Forever Free Read online

  It was a fun summer, a highlight of my childhood. We puffed up the Alcan Highway in our old Deadhead Volkswagen bus, camping or stopping in little Canadian towns along the way.

  When we got to Anchorage, it seemed huge, and for years after, whenever he told people about the trip, my father quoted the guidebook: If you fly into Anchorage from an American city of any size, it seems small and quaint. If you drive or ferry up through all the little villages, it seems like a teeming metropolis.

  I always remembered that when I came into Centrus, which is smaller than Anchorage had been, a millennium and a half ago. My own life has adapted itself to the scale and pace of a village, so my first impression of Centrus is one of dizzying speed and neck-craning size. But I take a mental deep breath and remember New York and London, Paris and Geneva – not to mention Skye and Atlantis, the fabulous pleasure cities that sucked away our money on Heaven. Centrus is a hick town that happens to be the biggest hick town within twenty light-years.

  I held on to that thought when we came in to confer with Centrus administrators – which is to say, the world’s – about our timetable for fixing up and crewing the Time Warp.

  We’d hoped they could just rubber-stamp it. Fourteen of us had spent most of a week arguing over who was to do what, when. I could just see starting over and repeating the process, with the additional pressure of demands from Man.

  We went all the way up to the tenth-floor penthouse office of the General Administration Building, and presented our plan to four Men, two male and two female, and a Tauran, who could have been any of three sexes. He turned out to be Antres 906, of course, the cultural attaché we had entertained at our house the night I earned my first entry on the police blotter.

  The five of them read the three-page schedule in silence, while Marygay and I looked out over Centrus. There wasn’t really too much to see. Beyond the dozen or so square blocks of downtown, the trees were higher than the buildings; I knew there was a good-sized town out there, but the dwellings and businesses were hidden by evergreens, all the way out to the shuttle pad on the horizon, The shuttles themselves weren’t visible; both were inside the launching tubes that rose out of the horizon mist like smokestacks on an old-fashioned factory.

  The one wall of this room that wasn’t window featured ten paintings, five each of human and Tauran manufacture. The human ones were bland cityscapes in the various seasons. The Tauran things were skeins and splotches of colors that clashed so much they seemed to vibrate. I knew that some of them were pigmented with body fluids. They were evidently prettier if you could see into the ultraviolet.

  At some subtle signal, they all set down their copies of the schedule in unison.

  ‘We have no objection to this as far as it goes,’ said the leftmost Man. She betrayed her lack of telepathy by glancing down the row; the others nodded slightly, including the Tauran. ‘The days when you need both shuttles will be an inconvenience, but we can plan around them.’

  ‘“… as far as it goes”?’ Marygay said.

  ‘We should have told you this earlier,’ she said, ‘but it must be obvious. We will require that you take two more passengers. A Man and a Tauran.’

  Of course. We’d known about the Man, and should have foreseen the Tauran. ‘The Man is not a big problem,’ I said. ‘He or she can eat our food. But ten years of rations for a Tauran?’ I did a quick mental calculation. ‘That’s an extra six or eight tonnes of cargo.’

  ‘No, it is not a problem,’ Antres 906 rasped. ‘My metabolism can be altered to survive on your food, with a few grams of supplement daily.’

  ‘You can see the value of this to us,’ the Man said.

  ‘Now that I think of it, of course,’ I said. ‘Both of your species may change somewhat in forty thousand years. You want a pair of time travelers as baselines.’

  Marygay shook her head slowly, biting her lower lip. ‘We’ll have to change the makeup of the crew. No disrespect, Antres, but there are many veterans who could not tolerate your presence for ten hours, let alone ten years.’

  ‘And in any case, we can’t guarantee your safety,’ I said. ‘Many of us were conditioned to kill your kind on sight.’

  ‘But they have all been de-conditioned,’ Man said.

  I thought of Max, slated as assistant civil engineer. ‘With uneven success, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That is understood and forgiven,’ Antres said. ‘If that part of the experiment fails, then it fails.’ It turned to the last page of the report and tapped on the diagram of the cargo cylinder. ‘I can make a small place to live down here. That way your people will not be exposed to me often or involuntarily.’

  ‘That’s workable,’ I said. ‘Send us a list of things you’ll need, and we’ll integrate them into the loading schedule.’

  The rest was formalities, having a small cup of strong coffee and a glass of spirits with the Men. The Tauran disappeared and came back in a few minutes with his list. They had obviously been prepared for us.

  We didn’t say anything about it until we were out of the building. ‘Damn. We should have foreseen that and beaten them to the punch.’

  ‘We should have,’ Marygay said. ‘Now we have to go back and deal with people like Max.’

  ‘Yeah, but it won’t be someone like Max who kills the Tauran. It’ll be someone who thinks he’s over with the war. And then one day just loses it.’

  ‘Someone like you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Hell, I’m not over the war. Bill says that’s why I’m running away.’

  ‘Let’s not think about the children.’ She put an arm around my waist and bumped me with her hip. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel and actively not think about them.’

  After a pleasant interlude, we spent the afternoon shopping, for friends and neighbors as well as ourselves. Nobody in Paxton had a lot of money; we basically had a barter economy, with every adult getting a small check each month from Centrus. Sort of like the universal dole that was working so well, the last time we’d been on Earth.

  It did work pretty well on Middle Finger, since nobody expected luxuries. On Earth, people had been almost uniformly poor, but surrounded by constant reminders of unattainable wealth. Out here everyone had about the same kind of simple life.

  We pushed a cart down the brick sidewalk, consulting our list, and made about a half-dozen stops. Herbs, guitar strings and clarinet reeds, sandpaper and varnish, memory crystals, a paint set, a kilo of marijuana (Dorian liked it but was allergic to Sage’s homegrown variety). Then we had tea at a sidewalk café and watched people go by. It was always a novelty to see all those faces you didn’t recognize.

  ‘I wonder what this will be like when we come back.’

  ‘Unimaginable,’ I said, ‘unless it’s ancient rubble. You go back forty millenniums in human history and what do you have? Not even towns, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s remember to look it up.’ On the street in front of us, a car banged into the rear of another one. The Men who were driving the vehicles got out and silently inspected the damage, which was slight, just a mark on a bumper. They nodded at each other and went back to their places.

  ‘Do you think that was an accident?’ Marygay said.

  ‘What? Oh … possibly not. Probably.’ A staged lesson on how well they got along together. How well Man got along with himself. The coincidence of it happening in front of us was unlikely; there was little traffic.

  We indulged in the services of a masseuse and masseur for the hour before we caught the bus back to Paxton.

  When we get back, I punched up the library to find out what we were doing forty thousand years ago. We weren’t even ‘us’ yet; still late Neanderthal. They did have flint and stone tools. No evident language or art, except for simple petroglyphs in Australia.

  What if Man, and people, were to develop characteristics as profound and basic as language and art – which they could share with us, perhaps, only to the extent that we can ‘talk’ to dogs, or be amused by
the smears a chimp will make with fingerpaints?

  It seemed to me that it would certainly be one or the other: extinction or virtual speciation. Either way, the 150 of us would be totally alone. To rebuild the race or wither away, a useless anachronistic appendage.

  I was going to keep that conclusion to myself. As if no one else would arrive at it. It would be Aldo Verdeur-Sims to first bring it up in public, or at least semi-public.

  Ten

  ‘We’re going to seem as alien to them as the Taurans did to us,’ Aldo said, ‘if they do manage to survive forty thousand years, which I doubt.’

  It was called a ‘discussion group’ in the first note we’d sent around, but in fact it was most of the people Marygay and I figured would be most active in setting up the project, if not actually running the ship. Sooner or later there would be some democratic process.

  Besides us, it was Cat and Aldo, Charlie and Diana, Ami and Teresa, and a floating population that included Max Weston (his xenophobia notwithstanding), our Sara, Lar Po, and the Tens – Mohammed and one or two of his wives.

  Po was a contrarian, in his polite way: express an opinion and watch his brain cells start grinding away. ‘You assume constant change,’ he said to Aldo, ‘but in fact Man claims perfection, and no need to change. They might enforce that among themselves, even for forty thousand years.’

  ‘But the humans?’ Aldo said.

  Po dismissed our race with a flick of his hand. ‘I don’t think we’ll survive two thousand generations. Most likely, we’ll challenge Man and the Taurans and be crushed.’

  We were meeting, as usual, in our dining room/kitchen. Ami and Teresa had brought two big jugs of blackberry wine, sweet and fortified with brandy, and the discussion was more animated than usual.

  ‘You’re both underestimating humanity,’ Cat said. ‘What’s most likely is that Man and the Taurans will stagnate, while humans evolve beyond them. When we come back, it may be only Man who’s familiar. Our own descendants grown into something beyond understanding.’

  ‘All this optimism,’ Marygay said. ‘Can we get back to the diagram?’

  Sara had drawn up a neat timetable, based on my notes and Marygay’s, roughing out the whole thing from now till launch on one big sheet of paper. At least it had started out neat. For the first hour tonight, people had studied it and penciled in suggestions. Then the Larsons came with their jugs, and the meeting became more relaxed and conversational. But we did have to refine the timetable in order to firm up the launch schedule.

  You could actually look at it as two linked timetables, and in fact there was a ruled line separating the two: before approval and after approval. For the next nine months, we were limited to two launches a week, and one of them had to be reserved for fuel shipment – a tonne of water and two kilograms of antimatter (which with its containment apparatus took up half the shuttle’s payload).

  After approval came from Earth, we could have daily shuttles most days, the one on the ground being loaded while the one in orbit unloaded. We could make a good case for getting the ship’s ecology up and running before approval, but there was no reason to send up people and their belongings, beyond the skeleton crew that was setting up the farms and fish, and the three engineers stalking from stem to stern, checking ‘systems’ (like toilets and door latches) and making repairs, while it was still relatively easy to find or make parts.

  The rationale for fueling up the ship prior to approval was that, if the Whole Tree were to turn us down, the huge ship would make a few trips to Earth, bringing back luxuries and oddities. (Mars, too; human and Man’s presence went back for centuries now; you could bundle up and breathe outdoors there with a slight oxygen supplement. They had their own artistic traditions, and even antiques.) There were plenty of humans on Middle Finger, let alone Men, who would much rather see the Time Warp used that way. Paintings, pianos, pistachio nuts.

  We might be allowed to go along as a sort of consolation prize.

  Assuming there would be no approval problem, though, we went ahead with scheduling the second stage. It would only take fifteen days to load all of the people and their personal effects, a hundred kilograms each. Each one could also petition to bring another hundred kilograms, or more, for general use. Mass wasn’t too critical, but space was; we didn’t want to be crowded with clutter.

  It does take a lot of stuff to keep 150 people happy for a decade, but much of it was already built into the ship, like the gym and theater. There were even two music rooms, acoustically isolated, so as not to drive neighbors to acts of vandalism. (We tried to get a real piano, speaking of antiques, but there were only three on Middle Finger, so we had to settle for a couple of electronic ones. I couldn’t hear the difference, myself.)

  Some requests had to be turned down because of the size of our little mobile town. Eloi Casi wanted to bring a two-tonne block of marble, to work for ten years on an intricate sculptural record of the voyage. I would love to see the result, but would not love living with ‘clink … clink … clink.’ He compromised with a log, a half-meter by two meters, and no power tools.

  Marygay and I were the initial arbiters for these requests, always with the understanding that everything from Eloi’s huge sculpture to a brass band could be approved by referendum, after the Whole Tree’s acceptance.

  I explained to Man that we might need extra launches for ‘afterthought’ luxuries that the population voted to include, and they were cooperative. They actually were getting into the spirit of the thing, in their own undemonstrative way: it was interesting to be in on the beginning of an experiment forty millenniums long.

  (They even went so far as to write up a description of the voyage and its purpose in a physical and linguistic medium that might last all those centuries: eight pages of text and diagrams inscribed on platinum plates, and another twelve pages that comprised an elaborate Rosetta Stone, starting with basic physics and chemistry, from which they derived logic, and then grammar, and finally, with some help from biology, a vocabulary large enough to describe the project in simple terms. They planned to put the plates on a wall in an artificial cave on the top of the highest mountain on the planet, with duplicates on Mount Everest on Earth and Olympus Mons on Mars.)

  It’s both natural and odd that Marygay and I wound up being leaders of the band. We did come up with the idea, of course, but we both new from our military experience that we weren’t natural-born leaders. Twenty years’ parenting and helping a small community grow had changed us – and twenty years of being the ‘oldest’ people in the world. There were plenty of people older than us in actual aging, but nobody else who could remember life before the Forever War. So people came to us for advice because of this mostly symbolic maturity.

  Most people seemed to assume that I was going to be the captain, when the time came. I wondered how many would be surprised when I stepped down in favor of Marygay. She was more comfortable with being an officer.

  Well, being an officer had gotten her Cat. All I got was Charlie.

  *

  The meeting broke up before dark. The first heavy flakes of a long storm were drifting down. There would be more than half a meter on the ground by morning; people had livestock to manage, fires to kindle, children to worry about – children like Bill, out on the road in this weather.

  Marygay had gone to the kitchen to make soup and scones and listen to music, while Sara and I sat at the dining room table and consolidated all of the scribblings on her once-neat chart into a coherent timetable. Bill called from the tavern, where he’d been in a pool tournament, and said he’d like to leave the floater there, if nobody needed it right away, and walk home. The snow was so dense in the air that headlights were useless. I said that was a good idea, not mentioning the slur in his speech that made it a doubly good idea.

  He seemed sober when he got home, more than an hour later. He came in through the mudroom, laughing while he beat snow off his clothes. I knew how he felt – this kind of snow was a bitch to driv
e in, but wonderful for walking. The sound of it feathering down, the light touch on skin – nothing like the killer horizontal spikes of a deep winter blizzard. We’d have neither aboard ship, of course, but the lack of one seemed a more than fair trade for the other.

  Bill got a fresh scone and some hot cider, and sat down with us. ‘Knocked out in the first round,’ he said. ‘They got me on a technical scratch.’ I nodded in sympathy, though I wouldn’t know a technical scratch from a technical itch. The game they played was not exactly eight ball.

  He frowned at the chart, trying to read it upside-down. ‘They really snaffed your pretty chart, sister.’

  ‘It was meant to be snaffed with,’ she said. ‘We’re making up a new one.’

  ‘Call it out to everyone tonight or in the morning,’ I said. ‘Give them something to do other than shovel snow.’

  ‘Your mind’s made up?’ he said to Sara. ‘You’re going to take the big jump? And when you come back, I won’t even be dust anymore.’

  ‘Your choice,’ she said, ‘as well as mine.’

  He nodded amiably. ‘I mean, I can see why Mom and Dad—’

  ‘We’ve had this conversation before.’

  I could hear the house creak. Settling under the weight of snow. Marygay was sitting silent in the kitchen, listening.

  ‘Run it by again,’ I said. ‘Things have changed since I last heard it.’

  ‘What, that you’re taking one of Man along? And a Tauran?’

  ‘You’ll be Man by then.’

  He looked at me for a long moment. ‘No.’

  ‘It shouldn’t make any difference which individual goes. Group mind and all.’

  ‘Bill doesn’t have the right genes,’ Sara said. ‘They’ll want to send a real Man.’ That was a pun that saw daily use.

  ‘I wouldn’t go anyhow. It stinks of suicide.’

  ‘There’s not much danger,’ I said. ‘More danger staying here, actually.’

  ‘That’s true. You’re less likely to die in the next ten years than I am in the next forty thousand.’