Worlds Apart (7 page)

Her name was Insila. She and her brother had climbed up the emergency stairs to the cargo bay level, and had gone inside the spaceship while the door was open. When one of the forklifts came back, they hid in an empty locker. They came out when everything was quiet and dark, and tried to get the bay door open. Then there were noises again, and they ran back to the locker to hide. Then something knocked her out. When she woke up they were floating and her brother was hurt bad, and her arm wouldn’t work, and then Ahmed came in and helped her.

She wondered what would become of her. Ahmed tried to explain what the brain devil actually was, and what doctors were, and how they would try to cure her. He suspected that she didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t tell her that in all likelihood she would spend the next ten years floating in that cage, with occasional forays into unconsciousness, until whatever it was did whatever it did, and she would go insane and die. And be sliced up, analyzed, and incinerated, like her brother. She knew he was dead but never once asked what had happened to him.

1

Before the war, the economy of New New had been a carefully controlled form of socialism, perhaps logical for a quarter of a million people living in a 99.9 percent closed ecology. People earned dollar income only for overtime work and as bonuses, and there was a limit to the number of dollars you could accumulate. But since there were few possessions not held in common by everyone, there just wasn’t much to spend money on. There were credit exchanges for gambling and prostitution, neither of which was illegal, but the luckiest gambler or the most skillful whore could not possess more than $999.99 at one time (along with an arbitrarily large stack of IOUs), since all credit transfers were handled electronically, and anything over a thousand dollars went straight back into the bank. Most people spent their money on luxury foods imported from Earth or trips to other Worlds.

But now there was no imported food, no other Worlds. A few people managed to spend their money becoming alcoholics, but that took some concerted effort, since wine and beer were rationed like any other food, and it was difficult to slip carbohydrates out of the food chain to ferment and distill.

That was one real advantage to having two husbands who worked in the CC laboratories. Every now and then
John or Daniel would come home with a flask of what they euphemistically called “gin.” It was 180-proof industrial alcohol with a few aromatic impurities, and only an internal-combustion engine could drink it straight. But it made a beer last a long time.

The Light Head tavern, which had been temporary housing for two years, was finally open again, and O’Hara spent quite a bit of time there with John and Daniel, as they had in the old days. There was amateur entertainment, musicians and sometimes a girl who was clever at undressing, but the main attraction was that it provided a link with everyone’s more pleasant past. It was a place to reminisce, and sometimes to talk about the future.

“It’s about the most hare-brained thing I’ve ever heard,” John was saying. “Shows how wonky people have gotten about Earth. Pure and simple paranoia.”

“It would get us out of range. Some of us,” Daniel said. People were talking about building a starship.

O’Hara splashed some gin in her glass and decanted a measure of beer over it. “You engineers. No sense of romance.”

“How can you say that to an Irishman who plies you with liquor? But I have a sense of priorities, too. We have to rebuild the Worlds first. Get some redundancy in the goddamned system.”

Daniel nodded. “If something happened to New New,” he explained carefully to O’Hara, “we wouldn’t have anyplace to go.”

“Really.” She watched the girl on the other side of the room doing tricks with her navel—she could rotate it clockwise, wink with it, and then rotate it the other way, all in time to a badly tuned mandolin. The room was palpable with male speculation as to her other talents. “Maybe it is irrational, John, but it’s not simple and it’s not purely paranoia. You didn’t grow up here. The star-ship has been a dream since before my mother was born.”

“I’m not arguing against dreams. I just think it ought
to be postponed for twenty years or so. Hell, I’d like to work on it myself. But not until we have things… straightened out.”

“Seems to me we could do both, once Deucalion comes in. Give people more of a sense of purpose, less bitterness. Everything else is just cleaning up after the groundhogs’ damned war.”

“You know, they wouldn’t even have to H-bomb us.” Daniel had had an hour’s head start on the gin, and it was beginning to show. “Just walk in the fuckin’ airlock and sneeze. All be dead in a week.”

She patted his hand. “Watch the girl, Dan. She’s winking at you.”

The basic idea behind the starship was even older than the Worlds. A generation ship: hundreds or even thousands of people aboard a vessel that would crawl out to the stars on a voyage of centuries. Their n-times-great-grandchildren would land on another world.

By the twenty-first century it was not such a preposterous idea. People who lived in the Worlds might as well be aboard such a ship; an incurious person, or one who didn’t care for the zerogee at New New’s only observation dome, could live his entire life without seeing Earth, Sun, or stars. If you have to live in a hollow rock anyhow, it might as well be going somewhere.

Furthermore—as had not been true in the previous century—the generation ship would have a definite target. A lunar observatory had discovered several earthlike planets orbiting “nearby” stars; one was only eleven light years away.

The main problem was energy. Not just the enormous push it would take to move a World-sized spaceship, but also the energy necessary to maintain life. The Worlds had been possible in the first place only because of the abundant free energy from the Sun. The generation ship would have to carry its own sunlike power source, with fuel enough for centuries.

In theory, the power could be supplied by conventional fusion. The deuterium could be mined either from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere or the frozen surface of Callisto. But the scale involved was vast.

A more elegant, but necessarily untested, power source was the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter. Antimatter could be contained in a magnetic bottle and fed out a few particles at a time, and the result was pure E =mc squared. It had never been done on a large scale because antimatter was tremendously expensive, in terms of energy, to produce: like burning down a forest to warm your hands. To manufacture enough antimatter to fuel the ship would require a solar collector the size of a planet; a synchrotron the size of the Moon.

Fortunately, the antimatter didn’t have to be manufactured. It could just possibly be mined. In
A.D.
2012 astronomers had discovered the tiny double star Janus, tagging along with the Sun a mere tenth of a light year away. The stars were both black dwarfs, barely hot enough to be considered stars. But one of them, Alfvén, was made of antimatter.

O’Hara belonged to a discussion group, where bright young people met one evening each week to talk over current issues with one or both Coordinators. For the past couple of weeks they had been talking about the administrative and engineering problems associated with a possible starship project. O’Hara was not fascinated by engineering, but she was intelligent enough to understand and be awed by the scope of the undertaking.

The outline was simple enough: two overlapping stages. With raw materials supplied both from Deucalion and the salvage from various wrecked Worlds, they would build two starships. S-1 was just a fuel-gathering vessel, hardly a proper starship at all. It would take a small crew out to Alfvén, to collect antimatter sufficient for the actual long voyage.

Meanwhile, S-2 would be a-building—a smaller version
of New New York, large enough to support ten thousand people. It should be finished by the time S-1 came back. They’d gas up and head for Epsilon Eridani, a ninety-eight-year voyage.

The projected expense in dollars was staggering, more than ten times what it had cost to build New New. But money was only a bookkeeping convenience in New New’s closed economy. The main counterargument was that the same sort of effort applied at home could rebuild the Worlds and do it right—not only a choice of utopias, dozens of different social and physical settings, but a guarantee of a safe future. The new Worlds, built without groundhog money or interference, could be built with unbreakable defenses against aggression from Earth.

This was the nagging worry partly motivating both the starship project and plans for reconstruction. Earth was a shambles now, but its industrial establishment was still there, dormant, orders of magnitude larger than New New’s. If the plague ran its course, or if a cure were found, they might rebuild within a generation or so—and then what would become of the Worlds? Groundhogs were a little crazy under the best of circumstances. What would happen if they were crazy for revenge?

The Coordinators told O’Hara’s group something that wasn’t yet generally known: New New was having its own epidemic, one of suicide. Suicides were the leading cause of death in all adult age groups, and there were enough of them almost to counterbalance the Devonite population increase.

There were other indications of an alarming sag in New New’s morale. Productivity lower than ever before; absenteeism at a record high. Drug addiction and alcoholism were growing, in spite of the difficulties involved in feeding the habits.

During her conversation with John, Daniel had quietly fallen asleep, slumped in his chair. Did one blowout a week make him an alcoholic? He was putting in twelve-and
fourteen-hour days at the lab, with Deucalion less than a year away. He was the only specialist in oil shale chemistry in New New—the only one anywhere—and was group leader for the entire applied chemistry section, always on call. Maybe he needed getting away. But she worried about him.

“Guess I’d better be taking the hero home,” she said. “Okay if I sleep with him tonight?”

“Somebody’s got to look out for him.” John peered into the gin bottle and shook it. “Better take this along. Breakfast of champions.”

“Champions?”

“Used to mean something.”

2

While she was getting ready for work the next morning, O’Hara’s cube beeped. She pulled a brush through her hair a couple of times and answered it.

It was the newscaster, Jules Hammond. “Marianne O’Hara?”

She just stared at his image and nodded. She had talked with him two years before, after the Zaire raid, but had never expected to see him again, outside of the nightly broadcast.

“Can you come down to the studio, Bellcom Studio One, this morning?”

“Wh—whatever for? Something about Zaire?”

He leaned forward, peering into his own cube. “That’s right, you were on that.” He shook his head. “Interesting. But this is something else, what we call a reaction story. Can you come down?”

“Sure…I’ll, uh, call in late.” Hammond nodded and rang off. She called the office and left a message for her assistant, asking him to cover a meeting for her if she
didn’t get away in time. Reaction story? She almost woke up Daniel, who was snoring open-mouthed, but decided not to complicate his hangover.

At the studio, an effeminate young man greeted her like an old friend, took her by the arm, and steered her into a side room. He sat her in one of two overstuffed swivel chairs facing a bank of six cubes and some complicated electronic equipment.

“Now, dear, we do want you to look pretty.” He unfolded a case and took out two combs; whistled through his teeth while he worked on her hair. He stood back and surveyed his work critically, head cocked, then applied a little powder to her face and neck. “We don’t want to shine.” Finger under her chin. “Tilt up just a wee… that’s it. Hold it. Sammy, you can calibrate now.”

She felt a warm laser spot on her cheek. “I feel like I’m having an X-ray taken,” she said with her mouth closed.

“Oh, we see through a lot of people here. That’s fine; you can move now. Mr.
Hammond
.”

The man left, slightly flouncing, and Jules Hammond came through the same door. He gave O’Hara a strange look and sat down next to her.

“We want you to listen to something.” He sat and pushed a button under the arm of his chair. “Ready on Four.”

One of the cubes lit up, but it was just a white block, no picture. Then there was a faint voice, metallic, crackling with static. She didn’t recognize it:

“This probably can’t work but it’s worth a try. I checked and the antenna is pointed at New New. Found a fuel cell with a little juice and plugged it into the ‘DC Emergency In’ slot. It moves the power needle a little bit.”

That night a quarter of a million people would see her gasp and burst into sudden tears. “This is Jeffrey Hawkings calling New New York, specifically calling Marianne O’Hara, root line Scanlan. Marianne? I hope you
got home all right. For some reason I’m alive. The plague didn’t touch me.

“I’m pretty sure it’s my acromegaly. You know I had to take NGH every day. After the war I couldn’t find any; it’s a pretty rare disease.

“Well, I’ve met two other adults who survived the plague, and they were both acromegalic. One’s an idiot who runs a tribe north of here, in Disney World. The other I just met on the road. He was mentally retarded, too; I guess neither of them got proper treatment when they were young.

“If anybody up there is interested in finding a cure for this thing, then there’s your main clue. Something to do with the pituitary gland. That’s what’s wrong with acromegalics, they put out too much growth hormone. My own physical profile should be in your records somewhere, since I applied for immigration just before the war.

“Things are pretty grim here, Marianne, as you can imagine. I understand it’s even worse up north. Not too bad for me personally—I’m in a place called Plant City, at the St. Theresa Pediatrics Hospital. I found the key to a civil defense vault here, full of medicine. I fill my saddlebags with it and pedal from town to town, playing doctor. They treat me as sort of a demigod…there’s a lot of violence, a lot of ritual killing from this damned Family business, but nobody lays a finger on me. My long white beard protects me. I’m glad it grew in white.”