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a mattress on the floor and a toilet. There was a fold-down sink next to the toilet, and across
from it, a fold-down desk. But no chair. The desk had a keyboard, but it didn't work.
It had a barroom smell, spilled alcohol. That must be what they used as a disinfectant, for
some reason.
I knew from a visit last year that the place had only two detention rooms, so Marygay and I
constituted a crime wave. (Serious criminals, actually, didn't even spend the night here; they
went straight to the real jail in Wimberly.)
I spent a while contemplating the error of my ways, and then managed to get a few hours' sleep
in spite of not being able to turn off the lights.
When the sheriff opened the door I could see sunshine behind him; it was ten or eleven. He
handed me a white cardboard box that had soap, a toothbrush, and such. "The shower is across the
hall. Please join me for tea when you are ready." He left with no further explanation.
There were two showers; Marygay was already in one of them. I raised my voice. "He tell you
anything?"
"Just unlocked the door and said to come for tea. Why didn't we ever think of doing this with
the children?"
"Too late to start now." I showered and shaved and we went to the sheriff's office together.
His pistol was hanging on a peg behind him. The papers on his desk had been hastily stacked in
a corner, and he'd set out a pot of tea with some crackers and jam and honey.
We sat and he poured us tea. He looked tired. "I've been with the Tree all night." Since it
had become daytime in Centrus, he might have been with hundreds or a thousand Men. "I have a
tentative consensus."
"That took all night?" I said. "For a group mind, you don't synape very fast." I kidded my Man
colleagues at the university about that. (Physics, in fact, was a good demonstration of Man's
limitations: an individual Man could tap into my colleagues' brains, but he or she wouldn't
understand anything advanced without having previously studied physics.)
"In fact, much of that time was waiting for individuals to be summoned. Besides
your...problem, there was another important decision to be made, not unrelated. `The more leaves,
the more Tree.' "
The jam was greenberry, a spicy sour flavor I'd liked immediately--one of the only things that
had impressed me, the first day on Middle Finger. I'd arrived in deep winter.
"So you've decided to hang us in the town square?" I said. "Or will it be a simple private
beheading?"
"If it were necessary to kill you, it would already have been done." Great sense of humor.
"What would be the point in explaining things?"
He poured himself some tea. "There will be a wait. I need confirmation from the Whole Tree."
That meant sending word to Earth and back, at least ten months. "But the tentative consensus is to
send you away with my blessings. Give you the time shuttle."
"And in return," Marygay said, "you lose one hundred fifty powerful malcontents."
"It's not just that. You are already fascinating anachronisms. Think of how valuable you will
be forty thousand years from now!"
"Living fossils," I said. "What an idea."
He hesitated for a moment; the word was unfamiliar. There were no actual fossils on his world.
"Yes, in body as well as in modes of thought. In a way, I owe it to my own heritage. I should have
thought of it myself." In their own language, there was a "collective `I,' " which I assumed he
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was using.
"You said there were two decisions," Marygay said. "A related one."
"A mirror of yours, in a way." He smiled. "Yon know I love humans very much. It has always
saddened me to see you go through life crippled."
"Crippled...by our individuality?" I said.
"Exactly! Unable to tap the Tree, and share life with billions of others."
"Well, we were given the choice when we mustered out. I've had over twenty years to regret not
joining you, and so far I'm just as glad I didn't."
"You did have the choice, yes, and some veterans took it."
"How many?" Marygay asked.
"Actually, less than one percent. But I was new and strange to you then.
"The point is that it's been a hundred Years--nearly three hundred Earth years--since anyone
was given the choice. The population of Middle Finger has grown in that time to over twenty
thousand, more than large enough to maintain a viable genetic pool. So I want to start giving
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zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plcs-sysunia.htw.pl
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