Forever Free (20 page)

But the fourteen wouldn't leave before deep winter, when not much work would be done, anyhow. The expedition could go to Earth, look around, and be back before spring.

When to make the choice? Stephen and Sage, both on the list, wanted to go ahead and get it over with. I argued for waiting until the last minute, ostensibly to make it more of an occasion; give people a little bit of drama that didn't have to do with day-to-day survival. Actually, my motivation was purely statistical—given a year and a half, some of the twenty-five were bound to change their minds, or die, or otherwise become ineligible, thus increasing our chances.

Marygay and I had decided we would only go if both of us were chosen. If Sara were chosen, she would go, period. She was apologetic about that, but adamant, and I was secretly proud of her for her independence, if apprehensive about the separation.

The council agreed to wait, and we went back to the job of making Centrus livable. The problem of power generation was frustrating and basic. We had always taken free and abundant power for granted: three microwave relay satellites had been in place for more than a century, turning solar power into microwaves and beaming it down. But there's no such thing as a simple stable orbit around MF, not with two large moons and the sun a close double star. Without supervision, the three satellites had wandered off on their own. Eventually, we'd be able to go out and retrieve them, or build and orbit new ones, but for now, our industrial planet was closer to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. Likewise, any of the three spaceships out on the pad had enough energy to keep us going for decades, but we had no way to release it slowly and safely.

In fact, a vocal minority, led by Paul Greyton, wanted those three ships parked in orbit, right now—before something happened to their magnetic containment apparatus, and we were all instantly vaporized. I understood his concern and didn't entirely disagree, even though the containment fields couldn't possibly fail so long as particle physics worked. Of course, particle physics didn't predict antimatter dwindling away of its own accord, either.

Parking them would require the shuttle, too, and I wouldn't mind the practice. But the rest of the council was unanimous in rejecting Greyton. To most people, the sight of the ships on the horizon was comforting, a symbol of options, possibilities.

We got two multi-purpose farming vehicles fired up, and I cheerfully delegated authority for that little set of problems to Anita Szydhowski, who used to keep the Paxton co-op organized.

There were too many choices. If we had landed on a random earthlike planet, it would be no problem; there were super-hardy varieties of eight basic vegetables in the ships' survival stores. But to get that hardiness, the breeders had to trade off things like taste and yield.

None of the Earth plants on Middle Finger had survived eight hard winters, but there were plenty of seeds in stock, a good fraction of which would be viable—plus hundreds of varieties in cryonic storage at the university. Anita wound up being Solomon-like, making sure enough of the super-hardy were planted to get us through the next year before allotting acreage for the traditional crops, riskier because of the age of the seeds. Then a few acres on the campus itself, for the three ex-farmers who had been itching for years to get their hands on the exotics the university doled out on rare occasion.

I restarted the teaching schedule I'd been following on Time Warp—much, of course, to the students' delight. I could drop general science, sadly, since my two youngest students had died in SA, but had to add calculus because the higher-math teacher, Grace Lani, had also died. That was a challenge. Doing calculus is a lot easier than teaching it, and the students I used to have had all been beyond the basics, so I didn't have any experience with the chore.

After a month had passed, we were able to make an expedition to Paxton. This took both vans out of service for two days—their range was about a thousand kilometers, so the van that made the trip had to carry along the other van's fuel cells.

The council magnanimously decided that one of the council should do it, and I drew the short straw. For my assistant and co-driver, I chose Sara. Like almost everyone, she was intensely curious. Also young and strong, to help with driving—all manual, of course—and changing over the heavy fuel cells. Marygay approved, though she would've liked to go herself. Sara was growing away from us, fast, but this was one area where our interests converged.

The van could carry three tonnes, so we could bring back a certain amount of stuff. I had Sara canvass people, and then we sat down with the list and made decisions. It was like the Time Warp winnowing process, in miniature. There weren't very many purely sentimental requests, since those things had been taken aboard the time ship and either brought back or abandoned. But there was a limit to the time and effort we could spare—it would be worth going to Diana's office and getting the medical records of the thirty-one of us she'd had as patients, for instance, but I wasn't going to ransack Elena Monet's place to find her crocheting kit.

We did have some hard decisions, juggling time and weight and needs, individual and communal. We were going to load Stan Shank's ceramic kiln, even though it weighed half a tonne and you'd think such things would not be rare. But he'd searched Centrus, and all nine of the kilns he'd found were ruined; left on until they'd burned out.

Sara and I didn't have anything on the list. But there was a little slack.

We left at first light, and a good thing. The trip, normally eight hours, took twenty, most of it crawling along the shoulder of the road rather than trying to negotiate the pavement's rubble.

When we got there, we went straight through town to our old place. Bill had moved in as temporary caretaker, until someone else came along, able and willing to fish in exchange for a nice old house.

We went straight to the kitchen and built a fire. I left Sara to do that while I went out to the lake for a couple of buckets of water, for which I had to break a skin of ice.

In the barrel on the end of the dock, the stasis field was still on; it requires no power to maintain. It was about one-quarter full of fish. I went back to the kitchen for tongs and brought in a few. Absolute zero, of course, but they'd thaw in time for breakfast.

We warmed the water over the fire and drank old wine—I'd bartered it from Harras not five months ago—and when the water was hot enough, I carried a candle into the cold living room to read, while Sara bathed. Having grown up in a nudist commune, and going from there to the army's communal showers, I didn't have any modesty about bathing, and neither did Marygay. So of course our children turned out to be prudes.

It looked like Bill had still been here on the Day, and not alone. I recognized the pile of his clothes where he'd been sitting on the couch in the living room, next to a pile of woman's clothing. Seeing his clothes was a sudden shock; my head swam and I had to grope for a chair.

When I could stand again, feeling curious and obscurely guilty, I checked upstairs, and yes, two people had slept in his unmade bed. I wondered who she was and whether they'd had time, or inclination, to fall in love.

After she'd washed up, Sara looked at her brother's clothes and fell silent. She found us reasonably fresh linen and went upstairs to change her bed and sleep, but for a long time, I could hear, she tossed and turned. I just made a pallet on the floor by the fire, no desire to sleep in our old bedroom alone.

In the morning I broiled the fish in the fireplace, and made a pot of rice that barely seemed a decade old. Then we went out on various errands, a pair of holo cameras mounted in front of the van. Stephen Funk had insisted on that; someday it would be a valuable historic record. And people would be curious about what their homes looked like, abandoned for eight years.

Most of them would be unhappy, since very few had had landscaping of native plants alone. There was status in planting and maintaining Earth stock, but very little of it had survived even one hard winter unattended. The native forms had taken over, especially the large and small green mushrooms, neither plant nor fungus, pretty ugly even out in the woods, where they belonged. All of the lawns were full of it, knee high to head high. The town looked like a nightmarish fairy tale.

We gathered records and artifacts and a few specialized tools—Stan's kiln, as he'd said, disassembled into ten pieces, but it was still a monster to load. By the end of the day, we were tired and depressed and ready to leave. But we had to wait till dawn.

I made a stew of boxed fruit with rice, and we sat by the fire, eating and drinking too much.

"Earth is going to be like this to you, isn't it?" Sara said. "Only worse."

"I don't know," I said; "it's been so long. I think I've adjusted to the fact that there won't be much I recognize."

I added some wood to the fire and went back to refill the wine pitcher. "I guess I told you about the guy from the 22nd."

"A long time ago. I forget."

"He came to Stargate while I was waiting for Charlie and Diana and Anita to get heteroed. He was alone, supposedly the only survivor of some battle. Too vague about it, though."

"You assumed he'd deserted."

"Right. But that wasn't what interested me." The wine was cool and tangy. "He'd been back to Earth in the twenty-fourth. Born in 2102, he'd mustered out into the 2300's. Like your mother and me, he couldn't tolerate what passed for Earth society, and re-upped to get away from it.

"But what he described sounded so much better than the world he'd been born into. That was a half-century after Marygay and I had left, and it was even worse. The leading cause of death in the United States was murder, and most of the murders were legal duels. People settled arguments and even made business deals and gambled with weapons—I put up everything I own, and you put up everything you own, and we fight to the death for the whole pile."

"And he liked that."

"He loved it! And after all his commando training and combat experience, he was looking forward to becoming a wealthy man.

"But the Earth wasn't like that anymore. There was a warrior class, and you were born into it, biologically engineered. They went into the army as children, and never left it; never mixed with polite society—and I mean polite. The Earth had become a planet of docile lambs who lived communally; no one owned—or desired—more than anyone else had; no one even spoke ill of anyone else.

"They even knew that their harmony was artificial, imposed by biological and social engineering, and were glad for it. The fact that a horrific war was being waged on a hundred planets, in their name, just made it the more logical that their own daily lives be serene and civilized."

"So he ran back to the army?"

"Not immediately. He knew how lucky he'd been to survive, and wasn't eager to press his luck. He couldn't live with the sheep, so he took off on his own—wandering through the countryside, trying to live off the land."

"But they wouldn't let him! They wouldn't leave him alone. They could always find him, and every day they sent someone new to try to bring him into the fold. He'd fight the messengers—or at least assault them; they didn't fight back—and even killed some. A new one would show up the next day, full of pity and concern."

"After a month or two, the one who showed up was an army re-enlistment officer. He was gone the next day." We watched the fire for a while.

"You think you could've adjusted?"

"Not adjusted. I could never be like them. But I could have lived in their world."

"So could I," she said. "It sounds like Man's world."

"Yeah, I suppose it does." The one I rejected for Middle Finger. "It was probably a first step. Even though we didn't make peace with the Taurans for another thousand years."

She took our bowls and spoons to the sink, walking with careful unsteadiness. "I sort of hope it's different, if I get, if we get chosen."

"It will be. Everything changes." I wasn't sure, though, once Man got a hold of it. Why mess with perfection? She agreed, and made her way upstairs to bed. I washed the bowls and spoons, pointlessly. This house probably wouldn't have inhabitants again in my lifetime.

I made up my pallet by the fire, after wrestling a big overnight log into place. I lay down and stared at the flames, but couldn't fall asleep. Maybe I'd had too much wine; that sometimes happens.

For some reason I was haunted by images of war—not only actual memories of the campaigns and the gore we twice had to deal with in transit. But I also went way back to training; to the ALSC-induced fantasies of combat, killing phantoms with everything from a rock to a nova bomb. I thought about having some more wine, enough to chase them away. But I'd be driving, steering, at least half of a long day.

Sara clumped down sniffling with her pillow and blankets and said, "Cold." She snugged up to me the way she used to when she was little, and in a minute was softly snoring. The familiar warm smell of her drove the demons away, and I slept, too.

Eventually, other people went on expeditions to Thornhill, Lakeland, and Black Beach/White Beach, scavenging from the lost past. No new clues as to what had happened showed up, but the dorm did become more homey, and crowded, with the junk they brought back.

Toward the end of spring, we began to expand, although it was more like an amoeba slowly splitting. There were no central utilities, and wouldn't be for some time, so they had to reproduce in miniature our mechanisms for power and plumbing and so forth.

Nine people moved into a building downtown that had been called "The Muses," a place where artists, musicians, and writers lived together. All the materials for those pursuits were still in place, though the cold had ruined some of them.

Eloi Casi's lover, Brenda Desoi, brought along the unfinished small sculpture that Eloi had given her before we left the Time Warp; she wanted to make an installation around it, and she knew that Eloi had spent a deep winter studying and working at The Muses when he was young. She found eight others who wanted to move there and start making art and music again.