The Voices of Heaven (29 page)

And Marcus said:

"Don't sit there. That's Theo's place."

That took swift care of my fantasies. Sure enough, a minute later Theophan came back with another helping of the something or other loaf for Marcus and a salad for herself. She was not cheerful. "Barry," she said as soon as she caught sight of me, "I'm beginning to get worried. I have to have some new equipment and I can't wait."

I shrugged, meaning What do you want from me? I'm not responsible for Garold Tscharka.

She went on regardless: "I've got an ugly feeling. That little cluster of tremors we've been having? I think there's a good chance that they're foreshocks for something a lot bigger. How'm I supposed to do my job? There's all kinds of data that would help. I ought to be measuring radon emissions, checking water-table levels, all that sort of thing—but I don't have the tools to do it with."

Becky said, in a superior way, "Garold says if Freehold had been established in a better place we wouldn't have that kind of worries."

Theo gave her an unfriendly look. "I wasn't consulted, was I? I wasn't even here when they picked this place. I'm just the one that gets blamed."

"So you blame me?" I said, meaning it lightly. It didn't come out that way. It came out defensive.

"Oh, not really, Barry. I'm sorry if it sounded that way," Theo said. She picked at her salad moodily. "It's just that time passes and nothing happens, and you got my hopes up. It's really Tscharka's fault."

That stung Becky Khaim-Novello. "Now, really! You mustn't say that. Garold Tscharka knows what's best for all of us. I'm sure that he'll do whatever's necessary."

"You think so? I wish I had your confidence. And what do we do if Barry here goes off the deep end before he gets around to it?"

So there it was again.

I didn't let it pass. By then I figured that it might as well all be out in the open, so I told them what I'd told Madeleine, and then I got up and started back to the apartment. I'd lost my appetite anyway.

As I left I felt as though everybody at the tables was giving me funny looks. I didn't like it. I didn't like being frustrated about the factory, either, but I was. The longer Tscharka stayed in orbit, the more unlikely it seemed that we'd ever get going on the plan to revitalize the satellite, and the more the colony seemed to revert to its torpor.

I hardly noticed when Geronimo came galumphing after me—he'd been foraging among the kitchen wastes while I ate—until I heard his whispery voice. "Candy, Barrydihoa?" he coaxed. And I fumbled in my pocket for another of those sour balls and felt a little better. There weren't many bright spots in my life those days, but there was always one, and its name was Geronimo.

I know that I keep coming back to Geronimo. I even know that I don't really have to tell you everything about him, because you know more than I do about the little guy. He was important to me, though. I never would have guessed that at a critical time in my life my best friend would turn out to be a squirmy, big-eyed caterpillar, but he was.

I didn't know what made Geronimo adopt me as a pal. He just did. It wasn't only a matter of playing games with him, and neither was it just the candy that he came for. He was there when I needed him, and he helped me. When I was sent out to hoe the garden plots, Geronimo worked right along with me. He didn't have the height or the strength for a man-sized hoe, but he did well enough humping along the muddy rows with a little spudding tool and he didn't mind the wet. When I was assigned to sort over broken tools to see what could be salvaged, he was there to tug the loads to the repair bins for me. And we talked.

Geronimo was fuller of questions than anyone else I'd ever met—well, except you, that is. The difference between the two of you was that there weren't any wrong answers to his questions. He wasn't grading me, and there wasn't any penalty if I failed.

What did Geronimo want to know? Everything. He wanted to know what spaceships were, and then what planets were—it astonished him when I told him he was living on one—and then what cities were. When I told him they were a lot like Freehold but a million times bigger he just chewed for a moment in silence on the roseberry branch we were sharing—I was eating the fruit, he was eating the leaves. Then he changed the subject. He didn't say anything directly, but he looked skeptical. I don't think he believed any rational creature would choose to live in a place as grotesquely huge as New York or Metro Mexico. Not even a human being.

Then we got into the baffling—to him—subject of human relationships. I told him about my ex-wife, Gina, and my son—you could almost call him my ex-son—Matthew, and then I tried to explain to him what "wife" and "son" meant, which was even harder for him to understand.

Our talks weren't all one-way. He answered my questions, too—well, some of them. Others just made him change the subject. He refused to talk about Theophan Sperlie, or about the recent suicide of my neighbor, Jubal Khaim-Novello. And he didn't seem to want to tell me very much about the way you people lived in your nests.

That was all right. I had plenty of other questions. There was a lot about leps that I didn't understand. Like your names, for instance.

We got to talking about that one evening, when he and I had just brought a carful of windfallen apples back to town and we were killing time while we waited to be told where to store them. It was drizzling again, though not enough to make it worthwhile to look for shelter. The apples were an unfamiliar variety to me, small and hard, but I ate one just for the sake of doing something. While we were sitting there it occurred to me to ask Geronimo why leps adopted human names.

He took a thoughtful moment to chew, the ragged, round edges of his mouthpart sawing away at the apple he had appropriated as his reward before he answered. Then he said, "I think it is because you could not say our real names."

"Try me," I said.

He vibrated his hard, slim tongue rapidly for a moment to clear it of apple pulp, then he made a queer, whistly sound. I got him to repeat it four or five times and copied it as best I could. "Is that right?"

"No."

"Is it at least close, anyway?

"Closer than I would have expected, though no one would recognize it. It is not worth your while to get it right, though. It will not matter in a few weeks."

I stopped chewing my own apple to look at him. "What's going to happen in a few weeks?*'

"I will take my fourth-instar name, of course. That will be, I think,——" And he made another of those sounds.

It was the first time I'd heard that leps changed their real names with each stage of development, and when he told me what his second-instar name had been, I thought I could detect a sort of a system.

"They get more complicated as you go along, but there are a lot of the same sounds, aren't there? What did you say your first-instar name was?"

"I did not say. There was none. We have no names in the first instar. We have none in the sixth, either, since no one in the sixth instar would be likely to recognize his name."

I tossed my apple core away, and then what he had said finally registered with me. "Hey! What do you mean it won't matter? Are you going to molt or something?"

"Indeed yes, Barrydihoa."

"Oh," I said, and stopped there, unsure of whether to follow it with "Too bad" or "Congratulations." "So then I won't be seeing you for awhile?"

"I will be cocooned for about twenty days. Provided the weather is satisfactory. Provided also that there are no accidents."

"I see," I said, and just as though the word "accidents" had been her cue, which it dramatically might have been if I had been making this into a screen show instead of just telling you all the things that happened, Theophan Sperlie came around the back of the car and greeted us.

I stood up to say hello, and she shook my hand. "How are you fellows doing?" she asked politely, helping herself to a wet apple.

"Just fine," I answered, though Geronimo didn't. He had already wriggled well out of earshot and was now ignoring us, putting all his attention into a bruise spot he'd found on his apple, rooting it out with his hard, rough tongue and spitting it away.

Theophan didn't seem to notice that he was avoiding her—well, she'd had plenty of opportunity to get used to that. "Barry," she said, "can you do me a favor?" I made a non-committal noise, waiting to hear what the favor was. "I'm having more troubles with that goddamn strain gauge we set out in the Rockies. With all the other uncertainties I need its data, and it isn't reporting. You didn't drop it or anything on the way up, did you?"

"Not me."

"Well, I need to have it working. If the weather clears tomorrow, we've got to get up there and fix it."

She surprised me with that. I couldn't resist a small dig. "Oh, really? What 'we' are we talking about, Theo, you and me? Why not you and Marcus? Is the work getting too heavy for him again?"

She glared at me. "No, the work is not too heavy for him. Anyway, it'll be pretty easy to go up there this time, actually. All we'll have to carry up the hill is tools. But I can't ask Marcus because he has his own work." She hesitated, then went on: "See, he's been talking to Becky Khaim-Novello, and he got some really fine material out of her for his novel—"

I gaped at her. "His what?"

She sounded impatient. "Oh, why do you think he signed up to come to Pava in the first place? It wasn't because he wanted to be some kind of pioneer. Marcus has been looking for suitable material to make into a novel for a long time. He wants it to be a big one, you see. One that'll make his reputation when he gets home. Now he's getting what he needs from Becky, and he says he has to get it all down in store while it's fresh. I don't know, I guess that's the way authors are."

It was the first I'd heard that Marcus Wendt was a novelist. As far as I was concerned that was just a synonym for "loafer," but I decided to be kind. I just shrugged. Theophan coaxed, "I need the data, Barry. It's in a critical area. Remember, I told you there's a fault segment up there that's coupled to the one by the dam? There's another segment that might be part of the same complex, and it hasn't moved for quite a while. I'm afraid it might be getting ready to pop."

"But that fault just did pop, didn't it? When the dam broke?"

Theophan took her patience in hand. I could see her remembering that, after all, I was still a novice and she had undertaken to teach me. All she said was, "That was long ago, Barry. When you get a slip in one place it just adds to the strain in other segments. Don't you remember anything I told you? We've been getting a lot of clusters of little temblors lately; they could be foreshocks." She looked up at me beseechingly, her face wet in the rain. "Will you do it for me?"

I couldn't think of any reason to say no. "If the rain stops," I promised.

She nodded. "Thanks," she said, and turned and left. I was looking after her, and didn't notice that Geronimo had come back until I heard his breathy voice from behind me.

"There will be chocolate cake tonight, Barrydihoa. Will you give me a piece?"

I turned and looked at him, his fur glistening in the wet, peacefully nibbling at bits of some ornamental shrubbery someone had planted nearby.

"Why not?" I asked. "Do you want to come along if we go up in the hills tomorrow?"

He took a moment to think that over. "I will come," he said finally, but he sounded reluctant.

I thought I knew why, so I tried him again on the unanswered question. "Geronimo? Do you want to tell me why you hate Theophan?"

He said, "No." I waited, but that was all there was to it. Just no.

"Please."

"No," he said again, but then he corrected himself. "Perhaps another time. First I need advice."

That sounded promising, if unexpected. "What kind of advice? Who from?"

But that one didn't even get a no. He didn't answer for a moment, while he finished mouthing and swallowing the bits of shrub. Then he reared up and looked at me. "I will come to see you when the dessert is served at supper, Barrydihoa. Good-bye." And that was that.

When supper was over Geronimo did come for his cake. He didn't stay, though. The reason for that was that as he was pulverizing the cake to swallow, Becky Khaim-Novello came up and took my arm. She squeezed it in a friendly way. "Going home now, Barry? Why don't we stop off in my place? I've got a surprise for you."

She sounded flirtatious. Whether Geronimo picked up on her tone or not I don't know, but he reared up at full height to study her, then turned and stretch-slid rapidly away without even saying good-bye.

So I let Becky lure me to her apartment, and when we were inside she produced her surprise with a wink. She'd been picking sushi fruit that afternoon. The surprise was a couple of fruits with the moldy stuff on them that Madeleine Hartly had told me about.

"I think," Becky said invitingly, slicing one of them into tiny pieces, "it's about time you and I got high together, Barry hon."

The woman was getting right to the point, I thought.

I've never been much for hallucinogenics, but the circumstances were special. Remember how long it had been since I'd had sex with anybody. It seemed clear that Becky was offering more than a little mind-expansion. The fact that I didn't even particularly like the woman just did not seem important at that moment.

So I took a nibble, and she did too, and we sat there, looking at each other and waiting for something to happen. She giggled. "God, I haven't done this since college. Do you feel anything yet?"

I explored the inside of my mind. "A little spacey, maybe," I ventured.

"Maybe we should eat a little more."

So we did. I didn't take very much. Then it occurred to me that we were sitting rather formally at her table, and that wasn't a good starting point for anything to develop. So I suggested we take the little plate of fruit and move over to her couch, and we did, and then I did begin to feel something. It wasn't a particularly pleasant feeling. It felt as though something warm and large was throbbing inside my chest. I thought it was as good a time as any to kiss her, and so I put my arm around her and did.