Marygay climbed into the captain’s chair and strapped herself in.
“Are there any further casualties?” the Man said without preamble.
“I was going to ask the same thing. Jynn Silver.”
“The one who killed one of us.”
“A Tauran is not `one of us’ if you are human. Is she alive?”
“Alive and in custody. I think we have deduced much of your plan. Would you care to reveal it now?”
Marygay looked at me and I shrugged.
She spoke slowly and quietly. “Our plan is that this ship is not going to Earth. We demand to be allowed to use the Time Warp as we originally requested.”
“You can’t do that without our cooperation. Forty shuttle flights. What will you do if we refuse?”
She swallowed. “We’ll send everybody back on the shuttle we have. Then my husband and I will ride the Time Warp to the ground. Crash-land near the southern pole.”
“So you think we will give you the ship rather than let you kill yourselves?”
“Well, it won’t be too comfortable for you, either. When the antimatter fuel explodes, the resulting vapor will blanket Middle Finger in clouds. There will be no spring or summer, this year or next.”
“The third year,” I said from behind her, “will be blizzard and then floods.”
“We can’t allow that to happen,” he said. “So all right. We accede to your demands.”
We looked at each other. “That’s it?”
“You give us no choice.” Two data screens lit up. “The launch schedule you see here was adapted from your original timetable.”
“So this is all according to plan,” Marygay said. “Your plan.”
“A contingency,” he said, “in case you allowed us no alternative.”
She laughed. “You couldn’t just let us go.”
“Of course not. The Whole Tree forbade that.”
“Hold it,” I said. “You’re disobeying the Whole Tree?”
“Not at all. It is you who are defying it. We are only taking a reasonable course of action. Reaction, to your declaration of intent to wholesale murder.”
“And the Whole Tree predicted this would happen?”
“Oh, no.” For the first time, he allowed himself a small smile. “Men on Earth don’t know you as well as we who grew up with you.”
The sheriff tried to explain what he knew or could deduce about the rationale for their plan. It was like a theological argument in somebody else’s religion.
“The Whole Tree is not infallible,” he said. “It represents a huge and well-informed consensus. In this case, though, it was…it was like a thousand people taking a vote, where only two or three were actually well-informed.”
We were all at a big table in the dining hall, drinking bad tea made from concentrate. “That’s what I don’t understand,” Charlie said. “It seems to me that would happen more often than not.” He was directly across from the sheriff, staring intently, his chin in his palm.
“No, this was a special case.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Men on Earth think they know humans. They live and work with them all their lives. But they’re not at all the same kind of people as you are.
“They or their ancestors chose to come to Earth, even though it meant becoming part of a small minority, outside of Man’s mainstream culture.”
“Trading independence for comfort,” I said. “The illusion of independence.”
“It’s not that simple. They live more comfortably than you–or we–do, but what’s more important is that they deeply wanted to come home. People who chose Middle Finger turned their backs on home.
“So when a Man on Earth thinks about humans, there’s a profoundly different composite picture. If you took one hundred fifty Earth humans and shot them forty thousand years into the future…it would be cruel. Like snatching a child from its parents, and abandoning it in a foreign land.”
“That’s nice,” Charlie said. “The Whole Tree’s decision was based on concern for our happiness.”
“Concern for your sanity,” the sheriff said.
“The huge expense of the enterprise wasn’t a factor.”
“Not a large one.” He made a circular gesture, indicating everything around us. “This ship represents a lot of wealth in terms of our economy. But it’s not worth much in Earth terms. There are thousands of them sitting empty, parked in orbit around the Sun. This wouldn’t be a big project if people on Earth had proposed it.”