Joe Haldeman - Worlds Apart

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.

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.

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.