Worlds (4 page)

So Dan and I were wrong. If everything operated as efficiently as hindsight, they’d have to scotch the laws of thermodynamics. But I was going to tell you about bringing the two of them together, Dan and O’Hara.

O’Hara and I were close friends, for reasons I did not care to examine too closely, and at this time of her life she was going through mates as if they were changes of underwear, so I thought it might be a friendly gesture to introduce her to Dan, in case there might be some chemistry there besides the oil-shale variety.

When our off-shifts and her class schedule finally meshed, we met at the Light Head, a quarter-gee tavern one level down from my flat. I went there frequently, not only because of the light gravity, but because they usually had a few bottles of Guinness. It didn’t taste anything like the Dublin variety, since it doesn’t travel well, but it was better than the thin brew your ration book got you. And it made me feel biospherically virtuous, giving New New a couple of pints of water recycled from the River Liffey (at Trinity we always maintained that Liffey water suffered nothing in flavor and appearance by being passed through a kidney or two).

Dan came from old New York, which was where O’Hara would be spending much of her time on Earth. Since she
was to leave in a couple of months, I thought she would welcome talking to him.

Well, we got off on the wrong foot Dan and I were talking about the Deucalion project when O’Hara came in, and we were being slightly sarcastic. She took offense, and tried to argue the Worlds’ case, citing as one instance the United States, which had to become independent of England before it could grow. An unfortunate argument, and I kept my silence, but Dan had to point out that Canada did quite well under the yoke of the Crown and had managed to avoid having two civil wars in the process.

That got O’Hara truly off, she being a local America expert and also young enough to believe that there were analytical answers to this sort of question. She compounded an interesting argument out of demographics, climate, distribution of resources, sectionalism, and God knows what else, which I was unable to evaluate (I’ve been to America, but only to study composite materials, not history). Dan wound up agreeing with her, and apologizing, though whether it was from the brain or somewhere south of that, I couldn’t say.

O’Hara always was an odd person in many ways, but in this she was no different from anybody else: to lose an argument gracefully was a shortcut to her friendship. The rest of the evening was very cordial, not to say slightly drunken, and they left the Light Head arm in arm. For several days thereafter Dan showed up for work late and tired, and I dare say O’Hara probably missed a few classes.

(None of this is meant to condemn O’Hara’s behavior. You must remember that this was the eighties, and sexual morality was much looser than it is today. A young single person with no line obligations was expected to “butterfly,” lovely verb.)

Over the ensuing weeks I must admit I grew annoyed with myself for having introduced them, and was jealous of Dan for the O’Hara-time he stole from me. But if ever two people were made for one another, it was that pair. From that first night to the day O’Hara left for Earth, they were inseparable.

O’Hara didn’t like him at first. The Light Head is a fine little bar, but women are generally immune to its main attraction, a low-gee stripper. She was unreasonably annoyed by the way his eyes kept wandering, and said some outrageous things, to nail down his attention and John’s.

So they spent a lively hour arguing, then a half hour conceding, during which Daniel’s eyes didn’t wander. O’Hara found herself liking him, and casually decided that she would try to lure him into her. He didn’t take much luring.

It was a difficult, vulnerable time of life for her. She’d been just nineteen when Charlie left her, and hadn’t had enough experience with such things to handle it gracefully. She was butterflying with grim determination, taking to bed almost anybody who could get there under his own power. By chance or her unconscious design, though, none of those men approached being her intellectual equal. Daniel Anderson did, and that was going to make a considerable difference.

By Devonite standards, Daniel would not have been considered a good lover. Their slang for men like him was “hard place”: he had the minimum physical requisite but none of the skills they prized so highly. To O’Hara that was less a disadvantage than an interesting challenge. She enjoyed
being good at things, and showing off her talents. So Daniel became the latest draftee into the platoon of men who indirectly benefited from Charlie Devon’s religious upbringing.

He was the first one who didn’t seem to be particularly impressed. Grateful, yes, and properly responsive to her ministrations, but from the beginning he seemed more interested in her brain than in the other organs. Rather than flattering her, this made O’Hara anxious. She had always taken her mind for granted.

But that was evidently what it took to make her fall in love. Intellectual combat she searched out all of Daniel’s most cherished beliefs and held them up to analysis, even ridicule; he gave it right back. They fenced and sparred and gleefully shouted each other down, and usually wound up in bed. It was an odd combination, pepper and honey, but they both responded to it. Within days, they had captured one another, and they grew ever closer during the two months she had remaining.

“You’ve got to be sensible.” They were squeezed together in the bed that took up a third of Anderson’s small room.

“I know, I know.” O’Hara sat drawn up tightly, chin on knees, arms wrapped around her legs. Staring at the blank wall.

“You’re overreacting. There was almost no chance.”

“Bureaucrats.” O’Hara had tried to have her trip to Earth delayed six months, until it was nearer time for Anderson to go back. After eight weeks she got her reply: Denied.

“You can’t pass it up. They won’t give you another chance.”

“They might. My record—”

“Your record will show that you were given the opportunity of a lifetime and refused it for the sake of a love affair. Drink?”

“No.” Daniel inchwormed out of bed and squirted some wine into a cup.

“Mind?” He held up his weekly cigarette.

“Go ahead.” The acrid smell filled the room quickly. To O’Hara it was exotic, but it made her want to sneeze. “I guess a lot of people on Earth smoke.”

“Depends on where you go. It’s illegal some places, like the Alexandrian Dominion. California.” He set the cup on
the bedstand and slid in next to her, pulling the cover up to his waist. “Try a puff?”

“No. I might like it.” None of the Worlds grew tobacco. She slid herself under the cover, up to her breasts, and dabbed at her eyes with a corner of it.

“I don’t want to see you leave, either.”

“I’m glad you finally said that” There was an awkward silence. “Sorry. Unfair.”

“All’s fair.”

She rested her hand on his thigh, under the cover. “Nothing is, really. First Law of the Universe.”

“Philosophy.” He blew a smoke ring. “How long will it take you to finish that damned thing?”

A rich tourist can get from New New York back to Earth in a little more than a day. Marianne O’Hara’s trip was going to take two weeks.

Her goodbye to Daniel Anderson was as awkward and contrary to plan as such things always are. (John Ogelby had given her an avuncular kiss the night before, pleading that work pressure would keep him from seeing her off, which wasn’t true.) She boarded the slowboat feeling sad and confused, and slightly ill from all the shots, and not thrilled at the prospect of two weeks of weightlessness.

Actually, her slowboat was a triumph of the electrical engineer’s art Its forebears, which had first made practical the transfer of large masses from high orbit to Earth, were
really
slow, taking months to spiral in.

The few dozen passengers and their life support system made up barely two percent of the huge vehicle’s pay-load. The rest of the cargo was industrial materials that couldn’t be made on Earth. Light and ultrastrong foamsteel girders from New New. Whisker matrices from Von Braun. Impossibly pure beryllium from Devon’s World, tonnes of it, and exotic alloys from B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah and Mazeltov. Each weekly flight involved an exchange of money equivalent to the gross national product of a small country.

The people riding on top were baggage, an afterthought The accommodations and food reflected this.

O’Hara spent a lot of her time exercising. Three stationary bicycle contraptions that could be worked with hands or feet stood opposite the only window in the craft Faced with the prospect of walking around for a year in Earth-normal gravity, she exercised her legs most. Also, being strapped on the bicycle was the only opportunity she had to sit down, that posture being unnatural in zerogee. She worked up quite a sweat and got it back in the form of one liter of water per day. for washing.

She slept well, strapped up standing against the wall, and read a lot of books and magazines, and watched more cube than she ever had in her life, and became an expert in the art of the zerogee toilet. She kept to herself. There would be a year of being nice to strangers, groundhogs at that. Mudballers. Earthies. Must forget those words for the time being; must not bristle at being called a spacer. As if there were no difference between a Devonite and a Yorker.

For days there seemed to be no change in the appearance of the Earth: the same face she had seen all her life, as New New marched in lockstep over northern Brazil. Then Africa and Europe peeked over the edge, and the Americas began to slide away. Sere Asia over the vast Indian Ocean. One day there was almost nothing but water, the Pacific framed by little bits of Australia and Alaska. The globe began to grow, and eventually its rotation was perceptible from hour to hour.

A fat nuclear tug was waiting for them at the edge of the Van Allen belts, through which the ion-drive slowboat could not pass. They switched payloads. The outward-bound cargo was mostly hydrogen, food, acids, and a few economy-class passengers, including a dance troupe cursing their tightwad manager.

O’Hara and the others felt acceleration for the first time, a gentle nudge. They cruised into low Earth orbit—the globe now spinning dizzily below them, once each ninety minutes—and the passengers transferred to a small shuttle-craft (the cargo went into large cone-shaped crafts called “dumbos,” which would be robot-guided into splashdowns near the purchasers of each load).

Even though she had taken the required tranquilizer, O’Hara felt growing excitement, along with a little apprehension.
In space, almost all transportation is graceful and slow, not to say boring. She knew the shuttle would be fast and violent, though safe: only two had crashed in her life-time.

She strapped herself in and waited. There was no countdown, just a steady growing surge of acceleration. From her window she could see the dumbos shrink away, then sweep out of her field of view as the shuttle tilted to present maximum area to the atmosphere, for braking. She was weightless again, no feeling of motion. Her window showed nothing but stars.

For long minutes nothing happened. Then the curve of the Earth rolled up, stopped, rolled back out of sight, making her a little dizzy. She had seen this on the cube a dozen times and wasn’t scared at all. A high-pitched moan sat at the edge of audibility when the steering jets stopped blasting: the atmosphere slowing them down.

O’Hara might have compared the middle part of the trip to a roller-coaster ride, had she known what a roller coaster was. The craft rolled, pitched, and yawed with controlled violence. When the sky showed, it started taking on color: inky violet brightening to cerulean. The stars faded away.

They came in over the Florida coast to a vista of breath-stopping and, to O’Hara, thoroughly alien beauty. The sun was low in the west, almost dim enough to look at directly, illuminating a spectacular array of high cumulus, crimson and gunmetal against a deepening sky. The ocean was almost black, studded with froth that the sun tinged red. The horizon had lost its curve: for the first time in her life the Earth was not just a planet, however special. It was the world.

From the shoreline to the horizon was a complicated maze of buildings and roads. If you could turn New New inside out and lay it down flat, it wouldn’t cover one tenth part of what was unrolling underneath her, yet this was a small city, she knew.

It changed abruptly at the edge of the spaceport’s territory. Swampland and scrub, mangrove jungle laced with streams and lakes. A wide, bridged river with a queue of huge barges carrying dumbos to be launched and refilled.

They were falling lower, impossibly low, and seemed to be gaining speed. An illusion, she knew, but she tightened her throat against crying out as the ground flashed by underneath
and then they hit hard, bounced, and the tires were screaming protest; then braking rockets boomed, pushing her hard against the restraining straps, hard enough to hurt her hipbones and shoulders; then they were rolling, more and more slowly, to a quiet stop. Her eyes filled with tears and she started to laugh.

John,

Where to start? You’ve been to the Cape, so I won’t give you a travelogue. It gave me a chill, though, the spaceport’s defenses. I counted ten of those offshore gigawatt lasers; there were probably more over the horizon. (Horizon! This damned planet bends the wrong way.) I wonder if they still work.

We took a subway to old New York, which only took a little over an hour, even though we stopped at Atlanta, Washington, and Philadelphia. Tempted to get out and see those places, but I guess there’s time for that later.

I called the school when we got to the station (for some reason they call it Pennsylvania Station; Pennsylvania must be over a hundred kilometers away). They sent a woman to pick me up, an older woman who had emigrated from Von Braun after the crack-up.

A lot of New York City came down in the Second Revolution, but they must have rebuilt with a vengeance. Pictures can’t do justice, can’t convey the size and intensity of it. I almost fainted when we stepped out on the street.