“Smells better. What do you mean?”
“I mean, people get along? All you old people?”
“We have to get along,” I said. “It’s like living on an island, with no place else to go.”
“You stuck in the same place all you life?” Timmy said.
“More or less. It’s a big place. And some people are talking about leaving, going to another star.”
“That’s real far away, isn’t it?” Oliver said.
“It’ll take years.” And husbands.
“Why they don’t jus’ come down here?” Timmy said. “You come down here.”
“We’ve always lived up in the sky. We’re used to it.”
For a minute they were quiet, assimilating that. Timmy hit a piece of glass with his heel until it broke. “Indira say you live inside a ball o’ dirt, like worms.”
“Sort of. It’s a hollow rock.”
“God damn,” Oliver said. “You live inside?”
“It’s just like living inside a building. But we have a nice park, full of trees, and we can look out the windows at the stars. And there aren’t any dogs.”
“That’s somethin’,” he conceded. “You got plenty to eat an’ all?”
“Now we do. It was hard for a few years after the war.”
“Still hard here. Hard as a fuckin’ rock, it is.”
“I know.” I put my arm around his thin shoulders and Timmy leaned up against my knee. I had to clear my throat. “It’ll be better now. The worst part is over.”
We sat like that for a couple of minutes, without speaking, which may have saved our lives. Two boys snuck in front of us, creeping, intent on the emporium floor.
They had large backpacks and shotguns.
We leveled our weapons on them. “Drop the guns!” I shouted, and steeled myself to pull the trigger.
They froze. “Do it, mu’fuck,” Timmy said, his voice an incongruous chirp. But they set the guns down and turned, hands clasped behind their heads.
“Are you alone?” I said.
“Raht,” the taller one said. “Jus’ passin’ through.” He had a heavy Southern accent “Heard the ‘splosion.”
“Gonna hear another one,” Oliver said. “You not alone, you dead meat.”
“Talk big shit, boy,” the shorter one said. “We didn’t do nothin’ to you.”
“Button it, Horace,” the other said. “Horace, he’s a little dumb. Sorry.”
“Too dumb to live, man,” Oliver said.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “Where’re you from?”
“Ah’m Jommy Fromme. Horace my brother. We come up from Clearwater, Flo’da.”
“Florida!”
“Ten months walkin’, come up the App’lachian Trail. Flo’da ain’t no place to be now. Lotta people leavin’.”
“Did you ever meet someone named Healer?”
“Ole guy? Sure. He give us shots once.”
“How long ago?”
Jommy and Horace looked at each other and shrugged. “Couple years.” Jommy stared at me. “You an ole one too. That how you known ‘im?”
“She from the sky,” Timmy said. “They all get old there.”
“You from the Worlds?” He pronounced it “whirls.”
“New New York. It’s the only one left.” Actually, Uchuden was still intact. But nobody lived there.
“That don’t beat all.”
“Oliver, pick up the guns.” I gestured toward the curb. “You two can sit. We have to figure out what to do with you.”
Jommy sat and cautiously lowered his hands to his lap. Horace kept his behind his head, staring with an unreadable blank expression. I suddenly realized he was braced to die. “You can put your hands down, Horace. Just don’t try anything.”
“He won’t do nothin’. All we want is to git along.”
“Wanna trade?” Horace said.
“Got any gold or silver?” Oliver asked.
“Nah,” Jommy said, “don’t use that shit anymore down South. Got plenny ammunition.”
Timmy laughed. “Big fuckin’ deal.”
“We really do,” Horace said, looking hurt. “We got slugs an’ shells for the shotguns and a couple boxes of.45s.”
“That won’t getcha a can of beans,” Oliver said. “We got a room full of ammo.”
“A room full?”
“Oliver,” I said, “be careful what you tell them, okay?”
You could almost hear the wheels turning in Jommy’s brain. “Look. What we really like to do is jine up with you. Couple niggers an’ a girl, you need somebody.”
“What can you do?” I asked. “Do you have any skills other than diplomacy?”
“Huh?”
“Do you know how to build things, or handle live-stock, or grow vegetables? Any useful skill?”
“I’m a hell of a good shot. Horace, he gen’rally hits what he aims at, too. Only way we could stay alive comin’ up the Trail.”
“You know how to dress game, then.”
“Oh, yeah—hell, yeah. An’ make leather, too, with jus’ piss.”
“Thrilling.” I set the laser down but kept my hand near it. Horace visibly relaxed. “We’ll see what the others say.”
“You got more of you?”
I nodded. “An army. Maybe we could use a couple of scouts.”
4 
We let them join us. They were big and strong and relatively old; Jommy was twenty and his brother two years younger. Jeff had probably given them the plague vaccine but we administered it again, to be sure. They accepted the notion that they might live another hundred years with skeptical caution.
Their Family down in Clearwater had been rabid Mansonites. Their leader, who called himself Charlie, had reached the age of twenty-three before killing himself out of remorse at not getting the death. He took the two next oldest with him, to the general approval of the rest of the Family. Jommy and Horace got understandably nervous at that, and snuck out the next night.
I decided not to tell them, or anybody, about Jeff, and passed the word to the other Worlds people. If he was still alive he probably was still keeping the vaccine secret.
They had walked two thousand kilometers without seeing another soul, though several times they heard people coming down the Trail and hid away. New York was the first city they’d gone into. They had heard that it survived the war and was thriving, like in the old days. They didn’t seem too disappointed, though, to find the rumor untrue. They had only a vague idea of what people actually used to do in a city, and seemed glad to be able to apply their hunting and tracking skills. The children loved them, probably not for any positive quality. When they went hunting I let them have one weapon and three rounds apiece; otherwise I kept them locked out of the armory. They said they understood about being on probation. I wondered if I ever would quite trust them.
Apparently they forgot about my knowing Healer; at least, they never brought it up again. I struggled against the fantasy of mounting a one-woman rescue operation. It was barely possible. Friedman taught me how to fly; we had an extra floater-sized fuel cell that could get me to Florida and back. But it was quixotic nonsense. Florida and half of Georgia comprised a trigger-happy xenophobic lunatic asylum. Even if Jeff was alive and I knew exactly where to go, I’d be shot out of the sky before I got to him.
We went into the city every day for more than a week. Searching through various hospitals, we finally found in Bellevue an unopened storage area, a vault that Friedman blew open easily. It took more than a day to transfer all the pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, probably enough to keep a small town healthy for a generation.
Setting up school was a challenging problem. Tom Smith was a brilliant educator and administrator, but what we really needed was a specialist in the history of education—no one in New New had ever taught children out of books. For several generations we had all grown up taking for granted the database terminal as the primary tool of elementary education, infinitely patient and automatically individualized by feedback algorithms. I was in tenth form before I ever saw a text that simply presented information, without interacting. And I had to go to Earth, postdoctoral, before I ever had a textbook printed on paper. (We had a stroke of luck in that, finding an antiquarian book store in Greenwich Village that specialized in old schoolbooks.)