Marygay assumed that was it; the physics of relativity and collapsar jump would separate them by years or centuries. So she came here to wait for me–not for Cat–on the Time Warp. She told me all about Cat soon after we got together, and I didn’t think it was a big deal; a reasonable adjustment under the circumstances. I’d always been easier with female homosex than male, anyhow.
So right after Sara was born, who should appear but Cat. She’d met Aldo on Heaven and heard about Middle Finger, and the two of them switched to het–something Man could easily do for you and, at that time, was required if you were going to Middle Finger. She knew Marygay was here, from Stargate records, and the space-time geometry worked out all right. She showed up about ten Earth years younger than Marygay and I were. And beautiful.
We got along well–Aldo and I played chess and go together–but you’d have to be blind not to see the occasional wistfulness that passed between Cat and Marygay.
We sometimes kidded one another about it, but there was an edge to the joking. Aldo was more nervous about it than me, I think.
Sara came along with us, and Bill would come with Charlie and Diana after church let out. We unbelievers got to pay for our intellectual freedom by donning work boots and slogging through the mud, pounding in the reference stakes for the pressor field generator.
We borrowed the generator from the township, and along with it got the only Man involved in the barn-raising. She would have come anyway, as building inspector, after we had the thing up.
The generator was worth its weight in bureaucrats, though. It couldn’t lift the metal girders; that took a lot of human muscle working together. But once they were in position, it kept them in place and perfectly aligned. Like a petty little god that was annoyed by things that weren’t at right angles.
I had gods on the brain. Charlie and Diana had joined this new church, Spiritual Rationalism, and had dragged Bill into it. Actually, they didn’t have gods in the old sense, and it all seemed reasonable enough, people trying to put some poetry and numinism into their everyday lives. I think Marygay would have gone along with it, if it weren’t for my automatic resistance to religion.
Lar Po had surveying tools, including an ancient laser collimator that wasn’t much different from the one I’d used in graduate school. We still had to slog through the mud and pound stakes, but at least we knew the stakes were going where they belonged.
The township also supplied a heavy truck full of fiber mastic, more reliable than cement in this climate, and easier to handle. It stayed liquid until it was exposed to an ultrasonic tone that was two specific frequencies in a silent chord. Then it froze permanently solid. You wanted to make sure you didn’t have any on your hands or clothes when they turned on the chime.
The piles of girders and fasteners were a kit that had come in a big floater from Centrus. Paxton was allotted such things on the basis of a mysterious formula involving population and productivity and the phases of the moons. We actually could have had two barns this spring, but only the Larsons wanted one.
By the time we had it staked out, about thirty people had showed up. Teresa had a clipboard with job assignments and a timeline for putting the thing up. People took their assignments good-naturedly from “Sergeant Larson, sir.” Actually, she’d been a major, like me.
Charlie and I worked together on the refrigeration unit. We’d learned the hard way the first years on this planet, that any permanent building bigger than a shed had to sit on ice year-round. If you carve down to the permafrost and lay a regular foundation, the long bitter winters crack it. So we just give in to the climate and build on ice, or frozen mud.
It was easy work, but sloppy. Another team nailed together a rectangular frame around what would be the footprint of the building, plus a few centimeters every way. Max Weston, one of the few guys big enough to wrestle with it, used an air hammer to pound alloy rods well below the frost line, every meter or so along the perimeter. These would anchor the barn against the hurricane-force winds that made farming such an interesting gamble here. (The weather-control satellites couldn’t muster enough power to deflect them.)