Free Transcendental by James Gunn Page A

looked up at him, widened by passion and squeezed tightly in fulfillment, and he had loved her and known then that he was destined for great things.
    He had grown up on Mars, terraformed over the centuries by bombardment with fragments from the asteroid belt and by water-laden comets and pieces of Saturn’s rings. His father had emigrated there with his new bride and his dreams of a better life. Jef Riley had built a hydroponic farm with his own hands, and prospered for a time, selling vegetables to new arrivals before he decided, in a fit of hubris, to try dry-land farming and lost everything. In desperation, he volunteered for the Interstellar Guard. He drilled for a month a year and for two days every month. He was promised that the Guard would never be used except for defense of Mars.
    Riley had worked inside the greenhouses and on the shifting red Martian soil, and before and after work his mother schooled him with computer programs and televised lessons. He loved the freedom, loved the new world, loved his mother, who was strong and beautiful, but hated the labor and his father’s folly, not realizing until much later that his father had cherished the same dream as his son—to get free, to be better than he was, to surpass his own limitations. All Riley could see then was the need to get away from the farm, from Mars even, and to take Tes with him.
    But Tes had been the first to volunteer as soon as she was sixteen and had been killed, like his father, in the first battles of the interstellar war. Riley had already been accepted to the Solar Institute of Applied Science, and his mother insisted he go. There had been enough death, she said; it was time to build, not to destroy. He had gone, not unwillingly but saddened, trying to make sense out of catastrophic change, trying to hate the aliens who had killed his father, his sweetheart, and his dreams. He was tortured by unanswerable questions: Why had the wars occurred? Why had the aliens attacked? Who were they? What did they want? How could humanity resist? Would humanity survive?
    It was difficult to focus on studies when the war raged through outer space, when media reports depicted attacks and victories and strategic withdrawals, complete with explosions and gouts of flame and the terrible faces of aliens looming out of the melee, brandishing weapons, or scattered across a barren battlefield like harvested grain. But Riley persisted, transferring to the classroom and laboratory the anxieties of wartime.
    Sharn had visited him in the recovery room, checking on his arm. Yes, it had been his arm she replaced, and in demonstrating its strength he had pulled her, unresisting, into his hospital bed. She came to him often after that, and he found that her fingers were good for more than working a surgical machine. Her body was trained and supple and responsive, and her mind was quick and perceptive. They talked more than they made love.
    They talked about humanity’s dreams of reaching the stars and the great ache in the heart of all humanity at the discovery that the stars belonged to someone else. That was what the wars were all about, Sharn thought: the battle for real estate. That was what all human wars had been about, she said, and the interstellar wars were no different. Good land was always scarce, and planets of the right size and the right distance from their suns were even scarcer. If humanity wanted any, if they wanted a future, they would have to take it from those who had it.
    Riley didn’t agree. “A classical humorist once said, ‘Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.’ But they are. Every system I ever visited had habitats. Mined-out asteroids, most of them. People living there, being born there, growing up there. Soon that’s all they’ll know. Lot of advantages to habitats. People don’t need planets. They can make their own living space—sometimes better.”
    “But it’s not land,” Sharn insisted. “It’s artificial, and sooner