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19

 

 

AGAIN there is a matter that is not understood. You have stated that the "town meeting" prescribed the actions for humans on Pava. Yet you also state that Garoldtscharka did not conform to the decisions that were taken at the meeting. How is that possible?

Why, that's the easiest thing in the world to understand. Yes, we have laws. But, yes, we also have people who break the laws. That's why all the laws have punishments written into them for the people who break them.

Then Garoldtscharka was "punished" in some manner?

 

Ah, well, no. Not exactly. In order to punish somebody you first have to catch him. Garold had taken himself out of our reach. He and Jillen flew themselves right up to Corsair in the shuttle, and once he was in orbit he stayed there.

He not only wouldn't come back down, he wouldn't even discuss the subject. He refused to talk on the radio to anybody but Friar Tuck, and whatever was said between them went no further. Their conversations were no one else's business, so the reverend said. All the reverend would add, benevolently smiling, was to tell us to be patient, dear ones, the captain knows what he is doing, he is acting for the best of all of us, and we just have to trust him.

I didn't, though. For that matter, it seemed that hardly anyone did but the most devoted Millenarists. Those had formed solid ranks behind Captain Tscharka after the meeting in support of his position that nobody had anything to say about Corsair and its cargo but himself. Very few others bought that, and so we were divided into hostile camps.

That brought a whole bunch of old problems to the fore again.

What I'm talking about now is religious problems, which are the kind I hate most. There were protest meetings in most of the churches; there were bitter arguments between Millenarists and their supposedly heretical next-door neighbors, and sometimes the arguments got violent.

Of course, not all the squabbles were serious, or at least I didn't think they were. The one that struck me as funniest was when our tiny band of Wiccas, the old witch-cult people, organized a protest demonstration against Tscharka in the square outside the meeting house.

No one really minded them demonstrating, at least in principle; that was their right. Besides, there only were about six of the Wiccas altogether, and their demonstration wasn't particularly noisy. What made a problem was that, for religious reasons, they announced they could only demonstrate effectively while they were "skyclad." What they actually meant by "skyclad" turned out to be "naked."

Even that was no particular problem for most of us—who cared if the Wiccas wanted to display their generally not-very-exciting nude bodies?—but our equally tiny group of hard-shell Baptists got really upset. The Baptists weren't defending Tscharka. They were as mad at him as anybody else, but they also firmly believed that all that bare flesh was inciting to sin. That offended them deeply. They made so much noise about it that cooler heads had to arbitrate. When the Wiccas finally agreed to confine their future skyclad activities to remote areas of the woods that one simmered down.

But the colony was still seriously divided, and that wasn't funny at all.

I didn't think so, anyway. I was frustrated and angry. I'd finally got myself started on what I thought was going to be a productive course of action. I wanted to charge ahead with it . . . and that bastard Tscharka had foreclosed it on me without warning.

Was I going through the beginning of those mood swings that meant trouble was on its way? I don't know. It didn't occur to me at the time. I knew I was in an up-and-down state, but I accounted for that by objective factors.

But there it was. I don't handle frustration very well, at least not when my medication's running thin. I found the situation depressing. And, as you know, I don't like to be depressed. It scares me.

 

The best antidote I know for depression is work, and I made a lot of it for myself.

The community kept finding jobs for me at its own regular chores, but when those were done I added another job of my own. If I couldn't go up to the orbiter just then I could do the next best thing. So I spent long hours over the screen in Jacky Schottke's apartment, going over and over the specs on the factory orbiter.

I know you keep saying that you want me to tell you everything, but that includes a lot. Should I mention that the weather stayed bad, cold, wet and windy? Or that a pack of goobers got into one of the riverside farm plots and sucked the juice out of every single tomato and green pepper on the vines? Or that we had a sudden cluster of those little quakes that I thought I had been getting used to, but hadn't? I noticed all those things, of course. You couldn't help it. But my thoughts were all on the orbiter.

The schematics told me a lot. The factory certainly had been designed to make use of any energy source that came along, including antimatter; there was an antimatter-fueled magnetohydrodynamic power generator built in, just like the ones on spaceships—at least, it had been built in, as part of the original plan.

But that brought up the question the screen couldn't answer for me. Was that system still there?

That was the worrisome unknown. I knew that over the years the orbiter had scrounged materials wherever it could find them. I knew it had eaten up parts of itself when its programming allowed it to make the assumption that the scrapped systems were of a lower priority than the new goods it was programmed to make.

Had some of those recycled parts been in the standby fuel system?

I could find no way of answering that question—until Madeleine Hartly offered to help me find one.

We had both been set to checking food stored in the warehouse to make sure none of it was spoiled. When I complained about my problem to her she volunteered to show me how to interrogate the factory itself, so between work and supper we went to her apartment to use her screen—she didn't want to make the trek over to mine.

Naturally Geronimo trailed along after me, but Madeleine didn't mind. She even rustled through her cupboards and found some raisins to give him—well, I don't suppose they were really raisins. I don't think they'd originally been actual grapes, anyway, but they were little dried fruits that were sweet enough to please Geronimo. Then she sat down at her screen to access the orbiter.

A moment later she looked up, frowning. "That's funny, Barry. It's asking me for a password," she said. "It never did that before. Wait a minute—"

And she tried another combination, and this time she did get a response. The legend on the screen said:

 

Entrance code required. Access to operating programs is temporarily restricted, pending resolution of new manufacturing instructions.

 

"Whatever that means," I said. The operating system in Freehold's computers was pretty ancient, naturally enough, and one that was unfamiliar to me.

She looked annoyed. "I guess what it means is what it says. We're blocked out. Maybe Jimmy Queng was afraid somebody would sneak in a manufacturing order before we made sure you can fuel it, so he embargoed the system. Or Captain Tscharka did it from his ship."

"Can he do that?"

"I guess he can, Barry, because it looks like he—or somebody—did." She tried a couple other combinations without success, then gave up.

"Well, we're not doing any good here. I'm sorry, Barry. Let's go eat." And then, as we were walking toward the mess, Geronimo loping silently along beside us, she was silent, as though she had something else on her mind. Then she looked up at me quizzically. "Mind if I ask you a question? How're you doing with your problem?"

"Which problem is that?"

"The medical one, Barry."

I stopped short. Geronimo stopped too, staring up at both of us with those immense eyes. "How did you know I had a medical problem?"

She shrugged, looking apologetic. "Everybody knows that, Barry. People have been talking about it for days. They say you're unstable, except if you have medication, and Bill Goethe doesn't have the right medication for you."

I flared up at her. "Damn the man! He's got no right to be spreading that kind of information around. Doctors are supposed to keep their mouths shut about their patients' problems!"

"Don't blame Billy. It might not be him. Anybody can access his files," she reminded me, and waited for an answer to her question.

I didn't see any way out of it, so I said unwillingly, "All right. I do have—I used to have—serious mood swings."

"Bad ones?"

"Damn bad ones. Incapacitating ones, in fact; I did some pretty crazy things. If they were to come back I'd be in real trouble. I'm in remission right now, though, so it's not an immediate problem. I ought to be good for a couple of months, anyway, and Goethe says he's trying to work up some treatment for me before it gets critical."

She squeezed my arm. "Let's hope, Barry," she said, and that was the end of the conversation.

It was not, of course, the end of my thinking about it. Although my head had been full of other things, I had not forgotten how little hope Goethe had offered for his "treatments."

I wondered if the sudden flare of anger I'd felt when Madeleine told me the news meant anything. It wasn't a good sign; I was supposed to avoid losing my temper as much as possible. Then there was the unexpected new responsibility that had been thrust on me; that was a new stress, too, added to all the other stresses that were working on me.

I didn't think there was immediate danger. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going off the deep end just then. However, there was no doubt that sooner or later I certainly would . . . unless, against the odds, Goethe came through with what I needed. If he didn't—

If he didn't, I did not like to think of what my life would be like then.

 

Madeleine excused herself to sit with her great-granddaughter at supper. When I'd filled my tray—the cooks were serving something that resembled meat loaf that day—I looked around for a place to sit, and saw Becky Khaim-Novello waving at me.

I hadn't seen much of Becky, after that one cup of coffee in her apartment. Now and then I'd caught sight of her as our paths crossed, of course, and I'd noticed that she went about the town looking as proud and pleased as the widow of a successful Millenarist suicide should. I didn't know how deep that went. Once or twice in the still night hours I had heard, through the thin flooring, the sound of her uncontrolled weeping.

She wasn't weeping now. She seemed chipper and inviting, and there was one other thing about her just then that struck me as interesting. She wasn't alone. She was sitting next to Marcus Wendt, and the annoyed look he gave me suggested that the conversation had been personal. And what that suggested was that maybe things hadn't been going very well between him and Theophan Sperlie.

Between the time I spotted them and the time I was getting ready to sit down across from them, my active imagination went through a whole scenario: Theo and Marcus breaking up; Theo available again; Theo taking a new interest in me; Theo and me maybe making it after all. I know how foolish that sounds. Just remember how many weeks I'd had to get horny, though; I'm really a reasonably serious person, but my glands don't always know that.

"You've made yourself a stranger," Becky chided me as I started to sit down. "Don't forget that I still have some of that good coffee."

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.

She eagerly kissed me back. Then she pulled away. "I've always admired you, Barry," she said.

That struck me as an irrelevant remark, not to mention that it seemed an odd time to start a conversation anyway. "That's nice," I said, playing with the lobe of her ear—she hadn't moved so far away that my arm was not around her.

"I think everybody here on Pava does," she went on. "Do you know how much we're counting on you?"

I said, "Um."

She leaned forward and took another crumb of the fruit, then nestled back against me. "The thing is," she said, letting one hand come to rest on my knee, "you shouldn't let your personal feelings about Captain Tscharka get in the way of cooperating. For the good of everybody, I mean. He's really a fine man."

"So I'm told," I said. I was a little preoccupied with engineering details. Although she was cuddling close, her head was just under my chin. That left me nothing convenient to kiss but her hair. Also, although her left hand was on my knee, her right arm was thrown across her chest and there wasn't much of Becky that was available to caress.

"So what I was thinking," she said, sounding peacefully warm and relaxed, "is that I'd like to get you and Reverend Tuchman together one of these days, so the two of you could straighten out this little difference of opinion—"

Dawn broke. I sat up straight.

"Oh, hell," I said. "He put you up to this, didn't he?"

She untangled herself. "Don't be silly, Barry. It's just that I'm fond of you both and—"

I didn't let her finish. I was suddenly furious. Maybe part of it was the drug. Not most of it, though; mostly it was one more kind of frustration, the kind a man feels when he has every reason to believe that within the next few minutes he's going to be making love, and without warning something gets in the way.

I didn't want to get up. I wanted to carry on as planned, right into her bed. But I did it. "Thanks for the party," I said. "Sorry I can't stay longer."

And I left—horny, mad, disappointed and thoroughly disgruntled.

Halfway up the stairs I thought I could hear her crying again, but I didn't stop. I really wanted to get laid . . . but not on Friar Tuck's orders. I don't know if you can understand that. I'm not sure I do myself. But I'd never wished more that I'd never been taken away from the Lederman colony, and from my comfortable life there, and from my Alma.

 

 

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