Forever Free

  But meanwhile we were ‘free.’ Man had helped us start up a civilization on this planet, and kept us in touch with the other inhabited ones, including Earth. You could even have gone to Earth, when you mustered out, if you were willing to pay the price – be sterilized and become one of them.

  A lot of vets had done it, but Earth didn’t sound at all inviting to me. One big city, full of Man and Taurans. I could live with these long winters, for the sake of the company.

  Most of the people were reasonably content here. I was hoping to change that tonight. Marygay and I had been hatching a plan, and I was going to throw it out for discussion.

  After about a half-hour, forty people had shown up, clustered around the fire, and I supposed weather was keeping the rest away. Diana tapped on a glass for attention, and introduced the woman from Centrus.

  Her name was Lori. Her English had the flat Man accent of most Centrans. (All of us vets spoke English, which had been the default language during the Forever War, for people born centuries and continents – or even planets – apart. Some of us only spoke it at get-togethers like this, and the strain showed.)

  She was small and slender and had an interesting tattoo that peeked out from under her singlet, a snake with an apple in its mouth. ‘There’s not much to report that hasn’t been in the news,’ she said. ‘A number of Taurans landed and stayed for one day of meetings, evidently some sort of delegation. But they never appeared in public.’

  ‘Good thing,’ Max Weston said. ‘I don’t care if I never see one of those bastards again.’

  ‘Don’t come to Centrus, then. I see one or two a day, in their bubbles.’

  ‘That’s gutsy,’ he admitted. ‘Sooner or later somebody’ll take a shot at them.’

  ‘That may be their purpose,’ I said. ‘Decoys, sacrificial lambs. Find out who has the weapons and the anger.’

  ‘Could well be,’ Lori said. ‘They don’t seem to do much but walk around.’

  ‘Tourists,’ Mohammed Morabitu said. ‘Even Taurans might be tourists.’

  ‘Three are permanent,’ Cat said. ‘A friend of mine installed a heat pump in their apartment in the Office for Interplanetary Communications.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ Lori said, ‘these Taurans came in for a day, were put on a blacked-out floater from the Law Building, spent four hours there, and returned to the shuttle and left. A couple of cargo handlers saw them; otherwise they could have been in and out without being noticed by humans.’

  ‘I wonder why bother with secrecy,’ I said. ‘There’ve been delegations before.’

  ‘I don’t know. And the shortness of the visit was odd, as well as the number four. Why should a group mind send more than one representative?’

  ‘Redundancy,’ Charlie said. ‘Max might have run into them and killed three with his bare hands.’

  As far as we could tell, the Tauran ‘group mind’ was no more mysterious than Man’s. No telepathy or anything; individuals regularly uploaded and downloaded experiences into a common memory. If an individual dies before tapping into the Memory Tree, new information is lost.

  It did seem uncanny, since they were all physically twins. But we could do the same thing, if we were willing to have holes drilled into our skulls and plugs installed. Thanks, no. I have enough on my mind.

  ‘Otherwise,’ Lori continued, ‘not much is happening in Centrus. The force field bunch got voted down again, so we’ll be shoveling snow another year.’

  Some of us laughed at that – with only ten thousand people, Centrus wasn’t big enough to warrant the energy expenditure to maintain a winter-long force field. But it was the planetary capital, and some citizens wanted the field as a status symbol as much as a convenience. Having the only spaceport, and alien visitors, didn’t make them special enough.

  To my knowledge, no Taurans had ever been here to Paxton. It might be unsafe; with our large vet population, a lot of people were like Max, unforgiving. I didn’t bear them any animus myself. The Forever War had been a colossal misunderstanding, and perhaps we were more at fault than they.

  They were still ugly and smelled weird and had killed a lot of my friends. But it wasn’t Taurans who had sentenced us to life imprisonment on this iceberg. That was Man’s idea. And Man might be a few billion twins, but they were still biologically human.

  A lot of what went on in these meetings was just a more splenetic version of complaints that had already been sent through channels. The power grid was unreliable and had to be fixed before deep winter, or people would die, and the only response from Centrus was a schedule of municipal engineering priorities, where we kept getting shoved back in favor of towns that were closer to the capital. (We were the farthest away – a sort of Alaska or Siberia, to use examples that would be meaningless to almost everyone.)

  Of course, the main reason for these secret meetings was that Centrus did not really reflect our concerns or serve our needs. The government was human, elected representatives whose numbers were based on population and profession. But in actual administration, Man had oversight that amounted to veto power.

  And Man’s priorities were not the same as ours. It was more than just a city/country thing, even though it sometimes took that appearance. I called it ‘deliberate speciation.’ About half the population of Men on the planet lived in Centrus, and most of the ones sent out to places like Paxton usually only stayed one long Year before going back. So whatever benefited Centrus benefited Man. And weakened us, out in the provinces, however indirectly.

  I’d worked with Man teachers, of course, and a few times dealt with administrators. I’d long gotten over the uncanniness of them all looking and, superficially, acting the same. Always calm and reasonable, serious and gentle. With just a grain of pity for us.

  We talked about the grid problem, the school problems, the phosphate mine that they wanted to build too close to Paxton (which would also bring a freight monorail that we needed), and smaller problems. Then I dropped my bombshell.

  ‘I have a modest proposal.’ Marygay looked at me and smiled. ‘Marygay and I think we all should help Man and our Tauran brothers out with their noble experiment.’

  There was a moment of absolute silence, except for the crackling fire. The phrase ‘modest proposal’ meant nothing to most of them, I realized, born a millennium after Swift. ‘Okay,’ Charlie said. ‘What’s the punch line?’

  ‘They want to isolate a human population as a genetic baseline. Let’s give them isolation with a vengeance.

  ‘What I propose is that we take the Time Warp from them. But we don’t just go back and forth between Mizar and Alcor. We take it out as far as it can go, and come back safely.’

  ‘Twenty thousand light-years,’ Marygay said. ‘Forty thousand, here and back. Give them two thousand generations for their experiment.’

  ‘And leave us alone for two thousand generations,’ I said.

  ‘How many of us could you take?’ Cat asked.

  ‘The Time Warp’s designed for two hundred, crowded,’ Marygay said. ‘I spent a few years on it, waiting for William, and it wasn’t too bad. We would probably want a hundred fifty, for long-term living.’

  ‘How long?’ Charlie said.

  ‘We’d age ten years,’ I said. ‘Real years.’

  ‘It’s an interesting idea,’ Diana said, ‘but I doubt you’d have to highjack the damned thing. It’s a museum piece, empty for a generation. Just ask for it.’

  ‘We shouldn’t even have to ask for it. Man’s claim to ownership of it is a legal fiction. I paid for one three-hundred-twelfth of it, myself,’ Marygay said. There were 312 vets in on the original ‘time shuttle’ deal.

  ‘With wealth artificially generated by relativity,’ Lori said. ‘Your salary piling up interest, while you were out soldiering.’

  ‘That’s true. It was still money.’ Marygay turned to the others. ‘Nobody else here bought a piece of the shuttle?’

  There was a general shaking of heads, but Teresa Larson raised her hand.
‘They stole it from us, pure and simple,’ she said. ‘I got billions of Earth dollars, enough to buy a mansion on the Nile. But it won’t buy a loaf of bread on Middle Finger.’

  ‘To be devil’s advocate here,’ I said, ‘Man offered to “assume stewardship” of it, if the humans were going to abandon it. And most of the humans had no interest in it after it had served its purpose.’

  ‘Including me,’ Marygay said. ‘And I don’t deny having been a willing collaborator in the swindle. They bought back our shares with money we could only spend on Earth. It was amusing at the time, worthless money in exchange for a worthless antique.’

  ‘It is an antique,’ I said. ‘Marygay took me up there once to show me around. But did it ever occur to you to wonder why they keep it maintained?’

  ‘Tell me,’ Diana said. ‘You’re going to.’

  ‘Not out of sentiment, that’s for sure. I suspect they’re maintaining it as a kind of lifeboat for themselves, if the situation gets difficult.’

  ‘So let’s make it difficult,’ Max said. ‘Stack ’em in there like cordwood and shoot ’em back to Earth. Or to their Tauran pals.’

  I ignored that. ‘No matter what their plans are, they won’t just let us have it. It may be three Earth centuries old, but it’s still by far the largest and most powerful machine in this corner of the universe – even without weapons, a Class III cruiser is a lot of power and materiel. They don’t make anything like them anymore. It probably comprises a tenth of the actual material wealth in the system.’

  ‘It’s an interesting thought,’ Lori said, ‘but how do you plan to get there? Both of the orbital shuttles on the planet are at Centrus. You’ll have to highjack at least one of those before you highjack the time shuttle.’

  ‘It will take some planning,’ I admitted. ‘We have to manufacture a situation where the alternative to letting us take the Time Warp is unacceptable. Suppose we had kidnapped those four Taurans and threatened to kill them?’

  She laughed. ‘They’d probably say, “Go ahead,” and send for four more.’

  ‘I’m not convinced of that. I suspect they may be no more actually interchangeable than Man is. We only have their word for it – as you say, if they’re all the same, why go to the expense of sending four?’

  ‘You could just ask them for the ship first,’ said Ami Larson. ‘I mean, they are reasonable. If they said no, then—’

  People were murmuring, and a couple of them laughed out loud. Ami was third-generation Paxton, not a vet. She was here because she was married to Teresa.

  ‘You grew up with them, Ami.’ Diana kept a controlled neutral expression. ‘Some of us old folks aren’t so trusting.’

  ‘So we go out for ten years, or forty thousand, and come back,’ said Lar Po. ‘Suppose Man’s experiment has been successful. We’ll be useless Cro-Magnons.’

  ‘Worse than that,’ I said cheerfully. ‘They’ll probably have directed their evolution into some totally new direction. We might be like house pets. Or jellyfish.

  ‘But part of my point is that you and I and most of us here have done this before. Every time we came back from a campaign, we’d have to start over – even if only a few dozen years had passed on Earth, most of our friends and relatives had died or aged into totally different people. Customs and laws were alien. We were largely unemployable, except as soldiers.’

  ‘And you want to do it again, voluntarily?’ Charlie said. ‘Leave behind the life you’ve built for yourself?’

  ‘Fisherman-teacher. I could tear myself away.’

  ‘William and I are in a better situation than most,’ Marygay said. ‘Our children are grown, and we’re still young enough to strike out in a new direction.’

  Ami shook her head. She was our age, biologically, and she and Teresa had teenage daughters. ‘You aren’t curious about how your kids will turn out? You don’t want to see your grandchildren?’

  ‘We’re hoping they’ll come along,’ she said.

  ‘If they don’t?’

  ‘Then they don’t,’ I said. ‘A lot of children leave home and start off on their own.’

  Ami pressed on. ‘But not many parents do. Look at the choice you’re giving them. Throw away their own world to join their parents.’

  ‘As time travelers. As pioneers.’

  Charlie butted in. ‘Forget about that aspect for a minute. Do you actually think you can recruit a hundred, a hundred fifty people without anybody going to Man and pointing the finger at you?’

  ‘That’s why we want to keep it among vets.’

  ‘I just don’t want to see my oldest friend in jail.’

  ‘We’re in jail, Charlie.’ I made a gesture that didn’t knock anything over. ‘We can’t see the bars because they’re over the horizon.’

  Four

  The meeting broke up at midnight, after I called for a show of hands. Sixteen were with us, eighteen against, and six undecided. More support than I’d thought.

  We walked home through snow that had a pleasant crunch to it, enjoying the night air, not saying much.

  We came in the back door, and there at the dining room table, sipping tea, was Man. Over by the fire, warming its back, a Tauran. My arm came up halfway, in an aiming reflex.

  ‘It’s late,’ I said to the Man, my eyes on the Tauran’s fisheye clusters. One hand fluttered its seven fingers, fourteen-jointed.

  ‘I have to talk to you now.’

  ‘Where are the children?’

  ‘I asked them to go upstairs.’

  ‘Bill! Sara!’ I called. ‘Whatever you say to us, they can hear.’ I turned to the Tauran. ‘—An evening of good fortune,’ I approximated in its language. Marygay repeated it, better.

  ‘Thank you,’ it said in English, ‘but not for you, I fear.’ It was wearing a black cloak, a nice Hallowe’en effect with its wrinkled orange skin. The cloak made it took less alien, hiding the wasp waist and huge pelvis.

  ‘I must be getting old,’ I said to Man. ‘Lori seemed like one of us.’

  ‘She is. She didn’t know we were listening.’

  Bill and Sara were at the top of the stairs in nightgowns. ‘Come on down. We’re not going to say anything you can’t hear.’

  ‘But I am,’ Man said. ‘Go back to bed.’ They obeyed.

  Disappointing, but not surprising. They’d listen anyhow.

  ‘This is Antres 906,’ Man said, ‘the cultural attaché to Middle Finger.’

  I nodded at it. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Are you curious as to why he is here?’

  ‘Not really. Just go ahead and have your say.’

  ‘He is here because a Tauran representative must be present in any negotiations involving possible travel to Tauran planets.’

  ‘What does that have to do with culture?’ Marygay said.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘It’s the cultural attacheé,’ she said. ‘What does that have to do with us borrowing the time shuttle?’

  ‘“Culture” includes tourism. And stealing is not borrowing.’

  ‘They’re not on our route,’ I said. ‘We’re going straight up, out of the galactic plane, and straight back. An isosceles triangle, actually.’

  ‘You should have gone through proper channels for this.’

  ‘Sure. Starting with you, the sheriff.’ He covered the back of his hand, with its identifying scar.

  ‘You could start with anyone. We are a group mind.’

  ‘But you didn’t send just anyone. You sent the one Man in this town who has weapons and exercises with weights.’

  ‘You are both soldiers.’ He opened his vest to display a large pistol. ‘You might resist.’

  ‘Resist what?’ Marygay said.

  ‘Coming with me. You’re under arrest.’

  Paxton doesn’t have a large enough criminal element to warrant an actual jail, but I suppose anything that locks on the outside will do. I was in a white room with no windows, furnished with a mattress on the floor and a toilet. There was a fold-d
own sink next to the toilet, and across from it, a fold-down desk. But no chair. The desk had a keyboard, but it didn’t work.

  It had a barroom smell, spilled alcohol. That must be what they used as a disinfectant, for some reason.

  I knew from a visit last year that the place had only two detention rooms, so Marygay and I constituted a crime wave. (Serious criminals, actually, didn’t even spend the night here; they went straight to the real jail in Wimberly.)

  I spent a while contemplating the error of my ways, and then managed to get a few hours’ sleep in spite of not being able to turn off the lights.

  When the sheriff opened the door I could see sunshine behind him; it was ten or eleven. He handed me a white cardboard box that had soap, a toothbrush, and such. ‘The shower is across the hall. Please join me for tea when you are ready.’ He left with no further explanation.

  There were two showers; Marygay was already in one of them. I raised my voice. ‘He tell you anything?’

  ‘Just unlocked the door and said to come for tea. Why didn’t we ever think of doing this with the children?’

  ‘Too late to start now.’ I showered and shaved and we went to the sheriff’s office together.

  His pistol was hanging on a peg behind him. The papers on his desk had been hastily stacked in a corner, and he’d set out a pot of tea with some crackers and jam and honey.

  We sat and he poured us tea. He looked tired. ‘I’ve been with the Tree all night.’ Since it had become daytime in Centrus, he might have been with hundreds or a thousand Men. ‘I have a tentative consensus.’

  ‘That took all night?’ I said. ‘For a group mind, you don’t synape very fast.’ I kidded my Man colleagues at the university about that. (Physics, in fact, was a good demonstration of Man’s limitations: an individual Man could tap into my colleagues’ brains, but he or she wouldn’t understand anything advanced without having previously studied physics.)

  ‘In fact, much of that time was waiting for individuals to be summoned. Besides your … problem, there was another important decision to be made, not unrelated. “The more leaves, the more Tree.”’