Haldeman, Joe - Forever Free

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Men stop war to make gods
sometimes. Peace gods, who would make
Earth a haven. A place for men to
think and love and play. No war
to cloud their minds and hearts. Stop,
somehow, men from being men.
Gods make war to stop men
from becoming gods.
Without the beat of drums to stop
our ears, what heaven we could make
of Earth! The anchor that is war
left behind? Somehow free to
stop war? Gods make men to
be somewhat like them. So men
express their godliness in war.
To take life: this is what gods
do. Not the womanly urge to make life.
Nor the simple sense to stop.
War-men make gods. To stop
those gods from raging, we have to
find the heart and head to make
new gods, who don't take men
in human sacrifice. New gods,
who find disgust in war.
Gods stop, to make men war
for their amusement. We can stop
their fun. We can make new gods
in human guise. No need to
call to heaven. Just take plain men
and show to them the heaven they could make!
To stop God's wars! Men make
their own destiny. We don't need war
to prove to anyone that we are men.
But even that is not enough. To stop
war, we have to become more. To
stop war, we have to become gods.
-To stop war, make men gods.
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book one
THE BOOK OF GENESIS
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Chapter one
Winter is a long time coming on this god-forsaken planet, and it stays too long, too. I
watched a sudden gust blow a line of cold foam across the grey lake and thought about Earth, not
for the first time that day. The two warm winters in San Diego when I was a boy. Even the bad
winters in Nebraska. They were at least short.
Maybe we were too quick to say no, when the magnanimous zombies offered to share Earth with
us, after the war. We didn't really get rid of them, coming here.
Cold radiated from the windowpane. Marygay cleared her throat behind me. "What is it?" she
said.
"Looks like weather. I ought to check the trotlines."
"Kids will be home in an hour."
"Better I do it now, dry, than all of us stand out in the rain," I said. "Snow, whatever."
"Probably snow." She hesitated, and didn't offer to help. After twenty years she could tell
when I didn't want company. I pulled on wool sweater and cap and left the rain slicker on its peg.
I stepped out into the damp hard wind. It didn't smell like snow coming. I asked my watch and
it said 90 percent rain, but a cold front in the evening would bring freezing rain and snow. That
would make for a fun meeting. We had to walk a couple of klicks, there and back. Otherwise the
zombies could look through transportation records and see that all of us paranoids had converged
on one house.
We had eight trotlines that stretched out ten meters from the end of the dock to posts I'd
sunk in the chest-deep water. Two more had been knocked down in a storm; I'd replace them come
spring. Two years from now, in real years.
It was more like harvesting than fishing. The blackfish are so dumb they'll bite anything, and
when they're hooked and thrash around, it attracts other blackfish: "Wonder what's wrong with that
guy--oh, look! Somebody's head on a nice shiny hook!"
When I got out on the dock I could see thunderheads building in the east, so I worked pretty
fast. Each trotline's a pulley that supports a dozen hooked leaders dangling in the water, held to
one-meter depth with plastic floaters. It looked like half the floaters were down, maybe fifty
fish. I did a mental calculation and realized I'd probably just finish the last one when Bill got
home from school. But the storm was definitely coming.
I took work gloves and apron off a hook by the sink and hauled the end of the first line up to
the eye-level pulley wheel. I opened the built-in freezer--the stasis field inside reflected the
angry sky like a pool of mercury--and wheeled in the first fish. Worked it off the hook, chopped
off the head and tail with a cleaver, threw the fish into the freezer, and then rebaited the hook
with its head. Then rolled in the next client.
Three of the fish were the useless mutant strain we've been getting for more than a year.
They're streaked with pink and have a noxious hydrogen-sulfide taste. The blackfish won't take
them for bait and I can't even use them for fertilizer; you might as well scatter your soil with
salt.
Maybe an hour a day--half that, with the kids helping--and we supplied about a third of the
fish for the village. I didn't eat much of it myself. We also bartered corn, beans, and asparagus,
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in their seasons.
Bill got off the bus while I was working on the last line. I waved him inside; no need for
both of us to get all covered with fish guts and blood. Then lightning struck on the other side of
the lake and I put the line back in anyhow. Hung up the stiff gloves and apron and turned off the
stasis field for a second to check the catch level.
Just beat the rain. I stood on the porch for a minute and watched the squall line hiss its way
across the lake. Warm inside; Marygay had started a small fire in the kitchen fireplace. Bill was
sitting there with a glass of wine. That was still a novelty to him. "So how are we doing?" His
accent always sounded strange when he first got back from school. He didn't speak English in class
or, I suspected, with many of his friends.
"Over the sixty percent mark," I said, scrubbing my hands and face at the work sink. "Any
better luck and we'll have to eat the damned things ourselves."
"Think I'll poach a big bunch for dinner," Marygay said, deadpan. That gave them the flavor
and consistency of cotton.
"Come on, Mom," Bill said. "Let's just have them raw." He liked them even less than I did.
Chopping off their heads was the high point of his day.
I went to the trio of casks at the other end of the room and tapped a glass of dry red wine,
then sat with Bill on the bench by the fire. I poked at it with a stick, a social gesture probably
older than this young planet.
"You were going to have the art zombie today?"
"The art history Man," he said. "She's from Centrus. Haven't seen her in a year. We didn't
draw or anything; just looked at pictures and statues."
"From Earth?"
"Mostly."
"Tauran art is weird." That was a charitable assessment. It was also ugly and
incomprehensible.
"She said we have to come to it gradually. We looked at some architecture."
Their architecture, I knew something about. I'd destroyed acres of it, centuries ago. Felt
like yesterday sometimes.
"I remember the first time I came across one of their barracks," I said. "All the little
individual cells. Like a beehive."
He made a noncommittal noise that I took as a warning. "So where's your sister?" She was still
in high school but had the same bus. "I can't keep her schedule straight."
"She's at the library," Marygay said. "She'll call if she's going to be late."
I checked my watch. "Can't wait dinner too long." The meeting was at eight and a half.
"I know." She stepped over the bench and sat down between us, and handed me a plate of
breadsticks. "From Snell, came by this morning."
They were salty and hard; broke between the jaws with an interesting concussion. "I'll thank
him tonight."
"Old folks party?" Bill asked.
"Sixday," I said. "We're walking, if you want the floater."
" `But don't drink too much wine,' " he anticipated, and held up his glass. "This is it.
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Volleyball down at the gym."
"Win one for the Gipper."
"What?"
"Something my mother used to say. I don't know what a gipper is."
"Sounds like a position," he said. "Server, spiker, gipper." As if he cared a lot about the
game qua game. They played in the nude, mixed, and it was as much a mating ritual as a sport.
A sudden blast of sleet rattled against the window. "You don't want to walk through that," he
said. "You could drop me off at the gym."
"Well, you could drop us off," Marygay said. The route of the floater wasn't registered; just
the parking location, supposedly for call forwarding. "Charlie and Diana's place. They won't care
if we're early."
"Thanks. I might score." He didn't mean volleyball. When he used our ancient slang I never
knew whether it was affection or derision. I guess when I was twenty-one I could do both at the
same time, with my parents.
A bus stopped outside. I heard Sara running up the boardwalk through the weather. The front
door opened and shut fast, and she ran upstairs to change.
"Dinner in ten minutes," Marygay called up the stairs. She made an impatient noise back.
"Starting to bleed tomorrow," Bill said.
"Since when do brothers keep track of that," Marygay said. "Or husbands?"
He looked at the floor. "She said something this morning."
I broke the silence. "If there are any Men there tonight..."
"They never come. But I won't tell them you're off plotting."
"It's not plotting," Marygay said. "Planning. We'll tell them eventually. But it's a human
thing." We hadn't discussed it with him or Sara, but we hadn't tried to keep them from
overhearing.
"I could come someday."
"Someday," I said. Probably not. So far it was all first-generation; all vets, plus their
spouses. Only a few of them, spouses, were born on this thing Man had called a "garden planet,"
when they gave us a choice of places to relocate after the war.
We usually called "our" planet MF Most of the people who lived here were dozens of generations
away from appreciating what we'd meant by "middle finger." Even if they did know, they probably
didn't connect the acronym with the primal Oedipal act.
After living through an entire winter, though, they probably called the planet their cultures'
versions of "motherfucker."
MF had been presented to us as a haven and a refuge--and a place of reunion. We could carve
out an existence here as plain humans, without interference from Man, and if you had friends or
lovers lost in the relativistic maze of the Forever War, you could wait for them on the Time Warp,
a converted battlewagon that shuttled back and forth between Mizar and Alcor fast enough to almost
halt aging.
Of course it turned out that Man did want to keep an eye on us, since we comprised a sort of
genetic insurance policy. They could use us as a baseline if, after X generations, something bad
cropped up in their carbon-copy genetic pattern. (I once used that term with Bill, and started to
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explain, but he did know what carbon copies were. Like he knew what cave paintings were.)
But they weren't passive observers. They were zookeepers. And MF did resemble a zoo: an
artificial simplified environment. But the zookeepers didn't build it. They just stumbled onto it.
Middle Finger, like all the Vega-class planets we'd found, was an anomaly and a cartoon. It
defied normal models of planetary formation and evolution.
A too-young bright blue star with a single planet, Earth-sized with oxygen-water chemistry.
The planet orbits at a distance where life can be sustained, if only just.
(Planet people tell us that there's no way to have an Earth-type planet unless you also have a
Jupiter-type giant in the system. But then stars like Vega and Mizar shouldn't have Earths
anyhow.)
Middle Finger has seasons, but they're provided not by inclination toward the sun, but by the
long oval of its orbit. We have six seasons spread over three Earth years: spring, summer, fall,
first winter, deep winter, and thaw. Of course the planet moves slower, the farther it is from its
sun, so the cold seasons are long, and the warm ones, short.
Most of the planet is arctic waste or dry tundra. Here at the equator, lakes and streams ice
over in deep winter. Toward the poles, lakes are solid permanent ice from the surface down, with
sterile puddles forming on warm summer days. Two-thirds of the planet's surface is lifeless except
for airborne spores and microorganisms.
The ecology is curiously simple, too-fewer than a hundred native varieties of plants; about
the same number of insects and things that resemble arthropods. No native mammals, but a couple of
dozen species of large and small things that are roughly reptiles or amphibians. Only seven kinds
of fish, and four aquatic mollusks.
Nothing has evolved from anything else. There are no fossils, because there hasn't been enough
time--carbon dating says nothing on or near the surface is more than ten thousand years old. But
core samples from less than fifty meters down reveal a planet as old as Earth.
It's as if somebody had hauled a planet here and parked it, seeded with simple life. But where
did they haul it from, and who are they, and who paid the shipping bill? All of the energy
expended by the humans and the Taurans during the Forever War wouldn't have moved this planet far.
It's a mystery to them, too; the Taurans, which I find reassuring.
There are other mysteries that are not reassuring. Chief among them is that this corner of the
universe had been inhabited before, up to about five thousand years ago.
The nearest Tauran planet, Tsogot, had been discovered and colonized during the Forever War.
They found the ruins of a huge city there, larger than New York or London, buried in drifting
dunes. The husks of dozens of alien spaceships drifted in orbit, one of them an interstellar
vessel.
Of the creatures who had built this powerful civilization, not a clue. They left behind no
statues or pictures, which may be explainable in terms of culture. Neither did they leave any
bodies, not even a single bone, which is harder to explain.
The Tauran name for them is Boloor, "the lost."
I usually cooked on Sixday, since I didn't teach then, but the Greytons had brought by a
couple of rabbits, and that was Marygay's specialty, hassenpfeffer. The kids liked it better than
most Earth food. They mostly preferred the bland native stuff, which is all they got at school.
Marygay says it's a natural survival trait; even on Earth, children stuck to bland, familiar food.
I hadn't, but then my parents were strange, hippies. We ate fiery Indian food. I never tasted meat
until I was twelve, when California law made them send me to school.
Dinner was amusing, Bill and Sara trading gossip about their friends' dating and mating.
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Sara's finally gotten over Taylor, who had been her steady for a year, and Bill had welcome news
about a social disaster the boy had caused. It had stung her when he declared himself home, but
after a few months' fling he turned her again, and asked her to take him back. She told him to
stick to boys. Now it turns out he did have a boyfriend over in Hardy, very secret, who got mad at
him and came over to the college to make a loud public scene. It involved sexual details that we
didn't used to discuss at the dinner table. But times change, and fun is fun.
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Chapter two
The thing we were plotting actually grew out of an innocent bantering argument I'd had with
Charlie and Diana some months before. Diana had been my medical officer during the Sade-138
campaign, our last, out in the Greater Magellanic Cloud; Charlie had served as my XO. Diana had
delivered both Bill and Sara. They were our best friends.
Most of the community had taken Sixday off to get together at the Larsons' for a barn-raising.
Teresa was an old vet, two campaigns, but her wife Ami was third-generation Paxton. She was our
age, biologically, and they had two fusion-clone teenaged daughters. One was off at university,
but the other, Sooz, greeted us warmly and was in charge of the coffee and tea.
The hot drinks were welcome; it was unseasonably cold for late spring. It was also muddy.
Middle Finger had weather control that was usually reliable--or used to be--but we'd had too much
rain the previous couple of weeks, and moving clouds around didn't seem to help. The rain gods
were angry. Or happy, or careless; never could tell about gods.
The first couple to arrive, as usual, were Cat and Aldo Verdeur-Sims. And as usual, Cat and
Marygay embraced warmly, but only for an instant, out of consideration for their husbands.
On her last mission Marygay, like me, was a het throwback in a world otherwise 100 percent
home. Unlike me, she overcame her background and managed to fall in love with a woman, Cat. They
were together for a few months, but during their last battle, Cat was severely wounded and went
straight to the hospital planet Heaven.
Marygay assumed that was it; the physics of relativity and collapsar jump would separate them
by years or centuries. So she came here to wait for me--not for Cat--on the Time Warp. She told me
all about Cat soon after we got together, and I didn't think it was a big deal; a reasonable
adjustment under the circumstances. I'd always been easier with female homosex than male, anyhow.
So right after Sara was born, who should appear but Cat. She'd met Aldo on Heaven and heard
about Middle Finger, and the two of them switched to het--something Man could easily do for you
and, at that time, was required if you were going to Middle Finger. She knew Marygay was here,
from Stargate records, and the space-time geometry worked out all right. She showed up about ten
Earth years younger than Marygay and I were. And beautiful.
We got along well--Aldo and I played chess and go together--but you'd have to be blind not to
see the occasional wistfulness that passed between Cat and Marygay.
We sometimes kidded one another about it, but there was an edge to the joking. Aldo was more
nervous about it than me, I think.
Sara came along with us, and Bill would come with Charlie and Diana after church let out. We
unbelievers got to pay for our intellectual freedom by donning work boots and slogging through the
mud, pounding in the reference stakes for the pressor field generator.
We borrowed the generator from the township, and along with it got the only Man involved in
the barn-raising. She would have come anyway, as building inspector, after we had the thing up.
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The generator was worth its weight in bureaucrats, though. It couldn't lift the metal girders;
that took a lot of human muscle working together. But once they were in position, it kept them in
place and perfectly aligned. Like a petty little god that was annoyed by things that weren't at
right angles.
I had gods on the brain. Charlie and Diana had joined this new church, Spiritual Rationalism,
and had dragged Bill into it. Actually, they didn't have gods in the old sense, and it all seemed
reasonable enough, people trying to put some poetry and numinism into their everyday lives. I
think Marygay would have gone along with it, if it weren't for my automatic resistance to
religion.
Lar Po had surveying tools, including an ancient laser collimator that wasn't much different
from the one I'd used in graduate school. We still had to slog through the mud and pound stakes,
but at least we knew the stakes were going where they belonged.
The township also supplied a heavy truck full of fiber mastic, more reliable than cement in
this climate, and easier to handle. It stayed liquid until it was exposed to an ultrasonic tone
that was two specific frequencies in a silent chord. Then it froze permanently solid. You wanted
to make sure you didn't have any on your hands or clothes when they turned on the chime.
The piles of girders and fasteners were a kit that had come in a big floater from Centrus.
Paxton was allotted such things on the basis of a mysterious formula involving population and
productivity and the phases of the moons. We actually could have had two barns this spring, but
only the Larsons wanted one.
By the time we had it staked out, about thirty people had showed up. Teresa had a clipboard
with job assignments and a timeline for putting the thing up. People took their assignments good-
naturedly from "Sergeant Larson, sir." Actually, she'd been a major, like me.
Charlie and I worked together on the refrigeration unit. We'd learned the hard way the first
years on this planet, that any permanent building bigger than a shed had to sit on ice year-round.
If you carve down to the permafrost and lay a regular foundation, the long bitter winters crack
it. So we just give in to the climate and build on ice, or frozen mud.
It was easy work, but sloppy. Another team nailed together a rectangular frame around what
would be the footprint of the building, plus a few centimeters every way. Max Weston, one of the
few guys big enough to wrestle with it, used an air hammer to pound alloy rods well below the
frost line, every meter or so along the perimeter. These would anchor the barn against the
hurricane-force winds that made farming such an interesting gamble here. (The weather-control
satellites couldn't muster enough power to deflect them.)
Charlie and I slopped around in the mud, connecting long plastic tubes in a winding snake back
and forth in what would be the building's sub-foundation. It was just align-glue-drop; align-glue-
drop, until we were both half drunk from the glue fumes. Meanwhile, the crew that had nailed up
the frame hosed water into the mud, so it would be nice and deep and soupy when we froze it.
We finished and hooked the loose ends up to a compressor and turned it on. Everybody took a
break while we watched the mud turn to slush and harden.
It was warmer inside, but Charlie and I were too bespattered to feel comfortable in anyone's
kitchen, so we just sat on a stack of foamsteel girders and let Sooz bring us tea.
I waved at the rectangle of mud. "Pretty complex behavior for a bunch of lab rats."
Charlie was still a little dull from the glue. "We have rats?"
"A breeding herd of lab rats."
Then he nodded and sipped some tea. "You're too pessimistic. We'll outlast them. That's one
thing I have faith in."
"Yeah, faith can move mountains. Planets." Charlie didn't deny the obvious: that we were
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animals in a zoo, or a lab. We were allowed to breed freely on Middle Finger in case something
went wrong with the grand experiment that was Man: billions of genetically identical non-
individuals sharing a single consciousness. Or billions of test-tube twins sharing a mutual data
base, if you wanted to be accurate.
We could clone like them, no law against it, if we wanted a son or daughter identical to us,
or fusion-clone like Teresa and Ami, if some biological technicality made normal childbirth
impossible.
But the main idea was to keep churning out offspring with a wild mix of genes. Just in case
something went wrong with perfection. We were their insurance policy.
People had started coming to Middle Finger as soon as the Forever War was over. Vet
immigration, spread out over centuries because of relativity, finally totaled a couple of thousand
people, maybe ten percent of the present population. We tended to stick together, in small towns
like Paxton. We were used to dealing with each other.
Charlie lit up a stick and offered me one; I declined. "I think we could outlast them," I
said, "if they let us survive."
"They need us. Us lab rats."
"No, they just need our gametes. Which they can freeze indefinitely in liquid helium."
"Yeah, I can see that. They line us up for sperm and egg samples and then kill us off. They
aren't cruel, William, or stupid, no matter what you think of them."
The Man came out to get the manual for her machine, and took it back to the kitchen. They all
looked alike, of course, but with considerable variation as they got older. Handsome, tall,
swarthy, black-haired, broad of chin and forehead. This one had lost the little finger of her left
hand, and for some reason hadn't had it grown back. Probably not worth the time and pain, come to
think of it. A lot of us vets remembered the torture of regrowing limbs and members.
When she was out of earshot, I continued. "They wouldn't kill us off, but they wouldn't have
to. Once they had sufficient genetic material, they could round us up and sterilize us. Let the
experiment run down, one natural death at a time."
"You're cheerful today."
"I'm just blowin' smoke." Charlie nodded slowly. We didn't have the same set of idioms, born
six hundred years apart. "But it could happen, if they saw us as a political threat. They get
along fine with the Taurans now, but we're the wild card. No group mind to commune with."
"So what would you do, fight them? We're not summer chickens anymore."
"That's `spring' chickens."
"I know, William. We're not even summer chickens."
I clicked my cup against his. "Your point. But we're still young enough to fight."
"With what? Your fishing lines and my tomato stakes?"
"They're not heavily armed, either." But as I said that, I felt a sudden chill. As Charlie
enumerated the weapons we did know them to have, it occurred to me that we were in a critical
historical period, the last time in human history that there would be a significant number of
Forever War veterans still young enough to fight.
The group mind of Man had surely made the same observation.
Sooz brought us more tea and went back to tell the others that our little mud lake had frozen
solid. So there was no more time for paranoia. But the seed had been planted.
We unrolled two crossed layers of insulation sheet, and then went about the odd business of
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actually raising the barn.
The floor was the easy part: slabs of foamsteel rectangles that weighed about eighty kilograms
apiece. Two big people or four average ones could move one with ease. They were numbered 1-40; we
just picked them up and put them down, aligned with the stakes we agnostics had pounded in.
This part was a little chaotic, since all thirty people wanted to work at once. But we did
eventually get them down in proper order.
Then we all sat and watched while the mastic was poured in. The boards that had served as
forms for the frozen mud did the same for the mastic. Po and Eloi Casi used long, broom-like
things to push the grey mastic around as it oozed out of the truck. It would have settled down
into a level surface eventually, but we knew from experience that you could save an hour or so by
helping the process along. When it was about a handspan deep, and level, Man flipped a switch and
it turned into something like marble.
That's when the hard work started. It would have been easy with a crane and a front-end
loader, but Man was proud of having designed these kits so they could be put up by hand, as a
community project. So no big machines came along with them, unless it was an emergency.
(In fact, this was the opposite of an emergency: the Larsons wouldn't have much to put into
the barn this year, their grapes almost destroyed by too much rain.)
Every fourth slab had square boxes on either end, to accept vertical girders. So you fasten
three girders together, ceiling and wall supports, put a lot of glue into the square boxes, and
haul them into an upright position. With the pressor field on, when they get within a degree or so
of being upright, they snap into place.
After the first one was set, the rest were a little easier, since you could throw three or
four ropes over the rigid uprights and pull the next threesome up.
Then came the part of the job that called for agile young people with no fear of heights. Our
Bill and Sara, along with Matt Anderson and Carey Talos, clambered up the girders--not hard, with
the integrated hand--and toeholds--and stood on board scaffolds while hauling up the triangular
roof trusses. They slapped glue down and jiggled the trusses until the pressor field snapped them
into place. When that was done, they had the easier job of gluing and stapling down the roof
sheets. Meanwhile, the rest of us glued and stapled the outer walls, and then unrolled thick
insulation, and forced it into place with the inner walls. The window modules were a little
tricky, but Marygay and Cat figured them out, working in tandem, one inside and one outside.
We "finished" the interior in no time, since it was all modular, with holes in the walls,
floor, and roof girders that would snap-fit with pre-measured parts. Tables, storage bins and
racks, shelves--I was actually a little jealous; our utility building was a jerry-built shack.
Eloi Casi, who loves working with wood, brought a wine rack that would hold a hundred bottles,
so the Larsons could put some away each good year. Most of us brought something for the party; I
had thirty fish thawed and cleaned. They weren't too bad, grilled with a spicy sauce, and the
Bertrams had towed over their outdoor grill, with several armloads of split wood. They fired it up
when we started working on the inside, and by the time we were done it was good glowing coals.
Besides our fish, there was chicken and rabbit and the large native mushrooms. I was too tired and
dirty to feel much like partying, but there was warm water to scrub with, and Ami produced a few
liters of skag she'd distilled, which had been sitting for months with berries, to soften the
flavor. It was still fiery, and revived me.
The usual people had brought musical instruments, and they actually sounded pretty good in the
big empty barn. People with some energy left danced on the new marble floor. I tended the fish and
mushrooms and broiled onions, and drank almost enough skag to start dancing myself.
Man declined our food, politely, and made a few stress measurements, and declared the barn
safe. Then she went home to do whatever it is they do.
Charlie and Diana joined me at the grill, setting out chicken pieces as I removed fish.
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"So you'd fight them?" she said quietly. Charlie'd been talking to her. "To what end? If you
killed every one of them, what would it accomplish?"
"Oh, I don't want to kill even one of them. They're people, whatever else they claim to be.
But I'm working on something. I'll bring it up at a meeting when we have the bugs ironed out."
"We? You and Marygay?"
"Sure." Actually, I hadn't discussed it with her, since the thought had only occurred to me
between the mastic and the girders. "One for one and all for all."
"You had some strange sayings in the old days."
"We were strange people." I carefully loosened the grilled fish and slipped them onto a warm
platter. "But we got things done."
Marygay and I talked long into the night and early morning. She was almost as fed up as I was,
with Man and our one-sided arrangement, breeding stock staked out on this dead-end arctic planet.
It was survival, but only that. We should do more, while we were still young enough.
She was wildly enthusiastic about my scheme at first, but then had reservations because of the
children. I was pretty sure I could talk them into going along with the plan. At least Sara, I
thought privately.
She agreed that we ought to work out some details before we brought the thing to meeting. Not
present it to the kids until after we'd talked it over with the other vets.
I didn't sleep until almost dawn, blood singing with revolution. For several weeks we tried to
act normal, stealing an hour here and there to take a notebook out of hiding and jot down
thoughts, work on the numbers.
In retrospect, I think we should have trusted Bill and Sara to be in on it from the first. Our
judgment may have been clouded by the thrill of shared secrecy, and the anticipated pleasure of
dropping a bombshell.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter three
By sundown the rain had gone through sleet to soft sifting snow, so we let Bill go straight to
his volleyball game, and walked over to Charlie's. Selena, the larger moon, was full, and gave the
clouds a pleasant and handy opalescence. We didn't need the flashlight.
Their place was about a klick from the lake, in a copse of evergreens that looked
disconcertingly like palm trees on Earth. Palm trees heavy with snow sort of summed up Middle
Finger.
We'd called to say we were coming early. I helped Diana set up the samovars and tea stuff
while Marygay helped Charlie in the kitchen.
(Diana and I had a secret sexual history that not even she knew about. Conventionally lesbian
before she came here, during Sade-138 she had gotten drunk and made a pass at me, just to give it
a try the old-fashioned way. But she passed out before either of us could do anything about it,
and didn't remember it in the morning.)
I lifted the iron kettle of boiling water and poured it over the leaves in two pots. Tea was
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