Charlie and I slopped around in the mud, connecting long plastic tubes in a winding snake back and forth in what would be the building’s sub-foundation. It was just align-glue-drop; align-glue-drop, until we were both half drunk from the glue fumes. Meanwhile, the crew that had nailed up the frame hosed water into the mud, so it would be nice and deep and soupy when we froze it.
We finished and hooked the loose ends up to a compressor and turned it on. Everybody took a break while we watched the mud turn to slush and harden.
It was warmer inside, but Charlie and I were too bespattered to feel comfortable in anyone’s kitchen, so we just sat on a stack of foamsteel girders and let Sooz bring us tea.
I waved at the rectangle of mud. “Pretty complex behavior for a bunch of lab rats.”
Charlie was still a little dull from the glue. “We have rats?”
“A breeding herd of lab rats.”
Then he nodded and sipped some tea. “You’re too pessimistic. We’ll outlast them. That’s one thing I have faith in.”
“Yeah, faith can move mountains. Planets.” Charlie didn’t deny the obvious: that we were animals in a zoo, or a lab. We were allowed to breed freely on Middle Finger in case something went wrong with the grand experiment that was Man: billions of genetically identical non-individuals sharing a single consciousness. Or billions of test-tube twins sharing a mutual data base, if you wanted to be accurate.
We could clone like them, no law against it, if we wanted a son or daughter identical to us, or fusion-clone like Teresa and Ami, if some biological technicality made normal childbirth impossible.
But the main idea was to keep churning out offspring with a wild mix of genes. Just in case something went wrong with perfection. We were their insurance policy.
People had started coming to Middle Finger as soon as the Forever War was over. Vet immigration, spread out over centuries because of relativity, finally totaled a couple of thousand people, maybe ten percent of the present population. We tended to stick together, in small towns like Paxton. We were used to dealing with each other.
Charlie lit up a stick and offered me one; I declined. “I think we could outlast them,” I said, “if they let us survive.”
“They need us. Us lab rats.”
“No, they just need our gametes. Which they can freeze indefinitely in liquid helium.”
“Yeah, I can see that. They line us up for sperm and egg samples and then kill us off. They aren’t cruel, William, or stupid, no matter what you think of them.”
The Man came out to get the manual for her machine, and took it back to the kitchen. They all looked alike, of course, but with considerable variation as they got older. Handsome, tall, swarthy, black-haired, broad of chin and forehead. This one had lost the little finger of her left hand, and for some reason hadn’t had it grown back. Probably not worth the time and pain, come to think of it. A lot of us vets remembered the torture of regrowing limbs and members.
When she was out of earshot, I continued. “They wouldn’t kill us off, but they wouldn’t have to. Once they had sufficient genetic material, they could round us up and sterilize us. Let the experiment run down, one natural death at a time.”
“You’re cheerful today.”
“I’m just blowin’ smoke.” Charlie nodded slowly. We didn’t have the same set of idioms, born six hundred years apart. “But it could happen, if they saw us as a political threat. They get along fine with the Taurans now, but we’re the wild card. No group mind to commune with.”
“So what would you do, fight them? We’re not summer chickens anymore.”
“That’s `spring’ chickens.”
“I know, William. We’re not even summer chickens.”
I clicked my cup against his. “Your point. But we’re still young enough to fight.”
“With what? Your fishing lines and my tomato stakes?”
“They’re not heavily armed, either.” But as I said that, I felt a sudden chill. As Charlie enumerated the weapons we did know them to have, it occurred to me that we were in a critical historical period, the last time in human history that there would be a significant number of Forever War veterans still young enough to fight.