Forever Free

  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.

  When she was out of earshot, I continued. ‘They wouldn’t kill us off, but they wouldn’t have to. Once they had sufficient genetic material, they could round us up and sterilize us. Let the experiment run down, one natural death at a time.’

  ‘You’re cheerful today.’

  ‘I’m just blowin’ smoke.’ Charlie nodded slowly. We didn’t have the same set of idioms, born six hundred years apart. ‘But it could happen, if they saw us as a political threat. They get along fine with the Taurans now, but we’re the wild card. No group mind to commune with.’

  ‘So what would you do, fight them? We’re not summer chickens anymore.’

  ‘That’s “spring” chickens.’

  ‘I know, William. We’re not even summer chickens.’

  I clicked my cup against his. ‘Your point. But we’re still young enough to fight.’

  ‘With what? Your fishing lines and my tomato stakes?’

  ‘They’re not heavily armed, either.’ But as I said that, I felt a sudden chill. As Charlie enumerated the weapons we did know them to have, it occurred to me that we were in a critical historical period, the last time in human history that there would be a significant number of Forever War veterans still young enough to fight.

  The group mind of Man had surely made the same observation.

  Sooz brought us more tea and went back to tell the others that our little mud lake had frozen solid. So there was no more time for paranoia. But the seed had been planted.

  We unrolled two crossed layers of insulation sheet, and then went about the odd business of actually raising the barn.

  The floor was the easy part: slabs of foamsteel rectangles that weighed about eighty kilograms apiece. Two big people or four average ones could move one with ease. They were numbered 1–40; we just picked them up and put them down, aligned with the stakes we agnostics had pounded in.

  This part was a little chaotic, since all thirty people wanted to work at once. But we did eventual
ly get them down in proper order.

  Then we all sat and watched while the mastic was poured in. The boards that had served as forms for the frozen mud did the same for the mastic. Po and Eloi Casi used long, broom-like things to push the grey mastic around as it oozed out of the truck. It would have settled down into a level surface eventually, but we knew from experience that you could save an hour or so by helping the process along. When it was about a handspan deep, and level, Man flipped a switch and it turned into something like marble.

  That’s when the hard work started. It would have been easy with a crane and a front-end loader, but Man was proud of having designed these kits so they could be put up by hand, as a community project. So no big machines came along with them, unless it was an emergency.

  (In fact, this was the opposite of an emergency: the Larsons wouldn’t have much to put into the barn this year, their grapes almost destroyed by too much rain.)

  Every fourth slab had square boxes on either end, to accept vertical girders. So you fasten three girders together, ceiling and wall supports, put a lot of glue into the square boxes, and haul them into an upright position. With the pressor field on, when they get within a degree or so of being upright, they snap into place.

  After the first one was set, the rest were a little easier, since you could throw three or four ropes over the rigid uprights and pull the next threesome up.

  Then came the part of the job that called for agile young people with no fear of heights. Our Bill and Sara, along with Matt Anderson and Carey Talos, clambered up the girders – not hard, with the integrated hand- and toe-holds – and stood on board scaffolds while hauling up the triangular roof trusses. They slapped glue down and jiggled the trusses until the pressor field snapped them into place. When that was done, they had the easier job of gluing and stapling down the roof sheets. Meanwhile, the rest of us glued and stapled the outer walls, and then unrolled thick insulation, and forced it into place with the inner walls. The window modules were a little tricky, but Marygay and Cat figured them out, working in tandem, one inside and one outside.

  We ‘finished’ the interior in no time, since it was all modular, with holes in the walls, floor, and roof girders that would snap-fit with pre-measured parts. Tables, storage bins and racks, shelves – I was actually a little jealous; our utility building was a jerry-built shack.

  Eloi Casi, who loves working with wood, brought a wine rack that would hold a hundred bottles, so the Larsons could put some away each good year. Most of us brought something for the party; I had thirty fish thawed and cleaned. They weren’t too bad, grilled with a spicy sauce, and the Bertrams had towed over their outdoor grill, with several armloads of split wood. They fired it up when we started working on the inside, and by the time we were done it was good glowing coals. Besides our fish, there was chicken and rabbit and the large native mushrooms.

  I was too tired and dirty to feel much like partying, but there was warm water to scrub with, and Ami produced a few liters of skag she’d distilled, which had been sitting for months with berries, to soften the flavor. It was still fiery, and revived me.

  The usual people had brought musical instruments, and they actually sounded pretty good in the big empty barn. People with some energy left danced on the new marble floor. I tended the fish and mushrooms and broiled onions, and drank almost enough skag to start dancing myself.

  Man declined our food, politely, and made a few stress measurements, and declared the barn safe. Then she went home to do whatever it is they do.

  Charlie and Diana joined me at the grill, setting out chicken pieces as I removed fish.

  ‘So you’d fight them?’ she said quietly. Charlie’d been talking to her. ‘To what end? If you killed every one of them, what would it accomplish?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to kill even one of them. They’re people, whatever else they claim to be. But I’m working on something. I’ll bring it up at a meeting when we have the bugs ironed out.’

  ‘We? You and Marygay?’

  ‘Sure.’ Actually, I hadn’t discussed it with her, since the thought had only occurred to me between the mastic and the girders. ‘One for one and all for all.’

  ‘You had some strange sayings in the old days.’

  ‘We were strange people.’ I carefully loosened the grilled fish and slipped them onto a warm platter. ‘But we got things done.’

  Marygay and I talked long into the night and early morning. She was almost as fed up as I was, with Man and our one-sided arrangement, breeding stock staked out on this deadend arctic planet. It was survival, but only that. We should do more, while we were still young enough.

  She was wildly enthusiastic about my scheme at first, but then had reservations because of the children. I was pretty sure I could talk them into going along with the plan. At least Sara, I thought privately.

  She agreed that we ought to work out some details before we brought the thing to meeting. Not present it to the kids until after we’d talked it over with the other vets.

  I didn’t sleep until almost dawn, blood singing with revolution. For several weeks we tried to act normal, stealing an hour here and there to take a notebook out of hiding and jot down thoughts, work on the numbers.

  In retrospect, I think we should have trusted Bill and Sara to be in on it from the first. Our judgment may have been clouded by the thrill of shared secrecy, and the anticipated pleasure of dropping a bombshell.

  Three

  By sundown the rain had gone through sleet to soft sifting snow, so we let Bill go straight to his volleyball game, and walked over to Charlie’s. Selena, the larger moon, was full, and gave the clouds a pleasant and handy opalescence. We didn’t need the flashlight.

  Their place was about a klick from the lake, in a copse of evergreens that looked disconcertingly like palm trees on Earth. Palm trees heavy with snow sort of summed up Middle Finger.

  We’d called to say we were coming early. I helped Diana set up the samovars and tea stuff while Marygay helped Charlie in the kitchen.

  (Diana and I had a secret sexual history that not even she knew about. Conventionally lesbian before she came here, during Sade-138 she had gotten drunk and made a pass at me, just to give it a try the old-fashioned way. But she passed out before either of us could do anything about it, and didn’t remember it in the morning.)

  I lifted the iron kettle of boiling water and poured it over the leaves in two pots. Tea was one thing that adapted well to this planet. The coffee was no better than army soya. There was no place on the planet warm enough for it to grow naturally.

  I put the heavy kettle back down. ‘So your arm’s better,’ Diana observed. She’d given me an elastic thing and some pills, after I pulled a muscle working on the roof.

  ‘Haven’t lifted anything heavier than a piece of chalk.’

  She punched a timer for the tea. ‘You use chalk?’

  ‘When I don’t need holo. The kids are kind of fascinated by it.’

  ‘Any geniuses this term?’ I taught senior physics at the high school and Introduction to Mathematical Physics at the college.

  ‘One in college, Matthew Anderson. Leona’s boy. Of course I didn’t have him in high school.’ Gifted science students had classes taught by Man. Like my son. ‘Most of them, I just try to keep awake.’

  Charlie and Marygay brought in trays of cheese and fruit, and Charlie went out to get another couple of logs for the fire.

  Their place was better suited than ours, or most others’, for this sort of thing. Downstairs was one large round room, the kitchen in a separate alcove. The building was a metal dome that had been half of a Tauran warship’s fuel tank, doors and windows cut in, its industrial origin camouflaged inside with wooden paneling and drapes. A circular staircase led to the bedrooms and library upstairs. Diana had a small office and examination room up there, but she did most of her work in town, at the hospital and the university clinic.

  The fireplace was a raised circle of brick, halfway between
the center and wall, with a conical hood. So the fire was sort of like a primitive campfire, a nice locus for a meeting of a council of elders.

  Which is what this was, though the ages of the participants ranged from over a thousand to barely a hundred, depending on when they were drafted into the Forever War. Their physical age went from late thirties to early fifties, in Earth years. The years here were three times as long. I guess people would eventually become used to the idea of starting school at 2, puberty before 4, majority at 6. But not my generation.

  I had been physically 32 when I got here, although if you counted from birth date, ignoring time dilation and collapsar jumps, I was 1,168 in Earth years. So I was 54 now – or ‘32 plus 6,’ as some vets said, trying to reconcile the two systems.

  The vets began to arrive, by ones, twos, and fours. Usually about fifty showed up, about a third of those within walking distance. One was an observer, with a holo recorder, who came from the capital city, Centrus. Our veterans’ group had no name, and no real central organization, but it did keep records of these informal meetings in an archive the size of a marble.

  One copy was in a safe place and the other was in the pocket of the woman with the recorder. Either one would scramble itself if touched by Man or Tauran; a film on the outside of the marble sensed DNA.

  It wasn’t that a lot of secret or subversive discussion went on here; Man knew how most of the vets felt, and didn’t care. What could we do?

  For the same reason, only a minority of the vets ever came to the meetings, and many of them just came to see friends. What was the use of griping? You couldn’t change anything. Not everyone even believed things needed changing.

  They didn’t mind being part of a ‘eugenic baseline.’ What I called a human zoo. When one Man died, another was quickened, by cloning. Their genetic makeup never changed – why mess with perfection? Our function was to go ahead and make babies the old-fashioned way, random mutation and evolution. I suppose if we came up with something better than Man, they’d start using our genetic material instead. Or perhaps see us as dangerous rivals and kill us off.