Worlds Apart (8 page)

There was a long crash of static. “—sure there isn’t enough power for me to receive. But I’ll keep looking for fuel cells, maybe figure out how to make one.

“I don’t have any way of keeping track of the date. But I’ll be back here, St. Theresa’s Pediatrics Hospital in Plant City, Florida, at every full moon, about midnight, to broadcast and try to receive an answer.

“Things must be tough up there, too… if you’re there at all. If the plague got carried up I guess I’m wasting my
time. But I hope, Marianne, you made it okay and got to marry Daniel. It seems like another life, a lifetime ago, when you were—” Static took over and when it quieted there was no more transmission.

Charlie’s Will

He turned off the radio transmitter and stared at his large hands. Maybe he shouldn’t have said midnight. That meant either traveling at night or holing up in this hospital for hours. The place was a boneyard. But he remembered his police radio used to receive best at night. He picked up his full saddlebags and his scattergun and followed a large cockroach down the hospital corridor to the fire stairs. Funny how you changed. One time, he would have chased the cockroach down and crushed it. Today he was obscurely glad that something else in the hospital was alive. Maybe it was affecting his brain, the growth hormone. It was affecting his hands and feet and other joints, aching like arthritis. He would treat himself to more aspirin, first stop.

On the ground floor he retrieved his wagon from its closet hiding place and put the saddlebags on top of the canvas bag that held his various possessions. He rolled the wagon out and wired it to the back fender of his bicycle, unlocked the bicycle and pedaled away, in search of customers.

The town was pretty well deserted, as all towns were once the shelves had been emptied. There was usually someone to trade with, some group of scavengers willing to dig deeper than the last group. But the house he’d stopped at a month earlier was deserted now. He pedaled on for an hour, quartering the downtown area, and had just about decided to break into his emergency rations
when he finally heard voices. He turned down an alley and saw a group of little girls playing a complicated hopping game. They were singing badly:

They stopped singing when they heard him rattling up the alleyway. One ran away but the other four stood and stared at him.

“I need food and water. Where is your family?” One girl, then all of them, pointed in the direction the other was running. He walked his bike slowly after her, scattergun pointed forward. The girls resumed their game, finished the rhyme:

She ran through an open door, yelling for her daddy. He leaned on his bike and waited, gun casually aimed at the door.

A rifle barrel pointed at him from a dark window. “Whaddayawant?”

“I’m Healer.”

“We heard about you.”

“So I want to trade. Is there anybody in your family needs healing?”

“A woman. What you need?”

“A fully charged fuel cell.”

“No got.”

“Food and water, then.”

“We got some of that. You come in but leave the gun outside.”

“Piss on that. She goes where I go.” And the two concealed pistols and the boot knife and the spraystick.

There was some muted conversation inside. “All right But you know we got you covered all the time.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He locked the bike and gathered the saddlebags and the canvas bag in his left arm. On the way to the door he passed a garbage pile. On top of the pile was a teenaged girl only a few hours dead, head crushed and body covered with purple bruises. He thought she had been disemboweled but saw that it was a placenta, partially expelled, and what was left of an infant.

“Monster birth?” he said, passing through the door.

“No eyes,” said the man with the rifle.

“Should have let the woman live.”

“It was her second. Family rules. The first was twins with just one head between them.”

He stood just inside, getting used to the dim light. “How long have you had this rule?”

“It’s a rule. It’s signtific.”

“Sure it is. What about the father?”

He shrugged. “That’s all of us. We just take turns.”

“Sounds scientific. Where’s the sick woman?”

They led him into a dark bedroom. It stank. He could barely make out a small form on the double bed, twitching and moaning incoherently. He went to the window and slid the knob to unpolarize it, flooding the room with sunlight. The girl cried out.

“The light hurts her eyes,” the leader said. The girl was twelve or thirteen, breasts juvenile. She was about six months pregnant. All she wore was a pair of filthy bandages wrapped around her upper thighs.

“Boil some water.”

“You want some coffee?”

“For washing. Boil a big pot.” The girl was flushed, her skin hot and dry. She had four degrees of fever. He
gave her some children’s aspirin dissolved in water. The leader came back, with most of the others crowding around the door.

They had to hold her down while he cut away the bandages. She was a mess. “How long has she been sick?”

“She got a rash last week. It’s only been bad for couple of days.” He’d never seen anything quite like it. On the inside of both thighs, from the crotch down about fifteen centimeters, was a growth of gray fungus. The flesh under the fungus was angry red and discharging pus. There were three prominent syphilis chancres on the lips of her vagina, which was probably associated, since the fungus was spreading up over the pubic mound.

“She gonna die?”

“Charlie knows when,” Healer said with only a little sarcasm.

“Charlie’s will,” the others muttered in ragged chorus.

He poured hydrogen peroxide on the infected areas and they foamed impressively. He rinsed with water from his canteen and applied the peroxide again, then rinsed again and patted the mess dry with a clean gauze pad. He turned her over and shot her full of wide-spectrum antibiotics.

“Here is what you do. Take this filthy sheet and burn it. Keep something clean under her. Don’t bandage it; let it breathe. Make her drink a lot of water. Anybody who touches her wash up afterwards with hot water and soap. Can you remember that?”

The leader nodded. “If she does die, you bury her. Or at least take the body far away. Don’t just chuck it out the door like that other one—and bury it too. You can get real sick, having dead people around.”

“We was going to. Two guys’re still out hunting, they gotta get their throws in. For luck.”

“Yeah, luck. I suppose all of you have syphilis, don’t you?” They looked at him blankly. He pointed to the chancres. “Sores like this.”

“’Course we get them, all the grownups,” the leader said.

“Except for Jimmy,” a girl said, and giggled. “He’s got hair but all he does is pull himself.”

“Jimmy’s scared to fight me,” the leader said proudly. “You don’t fight, you don’t fuck. That’s signtific. Natural selection.”

“Where did you get all this ‘scientific’ shit?”

“Old Tony taught us. He lived to be twenty-one, he could read really good.”

He tugged on his white beard. “You listen to me. I’m older than Tony ever was, and I’ve been reading since before any of you were born. Now, you’ve had children born blind, haven’t you.”

“Two or three,” the leader admitted.

“How do you suppose I knew that?”

“You’re pretty old.”

“That’s what happens when people have syphilis. They have babies born blind and stupid. It’s a
disease
. You don’t have to get it.”

“Sure,” the giggling girl said, “like you don’t have to get babies. Just don’t fuck.” The others giggled along with her.

“This is serious business. If you don’t get this syphilis cured, you’ll all go crazy before your time.” He looked at the leader. “You won’t be able to get it up any more. It’ll hurt too much.”

He was pale under the grime. “What do we have to do?”

“I’ll give you each a shot. Then I’ll leave a bottle of pills. Everybody takes one each morning; you watch and make sure they do. And no fucking for ten days.”

“Ten days! You can’t go ten days.”

“You can and will. Absolutely no sexual contact; not even boy-boy girl-girl. I want you to swear on Christ and Charlie.”

They all looked at the leader. He hesitated, then made
the sign of the cross and muttered “Charlie’s will.” The others did the same.

“Okay, call in the children. Then everybody line up in the living room and drop your pants.” He screwed a bottle of omnimycin into the hypodermic gun.

“We don’t do it to the children,” the leader said.

“Glad to hear it. But they can pick it up other ways, living with you.” He wasn’t sure that was true, but then neither could he be sure they actually did leave the younger children alone. That would make them an unusual family.

Waiting for the two hunters to come home, he treated various minor complaints. For most of them, he gave aspirin or an innocuous salve. His police training, many years before, had included a few days of emergency first aid—mostly what to do if you or your partner were shot. He did know how to assist childbirth, which often came in handy now. But everything else he’d had to learn from medical texts and the little brochures that came packed with medicine.

Medical books were rare. Before the war, a doctor could sit at a cube and punch up any text in existence, usually with three-dimensional illustrations of typical cases and techniques. Most of the books he’d found were heirlooms, their medicine a century or more out of date. The drugs prescribed no longer existed under the same brand names, since the books were written before all the manufacturers had merged into a single Pharmaceuticals Lobby.

He had no idea, for instance, what the girl’s fungus was. Would it start cropping up everywhere? Was it actually dangerous, or had it been just the dirty bandages that caused the infection and fever? Maybe he’d find a dermatology text.

The hunters came home triumphant, with a full case of freeze-dried beef stew. Healer took two boxes of it, a gallon of rainwater, and a bottle of old wine. He gave the hunters their shots and left. As he pedaled away he could
hear wild laughter and the dull smack of rocks hitting dead flesh.

Nothing could shock him any more, he thought; nothing could be revolting enough to get through the shell that contained his sanity. If you could call it sanity. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is weird. The people now dying of the plague had barely been teenagers when the war came. Their memories of the old days are distorted and vague. In another ten years there will be nothing but rumor and speculation. The old order changeth, he remembered from a poem; making place for new; and God fulfills himself in many ways.

1

At first Deucalion was a star, and then a bright star, moving slowly through the heavens. Soon it was definitely a shape, not a point, growing daily, and the observation dome in the hub of New New was often crowded.

It came to rest about twenty kilometers away. From that distance it looked like a small elongated potato, but with craters. The factories had been waiting in place for months, tiny bright toys attached to outsized solar collectors.

Now it was John Ogelby’s turn for overwork. He spent two months out at the factories, helping to supervise the interfacing of machine with rock. There was no way a spacesuit could fit his twisted body, so he worked from inside a modified emergency bubble, floating here and there, and using other people for hands. He loved zerogee work—the mobility and freedom from pain. But he did miss Marianne, and they spent many hours chatting, sometimes about inconsequential things, often about the suddenly complicated futures in store for them.

It seemed as if everything had happened at once. Scientists working with Insila had isolated the plague virus and synthesized a cure. After much argument, a very close referendum approved the manufacture of large quantities
of the antibiotic, which would be sent to Earth by robot drones.

The starship question was finally resolved by a series of carefully worded referenda. The available work force (only a third of the population was really needed to run New New) would be split into two roughly equal groups. The stay-at-homes would work on refurbishing Devon’s World and Tsiolkovski, which together would eventually provide enough room for another 150,000 people.

The rest of them would be Working on the starship, which would bear the name
Newhome
. Salvage teams were at work on the remains of Mazeltov and B’is’ma’masha’la, mining them for useful parts. The army of engineers no longer needed for Deucalion dove into the “Janus Project” with enthusiasm.

Daniel wanted to go, and so did John. O’Hara was not sure. The idea did excite her, as an abstraction, but the actual details of it boiled down to sitting in a spaceship playing gin rummy and waiting to die of old age. She would also probably have to raise a child. Her experience with her baby sister, now five, seemed to indicate that she had no great talent in that direction.

If she stayed in New New she would doubtless continue to advance. Having attained Grade 15 in only five years of service made her something of a prodigy, and although she was realistic about the influence of her continuing friendship with Sandra Berrigan, she didn’t doubt that she would have advanced on her own. She had access to her own psych profile and the analysis of it made by the Executive Evaluation Board.

The people who had set up New New’s charter, more than a century before, had done their best to ensure that the World’s administrative structure stay free of the taint of politics. Nobody got “on the track”—advancing beyond Grade 12—without minute investigation of his or her past and exhaustive psychological testing. They looked for a
balance of altruism with practicality; leadership ability without emotional dependence on having power over others; patience and deliberation. Nobody could insert himself into the power structure by dint of personal charisma, bribery, or influence. So New New’s history was rather dull, its leaders a succession of careful, phlegmatic people who usually retired with a great sense of relief. The Executive Evaluation Board was anonymous, but it was no secret that it consisted of a staff of professional psychologists overseen by past Coordinators and retired Justices. They had looked at Marianne and given their tentative blessing; now that she had reached Grade 15 she was subject to annual review, because power corrupts in subtle ways. A negative evaluation could mean anything from a temporary freeze in grade to demotion back to Grade 12, with no chance of appeal.