by Joe Haldeman
The soup was a bland chowder of fish and bean curd. They took their bowls outside; the cafeteria’s air conditioning was set too high for Jeff’s joints.
“You don’t want to go back north because it’s too cold. Sure as hell ain’t goin’ any other direction without a boat We stay here, our luck’s gonna run out.”
“I don’t know,” Jeff said. “We may have plenty of time. And things could change.”
“Haven’t seen much change.” Tad went back inside to scrape himself some salt.
“You ever think about the Worlds?” Jeff said when he returned.
“Aw, they’re all dead. Saw it on the cube the day of the war.”
“What if that was a lie? Suppose they aren’t all dead.”
“So what? They ain’t comin’ down here and we ain’t goin’ up there.”
“You think they caused the war?”
“Huh? Sure, them and the Easter Bunny. It was the fuckin’ Soshies. Maybe us, who cares anymore?”
Jeff finished his soup in thoughtful silence. “They are still there. That’s where I got the vaccine.”
“You’re shittin’ me. How the hell you get up there?”
“I didn’t go there. They sent it down, in a robot rocket. From New New York.”
“You feel all right?”
“It’s true. That’s why I needed the fuel cell from you, so I could talk to them, let them know where to send it.”
“New New York, that’s where the girl was from. That Newsman showed us the picture of.”
“Yes, and I…I’ve talked to her, from the hospital in Plant City. She helped with the vaccine. She’s even been back to Earth, since the war, to Africa.”
“This is really straight? You’re not yankin’ me off?”
“It’s true.”
“So what, you think she’s comin’ here? Gonna come get you?”
“I don’t think she can. They went to Africa because it was the only place left with a spaceport.” He set down the bowl and stared out into the darkness.
“I’d just like to get back in touch with her. Let her know I’m alive. That’s why I’ve been hanging around the library with Newsman, thinking maybe I could fix up the dish and talk to them up there.”
“The dish antenna, there’s nothin’ wrong with that.”
“Not outside. All the-gear inside’s been pretty well smashed. I think I can learn enough electronics to rig up a simple transmitter, though. We have all the raw materials here and plenty of power.”
“Okay,” Tad said slowly, “so you get to talk with your girl. But that don’t solve anything. We’re still takin’ a big chance stayin’ here. Bigger every day.”
“Maybe not, maybe not. It could be the key.” The door opened behind them, and they both looked up to see Elsie the Cow squeeze through. She was taller than Jeff and weighed twice as much. Her features were large and coarse and she had a downy growth of beard.
“Warm night,” she said, and settled ponderously between them on the steps. She balanced a pail of soup on her lap and stirred it noisily with a large kitchen spoon.
“Come on, Elsie,” Jeff said, “we’re talking man talk.”
“You’re a man,” she said, and slurped at the ladle. “He just a boy. All of ‘em boys.”
“We’re talking,” Tad said. “You want me to hit you?”
“This ain’t your step. You wanna talk, you go talk someplace.”
Jeff stood up. “I’ve had as much of this stuff as I want, anyhow.”
“Yeah.” They took their bowls back inside and went out the back door, heading toward the deserted southern part of the Island, the abandoned naval base.
“You got some kind of a plan?” Tad said.
“Not definite. Just a few notions.” They picked their way along the broken sidewalk. There was no moon, and all the street lights were out in this part of town. “Look at it this way. The oldest people around were thirteen or fourteen when the war came. That’s old enough to have been following politics.”
“Some people, yeah. It’s Florida, though.”
“If we just came right out and explained about the war, about the death being caused by biological warfare, a lot of them would agree with us… most would at least understand, even if they didn’t—”
“But hell. One wrong person says the word and we’re fresh meat. No way around that.”
“The thing to do is to get to those people first. The people in power.”
“General and Major and Hotbox? They’re all buggy. Hungry, too—start talkin’ against Charlie and we’re the menu, sure as shit.”
“There’s Storm. He’s obviously ready.”
“Yeah, but you never see him go against any of them. He’s got a safe place and aims to keep it.”
“It’s a tough problem,” Jeff admitted. “Another reason to get in touch with the spacers. There are lots of people who have special training, dealing with adolescents and crazy people. Psychiatrists, maybe they could give us an angle.”
“What are they gonna come up with that you can’t? Hell, you spent most of your life in school.”
“Mostly criminology, a little business administration. These dingos are murderers, cannibals, and sadists, but they aren’t criminals. They’re normal, by the standards of those around them. Most of what I know about dealing with people just doesn’t apply.”
“I still think we oughta fade. Another couple of months with nobody gettin’ the death, hell. They’re dumb, but they ain’t that dumb.” He stumbled, cursed. “There’s anybody dumb around, it’s you. Why’d you give the vaccine to General and Major? They’d be the first ones to go.”
“That’d be the same as murder.”
“Shit. I don’t understand you at all.” There was a pale flickering light down at the Navy docks. They steered toward it. “Now, Hotbox, I can see keepin’ her. I’d like to pork her myself.”
Jeff laughed. “Just ask.”
“Think I haven’t? Christ and Charlie.” They walked over to the dim pool of light. It was a creepy place, the mountainous warships indistinct shadows looming over them, creaking, smell of greasy rust. It was a mothball fleet; some of the ships had been out of service for most of a century.
“Too bad we can’t take one of these,” Tad said. “We could—”
“Take it where?” Storm stepped quietly out of the darkness, barefoot, holding a pistol. “I been behind you since Duval Street. You guys got some real explainin’ to do.”
5
I do admit to a number of personality defects, none serious, but I never thought jealousy was in my repertoire. Least of all sexual jealousy, since my husbands and I established at the outset, conventionally, that we were all free to do whatever we wanted with whomever. But when I got the news I was suddenly overcome with this alien emotion.
Daniel asked to marry Evelyn Ten. John wouldn’t veto it. I told him I had to think about it, snapped off the monitor, and shocked Sam Wasserman with my vocabulary. I went out into the garden to think. To fume.
I’ve known Evelyn since she was a child. She’s Ahmed’s granddaughter, a born charmer, talented but modest. Also young and quite beautiful, which I had to admit was the problem. I’m no longer one and never was the other.
Leave the coop for six weeks and the goddamned rooster goes on the prowl. Well, I knew it was deeper than that; it had been building for a couple of years. I did spend more time with John, and enjoyed sex with him more, though Daniel had better technique and raw material. The sex itself probably wasn’t that important. I hadn’t given him much affection lately, either, nor asked for much from him. If I needed a shoulder it was always John’s I would go to.
I really had only two choices. I could allow Evelyn to join the line, or ask Daniel to leave it. I didn’t see how I could refuse Evelyn and keep Daniel. So it was really a question of whether I loved Daniel enough to share him. Or little enough not to care. I looked myself straight in the heart for a long time over that. Finally I went back to the mo
nitor and called Evelyn and welcomed her to our family. Asked her to relay my consent to Daniel and give him my love; I couldn’t hog the monitor. I could, of course.
Instead I went back out into the garden, dark now, and sat on the damp earth and listened to things growing. There was a hint of wild honeysuckle on the air, that somehow disgusted me. I didn’t feel much like springtime. Evelyn was twelve years younger than I. Under other circumstances she could be my own child (not as pretty and somewhat lighter in complexion). I think the jealousy faded away there in the garden, but what replaced it was a hollow and cold feeling of mortality. Finally I did cry, but I don’t think it was over Daniel. I think it was over everything dying eventually.
I had a desperate desire, not especially erotic, to go find myself a limber young penis. Rocky or Sam. I even got up and walked toward the cottage where Rocky was sleeping. But at the brick footpath I turned away. He might have company. Or he might say no.
The next day was shift change. Ahmed had been out at the Mercedes for the past week. He came back to the farm and we stretched the foodisolation policy to the extent of one small bottle of gin. It’s not every day that you get a new in-law.
He was cautiously happy but a little concerned about her age. Also, it was odd for a Ten to marry outside of the line, which claimed to trace groundhog roots back to seventeenth-century Africa. He himself was all for it, especially since the war had effectively frozen New New’s gene pool.
(The marriage made me obliquely related to the single postwar addition to that gene pool: Insila, the girl we had brought back from Zaire. Ahmed had adopted her as soon as she came out of isolation.)
By the time we saw the bottom of the bottle he had taught me a half-dozen outrageous phrases in Swahili to surprise Evelyn with. Then he wandered off to bed. I was on night duty, so I had Dr. Long give me a shot of toloxinamide, which compresses all the joys of a. hangover into ten minutes of concentrated woe, followed by remorseful clarity.
I shared the shift with Sam again. He was always good company. I’d chosen him to come along as sort of a wild card. At eighteen he had a certificate in mathematics and most of a second one in historiography. He composed music, popular ballads, and last summer had written a young people’s introduction to calculus. He didn’t have much ambition in the conventional sense; he’d been offered a line apprenticeship and refused it, saying he’d rather stay in school until Janus took off. (That’s how we’d met originally; his name percolated to the top when I was databasing for a parttime ship’s historian.)
There wasn’t really anything to do at night but stay awake. The farm’s “nerve center” was originally a groundskeeper’s office, situated on a slight rise, giving us a view of the whole area. We had the monitor there and a sound-only communications system that Ingred Munkelt had jury-rigged. If anything suspicious happened, we could throw a switch that flooded the area with light. Another switch sent a wake-up buzz to every bedroom and dormitory floor, and unlocked the armory. We had a laser and a scattergun by the door. Otherwise, only Friedman had a weapon; we’d decided on a strict lock-up policy to prevent accidents and keep the murder rate down near zero.
We talked about history and historiography for a couple of hours and played a game of fairy chess. He spotted me a barrel queen and still won in fifteen minutes. Then, while I was putting the pieces away, he demonstrated yet another talent: mental telepathy.
“Uh, you know I overheard your conversation with your husband yesterday. You were pretty upset.”
“Surprised. Yes, upset. I still am, a little.”
“I don’t blame you. I wondered, um, whether you might want, whether your line permits, uh…” He started to make the polite finger sign but instead put his hand lightly on my forearm. His palm was wet and cold. “Would you want to have sex with me as a friend?” he said quickly. “I thought it might help.”
“It would help, a lot.” I put my hand over his. “You do know how old I am.”
“Sure.” He laughed nervously. “I like that. Women my age, we just don’t have anything real to talk about.” He looked around quickly. “Should I put the shades down?”
I tried to stifle a laugh. “Let’s wait until the shift is over, okay? Only another hour and a half.” He agreed, with a winsome look of real pain.
Boys that age should wear loose clothing. Galina and Ingred, who replaced us, could hardly have missed his erection. They were poker-faced, but Galina gave me a roguish wink as we went out the door.
Back at my place, the first iteration was predictably brief. But Sam’s refractory powers were impressive even for a youngster. After the fourth he fell asleep beside me, still inside. It was my first deep, untroubled sleep in a month.
(Sam was curiously ignorant of female geography. He confessed he’d only discovered girls a year before, having spent several years loving an older man, one of his teachers. Such a waste of natural resources.)
The next day we began working on a program of recruitment. Our efforts here would be spectacularly trivial if only sixteen people benefited. We decided it would be best to find loners and people living in twos and threes. If we tried to assimilate a large group, it might lead to an organized power struggle after we left.
I saw the farm as eventually growing into a small town, thousands of people, agriculturally self-sufficient and still close enough to New York to take advantage of the city and serve as a nucleus of power for rebuilding it. Some day I wanted to come back to the city and see it crackling with energy again.
There was some dissension over this ultimate goal, led by Carrie Marchand. A lot of people believed that cities were obsolete; that living in cities contributed to the mental disease that made war possible. A strange point of view to come from someone who grew up inside an oversized tin can. But she had never been to New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, as they had been before the war. As I was stating this argument, I realized that only a handful of adult people ever had been to a real city, let alone every one of the major cities in the non-Socialist world. It made me feel lonely rather than unique. And I did have to admit that the experience colored my judgment profoundly. Carrie made a good case, but my side prevailed. Being boss does simplify the process of debate.
The first stage of recruitment had to be quite selective. We made a couple of hundred flyers describing what we were and how to get in touch with us, and left them in prominent places in book stores and print libraries. We didn’t tell exactly where the farm was, but said we would pick people up at noon outside the Ossining tube station, every clear day.
We distributed the flyer over several hundred square kilometers, but for almost a week it looked like a wasted effort. Every noon Friedman or I would take the school bus inland a few kilometers, then circle around to the south of Ossining and sneak up on the tube station. On the fifth day three recruits, as cautious as we were, came out of the bushes after we landed.
We got two or three a day for the next eleven days. On March 16, the eighth anniversary of the war, it backfired.
One of the new recruits disappeared during the night. He came back about an hour before dawn, with a couple of dozen heavily armed comrades.
The shots woke me up an instant before the buzzer went off. Harry Volker and Albert Long were on duty; one of them managed to get to the emergency switch before dying. The invaders had burst in through both doors, shooting.
Evidently they hadn’t known where the armory was. That kept the bloodbath from being too one-sided. Friedman kept them away with his laser while weapons were being passed through the dormitory. Then there was a terrible free-for-all, our children and their children blasting away at each other right through the golden dawn. I looked on helplessly from my cottage window, along with Sam. Neither of us was foolhardy enough to try crossing over to the armory. We moved a dresser in front of the door and peered through the blinds at the war being fought.
Then we spent the morning picking up and burying bodies and pieces of bodies. There were twenty-three of them and
eleven of us—eight children, the two on night shift, and Sara O’Brien.
Sara’s body was the last one we found, which was probably a good thing, since we were numb by then. We followed the sound of flies. Behind some bushes, irrelevantly naked, her body at first looked like a pile of raw meat. They had hacked off her head and limbs and breasts and stacked everything up. They’d split her torso open from the womb to the heart, and spread things around. She didn’t look real. She looked like a montage a gruesome child might make, taking scissors to an anatomy diagram.
That was when the guilt really came home. Sara had been such a sweet person. She loved children with total soppy abandon. She was the best teacher we had for the very young, because her love infected the children and they would do anything to keep from disappointing her. She had three daughters and a son in New New. What the hell could I tell them? I chose your mother as backup pilot because her psych profile showed she was really great with children. I’m really sorry she wound up a bloody heap. Next time I’ll build a fence, first thing.
In a way, the ones who were less obviously dead were the worst. Some who were killed by laser just had a charred spot on their clothing. They looked asleep, except for the feet. For some reason dead people seem to crank their feet around into uncomfortable positions.
6
Nobody blamed me for the carnage. Maybe I blamed myself: I should have expected the worst and given highest priority to defense. Of all the adults, I had the most experience with this particular kind of insanity—Friedman knew more about war but he had never been in one except, like all the others, as a target. No use wasting energy in self-recrimination, I knew. But I had to start taking medicine to get to sleep.
We spent the next two weeks in furious activity, turning the farm into an armed camp. We surrounded the area with two concentric circles of sturdy posts and wound a complicated maze of taut razor wire between them. It was difficult and dangerous stuff to work with; only two of the children were physically strong enough to help, which might have been just as well. Three people severed fingers in moments of carelessness. Dr. Itoh was able to do emergency bone grafts and rejoin the digits, but they would have to be redone in New New if the victims were to ever use the fingers normally. I brushed against the stuff myself, reaching up to scratch my nose, and skinned off a flap of forearm the size of a sausage patty. There was an impressive amount of blood. Itoh glued it back, but now I can’t feel anything there but prickly numbness.