Worlds Apart

  “They’re a commune,” Tad said. “Hundreds of ‘em.”

  “We could join you, if you want us,” Jeff said.

  “Oh, we got you.” He looked away. “Red Dog, you wanna check the tide? Yeah, we got you. Couple of people you wanna meet anyhow. Newsman and Elsie the Cow. Oldies.”

  “A woman?” Jeff had only heard of male acromegalics surviving; he’d assumed there was some sex-linked factor in the immunity.

  “Claims to be.” He giggled. “A real stiffener. If you can keep it up long enough to pork her, maybe she’ll have another oldie.”

  “Half an hour to slack,” someone shouted from the water’s edge.

  “Let’s get this shit rounded up,” the leader said.

  “Wait,” Jeff said. “Are we going as prisoners? Or do we join your family?”

  That crooked smile again. “I guess you’re prisoners till someone gets the death. We ask Charlie, maybe you’re prisoners, maybe you’re family. Maybe you’re dinner.” He threw his head back and laughed, for the first time opening his mouth wide. His teeth were chipped and filed to points.

  2 John Ogelby

  For years I suppose I tacitly assumed that the Janus Project was a hoax, a make-work business the Coordinators cooked up for obvious morale purposes. You can’t have thousands of highly trained technical people just sitting around on their thumbs. Might as well let them design castles in the air: keep them happy and give the rest of the population something to dream about.

  Much of the research and development for Janus would be directly applicable to rebuilding the Worlds, anyhow, and the more exotic aspects—the fantastic propulsion schema and so forth—might be handy in a century or so, when they actually could afford to build a starship. I went along with the gag. The strength-of-materials problems were fascinating, even if the overall picture was just a fantasy. Many scientists and engineers shared my attitude, my tacit complicity, because we could look at the numbers and see the reality they concealed. It’s true that a matter/ antimatter drive had been demonstrated many years before, accelerating a small payload to solar escape velocity in a matter of minutes. But that didn’t really prove Janus would work—no more than you could produce a flea the size of an elephant and expect it to jump over mountains (it would collapse under its own weight).

  To begin with, the small m/a demonstration had actually been a simple reaction drive, a steam-powered rocket. They took a few hundred kilograms of water and bled a few grams of antimatter into it. It zoomed off very impressively. But for Janus to follow that design, it would have to fuel up with a small ocean.

  It’s true that a particle is totally, mutually, annihilated by its antiparticle; totally converted into energy. But you don’t really get emceesquared, not in any useful form. To begin with, half the energy goes off as neutrinos, which just ghost away and are wasted. The rest is high-energy gamma rays, which can’t be tapped directly. On a small scale, the radiation can be absorbed by water, which breaks down into energized ions of hydrogen and oxygen, which in turn provide exhaust for a reaction engine.

  But the Janus planners were talking about using the gamma rays directly, via some mythical “reflector.” The photon drive that science fiction writers mumbled about for a century. Problem is, this reflector has to be absolutely efficient, and not just to get the most for your money. If one hundredth of one percent of that radiation leaked through, everybody aboard the ship would be fried in an instant.

  As I say, though, the work was interesting (and, conversely, the strength-of-materials aspects of the Tsiolkovski reconstruction were simple numbercrunching), so I never voiced my doubts publicly. I stopped being sarcastic in private, too, when O’Hara dived into the demographics work. When she gets a bug in her brain about something she loses her sense of humor.

  Now that I’ve been proven wrong, both she and Dan can stand on the solid bedrock of hindsight and catalog the errors of my ways. Dan just contends that I underestimated the cumulative creativity of a thousand out-of-work physicists. (About what you would expect from a chemical engineer. By the time they get their degrees, they’ve taken so many physics and chemistry courses that they’re thoroughly brainwashed.) So I was wrong on that score: they did develop a workable reflector. Then they turned particle physics inside out and came up with this damned neutrino coupler. So I never claimed to be a scientist.

  I still didn’t think it would fly, not this century. The actual expense in time and material was an order of magnitude greater than that projected for rebuilding the Worlds. I contended that people—and their supposedly responsible leaders—would opt for security over dreams, when it actually came down to pulling out the checkbook.

  O’Hara, of course, had recourse to the “lessons of history,” which somehow always became clear after the fact. What I underestimated in this context was the motivating power of paranoia. How did we get into space in the first place? she asked rhetorically. It never would have happened without last century’s mutual xenophobia between the United States and the Soviet Union (precursor to the late unlamented SSU).

  So the fuel ship S-l is actually going out, early next year. If everything goes according to plan, S-2 fires up four years later. And we’ll be aboard it.

  Charlie’s Will

  They had a large flatboat, almost a floating dock, more than big enough to hold the mules and wagon. A small flotilla of rowboats towed it across the water. The bridges from the next island south to Key West were intact: four keys that collectively were called “the Island.”

  The Island did well by its family. For generations before the war, the Keys had tried to become more and more independent of the mainland. The automated desalinization plant still worked; anywhere on the Island you could turn on a tap and get any quantity of distilled water. Fish and edible seaweed shared huge mariculture pens, and hydroponic greenhouses produced everything from avocados to zucchini. No wonder the family had wanted to isolate itself; if the road were intact they’d have a constant stream of hungry nomads.

  They put Jeff and Tad into a musty jail cell. After the jailer went away, Jeff sat down on the edge of the bed and whispered the obvious: “They’re never going to let us off this island alive.”

  Tad nodded. He was looking at himself in the mirror over the sink, a real novelty. “Guess we better make ourselves wanted.”

  “Make ourselves essential. And keep a weather eye out for changes of opinion.”

  The jailer, who hadn’t spoken, came back with a pitcher of water and a tray of cold food. He slid both through a serving door and clumped away.

  Jeff uncovered the tray. “Oh, this is cute.” A grape-fruit, two small fish, and a bowl of smoked human parts: fingers, cheeks, and a penis. “I wonder if it’s a special treat. Or just what they feed prisoners.”

  “Pretty revolting.” Jeff agreed, but they had both eaten in the presence of worse. They polished off the fruit and fish, then gave the tray back to the waiting jailer. He walked off chewing on a finger. Tad fell asleep then, but Jeff sat on the bunk and watched the square of sky in their high window turn dark. He lay awake for some time after that, thinking. Maybe he was going to die here; maybe it didn’t make much difference. Maybe they had a transmitter and a dish.

  For breakfast the jailer brought a glutinous soup without any meat. When they’d finished he drew his gun, unlocked the door, and motioned them out. He led them to a courtyard and pointed to a bench.

  Soft breeze from the sea did not quite dispel the odor. There were four crosses, tilted over x-wise. One held most of a skeleton, hanging upside down; another, the slack remains of a person who had recently been butchered. The two others were empty, waiting, wood stained black with old blood. The birds had flown away when Jeff and Tad came out. Now they rejoined the ants and flies.

  “Is this it?” Jeff asked the jailer. He just stared, staying well out of reach.

  A heavy door to the outside wheeled open. Through it came two men helping a woman try to walk. One of the men was General, the po
inty-toothed leader from yesterday; the other had a huge shock of brown beard. The woman obviously had the death.

  As they got closer Jeff could see that the “beard” was actually a human scalp, held in place by strings.

  “Good morning, General,” Jeff said.

  “This is our charlie,” General said. “With Raincloud’s help he’ll tell us what to do with you.” Raincloud had probably been attractive until recently. Now she was drool and mucus and infected stumps where two fingers had been removed. She smiled sharp points and stared past them.

  The charlie produced a slim black book, a vest-pocket dictionary, and opened it at random. “Raincloud!” he shouted, and her stare turned in his direction. “Liferaft,” he read.

  “Rife laughed, raff life, life laugh.”

  “Lighthouse.”

  “Life light. Life life.”

  The charlie looked at General with raised eyebrows. He shouted again at Raincloud: “Death house.”

  She laughed. “Life house.”

  He put the book back in his pocket slowly. “Hm. I’ve never heard it be more clearly spoken.”

  “I suppose,” General said. He looked disappointed. “Give her the gift?”

  “It’s her time. Get-the-fire-started,” he said slowly to the jailer. He and General managed to worry the shift off her unresisting, uncooperative body. She wore nothing underneath. They led her to one of the crosses and General began wiring her wrists and ankles to the boards while the charlie went inside the jail.

  “That was luck,” Tad whispered.

  Jeff shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. He had her trained.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That dictionary opened to the N’s, nowhere near ‘liferaft.’ We have an ally.”

  Their ally returned, minus the false beard, carrying a leather case. He walked straight to the girl, not looking at them. He opened the case and said, “Distract her.”

  General poked her with a stiff finger and when she turned to look at him, the charlie pulled out a long, thick-bladed knife and plunged it between her breasts. She winced and shuddered, voided in a rush, but didn’t cry out. Jeff knew the final stages of the disease provided insensitivity to pain, but he had never seen it demonstrated so dramatically.

  He stabbed her twice more in the heart and then helped General push the cross over twice, so she hung head down. Then he slashed her throat with one quick cut. He walked over toward Jeff and Tad, holding the dripping knife.

  “We gotta bleed her for a few minutes,” he said conversationally. “You guys’re free to go now. Or you can watch like the others.” He gestured with the knife and Jeff saw for the first time that there were dozens of people sitting on the walls behind them.

  “It won’t bother us,” Tad said.

  “I hope they aren’t too disappointed,” Jeff said, “not seeing the two of us die.”

  “They’ll get over it. We gotta talk, you know.”

  “I know.” The charlie nodded and went back to his chores.

  It was easier to watch now, Jeff told himself, now that the woman’s face was transformed into a slick red mask, expressionless, gape-jawed, upside down. When the blood slowed to a dripping the charlie made an incision from pubis to sternum. A streaming mass of guts lolled out. Jeff didn’t look away. He had seen worse, after all. The charlie took a deep breath over his shoulder and pulled on the blue-gray bloodstreaked mass, and as it sagged to the ground the woman gurgled. He started to saw away inside the cavity and Jeff was annoyed to find himself fainting.

  3 Daniel Anderson

  Slightly excruciating dinner last night, with Marianne’s family. Her mother is scarcely older than me—she gave birth to Marianne at thirteen—but we have absolutely nothing in common, except Marianne.

  (Interesting that such a dull and silly woman could produce such a daughter. The father was a groundhog engineer, though; that must explain it.)

  Marianne’s little sister was entertaining, and very smart for an eight-year-old. Predictably spoiled. I’m glad we won’t be having any children until after acceleration. Life is complicated enough.

  Start-up is pressing me to be Engineering Liaison between Janus and New New. I couldn’t refuse outright, but I’m searching—rather, Marianne and I are—somewhat frantically for someone who could be talked into volunteering for the job. With more than four hundred track-grade engineers aboard, you’d think there would be one with some political ambition. But I guess all those are staying behind.

  Not that it’s such a difficult job. But hell, the main reason I wanted to go was to get out from behind this desk and back in the lab. Or so I keep telling myself.

  John would be willing to take it—he’ll be the highest-ranking engineer aboard—but he’s ineligible on account of not being able to use a spacesuit. One lovely part of the job will be supervising EVA drills. You do have to be reasonably good with a suit to work on the hull of an accelerating vessel, even at a small fraction of a gee. If you fall off you’re just gone.

  I don’t mind doubling up on jobs; we’ll all have to do that for a few years. I asked for food service; cooking was my hobby on Earth. But they didn’t want to waste all those years of administration experience. I feel like a prisoner whose sentence has been extended because he was so good at being incarcerated.

  Complaining to Sandra Berrigan didn’t help much. She said my feelings had been taken into consideration, but that it was a fact of life that most scientists and engineers who are good administrators are good in spite of not liking the job.

  Marianne’s second job is Entertainment Director. That makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose. She has a lot of experience in music and is one of those freaks with an eidetic memory for movies and plays. She was a little disappointed, though, hoping for something less frivolous. Seems like a pretty important job to me. There’ll be an awful lot of people just twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their replacements to grow up and be trained.

  The architects are going crazy, trying to design a star-ship that is also a dwelling for a population that stays stable for seventy-eight years and then grows like a yeast culture. I think the real problem is eleven egos all conscious of the fact that this is the most important project they will ever work on.

  I wouldn’t like to be in Berrigan’s shoes. When she okays the design she’ll make one friend for life—and ten enemies. That’s another thing that makes administration so attractive. If you keep at it long enough, you get to offend everybody.

  Charlie’s Will

  The charlie’s name was Storm. He lived in one corner of the old hospital, most of which was a huge dusty tomb. He helped Jeff and Tad set up quarters next to his. While they swept and scrubbed they tried to pry information out of one another.

  “What is the business with the fingers?” Jeff asked.

  “Just to tell when they can’t feel pain any more. That’s when we butcher ‘em. You let the death go all the way, the meat gets rotten.”

  “Sounds like it’s against Charlie’s Will,” Tad said. “Rushing it.”

  “Naw, they’ve got it all worked out. Our first charlie was a guy name Holy Joe, he wrote it all down. He was the first one to be meat, too.” He leaned on his broom. “What, you guys don’t eat meat up north?”

  “Not human meat,” Tad said. “Not our family, at least.

  We’ve got pigs and chickens.”

  Storm nodded. “Seen pictures in books. All we get is fish and sometimes a turtle. Get really tired of fish all the time.”

  “How did you get to be a charlie?” Jeff asked.

  “Reading. When the charlie gets the death, whoever reads the best gets to be the new charlie. Guess that’ll be you after me. Better learn how to butcher. Hard part is the bones, leaving the bones.”

  Jeff nodded. “How old are you?”

  “Just turned seventeen. Got a couple years.” Maybe a hundred, Jeff thought.

  “What about General?” Tad asked.

  “Almost twenty, w
aiting. How about you?”

  “Sixteen,” Tad said, perhaps too quickly. “Healer’s thirty-six.”

  “Old before the war.” Storm shook his head. “Bet you went to college.”

  “Seven years.”

  “Oh, say…” Storm looked at his watch, a reflex Jeff had not seen in years. “Newsman’s at the college now. General said you’d want to meet him.”

  “He’s an oldie?”

  “Is he ever. Come on.”

  They bicycled across the Island to the campus of the University of the Media. Jeff’s heart raced when he saw a dish pointed skyward, but Storm said the guts of it had been torn out. Nobody wanted anything to do with the charlie-damned spacers.

  They opened the door into the library and walked into a stiff wall of cold air. The building was set up with independent solar power, and the air conditioners hadn’t yet broken down. They walked past rows of old bound books and stepped onto a liftshaft. Storm punched Five and they rose swiftly.

  They came to a windowless door marked STUDIO and Storm knocked lightly. The man who opened the door was bigger than Jeff, huge shoulders and chest riding an immense belly. Bald and wrinkled, perhaps over sixty. He squinted stupidly at Jeff. “You’re that Healer.”

  “That’s right.” Jeff held out his hand. Newsman looked at it, blinked, and then engulfed it softly.

  He opened the door wide and turned his back on them, clumping toward a cube console. “I got the news. What day you want?”

  Jeff shrugged and said his birthday: “May 15, 2054.” Newsman scowled with concentration and slowly punched buttons on the console. A warning bell rang; he cleared the keyboard and started over patiently.

  When the headlines appeared, he broke into a smile. “Never did this one before, I think.”

  (1) XEROX LOBBY CLAIMS VOTE FRAUD IN AFRICA-REFEREN-DUM

  (2) SPRING DROUGHT WILL BRING NEW HIGH IN GRAIN PRICES

  (3) ATTEMPT ON SENATOR KEENE’S LIFE FOILED

  (4) TROPICAL STORM BECOMES HURRICANE BUTCH, THREATENS PR