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

single person
     must be fit, not only genetically, but intellectually. And after the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation,
     blacks just didn’t get the training. There had been few black applicants, even, and almost none of them had passed the rigorous
     tests. They had been wonderful people, of course, but that wasn’t enough. Every adult on board had to be outstandingly competent
     in several areas of expertise. There was no time to train people who had, through no fault of their own, been disadvantaged
     from the start. It came down to what D.H. Maston, the “Father of Spes,” called the cold equations, from an old story he liked
     to tell. “No dead weight on board!” was the moral of the story. “Too many lives depend on every choice we make! If we could
     afford to be sentimental—if we could take the easy way—nobody would rejoice more sincerely than I. But we can have only one
     criterion: excellence. Physical and mental excellence in every respect. Any applicant who meets that criterion is in. Any
     one who doesn’t, is out.”
    So even in the Union days there had only been three blacks in the Society. The genius mathematician Madison Aless had tragically
     developed slow-rad symptoms, and after his suicide the Vezys, a brilliant young couple from England, had dropped out and gone
     home; a loss not only to ethnicity but to multinationality in Spes, for it left only a handful from countries other than the
     Union and the U.S.A. But, as Maston had pointed out, that meant nothing, because the concept of nationality meant nothing,
     while the concept of community meant everything.
    David Henry Maston had applied the cold equations to himself. Sixty-one when the Colony moved to California, he had stayed
     behind in the States. “By the time Spes is built,” he had said, “I’ll be seventy. A seventy-year-oldman take up the place a working scientist, a breeding woman, a 200-IQ kid could fill? Don’t make jokes!” Maston was still
     alive, down there. Now and then he came in on the Network from Indianapolis with some advice, always masterful, imperative,
     though sometimes, these days, a bit off the mark.
    But why was Ike lying here thinking about old Maston? His train of thought trailed off into the inco-herencies of advancing
     sleep. Just as he relaxed, a thrill of terror jolted through him stiffening every muscle for a moment—the old fear from far,
     far back, the fear of being helpless, mindless, the fear of sleep itself. Then that too was gone. Ike Rose was gone. A warm
     body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.
    Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack were twelve. When Esther stopped them to ask questions they were partly shy with her, and partly
     rude, because even if she was sixteen, she was really gutwrenching-looking with those glass things she wore, and Timmy Kelly
     called her Kikey, and Timmy Kelly was so incredibly gorge. So Linda sort of looked away and acted like she didn’t hear her,
     but Treese was kind of flattered, actually. She laughed and said yeah they really had absolutely seen this gutwrenching woman
     and she was really like burned all over, shiny, even her clothes burned off except sort of a rag thing. “Her breasts were
     just hanging there and they were really weird, really long,” Treese said, “they were really gut, right? Hanging down. God!”
    “Did she have white eyes?”
    “You mean like Punky Fort said she saw? I don’t know. We weren’t all that close.”
    “It was her teeth were white,” Linda said, unable to let Treese do all the describing. “They were all white, like a skull
     would be, right, and like she had too many teeth.”
    “Like in those history vids,” Treese said, “you know, all those people that used to live where that was before the desert,
     right, Africa? That’s what she looked like. Like those famine people. Do you think there was some accident they didn’t