Free Forever Free by Joe Haldeman

does take a lot of stuff to keep 150 people happy for a decade, but much of it was already built into the ship, like the gym and theater. There were even two music rooms, acoustically isolated, so as not to drive neighbors to acts of vandalism. (We tried to get a real piano, speaking of antiques, but there were only three on Middle Finger, so we had to settle for a couple of electronic ones. I couldn't hear the difference, myself.)
    Some requests had to be turned down because of the size of our little mobile town. Eloi Casi wanted to bring a two-tonne block of marble, to work for ten years on an intricate sculptural record of the voyage. I would love to see the result, but would not love living with "clink … clink … clink." He compromised with a log, a half-meter by two meters, and no power tools.
    Marygay and I were the initial arbiters for these requests, always with the understanding that everything from Eloi's huge sculpture to a brass band could be approved by referendum, after the Whole Tree's acceptance.
    I explained to Man that we might need extra launches for "afterthought" luxuries that the population voted to include, and they were cooperative. They actually were getting into the spirit of the thing, in their own undemonstrative way: it was interesting to be in on the beginning of an experiment forty millenniums long.
    (They even went so far as to write up a description of the voyage and its purpose in a physical and linguistic medium that might last all those centuries: eight pages of text and diagrams inscribed on platinum plates, and another twelve pages that comprised an elaborate Rosetta Stone, starting with basic physics and chemistry, from which they derived logic, and then grammar, and finally, with some help from biology, a vocabulary large enough to describe the project in simple terms. They planned to put the plates on a wall in an artificial cave on the top of the highest mountain on the planet, with duplicates on Mount Everest on Earth and Olympus Mons on Mars.) It's both natural and odd that Marygay and I wound up being leaders of the band. We did come up with the idea, of course, but we both knew from our military experience that we weren't natural-born leaders. Twenty years' parenting and helping a small community grow had changed us—and twenty years of being the "oldest" people in the world. There were plenty of people older than us in actual aging, but nobody else who could remember life before the Forever War. So people came to us for advice because of this mostly symbolic maturity.
    Most people seemed to assume that I was going to be the captain, when the time came. I wondered how many would be surprised when I stepped down in favor of Marygay. She was more comfortable with being an officer.
    Well, being an officer had gotten her Cat. All I got was Charlie.
     
    The meeting broke up before dark. The first heavy flakes of a long storm were drifting down. There would be more than half a meter on the ground by morning; people had livestock to manage, fires to kindle, children to worry about—children like Bill, out on the road in this weather.
    Marygay had gone to the kitchen to make soup and scones and listen to music, while Sara and I sat at the dining room table and consolidated all of the scribblings on her once-neat chart into a coherent timetable. Bill called from the tavern, where he'd been in a pool tournament, and said he'd like to leave the floater there, if nobody needed it right away, and walk home. The snow was so dense in the air that headlights were useless. I said that was a good idea, not mentioning the slur in his speech that made it a doubly good idea.
    He seemed sober when he got home, more than an hour later. He came in through the mudroom, laughing while he beat snow off his clothes. I knew how he felt—this kind of snow was a bitch to drive in, but wonderful for walking. The sound of it feathering down, the light touch on skin—nothing like the killer horizontal