Forever Free (4 page)

There was a moment of absolute silence, except for the crackling fire. The phrase "modest proposal" meant nothing to most of them, I realized, born a millennium after Swift. "Okay," Charlie said. "What's the punch line?"

"They want to isolate a human population as a genetic baseline. Let's give them isolation with a vengeance. "What I propose is that we take the Time Warp from them. But we don't just go back and forth between Mizar and Alcor. We take it out as far as it can go, and come back safely."

"Twenty thousand light-years," Marygay said. "Forty thousand, here and back. Give them two thousand generations for their experiment."

"And leave us alone for two thousand generations," I said.

"How many of us could you take?" Cat asked.

"The Time Warp's designed for two hundred, crowded," Marygay said. "I spent a few years on it, waiting for William, and it wasn't too bad. We would probably want a hundred fifty, for long-term living."

"How long?" Charlie said.

"We'd age ten years," I said. "Real years."

"It's an interesting idea," Diana said, "but I doubt you'd have to highjack the damned thing. It's a museum piece, empty for a generation. Just ask for it."

"We shouldn't even have to ask for it. Man's claim to ownership of it is a legal fiction. I paid for one three-hundred-twelfth of it, myself," Marygay said. There were 312 vets in on the original "time shuttle" deal.

"With wealth artificially generated by relativity," Lori said. "Your salary piling up interest, while you were out soldiering."

"That's true. It was still money." Marygay turned to the others. "Nobody else here bought a piece of the shuttle?" There was a general shaking of heads, but Teresa Larson raised her hand. "They stole it from us, pure and simple," she said. "I got billions of Earth dollars, enough to buy a mansion on the Nile. But it won't buy a loaf of bread on Middle Finger."

"To be devil's advocate here," I said, "Man offered to 'assume stewardship' of it, if the humans were going to abandon it. And most of the humans had no interest in it after it had served its purpose."

"Including me," Marygay said. "And I don't deny having been a willing collaborator in the swindle. They bought back our shares with money we could only spend on Earth. It was amusing at the time, worthless money in exchange for a worthless antique."

"It is an antique," I said. "Marygay took me up there once to show me around. But did it ever occur to you to wonder why they keep it maintained?"

"Tell me," Diana said. "You're going to."

"Not out of sentiment, that's for sure. I suspect they're maintaining it as a kind of lifeboat for themselves, if the situation gets difficult."

"So let's make it difficult," Max said. "Stack 'em in there like cordwood and shoot 'em back to Earth. Or to their Tauran pals."

I ignored that. "No matter what their plans are, they won't just let us have it. It may be three Earth centuries old, but it's still by far the largest and most powerful machine in this corner of the universe—even without weapons, a Class III cruiser is a lot of power and materiel. They don't make anything like them anymore. It probably comprises a tenth of the actual material wealth in the system."

"It's an interesting thought," Lori said, "but how do you plan to get there? Both of the orbital shuttles on the planet are at Centrus. You'll have to highjack at least one of those before you highjack the time shuttle."

"It will take some planning," I admitted. "We have to manufacture a situation where the alternative to letting us take the Time Warp is unacceptable. Suppose we had kidnapped those four Taurans and threatened to kill them?"

She laughed. "They'd probably say, 'Go ahead,' and send for four more."

"I'm not convinced of that. I suspect they may be no more actually interchangeable than Man is. We only have their word for it—as you say, if they're all the same, why go to the expense of sending four?"

"You could just ask them for the ship first," said Ami Larson. "I mean, they are reasonable. If they said no, then—"

People were murmuring, and a couple of them laughed out loud. Ami was third-generation Paxton, not a vet. She was here because she was married to Teresa.

"You grew up with them, Ami." Diana kept a controlled neutral expression. "Some of us old folks aren't so trusting."

"So we go out for ten years, or forty thousand, and come back," said Lar Po. "Suppose Man's experiment has been successful. We'll be useless Cro-Magnons."

"Worse than that," I said cheerfully. "They'll probably have directed their evolution into some totally new direction. We might be like house pets. Or jellyfish.

"But part of my point is that you and I and most of us here have done this before. Every time we came back from a campaign, we'd have to start over—even if only a few dozen years had passed on Earth, most of our friends and relatives had died or aged into totally different people. Customs and laws were alien. We were largely unemployable, except as soldiers."

"And you want to do it again, voluntarily?" Charlie said. "Leave behind the life you've built for yourself?"

"Fisherman—teacher. I could tear myself away."

"William and I are in a better situation than most," Marygay said. "Our children are grown, and we're still young enough to strike out in a new direction."

Ami shook her head. She was our age, biologically, and she and Teresa had teenage daughters. "You aren't curious about how your kids will turn out? You don't want to see your grandchildren?"

"We're hoping they'll come along," she said.

"If they don't?"

"Then they don't," I said. "A lot of children leave home and start off on their own."

Ami pressed on. "But not many parents do. Look at the choice you're giving them. Throw away their own world to join their parents."

"As time travelers. As pioneers."

Charlie butted in. "Forget about that aspect for a minute. Do you actually think you can recruit a hundred, a hundred fifty people without anybody going to Man and pointing the finger at you?"

"That's why we want to keep it among vets."

"I just don't want to see my oldest friend in jail."

"We're in jail, Charlie." I made a gesture that didn't knock anything over. "We can't see the bars because they're over the horizon."

The meeting broke up at midnight, after I called for a show of hands. Sixteen were with us, eighteen against, and six undecided. More support than I'd thought. We walked home through snow that had a pleasant crunch to it, enjoying the night air, not saying much.

We came in the back door, and there at the dining room table, sipping tea, was Man. Over by the fire, warming its back, a Tauran. My arm came up halfway, in an aiming reflex.

"It's late," I said to the Man, my eyes on the Tauran's fisheye clusters. One hand fluttered its seven fingers, fourteen-jointed.

"I have to talk to you now."

"Where are the children?"

"I asked them to go upstairs."

"Bill! Sara!" I called. "Whatever you say to us, they can hear." I turned to the Tauran. "—An evening of good fortune," I approximated in its language. Marygay repeated it, better.

"Thank you," it said in English, "but not for you, I fear." It was wearing a black cloak, a nice Halloween effect with its wrinkled orange skin. The cloak made it look less alien, hiding the wasp waist and huge pelvis.

"I must be getting old," I said to Man. "Lori seemed like one of us."

"She is. She didn't know we were listening."

Bill and Sara were at the top of the stairs in nightgowns. "Come on down. We're not going to say anything you can't hear."

"But I am," Man said. "Go back to bed." They obeyed. Disappointing, but not surprising. They'd listen anyhow. "This is Antres 906," Man said, "the cultural attache to Middle Finger."

I nodded at it. "Okay."

"Are you curious as to why he is here?"

"Not really. Just go ahead and have your say."

"He is here because a Tauran representative must be present in any negotiations involving possible travel to Tauran planets."

"What does that have to do with culture?" Marygay said

"Pardon me?"

"It's the cultural attaché," she said. "What does that have to do with us borrowing the time shuttle?"

" 'Culture' includes tourism. And stealing is not borrowing."

"They're not on our route," I said. "We're going straight up, out of the galactic plane, and straight back. An isosceles triangle, actually."

"You should have gone through proper channels for this."

"Sure. Starting with you, the sheriff." He covered the back of his hand, with its identifying scar.

"You could start with anyone. We are a group mind."

"But you didn't send just anyone. You sent the one Man in this town who has weapons and exercises with weights."

"You are both soldiers." He opened his vest to display a large pistol. "You might resist."

"Resist what?" Marygay said.

"Coming with me. You're under arrest."

Paxton doesn't have a large enough criminal element to warrant an actual jail, but I suppose anything that locks on the outside will do. I was in a white room with no windows, furnished with a mattress on the floor and a toilet. There was a fold-down sink next to the toilet, and across from it, a fold-down desk. But no chair. The desk had a keyboard, but it didn't work.

It had a barroom smell, spilled alcohol. That must be what they used as a disinfectant, for some reason.

I knew from a visit last year that the place had only two detention rooms, so Marygay and I constituted a crime wave. (Serious criminals, actually, didn't even spend the night here; they went straight to the real jail in Wimberly.)

I spent a while contemplating the error of my ways, and then managed to get a few hours' sleep in spite of not being able to turn off the lights.

When the sheriff opened the door I could see sunshine behind him; it was ten or eleven. He handed me a white cardboard box that had soap, a toothbrush, and such. "The shower is across the hall. Please join me for tea when you are ready." He left with no further explanation.

There were two showers; Marygay was already in one of them. I raised my voice. "He tell you anything?"

"Just unlocked the door and said to come for tea. Why didn't we ever think of doing this with the children?"

"Too late to start now." I showered and shaved and we went to the sheriff's office together.

His pistol was hanging on a peg behind him. The papers on his desk had been hastily stacked in a corner, and he'd set out a pot of tea with some crackers and jam and honey.

We sat and he poured us tea. He looked tired. "I've been with the Tree all night." Since it had become daytime in Centrus, he might have been with hundreds or a thousand Men. "I have a tentative consensus."

"That took all night?" I said. "For a group mind, you don't synape very fast." I kidded my Man colleagues at the university about that. (Physics, in fact, was a good demonstration of Man's limitations: an individual Man could tap into my colleagues' brains, but he or she wouldn't understand anything advanced without having previously studied physics.)

"In fact, much of that time was waiting for individuals to be summoned. Besides your … problem, there was another important decision to be made, not unrelated. 'The more leaves, the more Tree.' "

The jam was greenberry, a spicy sour flavor I'd liked immediately—one of the only things that had impressed me, the first day on Middle Finger. I'd arrived in deep winter.

"So you've decided to hang us in the town square?" I said. "Or will it be a simple private beheading?"

"If it were necessary to kill you, it would already have been done." Great sense of humor. "What would be the point in explaining things?"

He poured himself some tea. "There will be a wait. I need confirmation from the Whole Tree." That meant sending word to Earth and back, at least ten months. "But the tentative consensus is to send you away with my blessings. Give you the time shuttle."

"And in return," Marygay said, "you lose one hundred fifty powerful malcontents."

"It's not just that. You are already fascinating anachronisms. Think of how valuable you will be forty thousand years from now!"

"Living fossils," I said. "What an idea."

He hesitated for a moment; the word was unfamiliar. There were no actual fossils on his world. "Yes, in body as well as in modes of thought. In a way, I owe it to my own heritage. I should have thought of it myself." In their own language, there was a "collective 'I,' " which I assumed he was using.

"You said there were two decisions," Marygay said. "A related one."

"A mirror of yours, in a way." He smiled. "Yon know I love humans very much. It has always saddened me to see you go through life crippled."

"Crippled … by our individuality?" I said.

"Exactly! Unable to tap the Tree, and share life with billions of others."

"Well, we were given the choice when we mustered out. I've had over twenty years to regret not joining you, and so far I'm just as glad I didn't."

"You did have the choice, yes, and some veterans took it."

"How many?" Marygay asked.

"Actually, less than one percent. But I was new and strange to you then.

"The point is that it's been a hundred Years—nearly three hundred Earth years—since anyone was given the choice. The population of Middle Finger has grown in that time to over twenty thousand, more than large enough to maintain a viable genetic pool. So I want to start giving people the choice again."

"Anyone who wants can become you?" I had a powerful premonitory urge to gather my children to me.

"No, it would only be one per new birth, and they would have to pass tests for suitability. And they wouldn't really be me, of course; their genetic make-up will be inferior. But they would still be leaves on the Tree." He smiled in a way that I'm sure he thought was not condescending. "It sounds horrible to you, doesn't it. You call us 'zombies.' "

"It does occur to me that there are enough of you already, on this planet. Not to mention ten billion or so back on Earth. Why not leave us alone? That was the original plan."