by Joe Haldeman
The jam was greenberry, a spicy sour flavor I’d liked immediately – one of the only things that had impressed me, the first day on Middle Finger. I’d arrived in deep winter.
‘So you’ve decided to hang us in the town square?’ I said. ‘Or will it be a simple private beheading?’
‘If it were necessary to kill you, it would already have been done.’ Great sense of humor. ‘What would be the point in explaining things?’
He poured himself some tea. ‘There will be a wait. I need confirmation from the Whole Tree.’ That meant sending word to Earth and back, at least ten months. ‘But the tentative consensus is to send you away with my blessings. Give you the time shuttle.’
‘And in return,’ Marygay said, ‘you lose one hundred fifty powerful malcontents.’
‘It’s not just that. You are already fascinating anachronisms. Think of how valuable you will be forty thousand years from now!’
‘Living fossils,’ I said. ‘What an idea.’
He hesitated for a moment; the word was unfamiliar. There were no actual fossils on his world. ‘Yes, in body as well as in modes of thought. In a way, I owe it to my own heritage. I should have thought of it myself.’ In their own language, there was a ‘collective “I,”’ which I assumed he was using.
‘You said there were two decisions,’ Marygay said. ‘A related one.’
‘A mirror of yours, in a way.’ He smiled. ‘You know I love humans very much. It has always saddened me to see you go through life crippled.’
‘Crippled … by our individuality?’ I said.
‘Exactly! Unable to tap the Tree, and share life with billions of others.’
‘Well, we were given the choice when we mustered out. I’ve had over twenty years to regret not joining you, and so far I’m just as glad I didn’t.’
‘You did have the choice, yes, and some veterans took it.’
‘How many?’ Marygay asked.
‘Actually, less than one percent. But I was new and strange to you then.
‘The point is that it’s been a hundred Years – nearly three hundred Earth years – since anyone was given the choice. The population of Middle Finger has grown in that time to over twenty thousand, more than large enough to maintain a viable genetic pool. So I want to start giving people the choice again.’
‘Anyone who wants can become you?’ I had a powerful premonitory urge to gather my children to me.
‘No, it would only be one per new birth, and they would have to pass tests for suitability. And they wouldn’t really be me, of course; their genetic make-up will be inferior. But they would still be leaves on the Tree.’ He smiled in a way that I’m sure he thought was not condescending. ‘It sounds horrible to you, doesn’t it. You call us “zombies.”’
‘It does occur to me that there are enough of you already, on this planet. Not to mention ten billion or so back on Earth. Why not leave us alone? That was the original plan.’
‘This is consistent with the original plan, only kinder. You don’t see it that way because you’re too old-fashioned.’
‘Well, at least we have ten months to get used to the idea.’ To talk some sense into Bill and Sara.
‘Oh, this isn’t like the starship. I can go ahead, and if the Whole Tree disagrees, only few people will be affected. But I do know myself; I know the Tree. There will be no problem.’
‘People who join you will still be human, though,’ Marygay said. ‘They’ll still marry and have families.’
Man looked puzzled. ‘Of course not.’
‘But they’ll be able,’ I said.
‘Oh, no. They will have to consent to sterilization.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. You say there are enough of me. In reality, there are more than enough of you.’
Five
I went straight from jail to the university, since I had to teach at 1400, and liked to be in the office for an hour before class, to go over notes and be available to talk to students. They served a hot lunch in the teachers’ lounge, too.
It was kind of grandiose to call the place a ‘university,’ though it did grant a couple of dozen degrees. It was a circle of ten log buildings connected by breezeways. My physics building had two labs, two small classrooms, and a larger lecture hall, which we shared with chemistry and astronomy. The second floor, which was really just a high attic, was a storage area with two offices tacked on the end.
I shared the office with a Man and Jynn Silver. Jynn had not been at the meeting, because she’d gone to Centrus for her son’s wedding, but I was pretty sure she would be on our side. She had no love for Man in general, and for the one who shared our office, in particular.
He was there when I came in, after a quick bowl of soup at the lounge. That was odd; he taught mornings and didn’t usually hang around.
He was staring out the window. ‘You know,’ he said without preamble. ‘You’re one of the first to know that you might join us. Rather than leave us.’
‘True.’ I sat down and turned on my screen. ‘I was tempted for about a microsecond. Then sanity returned.’
‘Joking aside. You should take some time to consider the advantages.’
‘I’m not joking.’ I looked over at him. ‘To me it would be a kind of death.’
‘The death of your individuality.’ He pronounced the last word very slowly, with just a breath of contempt.
‘It’s not something you could really understand. Human thing.’
‘I’m human.’ Technically true. ‘If you wanted more children, you could adopt.’
Now there was a compelling argument. ‘Two’s plenty, thanks.’ I blinked through the index outline.
‘You could save so much research time—’
‘I’m not doing research. I’m a modest fisherman who’s trying to teach rotational kinematics. If you’ll let me get to my notes.’
‘Sorry.’
There was a light knock on the doorframe. ‘Master Mandella?’
Baril Dain, from last term. ‘Come on in, Baril.’
He glanced at Man. ‘I don’t want to take up your time. Just that, well, I heard about your time trip thing. Can anyone go?’
‘We’ll have to pick from volunteers.’ He’d been a below-average student, but I’d made allowance for home conditions. His mother a drunk and his father living over in Filbin. ‘Are you six yet?’
‘I will be in Archimedes, 13 Archimedes.’
‘That’ll be plenty of time.’ Six months. ‘We’ll need young people. What are you best at?’
‘Music. I don’t remember your word, the English word for it … the choséd-reng.’
‘Harp,’ Man supplied, not looking up. ‘Forty-four-string magneto-harmonic neoharp.’
God, I hated the whining sound of those. ‘We’ll see. We’ll need all kinds of talents.’ Probably human music would have priority, though.
‘Thank you, sir.’ He nodded and backed out, as if I were still his teacher.
‘The children know already,’ Man said. ‘I’m surprised.’
‘Good news travels fast.’ I opened a drawer with a screech and took out a pad and stylus, and pretended to copy something from the screen.
The classroom was stuffy, stale with three classes’ exhalations. I opened the window partway and sat on the table in front. All twelve students were there.
A pretty girl in front raised her hand. ‘What’s it like to be in jail, Master?’
‘As many years as you’ve been in school, Pratha, you know all there is to know about jail.’ That got a slight laugh. ‘It’s just a room with no windows.’ I picked up the text and brushed the face with my sleeve.
‘Were you scared, Master?’ Modea, my best pupil.
‘Of course. Man isn’t accountable to us. I could have been locked up forever, eating the slop they and you call food.’ They smiled indulgently at my old-fashionedness. ‘Or they could have executed me.’
‘Man wouldn’t, sir.’
‘I guess you know them bett
er than I do. But the sheriff was careful to point out that that was in their power.’ I held up the text. ‘Let’s go back for a minute and review what we know about the big I, moment of inertia.’
It was a difficult period. Rotational kinematics is not intuitive. I remembered how much trouble I’d had with it, more than halfway back to Newton’s day. The kids paid attention and took notes, but most of them had that ‘on autopilot’ look. Taking it down by rote, hoping they could puzzle it out later. Some of them would not. (Three were hopelessly lost, I suspected, and I’d have to talk to them soon.)
We ground through to the end of the lesson. While they were putting on their coats and capes, Gol Pri voiced an obvious concern. ‘Master Mandella, if Man does let you take the starship, who will our teacher be? For mathematical physics?’
I thought for a moment, discarding possibilities. ‘Man, probably, if it’s someone from Paxton.’ Gol’s face tightened slightly. He’d had classes from my officemate. ‘I would put in a search, though. There are plenty of people in Centrus who could do it, if they felt a sudden hunger for life on the frontier.’
‘Would you be teaching on the ship?’ Pratha said. ‘If we came along?’
Her expression was interesting and not ambiguous. Down, boy; she’s barely older than your daughter. ‘Sure. That’s about all I’m good for.’
Actually, they might make me harvest fish, aboard the Time Warp. That would be a major part of the diet, and I certainly knew my way around a cleaver.
When I got home from class, I didn’t go straight out to the dock. There was no rush. The day was clear and cold, Mizar making the sky a naked energetic blue, like an electric arc. I’d wait for Bill to get home.
Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea and blinked through the news. The service came from Centrus, so our story was there, but buried in the exurb section, cross-ref to vets and Earth. Just as well. I didn’t want a lot of questions before we had answers.
I asked for random Beethoven and just listened, staring out at the lake and forest. There was a time when I would have thought you’d be nuts to trade this for the austerity and monotony of a starship.
There was also a time when I was, we were, romantic about the frontier. We came out here when Marygay was pregnant with Bill. But it’s grown up to where it’s just Centrus without conveniences. And there’s noplace farther out, not to live. No population pressure to speak of. No cultural mandate to keep moving out.
One of the useless things I remember from school is the Turner Thesis. How the American character was shaped by the frontier, always receding, always tempting.
That gave me a little chill. Is that what we were proposing? A temporal version of a dream that was really dead before I was born. Though it drove my father, along with my family – in a VW bus with flowers painted all over the rusted body – to the Pacific and then north to Alaska. Where we found rough-and-ready frontier shops that served latte and cappuccino.
It was possible that out of ten billion souls scattered through this corner of the Galaxy, only Marygay and I had even a tenuous connection to the American frontier. Charlie and Diana and Max were born in a place that still called itself America, but it had not been a place that Frederick Jackson Turner would have recognized, its only ‘frontier’ light-years and centuries away, men and women fighting an incomprehensible enemy for no reason.
Bill came in and we both put on aprons and gloves and went out to the dock. We worked in relative silence, monosyllables, for the first two trotlines, Bill beheading them with such fervor that twice he got the cleaver stuck in the wood.
‘People give you shit about your parents being jailbirds?’
‘“Birds”? Oh, being in jail, yeah. They mostly thought it was funny. Stealing the starship and all, like a movie.’
‘Looks like they’ll just give it to us.’
‘Our history Man said she thought they would. They could replace the starship with a newer one, from Earth, through the collapsar. No real loss.’ He whacked down on a fish. ‘To them.’
That was clear enough. ‘But there would be to you. If you don’t go with us.’
He held down the writhing headless fish for a moment, then chopped off its tail and threw it in the freezer. ‘There are things I can’t say in English. Maybe there aren’t words.’
‘Go on.’
‘You say “there would be to you,” a loss. Or you could say “there will be a loss to you.” But nothing in between.’
I paused, my hand on the line, trying to sort out grammar. ‘I don’t get it. You say “would” because it’s in the future, uncertain.’
He spat out a phrase in Standard: ‘Ta meeya a cha! You say meeya when the outcome is uncertain but the decision has been made. Not ta loo a cha or ta lee a cha, which is like your “would” or “will.”’
‘I was never good with languages.’
‘I guess not. But the point is, the point is …’ He was angry, jaw set, reddening. He did another fish and jammed its head back on the hook. ‘No matter what the outcome, you’ve done it. You’ve said to the world “the hell with Bill and Sara.” You’re going your own way. Whether Man allows it or not, the intent is there.’
‘That’s harsh.’ I finished the fish I was doing. ‘You can come with us. I want you to come with us.’
‘And what an offer that is! Throw away everything! Thanks a lot.’
I struggled to keep my voice calm. ‘You could see it as an opportunity, too.’
‘Maybe to you. I’d be over ten – thirty-some, by little years – and everyone I ever knew, except for you, dead for forty thousand. That’s not an opportunity. That’s a sentence! Almost a death sentence.’
‘To me it’s a frontier. The only one left.’
‘Cowboys and Hindus,’ he said quietly, turning back to the fish. I didn’t say ‘Pakistanis.’
I could see that he was normal and I was not, even by the standards of my own long-dead culture. Marygay and I, and the other Forever War vets, had repeatedly been flung forward in time, often knowing that when you came to ground, the only people still alive from your past would be the ones you had traveled with.
Twenty years later, that was still central to me: the present is a comforting illusion, and although life persists, any one life is just a breath in the wind. I would be challenged on that the next afternoon, from an unexpected source.
Six
Three times a long Year, I had to report to Diana for some primitive medicine. No human or Man born in the past several centuries had had cancer, but some of us fossils lacked the genes to suppress it. So periodically, Diana had to check, as we politely used to say, where the sun don’t shine.
The wall of her office, upstairs in the dome, had been gleaming metal at first, with really strange acoustics due to its roundness. She could stand across the room and whisper, and it would sound as if she were next to your ear. Charlie and Max and I liberated some studs and panels from a stack behind the firehouse, and nailed together a passably square room. The walls were a comfortable clutter of pictures and holos now, which I tried to study intensely as she threaded a sensor probe up into my colon.
‘Your little friend’s back,’ she said. ‘Precancerous lesions. I’ve got a sample to send off.’ It was an odd sensation when the probe withdrew, so fast it made me gasp. Relief and a little pain, an erotic shiver.
‘You know the drill. When you get the pill, don’t eat for twelve hours, take it, then two hours later, stuff yourself. Bread, mashed potatoes.’ She crossed over to the steel sinks of the lab module, carefully holding the ophidian probe away from her. ‘Get cleaned up and dressed while I set this up.’
She would send the cells off to a place in Centrus, where they’d make up a pill full of mechanical microphages, programmed to dine on my cancer and then switch off. It was only a minor inconvenience, nothing compared to the skin cancer treatment, which was just painted on, but burned and itched for a long time.
Marygay and I had to chase cancer all the time,
like everybody we knew who had gone through limb replacement on the hospital planet Heaven, back in the old days. They’ve licked that now.
I eased myself down by her desk just as she finished wrapping the package. She sat down and addressed it from memory. ‘I ordered five of these, which should be plenty for ten years. The examination’s just a formality; I’d be surprised if your cancer’s changed since the first one.’
‘You’ll be along, though, to check it out?’
‘Yeah. I’m as crazy as you are.’
I laughed. She didn’t. She put her elbows on the desk and stared at me. ‘I’ll never bother you about this again, William, but as your doctor I have to say it.’
‘I think I know what it is.’
‘You probably do. This whole ambitious scheme is just an elaborate response to post-traumatic stress disorder. I could give you pills for that.’
‘As you’ve offered in the past. Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t believe in chemical exorcism.’
‘Charlie and I are running away with you for the same reason. Hoping to put our ghosts to rest. But we’re not leaving any children behind.’
‘Neither are we. Unless they choose to stay.’
‘They will. You’re going to lose them.’
‘We have ten months to turn them around.’
She nodded. ‘Sure. If you can get Bill to go, I’ll let you stick something up my ass.’
‘Best offer I’ve had all day.’
She smiled and put a hand on my arm. ‘Come on downstairs. Let’s have a glass of wine.’
Seven
Marygay and I were in the group of twelve, plus one Man and one Tauran, who went up to inspect the starship, to determine what would be necessary for the voyage. We couldn’t just turn the key and go, when the ten months were up. We were assuming the Whole Tree would endorse the ‘good riddance’ policy, and it could take most of the ten months’ wait to get the ship in order.