Free Worlds Apart by Joe Haldeman Page B

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 Most of the books he’d found were heirlooms, their medicine a century or more out of date.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 couldhear 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 quantitiesof 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