Worlds (31 page)

Eighteen missiles were loaded with Koralatov-31. All but two were destroyed by America’s defensive laser net. One accidentally aborted somewhere over Eastern Europe. Another had been targeted for Chicago and almost made it. A near miss from a geriatric antimissile missile cracked it open and spilled K-31 into the jet stream. The result
was the same as in Europe: over the ensuing weeks and months the virus drifted down and found its human hosts quite hospitable. By the end of the year it was as ubiquitous as the common cold. But it didn’t have the effect Koralatov had planned; in fact, it was some time before any symptoms appeared anywhere. When the first victim lapsed into idiocy and died, the only humans left uninfected were a handful of desert nomads, some scientists stranded in Antarctica, and the people who lived in space.

The ones in Antarctica could hang on for a few years, while their supplies lasted, and the nomads would survive so long as they remained out of contact with the infected population. For the rest of the Earth, the plague was swift and complete.

Almost everyone over the age of twenty died in the first few weeks. Younger people didn’t seem to be affected. In the chaos of a world suddenly leaderless, parentless, ten times decimated, it took a while for the morbid truth to become clear: no one would live for very long. Sometime between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, everyone got sick and died.

A couple of billion doomed children couldn’t keep the twenty-first century running. Everything didn’t grind to a halt at once, since much of the world was automated, and the systems kept working for a while. You could go into an autobar and get a drink, or punch up a public-service number and have a dead woman pray for you. But sooner or later a crucial part would decay, or there would be vandalism, and no one left who knew how to fix things up, no one in the world.

There was at least one group that the war did not take by surprise, neither in its timing nor its ferociousness. The Mansonites were an underground and quite illegal religion, claiming tens of thousands of members in the southern United States. They had been predicting for some years that there would be a period of “helter-skelter,” followed by the end of the world, and they figured it would
happen in 2085, the hundredth anniversary of their savior’s deliverance.

The Mansonites based their creed on the writings of Charles Manson, a charismatic loony who in the previous century had led his followers in a small orgy of mass murder. To the Family, death was a blessing and murder a sacrament. They were the only church whose membership increased dramatically after the war.

1

There had been some hope that Australia, New Zealand, and Pacifica might in their isolation be spared. But the virus drifted down everywhere. On every tiniest speck of land, if there were people, all but the very young sickened and died.

As life on Earth sloughed into desperation and savagery, life in New New became more safe, more comfortable, at least for a while. The farms were repaired—O’Hara gratefully traded in her spacesuit and diapers for a desk—and people stopped worrying so much about their next meal and, in grim pursuit of normality, resumed worrying about which fork to use. They also worried quite a bit about who was sleeping with whom, and what went on when they weren’t sleeping, and why they didn’t at least get a document to legitimize it.

Marriage was a pretty complicated affair in New New York. Not the civil part of it; that could be done in a couple of minutes, by computer. The problem was deciding whether to marry one person, or two, or six, or several thousand.

There were dozens of “line families” in New New. The term was an archaic one that was now applied very loosely to any more-or-less permanent connection involving love, sometimes reproduction, cohabitation (if the
group was small enough and the room was big enough), and so forth.

As an example, Marianne O’Hara’s various families. When she was born, her mother belonged to the Nabors line. This was a conventional old-fashioned line family, several hundred people who were all husband and wife. Careful genealogical tables were kept to prevent inbreeding, but there were no inhibitions on nonreproductive sex. A pretty young girl like O’Hara’s mother spent a lot of time being nice to relatives, and even more time saying “no.” She wanted out, and she picked the quickest way: soon after menarche she got herself impregnated by an outsider. The Nabors line took care of her until the baby was born, and then kicked both of them out.

By that time she had a Nabors lover, who quit the line to be with her. Along with Marianne’s father, they joined the Scanlan line, which was actually a loose association of three-way marriages, rather than a true line. It was a fairly cold-blooded decision on her mother’s part. Marianne’s father was a groundhog, and (as had been prearranged) a week after the marriage he returned to his Earthside wife. So mother and lover became a simple married couple, but with the housing and schooling advantages of the Scanlan line. Marianne was the only child of a broken triune, which made her an outsider to the other children, and they were vicious in their clannishness. Growing up, the only thing she knew for sure about her future was that she would never join a triune marriage.

She was wrong. She’d been living with Daniel—as lovers again, finally—for over a year when a law was passed that forbade single people from occupying multiple dwellings. (A lot of families from other Worlds had been split up, living in dormitories, and once they had coordinated their interests, they made a substantial voting bloc.)

For the past year, O’Hara had been resisting social pressure to get married. Girls and boys from most lines in
New New were encouraged to “butterfly,” to seek a variety of sexual contacts. But as one grew older—certainly by O’Hara’s advanced age of twenty-three—one was expected to settle down. (In joining the Devon line, for instance, “settling down” meant restricting yourself to a few thousand potential sexual partners.) She knew her family and coworkers thought her relationship with Daniel was immature and even a little indecent. This annoyed her and might have delayed their marriage indefinitely, if the practical matter of housing hadn’t interfered.

There was no line she wanted to join, which was a relief to Daniel, so she suggested they start their own, and he nervously agreed. They filed the necessary documents, patterning the line after the old-fashioned Nabors one: new members accepted only on unanimous approval; old members divorced by majority vote. She drew the long straw, and the line was named O’Hara.

Before they’d filed, O’Hara brought up the possibility of their asking John Ogelby to join them, as a symbol of their mutual affection. Daniel thought it over for some weeks. He and John were closer than brothers, but, damn it, you can’t
marry
another man! Daniel’s parents had had a conventional pair-bond marriage, until-death-or-boredom-do-you-part, and nothing else really seemed right to him.

Marianne kidded and argued with him until he finally agreed. One thing that had never entered the discussion was sex. Daniel knew that she and John had tried on one occasion, and it hadn’t worked, and the presumption that he wouldn’t be gaining a rival in that arena probably influenced his decision. It’s likely that Marianne suspected otherwise. Daniel was nine years older, but she had literally worlds more experience in sex.

At any rate, the predictable transformation occurred. John Ogelby, forty-two years old, physically deformed, Irish Catholic upbringing: besides the unsuccessful event with Marianne, and two equally frustrating youthful encounters
with Dublin prostitutes, his only sexual partner in thirty years had been his own imagination. One simple ceremony and he was a different man.

Daniel suddenly found himself with a lot of time to reflect, alone, on the ways of a maid with a man. Marianne spent the first week of their expanded marriage up in John’s quarter-gee cubicle, with occasional forays to the zerogee gymnasium, where there were small rooms with locks.

There was no possibility of the three of them living together, since John couldn’t tolerate normal gravity for long. Eventually they settled down into an informal migratory pattern. Marianne would spend a few days up-stairs, a few days downstairs, free to change at her whim or either man’s desire. She got into the habit of carrying a toothbrush in her bag. The three of them took most of their meals together. Daniel was surprised to find himself not jealous.

O’Hara’s advanced training had been in the areas of American Studies and administration; she’d been aiming for a liaison position between the Worlds and the U.S. That didn’t look like much of a career now.

She had a temporary, or tentative, position as a minor administrator in Resources Allocation. Administrative trainee, actually, which turned out to be assistant to anybody junior enough not to have his own assistant. Being in Resources, though, gave her a realistic view of New New’s current situation. It was a fool’s paradise.

She and John and Daniel were taking their slow Friday walk through the park. Ogelby had to spend a few hours a week in normal gravity, or progressive myasthenia would trap him forever in the upper levels.

“I’m getting used to it again,” O’Hara said, “not having a horizon.” They sat down to rest on a bench beside the
lake. The lake rose in front of them, a sheet of still water that curved gently away to be lost in mist. If you looked straight overhead, squinting against the brilliance of the artificial suns, you might just make out the opposite shore.

“I never will,” Anderson said. A duck swam toward them, slightly downhill. Ogelby snapped his fingers at it.

O’Hara frowned. “Don’t tease the poor thing.”

“Tease?” He opened a pocket and took out a piece of rice cake. The duck waddled over and snatched it. “We must share with the less fortunate.” His speech was slightly slurred, and his eyes bright, from the pain pills.

“Time will come when you’ll wish you’d saved it,” she said. “When we’re up to our ears in Devonites.”

“They’ll come to their senses,” Ogelby said. “The whole line’s still in a state of shock.” Two years before, the Devonites had over fifteen thousand souls in their lines. Most of them lived in Devon’s World, a toroidal settlement in the same orbit as New New, about three thousand kilometers downstream. Devon’s World had suffered a direct hit during the war, and all but a few hundred perished. They were rescued and joined the several thousand who lived in New New.

Even in normal times, a Devonite woman was expected to have many children; their religion was a celebration of fertility. Now they were pregnant constantly, and taking drugs to guarantee multiple births. This put them at odds with public policy; for conservation of food and water, the administration of New New had asked for a five-year period of strict birth control.

Most women in New New were in the same situation as O’Hara. She’d had a half-dozen ova frozen and filed when she was a girl, and then had herself sterilized. If she wanted a child she could either choose a father and have the fertilized ovum implanted in her womb, or opt for parthenogenesis—have her cell quickened by micro-surgery, then bear a daughter who would be a genetic duplicate of herself. Since neither of these procedures
could be done outside of a hospital, New New’s administration had de facto control over population growth, if they wanted to exercise it. Many people, O’Hara included, did want them to shut down the conception labs for a few years, and they could do it as a simple administrative procedure (though there would be noise), since the right to bear and keep children was not guaranteed by the Declaration of Rights.

That was the demographic rub, though. Freedom of religious expression was guaranteed, and women being baby machines was fundamental to the Devonite religion. (Sterilization, of course, was an unforgivable sin; their ova were quickened the old-fashioned sloppy way.) In five years a lucky woman might have six or seven multiple pregnancies.

“It was different when they had a whole World to themselves,” Anderson said slowly. “They could feed themselves or starve.”

Ogelby came to their defense. “But they will be feeding themselves. They have a thousand people out there building extra farms, all volunteers.”

“It won’t work,” O’Hara said. “I’ve seen the projections. You know how long it takes to make soil from scratch. More time than it takes to make babies.”

“I thought they were mining Devon’s World.”

“What’s left of it. We’ll be lucky if they reclaim ten percent of the topsoil, and that’s been sitting exposed to space for two years. Sterilized and desiccated. We have to supply water, worms, microorganisms.”

“And nitrogen,” Anderson cut in, “and carbon—that’s it, ultimately. The same old story.” It was a problem as old as the Worlds themselves. Metals they had in plenty, and oxygen, from the lunar surface and the interior of New New, which was a hollowed-out mountain of steel. But you can’t grow food without carbon, nitrogen, and water, and although every molecule of these precious substances
was meticulously recycled, no such process is perfect. Because of inevitable steady losses, closed-cycle agriculture can’t even sustain a stable population, let alone a growing one. Before the war there had been active commerce between the Earth and the Worlds, Earth trading hydrogen (which the Worlds burned to make water), carbon, and nitrogen for energy and exotic manufacturing materials and pharmaceuticals that could only be produced in zero gravity. So the Worlds’ population could steadily grow.

“No more,” Ogelby said to the duck, who was pacing nervously in front of him. “I guess we lose perspective in the lab. As if Deucalion were coming in tomorrow.” Deucalion was the name of a CC (“carbonaceous chondritic”) asteroid that was being slowly moved toward New New. They would be able to mine it for nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and other useful things, but it was still five years away. Ogelby was involved in designing and setting up the factories that would eventually take the asteroid apart. Right now, though, they just had a pilot plant, working on small amounts of CC material sent up from the Moon. It didn’t manufacture enough to offset any population growth.