Worlds (3 page)

While the world and the Worlds watched helplessly, Jacob’s Ladder fell closer to the Earth each ninety minutes. The United States, Common Europe, and the Supreme Socialist
Union argued over the morality of blasting the thing out of the sky.

Marianne and John sat silently, sipping coffee all day and into the night, watching his video cube and a jury-rigged flatscreen. The cube brought them Earth newscasts, and the flatscreen picked up signals from Worlds telescopes, tracking the Ladder as it spun and yawed over familiar continents and oceans.

On the fifteenth pass, it glowed cherry-red and made charcoal of two thousand martyrs. Calculations showed that it would come down next time, landing safely in the ocean. Missilemen locked up their systems and sat back in relief.

It was a terrifying sight, the spinning incandescent cross lighting up the night of Africa. Skimming in over the Laccadive Islands, its sonic boom broke every window and eardrum in its path. None survived long enough to notice the deafness. The Ladder hit the water at four miles per second, and detonated with ten thousand times the force of a nuclear weapon, and sent a high surge of steam-backed water rolling across the lowlands of Kerala. All but a few hundred thousand had managed to get to high land.

They watched the cube for several hours after the crash, as the true magnitude of the disaster slowly unfolded. Sometimes they were awkwardly arm in arm, Marianne holding John with uncertain delicacy.

“John,” she said finally, “I’ve never asked. Do you believe in God?”

“No,” he said. He looked at one ugly large hand and pipestem wrist. “Sometimes I believe in a Devil.”

After briefly discussing the possibility of failure, they tried to make love, and it was the night’s second disaster. After a year or so they could talk and even joke about it, and they remained fast friends long after Charlie had gone off to join a baby machine (his place in O’Hara’s life was taken over by a rapid succession of men more characterized by variety than quality, Ogelby thought), and when she was on Earth O’Hara wrote more often to Ogelby than to anyone else, so long as she could write.

O’Hara loved to play the clarinet. She had a thorough classical grounding—had played every boring note in Klosé—because the clarinet had been her solo instrument for her music degree. She even played in the New York orchestra because she enjoyed losing herself in the complex harmonies and rhythms of symphonic music and liked to be around other musicians. But her real love was jazz: primitive American jazz—Dixieland, especially.

Her music library was dominated by tapes, flat-screen or plain audio, of twentieth-century American jazzmen. She often played along with them, and could do a dead-on pastiche of, say, Goodman’s solo in “Sing, Sing” or Fountain’s in “Swing Low.” A friend who was good with electronics had made her a copy of “Rhapsody in Blue” with the clarinet part filtered out; learning it had taken three hundred hours out of her seventeenth year.

An objective critic, and O’Hara was one by the time she was twenty, would note that her playing was mechanically competent and sometimes even brilliant, but she had no particular personal style and no real gift for improvisation. It might have been different if she had had other people to play with, but no jazz musicians in New York were interested in historic forms. The Ajimbo school, with its sixteenth-note phrasing and weird clapping chorus, had
dominated jazz for a generation, in the Worlds as well as on Earth. O’Hara thought it was degenerate, obvious, and unnecessarily complex. Other people might say the same of Dixieland, if they ever listened to it.

That was another reason to go to Earth. Chicago, San Francisco, old New York; they all sounded fascinating. But the place she most wanted to visit was New Orleans. To walk the streets they’d named songs after: Bourbon, Basin, Rampart. To sit on a hard chair in Preservation Hall, or nurse expensive drinks in crumbling old bars, or just stand on the sidewalk or in the French Quarter park and listen to old black men try to keep alive this two-century-old music. John Ogelby had been there (he was English but had taken a degree at Baton Rouge), and she made him talk about it all the time. She would go to New Orleans even if she could somehow foretell what was waiting for her there.

O’Hara didn’t really want to go to Devon’s World. She and Charlie both had a week of vacation coming up, and they’d discussed the possibility of going to another World, but it was Tsiolkovski she wanted to visit, or maybe Mazeltov. She had made a joke about going to Devon’s World, and Charlie claimed he had taken her literally and bought tickets, nonreturnable. So she went along, grumbling, to experience Edward D. Devon’s dream made solid, a World dedicated to the proposition.

Devon’s World was the oldest large structure in orbit. Originally called O’Neill—a ninety-year-old oak tree planted by O’Neill himself survived—it had been home to some ten thousand workers involved in the manufacture of other large space structures. Out of minerals flung up from the Moon’s surface they built energy farms, space factories, a large zerogee hospital, and other Worlds—thirty-two large structures and scores of smaller ones. But now its original purpose had been preempted by its children.

It was New New York that had forced them out of business. Foamed steel from the interior of Paphos was cheaper, stronger, and easier to work with than the aluminum alloys that lunar soil could provide. Devon’s World still had a modest income from the manufacture of solar cells, for
other Worlds, and some specialized products, such as large vapor-deposition mirrors.

But most of its workers, for generations now, had been lured to New New York. The New New York Corporation could afford generous relocation bonuses, high salaries, and profit-sharing plans, to save the cost of lifting men and women from Earth and training them to work in the hazardous conditions of space. Edward D. Devon and his New Baptists—who had seen the future and spent a decade in careful preparation—moved in as the workers moved out, in the most ambitious relocation of a religious body since Brigham Young’s trek to Utah.

For Charlie, the trip was a pilgrimage. He hadn’t been to Devon’s World since his own semarche, ten years before. Marianne was going with the attitude of an anthropologist, a slightly apprehensive anthropologist: it was one thing to be in love with a sex maniac, and quite another to be locked up in a World with ten thousand of them. She brought lots of schoolwork, figuring to stay in the hotel and work ahead on her studies while Charlie used his divining rod on female coreligionists. She gritted her teeth and told herself she was not jealous.

As she should have foreseen, Charlie had other ideas. This was his best and last opportunity to convert her. She cooperated, out of respect for his feelings and to satisfy her own considerable sexual curiosity, and got much more than she’d bargained for.

In his holy book
Temple of Flesh
, Edward D. Devon had provided a spiritual rationale for virtually every sexual diversion, with only brutality and male homosex proscribed. Charlie seemed determined to start at the beginning and work through to the concordance.

O’Hara had to admit that Devon’s World was comfortable, and beautiful—it had to be, considering that eighty percent of its income was from tourism (as opposed to eleven percent in New New)—but most of it was far too expensive for her and Charlie; prices reflected the small fortunes that groundhog tourists spent getting there. Charlie was able to get them space in a hotel that was a Devonite “retreat,” and therefore affordable. A room in Shangrila, one of the World’s two cities, would have eaten up all of their savings in a half hour.

Outside of the cities, the wheel-shaped World was mainly parkland, carefully manicured by an army of horticulturists.
O’Hara admired its formal beauty but preferred the wildness of New New’s park. She also found it disconcerting to have to step over and around people casually copulating on the path. Charlie primly pointed out that they wouldn’t be doing it in public if they didn’t want people to share their joy. O’Hara would just as soon have had them keep their joy to themselves.

The swimming pool was the worst. Acres of couples, and larger organizations, doing what came naturally (or with some effort). After much cajoling she joined Charlie there in public bliss, and was obscurely annoyed that nobody watched.

A bigger step was having sex with other people, which Charlie insisted was necessary. The people were invariably gentle and polite—once you got used to total strangers asking you to do things you’d never done even in your imagination—but she was surprised to find most of the experiences boring, because most of the people were boring. They seemed appallingly ignorant and smug. They had no curiosity about New New or even Earth, but could drone on forever about family, religion, sex, and jobs, in roughly that order. At least there was never any weather.

She gamely tried almost everything that Charlie suggested, and learned more from the failures than the successes. Some of the knowledge troubled her deeply.

The padded ropes. Charlie explained it to her and showed her the scriptural passage about it, about helplessness and trust. It seemed innocuous, if somewhat silly, but when Charlie started to tie her up she began to struggle, seized with mindless terror; she even bit him while he was trying to release her. She saw then that a large part of her love was self-love, pride in taming the beast, and the other side of the tarnished coin was fear of his huge strength.

Charlie made light of it, and even showed off the wound his “red Devil” had given him. But things changed, rapidly. Charlie was hard to find during the day and fell into deep sleep at night; O’Hara spent more time with her books, studying ahead of the assignments she had brought along. By the time they got aboard the shuttle for New New, they were distantly polite with one another. Two months later, Charlie emigrated to Devon’s World, leaving her with confused memories and a disturbing fund of experience, some of which could get her a good job in Las Vegas, a city she had never planned to visit.

I’m John Ogelby and I was the one who introduced Marianne O’Hara to Daniel Anderson. Dan and I are both mudballers, though I was permanently committed to living in New New, and Dan had every intention of eventually returning to Earth.

Dan was on a research grant from Cyanamid International. He was a specialist in oil-shale chemistry, which made him quite valuable to the CC Section, where I was the token strength-of-materials man.

The CC stood for “carbonaceous chondrite,” and to most Worlds people those two words spelled freedom. Our section must have been one of the most exciting—and excited—places to work in the eighties. Every test tube and caliper was heavy with destiny, yes, and the atmosphere was so clogged with Significance that Dan and I, the only mudballers, had to flee every now and then, to regain perspective. Talk about Earth and remember that there was more to the human condition than could be perceived inside a
spinning rock full of slightly wonky people. Nice people, but wonky.

In retrospect, I can see that my attitude was shortsighted. But since nobody now will admit to having had that attitude, let me set it down here briefly. I could never resist a joke at my own expense.

Between the lunar mines and the bowels of New New, the Worlds would have had raw materials enough to increase their number a thousandfold or more, if all you needed for a World was a pressure vessel full of oxygen, shielded from radiation. But you also need organic material and water, and we suffered from a marked deficiency of those.

If the Worlds were ever to become a closed system, independent of Earth, they had to have an outside source of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. Simply put, you burn the hydrogen for water; burn the carbon for carbon dioxide that plants will turn to food; plow the nitrogen into the soil so the food can have protein. Closed-system agriculture is not a hundred percent efficient, so it can’t support a stable population, let alone an expanding one, without a constant infusion of these three elements.

There are three sources for these elements: the Earth, the asteroids, and comets, in decreasing order of handiness. Only asteroids of the carbonaceous chondritic type are useful, and most CCs are in damned difficult orbits. They found an accessible one, though, and named it Deucalion, and sent a bunch of unlucky engineers out to haul it in.

It was going to be a slow business, twenty-eight years. We couldn’t use brute force, as was done with New New, because CCs are relatively fragile. One shaped charge and all you’d have would be ten million tons of dirt flying in every direction. So the first team set up O’Neill-type mass drivers at each pole, and settled in for a long, slow push—and died abruptly. It couldn’t happen in a million years, a two-tonne meteor impact, but it did happen, and I was doubly glad I hadn’t volunteered for that trip, or for any of the six replacement teams. Not that they would particularly want an SoM engineer who couldn’t fit into a space suit.

Dan and I both thought it was a quixotic enterprise, a century or so premature. The Worlds were getting from Earth a constant supply of organics in the form of luxury food, which was a universally appreciated sign of status (and about the only thing you could
buy
, at least in New
New). A well-aged Kansas City steak cost less than a day’s salary. I had one almost every Sunday—with asparagus, by God, and washed down with a Coke. I never could abide fish, and a steady diet of New New’s rabbit-chicken-goat regimen could turn an otherwise sane person to vegetarianism.

The point is, all that steak, asparagus, caviar, and what-not went straight from the shuttle into the biosphere. Next year it would come back to you as curried-goat molecules (to cite my least favorite of New New’s culinary abominations). All the Worlds were set up to recycle sewage and exhaled CO
₂
into new food, and the Earth was supplying plenty of surplus organics to make up for inefficiencies in the system. To make food out of cold rock was going to take a whole new set of systems, expensive ones, and the end result was going to be yet more trout and Hassen-pfeffer, and I would
still
be shelling out for steak. If there were some way to turn Deucalion into a cattle ranch, I would’ve been all for it.