Forever Free (3 page)

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 dead-end 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.

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 50 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.

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."