Forever Free

Etta and Charlie and I, along with specialists we’d call in now and then, spent a few hours every afternoon working on plans to reclaim Centrus. We could start out with small colonies like The Muses, but eventually we wanted to have an actual city to grow into.

It would have been easier on Earth, or some other well-behaved planet. Dealing with month after month of bitter cold complicated everything. Just keeping buildings livable was a challenge. In Paxton, we’d supplemented electrical heat with fireplaces and stoves, but out there we had heat farms; fast-growing trees whose limbs were trimmed every year for fuel. Centrus was surrounded by hills with native trees, but their spongy “wood” didn’t burn well, and if we cut them down in quantity, we’d cause erosion and probably flooding, during the spring thaw.

The ultimate solution was going to be finding one of those power-sats and bringing it back. But that wouldn’t be this winter. And this winter had to be dealt with soon–not only did it cool off quickly as the summer faded, but the output of the solar power plant plunged at the same time–we weren’t just dealing with the inverse-square law (when the sun became twice as far away, we’d have one-fourth the power), but also more and more cloudy days, lacking weather-control satellites.

So we would go for wood stoves. There was enough wood at Lakeland to keep us warm through dozens of winters. Normally, the heat-farm trees were kept “topped,” so they never grew above eye level. Eight uncontrolled seasons had turned those acres into a tall dense jungle of fuel.

In a shed next to a chemical factory outside of Centrus, we found hundreds of steel drums, 100- and 250-liter, which made ideal stoves for heating. I used to be a welder, and in an hour I taught a couple of guys how to cut the proper holes in the drums. Alysa Bertram also knew how to weld; she and I attached the metal ducts to the stoves. Back at the dorm, and at Muses, people were improvising exhaust ducts through windows or walls.

We diverted one farm machine and one van to a wood-gathering detail; it was going to require 850 cords of wood, to be on the safe side. They needed it to make water out of ice, as well as for keeping warm and cooking.

Everybody breathed a little easier when the first crops started coming in. The flock of chickens had grown to laying size. The artists took two pair, which was going to make living in The Muses interesting, come winter. At the dorm, we were able to turn the downstairs cube room into a chicken coop. People who had to have a large cube or screen for their movies could share them with the chickens. There weren’t going to be regular cube broadcasts for a while, I thought. (That would prove wrong; faced with a long winter’s boredom, people would watch anything, even if it was their own neighbors being themselves in front of a camera downstairs.)

The sunny upstairs exercise room became a greenhouse, for growing seedlings to be transplanted. We could also grow greens there during the winter, for which Anita installed three woodstoves and supplemental lighting.

As for the truly big winter problem–finding an alternative to running through the snow to bare your butt over a slit trench at fifty below–Sage came up with a solution more direct than elegant. Even at this latitude there was a permafrost layer. Anything below seven meters (and not so deep that the earth began to warm) would freeze and stay frozen forever. We didn’t have earthmoving tools, or power, for that matter, to actually dig a pit deep enough and large enough for a population that was ninety and growing. But there was a copper mine only ten klicks out of town, and from it she appropriated shaped charges and a mining laser that did the job.

The folks in town would have to make do with their slit trench, but art always requires sacrifices. Going out to the frozen atrium would put them in touch with nature, and their inner selves.

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Chapter twenty-seven

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