by Joe Haldeman
While we were doing that, the children dug sixteen bunkers, equally spaced around the perimeter, and with some trepidation I allowed the holes to be stocked with weapons and ammunition. The bloodbath had had a so-bering effect, though, and the children treated the weapons with exaggerated caution.
There was no break in the wire. The only way in or out of the farm, for the time being, would be by floater. We found another workable one, a utility pickup, and taught Indira and two others how to fly, after a fashion. They took the Fromme brothers out on daily hunting sorties that were also reconnaissance, trying to find large groups of children before they found us.
Friedman, always full of good news, pointed out that though the wire would protect us from another attack of the same kind, it wouldn’t be much of an obstacle if somebody else had managed to break into an armory. A few seconds of concentrated laser fire would melt a hole in the fence, or it could be breached by explosives.
I wondered whether our situation was a microcosm of the near future—a few people living well but in anxious isolation. Perhaps this was unavoidable for a time, but I could hope that it would prove to be only a period of transition, not a grisly New Order.
The ferocity of the attack and the way the children seemed indifferent toward dying made me wonder whether Jeff had been wrong in thinking that Charlie’s Country only extended into Georgia. None of the children on the farm had ever heard of it until the Fromme boys came. But maybe it was a behavior pattern that cropped up independent of Manson’s crazy writings. I talked to Dr. Long, who had specialized in child psychology before the war, and he wasn’t too much help. After all, not even the most desperate of prewar cultures had anything like the background of helpless despair these children endured. His practice had been limited to children who had grown up in New New, with an occasional immigrant for variety. More bedwetting than mass murder.
When the new trouble first began, we thought it was a reaction to stress, to the isolation and tension of living inside the razor wall. We increased the amount of time each person spent outside, making up search missions to give the kids something to do. But they became increasingly irritable and hard to control, and the doctors spent long days treating vague complaints.
And then Indira got sick. One morning she didn’t get out of bed, and when we shook her awake she mumbled incoherent nonsense. She was incontinent and wouldn’t eat. We turned my cabin into a sickroom and fed her intravenously while the doctors and Harry Volker ran tests. They were in constant communication with medical people in New New, who could only confirm the obvious: It was the death. There was nothing anyone could do.
We had reinoculated everyone with the vaccine our first day here, to be on the safe side. Either Indira was somehow unaffected by the vaccine, or the vaccine didn’t work. Which meant we were all doomed.
Tishkyevich found the answer. We didn’t have anything like a complete medical laboratory, but she was able to take blood samples from Indira, the other children, and us, and compare forcegrown disease cultures from each. Indira and the children had a mutated form of the death, but none of us had it. That was a relief, but perplexing. Then Galina deduced the truth: We had given it to them. Except for Rocky, Friedman, Ahmed, and me, none of the party had ever been to Earth; most of them represented several generations of biological isolation from the home planet. When the virus settled into our lungs it found a strange new ecology. In the process of trying to adapt to one or all of us, it changed.
We were evidently protected the same way we were protected from other Earth diseases. The virus couldn’t survive our beefed-up immune systems. But before it perished some of it got back out, and reinfected the children.
The scientists at New New confirmed Galina’s explanation. They also said it would be easy to produce an antigen specific to the mutation, if we would bring up a blood sample.
No children were around while this was going on. That was good. We had to leave, and quickly, and preferably not in a hail of bullets.
Irrationally, I wanted to stay until Indira died. It felt like we were deserting her. But there was really nothing we could do, and she might hold on for a week or more. So at two in the morning, cold rain misting down, we met at the school bus and drifted away.
We left the monitor so we could call from the Mercedes and explain what had happened, and that a new vaccine would be coming in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the first person to hear the beeping and come into the sick-room was Horace Fromme. He just stared sullenly while I talked, and before I could finish, his image tilted and slid away and then the screen went dead. He’d turned over the table that held the monitor.
There was nothing more we could do, and staying longer might be dangerous. It was getting light; the other floater could reach Kennedy in a half hour, with enough armament to reduce the Mercedes to small bits of scrap metal. We strapped in and blasted off. Everything had happened so fast. It wasn’t till we were in orbit that it hit me: This part of my life was over. I would never go to Earth again. Even if Jeff was alive, I would never see him.
Charlie’s Will
Storm listened without comment for several minutes while Jeff explained how the vaccine worked, where it came from, and how he had been administering it through southern Florida. Storm kept the gun dangling loosely at his side.
“Supposing things are like you say,” he said slowly. “There’s something I don’t get. How come the spacers would go to that trouble? How come you go to all that trouble?”
“The Worlds need us back on our feet,” Jeff said. “They have a hard time getting along without the Earth.”
“No skin off you. You could just stay in a safe place and doctor people.”
“He couldn’t take the cold,” Tad said. “Had to get as far south as he could.”
He frowned and scratched his chin. “Still didn’t have to use the vaccine on anybody. Why you take the chance?”
“Loneliness,” Jeff said. “I might live another eighty years. I want company.”
Storm shook his head. “Well, hell.” He put the shot-gun-pistol away in his shirt pouch. “Guess I’ll believe you for the time being. I gotta keep it secret, though?”
“For as long as possible,” Jeff said. “When everybody starts getting gray hair, they’ll probably figure it out.”
The next day General left with a war party to head toward Ciudad Miami—the crater that used to be Miami—on a meat-gathering expedition. Jeff held sick call as usual, then sequestered himself in the University of the Media library.
Studying electronics didn’t present the practical problems he’d encountered years before, trying to learn some medicine. The university had a working database system; he didn’t have to rely on antique books. His main problem was an absolute lack of talent. He’d enrolled in a physics survey course his second year of college, but dropped it and transferred to chemistry before the first test.
Now he was doggedly worrying through the mysteries of resistors and capacitors, vaguely aware of how much work was ahead before he got to the quantum electronics he’d need to repair the transceiver. Not being able to make hard copies of the texts was frustrating. He did have a comprehensive wiring diagram for the transceiver, over a hundred pages of hieroglyphics, and whenever he learned a new symbol he would go through the booklet and circle everything that looked like it. He hoped that eventually he would develop some sort of gestalt understanding of the thing’s structure, but so far it was still a random assortment of gibberish.
Tad and Storm were no help, of course, and Newsman was a definite liability. He would come down to the carrel to watch Jeff work, muttering silly questions and non sequiturs. Jeff’s ruse was that he was working on understanding the medical machines at the hospital, so he had to make up a line of moderately convincing nonsense while he worked, which didn’t help his concentration.
Newsman always napped in the afternoon, though, which gave Jeff time to sneak down to the dish installation occasionally, and try to coordinate wh
at he was learning with the actual devices there. Whole blocks of circuit boards were still intact, and he’d managed to match up nearly half of them with pages in the booklet. The smashed-up equipment that littered the floor no doubt had a lot that could be salvaged, and there was a closet full of spare parts. A competent electronics engineer could probably go in with a screwdriver and make some sort of working transmitter in an afternoon. Jeff hoped he’d be able to do it sometime before the turn of the century.
Jeff and Tad were in the library, Jeff studying circuits and Tad with Newsman, watching an old animalporn movie, when a runner came and said the two of them and Storm were supposed to come downtown right away. General was back and he needed some advice.
So Jeff painfully mounted a bicycle, cursing for the thousandth time the memory of old Holy Joe, who had decreed floaters blasphemous and sent them all pilotless out over the horizon. They stopped by at the jail/church and woke up Storm.
General was sitting on the steps of City Hall with Hotbox lying next to him, her head in his lap. As they approached, he disengaged her and stood up.
“Come on inside,” he said, smiling. “Someone you wanta meet.”
Standing alone in the foyer, feet hobbled, was Mary Sue, the eldest of the family Tad had left behind. Her face was bruised and swollen. “That’s him,” she said, pointing. “Healer. He’s the one keeps people from gettin’ the death.”
“Storm,” General said, “take him.”
Storm put his hand on Jeff’s arm. “Hold on,” he said. “Who is this slit?”
“She used to belong to him,” he said, nodding at Tad. “He gets it, too.”
“Met some people come down from Atlanta,” she said. “They don’ get the death there no more, said it was shots they got from the sky people, the spacers. He’s one of ‘em. We followed the way you two went. Nobody’s got the death anyplace you went, not since you give ‘em shots. Typhoid shots.”
“I’ve never been off the Earth,” Jeff said. “I’m not a spacer.”
“But you’re in with ‘em,” she said. “That medicine come down in a rocket. People seen it.”
“It’s true, isn’t it,” General said.
Jeff hesitated. “Substantially. But Tad doesn’t have anything to do with it. New New York sent me the medicine, and I’ve given it to thousands of people. No one here is going to get the death. You can live a normal life span if you want.”
“What’s normal?”
“Hundred twenty, more or less.”
General made a strained growling noise in his throat. “Kill him.”
Storm didn’t move. “Maybe we better—”
“You kill him. Right here.”
The priest pulled his shotgun-pistol out of his shirt pouch and pushed Jeff roughly to his knees. He held the gun to his head. “You want to pray to Christ and Charlie?” he said in a quavering voice.
Jeff’s eyes were squeezed shut, teeth clenched. “Fuck them both,” he said clearly.
“You—” General stepped forward to kick. Storm swung the pistol up and fired point-blank, ripping a large hole out of the center of General’s chest. He staggered backwards a couple of steps, slipped in his own blood, and fell heavily. Mary Sue was covered with gore but didn’t react.
Storm heard a noise and spun around. Hotbox was trying to open the door and cock a pistol simultaneously. He fired and she fell back down the stars in a shower of glass and blood.
“Get up, get up!” Storm put a hand under Jeff’s arm and hoisted him to his feet. “We gotta find guns for you two—go get Major. We get him, I think we’re okay, we’re in charge.”
“You don’t gotta,” Mary Sue said calmly. “He’s in back there, dressed out and smoked.”
“What he do?”
“Up in Islamorada. He told General most of the boys didn’ want Healer killed. So General killed him.”
“Was it true?” Jeff asked. “About the others?”
“Guess so. Most of ‘em run away.” She licked the blood on her lips. “Christ and Charlie. It just don’ make sense.”
7
People weren’t as paranoid about infection as they used to be, but we still spent a week in isolation, watching the cucumbers and tomatoes grow. It only took two days to synthesize the new antigen, since the scientists knew what they were looking for, and a small drone carrying the medicine got to the children before we left isolation.
We watched it on flatscreen. The magnification wasn’t quite enough to make out individual people, but we could see there were still some children at the compound. They had evidently opened part of the razor wire; one person went out and retrieved the medicine. I hoped they had the sense to use it.
Some of the ones who attacked the farm, certainly the ones who mutilated Sara O’Brien, would also have been exposed. They would die, which bothered me not at all, but I was afraid they might first become carriers for this new version of the death. Our epidemiologists said it wouldn’t happen; the population was too spread out. If it did happen, we’d have to start over, sending another hundred million doses dirtside. If the Yorkers would stand for it—there was no end of grumbling about the original project, which had been by far the most expensive public health undertaking in the history of the Worlds.
I got my old job back with Start-up and put in a full week’s work while we were sequestered. The transition back to “normal” family life was a little more complicated.
It was partly my fault. I had gotten really sweet on Sam, shared troubles and so forth, and since the medics were kind enough to provide us a little privacy, individual tents, I took it upon myself to extend his sexual education into the realm of free fall. At least twice a day.
My emotions toward him should have been simple, but they weren’t. Sometimes he made me feel like a girl again. Sometimes I felt frankly maternal toward him. And all sorts of states in between.
It was obvious to the others what was going on. Most of them, I think, were amused, and most conventionally minded their own business, but some were quite scan-dalized. After all, we were “home,” even though hundreds of meters of hard vacuum separated me from my husbands’ bedrooms. Some, like Maria Mandell and Louise Dore (and Martin Thiele, I think) wanted a fling at that lean long body themselves, and resented the old hag pulling rank on them. That was part of Sam’s attraction, too. I hadn’t made anybody jealous, or shocked anybody, in years.
After the week was up, though, I had to face the problem of what I was going to do with him, and with myself. I was tempted to ask him to marry us, but I didn’t really know him well enough—and it would be too much like getting back at Daniel.
I remembered the term “shipboard romance” from old novels, and I suppose the smart thing would have been to treat it just like that, kiss him good-bye before we came through the airlock, and then walk away, back to my normal life. I couldn’t quite do it.
We had a small reunion party, necessarily cramped, up in John’s flat. Evelyn was shy and deferential. I didn’t think it was the right time to discuss Sam (perversely, I didn’t want to shock Evelyn). We talked about the New York adventure, and I caught up on Janus gossip.
They’ve started building S-2, Newhome, using Uchūden as a nucleus. They ‘ve moved the Japanese satellite to a position between New New and Deucalion. It’s a pretty thing, an old-fashioned doughnut design with a delicate landscape painted around the outside. It was undamaged during the war, but the people inside all relocated here. Theoretically it could support one hundred twenty people, but they’d have to be awfully fond of algae. In the prewar days it was periodically resupplied with “real” food, by the Japanese corporations that put it into orbit.
Eventually Uchūden will be the control center of Newhome, the top of a cylindrical column of rock. I’ll probably live there, on top. It’s a strange feeling to watch it, spinning slowly against the stars, knowing that in a couple of years we may move there and never come back.
I’m going to have some trouble from a group that call
s itself God’s Armada, of all things. It’s mostly Devonites, with a few other evangelical types involved. They managed to access my roster and break it down according to religious belief. There are no fundamentalist Devonites among the seven thousand people I’ve chosen so far, and only a few hundred Reform Devonites. Only eighteen percent of the colonists profess religious belief, less than half the percentage that prevails in New New. The Armada served notice they’ll be taking me to court. I’ll try to look on it as an educational experience.
S-1 took off the day after our farm was attacked. If it had been a clear night, it would have looked like the brightest star in the sky. You can still see it now, a bright blue spark in Gemini. (I asked what S-2 will look like when it takes off. Oddly enough, it will be almost invisible. You wouldn’t want to be looking at the exhaust any-way—the gamma radiation would be strong enough to kill at a million kilometers’ distance. We’ll be launching straight “up,” out of the plane of the ecliptic, to get safely away from Earth and New New before we tip over and head for Epsilon.)
On the way back from Earth I’d had a depressed, resigned feeling about Janus. Now I was starting to look forward to it, catching the enthusiasm Dan and Evelyn projected. Even John seemed somewhat excited. With S-1 gone and Uchūden growing, the project was a reality.
About midnight Dan and Evy went back to Dan’s flat. I stayed with John and we made slow love. Afterwards, I broached the subject of Sam.