Peace and War - Omnibus (51 page)

People were excited about an expedition to Earth. The escape ships still had plenty of fuel for a collapsar jump, there and back. If there were still people and Man and Tauran on Earth, they might be able to help us figure out what had happened. If there were none, we'd be no worse off; one more bit of data.

Or so the reasoning went. I agreed, but some were not so sure that we had so completely cut our bonds to Earth. If everyone was gone, if they'd disappeared on the Day, we wouldn't stop hearing from them for another sixty-four Earth years. By that time, we'd be re-established on MF – it would be a shock, but life would go on.

If we were to find out now, still reeling from the original disaster, that we were alone in the universe – and still vulnerable to whatever force had snuffed out everyone else – it might be more than we could handle, as individuals and as a culture. So the theory went.

We were not too stable 'as a culture' even now. If the last ship was indeed lost, we totaled 90 people, only 4 of them children. (Two of the 9 who died in SA were under twelve years of age.) We had to start making babies, wholesale as well as retail, hatching some of the thousands of ova frozen aboard the ships.

The prospect was not greeted with enthusiasm. A lot of the people were like me and Marygay: we've already
done
that! Among the various options we'd seen opening up in middle age – like the wild scheme to highjack the
Time Warp –
starting a second family was pretty low on the list.

Sara comprised one-fourth of the females old and young enough for natural motherhood, and she wouldn't have felt ready for it even if any of the available men appealed to her. None of them did.

The sheriff suggested we raise a large batch Man-style, in a group creche, with no parents as such, just supervisors. I could see some merit to it, since a large majority of them actually wouldn't have living parents, and if it wasn't for the association with Man, I think most would have gone along with it. But there was a general counter sentiment; this was the kind of thing we wanted to
escape
from, and now you want to re-invent it?

They might reconsider when they have four or five infants crawling around. The council decided on a compromise, only possible because we had people like Rubi and Roberta, who were mad about children but unable to have their own. They volunteered to supervise a creche. Every year – three times a Year – they would hatch eight or ten from the ship's stores; they'd also take on the stewardship of unwanted children born the old-fashioned way.

Antres 906 was probably worse off than any of us, though of course it's hard to say anything about a Tauran's emotional state. For all it knew, Antres 906 was the last survivor of its race. They didn't have gender, but they couldn't reproduce without an exchange of genetic material – a holdover from their ancient past, since for millenniums all Taurans had been genetically identical.

People were getting used to the sight of it wandering around, trying to be helpful, but it was like the situation aboard the
Time Warp
, it essentially had no useful skill, being a linguist who was the sole speaker of its language, and a diplomat representing only itself.

Like the sheriff, the Tauran could tap into the Tree, but they both had the same experience. There was no sense of any danger or even problem approaching, but after the Day, no information had been added. The last collapsar-jump message from Earth, three weeks before the Day, also had no premonitions of disaster, from either Man or Tauran.

Antres 906 was in favor of going to Earth or Kysos, nominally the Tauran home planet, and volunteered to make the collapsar jump alone, and come back with a report. Marygay and I believed it was sincere, and I think we knew Antres 906 better than anyone but the sheriff. But most people thought that would be the last we saw of ship or Tauran (but some of them thought it would be worth losing a ship to get rid of the last surviving enemy).

A lot of people did want to go check out Earth, with or without Antres 906. We left a sheet on the dining room bulletin board, and got thirty-two volunteers.

Including Marygay and Sara and me.

Logic would dictate that the ones least essential to the fledgling colony ought to go. But it was hard to say who was more valuable than who, beyond a few who couldn't be replaced, like Rubi and Roberta (who weren't on the list anyhow), and Diana and two young people she was training to be doctors (who were).

The council decided that twelve would be selected from a pool we winnowed to twenty-five non-essentials. (I got disappointingly little argument when I insisted I was not essential.) The sheriff and Antres 906 would go, as observers with unique points of view.

But the fourteen wouldn't leave before deep winter, when not much work would be done, anyhow. The expedition could go to Earth, look around, and be back before spring.

When to make the choice? Stephen and Sage, both on the list, wanted to go ahead and get it over with. I argued for waiting until the last minute, ostensibly to make it more of an occasion; give people a little bit of drama that didn't have to do with day-to-day survival. Actually, my motivation was purely statistical – given a year and a half, some of the twenty-five were bound to change their minds, or die, or otherwise become ineligible, thus increasing our chances.

Marygay and I had decided we would only go if both of us were chosen. If Sara were chosen, she would go, period. She was apologetic about that, but adamant, and I was secretly proud of her for her independence, if apprehensive about the separation.

The council agreed to wait, and we went back to the job of making Centrus livable. The problem of power generation was frustrating and basic. We had always taken free and abundant power for granted: three microwave relay satellites had been in place for more than a century, turning solar power into microwaves and beaming it down. But there's no such thing as a simple stable orbit around MF, not with two large moons and the sun a close double star. Without supervision, the three satellites had wandered off on their own. Eventually, we'd be able to go out and retrieve them, or build and orbit new ones, but for now, our industrial planet was closer to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. Likewise, any of the three spaceships out on the pad had enough energy to keep us going for decades, but we had no way to release it slowly and safely.

In fact, a vocal minority, led by Paul Greyton, wanted those three ships parked in orbit, right now – before something happened to their magnetic containment apparatus, and we were all instantly vaporized. I understood his concern and didn't entirely disagree, even though the containment fields couldn't possibly fail so long as particle physics worked. Of course, particle physics didn't predict antimatter dwindling away of its own accord, either.

Parking them would require the shuttle, too, and I wouldn't mind the practice. But the rest of the council was unanimous in rejecting Greyton. To most people, the sight of the ships on the horizon was comforting, a symbol of options, possibilities.

Twenty-five

We got two multi-purpose farming vehicles fired up, and I cheerfully delegated authority for
that
little set of problems to Anita Szydhowski, who used to keep the Paxton coop organized.

There were too many choices. If we had landed on a random Earth-like planet, it would be no problem; there were super-hardy varieties of eight basic vegetables in the ships' survival stores. But to get that hardiness, the breeders had to trade off things like taste and yield.

None of the Earth plants on Middle Finger had survived eight hard winters, but there were plenty of seeds in stock, a good fraction of which would be viable – plus hundreds of varieties in cryonic storage at the university. Anita wound up being Solomon-like, making sure enough of the super-hardy were planted to get us through the next year before allotting acreage for the traditional crops, riskier because of the age of the seeds. Then a few acres on the campus itself, for the three ex-farmers who had been itching for years to get their hands on the exotics the university doled out on rare occasion.

I restarted the teaching schedule I'd been following on
Time Warp
– much, of course, to the students' delight. I could drop general science, sadly, since my two youngest students had died in SA, but had to add calculus because the higher-math teacher, Grace Lani, had also died. That was a challenge. Doing calculus is a lot easier than teaching it, and the students I used to have had all been beyond the basics, so I didn't have any experience with the chore.

After a month had passed, we were able to make an expedition to Paxton. This took both vans out of service for two days – their range was about a thousand kilometers, so the van that made the trip had to carry along the other van's fuel cells.

The council magnanimously decided that one of the council should do it, and I drew the short straw. For my assistant and co-driver, I chose Sara. Like almost everyone, she was intensely curious. Also young and strong, to help with driving – all manual, of course – and changing over the heavy fuel cells. Marygay approved, though she would've liked to go herself. Sara was growing away from us, fast, but this was one area where our interests converged.

The van could carry three tonnes, so we could bring back a certain amount of stuff. I had Sara canvass people, and then we sat down with the list and made decisions. It was like the
Time Warp
winnowing process, in miniature. There weren't very many purely sentimental requests, since those things had been taken aboard the time ship and either brought back or abandoned. But there was a limit to the time and effort we could spare – it would be worth going to Diana's office and getting the medical records of the thirty-one of us she'd had as patients, for instance, but I wasn't going to ransack Elena Monet's place to find her crocheting kit.

We did have some hard decisions, juggling time and weight and needs, individual and communal. We were going to load Stan Shank's ceramic kiln, even though it weighed half a tonne and you'd think such things would not be rare. But he'd searched Centrus, and all nine of the kilns he'd found were ruined; left on until they'd burned out.

Sara and I didn't have anything on the list. But there was a little slack.

We left at first light, and a good thing. The trip, normally eight hours, took twenty, most of it crawling along the shoulder of the road rather than trying to negotiate the pavement's rubble.

When we got there, we went straight through town to our old place. Bill had moved in as temporary caretaker, until someone else came along, able and willing to fish in exchange for a nice old house.

We went straight to the kitchen and built a fire. I left Sara to do that while I went out to the lake for a couple of buckets of water, for which I had to break a skin of ice.

In the barrel on the end of the dock, the stasis field was still on; it requires no power to maintain. It was about one-quarter full of fish. I went back to the kitchen for tongs and brought in a few. Absolute zero, of course, but they'd thaw in time for breakfast.

We warmed the water over the fire and drank old wine – I'd bartered it from Harras not five months ago – and when the water was hot enough, I carried a candle into the cold living room to read, while Sara bathed. Having grown up in a nudist commune, and going from there to the army's communal showers, I didn't have any modesty about bathing, and neither did Marygay. So of course our children turned out to be prudes.

It looked like Bill had still been here on the Day, and not alone. I recognized the pile of his clothes where he'd been sitting on the couch in the living room, next to a pile of woman's clothing. Seeing his clothes was a sudden shock; my head swam and I had to grope for a chair.

When I could stand again, feeling curious and obscurely guilty, I checked upstairs, and yes, two people had slept in his unmade bed. I wondered who she was and whether they'd had time, or inclination, to fall in love.

After she'd washed up, Sara looked at her brother's clothes and fell silent. She found us reasonably fresh linen and went upstairs to change her bed and sleep, but for a long time, I could hear, she tossed and turned. I just made a pallet on the floor by the fire, no desire to sleep in our old bedroom alone.

In the morning I broiled the fish in the fireplace, and made a pot of rice that barely seemed a decade old. Then we went out on various errands, a pair of holo cameras mounted in front of the van. Stephen Funk had insisted on that; someday it would be a valuable historic record. And people would be curious about what their homes looked like, abandoned for eight years.

Most of them would be unhappy, since very few had had landscaping of native plants alone. There was status in planting and maintaining Earth stock, but very little of it had survived even one hard winter unattended. The native forms had taken over, especially the large and small green mushrooms, neither plant nor fungus, pretty ugly even out in the woods, where they belonged. All of the lawns were full of it, knee high to head high. The town looked like a nightmarish fairy tale.

We gathered records and artifacts and a few specialized tools – Stan's kiln, as he'd said, disassembled into ten pieces, but it was still a monster to load. By the end of the day, we were tired and depressed and ready to leave. But we had to wait till dawn.

I made a stew of boxed fruit with rice, and we sat by the fire, eating and drinking too much.

'Earth is going to be like this to you, isn't it?' Sara said. 'Only worse.' 'I don't know,' I said; 'it's been so long. I think I've adjusted to the fact that there won't be much I recognize.'

I added some wood to the fire and went back to refill the wine pitcher. 'I guess I told you about the guy from the 22nd.'

'A long time ago. I forget.'

'He came to Stargate while I was waiting for Charlie and Diana and Anita to get hetero-ed. He was alone, supposedly the only survivor of some battle. Too vague about it, though.'