The examination turned up nothing beyond an allergy to cow’s milk, which was no surprise (and no problem, since the nearest cow was 36,500 kilometers away). Neither she nor anyone else had the plague. They were kept under observation for ten days, then returned to New New.
Very tired of the bland emergency rations they’d been fed in the module, O’Hara went straight to the cafeteria. The day’s lunch was centered around gazpacho, cold tomato and cucumber soup.
Charlie’s Will 
Most of the weapons that roared into the sky, 16 March 2085, were antiques, fifty to a hundred years old, but one type was quite new. Experimental; inadequately tested.
The Koralatov virus was a humane sort of weapon. It was meant to induce a lengthy period of mental confusion in-the enemy population, some months of being unable to think effectively. Better dumb than dead, if it had worked, but it hadn’t worked well at all.
Eighteen missiles were loaded with Koralatov-31. All but two were destroyed by America’s defensive laser net. One accidentally aborted somewhere over Eastern Europe. Another had been targeted for Chicago and almost made it. A near miss from a geriatric antimissile missile cracked it open and spilled K-31 into the jet stream. The result was the same as in Europe: over the ensuing weeks and months the virus drifted down and found its human hosts quite hospitable. By the end of the year it was as ubiquitous as the common cold. But it didn’t have the effect Koralatov had planned; in fact, it was some time before any symptoms appeared anywhere. When the first victim lapsed into idiocy and died, the only humans left uninfected were a handful of desert nomads, some scientists stranded in Antarctica, and the people who lived in space.
The ones in Antarctica could hang on for a few years, while their supplies lasted, and the nomads would survive so long as they remained out of contact with the infected population. For the rest of the Earth, the plague was swift and complete.
Almost everyone over the age of twenty died in the first few weeks. Younger people didn’t seem to be affected. In the chaos of a world suddenly leaderless, parentless, ten times decimated, it took a while for the morbid truth to become clear: no one would live for very long. Sometime between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, everyone got sick and died.
A couple of billion doomed children couldn’t keep the twenty-first century running. Everything didn’t grind to a halt at once, since much of the world was automated, and the systems kept working for a while. You could go into an autobar and get a drink, or punch up a public-service number and have a dead woman pray for you. But sooner or later a crucial part would decay, or there would be vandalism, and no one left who knew how to fix things up, no one in the world.
There was at least one group that the war did not take by surprise, neither in its timing nor its ferociousness. The Mansonites were an underground and quite illegal religion, claiming tens of thousands of members in the southern United States. They had been predicting for some years that there would be a period of “helter-skelter,” followed by the end of the world, and they figured it would happen in 2085, the hundredth anniversary of their savior’s deliverance.
The Mansonites based their creed on the writings of Charles Manson, a charismatic loony who in the previous century had led his followers in a small orgy of mass murder. To the Family, death was a blessing and murder a sacrament. They were the only church whose membership increased dramatically after the war.
Year Two
1
There had been some hope that Australia, New Zealand, and Pacifica might in their isolation be spared. But the virus drifted down everywhere. On every tiniest speck of land, if there were people, all but the very young sickened and died.
As life on Earth sloughed into desperation and savagery, life in New New became more safe, more comfortable, at least for a while. The farms were repaired—O’Hara gratefully traded in her spacesuit and diapers for a desk—and people stopped worrying so much about their next meal and, in grim pursuit of normality, resumed worrying about which fork to use. They also worried quite a bit about who was sleeping with whom, and what went on when they weren’t sleeping, and why they didn’t at least get a document to legitimize it.
Marriage was a pretty complicated affair in New New York. Not the civil part of it; that could be done in a couple of minutes, by computer. The problem was deciding whether to marry one person, or two, or six, or several thousand.
There were dozens of “line families” in New New. The term was an archaic one that was now applied very loosely to any more-or-less permanent connection involving love, sometimes reproduction, cohabitation (if the group was small enough and the room was big enough), and so forth.
As an example, Marianne O’Hara’s various families. When she was born, her mother belonged to the Nabors line. This was a conventional old-fashioned line family, several hundred people who were all husband and wife. Careful genealogical tables were kept to prevent inbreeding, but there were no inhibitions on nonreproductive sex. A pretty young girl like O’Hara’s mother spent a lot of time being nice to relatives, and even more time saying “no.” She wanted out, and she picked the quickest way: soon after menarche she got herself impregnated by an outsider. The Nabors line took care of her until the baby was born, and then kicked both of them out.
By that time she had a Nabors lover, who quit the line to be with her. Along with Marianne’s father, they joined the Scanlan line, which was actually a loose association of three-way marriages, rather than a true line. It was a fairly cold-blooded decision on her mother’s part. Marianne’s father was a groundhog, and (as had been prearranged) a week after the marriage he returned to his Earthside wife. So mother and lover became a simple married couple, but with the housing and schooling advantages of the Scanlan line. Marianne was the only child of a broken triune, which made her an outsider to the other children, and they were vicious in their clannishness. Growing up, the only thing she knew for sure about her future was that she would never join a triune marriage.
She was wrong. She’d been living with Daniel—as lovers again, finally—for over a year when a law was passed that forbade single people from occupying multiple dwellings. (A lot of families from other Worlds had been split up, living in dormitories, and once they had coordinated their interests, they made a substantial voting bloc.)
For the past year, O’Hara had been resisting social pressure to get married. Girls and boys from most lines in New New were encouraged to “butterfly,” to seek a variety of sexual contacts. But as one grew older—certainly by O’Hara’s advanced age of twenty-three—one was expected to settle down. (In joining the Devon line, for instance, “settling down” meant restricting yourself to a few thousand potential sexual partners.) She knew her family and coworkers thought her relationship with Daniel was immature and even a little indecent. This annoyed her and might have delayed their marriage indefinitely, if the practical matter of housing hadn’t interfered.
There was no line she wanted to join, which was a relief to Daniel, so she suggested they start their own, and he nervously agreed. They filed the necessary documents, patterning the line after the old-fashioned Nabors one: new members accepted only on unanimous approval; old members divorced by majority vote. She drew the long straw, and the line was named O’Hara.