Forever Free

“I understand,” it said, and made a noise like a throat clearing. “In your game with Charles, you should move the queen’s rook to QR6. Then sacrifice your remaining knight to the pawn, and move the black bishop up to checkmate.”

“Thanks. I’ll try to remember that.”

“I’ll miss everybody,” it said without prompting. “I do have plenty of information to move around and recombine; enough to keep busy for a long time. But it’s not the same as the constant chaotic input from you.”

“Goodbye, Ship.”

“Goodbye, William.”

There was a line floating for the lift. I clambered down the steps hand-over-hand, feeling athletic.

I realized I had shifted into an emotional mode reminiscent of combat. Something over which I had no control had suddenly put me into a situation where I had a 20 percent chance of dying. Instead of apprehension, I felt a kind of resignation, and even impatience: let’s get this over with, one way or the other.

Did I have three kilograms of stuff I wanted to take back to MF? The old book of paintings from the Louvre–I’d picked that up from a pile of Earth artifacts when I left Stargate for Middle Finger, a fairly new thousand-year-old antique. That wasn’t even a kilogram. I’d brought along my comfortable boots in case there were no cobblers forty thousand years in the future. But with only twenty-four years passing, Herschel Wyatt would probably still be at his last.

I wondered who would be fishing my trotlines. Not Bill. He would probably be in Centrus by now, totally integrated into Man. Hell, he might even have gone to Earth.

We might never see him again. That felt different now. I shook my head and four tiny globules of tears floated away from my lashes.

Marygay and I, along with the rest of the council and Diana and Charlie, waited till the last. The last shuttle was almost half empty: thirteen people had elected to stay behind.

Teresa Larson was their spokeswoman, still staying though her wife Ami was asleep aboard the second ship. Their daughter Stel was staying with Teresa; their other daughter was on MF.

“For me, there’s no decision,” she said. “God sent us on this pilgrimage, to come back and start anew. She interrupted our progress in order to test our faith.”

“You aren’t going to start anew,” Diana said. “You have ten thousand sperm and ova frozen, but not one of you knows how to thaw them out and combine them.”

“We’ll make babies the old way,” she said bravely. “Besides, we have plenty of time to study. We’ll learn your arts.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll starve or freeze right here. God didn’t take that antimatter away, and it’s not coming back.”

Teresa smiled. “You’re only saying that on faith. You don’t know any more about it than I do. And my faith is as good as yours.”

I wanted to shake some sense into her. Actually, I wanted to hunt them all down with the tranquilizer darts and load them aboard the ship unconscious. Almost everybody disagreed with me, though, and Diana wasn’t sure that they could be hooked up properly without being conscious and cooperating.

“I’ll pray for you all,” Teresa said. “I hope you all survive and find a good life back home.”

“Thank you.” Marygay looked at her watch. “Now go back to your people and tell them that at 0900 the ship will seal this door and evacuate the chamber. We can take anybody, everybody until 0800. After that, you just stay here and…take your chances.”

“I want to go with you,” Diana said. “One last chance to talk some sense into them.”

“No,” Teresa said. “We’ve heard you, and the ship has repeated your argument twice.” To Marygay: “I’ll tell them what you said. We appreciate your concern.” She turned and floated away.

There was only one zerogee toilet. Stephen Funk came out of it looking pale. “Your turn, William.”

The stuff tasted like honey with a dash of turpentine. The effect was an internal scalding waterfall.

In school, in anthropology, we read about an African tribe that lived all year on bread and milk and cheese. Once a year, they butchered a cow to gorge themselves on fat, because they thought diarrhea was a gift from the gods, a holy cleansing. They would have loved this stuff. Even I felt holier. In fact, I felt like one big empty hole.

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