Forever Free

Nothing has evolved from anything else. There are no fossils, because there hasn’t been enough time–carbon dating says nothing on or near the surface is more than ten thousand years old. But core samples from less than fifty meters down reveal a planet as old as Earth.

It’s as if somebody had hauled a planet here and parked it, seeded with simple life. But where did they haul it from, and who are they, and who paid the shipping bill? All of the energy expended by the humans and the Taurans during the Forever War wouldn’t have moved this planet far.

It’s a mystery to them, too; the Taurans, which I find reassuring.

There are other mysteries that are not reassuring. Chief among them is that this corner of the universe had been inhabited before, up to about five thousand years ago.

The nearest Tauran planet, Tsogot, had been discovered and colonized during the Forever War. They found the ruins of a huge city there, larger than New York or London, buried in drifting dunes. The husks of dozens of alien spaceships drifted in orbit, one of them an interstellar vessel.

Of the creatures who had built this powerful civilization, not a clue. They left behind no statues or pictures, which may be explainable in terms of culture. Neither did they leave any bodies, not even a single bone, which is harder to explain.

The Tauran name for them is Boloor, “the lost.”

I usually cooked on Sixday, since I didn’t teach then, but the Greytons had brought by a couple of rabbits, and that was Marygay’s specialty, hassenpfeffer. The kids liked it better than most Earth food. They mostly preferred the bland native stuff, which is all they got at school. Marygay says it’s a natural survival trait; even on Earth, children stuck to bland, familiar food. I hadn’t, but then my parents were strange, hippies. We ate fiery Indian food. I never tasted meat until I was twelve, when California law made them send me to school.

Dinner was amusing, Bill and Sara trading gossip about their friends’ dating and mating. Sara’s finally gotten over Taylor, who had been her steady for a year, and Bill had welcome news about a social disaster the boy had caused. It had stung her when he declared himself home, but after a few months’ fling he turned her again, and asked her to take him back. She told him to stick to boys. Now it turns out he did have a boyfriend over in Hardy, very secret, who got mad at him and came over to the college to make a loud public scene. It involved sexual details that we didn’t used to discuss at the dinner table. But times change, and fun is fun.

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Chapter two

The thing we were plotting actually grew out of an innocent bantering argument I’d had with Charlie and Diana some months before. Diana had been my medical officer during the Sade-138 campaign, our last, out in the Greater Magellanic Cloud; Charlie had served as my XO. Diana had delivered both Bill and Sara. They were our best friends.

Most of the community had taken Sixday off to get together at the Larsons’ for a barn-raising. Teresa was an old vet, two campaigns, but her wife Ami was third-generation Paxton. She was our age, biologically, and they had two fusion-clone teenaged daughters. One was off at university, but the other, Sooz, greeted us warmly and was in charge of the coffee and tea.

The hot drinks were welcome; it was unseasonably cold for late spring. It was also muddy. Middle Finger had weather control that was usually reliable–or used to be–but we’d had too much rain the previous couple of weeks, and moving clouds around didn’t seem to help. The rain gods were angry. Or happy, or careless; never could tell about gods.

The first couple to arrive, as usual, were Cat and Aldo Verdeur-Sims. And as usual, Cat and Marygay embraced warmly, but only for an instant, out of consideration for their husbands.

On her last mission Marygay, like me, was a het throwback in a world otherwise 100 percent home. Unlike me, she overcame her background and managed to fall in love with a woman, Cat. They were together for a few months, but during their last battle, Cat was severely wounded and went straight to the hospital planet Heaven.

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