Forever Free Read online

  I smiled. ‘Ten versus ten.’

  ‘It’s still running away. You’re bored with this life and you’re deathly afraid of growing old. I’m not either of those things.’

  ‘What you are is twenty-one and all-knowing.’

  ‘Yeah, bullshit.’

  ‘And what you don’t know is what life used to be like, without Man or Tauran to complicate things. Or make things easier, by brainwashing you.’

  ‘Brainwashing. You haven’t brought that up in weeks.’

  ‘It’s as obvious as a wart on your nose. But like a wart, you don’t see it because you’re used to it.’

  Bill exploded. ‘What I am used to is this constant nagging!’ He stood up. ‘Sara, you can supply the answers. Keep talking, Dad. I’m gonna go take a nap.’

  ‘So who’s running away now?’

  ‘Just tired. Really tired.’

  Marygay was at the kitchen door. ‘Don’t you want some soup?’

  ‘Not hungry, Mom. I’ll zap some later.’ He took the stairs two at a time.

  ‘I do know the answers by heart,’ Sara said, smiling, ‘if you want to run through the logic again.’

  ‘You’re not the one I’m losing,’ I said. ‘Even though you plan to go over to the enemy someday.’ She looked down at her chart and growled something in Tauran. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s part of their catechism. It sort of means “Own nothing, lose nothing.”’ She looked up and her eyes were bright. ‘It also means “Love nothing, lose nothing.” They use the words interchangeably.’

  She stood up slowly. ‘I want to talk to him.’ When I went up to bed, an hour and a half later, they were still arguing in whispers.

  It was Bill’s turn to fix breakfast the next morning, and he was silent as he worked over the corn cakes and eggs. I started to compliment him when he served them, but he cut me short: ‘I’m going. I’m going with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ He looked at Sara. ‘Or had it changed. Sister says there’s room for another guy in aquaculture.’

  ‘And you have a natural love for that,’ I said.

  ‘The head-chopping part, anyhow.’ He sat down. ‘It is the chance of a lifetime, of many lifetimes. And I won’t be that old, when we get back.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Marygay said, her voice wavering. Bill nodded. Sara smiled.

  Eleven

  The next few months were tiring but interesting. We spent ten or twelve hours a week in the library’s ALSC – Accelerated Life Situation Computer – learning or relearning the arcana of spaceflight. Marygay had gone through it before; everyone who went on the time shuttle had to know the basics of how the ship was run.

  Unsurprisingly, things had gotten simpler in the centuries since I was last in training. One person could actually control the whole ship, under normal circumstances.

  We trained for specialties, too. For me it was shuttle piloting and the suspended-animation facility, which made me long for summer even more than usual.

  We were through first winter and well into deep winter before word came from Earth.

  Some people like deep winter for its austere simplicity. It rarely snows. The diminished sun climbs its same steady course. It gets down to thirty or forty below at night; sixty-five below before thaw season begins.

  The people who like deep winter are not fishermen. When the lake is solid enough to walk on, I go out to make ninety-six holes in the ice, using hollow heated cylinders.

  Each cylinder is a meter of thick aluminum with a heating element wound through inside. The cylinder is flared with insulation at the top so as not to sink. I set out a dozen at a time, upright, spaced evenly for the trotlines, then turn them on and wait. After a couple of hours, they melt through, and I turn off the power. Wait another hour or so, and then the fun begins.

  Of course by the time the ice is refrozen on the inside, the outside is stuck fast. I carry a sledgehammer and a crowbar. I whang around the outside of the cylinder until there’s a cracking, sucking sound, and then I take hold of the flange and haul this thirty-kilogram ice cube up. I turn the power on that one up high and move down to repeat the process on the next one.

  By the time I get to the end of the dozen, the first one has warmed enough so that I can slip it off the bar of ice it’s holding. Then I use the crowbar to break up the ice that’s re-formed in the hole, slip the aluminum sleeve back in, turn the power down to minimum, cap it, and move to the next one.

  The reason for this rigamarole is a combination of thermodynamics and fish psychology. I have to keep the water in the hole at exactly zero or the fish won’t bite. But if you don’t start out with liquid water – just melt through – you wind up with a cylinder of ice clinking around in it. The fish will bite the hook, but hang up and get away.

  Bill and Sara did half the holes one day, and Marygay and I did the other half the next. When we came in from work, late afternoon, the house smelled wonderful. Sara was roasting a chicken over the fire, and had made hot mulled cider with sweet wine.

  She wasn’t in the kitchen. Marygay and I poured cups and went into the living room.

  Our children were sitting silently with a Man. I recognized him by his bulk and the scar. ‘Afternoon, Sheriff.’

  Without preamble: ‘The Whole Tree said no.’

  I sat down heavily, sloshing some cider. Marygay sat on the couch armrest. ‘Just that?’ she said. ‘Only “no” and nothing more?’

  My spinning mind came up with ‘Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”’

  ‘There are details.’ He pulled out a four- or five-page document, folded over, and set it on the coffee table.

  ‘Basically, they thank you for your work, and have paid each of the one hundred fifty volunteers one one-hundred-fiftieth of what the ship is worth.’

  ‘In Earth credits, no doubt,’ I said.

  ‘Yes … but also a trip to Earth, to spend it. It is a large fortune, and could make life easier and more interesting for all of you.’

  ‘Let all one hundred fifty of us aboard?’

  ‘No.’ The sheriff smiled. ‘You might go someplace other than Earth.’

  ‘How many, and which of us?’

  ‘Seventeen; you choose. They’ll be in suspended animation during the flight, as a security precaution.’

  ‘While Man does the flying and life support. How many of you?’

  ‘I wasn’t told. How many would it take?’

  ‘Maybe twenty, if ten were farmers.’ We hadn’t actually thought in terms of minimums. ‘Are any of you farmers?’

  ‘I don’t know of any. We learn very fast, though.’

  ‘I suppose you do.’ Not the response a farmer would give.

  ‘Have you offered the sheriff some cider?’ Marygay said.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ he said. ‘I just wanted you two to hear before the general broadcast.’

  ‘That was kind,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  He stood up and began putting on layers of clothes. ‘Well, you have a special interest in it.’ He shook his head. ‘I was surprised. I thought the project was all gain and no real loss, which of course was the consensus here.’ He gestured at the table. ‘This was not just our Whole Tree’s decision, though. It’s very curious.’

  I ushered him out, as far as the waist-deep channel cut through the snow to the driveway. The sun was getting low and the air sucked my body heat away. Two breaths and my moustache froze into bristles.

  Only two years till spring. Real years.

  Marygay was almost done reading it when I came back inside. She was on the verge of tears. ‘What does it say?’

  Without taking her eyes from the last sheet, she handed me the first three. ‘The Taurans. It’s the god-damn Taurans.’

  The first couple of pages were the expected economic argument, which, with scrupulous fairness, they admitted was not reason enough by itself to deny us the time shuttle.

  But their group mind hooked up with the Taura
n group mind, and the Taurans said absolutely no. It was too dangerous – not to us, but to them.

  And they couldn’t explain why.

  ‘They used to say, “There are things man was not meant to know.”’ I looked at the kids. ‘That was when “man” meant us.’

  ‘That’s what this adds up to,’ Marygay said. ‘Nothing like an actual explanation.’ She felt along the bottom of the last sheet. ‘There’s some Tauran here.’ They did official documents in a Braille-like language. ‘Can you read it?’

  ‘Just simple things,’ Sara said. She ran a finger along the lines. ‘No. I’ll take it to the library after school, and scan it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’ll clear everything up.’

  ‘Oh, Dad. Sometimes they’re not strange at all.’ She got up. ‘Check the chicken. It should be almost done.’

  It was a good dinner. She had roasted potatoes and carrots in the coals, wrapped in foil with garlic butter and herbs.

  The kids were animated all through dinner. Marygay and I were not good company. After dinner we watched a couple of hours of cube, an ice-skating show that made me reheat the cider.

  Upstairs, getting ready for bed, she finally started to cry. Just silently wiping tears.

  ‘I guess I should have been more ready for this. I hadn’t thought about the Taurans, though. Man is usually reasonable.’

  We peeled back sheet, blanket, and quilt, and bundled in against the cold. ‘Twenty more months of this,’ she said.

  ‘Not for us,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The hell with the Taurans and their mysticism. Back to Plan A.’

  ‘Plan A?’

  ‘We highjack the bastard.’

  Sara brought home the Tauran writing at noon. ‘The librarian said it was a ritual statement, like the end of a prayer: “Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable.” She said that was only close. There aren’t exact human translations for the concepts.’

  I found a pen and had her repeat it slowly, and printed it in block letters on the back. She went into the kitchen to fix a sandwich. ‘Wow. What are you doing with all the stuff?’

  ‘Nothing else scheduled till four. Thought I’d take care of everything at once.’ Out of an obscure impulse, I’d brought inside every farming and fishing implement that held an edge or came to a point, and was cleaning and sharpening them. They were stacked in a glittering array along the dining-room table. ‘Been putting it off, since it’s been too cold to work in the shed.’

  I hadn’t expected anyone to be home this early. She walked by them with a nod, though. She’d grown up around them, and didn’t see them as weapons.

  We had lunch together in amiable silence, surrounded by axes and gaffs, reading.

  She finished her sandwich and looked straight at me. ‘Dad, I want to go with you.’

  I was startled. ‘What?’

  ‘To Earth. You’ll be one of the seventeen, won’t you?’

  ‘Your mother and me, yes. That was in the note. It didn’t say how the other fifteen would be chosen, though.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll let you choose.’

  ‘Maybe so. You’ll be at the top of my list.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’ She gave me a kiss on the cheek, bundled up, and hurried back to school.

  I wondered if I understood quite what had just transpired – or whether she knew, at some level. Fathers and daughters don’t communicate that well even when alien languages and secret conspiracies aren’t involved.

  Marygay and I had been chosen, of course, since we were the only two people alive who remembered twentieth-century Earth, before the Forever War. Man would be interested in our impressions. I supposed the other fifteen were to be chosen at random, from people who wanted to make the trip – probably half the planet.

  There would be no trip, of course. The ship would be accelerating straight up to nowhere. With Sara aboard, as originally planned.

  I unrolled the revised loading schedule she’d prepared, weighing down the four corners with salt and pepper shakers and two wicked-looking knives.

  It was discouraging, the hundreds of things that would have to be brought to the spaceport and launched into orbit. They weren’t going to bother with all that, just going to Earth and back. So we’d have to highjack the Time Warp and then somehow keep control of the situation long enough to launch the shuttles dozens of times. The people alone would take up ten flights.

  We weren’t going to do it by attacking them with a bunch of farm implements. We somehow had to present a real threat. But there weren’t many actual weapons on Middle Finger, and they were almost all in the hands of authorities like the sheriff.

  I gathered up the tools to take outside. A weapon doesn’t always look like a weapon. What did we have? Did we have anything that would keep them at bay for ten days, a couple of weeks, while the shuttles plied back and forth?

  We could have, I suddenly realized. Maybe it was a little insane.

  Twelve

  It took planning and coordination – and an unexpected assist from our adversaries: the seventeen going to Earth were all from Paxton, more or less the ringleaders of the original plot. Whether they were planning to let us come back from Earth was open to question. It was also moot.

  We had only twelve days before the supposed departure for Earth. I had sent all the others copies of the document from the One Tree, and we’d commiserated and talked about how, among other things, we might still get approval for our long journey, after talking to Man and Tauran on Earth.

  While talking on the cube to them, I made a casual gesture, touching middle finger to cheekbone, that used to be phone code: ‘Disregard this; someone may be listening.’ Most of them returned the gesture.

  Not one word of the plot was communicated by voice or electronics. I wrote down brief and precise descriptions of each person’s role, the notes to be memorized and destroyed. Even Marygay and I never spoke of it, not even when we were tending the trotlines, alone out on the ice.

  The seventeen of us saw a lot of each other, talking about Earth and passing notes about escape. The consensus seemed to be that it probably wouldn’t work, but we didn’t have time to come up with anything more refined.

  I wished I could have told Sara. She was disconsolate at being denied a chance for Earth; a chance to leave Middle Finger just once in her life.

  I tried not to smile too much. ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong,’ my mother used to say. We were finally doing something.

  Middle Finger didn’t have an army; just a lightly armed police force to keep order. There were very few weapons on the planet – nothing to go hunting for with anything more lethal than a hook and line.

  But there was one weapon potentially more dangerous than all the small arms at Man’s disposal. In the Museum of History in Centrus, there was a fighting suit left over from the Forever War.

  Even stripped of its nuclear and conventional explosives, even with the laser finger deactivated, it was still a formidable weapon because of its strength-amplification circuitry and armor. (We knew the circuitry was intact because Man occasionally dusted it off for construction and demolition jobs.) A man or woman inside it became like a demigod of myth – or, for my generation, a superhero of comics. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Kill a person with a single punch.

  You could power up a cold suit from almost any source. It could suck the energy out of a floater and have enough juice for a little mayhem – or a couple of hours’ searching for a better source.

  We couldn’t assume the suit was powered up, sitting there waiting to be taken – though Charlie argued that it probably was, for the same reason there was no military force in Centrus to keep us in line. If we fought Man and won, what would we accomplish, from their point of view? They saw themselves as mentors and partners, our conduit to true civilization. There was no need for Man to take precautions against a useless and futile action.

  We we
re to learn otherwise.

  Max Weston was the only person I knew who was physically large and strong enough that I had no doubt he could overpower the sheriff. We needed his weapons in order to attack the museum. We had to take them at the last minute, of course, just before we left for Centrus. We could lock him up in his own cell or possibly take him hostage. (I argued against killing him, or anyone, if we could help it. Max agreed too easily, I thought.)

  Our timetable was set by Man. An express floater would arrive at noon on 10 Copernicus, and an hour later we would be in Centrus. We were to spend the afternoon in a last-minute briefing, then be prepped for suspended animation and shuttled up to the Time Warp as part of the baggage.

  Max raised the possibility, which had occurred to me and probably others, that they had no intention of prepping us for SA. They would give us a shot not to suspend our animation, but to end it. Send the Time Warp off and have it come back without us, with some sad story – we all died of a rare Earth disease, because of lack of immunity – and MF would somehow have to get along without seventeen troublemakers.

  It sounded paranoiac; I doubted that Man saw us as a threat worth disposing of, and if indeed they did, there were less elaborate ways to go about doing it. But then Man often did things in elaborate and unlikely ways. Comes from hanging around with Taurans all the time, I guess.

  Our timing had to be precise, and a lot of machines had to work. The sheriff’s weapons would get us the fighting suit; the fighting suit would get us the shuttle, and the shuttle would take us to the ultimate weapon.

  But the plan would stop dead if, for instance, the sheriff’s weapons were programmed to work only for him – they had that technology more than a millennium ago – or if the fighting suit wouldn’t crank, or if the shuttle or the Time Warp had an override that could be controlled from the ground. In our ALSC training as pilots, me for the shuttle and Marygay for the starship, there was nothing about that; both vehicles were autonomous systems. It was possible they had withheld a few details from our training, though.

  We were careful not to arrive at the town hall all at once. It did simplify our operation that the floater was picking us up right at the sheriff’s door, and we probably could have all come down as a group. But the plan was for Marygay and me to come early and distract the sheriff, and be there to help Max, if necessary.