Forever Free

You could actually look at it as two linked timetables, and in fact there was a ruled line separating the two: before approval and after approval. For the next nine months, we were limited to two launches a week, and one of them had to be reserved for fuel shipment–a tonne of water and two kilograms of antimatter (which with its containment apparatus took up half the shuttle’s payload).

After approval came from Earth, we could have daily shuttles most days, the one on the ground being loaded while the one in orbit unloaded. We could make a good case for getting the ship’s ecology up and running before approval, but there was no reason to send up people and their belongings, beyond the skeleton crew that was setting up the farms and fish, and the three engineers stalking from stem to stern, checking “systems” (like toilets and door latches) and making repairs, while it was still relatively easy to find or make parts.

The rationale for fueling up the ship prior to approval was that, if the Whole Tree were to turn us down, the huge ship would make a few trips to Earth, bringing back luxuries and oddities. (Mars, too; human and Man’s presence went back for centuries now; you could bundle up and breathe outdoors there with a slight oxygen supplement. They had their own artistic traditions, and even antiques.) There were plenty of humans on Middle Finger, let alone Men, who would much rather see the Time Warp used that way. Paintings, pianos, pistachio nuts.

We might be allowed to go along as a sort of consolation prize.

Assuming there would be no approval problem, though, we went ahead with scheduling the second stage. It would only take fifteen days to load all of the people and their personal effects, a hundred kilograms each. Each one could also petition to bring another hundred kilograms, or more, for general use. Mass wasn’t too critical, but space was; we didn’t want to be crowded with clutter.

It does take a lot of stuff to keep 150 people happy for a decade, but much of it was already built into the ship, like the gym and theater. There were even two music rooms, acoustically isolated, so as not to drive neighbors to acts of vandalism. (We tried to get a real piano, speaking of antiques, but there were only three on Middle Finger, so we had to settle for a couple of electronic ones. I couldn’t hear the difference, myself.)

Some requests had to be turned down because of the size of our little mobile town. Eloi Casi wanted to bring a two-tonne block of marble, to work for ten years on an intricate sculptural record of the voyage. I would love to see the result, but would not love living with “clink…clink…clink.” He compromised with a log, a half-meter by two meters, and no power tools.

Marygay and I were the initial arbiters for these requests, always with the understanding that everything from Eloi’s huge sculpture to a brass band could be approved by referendum, after the Whole Tree’s acceptance.

I explained to Man that we might need extra launches for “afterthought” luxuries that the population voted to include, and they were cooperative. They actually were getting into the spirit of the thing, in their own undemonstrative way: it was interesting to be in on the beginning of an experiment forty millenniums long.

(They even went so far as to write up a description of the voyage and its purpose in a physical and linguistic medium that might last all those centuries: eight pages of text and diagrams inscribed on platinum plates, and another twelve pages that comprised an elaborate Rosetta Stone, starting with basic physics and chemistry, from which they derived logic, and then grammar, and finally, with some help from biology, a vocabulary large enough to describe the project in simple terms. They planned to put the plates on a wall in an artificial cave on the top of the highest mountain on the planet, with duplicates on Mount Everest on Earth and Olympus Mons on Mars.) It’s both natural and odd that Marygay and I wound up being leaders of the band. We did come up with the idea, of course, but we both knew from our military experience that we weren’t natural-born leaders. Twenty years’ parenting and helping a small community grow had changed us–and twenty years of being the “oldest” people in the world. There were plenty of people older than us in actual aging, but nobody else who could remember life before the Forever War. So people came to us for advice because of this mostly symbolic maturity.

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