Forever Free (8 page)

You could actually look at it as two linked timetables, and in fact there was a ruled line separating the two: before approval and after approval. For the next nine months, we were limited to two launches a week, and one of them had to be reserved for fuel shipment—a tonne of water and two kilograms of antimatter (which with its containment apparatus took up half the shuttle's payload).

After approval came from Earth, we could have daily shuttles most days, the one on the ground being loaded while the one in orbit unloaded. We could make a good case for getting the ship's ecology up and running before approval, but there was no reason to send up people and their belongings, beyond the skeleton crew that was setting up the farms and fish, and the three engineers stalking from stem to stern, checking "systems" (like toilets and door latches) and making repairs, while it was still relatively easy to find or make parts.

The rationale for fueling up the ship prior to approval was that, if the Whole Tree were to turn us down, the huge ship would make a few trips to Earth, bringing back luxuries and oddities. (Mars, too; human and Man's presence went back for centuries now; you could bundle up and breathe outdoors there with a slight oxygen supplement. They had their own artistic traditions, and even antiques.) There were plenty of humans on Middle Finger, let alone Men, who would much rather see the Time Warp used that way. Paintings, pianos, pistachio nuts.

We might be allowed to go along as a sort of consolation prize.

Assuming there would be no approval problem, though, we went ahead with scheduling the second stage. It would only take fifteen days to load all of the people and their personal effects, a hundred kilograms each. Each one could also petition to bring another hundred kilograms, or more, for general use. Mass wasn't too critical, but space was; we didn't want to be crowded with clutter.

It does take a lot of stuff to keep 150 people happy for a decade, but much of it was already built into the ship, like the gym and theater. There were even two music rooms, acoustically isolated, so as not to drive neighbors to acts of vandalism. (We tried to get a real piano, speaking of antiques, but there were only three on Middle Finger, so we had to settle for a couple of electronic ones. I couldn't hear the difference, myself.)

Some requests had to be turned down because of the size of our little mobile town. Eloi Casi wanted to bring a two-tonne block of marble, to work for ten years on an intricate sculptural record of the voyage. I would love to see the result, but would not love living with "clink … clink … clink." He compromised with a log, a half-meter by two meters, and no power tools.

Marygay and I were the initial arbiters for these requests, always with the understanding that everything from Eloi's huge sculpture to a brass band could be approved by referendum, after the Whole Tree's acceptance.

I explained to Man that we might need extra launches for "afterthought" luxuries that the population voted to include, and they were cooperative. They actually were getting into the spirit of the thing, in their own undemonstrative way: it was interesting to be in on the beginning of an experiment forty millenniums long.

(They even went so far as to write up a description of the voyage and its purpose in a physical and linguistic medium that might last all those centuries: eight pages of text and diagrams inscribed on platinum plates, and another twelve pages that comprised an elaborate Rosetta Stone, starting with basic physics and chemistry, from which they derived logic, and then grammar, and finally, with some help from biology, a vocabulary large enough to describe the project in simple terms. They planned to put the plates on a wall in an artificial cave on the top of the highest mountain on the planet, with duplicates on Mount Everest on Earth and Olympus Mons on Mars.) It's both natural and odd that Marygay and I wound up being leaders of the band. We did come up with the idea, of course, but we both knew from our military experience that we weren't natural-born leaders. Twenty years' parenting and helping a small community grow had changed us—and twenty years of being the "oldest" people in the world. There were plenty of people older than us in actual aging, but nobody else who could remember life before the Forever War. So people came to us for advice because of this mostly symbolic maturity.

Most people seemed to assume that I was going to be the captain, when the time came. I wondered how many would be surprised when I stepped down in favor of Marygay. She was more comfortable with being an officer.

Well, being an officer had gotten her Cat. All I got was Charlie.

The meeting broke up before dark. The first heavy flakes of a long storm were drifting down. There would be more than half a meter on the ground by morning; people had livestock to manage, fires to kindle, children to worry about—children like Bill, out on the road in this weather.

Marygay had gone to the kitchen to make soup and scones and listen to music, while Sara and I sat at the dining room table and consolidated all of the scribblings on her once-neat chart into a coherent timetable. Bill called from the tavern, where he'd been in a pool tournament, and said he'd like to leave the floater there, if nobody needed it right away, and walk home. The snow was so dense in the air that headlights were useless. I said that was a good idea, not mentioning the slur in his speech that made it a doubly good idea.

He seemed sober when he got home, more than an hour later. He came in through the mudroom, laughing while he beat snow off his clothes. I knew how he felt—this kind of snow was a bitch to drive in, but wonderful for walking. The sound of it feathering down, the light touch on skin—nothing like the killer horizontal spikes of a deep winter blizzard. We'd have neither aboard ship, of course, but the lack of one seemed a more than fair trade for the other.

Bill got a fresh scone and some hot cider, and sat down with us. "Knocked out in the first round," he said. "They got me on a technical scratch." I nodded in sympathy, though I wouldn't know a technical scratch from a technical itch. The game they played was not exactly eight ball.

He frowned at the chart, trying to read it upside-down. "They really snaffed your pretty chart, sister."

"It was meant to be snaffed with," she said. "We're making up a new one."

"Call it out to everyone tonight or in the morning," I said. "Give them something to do other than shovel snow."

"Your mind's made up?" he said to Sara. "You're going to take the big jump? And when you come back, I won't even be dust anymore."

"Your choice," she said, "as well as mine."

He nodded amiably. "I mean, I can see why Mom and Dad—"

"We've had this conversation before."

I could hear the house creak. Settling under the weight of snow. Marygay was sitting silent in the kitchen, listening.

"Run it by again," I said. "Things have changed since I last heard it."

"What, that you're taking one of Man along? And a Tauran?"

"You'll be Man by then."

He looked at me for a long moment. "No."

"It shouldn't make any difference which individual goes. Group mind and all."

"Bill doesn't have the right genes," Sara said. "They'll want to send a real Man." That was a pun that saw daily use.

"I wouldn't go anyhow. It stinks of suicide."

"There's not much danger," I said. "More danger staying here, actually."

"That's true. You're less likely to die in the next ten years than I am in the next forty thousand."

I smiled. "Ten versus ten."

"It's still running away. You're bored with this life and you're deathly afraid of growing old. I'm not either of those things."

"What you are is twenty-one and all-knowing."

"Yeah, bullshit."

"And what you don't know is what life used to be like, without Man or Tauran to complicate things. Or make things easier, by brainwashing you."

"Brainwashing. You haven't brought that up in weeks."

"It's as obvious as a wart on your nose. But like a wart, you don't see it because you're used to it."

Bill exploded. "What I am used to is this constant nagging!" He stood up. "Sara, you can supply the answers. Keep talking, Dad. I'm gonna go take a nap."

"So who's running away now?"

"Just tired. Really tired."

Marygay was at the kitchen door. "Don't you want some soup?"

"Not hungry, Mom. I'll zap some later." He took the stairs two at a time.

"I do know the answers by heart," Sara said, smiling, "if you want to run through the logic again."

"You're not the one I'm losing," I said. "Even though you plan to go over to the enemy someday." She looked down at her chart and growled something in Tauran. "What does that mean?"

"It's part of their catechism. It sort of means 'Own nothing, lose nothing.' " She looked up and her eyes were bright. "It also means 'Love nothing, lose nothing.' They use the words interchangeably."

She stood up slowly. "I want to talk to him." When I went up to bed, an hour and a half later, they were still arguing in whispers.

It was Bill's turn to fix breakfast the next morning, and he was silent as he worked over the corn cakes and eggs. I started to compliment him when he served them, but he cut me short: "I'm going. I'm going with you."

"What?"

"I've changed my mind." He looked at Sara. "Or had it changed. Sister says there's room for another guy in aqua-culture."

"And you have a natural love for that," I said.

"The head-chopping part, anyhow." He sat down. "It is the chance of a lifetime, of many lifetimes. And I won't be that old, when we get back."

"Thank you," Marygay said, her voice wavering. Bill nodded. Sara smiled.

The next few months were tiring but interesting. We spent ten or twelve hours a week in the library's ALSC—Accelerated Life Situation Computer—learning or relearning the arcana of spaceflight. Marygay had gone through it before; everyone who went on the time shuttle had to know the basics of how the ship was run.

Unsurprisingly, things had gotten simpler in the centuries since I was last in training. One person could actually control the whole ship, under normal circumstances.

We trained for specialties, too. For me it was shuttle piloting and the suspended-animation facility, which made me long for summer even more than usual.

We were through first winter and well into deep winter before word came from Earth.

Some people like deep winter for its austere simplicity. It rarely snows. The diminished sun climbs its same steady course. It gets down to thirty or forty below at night; sixty-five below before thaw season begins.

The people who like deep winter are not fishermen. When the lake is solid enough to walk on, I go out to make ninety-six holes in the ice, using hollow heated cylinders.

Each cylinder is a meter of thick aluminum with a heating element wound through inside. The cylinder is flared with insulation at the top so as not to sink. I set out a dozen at a time, upright, spaced evenly for the trotlines, then turn them on and wait. After a couple of hours, they melt through, and I turn off the power. Wait another hour or so, and then the fun begins.

Of course by the time the ice is refrozen on the inside, the outside is stuck fast. I carry a sledgehammer and a crowbar. I whang around the outside of the cylinder until there's a cracking, sucking sound, and then I take hold of the flange and haul this thirty-kilogram ice cube up. I turn the power on that one up high and move down to repeat the process on the next one.

By the time I get to the end of the dozen, the first one has warmed enough so that I can slip it off the bar of ice it's holding. Then I use the crowbar to break up the ice that's re-formed in the hole, slip the aluminum sleeve back in, turn the power down to minimum, cap it, and move to the next one.

The reason for this rigmarole is a combination of thermodynamics and fish psychology. I have to keep the water in the hole at exactly zero or the fish won't bite. But if you don't start out with liquid water and just melt through—you wind up with a cylinder of ice clinking around in it. The fish will bite the hook, but hang up and get away.

Bill and Sara did half the holes one day, and Marygay and I did the other half the next. When we came in from work, late afternoon, the house smelled wonderful. Sara was roasting a chicken over the fire, and had made hot mulled cider with sweet wine.

She wasn't in the kitchen. Marygay and I poured cups and went into the living room.

Our children were sitting silently with a Man. I recognized him by his bulk and the scar. "Afternoon, Sheriff."

Without preamble: "The Whole Tree said no."

I sat down heavily, sloshing some cider. Marygay sat on the couch armrest. "Just that?" she said. "Only 'no' and nothing more?"

My spinning mind came up with "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.' "

"There are details." He pulled out a four- or five-page document, folded over, and set it on the coffee table. "Basically, they thank you for your work, and have paid each of the one hundred fifty volunteers one one-hundred-fiftieth of what the ship is worth."

"In Earth credits, no doubt," I said.

"Yes … but also a trip to Earth, to spend it. It is a large fortune, and could make life easier and more interesting for all of you."

"Let all one hundred fifty of us aboard?"

"No." The sheriff smiled. "You might go someplace other than Earth."

"How many, and which of us?"

"Seventeen; you choose. They'll be in suspended animation during the flight, as a security precaution."

"While Man does the flying and life support. How many of you?"

"I wasn't told. How many would it take?"

"Maybe twenty, if ten were farmers." We hadn't actually thought in terms of minimums. "Are any of you farmers?"

"I don't know of any. We learn very fast, though."

"I suppose you do." Not the response a farmer would give.

"Have you offered the sheriff some cider?" Marygay said.

"I can't stay," he said. "I just wanted you two to hear before the general broadcast."