, except in our memories. So many of the memories are tastes and smells; I’d even like to smell the thick city air again, not to mention the sea and the jungle.

Musty swamp and sharp smell of things burning, the
morning I left I don’t remember any sense of the enormity of what was happening. I was so numb, with medicine and from the quick succession of personal shocks, that I sort of missed the end of the world.

Not the End, really, though it may have been the end as a world. When I was a girl, you heard a lot of talk about a future when most of humanity lived in the Worlds, tens of billions of happy people, with the Earth a minor backwater, a historical preserve. It seemed inevitable, since the Earth’s population was declining and ours was increasing; since our fortunes were expanding and their horizons were closing in on them. But we saw it as happening through slow evolution, not sudden catastrophe. Not war and plague.

Old Jules Hammond had a particularly offensive program last week, with a so-called historian who tap-danced over European history in the relentless pursuit of edifying parallels to our present happy situation. Interposing the Black Plague between medieval darkness and Renaissance light The World Wars between the dehumanizing Industrial Revolution and the freedom of the Space Age and Cybernetica. It bothers me that this sort of slap-happy propaganda is socially useful, maybe necessary, and that I’ll have to acquiesce in it or even actively use it.

It’s not as if I will be the first leader who ever turned her back on the truth because her people needed the comfort of fantasy. If everyone shared my sense of loss we would be paralyzed, doomed.

I have to put it behind myself literally. Live only with the present and the future. We have no real past. We live in a hollow rock surrounded by nothing. Outside of this bubble of life, night that goes on forever.

But this is true: it’s only in the night that you can see the stars.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Worlds series

It had been the third world war or the fourth, depending on who did the counting, but nobody was counting anymore. It was simply “the war”: March 16, 2085, when a third of the world’s population had died in less than a day.

Most of the survivors had no idea why the war had been fought. A breakdown of antiquated systems. A series of misunderstandings. A run of bad luck that culminated in one side’s systems being under the total control of a man who had lost his mind.

The automatic defenses worked quite well; fewer than one in twenty warheads found their marks. So there were still many billions of people left to wonder what to do next, as the radioactive ash settled down, as the biological agents silently spread. There were some who suspected that the worst was yet to come, and they were right.

It was very nearly the end of the world, but it wasn’t the end of civilization. There were still the Worlds, what was left of them: a collection of more-or-less large Earth satellites, a quarter of a million people who didn’t have to worry about fallout or biological warfare. Most of the Worlds had been destroyed during the war, but the largest one had survived, and that’s where most of the people lived: New New York.

1

Marianne O’Hara was in the last group of shuttles to lift off from Earth, just before a direct hit turned the Cape into a radioactive inlet. Born in New New York, she’d been given a trip to Earth by the Education Council, for a year of postdoctoral work.

The six months she did spend on Earth were rather eventful. Her interest in Earth politics led her to join a political action group that turned out to be the cover organization for a cabal of violent revolutionaries. Her only friend in the group, who had also joined out of curiosity, was murdered. She herself was stabbed by a would-be rapist. She had a trip around the world and a small nervous breakdown. Finally, the man she loved managed to save her life by getting her to the Cape in time to leave Earth, but the shuttle had a strict quota system—no groundhogs—and she had to leave him behind. They comforted each other with the lie that he would join her when the trouble was over. But the warheads were already falling.

She knew that she was one of the lucky ones, but when they docked at New New she was still numb with shock and grief. Two men who loved her were waiting. She could hardly remember their names.

For some weeks after the war, life in New New was too desperately busy for much reflection. Survivors from a couple of dozen other Worlds had to be crowded in, and everybody somehow be fed, though more than half of New New’s agricultural modules had been damaged or destroyed. (The “shotgun” missiles couldn’t penetrate New New’s solid rock, but they devastated the structures outside.) They got by on short rations and stored food, but it wasn’t going to last. Modules had to be repaired and rebuilt, new crops sown, animals bred—and quickly. Every able-bodied person was pressed into service.

O’Hara was young and hyper-educated (had her first Ph.D. at age twenty), but none of her formal training was applicable. Like every other young person in New New, she had spent two days a week since the age of twelve doing agricultural and construction chores, but since her destiny clearly lay in other directions, she had only done dog work—slopping hogs and slopping paint—leaving more sophisticated chores to those who needed the training. Nevertheless, her first assignment was animal husbandry: collecting sperm from goats.

They could force estrus in the nannies and didn’t want to leave the rest of it up to nature. So O’Hara stalked through the goat pens with a suction apparatus, checking ID numbers until she found the one billy the computer had selected for a given nanny. Predictably, the billies were not enthusiastic about having sexual relations with a female of another species, so O’Hara got thoroughly butted and trampled and sprayed. It did keep her mind off her troubles, but after a week of low sperm count they decided to give the job to someone with more mass.

She asked for a job in construction and was mildly surprised when she got it. She’d spent many hours playing in zero gravity, but always indoors, and had never even
worn a spacesuit, let alone worked in one. She looked forward to the experience but was a little apprehensive about working in a vacuum.

She was even more apprehensive after her training: one day inside and one day out. Virtually all of the training concerned what to do in case of emergency. If you hear this chime, it’s a solar flare warning. Don’t panic. You have eight minutes to get to a radiation locker. If you hear
this
chime, your air pressure is falling. Don’t panic. You have two minutes at least, to get to the nearest first-aid bubble. Unless you’re also getting cold, which means your suit’s breached. Above all don’t panic. Have your buddy find the breach and put a sticky patch on it. Never be too far from your buddy. Presumably your buddy will not panic. She and thirty others practiced patching and not panicking, and then were given work rosters and unceremoniously dumped out the airlock.

With no special construction skills, O’Hara’s work was mostly fetch-and-carry. This required a certain amount of delicacy and intelligence.

You get around in a spacesuit with the aid of an “oxy gun,” oxygen being the only gas of which the Worlds always had a surplus. It’s just an aimable nozzle connected to a supply of compressed oxygen: you point it in one direction and hold down the trigger, and you go in approximately the opposite direction. Only approximately.

O’Hara and her buddy would get an order, say, for a girder of such-and-so specifications. They would locate the proper stack on their map and cautiously, very cautiously the first few days, jet their way over to it. The stacks were loose bundles of material that got less orderly as time went on. Once they found the right girder, the fun began.

Those girders weighed exactly nothing, being in free fall, but moving one was not just a matter of putting it on your shoulder and hi-ho, away we go. A tonne of girder
still had a tonne’s worth of inertia, even in free fall. Hard to get it started. Hard to point it in the right direction—and hard to tell which direction is right. Because when something’s in orbit, you can’t change its velocity without changing its orbit, however slightly. So you have to aim high or low or sideways, depending on which direction you’re aiming.

O’Hara and her partner would wrestle the girder into what they guessed was the proper orientation, then hang on to either end of it (strong electromagnets on their gloves and boots) and jet away. As the girder crawled its way toward the target, they would use their oxy guns to correct its flight path and slow it down, with luck bringing it to a halt right where the user wanted it. Sometimes they crashed gently, and sometimes they overshot and had to maneuver the damned thing back into position. The work was physically and mentally exhausting, which was just what she needed.