Worlds Apart (25 page)

He got up and poured us a glass of wine while I was talking. “All right, he’s clever and pretty and you went through a lot together. What do you want me to do? Give my blessing? You’ve got it.”

“I want not to hurt you. Have I?”

He sat cross-legged on the bed, a posture that accentuated his deformity. Normally I didn’t even see it any more. “No, you haven’t hurt me. When we were first together, remember, you were having three different men a day, with an eye out for new recruits. I wasn’t jealous
then, and I haven’t changed.”

“But I have changed, is what you’re saying. I should act my age.”

“No, no.” He took a sip and offered me the glass. “I’m not saying that. Others will, though.”

“What I do with my plumbing is my own business.”

“A noble principle. You know it’s not true. You’re coming up for review in another month, and there are a couple of people on the Board who would jump at any chance to hold you back. A pity you couldn’t have kept it secret.”

“We were living in each other’s pockets. It would be against my nature anyhow.”

“I know. I wouldn’t try to make you a politician at this late date. But you are going to get some noise about it.” He cleared his throat and looked away. “Unless we marry him.”

“Some year, maybe. I’m not going to be rushed into anything.”

He nodded slowly. “I have to say…I’m glad to hear you say that. I would feel like the odd man out, you and Daniel with your young lovers.”

“You mean you haven’t made love with Evy?”

“Yes, twice. We
are
married.” He looked uncomfortable. “It didn’t work out. Very dry and tight. I don’t think her heart was in it. Though she tried hard.”

“She’s inexperienced.”

“That may be it.” He drank off most of the wine and handed it to me to finish, then got under the cover.

“I’ll have a girl-to-girl talk with her.”

He put his hand on my thigh. “Don’t intercede on my behalf. I’m satisfied with the way things are, now that you’re back.”

I turned off the light and sipped wine in the darkness, sitting up in bed. I couldn’t help feeling somewhat manipulated. John had probably acquiesced in Evy’s joining our line so he would have more time with me, though I
suspect he would be surprised and hurt if I accused him of it. But then there was undeniably an element of manipulation in my relationship with Sam—mixed with honest lust; thinking about him gave me a prickly surge of desire.

My mother once counseled me that sexual relations grew more complicated in proportion to the square of the number of people involved. So this quintet was twenty-five times more complicated than masturbation. That seemed conservative.

The next month was a tiresome waste. The second day home I got a summons from God’s Armada. On Sandra’s advice I retained Taylor Harrison, an expert on constitutional law and a good trial lawyer as well.

Selecting the jury took more time than the trial itself. They came up with forty hand-picked Devonites, of course, and I found forty free-thinkers pretty easily. But then we both had veto power over the remaining twenty. We went through nearly a thousand before agreeing on them.

Harrison rejected out-of-hand my desire to consider the case on practical merits: the plain fact that the star-ship’s population had to remain stable for eighty years, and just a handful of Devonites would reproduce everybody into starvation. (I also asked the GA representative whether he had considered that little problem. He just smiled sadly and said God would provide.) By the screwy logic of the courts, that fact of certain disaster was irrelevant The case had to be decided in terms of technicalities of precedent and interpretation.

They droned on and on. It bothered me somewhat that GA’s lawyer, also an expert on constitutional law, was herself a hidebound atheist I supposed the two of them could switch sides and argue with equal passion either way. Maybe justice is best served with that kind of
professionalism. It still bothered me. But not as much as the bombshell Harrison dropped halfway through the trial.

We were having lunch together, reviewing his notes, when he said, “O’Hara, do you know what a ‘front organization’ is?”

“Sure,” I said. I’d studied the history of the Lobbies in American government.

“Well, that’s what your God’s Armada is. They’re fronting for a conservative coalition headed up by old Marcus. They don’t really give a damn about equal representation.”

“What are they up to, then?”

“Just want to stop
Newhome
. They will, too, if they can compel you to take eight percent fundamentalist Devonites. Might as well put a time bomb aboard.”

“They should have moved earlier. With S-1 gone—”

“But that’s just it. They want S-1 to come back with the antimatter. They just don’t want to use it in a starship.”

“Power generation? Sunlight must be cheaper.”

“That’s not exactly the kind of power they’re interested in.” He put down his chopsticks and looked at me. “They want to use it on Earth.”

“My god!”

“The idea is to set up about a dozen magnetic containment devices, holding antimatter, in the largest cities. Like the Sword of Damocles. They do something we don’t approve of, we turn off the power. Boom.”

“Or if the power fails. Or the magnet runs down.”

“That’s right. Or if someone who doesn’t like, say, Los Angeles gets hold of the button. It’s a spectacularly unstable system.”

“How do they think they could do it? It’d never get past the Coordinators.”

“Well, Marcus was a Coordinator once. The thing is, if the starship gets vetoed and S-1 comes back, we’ve got all that antimatter sitting in our own back yard. A lot of people would rather have it somewhere else.”

“Have you told Judge Delany about this?”

“Hardly. Delany was the one who told me. Of course it’s irrelevant, a side issue.”

“Of course.” I wished I had something stronger than orange juice.

As it turned out, it
was
irrelevant, or immaterial. We won the case, sixty-one to thirty-nine, even getting a few of the Devonites on our side.

In retrospect, the month was a useful lesson. I had already chosen ninety-two lawyers to go with Newhome. I reinterviewed them, and about a hundred more, in terms of the desirability of setting up a new system of jurisprudence. Surprisingly, I wound up with more old lawyers—including Harrison—than young ones. Fed up with the system, I suppose.

I also spent the month more or less losing Sam. Having discovered the female race, he started butterflying. The trial soaked up all my spare time, and he had plenty of girls his own age to divert him. It’s possible he was intimidated by John and Daniel, too, since he would be aboard
Newhome
on Engineering track, and one or both of them would sooner or later be his boss. I don’t really think he had that Machiavellian, or practical, a mind, though. One reason I was so fond of him.

My own mind being reasonably practical, even Machiavellian, I let him go gracefully. I’ll be on the starship, too. In another ten years our age difference won’t be so significant.

Charlie’s Will

After the violence at City Hall, the transition went fairly smoothly. Most of the Island’s weapons were locked up in the jail; Storm’s deputies were armed but loyal.

The Islanders were probably more amenable to the
prospect of long life than any other group in Charlie’s country. They lived comfortably amid the only working remnant of prewar civilization south of New York and north of Antarctica; the only city in the hemisphere that had survived the war relatively unchanged. It wasn’t hard to convince them that the gift of the death was no blessing.

It was harder to talk them out of cannibalism. Jeff got no help from Storm on this matter, nor from Tad, who still wouldn’t eat human flesh but didn’t want to make an issue about it. Most of them had only vague memories of any other kind of meat.

Oddly enough, it was Mary Sue who came up with a solution. She wanted to go back to the farm anyhow, and suggested that the two groups might trade. An armed guard could escort her up and come back with mating pairs of rabbits and chickens, maybe pigs if they had enough. The farm could use a refrigerator in return. Their old one had died, and they hadn’t been able to find one that worked.

Mary Sue’s bunch could just go down into Tampa and raid an appliance store, and find one still in a packing crate, but Jeff didn’t suggest it. Instead he solemnly picked out a nice expensive model from a mansion on Duval Street and had it loaded aboard the mule cart he’d come down in. He sent a party of four volunteers along with her, armed with accurate maps and lots of artillery, and started dreaming about fried chicken.

Storm hadn’t wanted to take over General’s leadership, opting for the safer position of being Jeff’s right-hand man. Jeff knew that for his own safety he had to go about civilizing this bunch of savages. But he wasn’t sure how to start.

The existing social organization was so loose as to be almost nonexistent. People had had duties assigned, and they did just enough work to keep General and Storm off their backs. One problem was that Key West was a Garden of Eden. It was set up to provide food, water, shelter, and power for a hundred thousand people, and though some
of the machines had broken down, the city would still take care of ten times their number. Most of the time they spent watching the cube or “hanging,” talking endlessly about the same things with the same people. Excess energy was dissipated in fights, sometimes fatal, and sex, sometimes heterosexual.

Fortunately, there weren’t many who were true Mansonite believers. There was no other religion, though, that Jeff might exploit to keep them in line. His own American Taoism was too gentle and subtle to have much effect on them. He toyed with the idea of making up a religion, a notion that had occurred to him before. His white hair and beard grown long and wild, he did look like an Old Testament prophet, and a lot of the younger ones treated him with tonguetied awe. He couldn’t marshal enough cynicism for it, though.

Finally he settled on just getting things somewhat organized. He picked a dozen boys and girls who seemed to have leadership potential, and made them “house leaders,” naming their houses after signs of the zodiac. Then he took Storm’s census and assigned each house twenty-three or twenty-four people, more or less randomly, preserving the two-to-one male/female ratio. He instructed the house leaders to select four people out of their groups to be assistants, each responsible for a “unit” of five or six people. It was simple military-style organization, company-platoon-squad, but he didn’t want to use the military names.

As a test of his authority, it was successful. People grumbled about being separated from friends and sex partners, but they went along with it. (The separation wasn’t profound, anyhow; houses only got together physically for meetings, and people continued to live wherever they’d cleared a space.)

There were four others besides Jeff and Storm and Tad who could read and write fairly well. They were made teachers and taken outside of the loose power structure,
and freed of work details. Jeff set up a class schedule by house, requiring everybody who was old enough to spend two hours a day learning fundamentals. Skipping class meant four hours of extra work; malingering at work put you in Storm’s jail for a day, with no food.

Jeff knew enough about child psychology not to be too surprised at the initial enthusiasm they showed, but he wasn’t sure what to do next, when the novelty wore off. Tad suggested they reinvent money. People would be rewarded for good performance in class, and with their money they could buy their way out of work details. Jeff could see the sense of it, but he hesitated, having known since childhood that money was intrinsically evil. It seemed a pity, since they were in a small way rebuilding society, to knowingly corrupt it from the very beginning. But he finally gave in. They had already begun commerce, trading a worthless refrigerator for priceless animals. As the people to the north grew older, there would be more and more contact. Better trade than war.

He brought together all of the teachers and house leaders and explained the setup. They worked out a table of various equivalences between class credits and work credits—watching a fishing line was not worth as much as scraping paint—and, foreseeing trouble, set up a review system, so that people who thought they had been unfairly treated could bring their case to Healer or Storm.

It took quite a while. Tad drew a couple of hundred credit bills, which Storm and Jeff signed. They locked them up in the jail’s armory.

In six days he created school, jobs, money, courts, and banks. On the seventh day he went fishing.

1

It was a busy, exciting couple of years, watching the good ship
Newhome
grow. I went up to the hub to look at it only once each month, so my eye’s memory of it is a steady progression from the simple torus of Uchūden, through the spidery framing skeleton, to the kilometers-long cylinder of rock we’re moving into now. Of course the progress wasn’t steady, as I knew from my husbands’ constant enthusiastic bitching. But I was so busy with my own end of it that I didn’t have any time to worry about theirs.

The work was far from over after I’d selected the ten thousand settlers. For one thing, the list was constantly changing as people reconsidered or acquired new spouses or inconveniently died—or managed to pressure someone into pressuring me into letting them aboard. Also, I was supervising what amounted to a crash program with the ten hypnotic induction machines. We wanted to do four hundred HI pairs before we leave next year, and the actual induction procedure is only part of the retraining process. Information isn’t enough. It wouldn’t do us much good to have a fanatical elephant trainer aboard if we forgot to bring along his elephant.

The Entertainment Director job is complicated for the same reason. We’ll have a duplicate of New New’s library, so there won’t be any shortage of books, movies, and so
forth. But there are thousands of other items people need to keep from being useful all the time. I sent out a general request for entertainment suggestions from all the settlers, and got a quarter of a million responses. The computer reduced the list to 2,436 things, cancelling duplicates, and it was my job to go through it and evaluate which we should and could take along. A couple of thousand people listed balls and gloves for handball; no problem. But what about the three who were light sculptors? The equipment weighs as much as a large floater. And every violinist suggested we bring along New New’s only Strad. Somehow I don’t think we’re going to get it.