Worlds Apart (23 page)

I had a desperate desire, not especially erotic, to go find myself a limber young penis. Rocky or Sam. I even
got up and walked toward the cottage where Rocky was sleeping. But at the brick footpath I turned away. He might have company. Or he might say no.

The next day was shift change. Ahmed had been out at the Mercedes for the past week. He came back to the farm and we stretched the foodisolation policy to the extent of one small bottle of gin. It’s not every day that you get a new in-law.

He was cautiously happy but a little concerned about her age. Also, it was odd for a Ten to marry outside of the line, which claimed to trace groundhog roots back to seventeenth-century Africa. He himself was all for it, especially since the war had effectively frozen New New’s gene pool.

(The marriage made me obliquely related to the single postwar addition to that gene pool: Insila, the girl we had brought back from Zaire. Ahmed had adopted her as soon as she came out of isolation.)

By the time we saw the bottom of the bottle he had taught me a half-dozen outrageous phrases in Swahili to surprise Evelyn with. Then he wandered off to bed. I was on night duty, so I had Dr. Long give me a shot of toloxinamide, which compresses all the joys of a. hangover into ten minutes of concentrated woe, followed by remorseful clarity.

I shared the shift with Sam again. He was always good company. I’d chosen him to come along as sort of a wild card. At eighteen he had a certificate in mathematics and most of a second one in historiography. He composed music, popular ballads, and last summer had written a young people’s introduction to calculus. He didn’t have much ambition in the conventional sense; he’d been offered a line apprenticeship and refused it, saying he’d rather stay in school until Janus took off. (That’s how we’d
met originally; his name percolated to the top when I was databasing for a parttime ship’s historian.)

There wasn’t really anything to do at night but stay awake. The farm’s “nerve center” was originally a groundskeeper’s office, situated on a slight rise, giving us a view of the whole area. We had the monitor there and a sound-only communications system that Ingred Munkelt had jury-rigged. If anything suspicious happened, we could throw a switch that flooded the area with light. Another switch sent a wake-up buzz to every bedroom and dormitory floor, and unlocked the armory. We had a laser and a scattergun by the door. Otherwise, only Friedman had a weapon; we’d decided on a strict lock-up policy to prevent accidents and keep the murder rate down near zero.

We talked about history and historiography for a couple of hours and played a game of fairy chess. He spotted me a barrel queen and still won in fifteen minutes. Then, while I was putting the pieces away, he demonstrated yet another talent: mental telepathy.

“Uh, you know I overheard your conversation with your husband yesterday. You were pretty upset.”

“Surprised. Yes, upset. I still am, a little.”

“I don’t blame you. I wondered, um, whether you might want, whether your line permits, uh…” He started to make the polite finger sign but instead put his hand lightly on my forearm. His palm was wet and cold. “Would you want to have sex with me as a friend?” he said quickly. “I thought it might help.”

“It would help, a lot.” I put my hand over his. “You do know how old I am.”

“Sure.” He laughed nervously. “I like that. Women my age, we just don’t have anything real to talk about.” He looked around quickly. “Should I put the shades down?”

I tried to stifle a laugh. “Let’s wait until the shift is over, okay? Only another hour and a half.” He agreed,
with a winsome look of real pain.

Boys that age should wear loose clothing. Galina and Ingred, who replaced us, could hardly have missed his erection. They were poker-faced, but Galina gave me a roguish wink as we went out the door.

Back at my place, the first iteration was predictably brief. But Sam’s refractory powers were impressive even for a youngster. After the fourth he fell asleep beside me, still inside. It was my first deep, untroubled sleep in a month.

(Sam was curiously ignorant of female geography. He confessed he’d only discovered girls a year before, having spent several years loving an older man, one of his teachers. Such a waste of natural resources.)

The next day we began working on a program of recruitment. Our efforts here would be spectacularly trivial if only sixteen people benefited. We decided it would be best to find loners and people living in twos and threes. If we tried to assimilate a large group, it might lead to an organized power struggle after we left.

I saw the farm as eventually growing into a small town, thousands of people, agriculturally self-sufficient and still close enough to New York to take advantage of the city and serve as a nucleus of power for rebuilding it. Some day I wanted to come back to the city and see it crackling with energy again.

There was some dissension over this ultimate goal, led by Carrie Marchand. A lot of people believed that cities were obsolete; that living in cities contributed to the mental disease that made war possible. A strange point of view to come from someone who grew up inside an oversized tin can. But she had never been to New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, as they had been before the war. As I was stating this argument, I realized that only a handful of adult people ever had been to a real city, let alone every one of the major cities in the non-Socialist world. It made me feel lonely rather than unique. And I did have to admit
that the experience colored my judgment profoundly. Carrie made a good case, but my side prevailed. Being boss does simplify the process of debate.

The first stage of recruitment had to be quite selective. We made a couple of hundred flyers describing what we were and how to get in touch with us, and left them in prominent places in book stores and print libraries. We didn’t tell exactly where the farm was, but said we would pick people up at noon outside the Ossining tube station, every clear day.

We distributed the flyer over several hundred square kilometers, but for almost a week it looked like a wasted effort. Every noon Friedman or I would take the school bus inland a few kilometers, then circle around to the south of Ossining and sneak up on the tube station. On the fifth day three recruits, as cautious as we were, came out of the bushes after we landed.

We got two or three a day for the next eleven days. On March 16, the eighth anniversary of the war, it backfired.

One of the new recruits disappeared during the night. He came back about an hour before dawn, with a couple of dozen heavily armed comrades.

The shots woke me up an instant before the buzzer went off. Harry Volker and Albert Long were on duty; one of them managed to get to the emergency switch before dying. The invaders had burst in through both doors, shooting.

Evidently they hadn’t known where the armory was. That kept the bloodbath from being too one-sided. Friedman kept them away with his laser while weapons were being passed through the dormitory. Then there was a terrible free-for-all, our children and their children blasting away at each other right through the golden dawn. I looked on helplessly from my cottage window, along with Sam. Neither of us was foolhardy enough to try crossing over to the armory. We moved a dresser in front of the
door and peered through the blinds at the war being fought.

Then we spent the morning picking up and burying bodies and pieces of bodies. There were twenty-three of them and eleven of us—eight children, the two on night shift, and Sara O’Brien.

Sara’s body was the last one we found, which was probably a good thing, since we were numb by then. We followed the sound of flies. Behind some bushes, irrelevantly naked, her body at first looked like a pile of raw meat. They had hacked off her head and limbs and breasts and stacked everything up. They’d split her torso open from the womb to the heart, and spread things around. She didn’t look real. She looked like a montage a gruesome child might make, taking scissors to an anatomy diagram.

That was when the guilt really came home. Sara had been such a sweet person. She loved children with total soppy abandon. She was the best teacher we had for the very young, because her love infected the children and they would do anything to keep from disappointing her. She had three daughters and a son in New New. What the hell could I tell them? I chose your mother as backup pilot because her psych profile showed she was really great with children. I’m really sorry she wound up a bloody heap. Next time I’ll build a fence, first thing.

In a way, the ones who were less obviously dead were the worst. Some who were killed by laser just had a charred spot on their clothing. They looked asleep, except for the feet. For some reason dead people seem to crank their feet around into uncomfortable positions.

6

Nobody blamed me for the carnage. Maybe I blamed myself: I should have expected the worst and given highest priority to defense. Of all the adults, I had the most experience with this particular kind of insanity—Friedman
knew more about war but he had never been in one except, like all the others, as a target. No use wasting energy in self-recrimination, I knew. But I had to start taking medicine to get to sleep.

We spent the next two weeks in furious activity, turning the farm into an armed camp. We surrounded the area with two concentric circles of sturdy posts and wound a complicated maze of taut razor wire between them. It was difficult and dangerous stuff to work with; only two of the children were physically strong enough to help, which might have been just as well. Three people severed fingers in moments of carelessness. Dr. Itoh was able to do emergency bone grafts and rejoin the digits, but they would have to be redone in New New if the victims were to ever use the fingers normally. I brushed against the stuff myself, reaching up to scratch my nose, and skinned off a flap of forearm the size of a sausage patty. There was an impressive amount of blood. Itoh glued it back, but now I can’t feel anything there but prickly numbness.

While we were doing that, the children dug sixteen bunkers, equally spaced around the perimeter, and with some trepidation I allowed the holes to be stocked with weapons and ammunition. The bloodbath had had a so-bering effect, though, and the children treated the weapons with exaggerated caution.

There was no break in the wire. The only way in or out of the farm, for the time being, would be by floater. We found another workable one, a utility pickup, and taught Indira and two others how to fly, after a fashion. They took the Fromme brothers out on daily hunting sorties that were also reconnaissance, trying to find large groups of children before they found us.

Friedman, always full of good news, pointed out that though the wire would protect us from another attack of the same kind, it wouldn’t be much of an obstacle if somebody else had managed to break into an armory. A few seconds of concentrated laser fire would melt a hole in
the fence, or it could be breached by explosives.

I wondered whether our situation was a microcosm of the near future—a few people living well but in anxious isolation. Perhaps this was unavoidable for a time, but I could hope that it would prove to be only a period of transition, not a grisly New Order.

The ferocity of the attack and the way the children seemed indifferent toward dying made me wonder whether Jeff had been wrong in thinking that Charlie’s Country only extended into Georgia. None of the children on the farm had ever heard of it until the Fromme boys came. But maybe it was a behavior pattern that cropped up independent of Manson’s crazy writings. I talked to Dr. Long, who had specialized in child psychology before the war, and he wasn’t too much help. After all, not even the most desperate of prewar cultures had anything like the background of helpless despair these children endured. His practice had been limited to children who had grown up in New New, with an occasional immigrant for variety. More bedwetting than mass murder.

When the new trouble first began, we thought it was a reaction to stress, to the isolation and tension of living inside the razor wall. We increased the amount of time each person spent outside, making up search missions to give the kids something to do. But they became increasingly irritable and hard to control, and the doctors spent long days treating vague complaints.

And then Indira got sick. One morning she didn’t get out of bed, and when we shook her awake she mumbled incoherent nonsense. She was incontinent and wouldn’t eat. We turned my cabin into a sickroom and fed her intravenously while the doctors and Harry Volker ran tests. They were in constant communication with medical people in New New, who could only confirm the obvious: It was the death. There was nothing anyone could do.

We had reinoculated everyone with the vaccine our first day here, to be on the safe side. Either Indira was
somehow unaffected by the vaccine, or the vaccine didn’t work. Which meant we were all doomed.

Tishkyevich found the answer. We didn’t have anything like a complete medical laboratory, but she was able to take blood samples from Indira, the other children, and us, and compare forcegrown disease cultures from each. Indira and the children had a mutated form of the death, but none of us had it. That was a relief, but perplexing. Then Galina deduced the truth: We had given it to them. Except for Rocky, Friedman, Ahmed, and me, none of the party had ever been to Earth; most of them represented several generations of biological isolation from the home planet. When the virus settled into our lungs it found a strange new ecology. In the process of trying to adapt to one or all of us, it changed.

We were evidently protected the same way we were protected from other Earth diseases. The virus couldn’t survive our beefed-up immune systems. But before it perished some of it got back out, and reinfected the children.

The scientists at New New confirmed Galina’s explanation. They also said it would be easy to produce an antigen specific to the mutation, if we would bring up a blood sample.

No children were around while this was going on. That was good. We had to leave, and quickly, and preferably not in a hail of bullets.