Just beat the rain. I stood on the porch for a minute and watched the squall line hiss its way across the lake.
Warm inside; Marygay had started a small fire in the kitchen fireplace. Bill was sitting there with a glass of wine. That was still a novelty to him. 'So how are we doing?' His accent always sounded strange when he first got back from school. He didn't speak English in class or, I suspected, with many of his friends.
'Over the sixty percent mark,' I said, scrubbing my hands and face at the work sink. 'Any better luck and we'll have to eat the damned things ourselves.'
'Think I'll poach a big bunch for dinner,' Marygay said, deadpan. That gave them the flavor and consistency of cotton.
'Come on, Mom,' Bill said. 'Let's just have them raw.' He liked them even less than I did. Chopping off their heads was the high point of his day.
I went to the trio of casks at the other end of the room and tapped a glass of dry red wine, then sat with Bill on the bench by the fire. I poked at it with a stick, a social gesture probably older than this young planet.
'You were going to have the art zombie today?'
'The art history Man,' he said: 'She's from Centrus. Haven't seen her in a year. We didn't draw or anything; just looked at pictures and statues.'
'From Earth?'
'Mostly.'
'Tauran art is weird.' That was a charitable assessment. It was also ugly and incomprehensible.
'She said we have to come to it gradually. We looked at some architecture.'
Their architecture, I knew something about. I'd destroyed acres of it, centuries ago. Felt like yesterday sometimes.
'I remember the first time I came across one of their barracks,' I said. 'All the little individual cells. Like a beehive.'
He made a noncommittal noise that I took as a warning. 'So where's your sister?' She was still in high school but had the same bus. 'I can't keep her schedule straight.'
'She's at the library,' Marygay said. 'She'll call if she's going to be late.'
I checked my watch. 'Can't wait dinner too long.' The meeting was at eight and a half.
'I know.' She stepped over the bench and sat down between us, and handed me a plate of breadsticks. 'From Snell, came by this morning.'
They were salty and hard; broke between the jaws with an interesting concussion. 'I'll thank him tonight.'
'Old folks party?' Bill asked.
'Sixday,' I said. 'We're walking, if you want the floater.'
"'But don't drink too much wine,"' he anticipated, and held up his glass. 'This is it. Volleyball down at the gym.'
'Win one for the Gipper.'
'What?'
'Something my mother used to say. I don't know what a gipper is.'
'Sounds like a position,' he said. 'Server, Spiker, gipper.' As if he cared a lot about the game qua game. They played in the nude, mixed, and it was as much a mating ritual as a sport.
A sudden blast of sleet rattled against the window. 'You don't want to walk through that,' he said. 'You could drop me off at the gym.'
'Well, you could drop us off,' Marygay said. The route of the floater wasn't registered; just the parking location, supposedly for call forwarding. 'Charlie and Diana's place. They won't care if we're early.'
'Thanks. I might score.' He didn't mean volleyball. When he used our ancient slang I never knew whether it was affection or derision. I guess when I was twenty-one I could do both at the same time, with my parents.
A bus stopped outside. I heard Sara running up the boardwalk through the weather. The front door opened and shut fast, and she ran upstairs to change.
'Dinner in ten minutes,' Marygay called up the stairs. She made an impatient noise back.
'Starting to bleed tomorrow,' Bill said.
'Since when do brothers keep track of that,' Marygay said. 'Or husbands?'
He looked at the floor. 'She said something this morning.'
I broke the silence. 'If there are any Men there tonight…'
'They never come. But I won't tell them you're off plotting.'
'It's not plotting,' Marygay said. 'Planning. We'll tell them eventually. But it's a human thing.' We hadn't discussed it with him or Sara, but we hadn't tried to keep them from overhearing.
'I could come someday.'
'Someday,' I said. Probably not. So far it was all first-generation; all vets, plus their spouses. Only a few of them, spouses, were born on this thing Man had called a 'garden planet,' when they gave us a choice of places to relocate after the war.
We usually called 'our' planet MF. Most of the people who lived here were dozens of generations away from appreciating what we'd meant by 'middle finger.' Even if they did know, they probably didn't connect the acronym with the primal Oedipal act.
After living through an entire winter, though, they probably called the planet their cultures' versions of 'motherfucker.'
MF had been presented to us as a haven and a refuge – and a place of reunion. We could carve out an existence here as plain humans, without interference from Man, and if you had friends or lovers lost in the relativistic maze of the Forever War, you could wait for them on the Time Warp, a converted battlewagon that shuttled back and forth between Mizar and Alcor fast enough to almost halt aging.
Of course it turned out that Man did want to keep an eye on us, since we comprised a sort of genetic insurance policy. They could use us as a baseline if, after X generations, something bad cropped up in their carbon-copy genetic pattern. (I once used that term with Bill, and started to explain, but he did know what carbon copies were. Like he knew what cave paintings were.)
But they weren't passive observers. They were zookeepers. And MF did resemble a zoo: an artificial simplified environment. But the zookeepers didn't build it. They just stumbled onto it.
Middle Finger, like all the Vega-class planets we'd found, was an anomaly and a cartoon. It defied normal models of planetary formation and evolution.
A too-young bright blue star with a single planet, Earth-sized with oxygen-water chemistry. The planet orbits at a distance where life can be sustained, if only just.
(Planet people tell us that there's no way to have an Earth-type planet unless you also have a Jupiter-type giant in the system. But then stars like Vega and Mizar shouldn't have Earths anyhow.)
Middle Finger has seasons, but they're provided not by inclination toward the sun, but by the long oval of its orbit. We have six seasons spread over three Earth years: spring, summer, fall, first winter, deep winter, and thaw. Of course the planet moves slower, the farther it is from its sun, so the cold seasons are long, and the warm ones, short.
Most of the planet is arctic waste or dry tundra. Here at the equator, lakes and streams ice over in deep winter. Toward the poles, lakes are solid permanent ice from the surface down, with sterile puddles forming on warm summer days. Two-thirds of the planet's surface is lifeless except for airborne spores and micro-organisms.
The ecology is curiously simple, too – fewer than a hundred native varieties of plants; about the same number of insects and things that resemble arthropods. No native mammals, but a couple of dozen species of large and small things that are roughly reptiles or amphibians. Only seven kinds of fish, and four aquatic mollusks.
Nothing has evolved from anything else. There are no fossils, because there hasn't been enough time – carbon dating says nothing on or near the surface is more than ten thousand years old. But core samples from less than fifty meters down reveal a planet as old as Earth.
It's as if somebody had hauled a planet here and parked it, seeded with simple life. But where did they haul it from, and who are they, and who paid the shipping bill? All of the energy expended by the humans and the Taurans during the Forever War wouldn't have moved this planet far.
It's a mystery to them, too; the Taurans, which I find reassuring.
There are other mysteries that are not reassuring. Chief among them is that this corner of the universe had been inhabited before, up to about five t
housand years ago.
The nearest Tauran planet, Tsogot, had been discovered and colonized during the Forever War. They found the ruins of a huge city there, larger than New York or London, buried in drifting dunes. The husks of dozens of alien spaceships drifted in orbit, one of them an interstellar vessel.
Of the creatures who had built this powerful civilization, not a clue. They left behind no statues or pictures, which may be explainable in terms of culture. Neither did they leave any bodies, not even a single bone, which is harder to explain.
The Tauran name for them is Boloor, 'the lost.'
I usually cooked on Sixday, since I didn't teach then, but the Greytons had brought by a couple of rabbits, and that was Marygay's specialty, hassenpfeffer. The kids liked it better than most Earth food. They mostly preferred the bland native stuff, which is all they got at school. Marygay says it's a natural survival trait; even on Earth, children stuck to bland, familiar food. I hadn't, but then my parents were strange, hippies. We ate fiery Indian food. I never tasted meat until I was twelve, when California law made them send me to school.
Dinner was amusing, Bill and Sara trading gossip about their friends' dating and mating. Sara's finally gotten over Taylor, who had been her steady for a year, and Bill had welcome news about a social disaster the boy had caused. It had stung her when he declared himself home, but after a few months' fling he turned het again, and asked her to take him back. She told him to stick to boys. Now it turns out he did have a boyfriend over in Hardy, very secret, who got mad at him and came over to the college to make a loud public scene. It involved sexual details that we didn't used to discuss at the dinner table. But times change, and fun is fun.
Two
The thing we were plotting actually grew out of an innocent bantering argument I'd had with Charlie and Diana some months before. Diana had been my medical officer during the Sade-138 campaign, our last, out in the Greater Magellanic Cloud; Charlie had served as my XO. Diana had delivered both Bill and Sara. They were our best friends.
Most of the community had taken Sixday off to get together at the Larson' for a barn-raising. Teresa was an old vet, two campaigns, but her wife Ami was third-generation Paxton. She was our age, biologically, and they had two fusion-clone teenaged daughters. One was off at university, but the other, Sooz, greeted us warmly and was in charge of the coffee and tea.
The hot drinks were welcome; it was unseasonably cold for late spring. It was also muddy. Middle Finger had weather control that was usually reliable – or used to be – but we'd had too much rain the previous couple of weeks, and moving clouds around didn't seem to help. The rain gods were angry. Or happy, or careless; never could tell about gods.
The first couple to arrive, as usual, were Cat and Aldo Verdeur-Sims. And as usual, Cat and Marygay embraced warmly, but only for an instant, out of consideration for their husbands.
On her last mission Marygay, like me, was a het throwback in a world otherwise 100 percent home. Unlike me, she overcame her background and managed to fall in love with a woman, Cat. They were together for a few months, but during their last battle, Cat was severely wounded and went straight to the hospital planet Heaven.
Marygay assumed that was it; the physics of relativity and collapsar jump would separate them by years or centuries. So she came here to wait for me – not for Cat – on the Time Warp. She told me all about Cat soon after we got together, and I didn't think it was a big deal; a reasonable adjustment under the circumstances. I'd always been easier with female homosex than male, anyhow.
So right after Sara was born, who should appear but Cat. She'd met Aldo on Heaven and heard about Middle Finger, and the two of them switched to het – something Man could easily do for you and, at that time, was required if you were going to Middle Finger. She knew Marygay was here, from Stargate records, and the space-time geometry worked out all right. She showed up about ten Earth years younger than Marygay and I were. And beautiful.
We got along well – Aldo and I played chess and go together – but you'd have to be blind not to see the occasional wistfulness that passed between Cat and Marygay. We sometimes kidded one another about it, but there was an edge to the joking. Aldo was more nervous about it than me, I think.
Sara came along with us, and Bill would come with Charlie and Diana after church let out. We unbelievers got to pay for our intellectual freedom by donning work boots and slogging through the mud, pounding in the reference stakes for the pressor field generator.
We borrowed the generator from the township, and along with it got the only Man involved in the barn-raising. She would have come anyway, as building inspector, after we had the thing up.
The generator was worth its weight in bureaucrats, though. It couldn't lift the metal girders; that took a lot of human muscle working together. But once they were in position, it kept them in place and perfectly aligned. Like a petty little god that was annoyed by things that weren't at right angles.
I had gods on the brain. Charlie and Diana had joined this new church, Spiritual Rationalism, and had dragged Bill into it. Actually, they didn't have gods in the old sense, and it all seemed reasonable enough, people trying to put some poetry and numinism into their everyday lives. I think Marygay would have gone along with it, if it weren't for my automatic resistance to religion.
Lar Po had surveying tools, including an ancient laser collimator that wasn't much different from the one I'd used in graduate school. We still had to slog through the mud and pound stakes, but at least we knew the stakes were going where they belonged.
The township also supplied a heavy truck full of fiber mastic, more reliable than cement in this climate, and easier to handle. It stayed liquid until it was exposed to an ultrasonic tone that was two specific frequencies in a silent chord. Then it froze permanently solid. You wanted to make sure you didn't have any on your hands or clothes when they turned on the chime.
The piles of girders and fasteners were a kit that had come in a big floater from Centrus. Paxton was allotted such things on the basis of a mysterious formula involving population and productivity and the phases of the moons. We actually could have had two barns this spring, but only the Larsons wanted one.
By the time we had it staked out, about thirty people had showed up. Teresa had a clipboard with job assignments and a timeline for putting the thing up. People took their assignments good-naturedly from 'Sergeant Larson, sir.' Actually, she'd been a major, like me.
Charlie and I worked together on the refrigeration unit. We'd learned the hard way the first years on this planet, that any permanent building bigger than a shed had to sit on ice year-round. If you carve down to the permafrost and lay a regular foundation, the long bitter winters crack it. So we just give in to the climate and build on ice, or frozen mud.
It was easy work, but sloppy. Another team nailed together a rectangular frame around what would be the footprint of the building, plus a few centimeters every way. Max Weston, one of the few guys big enough to wrestle with it, used an air hammer to pound alloy rods well below the frost line, every meter or so along the perimeter. These would anchor the barn against the hurricane-force winds that made farming such an interesting gamble here. (The weather-control satellites couldn't muster enough power to deflect them.)
Charlie and I slopped around in the mud, connecting long plastic tubes in a winding snake back and forth in what would be the building's sub-foundation. It was just align-glue-drop; align-glue-drop, until we were both half drunk from the glue fumes. Meanwhile, the crew that had nailed up the frame hosed water into the mud, so it would be nice and deep and soupy when we froze it.
We finished and hooked the loose ends up to a compressor and turned it on. Everybody took a break while we watched the mud turn to slush and harden.
It was warmer inside, but Charlie and I were too bespattered to feel comfortable in anyone's kitchen, so we just sat on a stack of foamsteel girders and let Sooz bring us tea.
I waved at the rectangle of mud. '
Pretty complex behavior for a bunch of lab rats.'
Charlie was still a little dull from the glue. 'We have rats?'
'A breeding herd of lab rats.'
Then he nodded and sipped some tea. 'You're too pessimistic. We'll outlast them. That's one thing I have faith in.'
'Yeah, faith can move mountains. Planets.' Charlie didn't deny the obvious: that we were animals in a zoo, or a lab. We were allowed to breed freely on Middle Finger in case something went wrong with the grand experiment that was Man: billions of genetically identical non-individuals sharing a single consciousness. Or billions of test-tube twins sharing a mutual data base, if you wanted to be accurate.
We could clone like them, no law against it, if we wanted a son or daughter identical to us, or fusion-clone like Teresa and Ami, if some biological technicality made normal childbirth impossible.
But the main idea was to keep churning out offspring with a wild mix of genes. Just in case something went wrong with perfection. We were their insurance policy.
People had started coming to Middle Finger as soon as the Forever War was over. Vet immigration, spread out over centuries because of relativity, finally totaled a couple of thousand people, maybe ten percent of the present population. We tended to stick together, in small towns like Paxton. We were used to dealing with each other.
Charlie lit up a stick and offered me one; I declined. 'I think we could outlast them,' I said, 'if they let us survive.'
'They need us. Us lab rats.'
'No, they just need our gametes. Which they can freeze indefinitely in liquid helium.'
'Yeah, I can see that. They line us up for sperm and egg samples and then kill us off. They aren't cruel, William, or stupid, no matter what you think of them.'
The Man came out to get the manual for her machine, and took it back to the kitchen. They all looked alike, of course, but with considerable variation as they got older. Handsome, tall, swarthy, black-haired, broad of chin and forehead. This one had lost the little finger of her left hand, and for some reason hadn't had it grow back. Probably not worth the time and pain, come to think of it. A lot of us vets remembered the torture of re-growing limbs and members.