Forever Free

  We weren’t sure how little shielding would be safe, so at the appointed time we cautiously made our way down into the Law Building’s second basement.

  The penlight showed orderly boxes of documents and a wall of old law books, from Earth, mostly in English. There was another wall, behind a locked iron gate, with hundreds of wine bottles, some of them with labels as old as forty MF years.

  I gave the lock a tug and it clicked open. I pulled us each out three bottles at random. The sheriff protested that he didn’t drink wine. I told him I didn’t shoot anymore, but I’d carried his damned ammunition.

  There was a triple sonic boom, pretty loud even at our depth, and then a protracted sound like sheets being torn. I ran upstairs as soon as it quit.

  Winded by the unaccustomed exercise, I held it down to a dogtrot going through the dead building and out the door.

  Standing in the middle of Main Street, I could see the three golden needles of the ships on the horizon.

  Marygay was barely understandable through a roar of static from secondary radiation. ‘Landing went okay,’ she said. ‘Some stuff came loose and crashed around.’

  ‘How soon can you disembark?’ I shouted.

  ‘You don’t have to shout! Maybe an hour. Don’t you come too close before that.’

  We spent the time loading the ambulance with ninety parkas from the police wardrobe – better too warm than too cold – and I chose a few cases of food from a grocery down the street.

  There would be plenty to eat for the next several years – unless everybody else suddenly showed up, naked and hungry. And pissed off. If one kind of magic is possible, or two, counting the antimatter – then what kind of magic might happen tomorrow?

  The sheriff seemed to have been thinking along those lines himself. When we finished loading up the clothing and food and a few extra bottles of wine – one for each ten people didn’t seem adequate – he said, ‘We have to talk to Antres 906.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘This. I never could understand Tauran humor. But it would be just like them to demonstrate a new scientific principle with a huge practical joke.’

  ‘Sure. Killing off a whole planet.’

  ‘We don’t know that they’re dead. Until we have a body, it’s still a “missing persons” case.’ I couldn’t tell whether he was being ironic, playing cop. Maybe exposure to the big-city police station had done something to him.

  In one of the vehicle’s many latched drawers, labeled only by number, we found a radiation counter. It didn’t need a power source in daylight. I pointed it toward the ships, and the needle gave a little quiver, well below the red sector labeled LEAVE AREA.

  ‘So? Let’s go on in.’

  ‘Inverse-square law,’ I said. ‘We’d probably get fried if we got within half a klick.’ I was guessing, of course; I didn’t know anything about secondary radiation.

  I thumbed the radio. ‘Marygay, have you asked the ship how long it will be until you can disembark?’

  ‘Just a second.’ I could hear a vague mumble mixed with the static. ‘It says fifty-eight minutes.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll meet you there about then.’ I nodded to Charlie and the sheriff. ‘Might as well get started, and keep an eye on the counter.’

  Going back was a lot easier than coming in had been. We wallowed across a ditch and then drove along the level mud that paralleled the broken-up road. We did wait for fifteen minutes at about the two-kilometer mark, watching the needle quiver less and less.

  What to do with 90, or 150, people? Food was not a problem, and shelter was just a matter of breaking and entering. Water was a problem, though.

  The sheriff suggested the university. It had dormitories, and a river ran through the middle of it. There might even be a way to jury-rig electricity, I thought; I remembered seeing a field full of solar collectors just off campus, and wondering what they were for – teaching, research, or maybe a backup power supply.

  Our ambulance had just crawled onto the landing field when the unloading ramp on Marygay’s ship rolled down. People wobbled down it carefully, tentatively, in groups of five, which was the capacity of the elevator down from the SA pods and control room.

  When she came down in the last group, I let out a held breath and realized how tense I’d been, ever since we’d admitted the possibility that they could have been marooned up there. I went halfway up the ramp and took her in my arms.

  The other two ships were emptying out as well, people milling around the ambulance trying on parkas for fit, chattering away with the release of tension and happiness at reunion – it had only been a couple of months, subjective, but that twenty-four years was somehow just as real.

  Of course everybody knew what we had found, or not found, on the surface, and they were full of apprehension and questions. I avoided them by taking Marygay off to ‘confer.’ After everybody was on the ground and in warm clothes, I went halfway up the ramp and waved both arms for attention.

  ‘We’ve decided to set up temporary quarters at the university. So far, this ambulance is our only working vehicle; it can take ten or twelve in at a time. Meanwhile, let’s all move indoors, out of the wind.’

  We sent the ten biggest, strongest people first, so they could get to work on breaking into the dormitory rooms, while Charlie and I led the others to the cafeteria where we had found our first planetside meal. They walked silently by the eerie piles of old clothing, which had some of the appearance of bodies felled by a sudden disaster, like Pompeii.

  Food, even old boxed fruit, cheered them up. Charlie and I answered questions about what we’d found in the city.

  Alysa Bertram asked when we could start planting. I didn’t know anything about that, but a lot of the others did, and there were almost as many opinions as people. None of the ones who’d come from Centrus were farmers; the farmers from Paxton were unfamiliar with the local conventions. It was obvious, though, that it wouldn’t just be a matter of picking up where the previous tenants had left off. Farming around here was specialized and technology-intensive. We had to devise ways to break up the soil and get water to it without using electricity.

  Lar Po, also no farmer, listened to the arguments and seriously suggested that our best chance for survival was to find a way back to Paxton, where we’d have a fighting chance of growing enough to feed ourselves. It would be a long walk, though.

  ‘There’s plenty of time to experiment,’ I reminded them. ‘We could probably survive here for a generation, scavenging and living off the ship rations.’ A few weeks on the ship rations, though, would drive anyone to agriculture. That was undoubtedly part of the plan.

  The sheriff came back with the welcome news that they’d found a dormitory on the river that didn’t even require breaking into. The rooms had electronic locks, and power failure had opened everything up.

  I sent Charlie out to start setting up work details. We had to have a water system and temporary latrine as soon as possible, and then organize into search parties to map out the location of resources in the city.

  Marygay and I wanted to go downtown, though, to look for two more pieces to the puzzle. The Office for Interplanetary Communications.

  Twenty-three

  Like the Law Building, the OIC had been unlocked in the middle of the day. The sheriff dropped us off and we walked right in – and were startled to find artificial light inside! The building was independent of the city’s power grid, and whatever it used was still working.

  Direct broadcasts from Earth wouldn’t be useful, since it’s 88 light-years away. But messages via collapsar jump only took ten months, and there should be a log somewhere.

  There was also Mizar, only three light-years away. Its Tauran planet Tsogot had a Man colony, and we might hear something from them, or at least call them, and hear back six years later.

  It wasn’t a matter of just picking up a mike and flipping a switch – if it was, you did have to know which mike and which switch. None of the terse labels we
re in English, of course, and Marygay and I didn’t know much MF other than idiomatic conversation.

  We called the sheriff to come back and translate. First he had to pick up a load of food downtown and ferry it to the dorm; then he’d come by on his way to the next pickup.

  While we waited, we searched the place pretty thoroughly. There were two consoles in the main large room, with signs that identified them as ‘incoming’ and ‘outgoing’ (though the words are so similar, we might have been exactly wrong about both), and each console was divided into thirds – Earth, Tsogot, and something else, probably ‘other places.’ The ones for Tsogot had Tauran resting frames as well as human chairs.

  When the sheriff showed up he brought along Mark Talos, who had worked with the phone system in Centrus, and was pretty fluent in Standard.

  ‘They don’t pick up everything from Earth all the time,’ he said. ‘That would be insane and probably impossible. But there’s one frequency they do monitor and record all the time. It’s basically an ongoing archive. Important messages come and go by way of the collapsar drone, but this one is basically “Here’s what happened on Earth eighty-eight years ago today.”’

  He stepped up to the console and studied it. ‘Ah, Monitor 1.’ He flipped a switch and there was a rapid, high-pitched flow of the language they call Standard.

  ‘So the one under it is Monitor 2?’

  ‘Not exactly. More like “1A”’. He turned off the first one and clicked on 1A, Nothing. ‘I’d guess that it talks to the collapsar drone, and maybe to people who go back and forth. That might be done at the spaceport, though.’

  ‘Can we send a message to Earth?’ Marygay asked.

  ‘Sure. But you’ll be … we’ll all be pretty old by the time it gets there.’ He waved at the chair. ‘Just sit down and push the red button in front, the one that says HIN/HAN. Then press it again when you’re done.’

  ‘Let me write down the message first.’ She took my hand. ‘We’ll all take a look at it and make sure it has everything.’

  ‘They’re probably getting pretty curious,’ Mark said.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ I said. ‘Where are they, then?’ I looked at the sheriff. ‘Are humans that unimportant in the scheme of things? That we could suddenly disappear, and they don’t even bother to send a ship to check?’

  ‘Well, they’d still be getting radio from—’

  ‘Eighty-eight years ago, but bullshit! Don’t they think that twenty-four years without an urgent message, via collapsar jump, might be cause for concern? We send several a year.’

  ‘I can’t speak for them—’

  ‘I thought you were a group fucking mind!’

  ‘William …’ Marygay said.

  The sheriff’s mouth was set in a familiar line. ‘We don’t know that they haven’t responded. If they came and found what we have found, they wouldn’t necessarily stay. Why would they stay? We weren’t due back for another forty thousand years.’

  ‘That’s true, sorry.’ It still bothered me. ‘But they wouldn’t come all the way here, take a look around, and go back without leaving a sign.’

  ‘We don’t know they haven’t left a sign,’ Marygay said. ‘It would probably be out at the spaceport.’

  ‘Or maybe here.’

  ‘If so, it’s not obvious,’ Mark said. He stepped to the next station. ‘Want to try Tsogot?’

  ‘Yeah, let’s do it while the sheriff’s here. He knows more Tauran than we do.’

  He clicked a few switches and shook his head. Turned a dial up and the room filled with a roar of white noise.

  ‘That’s all they’re sending,’ he said.

  ‘A dead line?’ I asked, suspecting the answer.

  ‘Nothing wrong with the circuit,’ he said slowly. ‘Just an open mike at the other end.’

  ‘So the same thing happened there,’ the sheriff said, and corrected himself: ‘May have happened.’

  ‘Is it continuously recorded?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. If it stops 3.1 years after the big day, then it’s compelling evidence. I can check that out.’ He turned off the white noise and fiddled with some dials. He slid a Tauran keyboard out of the way and a human one took its place.

  ‘Think I can make it go fast-forward here.’ A small screen gave him date and time, about eight years ago, and he turned the sound back up. Tauran chatter got faster and faster, more high-pitched, and then suddenly stopped. ‘Yep. Same time, about.’

  ‘There and here and where else?’ I said. ‘Maybe Earth didn’t send anybody here because there’s nobody there.’

  Twenty-four

  The next week was too busy with practical matters to allow much time or energy for mystery. We were keeping the same leadership until things settled down, so I was pretty occupied with the business of turning this corner of a ghost town into a functional town.

  People wanted to roll up their sleeves and get the farms started, but our immediate needs were power, water, and sanitation. Another vehicle or two wouldn’t hurt, either, but nothing turned up in the first search.

  The solar power plant the university maintained outside of the city limits was evidently for teaching, thank goodness, rather than research. It wasn’t working, but that was because it hadn’t been completely reassembled for the nth generation of engineering students. I took a mechanic and an engineer out there, and after we found the plans, it only took us a day to reconstruct it and two days to carefully take it apart.

  Then we moved the pieces to the dormitory and reassembled it on the roof, and started charging fuel cells. People weren’t too happy about all of the electricity going into batteries when it could be giving them light and heat, but first things first. (My mother and father were always talking about ‘power to the people.’ A good thing they weren’t here to agitate.)

  We got two delivery vans running – I guess we should have called them ‘scavenger’ vans – and raided a plumbing supply depot and a hardware store for the things we needed to get running water in the dorm. We basically pumped water from the river, presumably clean, up to a collapsible swimming pool on the roof, which served as a holding tank. That gave us gravity-fed plumbing for the kitchen and the dormitory’s first floor, complete with hot water, since it was only a matter of finding the right adapters to run the water through a heater. Still no toilets, since the dorm used conventional ‘flash and ash’ disposal, completely sanitary but requiring truly huge amounts of power. There wasn’t enough water to convert to the ancient kind of plumbing I grew up with, and I don’t know what you could safely do with the effluent anyhow. I remember big sewage plants, but I’m not sure how they did what they did. So we kept using slit latrines, a simple design from an army manual, and Sage was researching for more permanent solutions.

  The fourth ship, Number Two, came into orbit after twelve days and landed without incident. Its passengers all got second-floor rooms, except for Cat. Ami Larson really needed someone sympathetic; she was grieving over Teresa and feeling guilty for having abandoned her and their daughter. Cat had been het since she came to Middle Finger, but she’d been lesbian all her life before that. Which was probably less important than having twenty years’ more experience than Ami, in love and loss, and a patient ear.

  So she was next door, which shouldn’t have bothered me – would it have, if Cat had been an old boyfriend? Maybe it was the long period of their lives (only about a year in real time) that was theirs alone, which I could never share – when I had been out of the picture, presumed dead.

  Of course all of us first-generation veterans who’d been home had been switched to het, as a condition for coming to Middle Finger and jumping in the gene pool. Teresa showed how effective that was. And I knew Charlie had had at least one fling with a guy, maybe for old times’ sake. Boys will be girls and girls will be boys, we used to say, in my unenlightened youth.

  Mark kept searching for more information at the OIC, but had found nothing new. He also spent days prowling around the spaceport, but in neithe
r place was there any record of collapsar-jump messages from Earth, either before or after the disaster. They were evidently kept secret from hoi polloi; the sheriff had no idea where they might be. Of course, even if we did find messages and there were none from Earth after the Day plus ten months, it wouldn’t prove anything. There wasn’t anyone here to receive.

  (In fact, we could be getting messages from Earth every hour, via collapsar, and never know it. The transmitter comes tearing out at a velocity much higher than Mizar’s escape velocity, since the small collapsar’s in a tight orbit around Mizar. It whips by MF at fifty or a hundred times the planet’s escape velocity, and sends its message down in a burst, and goes off for parts unknown. It’s only about the size of a fist, so it’s almost undetectable if you don’t know the frequency it’s using.)

  People were excited about an expedition to Earth. The escape ships still had plenty of fuel for a collapsar jump, there and back. If there were still people and Man and Tauran on Earth, they might be able to help us figure out what had happened. If there were none, we’d be no worse off; one more bit of data.

  Or so the reasoning went. I agreed, but some were not so sure that we had so completely cut our bonds to Earth. If everyone was gone, if they’d disappeared on the Day, we wouldn’t stop hearing from them for another sixty-four Earth years. By that time, we’d be re-established on MF – it would be a shock, but life would go on.

  If we were to find out now, still reeling from the original disaster, that we were alone in the universe – and still vulnerable to whatever force had snuffed out everyone else – it might be more than we could handle, as individuals and as a culture. So the theory went.

  We were not too stable ‘as a culture’ even now. If the last ship was indeed lost, we totaled 90 people, only 4 of them children. (Two of the 9 who died in SA were under twelve years of age.) We had to start making babies, wholesale as well as retail, hatching some of the thousands of ova frozen aboard the ships.