“So you’ve decided to hang us in the town square?” I said. “Or will it be a simple private beheading?”
“If it were necessary to kill you, it would already have been done.” Great sense of humor. “What would be the point in explaining things?”
He poured himself some tea. “There will be a wait. I need confirmation from the Whole Tree.” That meant sending word to Earth and back, at least ten months. “But the tentative consensus is to send you away with my blessings. Give you the time shuttle.”
“And in return,” Marygay said, “you lose one hundred fifty powerful malcontents.”
“It’s not just that. You are already fascinating anachronisms. Think of how valuable you will be forty thousand years from now!”
“Living fossils,” I said. “What an idea.”
He hesitated for a moment; the word was unfamiliar. There were no actual fossils on his world. “Yes, in body as well as in modes of thought. In a way, I owe it to my own heritage. I should have thought of it myself.” In their own language, there was a “collective `I,’ ” which I assumed he was using.
“You said there were two decisions,” Marygay said. “A related one.”
“A mirror of yours, in a way.” He smiled. “Yon know I love humans very much. It has always saddened me to see you go through life crippled.”
“Crippled…by our individuality?” I said.
“Exactly! Unable to tap the Tree, and share life with billions of others.”
“Well, we were given the choice when we mustered out. I’ve had over twenty years to regret not joining you, and so far I’m just as glad I didn’t.”
“You did have the choice, yes, and some veterans took it.”
“How many?” Marygay asked.
“Actually, less than one percent. But I was new and strange to you then.
“The point is that it’s been a hundred Years–nearly three hundred Earth years–since anyone was given the choice. The population of Middle Finger has grown in that time to over twenty thousand, more than large enough to maintain a viable genetic pool. So I want to start giving people the choice again.”
“Anyone who wants can become you?” I had a powerful premonitory urge to gather my children to me.
“No, it would only be one per new birth, and they would have to pass tests for suitability. And they wouldn’t really be me, of course; their genetic make-up will be inferior. But they would still be leaves on the Tree.” He smiled in a way that I’m sure he thought was not condescending. “It sounds horrible to you, doesn’t it. You call us `zombies.’ ”
“It does occur to me that there are enough of you already, on this planet. Not to mention ten billion or so back on Earth. Why not leave us alone? That was the original plan.”
“This is consistent with the original plan, only kinder. You don’t see it that way because you’re too old-fashioned.”
“Well, at least we have ten months to get used to the idea.” To talk some sense into Bill and Sara.
“Oh, this isn’t like the starship. I can go ahead, and if the Whole Tree disagrees, only few people will be affected. But I do know myself; I know the Tree. There will be no problem.”
“People who join you will still be human, though,” Marygay said. “They’ll still marry and have families.” Man looked puzzled. “Of course not.”
“But they’ll be able,” I said.
“Oh, no. They will have to consent to sterilization.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand. You say there are enough of me. In reality, there are more than enough of you.
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Chapter five
I went straight from jail to the university, since I had to teach at 1400, and liked to be in the office for an hour before class, to go over notes and be available to talk to students. They served a hot lunch in the teachers’ lounge, too.
It was kind of grandiose to call the place a “university,” though it did grant a couple of dozen degrees. It was a circle of ten log buildings connected by breezeways. My physics building had two labs, two small classrooms, and a larger lecture hall, which we shared with chemistry and astronomy. The second floor, which was really just a high attic, was a storage area with two offices tacked on the end.