Forever Free

by Joe Haldeman

  Marygay looked at me and I shrugged.

  She spoke slowly and quietly. ‘Our plan is that this ship is not going to Earth. We demand to be allowed to use the Time Warp as we originally requested.’

  ‘You can’t do that without our cooperation. Forty shuttle flights. What will you do if we refuse?’

  She swallowed. ‘We’ll send everybody back on the shuttle we have. Then my husband and I will ride the Time Warp to the ground. Crash-land near the southern pole.’

  ‘So you think we will give you the ship rather than let you kill yourselves?’

  ‘Well, it won’t be too comfortable for you, either. When the antimatter fuel explodes, the resulting vapor will blanket Middle Finger in clouds. There will be no spring or summer, this year or next.’

  ‘The third year,’ I said from behind her, ‘will be blizzard and then floods.’

  ‘We can’t allow that to happen,’ he said. ‘So all right. We accede to your demands.’

  We looked at each other. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘You give us no choice.’ Two data screens lit up. ‘The launch schedule you see here was adapted from your original timetable.’

  ‘So this is all according to plan,’ Marygay said. ‘Your plan.’

  ‘A contingency,’ he said, ‘in case you allowed us no alternative.’

  She laughed. ‘You couldn’t just let us go.’

  ‘Of course not. The Whole Tree forbade that.’

  ‘Hold it,’ I said. ‘You’re disobeying the Whole Tree?’

  ‘Not at all. It is you who are defying it. We are only taking a reasonable course of action. Reaction, to your declaration of intent to wholesale murder.’

  ‘And the Whole Tree predicted this would happen?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ For the first time, he allowed himself a small smile. ‘Men on Earth don’t know you as well as we who grew up with you.’

  The sheriff tried to explain what he knew or could deduce about the rationale for their plan. It was like a theological argument in somebody else’s religion.

  ‘The Whole Tree is not infallible,’ he said. ‘It represents a huge and well-informed consensus. In this case, though, it was … it was like a thousand people taking a vote, where only two or three were actually well-informed.’

  We were all at a big table in the dining hall, drinking bad tea made from concentrate. ‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ Charlie said. ‘It seems to me that would happen more often than not.’ He was directly across from the sheriff, staring intently, his chin in his palm.

  ‘No, this was a special case.’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Men on Earth think they know humans. They live and work with them all their lives. But they’re not at all the same kind of people as you are.

  ‘They or their ancestors chose to come to Earth, even though it meant becoming part of a small minority, outside of Man’s mainstream culture.’

  ‘Trading independence for comfort,’ I said. ‘The illusion of independence,’

  ‘It’s not that simple. They live more comfortably than you – or we – do, but what’s more important is that they deeply wanted to come home. People who chose Middle Finger turned their backs on home.

  ‘So when a Man on Earth thinks about humans, there’s a profoundly different composite picture. If you took one hundred fifty Earth humans and shot them forty thousand years into the future … it would be cruel. Like snatching a child from its parents, and abandoning it in a foreign land.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Charlie said. ‘The Whole Tree’s decision was based on concern for our happiness.’

  ‘Concern for your sanity,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘The huge expense of the enterprise wasn’t a factor.’

  ‘Not a large one.’ He made a circular gesture, indicating everything around us. ‘This ship represents a lot of wealth in terms of our economy. But it’s not worth much in Earth terms. There are thousands of them sitting empty, parked in orbit around the Sun. This wouldn’t be a big project if people on Earth had proposed it.’

  ‘But they never would,’ I said. ‘They’re stay-at-homes.’

  He shrugged. ‘How many people on Middle Finger think you’re crazy?’

  ‘More than half, I guess.’ We only had 1,600 volunteers out of 30,000 people. ‘The younger half of my family does.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘But weren’t they going along?’

  ‘Bill, especially, in spite of thinking we’re crazy.’

  ‘I understand that,’ he said. ‘So am I.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We asked that you take a Man and a Tauran.’

  The Tauran spoke up for the first time. ‘We are they,’ it growled.

  Book Three

  The Book of Exodus

  Thirteen

  The timetable had called for fifteen days’ loading before launch, but that presupposed everybody being packed and waiting. Instead, they’d had two weeks to rearrange their lives, knowing that the expedition had been scotched.

  We lost 12 out of the original 150. Replacing them was not as simple as asking for volunteers, since they’d been chosen with an eye toward a certain demographic mix and assortment of skills.

  Forty thousand years from now, we might come back to an unpopulated planet. We wanted our descendants to have a chance at civilization.

  We didn’t have unlimited leisure for revision, juggling the shuttle schedule while we found replacements. Word had of course gone to Earth about our insurrection, so ten months from now there might be some response. If they had thousands of ships at their disposal, a few of them might be faster than the Time Warp; a lot faster.

  A hundred fifty people were sufficient for a town-hall kind of democracy. We’d worked out the structure a couple of months before. There was an elected Council of five, each one of whom would serve a year as mayor, and then retire, a new councilor being elected each year.

  So we worked as fast as we could, without cutting corners. Fortunately, none of the elected officials were among the ones who decided to stay home, so our little bureaucracy was intact. We probably had to make more decisions in a couple of weeks than we would in two years aboard the ship.

  But it was a ship as well as a town, and the ship’s captain had authority over the mayor and council. Both Marygay and I were nominated for captain, along with Anita Szydhowska, who had been with me in the Sade-138 campaign. Anita stepped down in favor of us, and I stepped down in favor of Marygay, and no one objected. Both Anita and I were elected councilors. The other three were Chance Delany, Stephen Funk, and Sage Ten. Diana Alsever-Moore was nominated but declined, arguing that as the ship’s only doctor, she wouldn’t have time for a hobby.

  It only took twenty days to get everyone aboard the ship. I wondered whether anyone else, watching the shuttles leave for the last time, had the image – old-fashioned even in my youth – of the last ropes being thrown back onto the dock, as a great ship left its safe harbor.

  The last shuttle was supposed to have our children aboard. It was one short. Sara floated over to us and wordlessly handed me a sheet of paper.

  I love you but I never did intend to come with you. Sara talked me into pretending that I would, so that we would stop wasting time fighting. It was dishonest but I think I agree it was the best thing.

  I’m somewhere in Centrus. Don’t try to find me.

  If I was not loyal to you I could have stopped the whole thing the day we left you at the sheriff’s. But I guess we all have to be crazy in our own way.

  Have a good 40,000 years.

  Love,

  Bill

  The blood had drained from Marygay’s face. I handed her the note, but of course she knew what was in it.

  I felt loss, but also a strange relief. And I wasn’t completely surprised; at some level I guess I’d known something was going on.

  Maybe Marygay had, too. She stared at the note and then slipped it under the other sheets on her clipboard, cleared her throat, and spoke to the new arrivals with only a
slight quaver in her voice. ‘These are your initial housing assignments. We’ll be trading around. But put your stuff in there now, and come back to the assembly area. Is anybody feeling space-sick?’

  One big man obviously was; his skin had a greenish cast. He raised his hand. ‘I’ll take you to the doctor,’ I said. ‘She has something stronger than that pill.’ He actually made it to the clinic before he barfed.

  There were ten communication channels, and Marygay allowed everyone ten minutes for goodbyes. Not many people took that long. After a little more than an hour, everybody was in the assembly area, watching a large flatscreen display of Marygay in the captain’s chair. All 148 of us had maneuvered so as to be ‘lying’ on the ‘floor’ in front of the screen.

  Marygay peered out of the screen, her thumb poised over a red button on the console. ‘Is everybody ready?’ The crowd shouted yes and, with less than military precision, our journey began. (I wondered how many people were aware of the fact, or suspected, that the red button wasn’t attached to anything. It was just an engineer’s joke. The ship launched itself, and knew its time of departure to within a millionth of a second.)

  The onset of acceleration was slow. I was floating about a foot off the floor, and I drifted down gently, and then gained weight over the course of ten or twelve seconds. There was a slight hum, which would be the background of all our lives for ten years: the tiny residue of the unimaginable sustained violence that was flinging us out of the galaxy.

  I stood up and fell down. So did a lot of people, after days or weeks of zerogee. Sara took my arm and we helped each other up, laughing, forming a wobbly triangle with the floor, that closed up into two roughly parallel people. I cautiously lowered myself into a squat and stood up again, muscles and joints protesting.

  About a hundred people were stepping around carefully, looking at their feet. The rest were sitting or lying down, some showing signs of anxiety or even panic.

  They’d been told what to expect, that even breathing would seem to be an effort, at first. Those of us who’d been in and out of orbit the past months were used to it. But having it described to you and feeling it were two different things.

  Marygay switched us over to a view of the planet. At first it just turned beneath us, a few wispy clouds over the mottled white snowscape. People were chatting and groaning in commiseration.

  After a few minutes, things quieted down, as our motion became apparent. People sat and stared at the screen in silent meditation, perhaps a kind of hypnosis.

  One curved horizon appeared, and then, on the opposite side of the screen, another. They inched toward one another until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, the planet was a huge ball, visibly shrinking.

  Marygay had tottered down the stairs and was sitting next to me. ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ she whispered, and I echoed her. But I think she was mostly saying goodbye to our son. I was saying goodbye to the planet and the time.

  As it shrank away I felt an odd epiphany, born of science and mathematics. I knew that it would be a month – 34.7 days – before we reached a tenth of the speed of light, and officially I entered the realm of relativity. And it would be months later before the effect of it would be visible, looking out at the stars.

  But we were actually there already. The huge force that made the ship’s deck feel like a floor was already bending space and time. Our minds and bodies were not subtle enough to directly sense it yet. But that acceleration was slowly pulling us away from the mundane illusion we called reality.

  Most of the matter and energy in the universe live in the land of relativity, because of extreme mass or speed. We would be joining them soon.

  Fourteen

  We kept the image of Middle Finger centered on the screen for a couple of days, as it shrank to a dot, and then a bright star, and then was lost in the hot glow of Mizar. By the end of the first day, we didn’t even have to filter Mizar’s glare; it was just the brightest star in the sky.

  People started going about their business. They knew that much of what they did was make-work; the ship, by necessity, could run itself. Even the agriculture, being integral to the life-support system, was closely monitored by the ship.

  Sometimes it bothered me to know that the ship was intelligent and self-aware. It could greatly simplify its existence by turning off life support.

  We, in turn, could override the ship. Marygay’s captaincy, now largely symbolic, would suddenly become a real and huge burden. The Time Warp could be run without its brain, but it would be a daunting enterprise.

  The fifteen children aboard did need parents and teachers, which gave some of us real work. I taught physical science and still had ‘father’ in my job description, though most of my job there was keeping out of Sara’s way.

  Everybody who didn’t have children had some other ongoing project. A lot of them, of course, were engaged in creating and dissecting scenarios about what we were going to do forty thousand years from now. I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm for that, myself. It seemed to me the only model worth planning about was the tabula rasa one, where we came back to find nothing left of humanity. Otherwise, we were Neanderthals speculating about starflight.

  (The sheriff was in favor of a scenario where not much would change over forty thousand years, except increasing mastery over the physical universe. Why would Man want to change? I was more in favor of the one where Man, refusing to allow change, declines into gibbering savagery, in obedience to the Law of Increasing Entropy.)

  There were several people writing histories of our voyage, whom I could visualize waiting hungrily for something bad to happen. No news is bad news for historians. Others were studying the social dynamics of our little group, which did seem worthwhile. Sociology with a uniquely reduced set of variables.

  Others were writing compositions or novels, or otherwise engaged in the arts. Casi was already whittling away at his log, and on the second day out, Alysa Bertram announced she was holding auditions for a play that was in progress; the actors to collaborate on the script. Sara was one of the first to show up, and she was chosen. She wanted me to try out, but the idea of memorizing pages of dialogue always had sounded like mind-numbing torture to me.

  Of course I did have my position on the council to keep me out of trouble. But we had a lot less to do, now that the voyage had begun.

  With ‘gravity,’ the ship was a totally different place. In orbit, the floors were just nuisances, obstacles you had to swim around, and you thought of the ship in a sort of horizontal way, bow to stern, like a water ship. But now forward was up and aft was down. Less than an hour into the flight, Diana had to treat her first broken bone, when Ami – who had lived for months in zero-gee – instinctively tried to float down a staircase.

  When that happened, I realized we didn’t have anyone who was a safety inspector. So I gave myself the job, but wanted an assistant trained in civil engineering. One of the three people qualified was Cat. I guess I chose her so as not to appear to be avoiding her.

  I didn’t dislike Cat, though I’d never felt completely comfortable around her. Of course, she’d been born, if you can call it that, nine hundred years after me, into a world where heterosexuality was an affliction so rare most people never even encountered it. But the same was true of Charlie and Diana, our best friends.

  Some were more hetero than others, though; Charlie’d had at least one fling with a guy. I wondered about Cat, who had left her husband behind. (Though at the time I’d been relieved; he was kind of worthless except for chess and go.)

  Cat accepted the offer with enthusiasm. Most of her work was not really going to start for another ten years, when and if we had to roll up our sleeves and start building a new world.

  We decided to work from top to bottom. There wasn’t much to be concerned about on the top floor, just cargo and control. Nobody would be going there regularly except for Marygay and her assistants, Jerrod Weston and Puül Ten. The five escape ships weren’t locked, and I supposed people might sn
eak into them for privacy, so we checked them with that in mind.

  There was not much inside them but acceleration couches and the suspended-animation pods. The couches looked safe enough, all padding, and I didn’t think anyone would venture into the pods, unless they wanted to have sex in a dark coffin full of machinery. Cat said I lacked imagination.

  The fourth floor was where most of the aquaculture was, so there was theoretical danger of drowning. All the tanks were shallow enough for adults to stand in with their heads above water, but most of the children were small enough for it to be a potential hazard. All the families with children lived on the first floor, but of course the kids would be roaming everywhere. The DON’T FEED THE FISH sign gave me an idea. I found Waldo Everest, who confirmed that the fish were fed a measured amount each day, and he agreed to go along with my plan: make the children responsible for actually scattering the feed. So the aquaculture pools would be their workplace, rather than a forbidden ‘attractive nuisance.’

  I’d never heard of that phrase until Cat used it. Describes some people well.

  There were three shallow rice paddies which also were home to thousands of crayfish, not quite big enough for the menu yet. About half the floor area was given over to fast-growing grains, fish food. This floor smelled best to me, a whiff of the sea along with green growing things.

  Not many safety hazards other than the fish ponds and some of the harvesting machinery. This was the stairwell where Ami fell and broke her arm, but it wasn’t uniquely dangerous.

  The elevator was right across from the stairs, 120 meters away, but you couldn’t just walk across. The narrow path between the various hydroponic fields zigged and zagged. So we just walked around the sidewalk in front of the living quarters, which on this floor made up half a circumference of apartments, identical in size but with slightly different layouts.

  The apartment where Marygay and I lived was right next to the elevator, a privilege of rank that was also a necessary convenience: the control room was directly overhead. I invited Cat in for tea. One apartment was as good as any other, to look over for safety hazards.