Peace and War - Omnibus (47 page)

'The purging part is like lightning. You want to be sitting on a toilet when you take the medicine.' Some people laughed nervously. 'Seriously. Then it takes maybe five minutes to hook up the orthotics. Those of us who did high-gee combat used to do it in under a minute. But we're out of practice.'

'And a little older now. So figure the second group at noon?'

'That's reasonable. Nobody eat anything between now and then, and don't drink anything but water. Don't take any medicine unless you clear it with me.'

The clipboard started around. 'Once I get these sixty names,' Marygay said, 'the ones who've signed up can go. Then we'll start filling ships Three and Four. How many people are dead set against going?' Twenty people raised hands, some tentatively. I think Paul Greyton and Elena Monet did it out of fear of going against their spouses. Or maybe reluctance to leave them. 'Come over here with me and William, to the coffee station.'

No more coffee from this gravity-fed machine, ever again. That was a plus.

Marygay kissed for the ship. 'What chance do these people have for survival?'

'I can't calculate that, Captain. I don't know where the antimatter went, so I don't know what the probability is that it might reappear.'

'How long will they live if it stays missing?'

'If the twenty people stayed in this one room, and kept it insulated, they could live for many years. My water will begin to freeze in a few weeks, though, and one person will have to go out to the pool and mine it.

'But the pool has enough water for ten years, if you only drink it, and don't wash.

'Food is the complicating factor. Before the first year is over, you'll have to resort to cannibalism. Of course, with each person harvested, there is one less person to feed, and the average body should yield about three hundred meals. So the final survivor will have lived one thousand sixty-four days after the first one is killed, assuming he or she stays warm.'

Marygay was silent for a moment, smiling. 'Think it over.' She kicked off from the table and floated toward the door. I followed, less gracefully.

There was a private command line outside the cafeteria door. I picked up the handset, and said, 'Ship, do you have a sense of humor?'

'Only in that I can distinguish between incongruous situations and sensible ones. That was incongruous.'

'What are you going to do when everyone is gone?'

'I have no choice but to wait.'

'For what?'

'For the return of the antimatter.'

'You actually think it will come back?'

'I didn't "actually" think it would disappear. I have no idea where it is. Whatever agency caused it to relocate may be constrained by some physical conservation law.'

'So you wouldn't be surprised if it reappeared.'

'I'm never surprised.'

'And if it
does
come back?'

'I'll return to Middle Finger, to my parking orbit. With some new data for you physicists.'

Nobody had called me a physicist in a long time. I'm a science teacher and fish harvester and vacuum welder. 'I'll miss you, Ship.'

'I understand,' it said, and made a noise like a throat clearing. 'In your game with Charles, you should move the queen's rook to QR6. Then sacrifice your remaining knight to the pawn, and move the black bishop up to checkmate.'

'Thanks. I'll try to remember that.'

'I'll miss everybody,' it said without prompting. 'I do have plenty of information to move around and recombine; enough to keep busy for a long time. But it's not the same as the constant chaotic input from you.'

'Goodbye, Ship.'

'Goodbye, William.'

There was a line floating for the lift. I clambered down the steps hand-over-hand, feeling athletic.

I realized I had shifted into an emotional mode reminiscent of combat. Something over which I had no control had suddenly put me into a situation where I had a 20 percent chance of dying. Instead of apprehension, I felt a kind of resignation, and even impatience: let's get this over with, one way or the other.

Did I have three kilograms of stuff I wanted to take back to MF? The old book of paintings from the Louvre – I'd picked that up from a pile of Earth artifacts when I left Stargate for Middle Finger, a fairly new thousand-year-old antique. That wasn't even a kilogram. I'd brought along my comfortable boots in case there were no cobblers forty thousand years in the future. But with only twenty-four years passing, Herschel Wyatt would probably still be at his last.

I wondered who would be fishing my trotlines. Not Bill. He would probably be in Centrus by now, totally integrated into Man. Hell, he might even have gone to Earth.

We might never see him again. That felt different now. I shook my head and four tiny globules of tears floated away from my lashes.

Marygay and I, along with the rest of the council and Diana and Charlie, waited till the last. The last shuttle was almost half empty: thirteen people had elected to stay behind.

Teresa Larson was their spokeswoman, still staying though her wife Ami was asleep aboard the second ship. Their daughter Stel was staying with Teresa; their other daughter was on MF.

'For me, there's no decision,' she said. 'God sent us on this pilgrimage, to come back and start anew. She interrupted our progress in order to test our faith.'

'You aren't going to start anew,' Diana said. 'You have ten thousand sperm and ova frozen, but not one of you knows how to thaw them out and combine them.'

'We'll make babies the old way,' she said bravely. 'Besides, we have plenty of time to study. We'll learn your arts.'

'No, you won't. You'll starve or freeze right here. God didn't take that antimatter away, and it's not coming back.'

Teresa smiled. 'You're only saying that on faith. You don't know any more about it than I do. And my faith is as good as yours.'

I wanted to shake some sense into her. Actually, I wanted to hunt them all down with the tranquilizer darts and load them aboard the ship unconscious. Almost everybody disagreed with me, though, and Diana wasn't sure that they could be hooked up properly without being conscious and cooperating.

'I'll pray for you all,' Teresa said. 'I hope you all survive and find a good life back home.'

'Thank you.' Marygay looked at her watch. Now go back to your people and tell them that at 0900 the ship will seal this door and evacuate the chamber. We can take anybody, everybody until 0800. After that, you just stay here and … take your chances.'

'I want to go with you,' Diana said. 'One last chance to talk some sense into them.'

'No,' Teresa said. 'We've heard you, and the ship has repeated your argument twice.' To Marygay; 'I'll tell them what you said. We appreciate your concern.' She turned and floated away.

There was only one zero gee toilet. Stephen Funk came out of it looking pale. 'Your turn, William.'

The stuff tasted like honey with a dash of turpentine. The effect was an internal scalding waterfall.

In school, in anthropology, we read about an African tribe that lived all year on bread and milk and cheese. Once a year, they butchered a cow to gorge themselves on fat, because they thought diarrhea was a gift from the gods, a holy cleansing. They would have loved
this
stuff. Even I felt holier. In fact, I felt like one big empty hole.

I cleaned up and floated out. 'Have fun, Charlie. It's a moving experience.'

I floated and clambered over to the last escape ship, with its thirty coffins lined up in dim red light. Was this the last thing I would ever see? I could think of more pleasant scenes.

Diana helped me hook up the orthotics, with a lubricant that contained a muscle relaxant. It was easier than the last time, coming back from the last battle. I suppose they had learned something over the centuries.

A slap on my left leg numbed it from the groin down. I knew this was the last one, the shunt that would replace my blood with a slippery polymer.

'Wait,' Marygay said, and she leaned over the coffin and held my face in both hands, and kissed me. 'See you tomorrow, darling.'

I couldn't think of anything to say, and just nodded, already getting dreamy.

Nineteen

I didn't know that five of Teresa's gang had a change of heart, and joined my pod at the last minute. I was already in the strange space I would occupy for the next twenty-four years.

All five ships were ejected from the
Time Warp
simultaneously,. so they would have a chance of arriving back home within a few days or weeks of one another. A difference in thrust down in the seventh or eighth decimal place could make a big difference in arrival time, multiplied over twenty-four years.

We basically pointed our noses in the direction of Middle Finger and patiently ate away velocity for ten years. At some point, for one instant, we were absolutely still, with respect to the home planet. Then for seven years we accelerated toward it, and flipped, and for another seven years slowed back down.

Of course I felt none of this. Time passed quickly – far too fast to be almost half as long as my life – but I could tell it was passing. I was neither quite awake nor asleep, it seemed to me afterwards, but floating in a kind of sea of remembrance and fantasy.

For many years, or year-long days, I was obsessed with the notion that all of my life since the Aleph-null campaign, or Yod-4 or Tet-2 or Sade-138, was being lived in the instant between a fatal wounding and death: all those billions of neurons basking in their last microsecond of existence, running through a finite, but very large, combination of possibilities. I would not live forever, but I wouldn't really die as long as the neurons kept firing and seeking.

Coming awake was like dying – all that had been real for so long slowly fading into blindness and deafness and the chill numbing that had been my body's actual state for decades.

I vomited dry air, over and over.

When my stomach and lungs were tired of that, a tube inside my mouth misted something sweet and cool. I tried to open my eyes, but damp pads held them gently shut.

Two delicious stings as the orthotics withdrew, and the first motion of my limbs, if you count a twig as a limb, was a fast erection in reaction to warm blood. I couldn't move my arms or legs for some time. Fingers and toes made satisfying crackly sounds, coming to life.

Diana lifted the pads from my eyes and pried the lids apart with dry fingers. 'Hello? Anybody home?'

I swallowed thin syrup, and coughed weakly. 'Is Marygay all right?' I croaked.

'Resting. I just woke her a few minutes ago. You're second.'

'Where are we? Are we here?'

'Yes, we're here. When you're able to sit up, you'll see good old MF down there, looking cold as a bitch.' I strained, but was only able to rock a few inches. 'Don't knock yourself out. Just rest for a while. When you get hungry, you can have some ancient soup.'

'How many ships?'

'I don't know how to hail them. When Marygay gets up, she or you can give them a call. I can see one.'

'How many people? Did we lose any to SA?'

'One. Leona; I've kept her frozen. There might be disabilities among the others, but they're waking up.'

I slept for a couple of hours and then woke to the low murmur of Marygay's voice on the horn. I sat up in my coffin and Diana brought me some broth. It tasted like carrots and salt.

She unlatched the side. My clothes were where I had left them, twenty-four years older but still in style. I had to stop halfway through dressing to swallow hard a few times, coping with zerogee nausea. It wasn't too bad. I remembered the first time, back in graduate school, when I was useless for a couple of days. Now I just swallowed until the soup remembered to stay down, and finished dressing and floated up to join Marygay.

She was half-sitting, in a zerogee crouch, in the pilot's station. I strapped myself in next to her.

'Darling.'

She looked bad, both haggard and bloated, and from her expression I knew I looked the same. She leaned over and kissed me, carrot-flavored.

'It's not good,' she said. 'This ship lost track of Number Four years ago. Number Two is more than a week behind, for some reason.'

'It thinks Number Four's dead?'

'Doesn't have an opinion.' She chewed her lower lip. 'Seems likely. Eloi and the Snells. I haven't checked the roster, who else is on board.'

'Cat's on Two,' I said unnecessarily.

'It's probably okay.' She stabbed at a button. 'We have another little problem. Can't get Centrus.'

'The spaceport?'

'The spaceport, no. Nothing else, either.'

'Could it be the radio?'

'I get the other two ships. But they're close. Maybe it's a power thing.'

'Maybe.' I didn't think so. If the radio worked at all, it would pull in pretty weak signals. 'Tried a visual search?'

She shook her head, one jerk. 'The optical gear's on Number Four. We've got sperm and ova and shovels.' Mass was critical, of course, and the planet-building stuff was distributed among the five ships with only enough duplication so that the loss of one ship wouldn't doom all the others.

'I got some sort of carrier wave when I first turned it on. The ship thinks it's one of the Centrus shuttles, in a medium-low orbit. Should be back in an hour or so.' We were in geosynch, high up.

I looked at the cold white ball of MF, and remembered warm California. If we had gone to Earth twenty-some years ago, forty-some now, it would be warm and safe. No children to worry over or grieve.

Somebody was vomiting loudly. I unsnapped the vacuum cleaner from the back of the copilot's chair and kicked aft to deal with it.

It's not too bad if you work fast. It was Chance Delany, who looked more sheepish than sick.

'Sorry,' he said. 'It didn't want to get past my throat.'

'Drink water for a while,' I said, buzzing up the little globules. As if I were an expert.

I filled him in on the situation. 'Good God. You don't think the Mother Earth people got in power?'

That was Teresa's crowd. 'No. Even if they did, Man wouldn't let them shut everything down.'