“Thanks. I might score.” He didn’t mean volleyball. When he used our ancient slang I never knew whether it was affection or derision. I guess when I was twenty-one I could do both at the same time, with my parents.
A bus stopped outside. I heard Sara running up the boardwalk through the weather. The front door opened and shut fast, and she ran upstairs to change.
“Dinner in ten minutes,” Marygay called up the stairs. She made an impatient noise back.
“Starting to bleed tomorrow,” Bill said.
“Since when do brothers keep track of that,” Marygay said. “Or husbands?”
He looked at the floor. “She said something this morning.”
I broke the silence. “If there are any Men there tonight…”
“They never come. But I won’t tell them you’re off plotting.”
“It’s not plotting,” Marygay said. “Planning. We’ll tell them eventually. But it’s a human thing.” We hadn’t discussed it with him or Sara, but we hadn’t tried to keep them from overhearing.
“I could come someday.”
“Someday,” I said. Probably not. So far it was all first-generation; all vets, plus their spouses. Only a few of them, spouses, were born on this thing Man had called a “garden planet,” when they gave us a choice of places to relocate after the war.
We usually called “our” planet MF Most of the people who lived here were dozens of generations away from appreciating what we’d meant by “middle finger.” Even if they did know, they probably didn’t connect the acronym with the primal Oedipal act.
After living through an entire winter, though, they probably called the planet their cultures’ versions of “motherfucker.”
MF had been presented to us as a haven and a refuge–and a place of reunion. We could carve out an existence here as plain humans, without interference from Man, and if you had friends or lovers lost in the relativistic maze of the Forever War, you could wait for them on the Time Warp, a converted battlewagon that shuttled back and forth between Mizar and Alcor fast enough to almost halt aging.
Of course it turned out that Man did want to keep an eye on us, since we comprised a sort of genetic insurance policy. They could use us as a baseline if, after X generations, something bad cropped up in their carbon-copy genetic pattern. (I once used that term with Bill, and started to explain, but he did know what carbon copies were. Like he knew what cave paintings were.)
But they weren’t passive observers. They were zookeepers. And MF did resemble a zoo: an artificial simplified environment. But the zookeepers didn’t build it. They just stumbled onto it.
Middle Finger, like all the Vega-class planets we’d found, was an anomaly and a cartoon. It defied normal models of planetary formation and evolution.
A too-young bright blue star with a single planet, Earth-sized with oxygen-water chemistry. The planet orbits at a distance where life can be sustained, if only just.
(Planet people tell us that there’s no way to have an Earth-type planet unless you also have a Jupiter-type giant in the system. But then stars like Vega and Mizar shouldn’t have Earths anyhow.)
Middle Finger has seasons, but they’re provided not by inclination toward the sun, but by the long oval of its orbit. We have six seasons spread over three Earth years: spring, summer, fall, first winter, deep winter, and thaw. Of course the planet moves slower, the farther it is from its sun, so the cold seasons are long, and the warm ones, short.
Most of the planet is arctic waste or dry tundra. Here at the equator, lakes and streams ice over in deep winter. Toward the poles, lakes are solid permanent ice from the surface down, with sterile puddles forming on warm summer days. Two-thirds of the planet’s surface is lifeless except for airborne spores and microorganisms.
The ecology is curiously simple, too-fewer than a hundred native varieties of plants; about the same number of insects and things that resemble arthropods. No native mammals, but a couple of dozen species of large and small things that are roughly reptiles or amphibians. Only seven kinds of fish, and four aquatic mollusks.