Free Heirs of the New Earth by David Lee Summers

diseases that the doctor knew to be incurable. However, as she listened, she realized that the President and the Senators were talking about cures—and the cures sounded completely plausible and obvious. It was as though there wasn't such a thing as an incurable disease.
    Jenna Walker looked up, smiled and waved very briefly, then returned her attention to the meeting.
    Eva Cooper stepped into the room, moved through, but lingered near the main door. As she did, she caught snippets of conversation about humanity moving into the future and cleaning up the Earth. No one seemed worried about the Doomsday Dead except for the logistics of dealing with the bodies. It was as though they suddenly knew the answers to Doomsday and were no longer concerned. Neither were they concerned about the Clusters and the fact that Earth was out of touch with the remainder of the Galaxy. Eva swallowed hard, knowing she had some research to do. She looked at her watch and saw that it was time for her dose of Proxom. With the emotion-stabilizing drug in her system, she'd be better able to deal with whatever she learned.
    * * * *
    Swearing mildly, Samuel “Old Man” Coffin dug though his sea chest, in search of a tobacco pouch. While it was true that Coffin was addicted to nicotine, he smoked his pipe less from addiction than from a sense of history. His home was the island of Nantucket and legend said that Nantucket was created when God dumped out his gray pipe ash in the Atlantic Ocean. In the late 25th century, many people in old Nantucket families took up smoking as a way to set themselves apart from off islanders and to retain a sense of island history. The drug Dairtox, introduced to reduce toxins in the lungs from air-borne pollutants, made smoking a relatively safe pastime. After several minutes of searching, Coffin still could not find the tobacco. He sat down on the floor in front of the chest and stroked his snow-white beard—eyes searching a room that was at once familiar, yet not his own.
    Old Man Coffin sat in a guest room of the Ellis house—one of the last homes on Nantucket that was still owned by one of the old families. While Suki and John Mark Ellis were searching for the Cluster, Coffin stayed at their home—a sentinel guarding the old house against off-islanders, tax collectors and vandals. Coffin stood, joints complaining, and hobbled out of the guest room. He pondered the Clusters. Watching the teleholo the night before, he'd learned that four had appeared in orbit above the Earth. After watching a short time, he shut off the teleholo and went to bed, spending a restless night huddled under the covers, wishing the Ellises were back from their sojourn in space. In the morning, Coffin awoke. Not used to owning a teleholo, he hadn't bothered to turn it on. Instead, he sought the comfort of his familiar pipe. Though he'd found the pipe, he couldn't find the tobacco.
    Coffin descended the creaking, wooden staircase and searched the living room to see if John Mark Ellis or his late father had left any tobacco behind. He saw a familiar rack of pipes on the fireplace mantle—but ignored them. More promising was a wooden box—the lid carved with the image of a sailing ship—next to an old couch. Coffin opened the box and discovered that it was a small humidor containing a few cigars, but no pipe tobacco. For a few moments, Coffin was tempted to take a cigar, but decided that he really wanted the comfort of his old pipe. Sighing, he realized that he had no choice but to ride out to his shack in the nearby village of Madaket.
    Coffin pulled himself upstairs and found a backpack and shoes. As he prepared for the short trip, he grew light-hearted. It had been too long since he had been out to his own home. While it was only a shack, it contained the last vestiges of his life: his own books as well as books left behind by his ancestors, memorabilia from old whaling days and from the days when the Coffins turned their attention to