Back | Next
Contents

15

 

 

A QUESTION. Explain Theophansperlie's use of term "angels" as applied to ourselves.

And?

The significance of "and" in this context is not understood.

It signifies I'm waiting for something. Is that really all you want to say? Don't you maybe want to discuss whether you were fair to her?

No discussion is necessary. We acknowledge that the human female Theophansperlie did not in fact bring about the desolation of our nests through any act of her own. The previous assumption was an error, and the consequent behavior of many of our third-, fourth- and fifth-instar cohorts was therefore unjustified. It was not appropriate to treat her as a nonperson.

Thanks. I'm sure Theophan thanks you too.

There remains the question. Why did she refer to us as "angels"? Many of you have stated that "angels" are purely imaginary beings related to some "religious" concepts. We are not imaginary. Explain this.

Please.

Please.

Well, it's not really worth wasting time on, but what the hell.

The thing is, when she called your old ones "angels" it was just a figure of speech. It's not to be taken literally. I'm sorry you people don't ever take anything any way but literally, but that's actually more your problem than ours, isn't it? Anyway, since angels are considered to be a sort of idealization of all the qualities that are best in human beings, it wasn't any kind of insult to refer to you people as "angels." If anything it's really sort of flattering. 

But of course you don't know anything about flattery, either, do you?

 

I finally got to see Madeleine Hartly a day or two later. When I knocked she called to come in, and I found her wrapped up in blankets on a couch in her living room. I handed her some flowers I'd picked on the way and said, "Your granddaughter said you were feeling a little better."

"You mean Debbie. She's my great-granddaughter. What pretty flowers, Barry!" She looked very small propped up on the couch, big eyes against that dark skin, but she seemed cheerful enough. She didn't want to discuss her health. She sent me to the kitchen for a glass to put the flowers in and, when I said I was hoping she could tell me what the early days of the colony were like, she showed me where to find the carrels of old pictures.

Most of the people who were laughing and talking on Madeleine's screen were her family and friends. I knew none of them. Even when I saw Madeleine herself, hand in hand with a short, slim black man on each side, all of them laughing, I didn't recognize her at first. She couldn't have been more than twenty when it was taken. In the picture, the young Madeleine Hartly winked at the camera, then turned and gave the man on her left a giant smooch.

"That's my husband I'm kissing, in case you wondered. The other one's his brother Mai. Mai didn't get along here, though; he gave up and went back to Mars a year or two later."

I wasn't greatly interested in her brother-in-law, especially since he wasn't around anymore. "What are those things back there?"

"They're tents, boy. Haven't you ever seen tents before? That's what most people had to live in; we were getting colonists coming in faster than we could build houses for them. I don't think you can tell in the picture, but I was pregnant with Matty then—she was Debbie's grandmother."

"You were very pretty," I said.

She studied the picture. "I was, wasn't I? Anyway, I guess you aren't all that interested in my family. Wait a minute; I have some other shots—"

She fiddled with the controller and the scene changed; we were looking down on Freehold from a hillside. "This is what the town looked like, oh, sixty years ago or so. We hadn't built the main meeting hall yet, but we were getting a start on housing. You can see the communications antenna just beside the creek; we moved it to the top of the hill later. Here we're unloading a parafoil from the factory. Here's the hydrogen-fuel plant down by the landing strip—What's the matter?"

I had raised my hand for attention. "What I'm really interested in is the factory," I said.

She looked regretful. "I'm afraid I don't have any pictures of the factory. I was never there—well, Barry, I guess that's the story of my life. I'm not much of a traveler; I was never off the surface of the planet at all. What do you want to know about it?"

"Anything you can tell me."

So she told me everything she could. Most of it I already knew, but she filled in a lot of details for me. Like how the computers at the factory orbiter knew what to make. "Why, we all decide that, of course. At the town meetings. Everybody makes up their wish lists, then Jimmy Queng sends the whole thing up to the orbiter to see what's possible. Then at the meeting we set priorities. That's a real mob scene, Barry, everybody fighting to try to get his requisitions approved—you'll see. There's going to have to be one pretty soon. Of course, ninety percent of the requests get turned down."

She paused, looking at me thoughtfully. "Theophan Sperlie says you think you could help get more production out of the factory for us, with the antimatter Garold brought from the Moon."

I hadn't known she was a friend of Theophan's, but it was a small community. "That's one possibility," I said.

"And you've got others in mind?"

I felt obligated to live up to my growing reputation, so I told her some of the things I'd been thinking about. She listened patiently. She even agreed that the colony certainly could have done a lot better in a lot of ways; but after a while I thought she was beginning to look tired. I stood up. "Well, thanks, Madeleine," I said, getting ready to go.

She put her hand on my arm to stop me. "Theophan's a good person," she said, out of nowhere.

"Well, I think so too."

She chose her words carefully. "It's none of my business, Barry, and I wouldn't say a word against Theophan. But I wouldn't get too serious about her right away."

From another person I might have resented intrusion into my private life. Not from Madeleine. "I'm not serious. Matter of fact, I hardly see her except when I'm helping her work. Anyway, she's got—"

I was going to say "another boyfriend," but that didn't seem fair. "She's got a lot on her mind," I said, and, since Theophan's experiences with the leps were fresh on my mind, I told Madeleine about it.

Madeleine nodded. "It's been that way," she said regretfully.

"But the leps act like they hate her, as though the whole thing were her fault."

"Ah, no. You just don't know the leps very well. Did you ever hear of 'shunning'? It's what some of the religious groups do back on Earth, when they have a member that does something wrong. The leps have the same practice. They shun. Even the leps do have a member now and then who acts in an antisocial way, and these leps are just shunned. Nobody talks to them. Nobody pays attention to them at all. Generally speaking, the shunned ones just go off into the wilderness. That's bad for them, though. When they reach sixth instar they won't breed because there won't be any other lep around to breed with. I guess that's why those genes die out in the leps." She hesitated, then said, "I know about that, because my brother-in-law got shunned."

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."

 

 

Back | Next
Framed