Peace and War

  The classroom was stuffy, stale with three classes' exhalations. I opened the window partway and sat on the table in front. All twelve students were there.

  A pretty girl in front raised her hand. 'What's it like to be in jail, Master?'

  'As many years as you've been in school, Pratha, you know all there is to know about jail.' That got a slight laugh. 'It's just a room with no windows.' I picked up the text and brushed the face with my sleeve.

  'Were you scared, Master?' Modea, my best pupil.

  'Of course. Man isn't accountable to us. I could have been locked up forever, eating the slop they and you call food.' They smiled indulgently at my old-fashionedness. 'Or they could have executed me.'

  'Man wouldn't, sir.'

  'I guess you know them better than I do. But the sheriff was careful to point out that that was in their power.' I held up the text. 'Let's go back for a minute and review what we know about the big I, moment of inertia.'

  It was a difficult period. Rotational kinematics is not intuitive. I remembered how much trouble I'd had with it, more than halfway back to Newton's day. The kids paid attention and took notes, but most of them had that 'on autopilot' look. Taking it down by rote, hoping they could puzzle it out later. Some of them would not. (Three were hopelessly lost, I suspected, and I'd have to talk to them soon.)

  We ground through to the end of the lesson. While they were putting on their coats and capes, Gol Pri voiced an obvious concern. 'Master Mandella, if Man does let you take the starship, who will our teacher be? For mathematical physics?'

  I thought for a moment, discarding possibilities. 'Man, probably, if it's someone from Paxton.' Gol's face tightened slightly. He'd had classes from my officemate. 'I would put in a search, though. There are plenty of people in Centrus who could do it, if they felt a sudden hunger for life on the frontier.'

  'Would you be teaching on the ship?' Pratha said. 'If we came along?' Her expression was interesting and not ambiguous. Down, boy; she's barely older than your daughter. 'Sure. That's about all I'm good for.'

  Actually, they might make me harvest fish, aboard the Time Warp. That would be a major part of the diet, and I certainly knew my way around a cleaver.

  When I got home from class, I didn't go straight out to the dock. There was no rush. The day was clear and cold, Mizar making the sky a naked energetic blue, like an electric arc. I'd wait for Bill to get home.

  Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea and blinked through the news. The service came from Centrus, so our story was there, but buried in the exurb section, cross-ref to vets and Earth. Just as well. I didn't want a lot of questions before we had answers.

  I asked for random Beethoven and just listened, staring out at the lake and forest. There was a time when I would have thought you'd be nuts to trade this for the austerity and monotony of a starship.

  There was also a time when I was, we were, romantic about the frontier. We came out here when Marygay was pregnant with Bill. But it's grown up to where it's just Centrus without conveniences. And there's no place farther out, not to live. No population pressure to speak of. No cultural mandate to keep moving out.

  One of the useless things I remember from school is the Turner Thesis. How the American character was shaped by the frontier, always receding, always tempting.

  That gave me a little chill. Is that what we were proposing? A temporal version of a dream that was really dead before I was born. Though it drove my father, along with my family – in a VW bus with flowers painted all over the rusted body – to the Pacific and then north to Alaska. Where we found rough-and-ready frontier shops that served latte and cappuccino.

  It was possible that out of ten billion souls scattered through this corner of the Galaxy, only Marygay and I had even a tenuous connection to the American frontier. Charlie and Diana and Max were born in a place that still called itself America, but it had not been a place that Frederick Jackson Turner would have recognized, its only 'frontier' light-years and centuries away, men and women fighting an incomprehensible enemy for no reason.

  Bill came in and we both put on aprons and gloves and went out to the dock. We worked in relative silence, monosyllables, for the first two trotlines, Bill beheading them with such fervor that twice he got the cleaver stuck in the wood.

  'People give you shit about your parents being jailbirds?'

  "'Birds"? Oh, being in jail, yeah. They mostly thought it was funny. Stealing the starship and all, like a movie.'

  'Looks like they'll just give it to us.'

  'Our history Man said she thought they would. They could replace the starship with a newer one, from Earth, through the collapsar. No real loss.' He whacked down on a fish. 'To them.'

  That was clear enough. 'But there would be to you. If you don't go with us.'

  He held down the writhing headless fish for a moment, then chopped off its tail and threw it in the freezer. 'There are things I can't say in English. Maybe there aren't words.'

  'Go on.'

  'You say "there would be to you," a loss. Or you could say "there will be a loss to you." But nothing in between.'

  I paused, my hand on the line, trying to sort out grammar. 'I don't get it. You say "would" because it's in the future, uncertain.'

  He spat out a phrase in Standard: Ta meeya a cha! You say meeya when the outcome is uncertain but the decision has been made. Not ta loo a cha or ta lee a cha, which is like your "would" or "will."'

  'I was never good with languages.'

  'I guess not. But the point is, the point is…' He was angry, jaw set, reddening. He did another fish and jammed its head back on the hook. 'No matter what the outcome, you've done it. You've said to the world "the hell with Bill and Sara." You're going your own way. Whether Man allows it or not, the intent is there.'

  'That's harsh.' I finished the fish I was doing. 'You can come with us. I want you to come with us.'

  'And what an offer that is! Throw away everything! Thanks a lot.'

  I struggled to keep my voice calm. 'You could see it as an opportunity, too.'

  'Maybe to you. I'd be over ten – thirty-some, by little years – and everyone I ever knew, except for you, dead for forty thousand. That's not an opportunity. That's a sentence! Almost a death sentence.'

  'To me it's a frontier. The only one left.'

  'Cowboys and Hindus,' he said quietly, turning back to the fish. I didn't say 'Pakistanis.'

  I could see that he was normal and I was not, even by the standards of my own long-dead culture. Marygay and I, and the other Forever War vets, had repeatedly been flung forward in time, often knowing that when you came to ground, the only people still alive from your past would be the ones you had traveled with.

  Twenty years later, that was still central to me: the present is a comforting illusion, and although life persists, any one life is just a breath in the wind. I would be challenged on that the next afternoon, from an unexpected source.

  Six

  Three times a long Year, I had to report to Diana for some primitive medicine. No human or Man born in the past several centuries had had cancer, but some of us fossils lacked the genes to suppress it. So periodically, Diana had to check, as we politely used to say, where the sun don't shine.

  The wall of her office, upstairs in the dome, had been gleaming metal at first, with really strange acoustics due to its roundness. She could stand across the room and whisper, and it would sound as if she were next to your ear. Charlie and Max and I liberated some studs and panels from a stack behind the firehouse, and nailed together a passably square room. The walls were a comfortable clutter of pictures and holos now, which I tried to study intensely as she threaded a sensor probe up into my colon.

  'Your little friend's back,' she said. 'Precancerous lesions. I've got a sample to send off.' It was an odd sensation when the probe withdrew, so fast it made me gasp. Relief and a little pain, an erotic shiver.

  'You know the drill. When you get the pill, don't eat for twelve hours, take it, the
n two hours later, stuff yourself. Bread, mashed potatoes.' She crossed over to the steel sinks of the lab module, carefully holding the ophidian probe away from her. 'Get cleaned up and dressed while I set this up.'

  She would send the cells off to a place in Centrus, where they'd make up a pill full of mechanical microphages, programmed to dine on my cancer and then switch off. It was only a minor inconvenience, nothing compared to the skin cancer treatment, which was just painted on, but burned and itched for a long time.

  Marygay and I had to chase cancer all the time, like everybody we knew who had gone through limb replacement on the hospital planet Heaven, back in the old days. They've licked that now.

  I eased myself down by her desk just as she finished wrapping the package. She sat down and addressed it from memory. 'I ordered five of these, which should be plenty for ten years. The examination's just a formality; I'd be surprised if your cancer's changed since the first one.' 'You'll be along, though, to check it out?'

  'Yeah. I'm as crazy as you are.'

  I laughed. She didn't. She put her elbows on the desk and stared at me. 'I'll never bother you about this again, William, but as your doctor I have to say it.'

  'I think I know what it is.'

  'You probably do. This whole ambitious scheme is just an elaborate response to post-traumatic stress disorder. I could give you pills for that.'

  'As you've offered in the past. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't believe in chemical exorcism.'

  'Charlie and I are running away with you for the same reason. Hoping to put our ghosts to rest. But we're not leaving any children behind.'

  'Neither are we. Unless they choose to stay.'

  'They will. You're going to lose them.'

  'We have ten months to turn them around.'

  She nodded. 'Sure. If you can get Bill to go, I'll let you stick something up my ass.'

  'Best offer I've had all day.'

  She smiled and put a hand on my arm. 'Come on downstairs. Let's have a glass of wine.'

  Seven

  Marygay and I were in the group of twelve, plus one Man and one Tauran, who went up to inspect the starship, to determine what would be necessary for the voyage. We couldn't just turn the key and go, when the ten months were up. We were assuming the Whole Tree would endorse the 'good riddance' policy, and it could take most of the ten months' wait to get the ship in order.

  The trip up to orbit was interesting, the first time I'd been in space since the kids were born. We went straight up, with constant gentle acceleration. That was a profligate waste of antimatter, I knew. The Man pilot shrugged and said there was plenty. She wasn't sure where it came from; maybe from the huge supply in the Time Warp.

  For a spaceship, the shuttle was tiny, about the size of a schoolbus. There were windows all around, including behind, so we could watch Centrus shrink until it merged with the countryside. Ahead, the starship became the brightest star in the darkening sky. By the time we were in black space, you could tell it wasn't a star; slightly elongated.

  The shuttle flipped and began slowing when we were maybe a thousand kilometers from it. Braking at about two gees, it was uncomfortable to crane around to watch the starship grow. But it was worth a stiff neck.

  The Time Warp was an antique, but not by my standards! It had been designed and built more than a millennium after I'd left school. The last cruiser I'd fought in had been an ungainly collection of modules stacked around in a jumble of girders and cables. The Time Warp had a simple elegant form: two rounded cylinders, attached at front and rear, with a slab of shielding between them along the rear half, to soak up gamma rays. The metal was like delicate lace around the very end of the top cylinder, where the antimatter engine waited.

  We docked with an almost imperceptible bump, and when the airlock door irised open, my ears popped and I was suddenly glad they'd warned us to bring sweaters.

  The ship had been maintained with the life-support systems at a bare minimum. The air was stale and cold, just enough above zero to keep the water from freezing and bursting pipes.

  The partial pressure was equivalent to three kilometers' altitude, thin enough to make you dizzy. We would get used to it over time.

  We used handholds to crawl clumsily through the zero-gee into an elevator decorated with cheerful scenes from Earth and Heaven.

  The control room looked more like something that actually belonged in a spaceship. A long console with four swivel chairs. When we entered, the control board glittered into life, indicator lights going through some warming-up sequence, and the ship spoke to us in a friendly baritone.

  'I've been expecting you. Welcome.'

  'Our agricultural expert wants the place warmed up as soon as possible,' Man said. 'What kind of timetable can she expect?'

  'About two days for hydroponics. Five before you ought to start planting in the dirt. For aquaculture, it depends on the species, of course. The water will be at least ten degrees everywhere in eight days.'

  'You have a greenhouse you can warm up?'

  'For seedlings, yes. It's almost ready now.'

  Teresa looked at Man. 'Why don't a couple of us stay up here and get some flats started. Be nice to have stuff growing as soon as possible.'

  'I'd like to help,' Rubi said. 'Have to be back by the twenty-first, though.'

  'Me, too,' Justin said. 'When's the next flight?'

  'We can be flexible,' Man said. 'A week, ten days.' She made the kissing sound that signaled the ship that she was talking to it. 'You have plenty of food for three people?'

  'Several years' worth, if they can survive emergency rations. Or I can activate the galley, and they can use up frozen food. It's very old, though.'

  Teresa smacked. 'Do that. Let's save the emergency rations for emergencies.'

  I wouldn't have minded joining them myself, though I'm not much of a farmer. It was pleasantly exciting. Like putting twigs on the embers of a banked fire, and blowing gently to make the small flame that would start it over again.

  But I had classes and fish to take care of. Maybe when classes were over next month, I could come up and help get the aquaculture started.

  Marygay pinched my butt. 'Don't even think about it. You've got classes.'

  'I know, I know.' How long had we been reading each other's minds?

  We took a holo tour of the 'engine room,' which was not a room by anybody's definition. It did have a cylindrical wall of lacy aluminum, for the convenience of workers. Nobody would ever be out there while the engine was running, of course, Gamma-ray leakage would fry them in seconds. A lot of the engine crew would practice working with remote robots, in case repairs had to be made and the engine couldn't be shut off.

  There was a huge water tank – a drained lake's worth of water – and a much smaller glowing ball of antimatter, a perfect sphere of sparkling blue pinpricks.

  I stared at it for some time, the ship droning on about technical specifications that I could look up later. That glittering ball was our ticket to a new life, one that suddenly seemed real. Freedom, in this small prison.

  It had occurred to me that it wasn't just the bland tyranny of Man and Tauran that I wanted to escape. It was also everyday life, the community and family that I had watched growing for the past generation. I was dangerously close to becoming a tribal elder – and despite the fact that I was technically the oldest person on the planet, I wasn't nearly ready for that. Time and spirit for a couple of adventures more. Even a passive adventure like this.

  Call it fear of becoming a grandfather. Settling into the role of observer and advisor. I shaved off my beard years ago, when it started to show patches of white. I could just see growing it long, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch…

  Marygay wiggled my elbow. 'Hello? Anybody home?' She laughed. 'The ship wants to take us downstairs.'

  We wended our serpentine way back to the lift, and in my mind's eye I could almost see fields of grain and fruits and vegetables; the tanks roiling with fish and shrimp.
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  When we reached the midpoint we got out of the lift and followed Man, floating down the corridor lined with artwork that was showing age. We were out of practice with this kind of locomotion, and kept butting and nudging each other until, with the aid of handholds, we managed to stay in a more or less orderly line.

  The 'bottom' cylinder was the same size as the one we'd just left, but it looked larger, for the lack of things on a familiar human scale. Five escape craft dominated the cargo hold, each one a fighter modified to hold thirty people. They could only accelerate up to one-tenth the speed of light (and decelerate at the other end, of course), but the life-support equipment included suspended-animation tanks that would keep people somewhat alive for centuries. Mizar and Alcor are three lightyears apart, so with the ship's original back-and-forth mission, the most time they would spend zipped up in the tanks was thirty years. Which would pass like nothing, supposedly.

  I clicked for the ship's attention. 'What's our upper limit, given the flight plan I filed? What's our point of no return?'

  'It's not possible to be definite,' it said. 'Each suspended-animation tank will function until a vital component fails. They're superconducting, and require no power input, at least not for tens of thousands of years. I doubt that the systems would last more than a thousand years, though; a hundred light-years' distance. That will be a little more than three years into our voyage.'

  It was amusing that a machine would use a romantic word like 'voyage.' It was well programmed to keep company with a bunch of middle-aged runaways.

  At the bow of the cylinder was a neat stack of modules left over from the war – a kind of build-a-planet kit, the ultimate lifeboat. We knew that Earthlike worlds were common. If the ship couldn't make collapsar insertion and go home, those modules gave the people a chance of building a new home. We didn't know whether it had ever happened. There had been forty-three cruisers unaccounted for at the end of the war, some of them so far away that we would never hear from them. My own last assignment had been in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 150,000 light-years away.