The Voices of Heaven (23 page)

She paused there, so I tried to be sympathetic. I said, "That's a shame."

"Actually not," she said regretfully. "Mai had it coming. He shot a lep. It was in the early days, but he should've known better. He did it, though. He lost his temper and he had a gun, and the lep was dead. And he couldn't stand being shunned, and that's why he gave up and went home. And so I have a lot of sympathy for Theophan Sperlie."

I don't really know what else to say about that particular time. By then I had settled into a routine. I was working at whatever I was given to work at, asking all my questions, spending time with Geronimo—the times with Geronimo were probably the brightest spots in a rather boring period. I know you keep telling me that I should give you the whole story, omitting nothing, but, Jesus, that's asking a lot. My life on Pava just wasn't all that interesting.

The biggest job I had every day was trying to reconcile myself to things I didn't want to be reconciled to. I was trying to figure out what I should do with this new and diminished, life I had ahead of me on Pava. I was doing my best to learn what my options were. It was pretty tedious, if you want to know. Do you want me to tell you how many times a day I wished I had something I didn't have, or how often I wondered if I'd missed the boat with Theophan Sperlie, or how many new things I decided the Pavans were doing all wrong?

There were plenty of those. Those erratic tectonic jolts sure did screw things up, and I couldn't help thinking that there had to be something that could be done about that. Then there were the headaches with the hydrogen-fuel electrolysis plant for the shuttle. When I drew maintenance work there one day I discovered what a rat's-nest tangle of compressors and piping the plant was, and how delicate. Some essential part of the thing broke down and needed repairing about twice a year, and whenever a serious tremor came along, there were likely to be some really scary problems; now and then the hydrogen tanks would come close to rupture and you never knew if the whole thing might blow up. Or then there were those pitiful little mines. Pava needed mines, or at least we human parasites on it did, because you could go just so far with plastics and ceramics and wood even for the limited fabrication that was done on the surface. But Pava seemed to be a metal-poor planet—in the neighborhood of Freehold, anyway. Until they got a good source of asteroid iron for the factory orbiter, they needed to dig; and when they did manage to find a decent vein of iron ore it was not easy to persuade people to go down into the shafts. Twice a temblor had collapsed a mine tunnel already, though fortunately no one had been killed.

People did get killed on Pava, though. That was part of the price of pioneering. And yet—

And yet I don't want you to think that all my days were spent in mourning and complaining, because it all did seem sort of worthwhile.

We certainly didn't have a comfortable life. We seemed to spend most of our time just trying to keep ahead of the setbacks. But over and above all of that was the feeling that, somehow, everything we did was making history. With every day and every act we were scratching our own personal, ineradicable marks on the future of a world.

That's another sort of feeling that you leps don't ever have, isn't it? You don't have a group future to think about. The only future you have is your personal and individual one, and after you've had it you just die.

Of course, whatever optimism I could scare up about my own personal future was pretty heavily dampened by my personal state of health. I didn't tell you about going back to Dr. Billygoat.

It was the day the town meeting was scheduled. Billygoat was busy with somebody's colicky infant when I got there—even in the waiting room I could hear the howling from upstairs—so I tried to pass the time of day with his wife while I was waiting. "I saw Madeleine Hartly the other night," I told her, "and she looked kind of poorly."

Nan Goethe kept her eyes on the screen she was working on. "The doctor and I never discuss a patient's medical condition," she said primly, "especially when it's
serious
."

I didn't press further. I knew what a stop sign was when I saw one, and anyway I didn't have to. I didn't really need to have Nanny tell me just what it was that had Madeleine so housebound and frail, because I knew that at Madeleine's age "serious" meant "
damn
serious," and I didn't like having that knowledge. It's funny how fond you can get of a person on short acquaintance. I had become fond of Madeleine, and thinking about her took my mind right off worrying about what progress Dr. Billygoat had made in my case.

That turned out to be not much. When I finally got in he was waiting impatiently for me, with my whole life story spread out on his data-screens, but before he started he looked at his watch. "Are you going to the town meeting tonight?"

"I'm planning on it."

"Well, so am I. I need to try to requisition a new autoclave and a hell of a lot more pediatric medicines, so let's see if we can get through this fast, all right?" He scowled at the screens. "You know, you've made a lot of extra work for me, di Hoa."

He waved me to sit down and turned the screens around so I could see them too. I looked at them to please the doctor, but what meaning they were supposed to convey I could not say. He said, "I thought for a while there I might have a diagnosis for you that I could do something about. It didn't work out, but see this little area here? That's it. This one I could have worked with. Hartnup disease, they call it. Did you ever hear of it?"

"No." I would have remembered, I was pretty sure.

"It's an autosomal recessive defect a lot like yours—but turns out it's not a winner. With Hartnup you're supposed to be bleeding at the gums and all, too, and since you don't have any of that it can't be Hartnup."

He sounded irritated, as though he wanted me to apologize for having the wrong disease, so I did. I said, "I'm sorry to be a disappointment to you."

"Be serious, di Hoa. I'm trying to tell you what kind of problems I'm up against here. You don't fit any of the patterns in my database. You've got good thyroid function and no reaction-time crossover. Your glucose uptake is good, according to the brainscan. Look at the charts for yourself. You can see I did a real complete workup on you. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

This time it looked as though he wanted a compliment, so I tried to give him one. I said, "I think you aren't a bad doctor. For a dentist, anyway."

"Yes," he said, glaring at me. "Well, the rest of what I have to tell you isn't so good. Are you sure they said your problem was metabolic?"

"I'm sure."

"Because if it isn't, if it's just some kind of crazy psycho stuff, then it's out of my line. I'm not qualified for psychoanalysis or anything like that."

I didn't want to ask him what he was qualified for, exactly. I just repeated, "I'm
sure
."

He sighed regretfully. "I guess I have to take it for granted that those other people knew what they were doing. Okay. We'll go on the assumption that it was a good diagnosis and the problem's in your body chemistry. In that case, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is that I think I have a clue about what it might be that you need. The blood-assay machines tracked down a fraction that was in your blood when you came out of the freezer, but—look, you can see in this histogram here—that fraction had already become pretty scarce by the time of the last sample. I bet it's the protein you're missing."

"And?" I said when he paused, bracing myself for the second installment.

"Well, then there's the bad news," he admitted. "In the latest blood sample that fraction's so scarce that I can't isolate enough to clone it. I tried everything, di Hoa. We aren't a fully staffed Global Health Service laboratory here, you know. Even a polymerase reaction needs a decent-sized sample to start with, with the kind of equipment I've got here, and we just don't have enough of the stuff to work on."

He turned one of the screens back and stared at it morosely for a moment, then looked appraisingly at me. "I even wondered if it might help if I got a bigger blood sample from you."

That made me squirm, but I was game for anything that would do me any good. "How much bigger?"

"Real big. I thought for a while that we might try actually replacing all your blood. You know? Drain it all out—of course, replacing it with blood substitutes and transfusions so you wouldn't die on me—"

"Hey!"

"—but, don't worry, I gave that idea up. Even if we took all the blood, we might still not be able to separate enough of that fraction out. And then, of course, there's the other problem. While I was fooling around with your own blood, the replacement stuff you'd have left in your system wouldn't contain any of the protein at all. I don't suppose you want to spend a couple of really goofy weeks in a straitjacket while I'm experimenting, do you?"

I took a deep breath. When my temper was safely back down in its cage I managed to say, without too much gritting of the teeth, "You've got a great sense of humor, Goethe, but why don't you quit telling me all the things you can't do and cut to something you can."

He grinned at me. Grinned ruefully, I guess you'd say; even a little embarrassedly, because there was a touch of hangdog apology behind the grin. "I just wanted to make sure you understood how tough all this is, di Hoa. It isn't hopeless, though. We're not finished with you yet. There are some other options that are worth trying."

"Can I hear one of those now?"

"Remember we've got plenty of psychoactive pharmaceuticals on the shelf—pepper-uppers, mood elevators, tranquilizers, whatever you need to bring you back to normal, more or less. Anytime you feel you're getting into trouble, you come in and I'll give you a shot to fix that up. Temporarily, I mean; of course, you can't stay on those things forever. But maybe we can hold you while I try to figure out what I can do about long-range treatment."

"Which is what?"

"Well, maybe we can find something that'll work, di Hoa. What I've got to do now is start a whole series of bioassays, trying to characterize something we can get or make locally that might be close enough to what you need. Then, of course, we'll have to run a series of in vivo tests—"

"You mean experiment on
me
?"

"On who else, then? You're all I've got."

"Wonderful. It's what I've always dreamed of, being a laboratory rat."

Dr. Billygoat asked simply, "Have you got any better ideas? No? Then I'll let you know when I've got something to try—and now, if you don't mind, I'd like to try to get around to some of my other patients so I can make it to the town meeting."

16

THERE is a question to be asked concerning the purpose and putility of these "town meetings"—

No, hold it a minute. Please?

I'd appreciate it if you didn't ask me any new questions right now. I'm getting to the important part—well, the part that's important to me, anyway. You see, I was finally beginning to wake up.

What I mean is, I guess it's pretty obvious that for the first few weeks I was on Pava I was pretty much just letting things happen to me. That's not my nature. Honest. I'm not usually so passive. I'm more the kind who makes things happen. I'm not making excuses for myself, but I did take a real mean hit when I woke up in Tscharka's freezer and discovered I had become an involuntary Pavan. It took a while to get over that.

I probably wasn't really
over
it by then, either, but Dr. Billygoat had got me mad and the town meeting was that night, and by the time I got to the supper tables I had figured out what I wanted to do.

The place was crowded. Almost every human being on Pava was there. People from the outside crews, like the woodcutters and the maintenance workers at the hydrogen-fuel plant, had been drifting into town all day for the meeting. A dozen loud little knots of people were getting a head start in arguing out their personal priorities. Theophan Sperlie's table was the closest, and I sat down next to her. She was, naturally, with whom I expected her to be with—Marcus Wendt—and the two of them were bent head-to-head over a portable screen, hardly remembering to eat as she added up the list of tools and instruments she could not live another day without. She looked up absently as I sat, then zeroed in on me. "Oh, it's you, Barry. Hi. Listen, take a look at my requisition list, will you? I really need everything there—you know that—but the meeting isn't going to approve more than ten percent of the list. They never do, but I'll have to fight for even that much. Can I count on your vote?"

I caught a whiff of that sweet scent that hung around her, partly perfume and partly Theophan, but for once I didn't let it distract me. I went right into my pitch. "Sure, but tell me something. Why are you willing to settle for a lousy ten percent when you really need it all?"

Marcus gawked at me over Theo's shoulder, and Theophan gave me the kind of scowl you give to the willfully obtuse. Irritably she tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear and said, "What are you talking about? This isn't your damn Moon. Resources are limited, you ought to know that by now."

"They don't have to be this limited, Theo. There's plenty of fuel on
Corsair
. I'm willing to go up to the factory and see how much of a job it will be to install it."

Marcus chose to put his two cents' worth in then. He said forgivingly, "I guess you just don't grasp the problem, Barry. Fuel's one thing. Raw materials are another. We don't have them. The orbiter can't manufacture Theo's instruments out of nothing."

"It won't have to." I was talking to Theo, not Wendt. "There's a couple years' supply of raw materials sitting out there in orbit already. Think about it. They tell me the colony cannibalized one ship to use its materials a while ago. What's wrong with doing the same with
Corsair
?"

Marcus only looked both baffled and insulted—mostly insulted—but the stare Theophan gave me was stricken. "Oh, Jesus, Barry! You don't care whose toes you step on, do you? If we only could! But there's no way Garold Tscharka is going to agree to letting us take his ship apart."