Forever Free

by Joe Haldeman

  ‘And you two,’ the priest said to me and Marygay, ‘are the obvious key. You provoked them.’

  Max had disappeared. He came back inside the fighting suit. ‘Max,’ I said, ‘be real. We can’t fight them that way.’

  ‘We don’t know,’ he said softly. ‘We don’t know anything.’

  ‘We still don’t know if you’re telling the truth,’ Sara said. ‘The nameless stuff might be so much sand. You did it – you killed everybody off and now you’re playing with us. You can’t prove otherwise, can you?’

  ‘One of us just died,’ the priest said.

  ‘No, he changed state and disappeared,’ I said.

  The priest smiled. ‘Exactly. Isn’t that what you do when you die?’

  ‘Drop it,’ Marygay said. ‘If it is the Omni, and an elaborate ghastly joke, we’re doomed no matter what we do. So we might as well take them at face value.’ Sara opened her mouth to say something and closed it.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Max said, and the fighting suit rocked and stood rigid.

  ‘Again,’ the priest said.

  ‘Max!’ I shouted. ‘Are you there?’ Nothing.

  Marygay moved behind the suit, where the emergency release was. ‘Should I do this?’

  ‘Have to, sooner or later,’ I said. ‘Sara …’

  ‘I can take it. I saw Anita,’ she said, her pale face going to chalk.

  Marygay popped the suit, and it was about as bad as I had imagined. There was nothing you could identify as Max. Gallons of blood and other fluids sloshed out on the ground. Chunks of muscle and organs and bone filled the lower part of the suit.

  Sara crouched and vomited. I almost did the same, but an old combat reflex made me clench my teeth and swallow, hard, three times.

  Max was the kind of guy you liked in spite of what he did; in spite of who he was. And they just took him out like removing a piece from a game.

  ‘Can we be part of this?’ I yelled. ‘Is there any way we can make a case for ourselves?’

  Cat exploded like a bomb. Not even organs and bones, this time; just a fine mist blowing away from where she had been standing. Marygay moaned and fainted. Sara, I think, didn’t even notice. She was on her knees, sobbing, her arms wrapped around herself while her body spasmed, trying to empty an empty stomach.

  There were two explosions inside Molly Malone’s, and hysterical screaming.

  Antres 906 looked at me. ‘I am ready,’ he said in slow English. ‘I do not want to be here anymore. Let the nameless take me.’

  I nodded numbly and went to Marygay. Kneeled and lifted her head and tried with a tissue to wipe her face clean, clean of what remained of the woman she loved. She half woke, her eyes still closed, and put an arm around my waist. She rocked silently, breathing hard.

  It was a closeness not many people could have, the way we’d felt sometimes in battle, or just before: We’re going to die now, but we’re going to die together.

  ‘Forget the nameless,’ I said. ‘We’ve been on borrowed time since the day we were drafted … and we’ve—’

  ‘Stolen time,’ she said, her eyes still closed. ‘And we made a good life out of it.’

  ‘I love you,’ we said at the same time.

  There was a loud thump; the fighting suit had fallen over. The breeze reversed itself and became a wind, blowing toward the suit. Something stung the back of my neck – a bone or a piece of one, again – and it tumbled on into the suit.

  With a sound like dry sticks rattling, an incomplete skeleton heaved itself upright from the open casket of the suit. A forearm, ulna and radius, attached itself to the right elbow; metacarpals grew out of the wrist, and fingerbones grew out of the metacarpals.

  Then a long coil of blue intestines settled onto the pelvic girdle, and a stomach on top, a bladder, faster and faster; liver, lungs, heart, nerves, and muscles. The skull fell forward with the weight of a brain, and it rose slowly to look at me with Max’s blue eyes. For a moment, the face was red and white, like a flayed specimen. But then skin appeared, and hair; and then skin and hair all over the body.

  He stepped out of the suit, gingerly, and clothing grew on him, a loose white robe. He walked toward us with a fixed, intense expression. He, or it.

  Marygay was sitting up now. ‘What’s happening?’ she said, in a voice so tight it cracked.

  It sat down cross-legged in front of us. ‘You’re a scientist.’

  ‘Max?’

  ‘I don’t have a name. You’re a scientist.’

  ‘You’re the nameless?’

  He waved that away. ‘William Mandella. You are a scientist.’

  ‘Trained as one. Science teacher, now.’

  ‘But you understand the nature of research. You understand what an experiment is.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The Omni had come over to join us. He nodded toward the black woman. ‘Then she was pretty close to the truth.’

  ‘The experiment’s over?’ she said. ‘And you’re cleaning up?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘How can I put it? First the mice you’re examining escape the cage. Then they understand what’s happening to them. Then they demand to talk to the experimenter.’

  ‘If it were me,’ I said, ‘I’d talk to the mice.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what a human would do.’ He looked around, with a vaguely annoyed expression.

  ‘So talk,’ Marygay said.

  He looked at her for a long moment. ‘When you were a little girl, you wet the bed. Your parents wouldn’t let you go to camp until you stopped.’

  ‘I’d forgotten that.’

  ‘I don’t forget.’ He turned to me. ‘Why don’t you like lima beans?’

  I drew a blank. ‘We don’t have lima beans on Middle Finger. I don’t even remember what they taste like.’

  ‘When you were three Earth years old, you stuck a dry lima bean up your nose. Trying to get it out, you pushed it farther up. Your mother finally figured out what you were crying about, and her ministrations made it worse. It began to swell, with the moisture. She took you to the commune’s holistic healer, and he made it worse still. By the time they got you to a hospital, they had to put you to sleep to extract it, and you had sinus problems for some time.’

  ‘You did that?’

  ‘I watched it. I set up the initial conditions, a long time before you were born, so, in a way, yes, I did. Every sparrow that falls, I hear the thump, and the thump never surprises me.’

  ‘Sparrows?’

  ‘Never mind.’ He made a small dismissive shrug. ‘The experiment’s over. I’m leaving.’

  ‘Leaving?’

  He stood up. ‘This galaxy.’ There was an explosion of soil, and the feet we’d buried flew back to where Anita had been standing when she died. Bits of flesh and bone and a mist of red sucked through the air toward the ghastly remnants, and began to reconstruct her. Ten feet away, Cat’s body was reassembling itself from the air.

  ‘I don’t guess I need to straighten up,’ he said; it said. ‘I’ll just leave you on your own. Check back in a million years or so.’

  ‘Just us?’ Marygay said. ‘You killed ten billion people and Taurans, and now you’re handing five empty planets over to us?’

  ‘Six,’ it said, ‘and they’re not empty. The people and Taurans aren’t dead. Just put away.’

  ‘Put away?’ I said. ‘Where did you put them?’

  It smiled at me like someone holding back a punch line. ‘How much space, how much volume, do you think it takes to store ten billion people?’

  ‘God, I don’t know. A big island?’

  ‘One and a third cubic miles. They’re all stacked in Carlsbad Caverns. And now they’re awake, and cold and naked and hungry.’ It looked at its watch. ‘Guess I could leave them some food.’

  ‘Middle Finger?’ I said. ‘They’re alive, too?’

  ‘In a grain elevator in Vendler,’ it said. ‘They’re really cold. I’ll do something for them. Have done.’

  ‘You do t
hings faster than the speed of light?’

  ‘Sure. That’s just one of the constraints I put on the experiment.’ It scratched its chin. ‘Think I’ll leave it. Otherwise you’d be all over the place.’

  ‘The Moon and Mars? Heaven and Kysos?’

  It nodded. ‘Mostly cold and hungry. Hot and hungry on Heaven. But they’ll all probably find some food before they’re reduced to eating one another.’

  It looked at Marygay and me. ‘You two are special, since nobody else remembers as far back as you do. It amused me to construct your situation.

  ‘But to me, time is like a table, or a floor. I can walk back to the Big Bang, or forward to the heat death of the universe. Life and death are reversible conditions. Trivial ones, to me. As you have seen here.’

  I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. ‘So now it amuses you to let us live?’

  ‘That’s one way to put it. Or you could say I’m leaving the experiment to cook on its own. I’ll walk forward a million years and see what happens.’

  ‘But you already know the future,’ Marygay said.

  The thing inside Max rolled his eyes. ‘It isn’t a line. It’s a table. There are all kinds of futures. Else why bother to experiment?’

  Sara spoke up. ‘Don’t leave!’ He looked at her with an impatient expression. ‘We see things like a line, a line of cause and effect. But you see millions of lines on your table.’

  ‘An infinity of lines.’

  ‘Okay. Is there anything else in the universe besides your table?’ He smiled. ‘Are there other tables? Is there a room?’

  ‘There are other tables. If they’re in a room, I’ve never seen the walls.’

  Then it spoke in exact unison with Sara: ‘So is there someone else in charge?’ By herself: ‘In charge of all of you and your tables?’

  ‘Sara,’ it said, ‘in some of those many lines, you choose to be alive a million years from now, when I return. You may ask me then. Or you may not need to.’

  ‘But if there isn’t anyone else; if you’re God—’

  ‘What?’ Max said. He rubbed the white cloth between his fingers. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ He looked over at the fighting suit. ‘I felt this horrible pain, all over.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Cat said. She was sitting cross-legged on the spot where she had died, one hand in her lap and the other over her breasts. ‘And then I was suddenly here, back again. But you got clothes.’ She looked at us with raised eyebrows. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  ‘God knows,’ I said.

  Thirty-two

  I worried for a few seconds about what to do with ten billion people and Taurans stranded naked in the middle of the desert. But the nameless had waved its wand one last time.

  The air around us shimmered, and we were suddenly surrounded by a thick crowd of men, women, and children, all naked, many screaming.

  A small cluster of people with clothes on does stand out in that situation. People began to approach us tentatively, and Marygay and I both braced for leadership.

  Of course it didn’t happen. An older Man walked straight up to me and started asking loud, pointed questions.

  But I couldn’t understand a word of it. I spoke a dead language that, on this planet, I shared with only a handful of scholars and immigration people.

  The three Omni stepped up, tall enough to draw attention, arms up and shouting something in unison. The priest touched my shoulder. ‘We’ll see what we can do here. You help your own people.’

  Marygay was standing with a protective arm around Cat. I took off my shirt and gave it to her; it was just big enough to cover the essentials.

  In fact, it looked kind of sexy. A popular woman once told me that the way to attract attention at a party was to wear a long dress when you knew the others would be in jeans or shorts, and vice versa. So if you’re at a party where everyone is naked, any old thing will do.

  We finally herded everyone together in Molly Malone’s. The cafeteria was jammed with hungry people, so we gathered in the ‘Social History of Prostitution’ room, or however it translates. The exhibits were unambiguous.

  Seven of us had been killed and reconstructed. We tried to explain to them what had happened. As if we could actually understand.

  God killed a bunch of you, to get our attention. Then He announced He was leaving, and revived you and ten billion others on His way out.

  I kept waiting to wake up. Like the old guy in A Christmas Carol, I was thinking this had to be something I ate.

  As it went on and on, of course, that possibility faded. Maybe everything before had been a dream.

  The sheriff and Antres 906 got in touch with their Trees and let everybody know what apparently had happened. The Omni amiably revealed their existence and helped pull things together. There was a little more involved than just finding clothes for everybody.

  Finding a ‘place’ for everybody was going to take a while: one thing human, Man, and Tauran cultures had in common was the assumption of the immutability of physical law. We may not understand everything, but everything does follow rules, which are eventually knowable.

  That was gone now. We had no idea what parts of physics had been a whim of the nameless. It had laid claim to the constancy and limitation of the speed of light, which meant that most of post-Newtonian physics was part of the joke.

  It had said it was going to leave that unaffected, to keep us in our cage. Were there other laws, assumptions, constants that did not please it? All of science was in question now, and had to be checked.

  Religion was less in question, interestingly enough. Just change a few terms, and ignore uncertainty as to the existence of God. God’s intent had never been that clear, anyhow. The nameless had left the faithful incontrovertible proof of its existence, and enough new data for millenniums of fruitful theological debate.

  My own religion, if you can call it that, had changed in its fundamental premise, but not its basic assertion: I’d always told religious friends that there may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn’t want to have him over for dinner. I’ll stand by that last part.

  Thirty-three

  After a couple of weeks, there was little we could do or learn on Earth, and we were anxious to get back. The Omni who had met us at our arrival wanted to go along, and I was glad to include it. A few magic tricks would make our fantastic story more acceptable.

  Nobody died on the jump, so five months later we came out of the SA coffins and stared down at Middle Finger, blinding white with snow and cloud. We should have found a few years of stuff to do on Earth; come back in thaw or spring.

  There was no one on duty at the spaceport, but we were able to get through to the Office for Interplanetary Communications, and they had a flight controller sent out. It took us a couple of hours to transfer to the shuttle, anyhow.

  The landing was a big improvement over our last one: reassuring lines of smoke from chimneys in outlying towns; a snarl of winter traffic in Centrus.

  A woman who identified herself as mayor came out in the transfer vehicle, along with her Man liaison – and Bill, who got the most attention from Marygay and Sara and me. He was growing a beard, but otherwise hadn’t changed much.

  Except perhaps in his attitude toward me. He wept when we embraced, as I did, and for a minute couldn’t do anything but shake his head. Then in heavily accented English he said, ‘I thought I’d lost you forever, you stubborn old bastard.’

  ‘Sure, me stubborn,’ I said. ‘Good to have you back. Even though you’re city folk now.’

  ‘Actually, we’re back in Paxton’ – he blushed – ‘my wife Auralyn and I. We went back to set the place up. Plenty of fish. Figured you’d come back soon, if you were coming back, so I came into Centrus last week to wait.

  ‘Charlie’s with me in town. Diana’s stuck in Paxton, doctoring. What the hell happened?’

  I groped for words. ‘It’s kind of complicated.’ Marygay was trying not to laugh. ‘You’ll be glad to know I f
ound God.’

  ‘What? On Earth?’

  ‘But he just said hello-goodbye and left. It’s a long story.’ I looked out at the snow, plowed higher than the vehicle’s windows. ‘Plenty of time to talk, before things get busy in the thaw.’

  ‘Eight cords of wood,’ he said. ‘Ten more on the way.’

  ‘Good.’ I tried to summon up the warm memory of sitting around the fireplace, but reality intruded. Slipping around on the ice, pulling in fish that froze in the air. Plumbing jammed by frozen pipes. And shovel, shovel, shovel snow.

  Thirty-four

  We resumed ‘everyday’ life in the sense of fishing and fighting the winter, though we were suddenly a household of five adults. Sara still had a term of school left before she could start university, but she got permission to wait a few months rather than start at midterm and play catch-up.

  Life in Paxton had resumed pretty much unchanged, once people found their way back from Centrus. We lived with constant power outages during the winter in the best of times, so it wasn’t hard to cope with a semi-permanent one.

  The town had been almost completely repopulated in a few weeks. Centrus had put a high priority on getting rid of anybody who could leave, since the city’s resources were strained to the limit, providing essentials for the people who normally lived there.

  The capital was settling down after five months of chaos. Eight winters’ exposure had left the city a shambles, but it was obvious that most repairs would have to wait till thaw and spring. Our group of involuntary pioneers had helped the city organize itself on a temporary bare-survival footing. The lack of a central power system would have been the death of all of the city dwellers, if anybody had been simple-minded enough just to go home. Instead, people packed together in large public shelters, to conserve heat and simplify the distribution of food and water.

  I’m sure it was all very chummy, but I was just as happy to be out in the provinces, with our cords of wood and boxes of candles. The university was open in the daytime, though most normal instruction was postponed, waiting for the power grid to give us back our computers and viewscreens, and most of all our library. We did have a couple of thousand printed books, but they were a disorganized collection of this and that.