Forever Free

by Joe Haldeman

  Compared to military quarters, the apartments were large. The ship was originally configured to hold 205 people, each one having one room four meters square. So our 150 were well spread out. Twenty-eight couples planned on having one or two children during the voyage, but even so, it wouldn’t be especially crowded.

  It did feel claustrophobic after our big house in Paxton, with the windows looking out on forest on one side and the broad lake behind. I put holo windows of the lake on the wall of our bedroom, but was thinking we ought to reset them. It looked real but felt false.

  ‘Fire hazard,’ I said, putting the kettle on for tea. ‘Burn hazard, anyhow.’ The two burners were induction heaters, so you’d have to be really trying, to injure yourself.

  ‘You have knives and things,’ Cat said. By choice, she didn’t have a cooking area in her own place. Marygay and I had brought along enough kitchenware to cook and serve a meal for six, and a cabinet of precious spices and herbs. Up to a certain hour, by our tentative rules, you could go to the kitchen and get a meal’s worth of raw materials, rather than show up for chow and have what everyone else was having.

  ‘They say the bathroom’s the most dangerous room in the house,’ she said. ‘Not much to worry about there.’ We had a toilet and small sink. Each floor had a shower room and a schedule, and there was a shower by the pool on the common floor.

  The teapot chimed and I poured us each a cup, and sat next to her on the couch. I looked around the room critically. ‘Not much to worry about anywhere. You think about accidents at home – falls, cuts, burns, exposure to dangerous substances – and most of them involve things we don’t have here.’

  She nodded. ‘Balanced by dangers we don’t have at home. Like meteorites and life-support failures and the idea of standing on top of tonnes of antimatter.’

  ‘I’ll make a note.’ We sipped in silence for an awkward minute. ‘Did you come along just to … just because of Marygay?’

  She stared at me for a moment. ‘Partly. Partly because I knew Aldo wouldn’t. It was an unembarrassing way to end the marriage.’ She set down her cup. ‘I also like the idea of running away, finding a new world. We weren’t drafted, you know, in my time. I joined up to see new worlds. Middle Finger was getting pretty small.’ She made a wry smile. ‘Aldo really liked that. He fell in love with the farm.’

  ‘You’re farming here, part time.’

  ‘Exercise. And I do know my root vegetables.’

  ‘I’m glad you came.’

  ‘You are.’ It was a question. ‘Aldo thought I was chasing after Marygay. Did he talk to you about that?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’ But a lot of unsubtle innuendo.

  ‘We do … I do love her.’ Cat was trying to keep a tremble out of her voice. ‘But I’ve been, we’ve been, sixteen years this way. Just neighbors, close neighbors. I’m content with that.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I don’t think you do. I don’t think men can.’ She picked up her cup with both hands, as if to warm them. ‘Maybe that’s not fair. I never met a het man until I was on Heaven, my mid-twenties. But the normal men and boys I grew up with always had to do each other. It wasn’t serious if you weren’t doing. Girls and women, it was different. You loved someone or you didn’t. Whether you did each other was not a big deal.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess we were different. It’s not het versus home. Women were more sexually aggressive in my time, too. But you were born, what, nine hundred years after I was?’

  She nodded. ‘I think it was 2880, your style.’

  ‘I don’t want to sound like a jealous husband,’ I said. ‘I know you and Marygay still love each other. It’s obvious to anyone who cares.’

  ‘Then let’s not worry about it. The lack of Aldo in my life is not going to drive me into her arms. Somebody’s, maybe. But I’m as het as you are, remember?’

  ‘Sure.’ I did wonder about that – how effective or permanent Man’s technique actually was. I trusted Cat but did wonder. ‘More tea?’

  ‘No, we ought to move along.’ She smiled. ‘People will start talking about us.’

  The third floor, the commons, did have safety problems that hadn’t been obvious in zerogee. The carpeting in the cafeteria was old and loose, inviting people with their hands full to trip. There was nothing to replace it with, of course. We pried up a corner and decided the metal deck would be preferable; the dried adhesive was easy to peel off. I’d assemble a work crew in a few days.

  We tested most of the apparatus in the fitness room, weight machines and stationary rowing, skiing, and pedaling ones. We looked at the rings and ropes and parallel bars and decided someone else could be the first to have an injury on them.

  There were a lot of people already in the pool, including nine of the children. I knew the ship was watching that all day and night. The only people who lived on the commons floor were Lucio and Elena Monet, both expert swimmers with an apartment that overlooked the pool. One of them was always there, and could get to the pool in seconds if the ship sounded an alarm.

  The first and second floors were drier versions of the fourth: 95 percent farm, ringed by apartments. The only water hazard was an oyster bed, so shallow you could only drown there in a prone position. (I had resisted activating the bed, which took six months to produce a crop, but was overridden by people who can actually look at an oyster without feeling ill.) Unlike the fourth floor, all of the apartments were one-story, so we didn’t even have stairs to worry about.

  The area under the first floor was the most dangerous part of the ship, but it was beyond the jurisdiction of the safety inspector and his trusty civil engineer. Seven tonnes of antiprotons seethed there in a glowing ball, held in place by a huge pressor field. If anything happened to the pressors, we would all have about one nanosecond to prepare ourselves for a new existence as highly energetic gamma rays.

  Cat volunteered to take charge of the carpet demolition project, and I let her lead it, though I’d become accustomed to the role myself. For ten months, I’d been at the center of everything – arguing, coordinating, deciding – and now I was just another passenger. With a title and an amorphous job, but not in charge anymore. I had to get used to watching other people do it.

  Fifteen

  Marygay was theoretically on duty all the time, but in fact she only spent one eight-hour shift each day actually in the control room. Jerrod and Puül took the other two shifts.

  Their physical presence in the control room was more a psychological, or social, need than an actual one. The ship always knew where all three were – and if there was a need for a quick decision, the ship would make it without consulting the humans. Human thought was too slow for emergencies, anyhow. Most of us passengers knew this, but it was comforting to have humans up there anyhow.

  She liked studying the controls, a complex maze of readouts, buttons, dials, and so forth, arrayed along a four-meter panel with two two-meter wings. She knew what everything was and did through her ALSC training, the way I knew how to fly a shuttle, but it was good to reinforce that crammed-in expertise with experience and observation in real time.

  (One evening I asked her how many bells and whistles she thought there were on those eight meters of control board. She closed her eyes for about five minutes and then said, ‘One thousand two hundred thirty-eight.’)

  She chose to be on from 0400 to 1200, so we always met for lunch when she got off. We’d usually throw something together at our place, rather than go down to the ‘zoo,’ the cafeteria. Sometimes we’d have company. Back on MF we always had lunch with Charlie and Diana on Tuesdays, and saw no reason to change that ritual.

  The second week out, I made potato and leek soup, for the first but not the last time – we’d be limited, for several months, to the vegetables Teresa and her crew had been able to grow in zerogee. So no tomatoes or lettuce for a few months.

  Charlie showed up first, and we sat down to our ongoing chess game. One move apiece, and Marygay and Diana cam
e in together.

  Marygay looked at the board. ‘You ought to dust that every now and then.’

  I gave Diana a kiss. ‘How’s the doctor business?’

  ‘God, you don’t want to know. I spent most of the morning exploring the rectum of one of your favorite people.’

  ‘Eloy?’ I knew he had a problem.

  She wagged a finger. ‘Confidentiality. I noticed a lot of vowels in his name, though.’

  Eloy Macabee was a strange abrasive man who called me almost every afternoon with some complaint or suggestion. He was the keeper of the chickens, though, so you had to give him some leeway. (Fish and chickens were the only animals we’d had aboard in zerogee. Fish can’t tell the difference and chickens are too dumb to care.)

  ‘Actually, you should know. Both of you,’ she said to Marygay as they both sat down at the table. ‘We have a small epidemic on our hands.’

  I turned up the heat on the soup and stirred it. ‘A virus?’

  ‘I wish. A virus would be easy.’ Marygay poured coffee. ‘Thanks. It’s depression. I’ve treated twenty-some people the last three days.’

  ‘That is an epidemic,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Well, people do catch it from each other. And it can be deadly; suicide.’

  ‘But we expected it. Allowed for it,’ Marygay said.

  ‘Not so soon, though, nor so many.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not worried about it yet. Just puzzled.’

  I ladled the soup into bowls. ‘Do the victims have anything in common?’

  ‘Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly people who don’t have real jobs, who aren’t involved in the day-to-day running of things.’ She took a notebook out of her pocket and tapped a few numbers. ‘Just occurred to me … none of them are veterans, either.’

  ‘Not too surprising either,’ Charlie said. ‘At least we know what it’s like, being cooped up together for years at a time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but not ten years. You’ll be seeing some of us before long.’

  ‘Good soup,’ Marygay said. ‘I don’t know. I’m feeling more and more comfortable, now that I’m used to …’

  ‘Bill,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Shipboard wasn’t the worst part of the war. This is like “old home week,” as we used to say. But without Taurans to worry about.’

  ‘One,’ Diana said. ‘But it’s really no problem, not yet.’

  ‘Keeps to itself.’ I hadn’t seen it five times.

  ‘It must be lonely,’ Marygay said. ‘Separated from its group mind.’

  ‘Who knows what goes through their heads.’

  ‘Throats,’ Diana said.

  I knew that. ‘Just an expression.’ I made the kissing sound for the ship. ‘Continue Mozart.’ Soft strains of a lute being chased by woodwinds.

  ‘He was German?’ Diana said.

  I nodded. ‘Maybe Prussian.’

  ‘He was still being played in our time. It sounds strange to my ear, though.’

  I called the ship again. ‘How much of your music comes from before the twentieth century?’

  ‘In playing time, about seven percent. In titles, about five percent.’

  ‘Good grief. Only one out of twenty I can listen to.’

  ‘You ought to sample the others,’ Charlie said. ‘Classicism and romanticism return in cycles.’

  I nodded, but kept my opinion to myself. I had sampled a few centuries. ‘Maybe we should switch jobs around. Give the depressed people something significant to do.’

  ‘Could help. We wouldn’t want to be too obvious about it.’

  ‘Sure,’ Marygay said. ‘Put dysfunctional people in all the important positions.’

  ‘Or put them in suspended animation,’ Charlie said. ‘Table the problem for forty thousand years.’

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t considered asking for that.’

  ‘We couldn’t just tell everybody there’s a problem?’ I said. ‘They’re intelligent adults.’

  ‘In fact, two of the patients are children. But no; I think that would cause even more depression and anxiety.

  ‘The problem is that depression, and anxiety for that matter, are both behavioral problems and biochemical ones. But you don’t want to treat a short-term problem by altering a person’s brain chemistry. We’d wind up with a ship full of addicts. Including the four of us.’

  ‘The mad leading the mad,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Ship of fools,’ Marygay said.

  I kissed for the ship and asked, ‘If we all went insane, would you be able to carry out the mission?’

  ‘Some of you are already insane, though perhaps my standards are too high. Yes, if the captain so ordered, I could lock the controls and conduct the mission without human mediation.’

  ‘And if the captain were insane?’ Marygay asked. ‘And the two co-captains?’

  ‘You know the answer to that, Captain.’

  ‘I do,’ she said quietly, and took a sip of wine. ‘And you know what? I find it depressing.’

  Sixteen

  The next day, we had something more depressing to worry about than depression.

  I was in my office on the common floor, doing the flunky job of tallying people’s requests for various movies for afternoon and evening showings. Most of them I’d never heard of. Two people asked for A Night to Remember and Titanic, which would do wonders for morale. Space icebergs. Hadn’t worried about them in days.

  The Tauran appeared at my door. I croaked a greeting at it, and glanced at my watch. Five minutes later and I would have escaped to lunch.

  ‘I did not know whether to bring this problem to you or the captain or the sheriff.’ The sheriff? ‘You were closest.’

  ‘What problem?’

  It made an agitated little dance. ‘A human has tried to kill me.’

  ‘Good God!’ I stood up. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘He is the one called Charlton.’

  Cal, of course. ‘Okay. I’ll get the sheriff and we’ll go find him.’

  ‘He is in my quarters, dead.’

  ‘You killed him?’

  ‘Of course. Wouldn’t you?’

  I called Marygay and the sheriff and told them to come down immediately. ‘Were there any witnesses?’

  ‘No. He was alone. He said he wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘Well, the ship will have seen it.’

  It bobbed its head. ‘To my knowledge, the ship does not monitor my quarters.’

  I kissed for the ship and asked it. ‘That’s correct. The Tauran’s quarters were improvised out of storage. I was not designed to monitor storage.’

  ‘Did you see Cal Charlton headed in that direction recently?’

  ‘Charlton got on the lift at 11:32 and it went down to the storage level.’

  ‘Was he armed?’

  ‘I could not tell.’

  ‘He tried to kill me with an axe,’ the Tauran said. ‘I heard glass break, and he came running in. He got the axe from the fire station outside my quarters.’

  ‘Ship, can you confirm that?’

  ‘No. If he had pulled the fire alarm, I would have known that.’ Well, that was an interesting fact.

  ‘So you took the axe away from him?’

  ‘It was simple. I heard the glass break, and correctly interpreted that. I stepped behind the door. He never saw me.’

  ‘So you killed him with the axe.’

  ‘Not actually. I believe I broke his neck.’ It demonstrated with a convincing karate-like stroke.

  ‘Well, that’s … it could be worse.’

  ‘Then, to be sure, I took the axe and severed his head.’ It made a gesture like a shrug. ‘That’s where the brain is.’

  You don’t want to be disrespectful of the dead, but it was a good thing the Tauran hadn’t killed someone anybody liked. Cal was kind of a loose cannon when he was younger, and although he seemed to have calmed down in recent years, he did have outbursts. Married three times, never for very long. In retrospect, it’s clear we shouldn’t have brought h
im along; if he hadn’t been in on it from the beginning, he probably wouldn’t have been chosen, in spite of his many useful talents.

  He was one of Diana’s depression patients, it turned out, but when we looked over his belongings we found that he had taken one pill and then quit. Two days later, he tried to kill Antres 906.

  If everyone aboard had liked Cal, we would have had a lynch mob. As it was, the council agreed with the sheriff that it was an unambiguous case of self-defense, and there was no public disagreement with that. So we were spared the knotty problem of a trial between species. No Tauran had ever committed a crime on MF. Antres 906 claimed that the Taurans had no equivalent to the human legal system, and it appeared to me that it didn’t really grasp what a trial was. If there are no individuals in your race, what constitutes crime and punishment – or morality or ethics, for that matter?

  Anyhow, Antres 906 was in a kind of existential solitary confinement already, by choice. Whatever ‘choice’ means to a Tauran; I suppose they normally have their equivalent of the Whole Tree, and just follow its orders without question.

  In solitary, but not alone. One of the council was always with it for several days after the killing, protecting it, armed with the tranquilizer rifle. It was a lot more time than I’d ever spent with a Tauran, and Antres 906 didn’t mind talking.

  One time, I brought along the five-page document from Earth, sentencing us to stay out of space. I asked it about that mysterious last line: ‘Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable.’

  ‘I don’t understand this,’ I said. ‘Is it supposed to be a general statement about reality?’

  It rubbed its neck in an almost human gesture, which I knew meant I’m thinking, ‘No. Not at all.’ It lightly ran its long finger over the Braille twice more.

  ‘Our languages are very different, and the written language is subtle. The translation is incomplete, because …’ It rubbed the line again.