9
IT is interesting that you seem embarrassed when you say we were called "bugs."
Is that meant to be a question?
No. The question is this: Do you feel that the term "bug" is a derogatory epithet, meant to give offense to the person named, like some of the terms you humans sometimes apply to each other?
Well, I guess it is, in a way. It's not as insulting as some of the things we call each other, but it's not meant to be particularly flattering, either—although in your case I would have to say that it's sort of justified because of the way you look. I mean, the closest thing there is on Earth to your kind is the insects. Especially the moths and butterflies that they call "lepidoptera." In your case, "leps" for short.
Jacky Schottke is the reason I know as much as I do about the subject of you leps (which probably is not all that much, anyway). He did his best to explain the differences between leps and insects after we had gone to his place that night. He was talking about his work as a taxonomist, and how he was mostly self-taught out of the stored datafiles, and how he had come to specialize in the fascinating (he said) dynamics of ecological communities.
Schottke was a pretty elderly fellow, at least eighty, I judged, but he seemed so enthusiastic about his work that I made the mistake of asking him what the work was, exactly. The result was that I got a twenty-minute lecture on the interactions of Pava's living things—he referred to them as the planet's "biota." The way he organized the data he collected was, he said, in the form of n-dimensional food webs. That was the only rational way to do it, he said, because, after all, when you consider what effects the members of a given clutch of living organisms have on each other, your clearest road map lies in observing who eats whom. Once you had that much straightened out you could group them into what he called "trophic species" and then you could start analyzing how each species affected the others.
It was all sort of interesting, and I thought it was actually touching to see how Schottke's eyes sparkled when he talked about it. Still, an Entomology 101 lecture wasn't exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear, so I asked him specifically to tell me about you people.
He stopped in the middle of the lecture. The sparkle went out of his eyes. Then he sighed.
I could see that he was sorry to abandon the really fascinating subjects of trophic species and reciprocal predation just to give me a simple answer to a dumb question, but he was a good host. "How about a drink, Barry?" he said. I thought that was a fine idea, and so he pulled out a bottle. I looked at the label with a little surprise; it said Moët et Chardonne.
That made him laugh a little. "Oh, it's not champagne, I'm afraid. We reuse all our old bottles for home brew, but I think it's not bad."
He waited expectantly while I tasted it. No, it certainly wasn't champagne. Wasn't wine at all; it had been distilled and it had a healthy kick. But it went down all right, and when I acknowledged it was drinkable, he began producing pictures for me on his screen.
The leps, he said, were something like an Earthly butterfly, not counting the size—well, a little like butterflies—though of course butterflies didn't have lungs and circulatory systems, and certainly weren't as intelligent. Butterflies didn't have language, or laws, or settlements, or well-formed relationships. But butterflies also didn't have much consistency of shape or behavior during their lives, and neither, Schottke told me earnestly, did leps.
"I guess I knew that, Jacky—sort of. I mean, there used to be all kinds of stories about Pava and the leps when I was a kid."
He seemed pleased to hear that I was at least that well informed and went on to retrieve images for his screen and tell me the things I hadn't known.
He showed me pictures of a newly hatched, first-instar baby lep, practically nothing but mouth and digestive system. The new-hatched lep didn't look at all like St. John to me. Schottke told me that was an accurate observation. That was one of the significant morphological differences between leps and human beings, he said. A baby human does look quite a lot like an adult; but what a "one-star," or infant, lep mostly looked like, he pointed out, was a large, messy, cowflop-sized turd, and what it did in that stage, outside of eat and excrete and grow, was basically nothing.
Then the second-instar lep, a little bigger, a lot more active, began to have the intelligence, say, of a human toddler. What the picture looked like to me was a scaly sort of earthworm, though at that stage their coloring was generally bright red. At the third instar I could see the little "arms" and "hands" developing on the still-wormy torso; the fourth instar looked physically about the same, though now all the adult features were quite visible. Even the fifth looked not that much different to me, until Schottke told me that the fourth instar was full maturity, which would last unchanged for as much as thirty or forty years, and pointed out that the fifth instar was looking pretty ragged.
"You could call the five-star leps their senior citizens," he explained. "At the fifth instar they're, as you might say, retired from most activities. They're getting ready to convert to the final winged form, and their minds are beginning to suffer. Their fur gets frayed and their colors fade, and they begin to develop sexual organs—and they go on doing that for a year or so, until they molt into the final, sexual, winged, egg-laying kind."
He stopped there, thinking.
"At that point they don't have any intelligence at all left," he went on after a moment—reluctantly, I thought. "In the sixth instar they don't eat, either. They just make love, and fly around, and lay their eggs, until they die." And he stopped again.
He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring mournfully at the picture on the screen of the sixth-instar lep, with its giant, lacy, all-colored wings. It was a spectacularly beautiful picture, I thought, but Schottke didn't look as though he were enjoying its beauty.
He looked sadder than I had ever seen a human being look before.
I didn't know why. Not then, anyway. But I wondered if it had anything to do with his touchy worries about Captain Tscharka (I eventually discovered that it did, though not in any way I could have guessed), and so I thought it might be all right to pry a little. "Jacky?" I began. "What was it you used to be?"
He blinked and focused on me. "What?"
"You said you used to be something else before you got into taxonomy. What was it?"
"Oh." He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm not ashamed of it. When I was young I thought I had the call. I was going to be a Millenarist preacher, like Friar Tuck. As a matter of fact, Tuck was the one who trained me, and not just me, either. There were half a dozen of us young ordained Millenarist ministers then, and we had a lot of people in our church—there were only about four hundred people on Pava at the time, and more than half of them Millenarists. We were all real red-hots. When Tuchman left with Captain Tscharka to make the run to Earth, we all vowed that we would carry on the faith. We knew they'd be gone for nearly half a century. It didn't worry us. We swore we'd stay consecrated, no matter how long we had to wait for their return, and we'd devote ourselves to spreading the word as long as we lived."
He swallowed, looking guilty. "We didn't, though. After he left things changed. We stopped making so many converts. When new colonists arrived a lot of them just weren't interested. We had a lot of trouble keeping the colony alive, too; this is not the easiest planet to survive on. . . . Well, things happened. A few people made the transition—you know; you call it suicide. Others just drifted away. I got interested in the goobers and the leps, and—well, you know how it is, Barry; fifty years is a long time to expect anybody to keep on burning with a white-hot flame, isn't it? I couldn't make it."
"I see," I said.
I didn't, really, of course. Do you ever really see what some other person is thinking in his secret heart? I don't think so. It wouldn't be his secret heart if you did, would it? You think you know somebody pretty well—your parish priest when you're a kid, for instance, or the recent widower who's so hopelessly, terminally devastated because his dear wife of twenty years got herself electrocuted when she fell into the hot leads for the particle accelerator. And then one day when you're not expecting anything of the kind, the priest gets caught buggering a choirboy, and the cops come and pick your friendly mourner up because his wife didn't fall, he pushed her. So what do you know, really?
Well, I knew there was something going on with Jacky Schottke, something to account for his obvious distress when he talked about the leps or his failed ministry. I just didn't know what it was, and I didn't know what questions to ask. And then, there was one other thing. I had begun to like Jacky Schottke, enough so I didn't want to make him unhappy. And there wasn't any doubt that those subjects were painful for him.
So I just said, more or less trying to change the subject away from his private pains without being too obvious about it, "I'm a little surprised that there's such a large proportion of Millenarists here on Pava. They're kind of scarce back on Earth."
He nodded gloomily, looking at the screen again. "There was some great missionary work done here. You have to admit that Garold and Tuchman are pretty convincing people," he said. "It was hard to say no to them. It was for me, anyway. And then—"
He stopped abruptly. "Damn it. There we go again," he said.
The picture on the screen had garbled, and the room lights flickered off, then back on. I felt a little quiver in my chair, as though a heavy truck had just run past us on the road . . . although, of course, there wasn't even a road of any kind nearby, much less that heavy a truck.
"Hell," Jacky said, dismally anticipating what was going to happen next. . . .
Then the lights went all the way off. We were sitting there in the dark.
I could hear his sigh of resignation. "Sorry about that, Barry. We've obviously lost our power again. If it's any consolation, I don't think it's serious. It's probably that little tremor just now that got the transmission line. Hang on, I've got a couple of battery lights here—and I've really been a rotten host, haven't I? I haven't even shown you around the apartment yet."
I know none of this has much to do with Garold Tscharka. I can't help it. If I don't tell it all as I remember it I'll probably leave something out, and then you'll be on my case about that. Bear with me.
I also know that you people don't take much interest in houses, because you don't live in them. We do. They're important to us. They're one of the things that make us human, so when Jacky Schottke offered me the tour of his apartment I was willing to go along.
Schottke's place was on the top floor of one of the four buildings that surrounded one of those grassy squares. His was the only two-story one of the four. The apartment wasn't much, even compared with our tight living spaces on the Moon. He had four small rooms. No carpets. The furniture was an odd mixture, some of it obviously homemade, some quite new (from the factory orbiter, I supposed), some old and tattered enough to have been brought by the first settlers. It all evoked memories for me. It took me back to the place Gina and I had lived in right after we were married, before Matthew came, before—well, before everything. True, this place was only one story above ground, and the apartment Gina and I had then had been on the thirty-first floor of the high rise. But it had that same feel—scratched together, making do.
Schottke lifted his battery lamp to peer into my face. "Is something the matter?" he asked.
I shook myself. "No, I was just thinking about something." Actually, Schottke's place was quite different. It had two little bedrooms instead of the one Gina and I had shared, and each had two narrow beds that were set against a wall with a ceiling-high clothes-storage chest between them. Schottke's minute living room contained a plastic-upholstered couch, a few odd chairs and a table that bore a screen and workstation. All else the apartment had was a functionally complete but crowded bathroom and an also functionally complete but even more densely crammed kitchen.
Schottke said, "We've got a new couple moving in below us, the Khaim-Novellos. I guess they're friends of yours from the ship?"
"You don't get a chance to make friends when you're in the freezer," I told him. "Which room is mine?"
"The one on the left—I mean, if that's all right with you? They're pretty much identical. And, oh, listen, about the bathroom. There's a toilet there, but we don't use it anymore, until we figure out how to repair the sewerage system. There's something out in back."
"An outhouse, right. I've already been warned about that."
"Fine. Well, that's about it, then. God knows when they'll get the power back on, and it's late. We might as well get to bed, if that's all right with you? All right, then. Good night, Barry."
In the morning Schottke was awake before me, bright-eyed and no longer very interested in conversation. The power was back on and Schottke was in a hurry. "You'll have a lot of things you're supposed to be doing today, Barry," he said. "You'll need your shots. Then you'll have to see Jimmy Queng to get your work assignment—"
"I told you I'm a fuelmaster," I pointed out, a little surprised at the idea that I might be asked to do something different.
"Yes, but you can't always be shipping antimatter fuel around, can you? And when you're not busy at that you'll have to help with the colony's regular work. We all do, how else could we survive here? Me? Well, certainly, I do my share. Of course I did more when I was younger, just like everybody else. I strung lines, I cooked, I helped build the roads, I farmed for a while, I even spent three months in the mine—it's only now, when I'm getting a little past any kind of rugged outdoor work, that they let me spend most of my time on taxonomy. Come on. I guess you'll want to get cleaned up first, but then we'd better get on down to the commons. They'll have breakfast ready—and then you can get started on your chores."
By the time we arrived at the open-air dining trestles I'd learned more about Pava's housekeeping practices. There was running water in the little bathroom, at least. It didn't help with the toilet. The lid on that was lowered. Schottke had draped a cloth over the lid and then, to make sure I didn't forget, put a pot of flowers on the cloth. Still, I could wash up, as long as I didn't mind doing it in cold water, although then I had to head for the outhouse.
Incoming water, Schottke explained, was taken care of by flexible piping from the central water tower, and outgoing water was allowed to drain away in back, as long as it didn't come from the toilet. The trouble with the toilet was that they hadn't been able to arrange any underground waste pipes that didn't fracture every time there was a temblor. "And one time the town water tower itself fell over," he said gloomily. "We had real problems for a while then, but now we've got the new one pretty well braced—it's stayed up through our eight-point-one shake, which is more than a lot of the houses did."
"Grand," I said, still chewing, and got up to locate Captain Tscharka.
He wasn't hard to find, and evidently his temper had not improved overnight. As I was finishing eating Jillen came away from an interview with him, looking scalded. "Don't ask him anything now," she warned me. "He's still furious about the way the colony has backslid."
There are some things I'm good at and some things I'm not, and one of the things I'm particularly bad at is following advice I don't like. I didn't really care about how Captain Garold Tscharka felt about the religious failings of his colony. But Jillen's advice hadn't been entirely wrong, either, because by the time I got to him he was out of his seat at the breakfast table and heading rapidly toward one of the offices.
"Tscharka," I called, and finally had to trot after him and catch his arm before he stopped. He gave me a very hostile look.
"What the hell do you want?"
"Just one question, Captain. When are you going to take off for the return flight to the Moon?"
The look turned even more hostile. "Tired of the planet already? Well, don't hold your breath. Corsair isn't going to leave until Buccaneer arrives. At least."
"But I don't want to stay here. I wasn't supposed to come to Pava in the first place," I protested.
That didn't interest him. "You can file a complaint with the authorities on the Moon when you get back," he said, "assuming any of the people involved are still alive. Quit bitching, will you? It's not so bad here on Pava, di Hoa, and besides you can make yourself useful. As long as you're here you'll have to work, you know. We don't have any loafers on Pava."
I didn't take any pleasure in being reminded of that again. In fact, nothing the man said made me like him any better, but it seemed like a good idea to start lining myself up for an interesting job. "I'm a qualified pilot," I reminded him. "If there's time before I leave I guess I could take one of those exploring ships out."
He blinked at me. "What kind of ships?"
"The ships you requisitioned all that antimatter for. To explore the Delta Pavonis system."
"Oh," he said, "those." He studied me for a while, then gave me a really unfriendly scowl. "Have you seen any short-range ships in orbit? No, you haven't. There aren't any. Nobody bothered to build them."
"But—"
"But we'll probably find another use for the antimatter—maybe in the factory orbiter. If that happens you can help me transship the pods, as soon as Buccaneer arrives."
"But—" I began again, and never got past that "but," either, because he had pulled his arm free and was already a meter away and moving fast. I turned to Jillen. "Hell," I said.
She shrugged. "There isn't any daily shuttle service between here and Earth, you know."
I surrendered to the inevitable. "It's funny, though," I said. "Why's he going to wait until Buccaneer arrives to ship the fuel to the factory orbiter?"
"You'd have to ask him," she said, "and I still don't recommend doing that. Give me a hand with these dishes, will you?"
That was when I found what my first real job on Pava was going to be. It was kitchen police.
Well, not quite. I didn't have to do the washing up. As soon as the tables were clear I, with all the other new arrivals, was ordered—"invited" might have been a politer word, because at least they were smiling when they said it—to get out in front of the hall again for our prophylactic shots and our turn in the daily job lineup.
Shots for what? I asked the woman who was shepherding us out, name of Sharon something. Shots against native diseases, she said, and when I asked her what kind of diseases those were, she said, "How would I know? Nobody ever gets them anymore, because we all get the shots." Then she looked at me more carefully. "Do you have any special reason for asking? Like some medical problem the doctor ought to hear about?"
"Ah," I said, suddenly aware that I did. "Yes. Actually I do have—"
Nobody was letting me finish sentences that morning. "Jesus," she said in dismay, "how come they let you get here with a medical problem? Don't they give physicals anymore? Anyway, that's not my department. Ask Billygoat or his wife about it when they come to you with the shots."
When the shots came they weren't painful, of course, but there were a lot of them—two or three in each arm, a man going down the line on right arms, a woman following him and taking care of the lefts. They both looked harried and not interested in talking to their new patients. When the man began dotting my forearm with his little vaccine spray, I said, "Are you the one they call Billygoat?"
He gave me a frosty look, then a glance of suspected recognition. "Are you the one Sharon says has the medical problem?"
When I said I was, and began to tell him about my little difficulty of occasional loopiness, he looked startled, then resigned. "Oh, hell, this is all I need. I can see you're going to be a real pain in the ass," he told me. "I can't deal with that kind of thing now. You're not likely to go critical right away, are you?"
"I hope not."
"Well, don't. Come around to my office tomorrow—no, wait, better make it next week. I'm pretty busy right now. Next!"
And that was that. I didn't really have time to press the matter, because the gang boss was already whistling and gesturing at us to come over to where he was waiting.
I recognized the gang boss. He was one of the ones who had picked us up at the landing strip, the tall, black-haired fellow named Jimmy Queng. Now he was carrying a handscreen. When we were all gathered around him he stared at whatever was displayed on the screen for a second, then waved it at us for quiet.
"All right, new fellow citizens. Welcome to Pava. We're glad to have you here, we hope you'll find your new lives worthwhile, but we do need to get work done. These first assignments are all temporary, but that doesn't mean they aren't important. Everybody works here, even on the dumb, duty jobs. Especially on those jobs, because they're the ones that nobody wants to do. Our biggest job is keeping ourselves alive, and that takes all of us, okay?" No one answered what evidently had already become a familiar litany for all of us, so he started right in. "Let's see, the first thing we need is about eight or nine good hands for farm work. Any of you interested in a healthy out-of-doors life?"
He waited expectantly. A moment passed, then two women and a man stepped warily forth.
"That's a start, anyway," he said. "What's the matter, does the work sound beneath you? Or just too hard? It's not so bad, you know. You'll just start out with chopping and harvesting, but it doesn't stop there. As soon as we get the new cargoes down from Corsair we need to do some more interesting stuff; we've got to inseminate some soil with fungus to make real trees grow, and start some new earthworm colonies to aerate the soil. And, listen, if any of you like good food, some of the fungi will make truffles—you'll be the ones who will know where to find them a couple of years from now."
This time two others began hesitantly to move up—I couldn't guess whether it was because they were truffle fanciers or because they figured some other job might be even worse. Jimmy Queng nodded. "The rest of the farm crew," he said pleasantly, "we'll just have to draft when we finish up asking for volunteers, I guess. How about building maintenance? That means carpentry, repair work, everything we need to put the town back together again every time a quake comes along. We can use about three here?"
He got his three, and he got the three more he wanted for cutting fuel for the power generator. That puzzled me, but I didn't have a chance to ask why they needed to be cutting fuel when, I was pretty sure Tscharka had said, they were supposed to have a perfectly good hydroelectric plant in operation by now. I didn't get a chance to ask any questions at all, because he was already calling for power plant maintenance personnel. That sounded like skilled work, but not drudgery, and I figured I knew enough to get by from my experience as a fuelmaster. I immediately put up my hand.
Jimmy looked up at me approvingly over his glasses, but before he could accept my offer someone whispered in his ear.
"Oh, right," he said. "He's the one, eh?" He shook his head at me. "Not you, di Hoa. We've got something else for you. You're going to be doing seismology."
"I don't know thing one about seismology!" I protested.
"Then you'll never find a better time to start learning about it, will you? Anyway, the seismologist will teach you and I imagine she'll be patient. She asked for you specifically, in fact." And when I looked around somehow I wasn't surprised, and was even less displeased, to find that the seismologist in question was Theophan Sperlie.