Dad shook his head. "Earthside jurisdiction doesn't apply. As indentured colonists, we're the property of the corporation. If I haven't broken any starside laws, they can't touch me. I checked it out before we left, Charles. As long as we have a valid contract, we're safe."
It sounded too easy, but maybe—I didn't know. There was too much happening for me to figure out. "I don't get it. I thought you said this was a stupid idea."
"Yeah, but staying is stupider. For me, anyway."
"Why?" I demanded.
"It's about my scholarship," Douglas said. "I'm not going to get it."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Same way I know about the cops. A kid with a wire and a big mouth."
"Do you know why?" He took a deep breath. "They don't give you the scholarship if you don't need rechanneling."
"Oh," I said. And then, "Oh!"
"It was Mickey," Douglas said.
Mickey? The elevator attendant?! For a moment, I didn't know what to feel. Angry. Or jealous. Or hurt. Or curious. Or just disgusted. While I hadn't been looking, Douglas really had turned into a grownup.
I didn't know what to say, so I said something I'd never said to him before. At least not like this. "I'm sorry, Douglas."
He reached over and put his hand on mine. "There's nothing to be sorry about, Chigger. This is how things turned out."
"I know, but—you wanted to go to UCLA."
"There are good schools in the outbeyond."
"Yeah, but you said it would be slavery—" I shut up. I had the feeling that I didn't know what I was talking about anymore.
"It's an economic decision. You sell what you have. If you don't have anything to sell, you sell who you are. It's only seven years, Chigger. And then I'll be a free man on a new world." He sounded resigned. As if he hadn't finished convincing himself. "And it's not like the old kind of slavery. It's not—not really."
He sounded more like a grownup than I'd ever heard him sound before. I didn't like it very much. It made me feel abandoned, sort of. More alone than before—like someone had taken away my security. Again.
Now, Dad spoke up. "You know what the joke is, Charles? I'd asked Douglas to come with me to the outbeyond, because I wanted him to have the chance at a life without rechannelling. Now—it turns out that it doesn't matter. But it's still a good choice, Charles—I think it's one that will work out all right for him in the long run."
"Yeah," I said, "I sort of see the joke. And I sort of understand. But what about me and Stinky? What happens to us?"
"I really wish you wouldn't call your brother that," Dad said, but that wasn't what he really wanted to say. He tried to run his hand through his hair, he only ended up brushing his near-naked scalp. He looked annoyed, sighed, and started again. "You see, Charles, here's the thing—I was pretty sure that Douglas wasn't going to want to come with me. He'd made that clear back in Mexico. So I'd been counting on him to take you and Bobby back to Earth. That is, if you didn't want to come any farther with me. Now that he's decided to go on, that puts the responsibility on you. Do you want to go back? Or do you want to come with?"
"But what about Sti—Bobby?"
"First we need to know what you want to do."
"If I go back, I'll be living with Mom again, won't I?"
"Your mother is a good woman," Dad said, but he didn't sound like he believed it.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "She's good enough for me to live with, but not good enough for you."
"Point taken," Dad said.
"And if I go with you—"
"When I put my name in the registry, I also put your name in, as a possible. And Douglas and Bobby too. So far, we have one bid from the Sierra Corporation. That's not too bad. But I haven't accepted it yet; I'm waiting to see who else bids. Then we'll pick the best. I'm more valuable if I bring sons, but it'll be your choice to come with me."
"What if nobody else bids?"
"Then we go with Sierra. I'll accept the bid before we disembark."
"What if we don't like the Sierra contract?"
"I took out an insurance policy against that. We're guaranteed a suitable bid or our passage home."
"Oh," I said.
"So you don't have to let that influence your decision."
"But it does," I said. "This really is a Magical Mystery Tour, isn't it?" Just like you said—we're not going to know where we're going until we get there."
"So you're coming?"
I shrugged. "What's to go back to?"
"You know that I'm breaking the law if I try to take you against your will."
"You've already broken the law, Dad."
He nodded. "Consider it a measure of how much I love you."
DECISIONS POSTPONED
When you're a kid, you just keep on going like you're going to be a kid forever. And every time someone calls you young man or young adult or talks about grownup responsibilities, you just blink and wonder what they're talking about. How can a kid make that kind of decision? But that's what Dad was asking me to do now.
Would the grownup I was going to become feel that I had done the right thing? Or would he hate me for condemning him to whatever bad consequences came of this decision? What was I supposed to choose here?
Weird tried to help. In his clumsy way. He punched up some programs on the TV to give me an idea of what the options were.
One program was about the different colonies. What it was like to live and work there. None of the colonies really looked like a fun place to live—they were either too hot or too cold. The sky was the wrong color on all of them. And none of the colony planets had any life at all, except what you brought with you and grew in your own indoor farms. What was true about all of them was that it took a lot of work just to stay alive. Hard work.
On the other hand, none of the colonies had seventeen billion people all competing for the same jobs and the same houses and the same mouthfuls of food. The per capita comparisons were astonishing. Dad said that on Earth the chances of becoming a millionaire were one in seventeen million. On any of the colonies, right now, the chances were one in twenty. All you had to do was survive.
"Why don't they use robots?" I asked.
"They do," Dad said. "But robots can't do it all. They need people to do the hard part—make decisions and babies. In that order."
"But Douglas can't make babies—"
"Yes, I can," said Douglas. "It's the how that's different."
I shook my head. I didn't want to argue about that stuff.
"Look, kiddo," Dad said. "The human race has eaten the Earth. We're walking an ecological tightrope. A crop failure here, a plague there, a war somewhere else—and every time the system collapses a little bit more, we patch it up somehow and keep on going for a little bit longer. We add a few more mechanisms around the edges to help keep it from collapsing quite the same way the next time, but the basic inequilibrium just keeps on going. The whole thing is staggering like a drunken sailor—sooner or later he's going to fall down. It's not a question of if; it's a question of when. There are sixteen billion people too many on the planet and there's no telling how long that condition can be sustained. But whether it's sustained or whether it collapses, either way, most of those people aren't going to have the kind of freedom in their lives that you can have out in the colonies. The freedom to design your own possibilities."
"We have freedom—" I started to say.
"No." Dad shook his head. "We don't have freedom. The only freedom you have is inside your head, and there's not too much of that left anymore. We can't have freedom the way Earth is presently constituted. If freedom is the ability to swing your fist, there are seventeen billion places on Earth where your freedom stops. In order to keep all of those people alive, we've sacrificed all kinds of individual liberties—including the right to be who you want to be. The more people you have, the more accommodations you have to make to society. But good grief, Charles! What do you think my argument with Douglas was all about? It wasn't about what he would be—it was about the fact that he was being pushed into it. And someday, you're going to be pushed in that same direction. And Bobby too. That's when I started thinking about getting you boys offworld somehow. Someplace where you wouldn't have to make any concessions or accommodations to anyone else."