Forever Free (21 page)

There was no objection—in fact, most of us would have borne Brenda out on our shoulders, just to get rid of her. We'd found a storage room full of solar panels and equipment out at the spaceport, and so that was not a problem; Etta Berenger set it up in a few afternoons. She also designed a year-round latrine for them, in an elegant atrium, but allowed them to do the artistic pick-and-shovel work themselves.

That freed up six rooms at the dorm. We shuffled people around so that the west end of the building was given over to Rubi and Roberta's crèche and the families who were raising children on their own. It was good for the kids to have other kids around, and marvelous to have a door—the firedoor that isolated the west wing—beyond which children could not go unescorted.

Etta and Charlie and I, along with specialists we'd call in now and then, spent a few hours every afternoon working on plans to reclaim Centrus. We could start out with small colonies like The Muses, but eventually we wanted to have an actual city to grow into.

It would have been easier on Earth, or some other well-behaved planet. Dealing with month after month of bitter cold complicated everything. Just keeping buildings livable was a challenge. In Paxton, we'd supplemented electrical heat with fireplaces and stoves, but out there we had heat farms; fast-growing trees whose limbs were trimmed every year for fuel. Centrus was surrounded by hills with native trees, but their spongy "wood" didn't burn well, and if we cut them down in quantity, we'd cause erosion and probably flooding, during the spring thaw.

The ultimate solution was going to be finding one of those power-sats and bringing it back. But that wouldn't be this winter. And this winter had to be dealt with soon—not only did it cool off quickly as the summer faded, but the output of the solar power plant plunged at the same time—we weren't just dealing with the inverse-square law (when the sun became twice as far away, we'd have one-fourth the power), but also more and more cloudy days, lacking weather-control satellites.

So we would go for wood stoves. There was enough wood at Lakeland to keep us warm through dozens of winters. Normally, the heat-farm trees were kept "topped," so they never grew above eye level. Eight uncontrolled seasons had turned those acres into a tall dense jungle of fuel.

In a shed next to a chemical factory outside of Centrus, we found hundreds of steel drums, 100- and 250-liter, which made ideal stoves for heating. I used to be a welder, and in an hour I taught a couple of guys how to cut the proper holes in the drums. Alysa Bertram also knew how to weld; she and I attached the metal ducts to the stoves. Back at the dorm, and at Muses, people were improvising exhaust ducts through windows or walls.

We diverted one farm machine and one van to a wood-gathering detail; it was going to require 850 cords of wood, to be on the safe side. They needed it to make water out of ice, as well as for keeping warm and cooking.

Everybody breathed a little easier when the first crops started coming in. The flock of chickens had grown to laying size. The artists took two pair, which was going to make living in The Muses interesting, come winter. At the dorm, we were able to turn the downstairs cube room into a chicken coop. People who had to have a large cube or screen for their movies could share them with the chickens. There weren't going to be regular cube broadcasts for a while, I thought. (That would prove wrong; faced with a long winter's boredom, people would watch anything, even if it was their own neighbors being themselves in front of a camera downstairs.)

The sunny upstairs exercise room became a greenhouse, for growing seedlings to be transplanted. We could also grow greens there during the winter, for which Anita installed three woodstoves and supplemental lighting.

As for the truly big winter problem—finding an alternative to running through the snow to bare your butt over a slit trench at fifty below—Sage came up with a solution more direct than elegant. Even at this latitude there was a permafrost layer. Anything below seven meters (and not so deep that the earth began to warm) would freeze and stay frozen forever. We didn't have earthmoving tools, or power, for that matter, to actually dig a pit deep enough and large enough for a population that was ninety and growing. But there was a copper mine only ten klicks out of town, and from it she appropriated shaped charges and a mining laser that did the job.

The folks in town would have to make do with their slit trench, but art always requires sacrifices. Going out to the frozen atrium would put them in touch with nature, and their inner selves.

I worked as hard on the reclamation project as I ever had on anything, outside of combat, and so did Marygay. There was a lot of desperation in the air. We didn't talk about the Earth expedition, not until the day of the drawing.

Everybody gathered at the dorm cafeteria at noon, where there was a glass bowl with thirty-two slips of paper in it. The youngest child who was not too young to be able, Mori Dartmouth, sat up on the table and picked out twelve names for me to announce. Sara was second, and she rewarded me with a squeal of delight. Cat was third, and hugged Sara. Marygay was eighth and she just nodded.

After twelve, my name was still in the bowl. I didn't want to look at Marygay. A lot of other people did. She cleared her throat, but it was Peek Maran who spoke: "Marygay," he said, "you're not going without William, and I'm not going without Norm. It looks like we have a game situation."

"What do you propose?" she said. "We don't have coins."

"No," he said, momentarily puzzled at the word—he was third-generation and had never seen money in any nonelectronic form. "Let's empty out the bowl and put our names—no, William's and Norm's—into it. Then have Mori draw." Mori smiled and clapped.

So I won, or we did, and there was a quiet pressure of jealousy in the room. A lot of people who hadn't volunteered their names for the bowl back in the spring would be only too glad to take their chances, and a little trip, now that deep winter loomed.

The physical preparations had been finished months before. We were taking ship Number Two, christened Mercury. All of the terraforming and recolonization tools and materials had been taken out; if Earth was deserted, we would just come back with that news, and let later generations decide about repopulating it.

We were prepared for other contingencies, though. Each ship had a fighting suit, and we took all four. We also carried a stasis dome, but elected not to bother with a nova bomb, or any such dramatic weapon. If anything that serious happened, we'd be meat anyhow.

They weren't great fighting suits, since they had to accommodate a range of sizes and skills, and we discussed leaving them behind, as a matter of principle. I argued that we could decide not to use them, when the time came, as a matter of principle. But meanwhile, as the poet said, do not go gentle into that bad night. Or something.

Some Indian tribe or tribes had no ritual for goodbyes; the person leaving just turned his back and left. Sensible people. We spent a day making the rounds, saying good-bye to everyone because you didn't dare leave anyone out.

I saw half the people in the colony, anyhow, as mayor, since everybody seemed to be in charge of this or that, and had to come by and give me a report and sketch out what they'd be doing while I was gone. Sage, who would be interim mayor, sat beside me for all of the discussions.

It was also her job, the next day, to make sure everyone was safely underground, away from the launch's radiation, when Marygay pressed the button. Precisely at noon she radioed that everyone but her was downstairs. The button gave her a minute; the ship counted down the last twenty seconds of it.

It was a crushing four gees at first; then two. Then we floated in free fall for half an orbit, and the ship drove toward Mizar's collapsar at a steady one gee.

A day and a half of constant acceleration. We made simple meals and small talk while Mizar drew closer—finally, closer than you'd like to be, to a young blue star.

The collapsar was a black pinprick against the filtered image of the huge star, and then a dot, and then a rapidly swelling ball, and then there was the odd twisting feeling and we were suddenly in dark deep space.

Now five months to Earth. We got into our coffins—Sara clumsily quick in her modesty about nakedness—and hooked up the orthotics and waited for sleep. I could hear the ship whispering, telling a couple of people to redo this or that attachment, and then the universe squeezed to a pinpoint and disappeared, and I was back in the cool dream of suspended animation.

I'd talked with Diana about the emotional, or existential, discomfort I'd gone through last time, and she said that as far as she knew, there was no medical solution for it. How could there be, when you're metabolizing slower than a sequoia? Just try to think comfortable thoughts before you go under.

It sort of worked. Most of us could see the overhead viewscreen, and I'd set up a program for it to show a sequence of soothing pictures while we waited to cool down. Expressionist paintings, quiet nature photographs. I wondered whether Earth had any nature left. Neither Man nor Tauran was sentimental about such things; they found beauty in abstractions.

Well, we didn't have such a great track record, either. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

So I spent the dreaming five months, which sometimes felt like five minutes, in a series of quiet pastoral environments, most of which were extrapolations of places I'd only read about or seen in pictures; even the commune where I grew up was in a suburb. I had played in neatly manicured parks and dreamed they were jungles. I came back to those dreams now.

It was curious. My dreams didn't take me back to Middle Finger, where Mother Nature and I had always been on intimate, battling terms. No rest in that, I guess.

Coming out of SA was more difficult, and uncomfortable, than when I'd had Diana to help. I was confused and numb. My fingers didn't want to work, and they couldn't tell clockwise from counterclockwise, unscrewing the bypass orthotics. When I lifted myself out I was streaked with blood from the abdomen down, though there was no injury.

I went to help Marygay, and she was only one step behind me, trying to sort out and loosen straps. She had managed not to splash blood all over herself. We both got dressed, and she went back to check on Sara, while I looked at the others.

Then I checked on Rii Highcloud, who was our volunteer medico. She was actually a librarian, way back in real life, but Diana had given her an intense week of training in how to use the standard medical kit aboard the ship.

Antres 906 was alert, and nodded at me when I peered over the edge of the box. Good thing. If something went wrong, the creature would have been at the mercy of a first-aid manual that had an appendix about Taurans.

Jacob Pierson was frozen solid, with no life signs. He had probably been dead for five months. It made me feel vaguely guilty that I didn't like him and hadn't looked forward to working with him.

Everyone else was at least moving. We wouldn't know if they were well until they were up and talking. Unwellness could take odd forms, too; Charlie had come out of SA on Middle Finger unable to smell flowers, though he could smell other things. (Marygay and I used it as an excuse, a private joke, for not remembering names or numbers: "Must've lost it in SA.")

She said that Sara was coming along fine; she'd needed some mopping up, but didn't want her mother to help, of all people.

We got the screen working, and Earth looked all right, or at least as we expected. About a third of what we could see, between clouds, seemed to be city, a featureless grey, all over northern Africa and southern Europe.

I drank some water and it stayed down, though I could imagine it floating, a cold spherical lump, in my stomach. I was concentrating on that when I realized Marygay was crying, silently, blotting floating tears with her knuckles and forearm.

I thought it was about Pierson and started to say something comforting.

"The same," she said tightly. "Nothing. Just like Middle Finger."

"Maybe they're … " I couldn't think of anything. They were dead or gone. All ten billion.

Antres 906 had climbed out of the box and was floating behind me. "This is not unexpected," it said, "since there was no sign of Centrus having been visited by them." It made a strange sound, like a hoarse dove. "I must go to the Whole Tree."

Marygay looked at it for a long moment. "Where is your Tree?"

It cocked its head. "Everywhere, of course. Like a telephone."

"Of course." She unbelted and floated out of the chair. "Well, let's help people get up and around. See what's down there."

We "buried" Jacob Pierson in space. He was sort of a Muslim, so Mohammed Ten said a few words before Marygay pressed the button that opened the outer lock and spun him gently into the void. It was deferred cremation, actually, since we were in a low enough orbit for him to eventually fall into friction fire.

We landed at Cape Kennedy, far out on a spit, on a special pad reserved for those of us who had to come down in a shower of gamma rays. A personnel carrier, heavily armored, rolled up to wait for us.

After thirty minutes, the radiometer let us exit. The air was sultry warm and heavy with salt fragrance. Wind rushed across mangrove swamps and ruffled our clothing as we walked unsteadily down the gangway. At the bottom, the smell was of burnt metal, and the landing pad patiently ticked as it contracted.

"So quiet," Alysa said.

"This part has always been quiet," Po said, "between launches and landings. I'm afraid the rest of the spaceport is going to be quiet, too. Like ours."

The metal ground still radiated heat. And maybe a few alpha particles. The air was wonderful, though; I was a little giddy from breathing deep.

"Who are you?" the personnel carrier boomed, in Standard. "Where are you from?"

Marygay answered in English. "Speak English. We're just a group of citizens from Middle Finger, a planet of Mizar."