Forever Free

  The trip up to orbit was interesting, the first time I’d been in space since the kids were born. We went staight 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.

  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 light-years 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.

  Most of the rest of the hold was given over to redundancy, materials and tools to rebuild almost anything in the living cylinder, but the area closest to wher
e we were floating was all tools, some as basic as picks and shovels and forklifts, some unrecognizably esoteric. If something went wrong with the drive or the life-support system, there would be no other job for anyone until it was fixed – or we were fried or frozen.

  (Those of us with engineering and scientific backgrounds would be speed-training with the ALSC – Accelerated Life Situation Computer – which was not quite as good as learning in real time, hands on, but it did give you a lot of data, fast. It was sobering to realize that if something did go wrong with the drive – which restrained more energy than had been released in any Earth war – then the person in charge of repairing it would be essentially a walking, talking manual, who had really vivid memories of procedures that had actually been done by some actor centuries dead.)

  On the way back up the corridor, Man showed off her zerogee expertise by exuberant spinning and cartwheeling. It was good to sometimes see them acting human.

  We were free to wander around and poke at things for a couple of hours before going back to Centrus. Marygay and I retraced the patterns of her life here, but it seemed less like revisiting old memories than like exploring a ghost town.

  We went into the last apartment she’d occupied, waiting for me, and she said she wouldn’t have recognized it. The last occupant had painted the walls in bright jagged graphics. When Marygay had lived there, the walls were light cobalt blue, and covered with her paintings and drawings. She didn’t do it much anymore, but in the years while she was waiting here, she’d become an accomplished artist.

  She’d looked forward to getting back to it, once the kids were out of the house. They might be light-years out of the house, soon.

  ‘It’s sad for you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes and no. They weren’t unhappy years. This was the stable part of my world. You’d make close friends and then they’d get off the ship, and every time you stopped at Middle Finger, they’d be six or twelve or eighteen years older, and then dead.’ She gestured at the dead dry fields and still waters. ‘This was permanence. That it’s a shambles now does bother me a little.’

  ‘We’ll have it rebuilt soon.’

  ‘Sure.’ She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the place. ‘We’ll make it better.’

  Eight

  Of course, it wasn’t going to be just a matter of rolling up our sleeves and slapping paint around. Man allotted us one shuttle every five days, so we had to plan carefully what and whom to take up when.

  The ‘whom’ was something we had to work out now. There were 150 slots to fill, and they couldn’t just be random people. Marygay and Charlie and Diana and I all made up independent lists of the kinds of skills we’d need, and then met at our place and merged the lists and added a few more possibilities.

  We had nineteen volunteers from Paxton – one had changed his mind after the meeting – and after we fit each of us to a job assignment, we publicized the plan and asked for volunteers planet-wide, to fill the other 131 berths.

  In a week, we had 1,600 volunteers, mostly from Centrus. There was no way the four of us could interview all of them, so first we had to winnow through the applications. I took 238 who had technical occupations and Diana took 101 who were medical. We split the rest up evenly.

  I wanted, at first, to give priority to veterans, but Marygay talked me out of it. That was more than half the volunteers, but it wasn’t necessarily the most qualified half. The proportion of them who were congenital malcontents and troublemakers was probably high. Did we want to be locked up in a box with them for ten years?

  But how could we tell which of the applicants might be unstable, on the basis of a few paragraphs? The people who said some version of ‘You’ve got to take me; Man is driving me crazy!’ were just echoing my own sentiments, but they might also be revealing an inability to get along with others, which would make them bad company in our mobile prison.

  Both Diana and Marygay had studied psychology in school, but neither claimed any expertise in the detection of loonies.

  We narrowed the applications down to four hundred, and wrote back a form letter emphasizing the negative aspects of the ten-year joyride. Isolation, danger, privation. The absolute certainty of returning to a completely alien world.

  About 90 percent of the people wrote back and said okay; I’ve already taken these things into consideration. We dropped the ones who didn’t respond before the deadline, and scheduled holo interviews with the others.

  We wanted to wind up with a list of two hundred, fifty of them being alternates, to be called if we lost people from death or cold feet. Marygay and I interviewed half, Charlie and Diana the other half. We gave a slight edge to married couples or people in some long-term relationship, but tried not to give het preference over home. You could argue that the more homosexuals, the better, since they were unlikely to add to the population. We couldn’t handle more than a dozen, maybe twenty, children.

  Charlie and Diana would take longer than Marygay and I, since Diana had to keep clinic hours. Marygay and I were in the twenty-day recess between semesters.

  That also meant that Bill and Sara were home, underfoot. Sara spent a lot of time on her loom, trying to finish up a large rug before school started. Bill’s big project for the twenty days was to talk us out of this insane quest.

  ‘What’re you running away from?’ was his basic question. ‘You and Mom won’t let go of that damned war, and we’re going to lose you to it, centuries after it’s over.’

  Marygay and I argued that we weren’t running away from anything. We were taking a leap into the future. A lot of our volunteers were his age or a little older, who had also grown up with Man, but had a less sanguine view of them.

  About two weeks into the recess, Bill and Sara dropped their separate bombshells. I’d spent a pleasant hour in the kitchen, fixing polenta and eggs with the last greens of the season, listening to Beethoven and enjoying not talking to strangers over the holo. Bill had set the table without being asked, which I should have recognized as a danger sign.

  They ate in relative silence while Marygay and I talked about the day’s interviews – mostly about the rejects, who made for better conversation than the sane, sober ones who passed the test.

  Bill finished his plate and pushed it slightly away from him. ‘I passed a test today.’

  I knew what he was going to say, and it felt as if the heat had been sucked out of my body; out of the room. ‘The sheriff’s test?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m going to become one of them. A Man.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything about—’

  ‘Are you surprised?’ He stared at me like a stranger on a bus.

  ‘No,’ I finally said. ‘I thought you might wait until we were gone.’ And not be so obviously a traitor, I kept myself from saying.

  ‘You still have time to change your mind,’ Marygay said. ‘They’re not starting the program until deep winter.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Bill said without elaboration. It felt like he was halfway there already.

  Sara had put down her knife and fork and was not looking at Bill. ‘I’ve decided, too.’

  ‘You’re not old enough to take the test yet,’ I said, perhaps a little too firmly.

  ‘Not that. I’ve decided to go with you. If there’s room for me.’

  ‘Of course there is!’ No matter who we have to leave behind.

  Bill looked startled. ‘I thought you were going to—’

  ‘There’s plenty of time for that.’ She looked at her mother with pretty earnestness. ‘You think that Man will be long gone when you return. I think they’ll still be here, in improved, evolved form. That’s when I’ll join them, and bring them all that I’ve learned and seen on the voyage.’ Then she looked at me with her dimpled open smile. ‘Will you take me, as a spy for the other side?’

  ‘Of course I will.’ I looked at Bill. ‘We do have to take a Man or two. The family could stay together.’

  ‘You don’t understand. You don’t get it a
t all.’ He stood up. ‘I’m going to a new world, too. And I’m going tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ Marygay said.

  ‘Forever,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand this anymore. I’m going to Centrus.’

  There was a long silence. ‘What about the house?’ I said. ‘The fish?’ The plan had been for him to take it all over, when we left.

  ‘You’ll just have to find somebody else.’ He was almost shouting. ‘I can’t live here! I have to get out and start over.’

  ‘You couldn’t wait until—’ I began.

  ‘No!’ He glared at me, struggling for words, and then just shook his head and left the table. We watched in silence as he threw on his cold-weather gear and went outside.

  ‘You aren’t surprised,’ Sara said.

  ‘We talked this over,’ I said. ‘He was going to keep the place; do the trotlines.’

  ‘The hell with the fish,’ Marygay said quietly. ‘Don’t you see we just lost him? Lost him for good.’ She didn’t cry until we were upstairs.

  I just felt numb. I realized I’d given him up a long time ago. It’s easier to stop being a father than a mother.

  Book Two

  The Book of Changes

  Nine

  Bill only stayed in Centrus for two days. He came back, embarrassed at his outburst. There was still no way he was going to get aboard that starship, but he wasn’t going to go back on his word; he’d take care of the fish as long as it was necessary.

  I couldn’t blame him for wanting to go his own way. Like father, like son. Marygay was happy at his return, but wistful and a little shaken. How many times would she have to lose her son?

  We were headed for the big city ourselves, which provoked an odd association with my own boyhood.

  An unimaginably long time ago, when I was seven or eight, my hippy parents spent the summer in a commune in Alaska. (That’s when my brother was conceived, by somebody; my father always insisted he looked like him!)