Forever Free Read online

  ‘Especially the Tauran Tree,’ the brave said. ‘We can tap it, but a lot of it is confusing.’

  ‘I’m afraid much of it is confusing to me as well,’ Antres said. ‘I’m from Tsogot. We’re in contact with Earth, or were in contact, but our cultures have been diverging for centuries.’

  ‘That might be useful.’ The brave changed into a kindly-looking old man. ‘A doubly alien perspective.’ He produced a blue package of cigarettes and lit one, wrapped in yellow paper, which smelled even more noxious than the one before. I sorted through grandfatherly images and came up with Walt Disney.

  ‘Why are so many of your images from the twentieth century?’ I asked. ‘Are you reading our minds, Marygay and me?’

  ‘No, I can’t do that. I just like the period – end of innocence, before the Forever War. Everything got kind of complicated after that.’ He took a deep drag on the cigarette and closed his eyes, evidently savoring it. ‘Then it got too simple, if you ask me. We were all sort of waiting for this Man thing to run its course.’

  ‘It survived so long because it worked,’ the sheriff said mildly.

  ‘Termite colonies work,’ Disney said. ‘They don’t produce interesting conversation.’ To Antres: ‘You Taurans got a lot more done, or at least more interesting things, before you had a group mind. I went to Tsogot once, as a xenosociologist, and studied your history.’

  ‘It’s academic now,’ I said; ‘both Man and Tauran. No group, no group mind.’

  The sheriff shook his head. ‘We’ll grow back, same as you. Most of the frozen ova and sperm are Man.’

  ‘You assume the others are all dead;’ Disney said, ‘but all we really know is that they’ve disappeared.’

  ‘They’re all in some big nudist colony in the sky,’ I said.

  ‘We have no evidence one way or the other. Your group is here and so is ours. Omni on the Moon and Mars and in local spaceships all report the disappearance of humans and Taurans, but none of us is gone, as far as we can tell.’

  ‘Other starships?’ Stephen said.

  ‘That’s why I was waiting at the Cape. There are twenty-four within one collapsar jump of Stargate. Two should have returned by now. But only unmanned drones have come in, with routine messages.’

  ‘Why do you think the Omni were spared?’ Marygay said. ‘Because you’re immortal?’

  ‘Oh, we’re not immortal, except the way an amoeba is.’ He smiled at me. ‘If you had targeted me this morning, rather than the hot dog stand, you would probably have done enough damage to kill me.’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  He waved it away. ‘You thought I was a machine. But no, except for you, the thing seems species-selective. Humans and Taurans disappear; birds and bees and Omni don’t.’

  ‘And the thing that sets us apart is that we were trying to escape,’ Cat said.

  Disney shrugged. ‘Suppose for a moment that the universe does care about intent. What you were doing would get its notice.’

  That was a bit much. ‘And that would piss off the universe so much that it would destroy ten billion people and Taurans.’

  Anita moaned softly. ‘Something … something’s wrong.’ She stood erect, her back arching, and her eyes grew round and bulged. Her face swelled. Her coveralls became taut and the seams started to split.

  Then she exploded: one horrible wet smack, and we were all spattered with blood and tissue; a piece of bone glanced off my cheekbone with stinging force.

  I looked at the Omni. He was Disney, covered with blood and gore, and then he flickered, between Disney and an apparition that was mostly fangs and claws – and then he was Uncle Walt again, clean.

  Most of us, including me, sat down. Chance and Steve sort of fell down. Where Anita had been standing, there were a pair of boots with two blood-streaked stalks of bone.

  ‘I didn’t do this,’ Disney said.

  The sheriff drew his pistol. ‘I don’t believe you.’ He shot him point-blank in the heart.

  Thirty

  The next few minutes were grotesque. The little robots rolled out to clean up – Mickey and Donald and Minnie chanting admonitory rhymes while they speared and vacuumed up the fragmentary remains of a woman I’d known for half my life. When they went to police up her boots, all that was left that had any individuality, I followed the Omni’s example and kicked them away. The sheriff saw what I was doing and helped.

  We each picked up a gory boot. ‘There has to be some way to bury her,’ he said.

  Disney sat up, clutching his chest. ‘If you’ll stop shooting me, I can help.’ He closed his eyes, his skin chalk grey, and for a moment it looked like he was just going to fall back dead. But he transformed himself, slowly, limb by limb, into a large black working man in overalls, clutching a shovel. He got to his feet with exaggerated stiffness.

  ‘You been around these normal people too long,’ he said in a gravelly Louis Armstrong bass. ‘You suppose’ to control that temper.’ He whacked a robot away with the shovel, and pointed with it, toward a stand of palm trees. ‘Let’s take her over there, put her to rest.’ He addressed the others. ‘You all get inside and clean up. We take care of this part.’

  He hefted the shovel and walked toward the palms. As he passed the sheriff, he said, ‘Don’t do that. It hurts.’

  The sheriff and I followed him, each with our grisly token. It took him about a minute to dig a deep square hole.

  We put the boots in the hole and he refilled it and patted the dirt smooth. ‘Did she have a religion?’

  ‘Orthodox New Catholic,’ I said.

  ‘I can do that.’ He absorbed the shovel and became a tall priest in a black cowled robe, with tonsure and heavy cross on a chain swinging from his neck. He said a few words in Latin and made a cross gesture over the grave.

  Still the priest, he walked with us back to Molly Malone’s, where several people were sitting on porch chairs and a rocker. Stephen was weeping uncontrollably, Marygay and Max holding on to him. He and Anita had had a son together, who died in an accident at nine or ten. They drifted apart after that, but were still friends. Rii brought him a glass of water and a pill.

  ‘Rii,’ I said, ‘if that’s some sort of trank, I could use one myself.’ I felt as if I was about to explode, out of grief and confusion.

  She looked at the vial. ‘It’s mild enough. Anybody want to take a nap?’ I think everybody took one, except Antres 906 and the priest. Marygay and I went up to the inn’s second floor and found a bed, and collapsed in each other’s arms.

  It was almost sundown when I woke up. I got out of bed as quietly as possible and found that Molly Malone’s plumbing still worked, even to hot water. Marygay got up while I was washing, and we went downstairs together.

  Stephen and Matt were making noise in the dining area. They’d pulled several tables together and set out some plastic dishes and forks, and a pile of food boxes. ‘Our fearless leader,’ she said. ‘You get to open the first box.’

  I didn’t really feel like eating, though I should have been famished. I picked up one that said chili in bright red letters, with a picture of Donald Duck holding his throat, fire issuing from his beak. I pulled the top back and it worked, the chili sizzling and filling the room with an agreeable odor.

  ‘Not spoiled,’ I said, and blew on a forkful. It was bland, meatless. ‘Seems okay.’

  The others popped boxes, and soon the place smelled like a cafeteria. Cat and Po came down, followed by Max. We ate the small meals in stunned silence, except for mumbled greetings. Po said grace before he opened his box.

  I left mine unfinished. ‘See what the sunset looks like,’ I said, and got up from the table. Marygay and Cat came along.

  Outside, Antres 906 and the Omni, still looking like a priest, were conversing in croaks and squeaks, standing where Anita had died.

  ‘Discussing who the next will be?’ Cat said, glaring at the priest.

  He looked up, startled. ‘What?’

  ‘What caused that,’
she said, ‘if it wasn’t you?’

  ‘Not me. I could do that to myself, if I wanted to die, but I couldn’t do it to someone else.’

  ‘Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?’ I said.

  ‘Couldn’t. “Physically impossible,” to put it in words of four syllables. To use your belief system.’

  ‘So what happened? People don’t just explode!’

  He sat down on the edge of the porch and crossed his long legs, lacing his fingers over his knee, looking toward the sunset. ‘There you go again. People do explode, obviously. One just did.’

  ‘And it could have been any of us.’ Marygay’s voice shook. ‘We could all go like that, one by one.’

  ‘We could,’ the priest said, ‘including me. But I hope it was just an experiment. A test.’

  ‘Someone’s testing us?’ I was feeling dizzy and trying to control nausea. I sat down carefully on the porch floor.

  ‘Always,’ the priest said quietly. ‘You’ve never felt that?’

  ‘Metaphor,’ I said.

  He made a slow sweeping gesture. ‘The way all this is metaphor. Taurans understand that better than you do.’

  ‘Not this,’ Antres 906 said. ‘This is something I cannot contain.’

  ‘The nameless.’ The priest said a Tauran word I didn’t know.

  Antres touched his throat. ‘Of course. But the … you say “nameless”? They are not literally real. They are a convenience, a symbol, talking about … I do not know how to say it. Truth underneath appearance, fate?’

  The priest touched his cross and it became a circle with two legs, a Tauran religious icon. ‘Symbol, metaphor. The nameless, I think, are more real than we are.’

  ‘But you’ve never seen or touched one,’ I said. ‘Just guessing.’

  ‘No one ever has. You’ve never seen a neutrino, but you don’t doubt their existence. In spite of “impossible” characteristics.’

  ‘All right. But you can prove neutrinos are there, or something is there, because otherwise particle physics wouldn’t work out. The universe couldn’t exist.’

  ‘I could just say, “I rest my case.” You don’t like the idea of the nameless because it smacks of the supernatural.’

  Fair enough. ‘Okay. But for the first fifty – or fifteen hundred – years of my life, and for thousands of years preceding me, the universe could be explained without resorting to your mysterious nameless.’ I turned to Antres. ‘That’s also true of Taurans, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very much so, yes. The nameless are real, but only as intellectual constructs.’

  ‘Let me ask you an old question,’ the priest said. ‘How likely is it that humans and Taurans, evolving independently on planets forty light-years apart, would meet at the same level of technology, and be similar enough psychologically to fight a war?’

  ‘A lot of people have asked that question,’ I nodded toward Antres, ‘and a lot of Taurans, I suppose. Some of the people from my future, under my command, belonged to a religious sect that had it all explained. Something like your nameless.’

  ‘But you have a better explanation?’

  ‘Sorting. If they had been pre-technological, we wouldn’t have interacted. If they’d been thousands of years ahead of us, there would have been no war. Extermination, maybe.’ Antres made a sound of agreement. ‘So it’s partly coincidence, but not completely.’

  ‘It was not at all coincidence. We Omni have been on both planets since before humans and Taurans had language, which we gave you. Or technology, which we controlled.

  ‘We were Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton. In your parents’ time, we took control of NASA, to retard human development in space.’

  ‘And you masterminded the Forever War.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think we just set up the initial conditions. You could have cooperated with one another, if it had been in your natures.’

  ‘But first you made sure our natures were warlike,’ Marygay said.

  ‘That I don’t know. That would be far before my time.’ He shook his head. ‘Let me explain. We’re not born the way you are; nor you, Antres 906. I think there are a fixed number of us, around a hundred, and when one of us dies, a new one comes to be.

  ‘You’ve seen how I can split into two or several pieces. When it’s time for a new Omni – when one of us dies somewhere – I or someone else will split, and half will stay separate, and go off to become a new individual.’

  ‘With all the parent’s memories and skills?’ Rii said.

  ‘I wish. You start out a duplicate of your parent, but as the months and years go by, that fades away, replaced by your own experience. I would love to have a hundred fifty thousand years of ancestral memory. But all I have is hearsay, passed on by others of my kind.’

  ‘Including this “nameless” stuff,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true. And at various times in my life, I’ve wondered whether it might not be a delusion – some sort of fiction that we share. Like a religion: there’s no way you or I could prove that the nameless don’t exist. And if they do, their existence can explain the otherwise inexplicable. Like the coincidence of parallel evolution, Taurans and humans coming together at just the right time. Like random people exploding.’

  ‘Which happens all the time,’ Cat said.

  ‘All sorts of inexplicable things happen. Most of them do get explained. I think sometimes the explainers are wrong. If, in the normal course of things, you came upon the remains of someone who had died the way your friend did, you would have assumed foul play; some kind of bomb or something. Not a whim of the nameless.’

  The sheriff gave words to my thoughts: ‘I still haven’t ruled out foul play. We’ve watched you do all sorts of things we would call impossible. It is much easier for me to assume you did this, somehow, than to posit the existence of invisible malevolent gods.’

  ‘Then why did I do it to her, rather than you? Why didn’t I do it to Mandella when he came within an inch of killing me?’

  ‘Maybe you crave excitement,’ I said. ‘I’ve met people like that. You want the two of us to live, to make your world more interesting.’

  ‘It’s interesting enough, thank you.’ He cocked his head. ‘And about to become more so.’

  Book Six

  The Book of Revelation

  Thirty-one

  I heard it then, the faint warbling sound of two floaters converging from different directions. In a few seconds they were visible; in a few more, they floated over us and settled down in the park.

  They were sport floaters, bright orange and cherry, streamlined like the combat helicopters of my youth – ‘Cobras,’ and they did look like cobras.

  The cockpit canopies slid back and a man and a woman climbed out. They were both a little too large, like our pal, and the floaters rocked in gratitude, relieved of their weight.

  Both the man and the woman shrank when they saw us. But they left deep footprints in the grass. I wondered why they hadn’t just come as floaters. Maybe that took too much material.

  The woman was black and stocky, and the man was white and so plain it would be hard to describe his face. Protective coloration, I supposed; a kind of default configuration. They were both wearing togas of natural unbleached cloth.

  There was no greeting. The three Omni looked at each other, conversing silently, for less than a minute.

  The woman spoke. ‘There will be more of us here soon. We are dying too, in violence, the way your friend died.’

  ‘The nameless?’ I asked.

  ‘What can you say about the nameless?’ the man said. ‘I think it is them, because things are happening contrary to physical law.’

  ‘They’re in control of physics?’

  ‘Apparently,’ our priest said. ‘People exploding, antimatter evaporating. Ten billion creatures going off to, as you say, some cosmic nudist colony. Or mass grave.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is a grave,’ the woman said. ‘And we’re about to join them.’

  All three of them
looked at me. The faceless man spoke. ‘You did it. You tried to leave the Galaxy. Escape the preserve the nameless established for us.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I’ve left the Galaxy before. The Sade-138 campaign was in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Other campaigns were in the Lesser Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf.’

  ‘Collapsar travel is not the same,’ the woman said. ‘Wormholes. It’s like exchanging one quantum state for another, and then going back.’

  ‘Like a bungee jump,’ our fan of the twentieth century added.

  ‘With your starship,’ she continued, ‘you were actually leaving. You were going into the territory of the nameless.’

  ‘They told you this?’ Marygay asked. ‘You talk to the nameless?’

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘It’s just inference.’

  ‘You would call it Occam’s Razor,’ the woman said. ‘It’s the least complicated explanation.’

  ‘So we’ve provoked the wrath of God,’ I said.

  ‘If you want to put it that way,’ the plain one said. ‘What we’re trying to figure out is how to get God’s attention.’

  I wanted to scream, but Sara expressed it more calmly. ‘If they’re omnipotent and everywhere … we have their attention. Too much of it.’

  The priest shook his head. ‘No. It’s sporadic. The nameless leave us alone for weeks, for years. Then they introduce a variable, like a scientist or a curious child would, and watch how we react.’

  ‘Getting rid of everybody?’ Marygay said. ‘That’s a variable?’

  ‘No,’ the black woman said. ‘I think it means the experiment is over. The nameless are cleaning up.’

  ‘And what we have to do,’ the plain man said, and paused. ‘Now me.’ He exploded, but not into blood and guts and fragments of bone. It was a shower of white particles, a small blizzard. The particles settled to the ground and disappeared.

  ‘Hell,’ the priest said. ‘I liked him.’

  ‘What we have to do,’ the woman continued for him, ‘is get the attention of the nameless and convince them to leave us alone.’