“But they wouldn’t let him! They wouldn’t leave him alone. They could always find him, and every day they sent someone new to try to bring him into the fold. He’d fight the messengers–or at least assault them; they didn’t fight back–and even killed some. A new one would show up the next day, full of pity and concern.”
“After a month or two, the one who showed up was an army re-enlistment officer. He was gone the next day.” We watched the fire for a while.
“You think you could’ve adjusted?”
“Not adjusted. I could never be like them. But I could have lived in their world.”
“So could I,” she said. “It sounds like Man’s world.”
“Yeah, I suppose it does.” The one I rejected for Middle Finger. “It was probably a first step. Even though we didn’t make peace with the Taurans for another thousand years.”
She took our bowls and spoons to the sink, walking with careful unsteadiness. “I sort of hope it’s different, if I get, if we get chosen.”
“It will be. Everything changes.” I wasn’t sure, though, once Man got a hold of it. Why mess with perfection? She agreed, and made her way upstairs to bed. I washed the bowls and spoons, pointlessly. This house probably wouldn’t have inhabitants again in my lifetime.
I made up my pallet by the fire, after wrestling a big overnight log into place. I lay down and stared at the flames, but couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe I’d had too much wine; that sometimes happens.
For some reason I was haunted by images of war–not only actual memories of the campaigns and the gore we twice had to deal with in transit. But I also went way back to training; to the ALSC-induced fantasies of combat, killing phantoms with everything from a rock to a nova bomb. I thought about having some more wine, enough to chase them away. But I’d be driving, steering, at least half of a long day.
Sara clumped down sniffling with her pillow and blankets and said, “Cold.” She snugged up to me the way she used to when she was little, and in a minute was softly snoring. The familiar warm smell of her drove the demons away, and I slept, too.
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Chapter twenty-six
Eventually, other people went on expeditions to Thornhill, Lakeland, and Black Beach/White Beach, scavenging from the lost past. No new clues as to what had happened showed up, but the dorm did become more homey, and crowded, with the junk they brought back.
Toward the end of spring, we began to expand, although it was more like an amoeba slowly splitting. There were no central utilities, and wouldn’t be for some time, so they had to reproduce in miniature our mechanisms for power and plumbing and so forth.
Nine people moved into a building downtown that had been called “The Muses,” a place where artists, musicians, and writers lived together. All the materials for those pursuits were still in place, though the cold had ruined some of them.
Eloi Casi’s lover, Brenda Desoi, brought along the unfinished small sculpture that Eloi had given her before we left the Time Warp; she wanted to make an installation around it, and she knew that Eloi had spent a deep winter studying and working at The Muses when he was young. She found eight others who wanted to move there and start making art and music again.
There was no objection–in fact, most of us would have borne Brenda out on our shoulders, just to get rid of her. We’d found a storage room full of solar panels and equipment out at the spaceport, and so that was not a problem; Etta Berenger set it up in a few afternoons. She also designed a year-round latrine for them, in an elegant atrium, but allowed them to do the artistic pick-and-shovel work themselves.
That freed up six rooms at the dorm. We shuffled people around so that the west end of the building was given over to Rubi and Roberta’s crèche and the families who were raising children on their own. It was good for the kids to have other kids around, and marvelous to have a door–the firedoor that isolated the west wing–beyond which children could not go unescorted.