People were excited about an expedition to Earth. The escape ships still had plenty of fuel for a collapsar jump, there and back. If there were still people and Man and Tauran on Earth, they might be able to help us figure out what had happened. If there were none, we’d be no worse off, one more bit of data.
Or so the reasoning went. I agreed, but some were not so sure that we had so completely cut our bonds to Earth. If everyone was gone, if they’d disappeared on the Day, we wouldn’t stop hearing from them for another sixty-four Earth years. By that time, we’d be re-established on MF–it would be a shock, but life would go on.
If we were to find out now, still reeling from the original disaster, that we were alone in the universe–and still vulnerable to whatever force had snuffed out everyone else–it might be more than we could handle, as individuals and as a culture. So the theory went.
We were not too stable “as a culture” even now. If the last ship was indeed lost, we totaled 90 people, only 4 of them children. (Two of the 9 who died in SA were under twelve years of age.) We had to start making babies, wholesale as well as retail, hatching some of the thousands of ova frozen aboard the ships.
The prospect was not greeted with enthusiasm. A lot of the people were like me and Marygay: we’ve already done that! Among the various options we’d seen opening up in middle age-like the wild scheme to highjack the Time Warp–starting a second family was pretty low on the list.
Sara comprised one-fourth of the females old and young enough for natural motherhood, and she wouldn’t have felt ready for it even if any of the available men appealed to her. None of them did.
The sheriff suggested we raise a large batch Man-style, in a group crèche, with no parents as such, just supervisors. I could see some merit to it, since a large majority of them actually wouldn’t have living parents, and if it wasn’t for the association with Man, I think most would have gone along with it. But there was a general counter-sentiment; this was the kind of thing we wanted to escape from, and now you want to re-invent it?
They might reconsider when they have four or five infants crawling around. The council decided on a compromise, only possible because we had people like Rubi and Roberta, who were mad about children but unable to have their own. They volunteered to supervise a crèche. Every year–three times a Year–they would hatch eight or ten from the ship’s stores; they’d also take on the stewardship of unwanted children born the old-fashioned way.
Antres 906 was probably worse off than any of us, though of course it’s hard to say anything about a Tauran’s emotional state. For all it knew, Antres 906 was the last survivor of its race. They didn’t have gender, but they couldn’t reproduce without an exchange of genetic material–a holdover from their ancient past, since for millenniums all Taurans had been genetically identical.
People were getting used to the sight of it wandering around, trying to be helpful, but it was like the situation aboard the Time Warp: it essentially had no useful skill, being a linguist who was the sole speaker of its language, and a diplomat representing only itself.
Like the sheriff, the Tauran could tap into the Tree, but they both had the same experience. There was no sense of any danger or even problem approaching, but after the Day, no information had been added. The last collapsar-jump message from Earth, three weeks before the Day, also had no premonitions of disaster, from either Man or Tauran.
Antres 906 was in favor of going to Earth or Kysos, nominally the Tauran home planet, and volunteered to make the collapsar jump alone, and come back with a report. Marygay and I believed it was sincere, and I think we knew Antres 906 better than anyone but the sheriff. But most people thought that would be the last we saw of ship or Tauran (but some of them thought it would be worth losing a ship to get rid of the last surviving enemy).