Forever Free (12 page)

"Let's move along," Marygay said. "Whatever they've got set up for us, whatever they think they know, it doesn't change Phase Two."

"You're wrong," Max said. "We should find out what we can from this bastard. We can't lose anything by squeezing him."

"Or gain anything," the sheriff said. "I've told you all I know."

"Let's find out," Roberta said. "Max is right. Nothing to lose."

"A lot to lose," I said. "You sound like my old drill sergeants. This is a negotiation, not a war."

"They were threatening to kill us," Po said. "If it's not a war, it's something close to it."

Marygay came to my rescue. "Leave it as an option. Right now, I think we're ahead for not having hurt or coerced him."

"Other than beating him up and tying him down," Roberta said.

"If we ultimately have to force information out of him," Marygay pushed on, "then we can do it. Right now we have to act, not talk." She rubbed her face. "Besides, they probably have their own hostage by now. Jynn couldn't get far in that floater."

"Jynn killed one of them," Max said. "She's dead meat."

"You shut up, Max."

"If she's alive, she's a liability."

"Shut up."

"You homo cunts," Max said. "You always—"

"My wife is not a cunt or a homo." I tried to keep my voice down. "When we walk through that door she'll be your commander."

"And I have no problem with that. I had a long career and never saw a het commander. But if you think she's het, you're blind as a worm."

"Max," Marygay said quietly, "my heart has been het and homo and irrelevant, as now. William is in charge on this ship, and you're being insubordinate."

"You're right," he said flatly. To me: "I lost my head and I apologize. Too much has happened, too fast. And I haven't been a soldier since before my kids were born."

"Me neither," I said, and didn't push it. "Let's just move."

On the other side of the airlock, we expected it to be dark and cool, the minimum-energy mode we'd last left it in. But the artificial sun was bright and the air was warm and fragrant with growing things.

And there was a Tauran waiting for us on the shipside landing, unarmed. It made their sign of greeting, hugging itself. "You know me," it said. "Antres 906. Are you the leader, William Mandella?"

I looked beyond it to the well-tended fields. "What the hell is this?"

"I speak right now only to the leader. Are you he?"

"No." I put my hand on Marygay's shoulder. She was also staring, stunned. "My wife."

"Marygay Potter. Come with me to the control room."

"They're ready to ride," Max said behind me. "Straight to Earth." They'd told us there would be several weeks of tending to the life-support farms, before we went into suspended animation. This looked like we were headed straight to the tanks.

"How many are here, Antres?" Marygay said.

"No one else."

"This took a lot of people."

"Come with me." She followed Antres to the lift, and I came along, both of us struggling with the zerogee nets. Antres was deft with them, but elaborately slow.

We went up to the command level and picked our way into the control room. The center screen was lit, with the image of an older male Man, perhaps one we had talked to in Centrus.

Marygay climbed into the captain's chair and strapped herself in.

"Are there any further casualties?" the Man said without preamble.

"I was going to ask the same thing. Jynn Silver."

"The one who killed one of us."

"A Tauran is not 'one of us' if you are human. Is she alive?"

"Alive and in custody. I think we have deduced much of your plan. Would you care to reveal it now?"

Marygay looked at me and I shrugged.

She spoke slowly and quietly. "Our plan is that this ship is not going to Earth. We demand to be allowed to use the Time Warp as we originally requested."

"You can't do that without our cooperation. Forty shuttle flights. What will you do if we refuse?"

She swallowed. "We'll send everybody back on the shuttle we have. Then my husband and I will ride the Time Warp to the ground. Crash-land near the southern pole."

"So you think we will give you the ship rather than let you kill yourselves?"

"Well, it won't be too comfortable for you, either. When the antimatter fuel explodes, the resulting vapor will blanket Middle Finger in clouds. There will be no spring or summer, this year or next."

"The third year," I said from behind her, "will be blizzard and then floods."

"We can't allow that to happen," he said. "So all right. We accede to your demands."

We looked at each other. "That's it?"

"You give us no choice." Two data screens lit up. "The launch schedule you see here was adapted from your original timetable."

"So this is all according to plan," Marygay said. "Your plan."

"A contingency," he said, "in case you allowed us no alternative."

She laughed. "You couldn't just let us go."

"Of course not. The Whole Tree forbade that."

"Hold it," I said. "You're disobeying the Whole Tree?"

"Not at all. It is you who are defying it. We are only taking a reasonable course of action. Reaction, to your declaration of intent to wholesale murder."

"And the Whole Tree predicted this would happen?"

"Oh, no." For the first time, he allowed himself a small smile. "Men on Earth don't know you as well as we who grew up with you."

The sheriff tried to explain what he knew or could deduce about the rationale for their plan. It was like a theological argument in somebody else's religion.

"The Whole Tree is not infallible," he said. "It represents a huge and well-informed consensus. In this case, though, it was … it was like a thousand people taking a vote, where only two or three were actually well-informed."

We were all at a big table in the dining hall, drinking bad tea made from concentrate. "That's what I don't understand," Charlie said. "It seems to me that would happen more often than not." He was directly across from the sheriff, staring intently, his chin in his palm.

"No, this was a special case." He shifted uncomfortably. "Men on Earth think they know humans. They live and work with them all their lives. But they're not at all the same kind of people as you are.

"They or their ancestors chose to come to Earth, even though it meant becoming part of a small minority, outside of Man's mainstream culture."

"Trading independence for comfort," I said. "The illusion of independence."

"It's not that simple. They live more comfortably than you—or we—do, but what's more important is that they deeply wanted to come home. People who chose Middle Finger turned their backs on home.

"So when a Man on Earth thinks about humans, there's a profoundly different composite picture. If you took one hundred fifty Earth humans and shot them forty thousand years into the future … it would be cruel. Like snatching a child from its parents, and abandoning it in a foreign land."

"That's nice," Charlie said. "The Whole Tree's decision was based on concern for our happiness."

"Concern for your sanity," the sheriff said.

"The huge expense of the enterprise wasn't a factor."

"Not a large one." He made a circular gesture, indicating everything around us. "This ship represents a lot of wealth in terms of our economy. But it's not worth much in Earth terms. There are thousands of them sitting empty, parked in orbit around the Sun. This wouldn't be a big project if people on Earth had proposed it."

"But they never would," I said. "They're stay-at-homes.

He shrugged. "How many people on Middle Finger think you're crazy?"

"More than half, I guess." We only had 1,600 volunteers out of 30,000 people. The younger half of my family does."

He nodded slowly. "But weren't they going along?"

"Bill, especially, in spite of thinking we're crazy."

"I understand that," he said. "So am I."

"What?"

"We asked that you take a Man and a Tauran."

The Tauran spoke up for the first time. "We are they," it growled.

The timetable had called for fifteen days' loading before launch, but that presupposed everybody being packed and waiting. Instead, they'd had two weeks to rearrange their lives, knowing that the expedition had been scotched.

We lost 12 out of the original 150. Replacing them was not as simple as asking for volunteers, since they'd been chosen with an eye toward a certain demographic mix and assortment of skills.

Forty thousand years from now, we might come back to an unpopulated planet. We wanted our descendants to have a chance at civilization.

We didn't have unlimited leisure for revision, juggling the shuttle schedule while we found replacements. Word had of course gone to Earth about our insurrection, so ten months from now there might be some response. If they had thousands of ships at their disposal, a few of them might be faster than the Time Warp; a lot faster.

A hundred fifty people were sufficient for a town-hall kind of democracy. We'd worked out the structure a couple of months before. There was an elected Council of five, each one of whom would serve a year as mayor, and then retire, a new councilor being elected each year.

So we worked as fast as we could, without cutting corners. Fortunately, none of the elected officials were among the ones who decided to stay home, so our little bureaucracy was intact. We probably had to make more decisions in a couple of weeks than we would in two years aboard the ship.

But it was a ship as well as a town, and the ship's captain had authority over the mayor and council. Both Marygay and I were nominated for captain, along with Anita Szydhowska, who had been with me in the Sade-138 campaign. Anita stepped down in favor of us, and I stepped down in favor of Marygay, and no one objected. Both Anita and I were elected councilors. The other three were Chance Delany, Stephen Funk, and Sage Ten. Diana Alsever-Moore was nominated but declined, arguing that as the ship's only doctor, she wouldn't have time for a hobby.

It only took twenty days to get everyone aboard the ship. I wondered whether anyone else, watching the shuttles leave for the last time, had the image-old-fashioned even in my youth—of the last ropes being thrown back onto the dock, as a great ship left its safe harbor.

The last shuttle was supposed to have our children aboard. It was one short. Sara floated over to us and wordlessly handed me a sheet of paper.

I love you but I never did intend to come with you. Sara talked me into pretending that I would, so that we would stop wasting time fighting. It was dishonest but I think I agree it was the best thing.

I'm somewhere in Centrus. Don't try to find me. If I was not loyal to you I could have stopped the whole thing the day we left you at the sheriff's. But I guess we all have to be crazy in our own way. Have a good 40,000 years.

Love, Bill

The blood had drained from Marygay's face. I handed her the note, but of course she knew what was in it.

I felt loss, but also a strange relief. And I wasn't completely surprised; at some level I guess I'd known something was going on.

Maybe Marygay had, too. She stared at the note and then slipped it under the other sheets on her clipboard, cleared her throat, and spoke to the new arrivals with only a slight quaver in her voice. "These are your initial housing assignments. We'll be trading around. But put your stuff in there now, and come back to the assembly area. Is anybody feeling spacesick?"

One big man obviously was; his skin had a greenish cast. He raised his hand. "I'll take you to the doctor," I said. "She has something stronger than that pill." He actually made it to the clinic before he barfed.

There were ten communication channels, and Marygay allowed everyone ten minutes for goodbyes. Not many people took that long. After a little more than an hour, everybody was in the assembly area, watching a large flat-screen display of Marygay in the captain's chair. All 148 of us had maneuvered so as to be "lying" on the "floor" in front of the screen.

Marygay peered out of the screen, her thumb poised over a red button on the console. "Is everybody ready?" The crowd shouted yes and, with less than military precision, our journey began. (I wondered how many people were aware of the fact, or suspected, that the red button wasn't attached to anything. It was just an engineer's joke. The ship launched itself, and knew its time of departure to within a millionth of a second.)

The onset of acceleration was slow. I was floating about a foot off the floor, and I drifted down gently, and then gained weight over the course of ten or twelve seconds. There was a slight hum, which would be the background of all our lives for ten years: the tiny residue of the unimaginable sustained violence that was flinging us out of the galaxy.

I stood up and fell down. So did a lot of people, after days or weeks of zerogee. Sara took my arm and we helped each other up, laughing, forming a wobbly triangle with the floor, that closed up into two roughly parallel people. I cautiously lowered myself into a squat and stood up again, muscles and joints protesting.

About a hundred people were stepping around carefully, looking at their feet. The rest were sitting or lying down, some showing signs of anxiety or even panic.

They'd been told what to expect, that even breathing would seem to be an effort, at first. Those of us who'd been in and out of orbit the past months were used to it. But having it described to you and feeling it were two different things.

Marygay switched us over to a view of the planet. At first it just turned beneath us, a few wispy clouds over the mottled white snowscape. People were chatting and groaning in commiseration.

After a few minutes, things quieted down, as our motion became apparent. People sat and stared at the screen in silent meditation, perhaps a kind of hypnosis.

One curved horizon appeared, and then, on the opposite side of the screen, another. They inched toward one another until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, the planet was a huge ball, visibly shrinking.