The Voices of Heaven (30 page)

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.

20

WHY do you suppose that is not understood? You are not as different from us as you believe, Barrydihoa. Leps of the sixth instar also are driven by the biological mating imperative. Although, to be sure, they are not known to regret their actions afterwards.

Maybe that's just because they don't have any intelligence left by then, do they? I did. At least I thought I did, and yet my balls kept pushing me into places where my head knew perfectly well I didn't belong.

I suppose that "biological mating imperative" of yours is why I showed up for my date with Theophan Sperlie the next morning, even though I didn't have any real expectation of making it with her anymore, and wasn't all that sure I really wanted to. I didn't feel much like making the trip. I woke up with a bad attitude, crotchety, pissed off, resentful of the way things were going; I snapped at poor Jacky Schottke for asking me if anything was the matter, when obviously everything was the matter.

But when I'd eaten my lousy breakfast and forced down my second cup of mess-hall coffee—the awfulness about which Becky Khaim-Novello was perfectly right—I dutifully marched over to the car where Theo was waiting.

The only bright spot was that Geronimo was there, too. I hadn't really expected him to show up. With the light loads we'd be carrying we didn't really need any help, and he knew Theophan would be there. All the same, there he was. He hopped into the backseat of the car without saying a word.

Theophan, on the other hand, was cheerfully talkative. "Morning, Barry. Morning, Geronimo. Looks like we've got a nice day for a change. What's the matter, you guys get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?"

Neither of us answered. It didn't stop her. She didn't seem to care whether Geronimo and I felt conversational or not—well, maybe she was making allowances for the fact that she knew perfectly well Geronimo wouldn't talk to her at all. All the way down to the river and across and up into the hills on the other side she kept talking seismology to me. I was barely listening—I was replaying in my mind my scene with Becky Khaim-Novello from the night before, and not enjoying it any more the second time around—and Geronimo was in the backseat, resolutely staring at the road behind us. She kept right on with her lecture on basic principles: "The thing is, I'm pretty sure Pava's in the Pangaea phase. Do you know what that is? See, a planet like this, or like Earth, goes through a half-billion-year cycle as the land masses slosh back and forth. First there's a single giant continent like the one we're on. Then it breaks up. Then you get interior oceans developing inside the continent and they push the land masses apart until they're spread out as far as they can get. Then the mid-ocean ridges that drive the ocean growth dry up. By then the interior oceans aren't interior anymore—they're huge—but they begin to shrink again. Subduction starts. As the ocean floors get colder and denser and descend into the asthenosphere the spread-out continents are all pulled back to join together in one big one again . . . and then the whole cycle starts all over again."

She looked at me as though she was expecting a question. I took my mind off Becky long enough to oblige her. "It keeps on doing that over and over forever?"

"Close enough to forever. At least until the radioactive elements in the planet's core all wear out and there isn't enough interior heat to make it go, and it turns into a lump of solid rock." She paused there, glancing over at me. "How'd you do with the widow lady last night?"

By then I was getting used to the fact that I didn't have any secrets in this place. That didn't stop me from resenting her inquisitiveness. "Fine," I said flatly. "Why don't you keep your eyes on the road?"

She stopped talking then—for a while—but she was grinning to herself.

Although the rains had finally moved away, as promised, they had left the soil soft and slippery. After the big-wheeled car had taken us as far as it could, we walked. It was a long climb, and a real struggle to get back up that slick, wet hillside. Even with the light load I'd been carrying I was sweating. I threw my pack of tools down next to the one Geronimo had been dragging and sat, while Theo rummaged through all the packs for what she needed.

It didn't take long to help Theophan get the housing off the strain gauge. After that the job was all hers. I went back to sit on my wet rock and watched, Geronimo next to me, while she pulled out one component, put in another, poked her test probes in here and there for half an hour or so and then, doubtfully, pursed her lips.

She straightened up. "Ought to do it," she said. "Let's put the cover back on, Barry." When it was all dogged down she rubbed some of the wet off another rock and sat down, resting up for the return trip.

I remembered I had some sweet trail bars in my pack. I pulled them out and passed them around. Geronimo lopped dainty segments off his with the cutting edges around his mouthpart in silence. In silence Theophan ate hers, though she was watching him carefully.

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I wasn't any more cheerful; the bad mood persisted; but the pregnant silences were just making me feel worse. I tried to get some kind of a conversation going. "Looks like the weather will be nice for a while, don't you think, Geronimo?"

He finished his trail bar and darted that snaky, quick tongue around his mouthpart to find crumbs before he answered, "Yes, Barrydihoa."

"I do too," Theophan said. Her tone sounded as though she were trying to be pleasant. Not very hard, though. And not very long. A moment later she stood up. "Well, hell," she said irritably. "Let's get out of here."

But as soon as we turned to start down that slippery, nasty hill again, Geronimo stretch-slid quickly between us. He planted himself in our path and put his face up close to mine, breathing his warm, wet, vegetable smells at me.

"Barrydihoa," he said, "the sun is still high. You need not go quickly back across the river,"

Theophan gave me a nettled look, and I gave one to Geronimo. "Have you got some other idea?" I asked.

"Yes. I do. You have never seen our nests, Barrydihoa. I have been advised that if you wish I may take you there."

That was an unexpected offer. "Advised by who?" I asked.

He didn't answer that, just waited, swaying back and forth at full extension and watching me. I looked at Theophan to see if she had anything to say on the subject. She did, but she said it—eagerly—to Geronimo. "Does the invitation include me?"

He kept those eyes on me. "No one will prevent a conspecific coming with you, Barrydihoa," he told me, "if that is not avoidable."

It certainly was not the most openhearted invitation I'd ever heard, but Theophan settled for it.

We weren't far from the lep nests, Geronimo promised me that. I was glad of it. It was certainly far enough to suit me. It took us nearly two hours of climbing and sliding and pushing our way through heavy brush, down a slope, across an icy little stream, up another. . . . Those light backpacks were getting really heavy long before we were there.

Geronimo, of course, had no problem at all. He humped right along ahead of us, knowing exactly where he was going and singing screechily under his breath as he went. Theophan didn't sing. She swore a time or two, though, when she slipped in the mud or a branch swept back and caught her in the face. I didn't even do that much, not having the wind to spare for it.

In half an hour I was completely lost. I doubted I could find my way back to the strain gauge, much less to the car we had come in, and Theophan was looking worried herself.

Then, without warning, something big and bright came fluttering through the air toward us. It had a body the size of a collie's, and it also had lacy, bright-colored wings bigger than an eagle's. It hovered overhead for a moment, gazing benignly and emptily at the three of us.

"That is the sixth-instar person once named Marcanthony," Geronimo called over what would have been his shoulder if he'd had one. "He is newly fledged. He has left the nest just this day."

It was one of the first sixth-instar leps I had ever seen.

I had never met Marc Anthony; he had to have cocooned himself for his final transmogrification right after I landed on Pava. I found out later from Jacky Schottke that he had been a good and loyal friend of the human colony in his fourth and fifth instars, collecting biological samples for Schottke's study, tirelessly helping in whatever work was at hand. Of course, I had to find it out from someone else, since Marc Anthony was no longer able to tell me any of that himself. At his sixth instar he had passed beyond the point when he would ever tell anyone anything again—when he would ever again know anything to tell, for that matter. He fluttered around us for a moment, perhaps sniffing to see if any of us smelled like sixth-instar female lep, and then was gone. Looking, I suppose, for something that did.

Marc Anthony was the first other lep we saw, but soon there were others. I became aware that there were leps moving in the underbrush around us; they didn't approach, but they were watching. Geronimo ignored them, until some of them revealed themselves, joining our procession. They were all wingless ones, in all stages. Theophan was fascinated. "Look," she said, pointing to what looked like a giant cowflop under a moss-covered rock, "there's a first-instar baby." And when I paused to look I could hear the distant locusty chitter and screech of the whole community.

It grew louder, and then we were there.

"This is our nest," Geronimo declaimed proudly. "You are welcome, Barrydihoa. Here, they wish to offer you food."

It seemed they had expected us. Fifteen or twenty of them came crowding around us, mostly three- and four-star leps, stroking my arms with their little hands, smelling like a lawn after mowing on a rainy day. And they did offer food.

It wasn't exactly any kind of food that I wanted to eat. It wasn't lep food, though. It was worse. It was human food. At least it once had been: a soggy loaf of ancient bread, no doubt picked out of the kitchen garbage in town, and a brick of stone-hard goat cheese with bright green-and-orange mold all along one side, I assumed from the same place. I declined with thanks, for both of us, though they hadn't made the offer to Theophan. Evidently they were willing to tolerate the fact that she had come along, but just barely; she remained a nonperson. None of them said a word to her.

"I shall return with Merlin," Geronimo announced, and had slithered away before I could ask him who Merlin was. I didn't have time to worry about it; I was busy trying to take everything in.

I don't know what I had expected the lep nest to be like: A village of wattled huts? A little New England town with a church and a factory and homes with gardens around them? A hive? A giant termite mound? I'd certainly expected a visible community of some sort. What I had not expected was that the "nests" were no more than an arbitrary hectare or two of groves and crops and burrows.

See, there's another big difference between us. Human beings build towns. That's because humans are used to having community projects—places to work or pray or study or to buy and sell things—and they need to cluster around those projects. The only thing leps have to cluster around is themselves. I suppose you people wouldn't bother to live in groups at all except for the fact that you like each other's company.

Well, you know all that.

You also know that that was the occasion when I met Garibaldi and Jefferson and Confucius and eight or nine other leps, fourth and fifth instars mostly—the whole English-speaking population of the community, I guess, or at least all the English-speaking ones who happened to be present in the nests at that time. Well, you know who I met as well as I do, Merlin, because I'm sure you haven't forgotten that one of the ones I met was you.