Worlds Apart (18 page)

As they got closer Jeff could see that the “beard” was actually a human scalp, held in place by strings.

“Good morning, General,” Jeff said.

“This is our charlie,” General said. “With Raincloud’s help he’ll tell us what to do with you.” Raincloud had
probably been attractive until recently. Now she was drool and mucus and infected stumps where two fingers had been removed. She smiled sharp points and stared past them.

The charlie produced a slim black book, a vest-pocket dictionary, and opened it at random. “Raincloud!” he shouted, and her stare turned in his direction. “Liferaft,” he read.

“Rife laughed, raff life, life laugh.”

“Lighthouse.”

“Life light. Life life.”

The charlie looked at General with raised eyebrows. He shouted again at Raincloud: “Death house.”

She laughed. “Life house.”

He put the book back in his pocket slowly. “Hm. I’ve never heard it be more clearly spoken.”

“I suppose,” General said. He looked disappointed. “Give her the gift?”

“It’s her time. Get-the-fire-started,” he said slowly to the jailer. He and General managed to worry the shift off her unresisting, uncooperative body. She wore nothing underneath. They led her to one of the crosses and General began wiring her wrists and ankles to the boards while the charlie went inside the jail.

“That was luck,” Tad whispered.

Jeff shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. He had her trained.”

“What do you mean?”

“That dictionary opened to the N’s, nowhere near ‘liferaft.’ We have an ally.”

Their ally returned, minus the false beard, carrying a leather case. He walked straight to the girl, not looking at them. He opened the case and said, “Distract her.”

General poked her with a stiff finger and when she turned to look at him, the charlie pulled out a long, thick-bladed knife and plunged it between her breasts. She winced and shuddered, voided in a rush, but
didn’t
cry out. Jeff knew the final stages of the disease provided
insensitivity to pain, but he had never seen it demonstrated so dramatically.

He stabbed her twice more in the heart and then helped General push the cross over twice, so she hung head down. Then he slashed her throat with one quick cut. He walked over toward Jeff and Tad, holding the dripping knife.

“We gotta bleed her for a few minutes,” he said conversationally. “You guys’re free to go now. Or you can watch like the others.” He gestured with the knife and Jeff saw for the first time that there were dozens of people sitting on the walls behind them.

“It won’t bother us,” Tad said.

“I hope they aren’t too disappointed,” Jeff said, “not seeing the two of us die.”

“They’ll get over it. We gotta talk, you know.”

“I know.” The charlie nodded and went back to his chores.

It was easier to watch now, Jeff told himself, now that the woman’s face was transformed into a slick red mask, expressionless, gape-jawed, upside down. When the blood slowed to a dripping the charlie made an incision from pubis to sternum. A streaming mass of guts lolled out. Jeff didn’t look away. He had seen worse, after all. The charlie took a deep breath over his shoulder and pulled on the blue-gray bloodstreaked mass, and as it sagged to the ground the woman gurgled. He started to saw away inside the cavity and Jeff was annoyed to find himself fainting.

3 Daniel Anderson

Slightly excruciating dinner last night, with Marianne’s family. Her mother is scarcely older than me—she gave birth to Marianne at thirteen—but we have absolutely nothing in common, except Marianne.

(Interesting that such a dull and silly woman could produce such a daughter. The father was a groundhog
engineer, though; that must explain it.)

Marianne’s little sister was entertaining, and very smart for an eight-year-old. Predictably spoiled. I’m glad we won’t be having any children until after acceleration. Life is complicated enough.

Start-up is pressing me to be Engineering Liaison between Janus and New New. I couldn’t refuse outright, but I’m searching—rather, Marianne and I are—somewhat frantically for someone who could be talked into volunteering for the job. With more than four hundred track-grade engineers aboard, you’d think there would be one with some political ambition. But I guess all those are staying behind.

Not that it’s such a difficult job. But hell, the main reason I wanted to go was to get out from behind this desk and back in the lab. Or so I keep telling myself.

John would be willing to take it—he’ll be the highest-ranking engineer aboard—but he’s ineligible on account of not being able to use a spacesuit. One lovely part of the job will be supervising EVA drills. You do have to be reasonably good with a suit to work on the hull of an accelerating vessel, even at a small fraction of a gee. If you fall off you’re just gone.

I don’t mind doubling up on jobs; we’ll all have to do that for a few years. I asked for food service; cooking was my hobby on Earth. But they didn’t want to waste all those years of administration experience. I feel like a prisoner whose sentence has been extended because he was so good at being incarcerated.

Complaining to Sandra Berrigan didn’t help much. She said my feelings had been taken into consideration, but that it was a fact of life that most scientists and engineers who are good administrators are good in spite of not liking the job.

Marianne’s second job is Entertainment Director. That makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose. She has a lot of experience in music and is one of those freaks with an
eidetic memory for movies and plays. She was a little disappointed, though, hoping for something less frivolous. Seems like a pretty important job to me. There’ll be an awful lot of people just twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their replacements to grow up and be trained.

The architects are going crazy, trying to design a star-ship that is also a dwelling for a population that stays stable for seventy-eight years and then grows like a yeast culture. I think the
real
problem is eleven egos all conscious of the fact that this is the most important project they will ever work on.

I wouldn’t like to be in Berrigan’s shoes. When she okays the design she’ll make one friend for life—and ten enemies. That’s another thing that makes administration so attractive. If you keep at it long enough, you get to offend everybody.

Charlie’s Will

The charlie’s name was Storm. He lived in one corner of the old hospital, most of which was a huge dusty tomb. He helped Jeff and Tad set up quarters next to his. While they swept and scrubbed they tried to pry information out of one another.

“What is the business with the fingers?” Jeff asked.

“Just to tell when they can’t feel pain any more. That’s when we butcher ’em. You let the death go all the way, the meat gets rotten.”

“Sounds like it’s against Charlie’s Will,” Tad said. “Rushing it.”

“Naw, they’ve got it all worked out. Our first charlie was a guy name Holy Joe, he wrote it all down. He was the first one to be meat, too.” He leaned on his broom. “What, you guys don’t eat meat up north?”

“Not human meat,” Tad said. “Not our family, at least.

We’ve got pigs and chickens.”

Storm nodded. “Seen pictures in books. All we get is fish and sometimes a turtle. Get really tired of fish all the time.”

“How did you get to be a charlie?” Jeff asked.

“Reading. When the charlie gets the death, whoever reads the best gets to be the new charlie. Guess that’ll be you after me. Better learn how to butcher. Hard part is the bones, leaving the bones.”

Jeff nodded. “How old are you?”

“Just turned seventeen. Got a couple years.” Maybe a hundred, Jeff thought.

“What about General?” Tad asked.

“Almost twenty, waiting. How about you?”

“Sixteen,” Tad said, perhaps too quickly. “Healer’s thirty-six.”

“Old before the war.” Storm shook his head. “Bet you went to college.”

“Seven years.”

“Oh, say…” Storm looked at his watch, a reflex Jeff had not seen in years. “Newsman’s at the college now. General said you’d want to meet him.”

“He’s an oldie?”

“Is he ever. Come on.”

They bicycled across the Island to the campus of the University of the Media. Jeff’s heart raced when he saw a dish pointed skyward, but Storm said the guts of it had been torn out. Nobody wanted anything to do with the charlie-damned spacers.

They opened the door into the library and walked into a stiff wall of cold air. The building was set up with independent solar power, and the air conditioners hadn’t yet broken down. They walked past rows of old bound books and stepped onto a liftshaft. Storm punched Five and they rose swiftly.

They came to a windowless door marked
STUDIO
and Storm knocked lightly. The man who opened the door
was bigger than Jeff, huge shoulders and chest riding an immense belly. Bald and wrinkled, perhaps over sixty. He squinted stupidly at Jeff. “You’re that Healer.”

“That’s right.” Jeff held out his hand. Newsman looked at it, blinked, and then engulfed it softly.

He opened the door wide and turned his back on them, clumping toward a cube console. “I got the news. What day you want?”

Jeff shrugged and said his birthday: “May 15, 2054.” Newsman scowled with concentration and slowly punched buttons on the console. A warning bell rang; he cleared the keyboard and started over patiently.

When the headlines appeared, he broke into a smile. “Never did this one before, I think.”

Well, it was June 15, close enough. “I can’t read real good,” Newsman said. He pushed a button and the headlines faded, replaced by a spokesman in a Xerox uniform; he pushed it three more times and got a picture of a storm-wracked coastline. He licked his lips and stared at it. “Hap’m here a couple times.”

Storm made the “stupid” sign behind his back—tongue between lips, thumb striking temple twice. “What do you call that, Newsman?”

“Hurricane or himmicane. Couldn’t read the name.” He smiled up at Jeff and explained. “It’s always ‘hurricane’ in the headlines. Stupid.”

“Sure,” Storm said. “If they didn’t have both kinds, where would the babies come from?”

Newsman frowned at him and nodded slowly. “I guess that’s right.”

“How long have you…worked here?” Jeff asked.

“Oh, I was here before the war, twenty years before.” He chewed a nail nervously. “But I wasn’t Newsman then. I was a janitor downstairs. But they showed me how to use the machine, so I could look at it after work.”

“He was the only one on the Island when we got here four years ago,” Storm said. “He was in this room when they found him.”

“I kept everything real clean.”

Jeff had a sudden thought that raised the hair on the back of his neck. “Do you have newspapers in that machine?”

“Sure, lot of ’em.”

“Any from New Orleans?”

“Dunno.” He laboriously typed in
NOOSPAPERS
? The machine corrected his spelling and produced a list. One was the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Jeff tapped the screen. “That one.” He counted backwards. “I think the twelfth of March, 2085.”

“Jus’ before the war.” He tapped a button and an arrow moved up the screen to come to rest beside the Times-Picayune. With one slow finger he typed in the date.

Another list. “Entertainment section,” Jeff said.

“What’s this all about?” Storm asked.

“Oh, I…had a friend who said she had her picture in the paper that day. Playing in a band.” O’Hara had been invited to play clarinet for an evening at a place called Fat Charlie’s. She’d been a minor sensation, able to play Dixieland in spite of being white, female, and from another World.

“That’s her.” Jeff’s voice shook. It was a good picture of O’Hara, back arched, eyes closed, lost in the music.

“You knew somebody famous?” Tad said.

“For a day,” Jeff said. “Famous for one day.”

Newsman adjusted the color, surprisingly deft. “She sure was pretty. Dead now?”

“Yeah.” Jeff reached past Newsman and pushed the
HARD COPY
button. A red light came on. “Outta paper,” Newsman said. Jeff shrugged. “Not important.”

1 O’Hara

I was databasing without too much enthusiasm, trying to decide whether we wanted a cultural anthropologist who plays handball or a physical anthropologist who plays chess, when the
SAVE
light started blinking. I put everything on the holding crystal and opened the channel.

It was Sandra. “Hello there.”

“Hello yourself. What’s on?”

“I need a fast personnel selection job.” She studied her thumbnail. “Twenty people to go to New York City.”

“What?”

“Self-help team. We’re in contact with some survivors.”

“Contact?”

“Need farmers and doctors and mechanics—I’ll show you the cube. Young, strong people who’ve been to Earth. One track generalist to be in charge. Interested?” I just stared at her. “I’ll assign a pilot for the Mercedes. Let me have the list about 1400. Leave day after tomorrow.”

“Hold it,” I said. “This is too fast. Go to Earth with a bunch of farmers?”

“That’s right. You’re far and away the best qualified.”

“What do you mean? I can’t
farm
. I couldn’t grow a weed without help.”

“I don’t mean farming; I mean leading. You have the mix of Policy and Engineering experience and you’ve spent a lot of time on Earth.”

It was starting to sink in. “Go back to New York City.”

“That’s right. Nothing like Zaire. No plague, no violence.”

“Okay. I’ll do it.” I had to, even though it made life suddenly complicated.

“Good, I knew you would. You have a blank cube in the recorder?” I put one in and she transferred the message from Earth. “See you at 1400.”