There weren't many humans who were broken beyond repair, but though the details varied in every respect, the results were monotonously the same. For the most part disease had been eliminated. Everyone was healthy—except those who'd been hurt in accidents and who couldn't be resurgeried and regenerated into the beautiful mold characteristic of the entire population. And those few were sent to the asteroid.
They didn't like it. They didn't like being confined to Handicap Haven. They were sensitive and they didn't want to go back. They knew how conspicuous they'd be, hobbling and crawling among the multitudes of beautiful men and women who inhabited the planets. The accidentals didn't want to return.
What they did want was ridiculous. They had talked about, hoped, and finally embodied it in a petition. They had requested rockets to make the first long hard journey to Alpha and Proxima Centauri. Man was restricted to the solar system and had no way of getting to even the nearest stars. They thought they could break through the barrier. Some accidentals would go and some would remain behind, lonelier except for their share in the dangerous enterprise.
It was a particularly uncontrollable form of self-deception. They were the broken people, without a face they could call their own, who wore their hearts not on their sleeves but in a blood-pumping chamber, those without limbs or organs—or too many. The categories were endless. No accidental was like any other.
The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals were qualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens they alone could make the long journey there and return. But there were other factors that ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.
[2]
Docchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be bright. Darkness lurked outside.
A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The records in the hospital said it was a woman.
"Anti, they turned us down," said Docchi bitterly.