I thought for a moment, discarding possibilities. “Man, probably, if it’s someone from Paxton.” Gol’s face tightened slightly. He’d had classes from my officemate. “I would put in a search, though. There are plenty of people in Centrus who could do it, if they felt a sudden hunger for life on the frontier.”
“Would you be teaching on the ship?” Pratha said. “If we came along?”
Her expression was interesting and not ambiguous. Down, boy; she’s barely older than your daughter. “Sure. That’s about all I’m good for.”
Actually, they might make me harvest fish, aboard the Time Warp. That would be a major part of the diet, and I certainly knew my way around a cleaver.
When I got home from class, I didn’t go straight out to the dock. There was no rush. The day was clear and cold, Mizar making the sky a naked energetic blue, like an electric arc. I’d wait for Bill to get home.
Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea and blinked through the news. The service came from Centrus, so our story was there, but buried in the exurb section, cross-ref to vets and Earth. Just as well. I didn’t want a lot of questions before we had answers.
I asked for random Beethoven and just listened, staring out at the lake and forest. There was a time when I would have thought you’d be nuts to trade this for the austerity and monotony of a starship.
There was also a time when I was, we were, romantic about the frontier. We came out here when Marygay was pregnant with Bill. But it’s grown up to where it’s just Centrus without conveniences. And there’s noplace farther out, not to live. No population pressure to speak of. No cultural mandate to keep moving out.
One of the useless things I remember from school is the Turner Thesis. How the American character was shaped by the frontier, always receding, always tempting.
That gave me a little chill. Is that what we were proposing? A temporal version of a dream that was, really dead before I was born. Though it drove my father, along with my family–in a VW bus with flowers painted all over the rusted body–to the Pacific and then north to Alaska. Where we found rough-and-ready frontier shops that served latte and cappuccino.
It was possible that out of ten billion souls scattered through this corner of the Galaxy, only Marygay and I had even a tenuous connection to the American frontier. Charlie and Diana and Max were born in a place that still called itself America, but it had not been a place that Frederick Jackson Turner would have recognized, its only “frontier” light-years and centuries away, men and women fighting an incomprehensible enemy for no reason.
Bill came in and we both put on aprons and gloves and went out to the dock. We worked in relative silence, monosyllables, for the first two trotlines, Bill beheading them with such fervor that twice he got the cleaver stuck in the wood.
“People give you shit about your parents being jail-birds?”
” `Birds’? Oh, being in jail, yeah. They mostly thought it was funny. Stealing the starship and all, like a movie.”
“Looks like they’ll just give it to us.”
“Our history Man said she thought they would. They could replace the starship with a newer one, from Earth, through the collapsar. No real loss.” He whacked down on a fish. “To them.”
That was clear enough. “But there would be to you. If you don’t go with us.”
He held down the writhing headless fish for a moment, then chopped off its tail and threw it in the freezer. “There are things I can’t say in English. Maybe there aren’t words.”
“Go on.”
“You say `there would be to you,’ a loss. Or you could say `there will be a loss to you.’ But nothing in between.”
I paused, my hand on the line, trying to sort out grammar. “I don’t get it. You say `would’ because it’s in the future, uncertain.”
He spat out a phrase in Standard: “Ta meeya a cha! You say meeya when the outcome is uncertain but the decision has been made. Not to loo a cha or to lee a cha, which is like your `would’ or `will.’ “