“What did we have to do?” I demanded.
She wiped her eyes and stared at her knotted hands, saying nothing. Father rose to his feet, face twisted in distaste.
“I can’t deal with this, Louise. You tell her.”
“Harry! Damn it. You’re the one who…you’re her father!”
“You’re her mother, and you’ll have to. She needs to know, and I can’t.” He left the room, closing the door behind him.
“What?” I said, thoroughly confused. “What should I know?”
Mother’s cheeks were scarlet, and her mouth pursed, as though she had bitten into something sour. Her voice trembled as she said, “The Gentherans told us to apply a numerical rating to every person born on Earth. If a baby is its mother’s first child, it gets one point. If the child is its father’s second child, it gets two points and adding them together makes the child a three. Only those rated two, three, and four are allowed to have children or any scarce commodity. You’re my first child and your father’s third child, so you’re a four…”
I cried, “Father has other children! I have a brother or sister?”
Mother choked. “No. When he was quite young, he had a relationship with a woman. She had twins who died as infants.”
“But, if they died, then I’m his first child who lived…”
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Mother, nervously licking her lips. “Any child born alive is counted, whether the child lives or not. That isn’t…isn’t important. The Gentherans claimed it’s the fairest way to reduce population. It doesn’t cut off any genetic line and it leaves the gene pool as broad as possible.” She paused, her hands knotted. “Finally, Earthgov passed the two-three-four laws, but they did it secretly.”
Mother wiped moisture from the corners of her mouth with one knuckle of her clenched hands. “Earthgov was debating how to publicize the laws and begin enforcing them when the Mercans and the Omnionts showed up. You know what happened then! The Combine and the Federation said they’d salvage us. We begged for help. They offered to buy our people for water. Earthgov shilly-shallied, as usual. They thought they had a choice.
“They didn’t have a choice! They couldn’t get it through their stupid heads that there was no choice! ISTO says a living planet is more important than the members of any race on it, and if a race of barbarians or animals threatens a planet, the race has to be ‘reduced,’ and they were about to reduce us. It couldn’t be kept a secret any longer. The story broke everywhere at once: the offer to buy our people, the threat from ISTO, the laws that had been secretly passed…” She fell silent, staring at nothing for a time. I waited. “And what they’d been afraid would happen, did happen! The anti–population control people started rioting. Those opposing them began rioting back! Some religious fanatics took advantage of the disorder to start a biowar. That was the Great Plague of 2082 that killed a billion people while those huge ships just hung up there, watching.”
“They didn’t help?”
“Gentherans help. Omnionts observe. Mercans profit,” her mother snarled. “At least that’s what the Gentherans tell us.”
“That’s why…it was the terrible eighties?”
Mother wiped her eyes. “That was the start of them. While the plague was going on, all the local wars joined into one big war among former nations and states and tribal areas. That was the so-called Eight-Week War that killed another billion people.”
“I wasn’t even born.”
“No. The war happened right after your father arrived on Phobos. It’s a good thing we were there. Otherwise, we might not be alive today.” Her voice, already unfamiliarly shrill, went up another half tone. “We might have been just two more of the two billion people the plague and the war had killed, which still wasn’t enough to suit ISTO, which started an inquiry…”
“Into what?”
“If the plague had been started purposely by Earthgov, ISTO would have regarded it as a good-faith effort to reduce population; if the plague was simply a crime or accident, it wouldn’t have helped our rating at all. Everyone knew Earthgov hadn’t started the plague, because the fanatics who did it had told the whole world their god had commanded they do it! However, the fanatics were all dead by that time, so they couldn’t prove they’d done it, and that gave the Gentherans a loophole through which they negotiated with ISTO. They claimed that Earthgov had known the plague was going to start and had chosen not to stop it. That turned out to be ‘reasonable grounds’ for classifying us as semicivilized.
“ISTO agreed, but only if we immediately started enforcing our own laws by selling all our over-fours to the Combine and the Federation.”
“They’d never been enforced.”
Mother shrilled: “How could they have been! What with the plague and the war, nobody could enforce anything! ISTO said either comply at once, or the robot slaughterers would start arriving.” Her voice rasped, she coughed, before going on in her piercing, unfamiliar voice:
“Earthgov declared martial law and began shipping people out, and that bought us provisional status as a semicivilized and threatened world. We’ve been shipping people ever since, and we’re still provisional.”
Mother’s tone and expression were forbidding, but I wanted to know! I said, “I still don’t understand why we can’t talk about it!”
Tears pouring down her reddened face as she grated through clenched teeth, “Have you been listening to me, Margaret? I sound like a—a crazy person! I’m screaming! Even telling you about it makes me crazy! The war happened, and the plague happened, and even in the middle of all that, the proliferators just went on having child after child after child! Other people, those who called themselves the limiters, they blamed the others, the lifers, for destroying the world. If you
