Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future, Page 3

  Outside of the cities, the wheel-shaped World was mainly parkland, carefully manicured by an army of horticulturists. O’Hara admired its formal beauty but preferred the wildness of New New’s park. She also found it disconcerting to have to step over and around people casually copulating on the path. Charlie primly pointed out that they wouldn’t be doing it in public if they didn’t want people to share their joy. O’Hara would just as soon have had them keep their joy to themselves.

  The swimming pool was the worst. Acres of couples, and larger organizations, doing what came naturally (or with some effort). After much cajoling she joined Charlie there in public bliss, and was obscurely annoyed that nobody watched.

  A bigger step was having sex with other people, which Charlie insisted was necessary. The people were invariably gentle and polite—once you got used to total strangers asking you to do things you’d never done even in your imagination—but she was surprised to find most of the experiences boring, because most of the people were boring. They seemed appallingly ignorant and smug. They had no curiosity about New New or even Earth, but could drone on forever about family, religion, sex, and jobs, in roughly that order. At least there was never any weather.

  She gamely tried almost everything that Charlie suggested, and learned more from the failures than the successes. Some of the knowledge troubled her deeply.

  The padded ropes. Charlie explained it to her and showed her the scriptural passage about it, about helplessness and trust. It seemed innocuous, if somewhat silly, but when Charlie started to tie her up she began to struggle, seized with mindless terror; she even bit him while he was trying to release her. She saw then that a large part of her love was self-love, pride in taming the beast, and the other side of the tarnished coin was fear of his huge strength.

  Charlie made light of it, and even showed off the wound his “red Devil” had given him. But things changed, rapidly. Charlie was hard to find during the day and fell into deep sleep at night; O’Hara spent more time with her books, studying ahead of the assignments she had brought along. By the time they got aboard the shuttle for New New, they were distantly polite with one another. Two months later, Charlie emigrated to Devon’s World, leaving her with confused memories and a disturbing fund of experience, some of which could get her a good job in Las Vegas, a city she had never planned to visit.

  Sons of Judah and Prometheus

  (From Sons of Prometheus: An Informal History of the Deucalion and Janus Projects, by John Ogelby et al., copyright © 2119 by Gulf/Western Corporation, New New York)

  I’m John Ogelby and I was the one who introduced Marianne O’Hara to Daniel Anderson. Dan and I are both mudballers, though I was permanently committed to living in New New, and Dan had every intention of eventually returning to Earth.

  Dan was on a research grant from Cyanamid International. He was a specialist in oil-shale chemistry, which made him quite valuable to the CC Section, where I was the token strength-of-materials man.

  The CC stood for “carbonaceous chondrite,” and to most Worlds people those two words spelled freedom. Our section must have been one of the most exciting—and excited—places to work in the eighties. Every test tube and caliper was heavy with destiny, yes, and the atmosphere was so clogged with Significance that Dan and I, the only mudballers, had to flee every now and then, to regain perspective. Talk about Earth and remember that there was more to the human condition than could be perceived inside a spinning rock full of slightly wonky people. Nice people, but wonky.

  In retrospect, I can see that my attitude was shortsighted. But since nobody now will admit to having had that attitude, let me set it down here briefly. I could never resist a joke at my own expense.

  Between the lunar mines and the bowels of New New, the Worlds would have had raw materials enough to increase their number a thousandfold or more, if all you needed for a World was a pressure vessel full of oxygen, shielded from radiation. But you also need organic material and water, and we suffered from a marked deficiency of those.

  If the Worlds were ever to become a closed system, independent of Earth, they had to have an outside source of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. Simply put, you burn the hydrogen for water; burn the carbon for carbon dioxide that plants will turn to food; plow the nitrogen into the soil so the food can have protein. Closed-system agriculture is not a hundred percent efficient, so it can’t support a stable population, let alone an expanding one, without a constant infusion of these three elements.

  There are three sources for these elements: the Earth, the asteroids, and comets, in decreasing order of handiness. Only asteroids of the carbonaceous chondritic type are useful, and most CCs are in damned difficult orbits. They found an accessible one, though, and named it Deucalion, and sent a bunch of unlucky engineers out to haul it in.

  It was going to be a slow business, twenty-eight years. We couldn’t use brute force, as was done with New New, because CCs are relatively fragile. One shaped charge and all you’d have would be ten million tons of dirt flying in every direction. So the first team set up O’Neill-type mass drivers at each pole, and settled in for a long, slow push—and died abruptly. It couldn’t happen in a million years, a two-tonne meteor impact, but it did happen, and I was doubly glad I hadn’t volunteered for that trip, or for any of the six replacement teams. Not that they would particularly want an SoM engineer who couldn’t fit into a space suit.

  Dan and I both thought it was a quixotic enterprise, a century or so premature. The Worlds were getting from Earth a constant supply of organics in the form of luxury food, which was a universally appreciated sign of status (and about the only thing you could buy, at least in New New). A well-aged Kansas City steak cost less than a day’s salary. I had one almost every Sunday—with asparagus, by God, and washed down with a Coke. I never could abide fish, and a steady diet of New New’s rabbit-chicken-goat regimen could turn an otherwise sane person to vegetarianism.

  The point is, all that steak, asparagus, caviar, and what-not went straight from the shuttle into the biosphere. Next year it would come back to you as curried-goat molecules (to cite my least favorite of New New’s culinary abominations). All the Worlds were set up to recycle sewage and exhaled CO2 into new food, and the Earth was supplying plenty of surplus organics to make up for inefficiencies in the system. To make food out of cold rock was going to take a whole new set of systems, expensive ones, and the end result was going to be yet more trout and Hassen-pfeffer, and I would still be shelling out for steak. If there were some way to turn Deucalion into a cattle ranch, I would’ve been all for it.

  So Dan and I were wrong. If everything operated as efficiently as hindsight, they’d have to scotch the laws of thermodynamics. But I was going to tell you about bringing the two of them together, Dan and O’Hara.

  O’Hara and I were close friends, for reasons I did not care to examine too closely, and at this time of her life she was going through mates as if they were changes of underwear, so I thought it might be a friendly gesture to introduce her to Dan, in case there might be some chemistry there besides the oil-shale variety.

  When our off-shifts and her class schedule finally meshed, we met at the Light Head, a quarter-gee tavern one level down from my flat. I went there frequently, not only because of the light gravity, but because they usually had a few bottles of Guinness. It didn’t taste anything like the Dublin variety, since it doesn’t travel well, but it was better than the thin brew your ration book got you. And it made me feel biospherically virtuous, giving New New a couple of pints of water recycled from the River Liffey (at Trinity we always maintained that Liffey water suffered nothing in flavor and appearance by being passed through a kidney or two).

  Dan came from old New York, which was where O’Hara would be spending much of her time on Earth. Since she was to leave in a couple of months, I thought she would welcome talking to him.

  Well, we got off on the wrong foot Dan and I were talking about the Deucalion project when O’Hara came i
n, and we were being slightly sarcastic. She took offense, and tried to argue the Worlds’ case, citing as one instance the United States, which had to become independent of England before it could grow. An unfortunate argument, and I kept my silence, but Dan had to point out that Canada did quite well under the yoke of the Crown and had managed to avoid having two civil wars in the process.

  That got O’Hara truly off, she being a local America expert and also young enough to believe that there were analytical answers to this sort of question. She compounded an interesting argument out of demographics, climate, distribution of resources, sectionalism, and God knows what else, which I was unable to evaluate (I’ve been to America, but only to study composite materials, not history). Dan wound up agreeing with her, and apologizing, though whether it was from the brain or somewhere south of that, I couldn’t say.

  O’Hara always was an odd person in many ways, but in this she was no different from anybody else: to lose an argument gracefully was a shortcut to her friendship. The rest of the evening was very cordial, not to say slightly drunken, and they left the Light Head arm in arm. For several days thereafter Dan showed up for work late and tired, and I dare say O’Hara probably missed a few classes.

  (None of this is meant to condemn O’Hara’s behavior. You must remember that this was the eighties, and sexual morality was much looser than it is today. A young single person with no line obligations was expected to “butterfly,” lovely verb.)

  Over the ensuing weeks I must admit I grew annoyed with myself for having introduced them, and was jealous of Dan for the O’Hara-time he stole from me. But if ever two people were made for one another, it was that pair. From that first night to the day O’Hara left for Earth, they were inseparable.

  10

  Chemistry lesson

  O’Hara didn’t like him at first. The Light Head is a fine little bar, but women are generally immune to its main attraction, a low-gee stripper. She was unreasonably annoyed by the way his eyes kept wandering, and said some outrageous things, to nail down his attention and John’s.

  So they spent a lively hour arguing, then a half hour conceding, during which Daniel’s eyes didn’t wander. O’Hara found herself liking him, and casually decided that she would try to lure him into her. He didn’t take much luring.

  It was a difficult, vulnerable time of life for her. She’d been just nineteen when Charlie left her, and hadn’t had enough experience with such things to handle it gracefully. She was butterflying with grim determination, taking to bed almost anybody who could get there under his own power. By chance or her unconscious design, though, none of those men approached being her intellectual equal. Daniel Anderson did, and that was going to make a considerable difference.

  By Devonite standards, Daniel would not have been considered a good lover. Their slang for men like him was “hard place”: he had the minimum physical requisite but none of the skills they prized so highly. To O’Hara that was less a disadvantage than an interesting challenge. She enjoyed being good at things, and showing off her talents. So Daniel became the latest draftee into the platoon of men who indirectly benefited from Charlie Devon’s religious upbringing.

  He was the first one who didn’t seem to be particularly impressed. Grateful, yes, and properly responsive to her ministrations, but from the beginning he seemed more interested in her brain than in the other organs. Rather than flattering her, this made O’Hara anxious. She had always taken her mind for granted.

  But that was evidently what it took to make her fall in love. Intellectual combat she searched out all of Daniel’s most cherished beliefs and held them up to analysis, even ridicule; he gave it right back. They fenced and sparred and gleefully shouted each other down, and usually wound up in bed. It was an odd combination, pepper and honey, but they both responded to it. Within days, they had captured one another, and they grew ever closer during the two months she had remaining.

  11

  Leavings

  “You’ve got to be sensible.” They were squeezed together in the bed that took up a third of Anderson’s small room.

  “I know, I know.” O’Hara sat drawn up tightly, chin on knees, arms wrapped around her legs. Staring at the blank wall.

  “You’re overreacting. There was almost no chance.”

  “Bureaucrats.” O’Hara had tried to have her trip to Earth delayed six months, until it was nearer time for Anderson to go back. After eight weeks she got her reply: Denied.

  “You can’t pass it up. They won’t give you another chance.”

  “They might. My record—”

  “Your record will show that you were given the opportunity of a lifetime and refused it for the sake of a love affair. Drink?”

  “No.” Daniel inchwormed out of bed and squirted some wine into a cup.

  “Mind?” He held up his weekly cigarette.

  “Go ahead.” The acrid smell filled the room quickly. To O’Hara it was exotic, but it made her want to sneeze. “I guess a lot of people on Earth smoke.”

  “Depends on where you go. It’s illegal some places, like the Alexandrian Dominion. California.” He set the cup on the bedstand and slid in next to her, pulling the cover up to his waist. “Try a puff?”

  “No. I might like it.” None of the Worlds grew tobacco. She slid herself under the cover, up to her breasts, and dabbed at her eyes with a corner of it.

  “I don’t want to see you leave, either.”

  “I’m glad you finally said that” There was an awkward silence. “Sorry. Unfair.”

  “All’s fair.”

  She rested her hand on his thigh, under the cover. “Nothing is, really. First Law of the Universe.”

  “Philosophy.” He blew a smoke ring. “How long will it take you to finish that damned thing?”

  12

  Down to Earth

  A rich tourist can get from New New York back to Earth in a little more than a day. Marianne O’Hara’s trip was going to take two weeks.

  Her goodbye to Daniel Anderson was as awkward and contrary to plan as such things always are. (John Ogelby had given her an avuncular kiss the night before, pleading that work pressure would keep him from seeing her off, which wasn’t true.) She boarded the slowboat feeling sad and confused, and slightly ill from all the shots, and not thrilled at the prospect of two weeks of weightlessness.

  Actually, her slowboat was a triumph of the electrical engineer’s art Its forebears, which had first made practical the transfer of large masses from high orbit to Earth, were really slow, taking months to spiral in.

  The few dozen passengers and their life support system made up barely two percent of the huge vehicle’s pay-load. The rest of the cargo was industrial materials that couldn’t be made on Earth. Light and ultrastrong foamsteel girders from New New. Whisker matrices from Von Braun. Impossibly pure beryllium from Devon’s World, tonnes of it, and exotic alloys from B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah and Mazeltov. Each weekly flight involved an exchange of money equivalent to the gross national product of a small country.

  The people riding on top were baggage, an afterthought The accommodations and food reflected this.

  O’Hara spent a lot of her time exercising. Three stationary bicycle contraptions that could be worked with hands or feet stood opposite the only window in the craft Faced with the prospect of walking around for a year in Earth-normal gravity, she exercised her legs most. Also, being strapped on the bicycle was the only opportunity she had to sit down, that posture being unnatural in zerogee. She worked up quite a sweat and got it back in the form of one liter of water per day. for washing.

  She slept well, strapped up standing against the wall, and read a lot of books and magazines, and watched more cube than she ever had in her life, and became an expert in the art of the zerogee toilet. She kept to herself. There would be a year of being nice to strangers, groundhogs at that. Mudballers. Earthies. Must forget those words for the time being; must not bristle at being called a spacer. As if there were no differe
nce between a Devonite and a Yorker.

  For days there seemed to be no change in the appearance of the Earth: the same face she had seen all her life, as New New marched in lockstep over northern Brazil. Then Africa and Europe peeked over the edge, and the Americas began to slide away. Sere Asia over the vast Indian Ocean. One day there was almost nothing but water, the Pacific framed by little bits of Australia and Alaska. The globe began to grow, and eventually its rotation was perceptible from hour to hour.

  A fat nuclear tug was waiting for them at the edge of the Van Allen belts, through which the ion-drive slowboat could not pass. They switched payloads. The outward-bound cargo was mostly hydrogen, food, acids, and a few economy-class passengers, including a dance troupe cursing their tightwad manager.

  O’Hara and the others felt acceleration for the first time, a gentle nudge. They cruised into low Earth orbit—the globe now spinning dizzily below them, once each ninety minutes-and the passengers transferred to a small shuttle-craft (the cargo went into large cone-shaped crafts called “dumbos,” which would be robot-guided into splashdowns near the purchasers of each load).

  Even though she had taken the required tranquilizer, O’Hara felt growing excitement, along with a little apprehension. In space, almost all transportation is graceful and slow, not to say boring. She knew the shuttle would be fast and violent, though safe: only two had crashed in her life-time.

  She strapped herself in and waited. There was no countdown, just a steady growing surge of acceleration. From her window she could see the dumbos shrink away, then sweep out of her field of view as the shuttle tilted to present maximum area to the atmosphere, for braking. She was weightless again, no feeling of motion. Her window showed nothing but stars.