He tugged on his white beard. “You listen to me. I’m older than Tony ever was, and I’ve been reading since before any of you were born. Now, you’ve had children born blind, haven’t you.”
“Two or three,” the leader admitted.
“How do you suppose I knew that?”
“You’re pretty old.”
“That’s what happens when people have syphilis. They have babies born blind and stupid. It’s a disease. You don’t have to get it.”
“Sure,” the giggling girl said, “like you don’t have to get babies. Just don’t fuck.” The others giggled along with her.
“This is serious business. If you don’t get this syphilis cured, you’ll all go crazy before your time.” He looked at the leader. “You won’t be able to get it up any more. It’ll hurt too much.”
He was pale under the grime. “What do we have to do?”
“I’ll give you each a shot. Then I’ll leave a bottle of pills. Everybody takes one each morning; you watch and make sure they do. And no fucking for ten days.”
“Ten days! You can’t go ten days.”
“You can and will. Absolutely no sexual contact; not even boy-boy girl-girl. I want you to swear on Christ and Charlie.”
They all looked at the leader. He hesitated, then made the sign of the cross and muttered “Charlie’s will.” The others did the same.
“Okay, call in the children. Then everybody line up in the living room and drop your pants.” He screwed a bottle of omnimycin into the hypodermic gun.
“We don’t do it to the children,” the leader said.
“Glad to hear it. But they can pick it up other ways, living with you.” He wasn’t sure that was true, but then neither could he be sure they actually did leave the younger children alone. That would make them an unusual family.
Waiting for the two hunters to come home, he treated various minor complaints. For most of them, he gave aspirin or an innocuous salve. His police training, many years before, had included a few days of emergency first aid—mostly what to do if you or your partner were shot. He did know how to assist childbirth, which often came in handy now. But everything else he’d had to learn from medical texts and the little brochures that came packed with medicine.
Medical books were rare. Before the war, a doctor could sit at a cube and punch up any text in existence, usually with three-dimensional illustrations of typical cases and techniques. Most of the books he’d found were heirlooms, their medicine a century or more out of date. The drugs prescribed no longer existed under the same brand names, since the books were written before all the manufacturers had merged into a single Pharmaceuticals Lobby.
He had no idea, for instance, what the girl’s fungus was. Would it start cropping up everywhere? Was it actually dangerous, or had it been just the dirty bandages that caused the infection and fever? Maybe he’d find a dermatology text.
The hunters came home triumphant, with a full case of freeze-dried beef stew. Healer took two boxes of it, a gallon of rainwater, and a bottle of old wine. He gave the hunters their shots and left. As he pedaled away he could hear wild laughter and the dull smack of rocks hitting dead flesh.
Nothing could shock him any more, he thought; nothing could be revolting enough to get through the shell that contained his sanity. If you could call it sanity. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is weird. The people now dying of the plague had barely been teenagers when the war came. Their memories of the old days are distorted and vague. In another ten years there will be nothing but rumor and speculation. The old order changeth, he remembered from a poem; making place for new; and God fulfills himself in many ways.
Year Five
1 
At first Deucalion was a star, and then a bright star, moving slowly through the heavens. Soon it was definitely a shape, not a point, growing daily, and the observation dome in the hub of New New was often crowded.
It came to rest about twenty kilometers away. From that distance it looked like a small elongated potato, but with craters. The factories had been waiting in place for months, tiny bright toys attached to outsized solar collectors.
Now it was John Ogelby’s turn for overwork. He spent two months out at the factories, helping to supervise the interfacing of machine with rock. There was no way a spacesuit could fit his twisted body, so he worked from inside a modified emergency bubble, floating here and there, and using other people for hands. He loved zerogee work—the mobility and freedom from pain. But he did miss Marianne, and they spent many hours chatting, sometimes about inconsequential things, often about the suddenly complicated futures in store for them.
It seemed as if everything had happened at once. Scientists working with Insila had isolated the plague virus and synthesized a cure. After much argument, a very close referendum approved the manufacture of large quantities of the antibiotic, which would be sent to Earth by robot drones.
The starship question was finally resolved by a series of carefully worded referenda. The available work force (only a third of the population was really needed to run New New) would be split into two roughly equal groups. The stay-at-homes would work on refurbishing Devon’s World and Tsiolkovski, which together would eventually provide enough room for another 150,000 people.
The rest of them would be Working on the starship, which would bear the name Newhome. Salvage teams were at work on the remains of Mazeltov and B’is’ma’masha’la, mining them for useful parts. The army of engineers no longer needed for Deucalion dove into the “Janus Project” with enthusiasm.
Daniel wanted to go, and so did John. O’Hara was not sure. The idea did excite her, as an abstraction, but the actual details of it boiled down to sitting in a spaceship playing gin rummy and waiting to die of old age. She would also probably have to raise a child. Her experience with her baby sister, now five, seemed to indicate that she had no great talent in that direction.
If she stayed in New New she would doubtless continue to advance. Having attained Grade 15 in only five years of service made her something of a prodigy, and although she was realistic about the influence of her continuing friendship with Sandra Berrigan, she didn’t doubt that she would have advanced on her own. She had access to her own psych profile and the analysis of it made by the Executive Evaluation Board.
The people who had set up New New’s charter, more than a century before, had done their best to ensure that the World’s administrative structure stay free of the taint of politics. Nobody got “on the track”—advancing beyond Grade 12—without minute investigation of his or her past and exhaustive psychological testing. They looked for a balance of altruism with practicality; leadership ability without emotional dependence on having power over others; patience and deliberation. Nobody could insert himself into the power structure by dint of personal charisma, bribery, or influence. So New New’s history was rather dull, its leaders a succession of careful, phlegmatic people who usually retired with a great sense of relief. The Executive Evaluation Board was anonymous, but it was no secret that it consisted of a staff of professional psychologists overseen by past Coordinators and retired Justices. They had looked at Marianne and given their tentative blessing; now that she had reached Grade 15 she was subject to annual review, because power corrupts in subtle ways. A negative evaluation could mean anything from a temporary freeze in grade to demotion back to Grade 12, with no chance of appeal.
One reason this system had worked in the old days was the safety valve of emigration. There had been forty other Worlds then, with many different political setups, and a mutual pact required any World to accept an emigrant from any other World, so long as they had room. (They might put him in sewage maintenance and make sure he stayed there, but they did have to accept him.) Without that safety valve, and with guaranteed freedom of speech, New New was getting to be a rather noisy place. People who liked the old days were anxious to get a few new Worlds open for business. Many of them were also in favor of the Janus project, figuring that it would absorb a lot of the rowdier element.