A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

up. “It’s all
dead.
How come everybody isn’t up here?”
    “Money,” her mother said.
    “Because most people aren’t willing to trust reason,” Ike said. “The money, the means, are a secondary factor. For a hundred
     years anybody willing to look at the world rationally has been able to see what’s happening: resource exhaustion, population
     explosion, the breakdown of government. But to act on a rational understanding, you have to trust reason. Most people would
     rather trust luck or God or one of the easy fixes. Reason’s tough. It’s tough to plan carefully, to wait years, to make hard
     choices, to raise money over and over, to keep a secret so it won’t be co-opted or wrecked by greed or soft-mindedness. How
     many people can stick to a straight course in a disintegrating world? Reason’s the compass that brought us through.”
    “Nobody else even tried?”
    “Not that we know of.”
    “There were the Foys,” Noah piped up. “I read about it. They put thousands of people into like organfreezes, whole people
     alive, and built all these cheap rockets and shot them off, and they were all supposed to get to some star in about a thousand
     years and wake up. And they didn’t even know if the star had a planet.”
    “And their leader, the Reverend Keven Foy, would be there to welcome them to the Promised Land,” Ike said. “Pie in the sky
     and you die.… Poor fishsticks! That’s what people called them. I was about your age, I watched them on the news, climbing
     into those Toys.’ Half of them already either fungoids or RMV-positive. Carrying babies, singing. That was not people trusting
     reason. That was people abandoning it in despair.”
    The holovid showed an immense dust storm moving slowly, vaguely across the deserts of Amazonia. It was a dull, dark red-grey-brown,
     dirt color.
    “We’re lucky,” Esther said. “I guess.”
    “No,” her father said. “Luck has nothing to do withit. Nor are we a chosen people. We chose.” Ike was a soft-spoken man, but there was a harsh tremor in his voice now that made
     both his children glance at him and his wife look at him for a long moment. Her eyes were a clear, light brown.
    “And we sacrificed,” she said.
    He nodded.
    He thought she was probably thinking of his mother. Sarah Rose had qualified for one of the four slots for specially qualified
     women past childbearing. But when Ike told her that he had got her in, she had exploded—”Live in that awful little thing,
     that ball bearing going around in nothing? No air, no room?” He had tried to explain about the landscapes, but she had brushed
     it all aside. “Isaac, in Chicago Dome, a mile across, I was claustrophobic! Forget it. Take Susan, take the kids, leave me
     to breathe smog, OK? You go. Send me postcards from Mars.” She died of RMV-3 less than three years later. When Ike’s sister
     called to say Sarah was dying, Ike had already been decontaminated; to leave Bakersfield Dome would mean going through decontamination
     again, as well as exposing himself to infection by this newest and worst form of the rapidly mutating virus which had accounted
     so far for about two billion human deaths, more than the slowrad syndrome and almost as much as famine. Ike did not go. Presently
     his sister’s message came, “Mother died Wednesday night, funeral 10 Friday.” He faxed, netted, vidded, but never got through,
     or his sister would not accept his messages. It was an old ache now. They had chosen. They had sacrificed.
    His children stood before him, the beautiful children for whom the sacrifice was made, the hope, the future. On earth now,
     it was the children who were sacrificed. To the past.
    “We chose,” he said, “we sacrificed, and we were spared.” The word surprised him as he said it.
    “Hey,” Noah said, “come on, Es, it’s fifteen, we’llmiss the show.” And they were off, the spindly boy and the chunky girl, out the door and across the Common.
    The