Forever Free

  I realized I had shifted into an emotional mode reminiscent of combat. Something over which I had no control had suddenly put me into a situation where I had a 20 percent chance of dying. Instead of apprehension, I felt a kind of resignation, and even impatience: let’s get this over with, one way or the other.

  Did I have three kilograms of stuff I wanted to take back to MF? The old book of paintings from the Louvre – I’d picked that up from a pile of Earth artifacts when I left Stargate for Middle Finger, a fairly new thousand-year-old antique. That wasn’t even a kilogram. I’d brought along my comfortable boots in case there were no cobblers forty thousand years in the future. But with only twenty-four years passing, Herschel Wyatt would probably still be at his last.

  I wondered who would be fishing my trotlines. Not Bill. He would probably be in Centrus by now, totally integrated into Man. Hell, he might even have gone to Earth.

  We might never see him again. That felt different now. I shook my head and four tiny globules of tears floated away from my lashes.

  Marygay and I, along with the rest of the council and Diana and Charlie, waited till the last. The last shuttle was almost half empty: thirteen people had elected to stay behind.

  Teresa Larson was their spokeswoman, still staying though her wife Ami was asleep aboard the second ship. Their daughter Stel was staying with Teresa; their other daughter was on MF.

  ‘For me, there’s no decision,’ she said. ‘God sent us on this pilgrimage, to come back and start anew. She interrupted our progress in order to test our faith.’

  ‘You aren’t going to start anew,’ Diana said. ‘You have ten thousand sperm and ova frozen, but not one of you knows how to thaw them out and combine them.’

  ‘We’ll make babies the old way,’ she said bravely. ‘Besides, we have plenty of time to study. We’ll learn your arts.’

  ‘No, you won’t. You’ll starve or freeze right here. God didn’t take that antimatter away, and it’s not coming back.’

  Teresa smiled. ‘You’re only saying that on faith. You don’t know any more about it than I do. And my faith is as good as yours.’

  I wanted to shake some sense into her. Actually, I wanted to hunt them all down with the tranquilizer darts and load them aboard the ship unconscious. Almost everybody disagreed with me, though, and Diana wasn’t sure that they could be hooked up properly without being conscious and cooperating.

  ‘I’ll pray for you all,’ Teresa said. ‘I hope you all survive and find a good life back home.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Marygay looked at her watch. ‘Now go back to your people and tell them that at 0900 the ship will seal this door and evacuate the chamber. We can take anybody, everybody until 0800. After that, you just stay here and … take your chances.’

  ‘I want to go with you,’ Diana said. ‘One last chance to talk some sense into them.’

  ‘No,’ Teresa said. ‘We’ve heard you, and the ship has repeated your argument twice.’ To Marygay; ‘I’ll tell them what you said. We appreciate your concern.’ She turned and floated away.

  There was only one zerogee toilet. Stephen Funk came out of it looking pale. ‘Your turn, William.’

  The stuff tasted like honey with a dash of turpentine. The effect was an internal scalding waterfall.

  In school, in anthropology, we read about an African tribe that lived all year on bread and milk and cheese. Once a year, they butchered a cow to gorge themselves on fat, because they thought diarrhea was a gift from the gods, a holy cleansing. They would have loved this stuff. Even I felt holier. In fact, I felt like one big empty hole.

  I cleaned up and floated out. ‘Have fun, Charlie. It’s a moving experience.’

  I floated and clambered over to the last escape ship, with its thirty coffins lined up in dim red light. Was this the last thing I would ever see? I could think of more pleasant scenes.

  Diana helped me hook up the orthotics, with a lubricant that contained a muscle relaxant. It was easier than the last time, coming back from the last battle. I suppose they had learned something over the centuries.

  A slap on my left leg numbed it from the groin down. I knew this was the last one, the shunt that would replace my blood with a slippery polymer.

  ‘Wait,’ Marygay said, and she leaned over the coffin and held my face in both hands, and kissed me. ‘See you tomorrow, darling.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, and just nodded, already getting dreamy.

  Nineteen

  I didn’t know that five of Teresa’s gang had a change of heart, and joined my pod at the last minute. I was already in the strange space I would occupy for the next twenty-four years.

  All five ships were ejected from the Time Warp simultaneously, so they would have a chance of arriving back home within a few days or weeks of one another. A difference in thrust down in the seventh or eighth decimal place could make a big difference in arrival time, multiplied over twenty-four years.

  We basically pointed our noses in the direction of Middle Finger and patiently ate away velocity for ten years. At some point, for one instant, we were absolutely still, with respect to the home planet. Then for seven years we accelerated toward it, and flipped, and for another seven years slowed back down.

  Of course I felt none of this. Time passed quickly – far too fast to be almost half as long as my life – but I could tell it was passing. I was neither quite awake nor asleep, it seemed to me afterwards, but floating in a kind of sea of remembrance and fantasy.

  For many years, or year-long days, I was obsessed with the notion that all of my life since the Aleph-null campaign, or Yod-4 or Tet-2 or Sade-138, was being lived in the instant between a fatal wounding and death: all those billions of neurons basking in their last microsecond of existence, running through a finite, but very large, combination of possibilities. I would not live forever, but I wouldn’t really die as long as the neurons kept firing and seeking.

  Coming awake was like dying – all that had been real for so long slowly fading into blindness and deafness and the chill numbing that had been my body’s actual state for decades.

  I vomited dry air, over and over.

  When my stomach and lungs were tired of that, a tube inside my mouth misted something sweet and cool. I tried to open my eyes, but damp pads held them gently shut.

  Two delicious stings as the orthotics withdrew, and the first motion of my limbs, if you count a twig as a limb, was a fast erection in reaction to warm blood. I couldn’t move my arms or legs for some time. Fingers and toes made satisfying crackly sounds, coming to life.

  Diana lifted the pads from my eyes and pried the lids apart with dry fingers. ‘Hello? Anybody home?’

  I swallowed thin syrup, and coughed weakly. ‘Is Marygay all right?’ I croaked.

  ‘Resting. I just woke her a few minutes ago. You’re second.’

  ‘Where are we? Are we here?’

  ‘Yes, we’re here. When you’re able to sit up, you’ll see good old MF down there, looking cold as a bitch.’ I strained, but was only able to rock a few inches. ‘Don’t knock yourself out. Just rest for a while. When you get hungry, you can have some ancient soup.’

  ‘How many ships?’

  ‘I don’t know how to hail them. When Marygay gets up, she or you can give them a call. I can see one.’

  ‘How many people? Did we lose any to SA?’

  ‘One. Leona; I’ve kept her frozen. There might be disabilities among the others, but they’re waking up.’

  I slept for a couple of hours and then woke to the low murmur of Marygay’s voice on the horn. I sat up in my coffin and Diana brought me some broth. It tasted like carrots and salt.

  She unlatched the side. My clothes were where I had left them, twenty-four years older but still in style. I had to stop halfway through dressing to swallow hard a few times, coping with zerogee nausea. It wasn’t too bad. I remembered the first time, back in graduate school, when I was useless for a couple of days. Now I just swallowed until the soup
remembered to stay down, and finished dressing and floated up to join Marygay.

  She was half-sitting, in a zerogee crouch, in the pilot’s station. I strapped myself in next to her.

  ‘Darling.’

  She looked bad, both haggard and bloated, and from her expression I knew I looked the same. She leaned over and kissed me, carrot-flavored.

  ‘It’s not good,’ she said. ‘This ship lost track of Number Four years ago. Number Two is more than a week behind, for some reason.’

  ‘It thinks Number Four’s dead?’

  ‘Doesn’t have an opinion.’ She chewed her lower lip. ‘Seems likely. Eloi and the Snells. I haven’t checked the roster, who else is on board.’

  ‘Cat’s on Two,’ I said unnecessarily.

  ‘It’s probably okay.’ She stabbed at a button. ‘We have another little problem. Can’t get Centrus.’

  ‘The spaceport?’

  ‘The spaceport, no. Nothing else, either.’

  ‘Could it be the radio?’

  ‘I get the other two ships. But they’re close. Maybe it’s a power thing.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I didn’t think so. If the radio worked at all, it would pull in pretty weak signals. ‘Tried a visual search?’

  She shook her head, one jerk. ‘The optical gear’s on Number Four. We’ve got sperm and ova and shovels.’ Mass was critical, of course, and the planet-building stuff was distributed among the five ships with only enough duplication so that the loss of one ship wouldn’t doom all the others.

  ‘I got some sort of carrier wave when I first turned it on. The ship thinks it’s one of the Centrus shuttles, in a medium-low orbit. Should be back in an hour or so.’ We were in geo-synch, high up.

  I looked at the cold white ball of MF, and remembered warm California. If we had gone to Earth twenty-some years ago, forty-some now, it would be warm and safe. No children to worry over or grieve.

  Somebody was vomiting loudly. I unsnapped the vacuum cleaner from the back of the copilot’s chair and kicked aft to deal with it.

  It’s not too bad if you work fast. It was Chance Delany, who looked more sheepish than sick.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It didn’t want to get past my throat.’

  ‘Drink water for a while,’ I said, buzzing up the little globules. As if I were an expert.

  I filled him in on the situation. ‘Good God. You don’t think the Mother Earth people got in power?’

  That was Teresa’s crowd. ‘No. Even if they did, Man wouldn’t let them shut everything down.’

  In another hour, the rest of the council was up – Sage, Steve, and Anita. Marygay and I were starting to look more normal, as our faces filled in and tightened up.

  ‘Okay,’ Marygay said, touching a viewscreen. ‘I’ve got it again. It’s a shuttle, all right.’

  ‘Well, I’m the pilot. Let’s go get it and see what’s happening downstairs.’ We couldn’t simply land the escape vessels as if they were overgrown shuttles – or, rather, we could, but the exhaust would kill any humans or animals not under cover for a radius of several kilometers.

  ‘Let’s wait until everyone’s been up for a couple of hours. We ought to use the acceleration couches, in case.’

  ‘Can you see it?’ Anita asked.

  ‘Not from here. But it is there; the signal’s pretty strong.’

  ‘Only one?’ Steve said.

  ‘I think so. If there’s another one in orbit, it’s not broadcasting.’ She came back hand-over-hand to where we were floating. ‘We should maneuver all three ships into echelon, for safety, and approach it in formation.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. You had to be careful where you pointed the gamma-ray exhaust, even in space. If all three were parallel, we were safe.

  ‘No one aboard the shuttle?’ Chance asked.

  ‘I don’t get any voice response. They would’ve seen us arriving.’ We’d be brighter than Alcor, coming in. ‘There might be something wrong with our radio. But I don’t think so. I do pick up the carrier wave, and that’s the frequency they’d use.’

  She sighed, and shook her head. ‘We better hope it’s the radio,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t pick up anything at all, in any broadcast frequency. It’s as if …’

  ‘But it’s only been twenty-four years,’ Steve said.

  Anita finished the thought. ‘Not long enough for everyone to die out.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it takes too long,’ Chance said. ‘Not if you work at it.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘it’s just possible everybody left.’

  ‘In what?’ Steve gestured at the square of sky. ‘We took the only ship.’

  ‘Man said there were thousands parked back by Earth. It would be a huge undertaking, but if they had to, they could evacuate Middle Finger in less than a year.’

  ‘Some ecological catastrophe,’ Marygay said. ‘All those mutations, the crazy weather.’

  ‘Or another war,’ Chance said. ‘Not with the Taurans. There are probably worse ones out there.’

  ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ I said. ‘They probably left a note. Or a lot of bones.’

  Twenty

  It took ten hours to maneuver the three ships to within reach of the shuttle, skimming three hundred kilometers over the planet’s surface. I got into the roomy one-size-fits-everybody space suit and, after a clumsy hug from Marygay, managed to jet myself from airlock to airlock with only one overshoot.

  The readout over my eye said the shuttle’s air was good, temperature cold but liveable, so I climbed out of the big suit and called the other two over. I had decided to take Charlie down, and, in case there was something Man could understand better than us, the sheriff. I would have taken Antres 906 if it could have been squeezed into the suit. The Taurans may have left a Braille note saying, ‘Die, human scum,’ or something.

  I asked the shuttle what was going on, but got no answer. Not surprising; it didn’t need a lot of brainpower to maintain a low parking orbit. But under normal circumstances, it would automatically have tapped into a brain planetside, to answer my questions.

  I’d sort of expected grisly skeletons sitting in the acceleration couches. But there was no sign of human habitation, except for some coveralls floating around loose. I assumed the shuttle had been sent into orbit under autopilot.

  After Charlie and the sheriff made their way over, and stashed the three suits and got everybody strapped in, I punched in the one-digit command for ‘Return to Centrus.’ (So much for weeks in the ALSC machine.) The shuttle waited eleven minutes, and then began to angle down into the atmosphere.

  We approached the small spaceport from the east, over the exurbs of Vendler and Greenmount. It was early thaw, snow still on the ground. The sun was coming up, but there was no smoke rising from chimneys. No floaters or people in evidence.

  There were only two allowable landing paths, dead east and dead west, both fenced off from horizon to horizon. That wasn’t out of fear of crashing, although that might have occurred to somebody. Its primary function was to protect people from the shuttle’s gamma-ray exhaust, taking off.

  The horizontal landing was smooth. Not a peep from the control tower. No floater came out to greet us, surprise. I popped the airlock and a light staircase spidered down.

  Gravity was both reassuring and tiring. Our flight suits were not quite thick enough for the damp cold, and we were all shivering – even the genetically perfect sheriff – by the time we’d covered the kilometer back to the main building.

  It was almost as cold inside, but at least there was no wind.

  The offices were deserted and dusty. As far as we could tell, there was no power in the building. There was little disorder, just a few paper spills and drawers left open. No sign of panic or violence – no unsightly clutter of bodies or bones.

  No notes written in the dust either: BEWARE, THE END IS NIGH. It was as if everybody had stepped out for lunch and kept going.

  But they had left their clothes behind.

  All alon
g the corridors and behind most of the desks were tired bundles of clothing, as if each person had stopped where they were, undressed, and left. Flattened by years of gravity, stiff and dusty, most of the clothing was still identifiable. Business clothes and work coveralls, and a few uniforms. All of the inner and outer clothing piled on top of shoes.

  ‘This is …’ For once, Charlie was at a loss for words.

  ‘Scary,’ I said. ‘I wonder if it’s just here, or everywhere.’

  ‘I think everywhere,’ the sheriff said, and squatted down. He came up with a gaudy diamond ring, an obvious Earth antique. ‘No scavengers came through here.’

  Mystery or no, we were all famished, and searched out the cafeteria.

  We didn’t bother with the refrigerator and freezer, but found a pantry with some boxes of fruit, meat, and fish. After a quick meal, we split up to search the place for some clue as to how long it had been deserted; what had happened.

  The sheriff found a yellowed newspaper, dated 14 Galileo 128. ‘As we might have guessed,’ he said. ‘The same day we started back, allowing for relativity.’

  ‘So they disappeared the same time that our antimatter did.’ My watch beeped, reminding me that it was almost time for Marygay to pass overhead. The three of us were just able to push open an emergency door.

  The sky was slightly hazy, or we might have been able to see the escape ships as three close white spots drifting across the sky.

  We were only able to talk for a few minutes, but there wasn’t that much to say. ‘Two unexplainable things happening at the same time most likely had the same cause.’

  She said they’d continue a visual inspection from orbit. They didn’t have anything sophisticated, but Number Three had powerful binoculars. They could see our shuttle and the line it had made in the snow, landing, and the other shuttle, conspicuous under a snow-shedding tarpaulin.

  The escape ships would have to land on their tails, so there had better be no one living within a few kilometers of where they came down – else there would be no one living. Our shuttle’s gamma-ray blast wasn’t 1 percent of the larger ships’.