Pol sat in his bathroom at the dorm paging through The Truth about the Races. He had once taken the mirror off the wall in here to be sure he wasn’t being watched. He found he somehow knew about bugging devices and how to search for them, though he wasn’t sure how or where he’d been trained for it. In any event, he’d found nothing. But in the process he had made a hole behind the mirror where he could store a few things—his makeup, hair dye, razors… and now the book.

The author discussed at length the physical characteristics of the Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron races. Pol didn’t find himself in any of them, nothing about a fair-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed, round-eyed, eyebrowed, bearded visage. Was the book missing races in other parts of the world, in other states? What about the enemy state, Mesatona? But the book was poorly written, and he couldn’t find any definition of its scope. Like everything else in this world, the book painted a picture that was irredeemably polemic, and, to him, it read like a badly imagined lie.

There had to be other races. He couldn’t be that much of a freak.

Everyone knew the Irons were damaged genetically and often produced monstrosities, the author wrote. But what was kept hidden by the state was the fact that monstrosities were also born to Silvers and Golds due to overbreeding for certain traits, like the bluest temples. That was why the state instituted the policy of merits. To rise from a Bronze to a Silver or from a Silver to a Gold was a task beyond the reach of most citizens, but when a citizen did advance upward by merit the higher race benefited from the fresh blood of one of the best examples of the lower classes.

You could advance from Bronze to Silver or Silver to Gold? Pol reread the paragraph carefully. How could he not have known that? No wonder everyone was so driven to earn merits. It was one of the basic assumptions underlying everything in this society that he had completely missed. He got up, splashed cold water on his face, and stared into the mirror.

He had seen his blue-white eyes scream with rage, as when he had killed the Silver. He had seen them confused and wary, as when he first came to live with Marcus. More recently they had been determined and grim, hard eyes. Now they looked frightened and unsure. Weak. They were weak. The vulnerability shook him deeply.

The genetic inferiority of the Iron race, according to the book, was due to a great calamity that happened at least two thousand years ago. The state had secret evidence of a prior civilization. This earlier culture had invented a weapon of mass destruction, a bomb that could destroy entire cities at one blast and poison the air for centuries. There had been a Great War with these bombs. The richest members of society and the big brass of the military had survived in bunkers underground. The rest of the population had been left outdoors to fend for themselves. Thus were the Gold, Silver, and Iron races born; thus the propensity for deformity among the Irons, their genetic chain contaminated forever by the bombs. The origins of the red-skinned Bronze race, so the author claimed, had been a native people dwelling in this land before the war began. This continent was one of the places least devastated by the war, so the survivors had settled here. Beyond the Southlands the rest of the planet remained uninhabitable. And in that vast desert were monuments that might indicate that this Great War was not even the first of its kind, that the warlike people of this planet might go through this cycle again and again.

Pol could almost see it in the glass like a moving picture. He had heard this story before, hadn’t he? Hadn’t there been the threat of a war like that where he’d come from? And there was the feeling he always had, too, another of those places where the seams did not meet, that they were missing… things here, that their technology was behind where it should be, that he was always reaching for devices that didn’t exist—such as the small phone he kept imagining to be in his pocket when in reality there were only large ones, like the one on Gyde’s desk.

Staring into his own ice-blue eyes in the glass, he was suddenly quite sure that he’d come from a place where these bombs, these weapons of mass destruction, existed. In fact, he felt he had been involved with them in some fundamental way. And he had no idea what to do with that.

He had planned to hide the book behind the mirror. He changed his mind. He tore the pages into small fragments and flushed them down the toilet; then he burned the cover in the sink. He watched as the black ash swirled, carried by the water down the drain.

17.2. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott

The math code printouts were tucked away in a silver soft pack they’d found at the spaceport. Nate had it on his back, and the oversize bug goggles hung from the front of his jeans. The metal capsules from the supply room were being bounced in one hand pensively.

He looked like a prop person for a sci-fi film, especially with the blank, silent buildings filing past as they walked back from the spaceport in the descent of the smaller sun. Jill had had the prop person thought, anyway—fleetingly. But her brain was churning from their momentous discovery, and what Nate looked like, or even an acknowledgment of their surroundings, had a hard time keeping a foothold there.

“Seventy-thirty,” she said. “I still… I don’t know.”

“It’s not that unbelievable. We know we were completely bounced out of our own space and time. Why not to a whole other universe?”

“But what does it mean, to be in a seventy-thirty universe?”

“I have a guess. In our experiments we saw that the crest in the wave correlated to a positive force and the trough to a negative one—which you could call ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ If life on Earth is a balance of good and evil—fifty-fifty—that means this planet, and probably the entire universe we’re in, seventy percent good or creative impulse and thirty percent evil or destructive impulse.”

“It’s still hard for me to accept that Earth is fifty percent ‘evil,’ “ Jill debated, with an impatient shake of her head. “That’s certainly not my experience of it. And will you quit playing with those things? They could be dangerous.”

Nate grinned sheepishly and put the metal capsules back in his pocket. “Why? Things decay and die, don’t they? Who is it that said, ‘What’s not busy being born is busy dying’?”

“Nixon.”

Nate gave a huffing laugh. “Anyway, all you have to do is look at our history. Most of it’s been a bloodbath, including the twentieth century. What about Hitler? Nagasaki? Vietnam? The Khmer Rouge? Bosnia? And it’s not just man—it’s nature, too. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’? By all accounts the dinosaurs had a pretty vicious existence before they were wiped out permanently. In fact, most species become extinct.”

“That’s true, but…”

“I know; I know. Our life seems cush. But we have a warped perspective. We happen to live—ha! we lived—in a particularly benign place and time on Earth. But even so, even though modern Americans aren’t being overrun by Huns or living in fear of plague or the Inquisition, are most people living a life of ease? Hardly. We invent more and more ‘stuff’ and gadgets and mindless entertainment, yet everyone I know is stressed. People have to put their kids through sixteen years of expensive education and continue to reeducate themselves as adults. We have to maintain our cars and houses and all our ‘stuff,’ get groceries, feed the kids, pay the bills, worry about retirement, yadda, yadda, yadda. Meanwhile there’s the IRS, mental illness, heart disease, AIDS, cancer, terrorist threats, stock market crashes, and school shoot-outs. Which explains why so many guys drop dead in their fifties from heart attacks. So even we Americans can’t escape the law of fifty-fifty.”