Forever Free (19 page)

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 were 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."

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 homo 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 time's 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 neither 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.

The prospect was not greeted with enthusiasm. A lot of the people were like me and Marygay: we've already done that! Among the various options we'd seen opening up in middle age—like the wild scheme to highjack the Time Warp—starting a second family was pretty low on the list.

Sara comprised one-fourth of the females old and young enough for natural motherhood, and she wouldn't have felt ready for it even if any of the available men appealed to her. None of them did.

The sheriff suggested we raise a large batch Man-style, in a group crèche, with no parents as such, just supervisors. I could see some merit to it, since a large majority of them actually wouldn't have living parents, and if it wasn't for the association with Man, I think most would have gone along with it. But there was a general counter-sentiment; this was the kind of thing we wanted to escape from, and now you want to re-invent it?

They might reconsider when they have four or five infants crawling around. The council decided on a compromise, only possible because we had people like Rubi and Roberta, who were mad about children but unable to have their own. They volunteered to supervise a crèche. Every year—three times a Year—they would hatch eight or ten from the ship's stores; they'd also take on the stewardship of unwanted children born the old-fashioned way.

Antres 906 was probably worse off than any of us, though of course it's hard to say anything about a Tauran's emotional state. For all it knew, Antres 906 was the last survivor of its race. They didn't have gender, but they couldn't reproduce without an exchange of genetic material—a holdover from their ancient past, since for millenniums all Taurans had been genetically identical.

People were getting used to the sight of it wandering around, trying to be helpful, but it was like the situation aboard the Time Warp: it essentially had no useful skill, being a linguist who was the sole speaker of its language, and a diplomat representing only itself.

Like the sheriff, the Tauran could tap into the Tree, but they both had the same experience. There was no sense of any danger or even problem approaching, but after the Day, no information had been added. The last collapsar-jump message from Earth, three weeks before the Day, also had no premonitions of disaster, from either Man or Tauran.

Antres 906 was in favor of going to Earth or Kysos, nominally the Tauran home planet, and volunteered to make the collapsar jump alone, and come back with a report. Marygay and I believed it was sincere, and I think we knew Antres 906 better than anyone but the sheriff. But most people thought that would be the last we saw of ship or Tauran (but some of them thought it would be worth losing a ship to get rid of the last surviving enemy).

A lot of people did want to go check out Earth, with or without Antres 906. We left a sheet on the dining room bulletin board, and got thirty-two volunteers.

Including Marygay and Sara and me.

Logic would dictate that the ones least essential to the fledgling colony ought to go. But it was hard to say who was more valuable than who, beyond a few who couldn't be replaced, like Rubi and Roberta (who weren't on the list anyhow), and Diana and two young people she was training to be doctors (who were).

The council decided that twelve would be selected from a pool we winnowed to twenty-five non-essentials. (I got disappointingly little argument when I insisted I was not essential.) The sheriff and Antres 906 would go, as observers with unique points of view.