The usual people had brought musical instruments, and they actually sounded pretty good in the big empty barn. People with some energy left danced on the new marble floor. I tended the fish and mushrooms and broiled onions, and drank almost enough skag to start dancing myself.
Man declined our food, politely, and made a few stress measurements, and declared the barn safe. Then she went home to do whatever it is they do.
Charlie and Diana joined me at the grill, setting out chicken pieces as I removed fish.
“So you’d fight them?” she said quietly. Charlie’d been talking to her. “To what end? If you killed every one of them, what would it accomplish?”
“Oh, I don’t want to kill even one of them. They’re people, whatever else they claim to be. But I’m working on something. I’ll bring it up at a meeting when we have the bugs ironed out.”
“We? You and Marygay?”
“Sure.” Actually, I hadn’t discussed it with her, since the thought had only occurred to me between the mastic and the girders. “One for one and all for all.”
“You had some strange sayings in the old days.”
“We were strange people.” I carefully loosened the grilled fish and slipped them onto a warm platter. “But we got things done.”
Marygay and I talked long into the night and early morning. She was almost as fed up as I was, with Man and our one-sided arrangement, breeding stock staked out on this dead-end arctic planet. It was survival, but only that. We should do more, while we were still young enough.
She was wildly enthusiastic about my scheme at first, but then had reservations because of the children. I was pretty sure I could talk them into going along with the plan. At least Sara, I thought privately.
She agreed that we ought to work out some details before we brought the thing to meeting. Not present it to the kids until after we’d talked it over with the other vets.
I didn’t sleep until almost dawn, blood singing with revolution. For several weeks we tried to act normal, stealing an hour here and there to take a notebook out of hiding and jot down thoughts, work on the numbers.
In retrospect, I think we should have trusted Bill and Sara to be in on it from the first. Our judgment may have been clouded by the thrill of shared secrecy, and the anticipated pleasure of dropping a bombshell.
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Chapter three
By sundown the rain had gone through sleet to soft sifting snow, so we let Bill go straight to his volleyball game, and walked over to Charlie’s. Selena, the larger moon, was full, and gave the clouds a pleasant and handy opalescence. We didn’t need the flashlight.
Their place was about a klick from the lake, in a copse of evergreens that looked disconcertingly like palm trees on Earth. Palm trees heavy with snow sort of summed up Middle Finger.
We’d called to say we were coming early. I helped Diana set up the samovars and tea stuff while Marygay helped Charlie in the kitchen.
(Diana and I had a secret sexual history that not even she knew about. Conventionally lesbian before she came here, during Sade-138 she had gotten drunk and made a pass at me, just to give it a try the old-fashioned way. But she passed out before either of us could do anything about it, and didn’t remember it in the morning.)
I lifted the iron kettle of boiling water and poured it over the leaves in two pots. Tea was one thing that adapted well to this planet. The coffee was no better than army soya. There was no place on the planet warm enough for it to grow naturally.
I put the heavy kettle back down. “So your arm’s better,” Diana observed. She’d given me an elastic thing and some pills, after I pulled a muscle working on the roof.
“Haven’t lifted anything heavier than a piece of chalk.”
She punched a timer for the tea. “You use chalk?”
“When I don’t need holo. The kids are kind of fascinated by it.”
“Any geniuses this term?” I taught senior physics at the high school and Introduction to Mathematical Physics at the college.