Worlds Apart (20 page)

We had flatscreen shots of the Westchester area in various wavelengths that told our agricultural people what would grow best there. In two days they cloned and forcegrew thousands of seedlings, enough to get a balanced farm going. They immunized mating pairs of appropriate breeds of rabbits, goats, chickens, and several kinds of fish. We were going to be a kind of reverse Ark.

A large part of our preparation for the trip was learning how to keep these beasts and plants alive during the two-day transfer to braking orbit. I took the training along with all of the farmer types. I also spent a few hours with the security people, while the police trained them in various
degrees of mayhem control, and organized and attended hasty seminars in immunology, psychology of adolescence, first aid, and so forth. But it was obvious that what we all needed was years of specific and intensive study. We should have foreseen this and begun training a long time ago.

The day we left I got to be a Personality, interviewed by Jules Hammond. That was bad. He had to overdramatize the thing, and in trying to mitigate that I wound up looking like a self-effacing heroine. Watching it on the news was excruciating. John and I made love in the morning and later Daniel and I fucked out of a sense of necessity, and at midnight I boarded the Mercedes with a minimum of enthusiasm.

We didn’t drop at a steady rate, which for some reason would have been wasteful of fuel. Instead there were “burn intervals,” various times when we suddenly went from zerogee to 1.5 or two gees. The computer usually timed these for periods when I was trying to sleep, so I could be entertained by nightmares of falling.

The landing was interesting, too interesting. The “interplanetary” in JFK Interplanetary meant that it had one automated landing pad for Class I ships like the Mercedes. (Unlike Zaire, it didn’t have a runway long enough for a conventional landing.) Of course the automation was long since dead. So our pilot had to bring the ship in on its tail, using instruments that had last been calibrated two years before the war. We hit very hard. The humans were all right, strapped into soft acceleration couches, but both the rabbits were killed, and the goats suffered eight broken legs. Maria Mandell stayed aboard, tending to the poor creatures, while most of us went outside to meet the groundhogs.

We were no doubt an imposing sight, all wearing identical gray coveralls with plastic breathers and surgical gloves, five of us carrying flamethrowers. At any rate, most
of the groundhogs stayed hidden, with just one brave representative coming down the tarmac with his hands in the air.

As he approached, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t planned what to say on this historic occasion. What I came up with was, “Hello?”

“Can I put my hands down?” he said.

“We aren’t going to hurt you,” I said. “Where are the others?”

“Watching.” He hesitated and then turned around and waved. “They’ll be down in a minute.”

“I don’t like it,” Steve Friedman said. He had been a professional soldier before the war. “We’re really exposed.”

“We don’t have any weapons,” the man said.

“Sure.” Steve’s eyes were focused beyond him, searching from place to place. The building we faced was mainly tiers of opaque black glass windows, enough to hide an army of snipers. The ground was cluttered with hulks of rusting machinery, which I supposed we could hide behind if we had to. But then a door opened with a loud squeak and the rest of the groundhogs came out, looking very scared and not at all dangerous.

Their leader was a black woman in her early twenties, probably one of the only people left alive with a high school education (she had skipped four grades by “testing out”). Her name was Indira Twelve. She liked Ahmed because he was black, and Sam Wasserman because he was brilliant, and the rest of us she tolerated in a friendly but weary way. With the other black people in her group—six of the thirteen—she spoke an impenetrable patois, oddly slurred and clipped, with curious rhyming substitutions for some words (“gland” for “man” and “fright”
for “white”), but with the rest of us she used standard English with icy clarity and a professorial vocabulary.

They had made a kind of camp inside the terminal building. At one end they’d broken out a bank of windows for ventilation, and had a fire going. The fire was ringed with sleeping pallets and knapsacks. There was a pile of wood and yellowed newspapers for fuel.

We sat around the fire and she offered us a drink from an improbably large jug of bourbon. I declined, explaining that we’d been advised not to take any local food or drink.

“Typical bureaucratic half-logic,” she said. “Nothing could live in this stuff.” She measured out drinks for her companions (probably glad that it didn’t have to go around), and things slowly got more relaxed.

There were logistical problems to be hammered out. The spaceport was sixty kilometers from their bomb-shelter home base, and we had several tonnes of supplies to move out there. Richards and Rocky and a couple of groundhogs went out to the parking lot to try to find a working floater compatible with the fuel cells we’d brought.

I spread out my worksheet timetable and went over it with Indira. We were going to wait three weeks before planting anything, in case of a late frost, but there was plenty to do in the meantime. We had to take an inventory of their agricultural equipment and either scavenge or improvise what was missing. There was a lot of technique to be taught before a single seedling went in the ground, and a lot of plowing and hoeing. The doctors had a two-week program of tests and inoculations set up, and it was obvious that the dentist had his work cut out for him—the children born after the war had never been vaccinated against caries, and some had already lost permanent teeth.

Assuming we would find a working floater, the plan was to leave five people aboard the Mercedes as guards, rotating at least weekly. The pilot agreed to stay with the ship permanently, since under some circumstances the
only defense would be to take off. Sara O’Brien was a qualified pilot but admitted that, under the circumstances, she’d rather not try to land it; we might lose more than a couple of rabbits.

Rocky and Richards came back with the good news that not only had they found a floater, but it was a big one, a school bus. They looked a little gray, though. I later found out that the bus had been full of small skeletons.

We loaded a supply of food onto the floater and took everybody home. Some of them were fascinated by flying; some, predictably, were terrified. The going was a little bumpy at first. Friedman was the only one of us who’d ever flown a large floater, and he was out of practice. (That was the first of many rather important things I’d over-looked. I hadn’t thought to select for floater experience. When I was on Earth before, Jeff had let me take the stick now and then, and it was really quite simple—except for the matters of taking off and landing, which he had always done himself.)

Their base of operations was a YMCA building in Tarrytown, which had functioned as a civil defense repository. The CD part was in the basement, damp and midnight black. We went in with the first bright light it had seen in eight years, and were treated to a festival of rats and cockroaches. The roaches scuttled away to hide, but some of the rats stood their ground, studying us. We tried to ignore them while taking inventory. I was rattled by the fauna, but probably less upset than Suzanne and Harry, who had never been to Earth before and so had limited experience with bugs and rodents. They were game about it, but by the time we had finished our lists they were both shivering and sweating. It was good to get back into light.

They had enough food to last through summer. By then they’d be eating food from the garden, barring catastrophe. We decided to turn the Y’s baseball diamond into
a garden, since it had plenty of sun and was fenced. Once food started coming up the place would need a twenty-four-hour armed guard.

In the matter of armaments they were a little short: two shotguns with four shells each. Unlike Jeff’s Florida, New York had outlawed private gun ownership decades before the war. I reluctantly put a high priority on finding a source of weapons and ammunition. I checked with New New and found that the nearest state where guns had been legal was Connecticut. Indira overheard the conversation and told me there was a National Guard armory in the next town south, with a vault they hadn’t been able to crack. Friedman said he’d take some explosives to it.

Wearing the mask and gloves got uncomfortable very fast. I asked Galina, who was an immunologist, whether they were all that effective. After all, we couldn’t help having some exposure to the environment. We couldn’t go back to the ship every time we had to eat or eliminate. (Though the idea didn’t seem too unreasonable after I got my first whiff of their latrine facility.) She said it probably was a good idea, for the groundhogs’ protection as well as our own, to minimize skin-to-skin contact and sharing one another’s exhalations. It was like an exaggerated sickbed procedure; neither ineffective nor an absolute guarantee.

Rocky turned out to have an invaluable primitive skill: carpentry. I should have considered that lumber was as ubiquitous here as foamsteel was at home. Nobody but Rocky and Friedman knew which end of a hammer to apply to the nail. Rocky offered to give a class for the kids every morning. I decided I’d take it too—and wasn’t too surprised when Sara and Maria and Ingred and Suzanne made the same decision. Rocky was just a kid himself, but the instinct he aroused in us was not exactly maternal.

Does gravity make you horny?

Friedman got into the armory vault and came back with an embarrassment of riches: four busloads of weapons, enough to wage a small war. He couldn’t leave anything there, of course, once the vault was open. So we filled the basement up with lasers, mortars, rifles, mines, ammunition, grenades, pistols, rockets. Didn’t scare the rats away.

One thing that would be handy once we had enough power to use it was a neurotangler field. We could bury a wire around the compound that would effectively keep any vertebrate outside. Approaching it caused mental confusion and (at least in humans) a painful sense of unfocused anguish, depression. Friedman had been exposed to it once in his training, and said the memory of it still woke him up some nights.

A few of the weapons could be put to nonviolent purpose. We dismantled all but two of the lasers for their powerful fuel cells. The vibroblade bayonets sliced through wood like a warm knife through margarine, though there was no way of telling how long they would stay charged. The mines, “shaped charges,” could be used upside down for digging holes, but we decided not to set any off, to avoid attracting attention. For the same reason Friedman demonstrated the weapons without ammunition, and had the children practice that way. Later he would take them a few at a time to practice actual shooting, a safe twenty or thirty kilometers away. The children practically salivated at the prospect.

We had a long list of construction supplies, hardware, and so forth, that we had to accumulate before rebuilding could start in earnest. It was a good excuse to go into the city. Indira hadn’t been downtown in five or six years. When she’d been there as a child it was almost deserted, no food left, but they had seen two other bands of scavengers at safe distances.

I had to go there even though I knew it would be sad. My memories of New York were still vivid, still precious. I had to see what was left to rebuild on.

It wasn’t promising, flying in along the Hudson. The Bronx was all but leveled by fire. Indira remembered that from before, though, and said it had been as bad down-town. The police and firemen had been more effective there, the night before the bombs started to fall. (I wondered whether New York had been spared nuclear destruction because the enemy wanted to save it, or because of automatic defenses like the ones that had protected the Cape long enough for our shuttles to escape.)

We dropped down to water level as we approached Manhattan. It still looked impressive—more impressive, in faict, than it had in the old days. With no pollution, you could see how tall the skyscrapers actually were, even the five-kilometer-high Trade Center twins. I suggested to Friedman that we might want to go up to the top of some of those buildings and work our way down. Without elevators, not many looters would have made it that high. He agreed but pointed out that we wouldn’t find any hardware stores up there.

We got almost as far as Chelsea without seeing anyone. Around Twenty-sixth Street we flew by four children walking on a dock. Three ran for cover and one dove into the water. We slowed down and turned inland at Twenty-third Street. Friedman remembered a large hardware-and-hobby emporium down by Second Avenue.

The city was a dead ruin. The street was clogged with burned-out hulks of delivery vans and robot cabs. Very few intact windows up to the third story, and the sidewalks were heaped with glittering fragments of glass. After a couple of blocks we started to see skeletons; in midtown they were everywhere. Most of them were partly hidden inside brightly colored clothes of indestructible fabric. I noticed that there were more scattered bones than complete skeletons. “Dogs,” Indira said.

We passed the old Flatiron Building, which had been my favorite. It looked pathetic. Windows all out, stone facade blackened by fire. The park across from it, where
I used to have lunch with Benny, was treeless and shoulder-high in weeds. A terrible feeling of loss and hopelessness surged up; I bit my lip to keep from crying out. I walked back down the aisle to an open window and put my face into the wind. The air smelled of the sea and old smoke.

Friedman found an empty piece of street close to the hardware store and expertly floated down onto it. He checked our weapons as we left the bus. Indira and I had the lasers; the three boys had assault pistols. Friedman himself carried something he called a “meatgrinder,” and a belt of grenades. If any of those skeletons tried anything they’d be goners.

Glass crackled under our feet and a desolate wind sighed. The sun went behind a cloud. My whole body was one tense nerve, waiting for the first shot. Nothing happened.