Starburst

29

THE SUN WAS VERY HOT, EVEN THIS FAR NORTH, WHY? (JERON had not quite grasped the concept of "summer.") The stuff beneath his bare feet was hot, too, so hot that he winced and howled until Darien showed him how to scoop down to a cool place—and the stuff it was made of Crushed rock, sharp shell edges—like a hydroponics bed before you sludged it and wet it. And the things out in the harbor, great-bellied floating houses with tall sticks—sometimes as they moved swelling out with white "sails" on the "masts"; other, leaner floating houses with metal stacks that some­times emitted "smoke" and "steam"; smaller ones with oars or paddles, apparently just for fun—some of the people in them were children. "The clipper ships," Darien said, stripping down to the bikini bra she wore for comfort and the G-string for modesty, "they belong to the King of Hawaii, but they're ours on lease; we trade him timber, potatoes, and apples for pineapples, sugar, and rum. The ocean-going steamers are Japanese. They had some idea of colonizing here for a while, but we talked them out of it—" She pointed to a rusting hulk across the bay, and Jeron realized with a thrill it had been a warship. "The kayaks are for pleasure, the dories for commuting to islands across the bay. Coming in for a swim?"

He had automatically been removing his own clothes as she took hers off—when in Rome!—but he stopped with his tunic just over his head. "A what?"

"A swim. In the water," she explained. "Come on! I won't let you drown."

Jeron looked after her in amazement as she ran down the pebbly beach. Swim? In the water? But one could not see into it! One could only speculate what other "swim­mers" there might be, for he was, oh, so fully aware that under that pleasing sinusoidal blue there were a great variety of sorts and kinds and sizes of living things. Who ate each other! Who might well wish to eat him\ Things with bony shells and crushing claws, things with tentacles that stung, things with great jaws and teeth—and all of them, always, hungry!

But still—

It certainly looked like fun, as Darien hurled herself into a wave and other swimmers laughed and splashed nearby. He screwed up his courage, hesitated on the firm wet sand the retreating waves had left, squealed as a new wave splashed him to his thighs. "Come on, dummy!" she shouted, but he still hesitated; in Jeron's imagination every wave concealed a triangular fin and every shard of shell was the claw of a sheep-sized lobster, about to lop off a leg for its dinner.

And yet, the sheer physics of the thing was fascinating. At home, the whirled gravity was so light that any motion at all, in the few bodies of open water they had yet created, kept even a skinny child afloat; the tiny positive buoyancy of the human body was not important. Now hip deep, he felt the queer sensation of lifting and dropping as the waves passed him; and when a bigger one came and lifted him off his feet entirely, he no longer resisted. He coughed and splashed and spluttered, but he stayed afloat; then he forgot about lobsters and sharks and splashed together with Darien, laughing, until at last she was the one to drag him out. They flung themselves on the hot sands, breathing hard.

For a primitive technology, they had some pretty neat stuff, Jeron admitted to himself. The beach, the sky, the Sun, sometimes the rain—a very interesting set of phenomena, when you had never seen them before. More than that, they had kinds of technology the Alpha-Aleph people had forgotten existed. Darien's perky little alcohol-fueled car. Elevators in the buildings. Television! With situation comedies and game shows!

Darien pushed herself up on her elbows and shaded her eyes. "See that big ship just coming through the narrows? It's a tanker. From Japan. Oil."

"Oil! I thought all the oil was used up!"

"Oh, no, not all of it. It's too expensive to burn, but we use it for feedstock—fertilizer, industrial chemicals, some plastics."

Jeron marveled at the sheer size of the ugly thing, and listened to all she had to say. The oil was from China's offshore fields originally, but it was Japan's canny businessmen who had financed the drilling and marketed the product. They had survived the kaon stream very well. It was only the end of their world as they knew it—but Japan's World As It Knew It seemed to end about once every other generation, regular as the flick of a digital clock. The nation that had coped with Commodore Perry and Hiroshima, with the God-Emperor and the Meiji rebirth, with the samurai and the Economic Miracle—with incalculable change, always when least expected—simply picked itself up and rewrote its habits. Their electric power net was wholly wiped out and, as the seas rose, much of the low-lying shore area became swamps and uninhabitable tidelands. But just inside the beaches the archipelago's islands rose steeply to mountains. Most of the country remained dry. The Toyota plants became food warehouses. The night-soil carriers once again replaced the agricultural chemists. Surprisingly few starved. In China, even fewer— industrialization had not gone far enough for its loss to shock—but farther west the-losses of life and property had been appalling. But then, they always had been, in good times and bad. Nothing worse than Calcutta's slums and the Bangladesh floods had happened, because nothing could.

"So," said Jeron, nodding, "you have brought back International Trade. Uncle Ski taught us about this. Imperialism. Colonization. Trusts and cartels and dumping."

Darien laughed, but only out of friendship and good humor, not in the wounding way that would make the boy bottle up inside his sneering face. "It hasn't gone quite that far. I don't think anybody wants it to; I expect we're making plenty of mistakes, but I hope not the same ones all over again. No. What we trade is mostly food, some raw materials—and now and then information. Did you ever wonder how we knew you were coming?"

"We sent a message," Jeron said.

"You sent it by laser light. From Alpha Centauri. Did it ever occur to you superbrains that Alpha Centauri is never visible from the continental United States? It's too far south. But there are still telescopes on the mountains of Hawaii, and the King of Hawaii graciously allows the astronomers to use them-—and graciously traded us the message. Cost two hundred pounds of liquid nitrogen, though by the time he got it I suppose half of it had boiled away. Suppose you were worth it?"

The scowl flickered briefly back on his face—was she making fun of him? He did not want her to do that. What he wanted was for her to like him, very much, so that he would be able to like her as much as he wanted to—as much as he was coming to like all this complicated, strange, huge planet—

He was relieved to see that her smile was still friendly. Then it changed to concern. "Oh, hell, you're burning up, Jeron! You're just not used to this sun. Hold on a sec while I grease you up."

As she spread the sunscreen oil over his body he stretched slowly, pleased with the softness of her touch. No one had stroked him so gently since, at least, Aunt Mommy cared for the very young child he had been—

"Why, Jeron," she said softly, glancing at his face and then lower. "You seem to be falling in love again. Tell you what. It's about time I showed you where I live, eh? It's only up the hill. . . ."

Up the hill was what had once been a huge, rambling motor hotel, saunas and swimming pool, banquet rooms and lecture, facilities. There weren't enough transients or sales meetings to keep it busy anymore, and so it had become housing for nearly fifteen hundred Pugets. Mostly the occupants were singles, though there were some childless couples and, in the larger suites on the upper floors, a few families.

In energy terms it was a good bargain. Half of each picture window had been silvered over to keep out summer sun and keep in winter warmth, and the building was sturdy. It was true that the upper floors were unattractive without elevator service; the winches that pulled the cars imposed a considerable drain. But most of the inhabitants used the stairs by choice, except for moving furniture or carrying heavy loads of groceries, and lifting was energy-cheaper than heating. Things that go round use less energy than things that heat up; and "smart" cybernetics traded from the chip people down south in Santa Clara economized on trips. Each room had huge beds, a small refrigerator, a little stove, its own bath—it was not a bad life for a single. You didn't have much space for keeping knickknacks and family heirlooms, but who wanted all that stuff anyway?

Above all, the beds! How different from President Tupelo's soggy mattresses, or even the flower sacks back home! And what wonderful things one could do on them!

Although Darien was twice Jeron's age, it was at least an open question which brought more craftsmanship to their lovemaking. Or more puzzlement. Jeron's peculiar twitches and pokings in the middle of everything—they were off-putting, but how was Darien to know that they were what Jeron had picked up of the sex-as-­communications modality the Constitution's grownups had evolved? The attempts were wasted on her, but not much else was; it was good. Explosively good, and then when at last they rolled apart and their breathing slowed it was Jeron's turn to be puzzled. His voice almost tender, he said, "Perhaps we should save this one."

Darien, who had been playing with the long, straight hair that lay across his shoulder, propped herself up to look at him. "Save what, Jeron?"

"The baby," he explained. "Aunt Eve's probably going to want to plant some of the cabbages pretty soon. Of course, you'd have to carry it for a few weeks until the vegetable womb grows out—"

Darien had not yet switched her reasoning mind back on. She was slow to respond; but then the meaning of the words penetrated and she sat up. "What baby?"

"What do you mean, what baby? Our baby. I've been thinking it might make a nice cross." He sat up too, nodding as he thought it out. "See, I'm Eve and Jim Barstow—you can tell that by the name—"

"Tell what by the name?"

"Breeding. All the first ten cohorts or so show their bloodlines in the name—then they began fooling around, but my name, for instance, shows E for Aunt Eve and O for Uncle Jim. The J means I'm from the third cohort, R just means I'm unedited. The N has no significance, that's just for pretty. 'Jeron,' you see? Well! A lot of the younger kids, like Jeromolo Bill, have been edited some—there are plenty that have been edited more than him—but basically, there's just been the same four male and four female lines to play with. So what I'm saying is, I think it's a good idea to breed out a little."

The last time Darien remembered blushing she was six years old, tripping on her skirt as she curtseyed to the most famous people she had ever met; but she could feel her shoulders and throat reddening. Sexuality never made her blush. But such light talk of childbearing! "I'm thirsty," she said, getting up to fetch two bottles of beer out of the tiny fridge. She showed Jeron how to pry off the cap without damaging it, so that it could be used again, and took a long swallow.

She seemed doomed to go on repeating What strange people! to herself for the rest of her life. She had been doing it now, she counted, for a week and a day, the brief meetings in Washington, the quick flight across the continent, showing the visitors around Puget—and still they had the capacity to astonish! Or this one did, anyway. "Jeron," she said, "around here we don't get pregnant that easy, in fact a lot of us don't ever expect to get pregnant at all. But when we do, we take it pretty seriously. Sounds like you folks do it a little different, eh?"

His astonishment was equal to her own, and for ten minutes they exchanged data on childbirth and rearing. They let the actual foetal development take place in a surrogate vegetable womb, he explained. Obstetrician? Was that some kind of doctor? No, of course not. What would they need a doctor for? Most everybody knew how to do it, just as in the old world most everybody knew, for instance, how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or perform the Heimlich maneuver. Finding the ovum was a little tricky, he ad­mitted, but there was a douche with a selective stain that made it easier once you got the speculum and cannula deployed. Then you had to check if it was fertilized. If not you could always do it all in vitro—if you wanted to do any editing or cross-linking you pretty near had to— but mostly it seemed more fun to knock each other up in the old-fashioned way. Then you transferred the embryo to the vegetable womb. Any time in the first thirteen weeks was plenty of time, he assured her—you could let it go later if you wanted to, but who would want to? Then, for the next six or eight months, you could watch it swell with your child.

"Yes, but— Yes, but—" she kept saying. "Yes, but what about overpopulation?" (Not a problem when you were filling up a solar system!) "Yes, but suppose you don't want a child?" (Why wouldn't you?) "Yes, but suppose you don't even like the other person?"

He stared at her in increasing astonishment. ("What strange people!") "Now, what difference would that make?" he asked. "There's always somebody who likes to take care of babies. Don't you have any Aunt Mommies around here? Although," he added, with what Darien construed as a touch of embarrassment, "I did sort of teach my first two for a while. Not Bill, though. There was a second-cohort woman named Odirun who kind of liked to do that— Of course, I wouldn't interfere if you wanted to take that on . . ."

She shook her head. "It isn't going to happen, Jeron," she said, and explained why. Years before she had had a kid-not implant in her Fallopian tubes, as had nearly every nubile teenaged woman in Puget. Childbearing in Puget was almost always intentional, requiring an act of decision on at least the woman's part. He looked skeptical, then tolerant.

"We could always do it in vitro," he pointed out. "Or Aunt Eve will know how to reverse it. Or we could do tissue clones, like with Uncle Ghost's old blood specimens when we wanted to breed him after he died."

"Who's Uncle Ghost?"

"The one who died," he explained, and then, his face brightening, "Oh, Darien! We can do so much for you people!" He took another quick swig from the bottle, while Darien reflected that the last person who had said anything like that in her hearing was the commander of the Japanese warship across the bay. He swallowed hurriedly and went on. "Like Uncle Ski taught," he said, "Zen! You go through a couple of years of that and you're really able to handle things! Anything! And we can teach you— And all that waste space we flew over, why, with the vegetable wombs, we can fill that up in no time. And—"

"Can we tome in?" piped a voice from the door, interrupting him. The voice didn't wait for an answer but opened the door and entered, he oldest of the girls, Molomy, and one of the younger ones, perhaps the one called Ringo. "Been fucking?" Molomy asked politely. "They said you were up here, Jeron. Listen. You better come down to the ship. Uncle Ghost's there, and you won't believe what he's got with him!"