Forever Free

I restarted the teaching schedule I’d been following on Time Warp–much, of course, to the students’ delight. I could drop general science, sadly, since my two youngest students had died in SA, but had to add calculus because the higher-math teacher, Grace Lani, had also died. That was a challenge. Doing calculus is a lot easier than teaching it, and the students I used to have had all been beyond the basics, so I didn’t have any experience with the chore.

After a month had passed, we were able to make an expedition to Paxton. This took both vans out of service for two days–their range was about a thousand kilometers, so the van that made the trip had to carry along the other van’s fuel cells.

The council magnanimously decided that one of the council should do it, and I drew the short straw. For my assistant and co-driver, I chose Sara. Like almost everyone, she was intensely curious. Also young and strong, to help with driving–all manual, of course–and changing over the heavy fuel cells. Marygay approved, though she would’ve liked to go herself. Sara was growing away from us, fast, but this was one area where our interests converged.

The van could carry three tonnes, so we could bring back a certain amount of stuff. I had Sara canvass people, and then we sat down with the list and made decisions. It was like the Time Warp winnowing process, in miniature. There weren’t very many purely sentimental requests, since those things had been taken aboard the time ship and either brought back or abandoned. But there was a limit to the time and effort we could spare–it would be worth going to Diana’s office and getting the medical records of the thirty-one of us she’d had as patients, for instance, but I wasn’t going to ransack Elena Monet’s place to find her crocheting kit.

We did have some hard decisions, juggling time and weight and needs, individual and communal. We were going to load Stan Shank’s ceramic kiln, even though it weighed half a tonne and you’d think such things would not be rare. But he’d searched Centrus, and all nine of the kilns he’d found were ruined; left on until they’d burned out.

Sara and I didn’t have anything on the list. But there was a little slack.

We left at first light, and a good thing. The trip, normally eight hours, took twenty, most of it crawling along the shoulder of the road rather than trying to negotiate the pavement’s rubble.

When we got there, we went straight through town to our old place. Bill had moved in as temporary caretaker, until someone else came along, able and willing to fish in exchange for a nice old house.

We went straight to the kitchen and built a fire. I left Sara to do that while I went out to the lake for a couple of buckets of water, for which I had to break a skin of ice.

In the barrel on the end of the dock, the stasis field was still on; it requires no power to maintain. It was about one-quarter full of fish. I went back to the kitchen for tongs and brought in a few. Absolute zero, of course, but they’d thaw in time for breakfast.

We warmed the water over the fire and drank old wine–I’d bartered it from Harras not five months ago–and when the water was hot enough, I carried a candle into the cold living room to read, while Sara bathed. Having grown up in a nudist commune, and going from there to the army’s communal showers, I didn’t have any modesty about bathing, and neither did Marygay. So of course our children turned out to be prudes.

It looked like Bill had still been here on the Day, and not alone. I recognized the pile of his clothes where he’d been sitting on the couch in the living room, next to a pile of woman’s clothing. Seeing his clothes was a sudden shock; my head swam and I had to grope for a chair.

When I could stand again, feeling curious and obscurely guilty, I checked upstairs, and yes, two people had slept in his unmade bed. I wondered who she was and whether they’d had time, or inclination, to fall in love.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *