Upstairs, getting ready for bed, she finally started to cry. Just silently wiping tears.
“I guess I should have been more ready for this. I hadn’t thought about the Taurans, though. Man is usually reasonable.”
We peeled back sheet, blanket, and quilt, and bundled in against the cold. “Twenty more months of this,” she said.
“Not for us,” I said
“What do you mean?”
“The hell with the Taurans and their mysticism. Back to Plan A.”
“Plan A?”
“We highjack the bastard.”
Sara brought home the Tauran writing at noon. “The librarian said it was a ritual statement, like the end of a prayer: `Inside the foreign, the unknown; inside that, the unknowable.’ She said that was only close. There aren’t exact human translations for the concepts.”
I found a pen and had her repeat it slowly, and printed it in block letters on the back. She went into the kitchen to fix a sandwich. “Wow. What are you doing with all the stuff?”
“Nothing else scheduled till four. Thought I’d take care of everything at once.” Out of an obscure impulse, I’d brought inside every farming and fishing implement that held an edge or came to a point, and was cleaning and sharpening them. They were stacked in a glittering array along the dining-room table. “Been putting it off, since it’s been too cold to work in the shed.”
I hadn’t expected anyone to be home this early. She walked by them with a nod, though. She’d grown up around them, and didn’t see them as weapons.
We had lunch together in amiable silence, surrounded by axes and gaffs, reading.
She finished her sandwich and looked straight at me. “Dad, I want to go with you.”
I was startled. “What?”
“To Earth. You’ll be one of the seventeen, won’t you?”
“Your mother and me, yes. That was in the note. It didn’t say how the other fifteen would be chosen, though.”
“Maybe they’ll let you choose.”
“Maybe so. You’ll be at the top of my list.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek, bundled up, and hurried back to school.
I wondered if I understood quite what had just transpired–or whether she knew, at some level. Fathers and daughters don’t communicate that well even when alien languages and secret conspiracies aren’t involved.
Marygay and I had been chosen, of course, since we were the only two people alive who remembered twentieth-century Earth, before the Forever War. Man would be interested in our impressions. I supposed the other fifteen were to be chosen at random, from people who wanted to make the trip–probably half the planet.
There would be no trip, of course. The ship would be accelerating straight up to nowhere. With Sara aboard, as originally planned.
I unrolled the revised loading schedule she’d prepared, weighing down the four corners with salt and pepper shakers and two wicked-looking knives.
It was discouraging, the hundreds of things that would have to be brought to the spaceport and launched into orbit. They weren’t going to bother with all that, just going to Earth and back. So we’d have to highjack the Time Warp and then somehow keep control of the situation long enough to launch the shuttles dozens of times. The people alone would take up ten flights.
We weren’t going to do it by attacking them with a bunch of farm implements. We somehow had to present a real threat. But there weren’t many actual weapons on Middle Finger, and they were almost all in the hands of authorities like the sheriff.
I gathered up the tools to take outside. A weapon doesn’t always look like a weapon. What did we have? Did we have anything that would keep them at bay for ten days, a couple of weeks, while the shuttles plied back and forth?
We could have, I suddenly realized. Maybe it was a little insane.
——————————————————————————–
Chapter twelve
I took planning and coordination–and an unexpected assist from our adversaries: the seventeen going to Earth were all from Paxton, more or less the ringleaders of the original plot. Whether they were planning to let us come back from Earth was open to question. It was also moot.