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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
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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 cr�che 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.
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
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