Forever Free (7 page)

About two weeks into the recess, Bill and Sara dropped their separate bombshells. I'd spent a pleasant hour in the kitchen, fixing polenta and eggs with the last greens of the season, listening to Beethoven and enjoying not talking to strangers over the holo. Bill had set the table without being asked, which I should have recognized as a danger sign.

They ate in relative silence while Marygay and I talked about the day's interviews—mostly about the rejects, who made for better conversation than the sane, sober ones who passed the test.

Bill finished his plate and pushed it slightly away from him. "I passed a test today."

I knew what he was going to say, and it felt as if the heat had been sucked out of my body; out of the room. "The sheriff's test?"

"That's right. I'm going to become one of them. A Man."

"You didn't say anything about—"

"Are you surprised?" He stared at me like a stranger on a bus.

"No," I finally said. "I thought you might wait until we were gone." And not be so obviously a traitor, I kept myself from saying.

"You still have time to change your mind," Marygay said. "They're not starting the program until deep winter."

"That's true," Bill said without elaboration. It felt like he was halfway there already.

Sara had put down her knife and fork and was not looking at Bill. "I've decided, too."

"You're not old enough to take the test yet," I said, perhaps a little too firmly.

"Not that. I've decided to go with you. If there's room for me."

"Of course there is!" No matter who we have to leave behind.

Bill looked startled. "I thought you were going to—"

"There's plenty of time for that." She looked at her mother with pretty earnestness. "You think that Man will be long gone when you return. I think they'll still be here, in improved, evolved form. That's when I'll join them, and bring them all that I've learned and seen on the voyage." Then she looked at me with her dimpled open smile. "Will you take me, as a spy for the other side?"

"Of course I will." I looked at Bill. "We do have to take a Man or two. The family could stay together."

"You don't understand. You don't get it at all." He stood up. "I'm going to a new world, too. And I'm going tomorrow."

"You're leaving?" Marygay said.

"Forever," he said. "I can't stand this anymore. I'm going to Centrus."

There was a long silence. "What about the house?" I said. "The fish?" The plan had been for him to take it all over, when we left.

"You'll just have to find somebody else." He was almost shouting. "I can't live here! I have to get out and start over."

"You couldn't wait until—" I began.

"No!" He glared at me, struggling for words, and then just shook his head and left the table. We watched in silence as he threw on his cold-weather gear and went outside.

"You aren't surprised," Sara said.

"We talked this over," I said. "He was going to keep the place; do the trotlines."

"The hell with the fish," Marygay said quietly. "Don't you see we just lost him? Lost him for good." She didn't cry until we were upstairs.

I just felt numb. I realized I'd given him up a long time ago. It's easier to stop being a father than a mother.

Bill only stayed in Centrus for two days. He came back, embarrassed at his outburst. There was still no way he was going to get aboard that starship, but he wasn't going to go back on his word; he'd take care of the fish as long as it was necessary.

I couldn't blame him for wanting to go his own way. Like father, like son. Marygay was happy at his return, but wistful and a little shaken. How many times would she have to lose her son?

We were headed for the big city ourselves, which provoked an odd association with my own boyhood.

An unimaginably long time ago, when I was seven or eight, my hippy parents spent the summer in a commune in Alaska. (That's when my brother was conceived, by somebody; my father always insisted he looked like him!)

It was a fun summer, a highlight of my childhood. We puffed up the Alcan Highway in our old Deadhead Volkswagen bus, camping or stopping in little Canadian towns along the way.

When we got to Anchorage, it seemed huge, and for years after, whenever he told people about the trip, my father quoted the guidebook: If you fly into Anchorage from an American city of any size, it seems small and quaint. If you drive or ferry up through all the little villages, it seems like a teeming metropolis.

I always remembered that when I came into Centrus, which is smaller than Anchorage had been, a millennium and a half ago. My own life has adapted itself to the scale and pace of a village, so my first impression of Centrus is one of dizzying speed and neck-craning size. But I take a mental deep breath and remember New York and London, Paris and Geneva—not to mention Skye and Atlantis, the fabulous pleasure cities that sucked away our money on Heaven. Centrus is a hick town that happens to be the biggest hick town within twenty light-years.

I held on to that thought when we came in to confer with Centrus administrators—which is to say, the world's—about our timetable for fixing up and crewing the Time Warp.

We'd hoped they could just rubber-stamp it. Fourteen of us had spent most of a week arguing over who was to do what, when. I could just see starting over and repeating the process, with the additional pressure of demands from Man.

We went all the way up to the tenth-floor penthouse office of the General Administration Building, and presented our plan to four Men, two male and two female, and a Tauran, who could have been any of three sexes. He turned out to be Antres 906, of course, the cultural attaché‚ we had entertained at our house the night I earned my first entry on the police blotter.

The five of them read the three-page schedule in silence, while Marygay and I looked out over Centrus. There wasn't really too much to see. Beyond the dozen or so square blocks of downtown, the trees were higher than the buildings; I knew there was a good-sized town out there, but the dwellings and businesses were hidden by evergreens, all the way out to the shuttle pad on the horizon. The shuttles themselves weren't visible; both were inside the launching tubes that rose out of the horizon mist like smokestacks on an old-fashioned factory.

The one wall of this room that wasn't window featured ten paintings, five each of human and Tauran manufacture. The human ones were bland cityscapes in the various seasons. The Tauran things were skeins and splotches of colors that clashed so much they seemed to vibrate. I knew that some of them were pigmented with body fluids. They were evidently prettier if you could see into the ultraviolet.

At some subtle signal, they all set down their copies of the schedule in unison.

"We have no objection to this as far as it goes," said the leftmost Man. She betrayed her lack of telepathy by glancing down the row; the others nodded slightly, including the Tauran. "The days when you need both shuttles will be an inconvenience, but we can plan around them."

" ' … as far as it goes'?" Marygay said.

"We should have told you this earlier," she said, "but it must be obvious. We will require that you take two more passengers. A Man and a Tauran."

Of course. We'd known about the Man, and should have foreseen the Tauran. "The Man is not a big problem," I said. "He or she can eat our food. But ten years of rations for a Tauran?" I did a quick mental calculation. "That's an extra six or eight tonnes of cargo."

"No, it is not a problem," Antres 906 rasped. "My metabolism can be altered to survive on your food, with a few grams of supplement daily."

"You can see the value of this to us," the Man said.

"Now that I think of it, of course," I said. "Both of your species may change somewhat in forty thousand years. You want a pair of time travelers as baselines." Marygay shook her head slowly, biting her lower lip. "We'll have to change the makeup of the crew. No disrespect, Antres, but there are many veterans who could not tolerate your presence for ten hours, let alone ten years."

"And in any case, we can't guarantee your safety," I said. "Many of us were conditioned to kill your kind on sight."

"But they have all been de-conditioned," Man said.

I thought of Max, slated as assistant civil engineer. "With uneven success, I'm afraid."

"That is understood and forgiven," Antres said. "If that part of the experiment fails, then it fails." It turned to the last page of the report and tapped on the diagram of the cargo cylinder. "I can make a small place to live down here. That way your people will not be exposed to me often or involuntarily."

"That's workable," I said. "Send us a list of things you'll need, and we'll integrate them into the loading schedule." The rest was formalities, having a small cup of strong coffee and a glass of spirits with the Men. The Tauran disappeared and came back in a few minutes with his list. They had obviously been prepared for us.

We didn't say anything about it until we were out of the building. "Damn. We should have foreseen that and beaten them to the punch."

"We should have," Marygay said. "Now we have to go back and deal with people like Max."

"Yeah, but it won't be someone like Max who kills the Tauran. It'll be someone who thinks he's over with the war. And then one day just loses it."

"Someone like you?"

"I don't think so. Hell, I'm not over the war. Bill says that's why I'm running away."

"Let's not think about the children." She put an arm around my waist and bumped me with her hip. "Let's go back to the hotel and actively not think about them."

After a pleasant interlude, we spent the afternoon shopping, for friends and neighbors as well as ourselves. Nobody in Paxton had a lot of money; we basically had a barter economy, with every adult getting a small check each month from Centrus. Sort of like the universal dole that was working so well, the last time we'd been on Earth. It did work pretty well on Middle Finger, since nobody expected luxuries. On Earth, people had been almost uniformly poor, but surrounded by constant reminders of unattainable wealth. Out here everyone had about the same kind of simple life.

We pushed a cart down the brick sidewalk, consulting our list, and made about a half-dozen stops. Herbs, guitar strings and clarinet reeds, sandpaper and varnish, memory crystals, a paint set, a kilo of marijuana (Dorian liked it but was allergic to Sage's homegrown variety). Then we had tea at a sidewalk cafe and watched people go by. It was always a novelty to see all those faces you didn't recognize.

"I wonder what this will be like when we come back."

"Unimaginable," I said, "unless it's ancient rubble. You go back forty millenniums in human history and what do you have? Not even towns, I suppose."

"I don't know. Let's remember to look it up." On the street in front of us, a car banged into the rear of another one. The Men who were driving the vehicles got out and silently inspected the damage, which was slight, just a mark on a bumper. They nodded at each other and went back to their places.

"Do you think that was an accident?" Marygay said. "What? Oh … possibly not. Probably." A staged lesson on how well they got along together. How well Man got along with himself. The coincidence of it happening in front of us was unlikely; there was little traffic.

We indulged in the services of a masseuse and masseur for the hour before we caught the bus back to Paxton. When we got back, I punched up the library to find out what we were doing forty thousand years ago. We weren't even "us" yet; still late Neanderthal. They did have flint and stone tools. No evident language or art, except for simple petroglyphs in Australia.

What if Man, and people, were to develop characteristics as profound and basic as language and art—which they could share with us, perhaps, only to the extent that we can "talk" to dogs, or be amused by the smears a chimp will make with finger-paints?

It seemed to me that it would certainly be one or the other: extinction or virtual speciation. Either way, the 150 of us would be totally alone. To rebuild the race or wither away, a useless anachronistic appendage.

I was going to keep that conclusion to myself. As if no one else would arrive at it. It would be Aldo Verdeur-Sims to first bring it up in public, or at least semi-public.

We're going to seem as alien to them as the Taurans did to us," Aldo said, "if they do manage to survive forty thousand years, which I doubt."

It was called a "discussion group" in the first note we'd sent around, but in fact it was most of the people Marygay and I figured would be most active in setting up the project, if not actually running the ship. Sooner or later there would be some democratic process.

Besides us, it was Cat and Aldo, Charlie and Diana, Ami and Teresa, and a floating population that included Max Weston (his xenophobia notwithstanding), our Sara, Lar Po, and the Tens—Mohammed and one or two of his wives.

Po was a contrarian, in his polite way: express an opinion and watch his brain cells start grinding away. "You assume constant change," he said to Aldo, "but in fact Man claims perfection, and no need to change. They might enforce that among themselves, even for forty thousand years."

"But the humans?" Aldo said.

Po dismissed our race with a flick of his hand. "I don't think we'll survive two thousand generations. Most likely, we'll challenge Man and the Taurans and be crushed."

We were meeting, as usual, in our dining room/kitchen. Ami and Teresa had brought two big jugs of blackberry wine, sweet and fortified with brandy, and the discussion was more animated than usual.

"You're both underestimating humanity," Cat said. "What's most likely is that Man and the Taurans will stagnate, while humans evolve beyond them. When we come back, it may be only Man who's familiar. Our own descendants grown into something beyond understanding."

"All this optimism," Marygay said. "Can we get back to the diagram?"

Sara had drawn up a neat timetable, based on my notes and Marygay's, roughing out the whole thing from now till launch on one big sheet of paper. At least it had started out neat. For the first hour tonight, people had studied it and penciled in suggestions. Then the Larsons came with their jugs, and the meeting became more relaxed and conversational. But we did have to refine the timetable in order to firm up the launch schedule.