Worlds Apart (2 page)

He turned around inside her arms, gave her a solid
kiss, and eased away. “Let’s get on up there. Running a little late.”

New New, like all of the Worlds, derived its gravity artificially, by spinning. Along the axis of spin, there was no gravity; the farther “out” you went, the greater the force. Most people lived and worked close to the one-gee level, where all the parks and shops were.

There were laboratories, small factories, and some living quarters at the low-gee levels, which is what brought John Ogelby to New New. Born a hunchback with a debilitating curvature of the spine, he had lived most of his life alternating between pain pills and agony. He developed expertise in a particular corner of strength-of-materials engineering, so that he could emigrate to the Worlds and find work in a low-gravity lab, where his back would stop hurting.

He was a close friend of O’Hara’s—she had met Dan Anderson through him—and she and Dan often went up to the quarter-gee area where he lived and worked, to visit the Light Head tavern (now being used for emergency housing), or to take advantage of the short cafeteria lines there. Not many people ate in low gravity often enough to be comfortable with it. A cup of hot coffee can do amazing and painful things.

The quarter-gee cafeteria was the only room in New New that had wooden paneling on the walls. Some philanthropist had shipped it up from Earth after the low-gee hospital saved his life. A few cases of Scotch would have been more appreciated: to people who grew up surrounded by steel, the Philippine mahogany felt sinister and unnatural. (It didn’t look all that homey to people born on Earth, for that matter, since it was secured to the real walls with conspicuous bolts.)

Ogelby was already seated at a table when they came
in. He greeted them with a listless wave.

Dinner was rice covered with a gray substance, with a few molecules of cheese and a spoonful of well-aged lima beans. And a generous serving of wine; they were rationing protein but had vats of alcohol.

“Have you heard about Earth?” he said when they sat down.

“Nothing good, I suppose,” Daniel said.

“Plague. If it’s not a hoax, or a misunderstanding.” He speared one lima bean and ate it with reluctance. “Eastern Europe first, then Russia. The SSU accused America of having used a widely dispersed biological agent. But America’s got it too, it turns out.”

“What sort of plague?” O’Hara asked.

“Hard to say. The news broadcast was in very colloquial Polish, hysterical, and they’ve only been able to get a word here and there. It affects the brain, it’s fatal, and it appears to be very widespread. They’ve been trying to contact someone in the States, or at least intercept something. Not much in the way of communication going on nowadays.”

Dan checked the time. “Well, let’s eat up. Ten minutes to Jules Hammond.”

They went to the low-gee library, which was so crowded they had to stand in the rear. Dan helped John up onto a table so he could see the cube. The screen was blank except for the time. At precisely 2100, the cube filled with the avuncular and soberly dramatic features of Jules Hammond.

“This is May 5, 2085. All of you must know by now that there is a rumor of plague on Earth.” He paused. “The rumor is true. How widespread the epidemic is, we aren’t yet sure. It may be all over the planet.

“We haven’t yet gotten through to the United States, but we did intercept a broadcast in Nevada.” Nevada was an independent, rather lawless country in the middle of America.

Hammond’s face faded and was replaced by that of a young female. The picture had a bad Z-axis flicker: the image twitched between three dimensions and two, solid and flat.

The sound was clear. Her voice cracked with hysteria. “Everyone who has been to the States, or anywhere outside of Nevada, since the war started must clear out! Don’t stop to pack, just get out. Whatever this shit is, we don’t want it. The Assassins’ Guild is cooperating fully with the Public Health Syndicate…anyone who might have had contact with the plague has until midnight to be missing.

“If you know anybody who’s been outside, report his name to any assassin. They’re gonna be busy, so don’t use this to settle old business, all right? It might be life or death for all of us—it looks like this shit spreads fast and gets everybody.

“Likewise, if you see anybody with symptoms, go get an assassin. Or do the job yourself—but only if you have a flamer. Then report it to Public Health.

“Symptoms are fever and sweats, and talking nonsense. Whatever it is, it hits the brain first. But they can walk around for days before they die. Don’t take any chances.”

Jules Hammond returned in all his comforting solidity. “I have with me Coordinators Markus and Berrigan.”

The camera rolled back to show that Hammond was seated between the two Coordinators. Weislaw Markus, the Policy Coordinator, had glossy black hair but showed his age in his eyes and the deep creases that worried his face. Sandra Berrigan, Engineering Coordinator, was new to her office and young for it, forties, but her face was also a portrait of stress, slack bruises under sad eyes.

Markus shifted in his chair. “It’s virtually certain that this plague is the result of biological warfare, one side or the other. Our main concern is that it not spread to New New, of course. Anyone who was on Earth when the war
started is a potential carrier.”

Dan put his arm around O’Hara, but it was a stiff, self-conscious gesture.

“We certainly don’t have sympathy for the Draconian approach Nevada is taking. But our reaction must be equally absolute, equally swift. Your department, Sandra.”

“It may not be our problem at all,” she said. “Even if some of us were exposed to the microorganism on Earth, it’s not likely the bug would live through the prophylaxis series everyone has to complete before they come through the airlock.” O’Hara agreed; the shots were a combat assault on your body. It seemed as if everyone on the slow-boat spent half their waking hours in the john.

“However. We do have to consider the remote possibility that some of you are carrying the plague. We’re in the process of converting Module 9B into living quarters, to quarantine and examine you. If you were on Earth within the past year—because the agent could have been released long before the nuclear exchange—you must go immediately to Module 9B. Don’t pack. Don’t even pick up your toothbrush. We don’t know at what stage of incubation this disease becomes communicable.”

O’Hara squeezed John’s hand and kissed Daniel antiseptically on the cheek. As she made her way to the door, people gave her a lot of room.

They had all the tomatoes and cucumbers they could ever want; that was the crop in Module 9B. Seconds after O’Hara floated through the module airlock, she knew she’d grow to hate the tomatoes’ vinous smell.

The agricultural modules, the farms, were glassed-in bubbles that contained rigidly controlled environments, floating around New New York. They provided most of the vegetables and some of the meat for a quarter of a
million people. (Only fish and chickens grew well in zero gravity; the rabbits and goats had to live inside with everybody else.)

The module was big, since it had been built with expansion in mind, but it wasn’t big enough for 1,230 people. Besides the potential carriers, there were several dozen technicians, mostly medical, with a few engineering and agricultural workers to make sure that the people, tomatoes, and cukes all survived their period of close communion. The technicians wore spacesuits, in case somebody sneezed.

At least it wasn’t like being cooped up with a bunch of strangers. People began to form in clusters of friends, swapping stories and speculations about Earth. O’Hara found her bunch, a group of students who used to meet every Tuesday at the River Liffey in Manhattan. Seven hadn’t made it.

They were asked all to assemble at one end of the module, where a gruff medico told them they’d have to be quarantined for at least five days. There was a lot of predictable harrumphing about that. Only about one person in three hundred got a trip to Earth, in his lifetime; these were some of New New’s most important people.

Someone asked about solar flares—and got the answer, “Just hope we don’t get a bad one.” A Class 3 would kill them all in minutes, without shielding, but they were rare.

The first order of business was a thorough medical examination. Being in the middle of the alphabet, O’Hara handed in her samples and then loafed around for a couple of days. She couldn’t read, since there were only a dozen cubes in the place, each being watched by twenty or thirty people at once. She got tired of movies and plays, and wound up with a group that was laboriously filling in “the world’s largest crossword puzzle.”

Finally she spent some hours being scanned and poked and thumped and swabbed. The doctors were fast, bored,
and tired; O’Hara felt like a product on an assembly line. There was one moment that made her laugh, though, floating naked in midair behind a rack of tomato vines (for privacy), upside-down, holding on to a gynecologist’s boots so he could keep his bearings while taking smears, both of them slowly rotating in a posture that was a parody of soixante-neuf. She remembered her last conversation with Daniel and wondered what it would take to give an erection to a gynecologist, in a spacesuit or otherwise.

The examination turned up nothing beyond an allergy to cow’s milk, which was no surprise (and no problem, since the nearest cow was 36,500 kilometers away). Neither she nor anyone else had the plague. They were kept under observation for ten days, then returned to New New.

Very tired of the bland emergency rations they’d been fed in the module, O’Hara went straight to the cafeteria. The day’s lunch was centered around gazpacho, cold tomato and cucumber soup.

Charlie’s Will

Most of the weapons that roared into the sky, 16 March 2085, were antiques, fifty to a hundred years old, but one type was quite new. Experimental; inadequately tested.

The Koralatov virus was a humane sort of weapon. It was meant to induce a lengthy period of mental confusion in the enemy population, some months of being unable to think effectively. Better dumb than dead, if it had worked, but it hadn’t worked well at all.

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.