Forever Free

It was amusing that a machine would use a romantic word like “voyage.” It was well programmed to keep company with a bunch of middle-aged runaways.

At the bow of the cylinder was a neat stack of modules left over from the war–a kind of build-a-planet kit, the ultimate lifeboat. We knew that earthlike worlds were common. If the ship couldn’t make collapsar insertion and go home, those modules gave the people a chance of building a new home. We didn’t know whether it had ever happened. There had been forty-three cruisers unaccounted for at the end of the war, some of them so far away that we would never hear from them. My own last assignment had been in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 150,000 light-years away.

Most of the rest of the hold was given over to redundancy, materials and tools to rebuild almost anything in the living cylinder, but the area closest to where we were floating was all tools, some as basic as picks and shovels and forklifts, some unrecognizably esoteric. If something went wrong with the drive or the life-support system, there would be no other job for anyone until it was fixed–or we were fried or frozen.

(Those of us with engineering and scientific backgrounds would be speed-training with the ALSC-Accelerated Life Situation Computer–which was not quite as good as learning in real time, hands on, but it did give you a lot of data, fast. It was sobering to realize that if something did go wrong with the drive–which restrained more energy than had been released in any Earth war–then the person in charge of repairing it would be essentially a walking, talking manual, who had really vivid memories of procedures that had actually been done by some actor centuries dead.)

On the way back up the corridor, Man showed off her zerogee expertise by exuberant spinning and cartwheeling. It was good to sometimes see them acting human.

We were free to wander around and poke at things for a couple of hours before going back to Centrus. Marygay and I retraced the patterns of her life here, but it seemed less like revisiting old memories than like exploring a ghost town.

We went into the last apartment she’d occupied, waiting for me, and she said she wouldn’t have recognized it. The last occupant had painted the walls in bright jagged graphics. When Marygay had lived there, the walls were light cobalt blue, and covered with her paintings and drawings. She didn’t do it much anymore, but in the years while she was waiting here, she’d become an accomplished artist.

She’d looked forward to getting back to it, once the kids were out of the house. They might be light-years out of the house, soon.

“It’s sad for you,” I said.

“Yes and no. They weren’t unhappy years. This was the stable part of my world. You’d make close friends and then they’d get off the ship, and every time you stopped at Middle Finger, they’d be six or twelve or eighteen years older, and then dead.” She gestured at the dead dry fields and still waters. “This was permanence. That it’s a shambles now does bother me a little.”

“We’ll have it rebuilt soon.”

“Sure.” She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the place. “We’ll make it better.”

——————————————————————————–

Chapter eight

Of course, it wasn’t going to be just a matter of rolling up our sleeves and slapping paint around. Man allotted us one shuttle every five days, so we had to plan carefully what and whom to take up when.

The “whom” was something we had to work out now. There were 150 slots to fill, and they couldn’t just be random people. Marygay and Charlie and Diana and I all made up independent lists of the kinds of skills we’d need, and then met at our place and merged the lists and added a few more possibilities.

We had nineteen volunteers from Paxton–one had changed his mind after the meeting–and after we fit each of us to a job assignment, we publicized the plan and asked for volunteers planet-wide, to fill the other 131 berths.

In a week, we had 1,600 volunteers, mostly from Centrus. There was no way the four of us could interview all of them, so first we had to winnow through the applications. I took 238 who had technical occupations and Diana took 101 who were medical. We split the rest up evenly. I wanted, at first, to give priority to veterans, but Marygay talked me out of it. That was more than half the volunteers, but it wasn’t necessarily the most qualified half. The proportion of them who were congenital malcontents and troublemakers was probably high. Did we want to be locked up in a box with them for ten years?

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