Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart

Worlds, Book 2

Joe Haldeman

This book is for Rhysling and Joe-Jim, Harriman and Harshaw, Lorenzo and Lazarus, the Menace from Earth and our gal Friday—and all you other zombies who so delightfully live on.

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness—electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself.

A world of made is not a world of born—pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if—listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go

—e e cummings

It had been the third world war or the fourth, depending on who did the counting, but nobody was counting anymore. It was simply “the war”: March 16, 2085, when a third of the world’s population had died in less than a day.

Most of the survivors had no idea why the war had been fought. A breakdown of antiquated systems. A series of misunderstandings. A run of bad luck that culminated in one side’s systems being under the total control of a man who had lost his mind.

The automatic defenses worked quite well; fewer than one in twenty warheads found their marks. So there were still many billions of people left to wonder what to do next, as the radioactive ash settled down, as the biological agents silently spread. There were some who suspected that the worst was yet to come, and they were right.

It was very nearly the end of the world, but it wasn’t the end of civilization. There were still the Worlds, what was left of them: a collection of more-or-less large Earth satellites, a quarter of a million people who didn’t have to worry about fallout or biological warfare. Most of the Worlds had been destroyed during the war, but the largest one had survived, and that’s where most of the people lived: New New York.

1

Marianne O’Hara was in the last group of shuttles to lift off from Earth, just before a direct hit turned the Cape into a radioactive inlet. Born in New New York, she’d been given a trip to Earth by the Education Council, for a year of postdoctoral work.

The six months she did spend on Earth were rather eventful. Her interest in Earth politics led her to join a political action group that turned out to be the cover organization for a cabal of violent revolutionaries. Her only friend in the group, who had also joined out of curiosity, was murdered. She herself was stabbed by a would-be rapist. She had a trip around the world and a small nervous breakdown. Finally, the man she loved managed to save her life by getting her to the Cape in time to leave Earth, but the shuttle had a strict quota system—no groundhogs—and she had to leave him behind. They comforted each other with the lie that he would join her when the trouble was over. But the warheads were already falling.

She knew that she was one of the lucky ones, but when they docked at New New she was still numb with shock and grief. Two men who loved her were waiting. She could hardly remember their names.

For some weeks after the war, life in New New was too desperately busy for much reflection. Survivors from a couple of dozen other Worlds had to be crowded in, and everybody somehow be fed, though more than half of New New’s agricultural modules had been damaged or destroyed. (The “shotgun” missiles couldn’t penetrate New New’s solid rock, but they devastated the structures outside.) They got by on short rations and stored food, but it wasn’t going to last. Modules had to be repaired and rebuilt, new crops sown, animals bred—and quickly. Every able-bodied person was pressed into service.

O’Hara was young and hyper-educated (had her first Ph.D. at age twenty), but none of her formal training was applicable. Like every other young person in New New, she had spent two days a week since the age of twelve doing agricultural and construction chores, but since her destiny clearly lay in other directions, she had only done dog work—slopping hogs and slopping paint—leaving more sophisticated chores to those who needed the training. Nevertheless, her first assignment was animal husbandry: collecting sperm from goats.

They could force estrus in the nannies and didn’t want to leave the rest of it up to nature. So O’Hara stalked through the goat pens with a suction apparatus, checking ID numbers until she found the one billy the computer had selected for a given nanny. Predictably, the billies were not enthusiastic about having sexual relations with a female of another species, so O’Hara got thoroughly butted and trampled and sprayed. It did keep her mind off her troubles, but after a week of low sperm count they decided to give the job to someone with more mass.

She asked for a job in construction and was mildly surprised when she got it. She’d spent many hours playing in zero gravity, but always indoors, and had never even
worn a spacesuit, let alone worked in one. She looked forward to the experience but was a little apprehensive about working in a vacuum.

She was even more apprehensive after her training: one day inside and one day out. Virtually all of the training concerned what to do in case of emergency. If you hear this chime, it’s a solar flare warning. Don’t panic. You have eight minutes to get to a radiation locker. If you hear
this
chime, your air pressure is falling. Don’t panic. You have two minutes at least, to get to the nearest first-aid bubble. Unless you’re also getting cold, which means your suit’s breached. Above all don’t panic. Have your buddy find the breach and put a sticky patch on it. Never be too far from your buddy. Presumably your buddy will not panic. She and thirty others practiced patching and not panicking, and then were given work rosters and unceremoniously dumped out the airlock.

With no special construction skills, O’Hara’s work was mostly fetch-and-carry. This required a certain amount of delicacy and intelligence.

You get around in a spacesuit with the aid of an “oxy gun,” oxygen being the only gas of which the Worlds always had a surplus. It’s just an aimable nozzle connected to a supply of compressed oxygen: you point it in one direction and hold down the trigger, and you go in approximately the opposite direction. Only approximately.

O’Hara and her buddy would get an order, say, for a girder of such-and-so specifications. They would locate the proper stack on their map and cautiously, very cautiously the first few days, jet their way over to it. The stacks were loose bundles of material that got less orderly as time went on. Once they found the right girder, the fun began.

Those girders weighed exactly nothing, being in free fall, but moving one was not just a matter of putting it on your shoulder and hi-ho, away we go. A tonne of girder
still had a tonne’s worth of inertia, even in free fall. Hard to get it started. Hard to point it in the right direction—and hard to tell which direction is right. Because when something’s in orbit, you can’t change its velocity without changing its orbit, however slightly. So you have to aim high or low or sideways, depending on which direction you’re aiming.

O’Hara and her partner would wrestle the girder into what they guessed was the proper orientation, then hang on to either end of it (strong electromagnets on their gloves and boots) and jet away. As the girder crawled its way toward the target, they would use their oxy guns to correct its flight path and slow it down, with luck bringing it to a halt right where the user wanted it. Sometimes they crashed gently, and sometimes they overshot and had to maneuver the damned thing back into position. The work was physically and mentally exhausting, which was just what she needed.

2

O’Hara clumped into the room she shared with Daniel Anderson and sat down hard on the bed. For a minute she just stared at the floor, sagging with fatigue, maybe depression. Then she arranged both pillows and turned on the wall cube, planning to punch up the novel she was reading. But the cube was showing a pleasant modern dance performance that she’d never seen, so she eased back onto the pillows and let herself be entertained.

In a few minutes Anderson came in. “Home early?” she said.

“Going back later.” He set his bag down on the dresser and stretched. “We started some tests, color chromatography, and can’t do anything until they’re ready. Couple of hours. Eat yet?”

“Not hungry.” She turned off the dance program.

“You ought to eat something.”

“I guess.” She slid down to a horizontal position and put her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling.

“Bad day out there?”

“The usual.” She laughed suddenly. “You know what I’ve got?”

“Is it catching?”

“Penis envy. I’ve got a delayed case of penis envy.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You never studied psychology.”

Daniel shrugged. “The psychology of oil shale is pretty well established. It just sits there. You can say anything about it and it doesn’t mind.”

“Freud thought little girls had penis envy. They saw little boys pee in any direction they wanted, and they knew they’d never be able to do that, and felt uncompleted.”

“Are you serious?”

“Part way, I really am. Not in the Freudian way.” She ran her fingers through her short red hair. “Did you ever try to do anything difficult while wearing a wet diaper?”

He sat on the bed and put his hand, neutrally, on her hip. “I guess learning to walk is pretty challenging. Don’t remember that far back.”

“I tried the catheter-style suit but just couldn’t work in it. It was like…it was awful.”

Daniel nodded. “Most women can’t use them.” He was from Earth but had spent a lot of time in spacesuits.

“So I get a diaper. A wet diaper, if we’re out long enough.”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“Who’s embarrassed? It’s just distracting, uncomfortable. I’m getting a rash. I want a penis and a hose, just during working hours.”

Daniel laughed. “Those hoses aren’t all they might be.

You get cold enough, or startled, and you’ll retract out of it, but it feels like you still have it on. Nasty surprise when you start filling your boot.”

“Really?” She looked thoughtful. “What about erections?”

“Anybody who can get an erection in a spacesuit is in the wrong line of work.” They laughed together and he cautiously moved his hand; she stopped him.

“Not quite yet,” she said quietly.

“It’s all right.” They had been lovers when she went to Earth, and had planned to marry when she came back.

He stood up quickly and went to the dresser—two steps; the bed took up most of the cubicle—and pulled a comb through his hair.

“Do you want me to sleep someplace else until it gets better?” she asked.

“Of course not. I haven’t had such interesting dreams in twenty years.”

“Seriously. I feel like…such a—”

His reflection stared at her. “I can live with your grief easier than you can. And I want to be the one around when you do recover.”

“I didn’t mean I’d move in with somebody else. I could get a hot berth in the labor dormitory.”

“Sure you could. And when they found out I was living here alone, they’d assign me a dormitory space too. Crowded as things are, it might take years to get a room again.”

O’Hara turned to face the wall. “Nice to feel useful.”

He opened his mouth and closed it, and set the comb down quietly. “Anyhow, I’m meeting John for chop. Want to come along?”

“Oh.” She sat up and rubbed her face vigorously with both hands. “Might as well. See what they did to the rice this time.” She went to Daniel and hugged him, or leaned on him, from behind. “I’m sorry.”