The Voices of Heaven (38 page)

When, one day at supper, he sat down across from us and said, "Mind if I join you?"—well, Alma almost reached over and kissed him.

After we'd shaken hands, I said, "I thought you'd be busy jockeying
Corsair
into position."

"I am—I mean we are. I'll go back up for the docking, but the ship's in good hands for now. I left Jillen Iglesias and my number two, Martine Grossman, in charge. They're both fully qualified, and I wanted to come down to talk to you."

"Ah," I said. "About Jillen, you mean." I had been wondering when her name would come up.

"Well, partly about Jillen. You know she's in
Buccaneer
now—"

"Yes." Everybody knew that. Jillen hadn't come out of the business entirely unscarred. There were a lot of people in Freehold who had wanted her locked up with Tscharka and the reverend, and when Bennetton mentioned he could use another hand on
Buccaneer
she'd jumped at the chance to get out of everybody's way.

"Well, Jillen's decided she doesn't want to stay here. She wants to go back with me and raise her baby on Earth."

"Probably that would be the best thing," I agreed.

"For her, yes. What's the best thing for the colony? You people are going to need pilots."

"For transshipping the fuel to the factory?"

Captain Bennetton shook his head. "After that. For the short-haul spaceship. It'll be a sort of a combination of explorer, and asteroid-spotter, and tug. They'll be using it to mine the asteroid belt, after the metals from salvaging
Corsair
run out."

I stared at him. "When did the colony decide to build that?"

"Well, they haven't yet, because they haven't had a meeting, but they will. It's the only thing that makes sense. The only problem is that Martine doesn't really want to stay here, either." He cleared his throat, studying me appraisingly, and added, "I understand you used to be a spotter-ship pilot in the Belt."

"Well, hell," I said, surprised that he'd even bother to ask, "of course I'll—"

Then I stopped, looking at Alma.

Staying on in Freehold wasn't entirely my decision to make anymore, I thought. I was remembering what life in the Belt had been like: getting into the suit, living in it for weeks at a time, all by yourself. That kind of existence tended to get lonesome, even there.

Here around Delta Pavonis it would be even more so. When I went out it wouldn't be for just a matter of weeks. Delta Pavonis's Belt wouldn't have any central smelter station to return to after a spotter flight, with all the (actually, fairly spartan) comforts the central station could provide. The only base for operations would be Pava itself, and if I were that ship's pilot I would be gone for months at a time.

Gone, that is to say, from the company of my lost and unbelievably restored love.

I thought about what that would mean. I would miss Alma, there was no doubt of that. Of course, missing her for a short period—even a period of months—would be a good deal easier to take than the kind of missing her that had been dampening my mood for all the months when I thought I'd never see her again.

On the other hand, how would Alma feel about that?

I felt Alma's hand closing over mine, as though she were thinking the same thoughts in parallel. Probably she was. I sighed. "Can I think it over?" I asked.

Bennetton grinned at me—he was in no doubt which way I would decide, I could see that. "Take all the time you like," he said generously, "only if you decide to do it you probably ought to get in some practice now. Take a few turns as copilot, with me or Jillen, or Marline Grossman."

I'd met Marline, Bennetton's second-in-command; she was a sharp, middle-aged lady who seemed to know what she was doing. "That makes sense," I agreed, carefully staying on the safe side of an outright promise.

"And we probably ought to try to train one or two other pilots while we're here. The way the designs look, the tug would take a crew of two, anyway."

"Ah," I said stupidly, "oh. Right." For I had been thinking in terms of the way it had been in the Belt, and the thought of a two-person spacecraft had never occurred to me.

Alma began lo laugh. "Damn you, Vernon," she said, "why didn't you say thag in the first place? I think I'd make a fine copilot. I volunteer. We both do."

Well, Merlin, I guess we're coming pretty close to the end now, aren't we? I've said just about everything I can say. I hope it's enough. Now it's just a matter of filling in some of the details.

Like about the town meeting, for instance. I'm sure I should tell you about that, although, speaking for myself personally, what happened at the meeting wasn't as important as what happened on the way to it. That's when Alma stopped me on the way there and looked up into my face and said, "Am I taking too much for granted, Barry?"

"Like what?"

"Well . . ." She looked a little uncomfortable. "I sort of jumped in for both of us. We haven't really talked much about plans for the future, have we? And if you wanted to back out or anything—"

"Not a bit of it," I said immediately and look a deep breath. Then it all came out al once: "I love you, Alma. I've loved you for a long lime. I've been afraid lo say it, but what I want to do is get married. Soon as we can. Here."

It was astonishing how easy the impossible turned out to be, once I'd made up my mind to say it. Alma didn't hesitate. She said crossly, "Well, what the hell took you so long? I accept your proposal!"

I held up my hand. "It's not that easy. I don't want lo be unfair to you, Alma. What about children?"

"What about them? We'll have them." She let me hang there for a minute, before she added, "Did you forget that I've studied up on the subject? And then before I left the Moon I spent a lot of time with Helga—you remember Helga? Your doctor at Lederman? Well, she explained what we'll have to do all over again. She gave me all the datafiles and I've already turned them over to Dr. Goethe. I know," she said, "you're not too crazy about him, but all the procedures are in the files. Anybody could follow them. He says it's no problem. We can have all the babies we want, and we can be sure they won't inherit any nasties. So all we need to do," she finished, "is set a date for the wedding."

I said, "How about tonight?"

"Tonight's good," she said. "Right after the town meeting would be fine. Now, who do we get to do the job for us?"

So we had a word with Byram Tanner before the meeting began—neither of us wanted a religious ceremony, and he was just about Freehold's chief magistrate. There was no problem there. "I would be pleased and honored to perform the ceremony," he said agreeably, "especially if I get to kiss the bride. We'll do it right after the meeting, so let's gel started—"

But there was a little delay there. Before Byram could call the meeting to order Jacky Schottke came fluttering up, waving his hands at us. He had news. "I just brought dinner over for Tscharka and Tucnman, and they weren't mere. They've gone AWOL!"

Byram swore.

"But where in the world could they go?" Alma asked.

"That's just it," Jacky cried. "There isn't anywhere. They can probably stay alive wherever they are, I guess—there's food to be found in the woods, and if they went far enough away they could probably find leps who never heard of them, and maybe the leps would help. But they're definitely gone."

Byram thought fast. "The hell with them," he decided. "There's nothing they can do but disappear or die, and either way we're well rid of them. Let's get on with the meeting."

When he announced that the two had broken their house arrest, there were groans and catcalls from me audience, but as there was nothing to be done no one demanded we do anything. Then the meeting went really swiftly.

There wasn't really much to decide. Most of the questions had been voted on already: Recharge the factory with antimatter fuel from
Corsair
and
Buccaneer
, use what was left of
Corsair
for feedstock, start building a space tug to check out the asteroids. A few people raised objections—mostly on the grounds that we really shouldn't be making long-range plans, since we had no guarantee that Earth would continue funding us—but they were howled down by the majority, and then Captain Bennetton got up and settled it.

"Don't worry about the Budget Congress," he said. "They'll give you whatever you need."

Dabney Albright called sourly, "That's easy to say, but they never have."

"That was then," Bennetton said. "This is now. Things have changed. Barry here saved all their lives, remember, so they owe you now—they don't know that they do yet, but I give you my word they will. I'll tell them. And, trust me, I'll make sure they listen."

After that it was just a matter of voting, and then it was time for Alma and me to do our thing.

It was a nice wedding. Captain Bennetton gave the bride away. Jacky Schottke was my best man, and Madeleine Hartly's great-granddaughter stood up for Alma as maid of honor, and most of the colony joined in the extemporaneous party that formed around us afterward. The only thing we left out was going on a honeymoon. There wasn't really anyplace for honeymooners to go, and besides we'd pretty much had it already.

So the next morning Alma and I went back to hauling crops from the farm plots. Everything was just the way it had been before, except that now we were married. I think I was grinning a lot, all day long.

And at the end of the day Alma and I checked the place where I'd left a couple of hard candies.

The candies were gone.

There was no doubt in my mind about that. I'd left them in plain sight on the stump of a storm-killed tree. Now the stump was bare.

Of course, that didn't prove that Geronimo had been there. It was perfectly possible, I told myself, that some other creature with a sweet tooth had come by—

"Ugh," Alma said. "What's that thing?"

She was pointing to the ground at the base of the stump, and what she was pointing at was the crumpled corpse of a small flying rat.

That was enough for me. There was only one person on Pava who would have left that particular token for me.

I climbed up on the narrow stump and peered around. There wasn't any sign of Geronimo, but then I hadn't really expected there would be. I funneled my hands and called, "Geronimo?"

Alma stood quiet, watching; I didn't have to explain to her what was going on. I listened for an answer. There was no sound but the usual distant chirps and shrills, and an occasional unintelligible word coming up from the fields as one farm worker called to another. I tried again: "Geronimo, please talk to me."

Nothing but more nothing, but I was determined. I called, "Geronimo, I'm sure you're there. Come out, will you? I want you to meet my, uh, wife."

I stammered over that because it was almost the first time I'd said it. It felt good. And a moment later there was movement inside the hollow trunk of an old strangler tree, and a lep slid out. The colors were a little different than I remembered, and the shape was longer and slimmer, but I was in no doubt. This fourth-instar lep was Geronimo, all right.

He slid right up to Alma and raised his body to full elevation to study her. Then he said, "Hello, wife of Barrydihoa."

He was the first lep Alma had seen. I wondered for a moment if she would be able to understand what he was saying in that breathy, hissy lep voice, but she was equal to the challenge. "Hello, Geronimo," she said, unfazed. "I've been looking forward to meeting you." And she shook his tiny hand.

By then I had hopped down from the stump for my turn, but I wasn't willing to settle for a handshake. I caught him at full elevation, and I put my arms around him for a hug.

Hugging, of course, is not a lep custom. I took him by surprise. He made a little gaspy squawk and started to shrink away, but then he changed his mind. As best he could, with what his lep anatomy had provided him for arms, he actually hugged me back.

"I've missed you," I told him. "I wasn't sure I'd ever see you again."

"Yes," he said, and this time he did shrink back down. He even retreated a few steps.

I thought there might be more to come of that, but there wasn't. So I went on: "I need to talk to you—all of you. Please? I know what Becky Khaim-Novello did. There's no excuse for it, but it shouldn't poison our relations forever. I'd like to try to straighten things out."

That didn't produce any reaction at all. Geronimo just rocked slowly back and forth, regarding me with those enormous eyes. I persevered. "You don't have to worry about Becky. She won't be here anymore. She's going back to Earth, and—Do you know who Captain Tscharka and Reverend Tuchman are?"

"The God persons. Yes."

"Well, they were just as bad as she—No. They were a hell of a lot worse than Becky ever was, but they're probably going to be sent away too. Matter of fact, they're hiding in the woods somewhere right now. So I'm asking for a favor. I'd like you to take me back to the lep nest so we can talk it over.' *

He rocked silently for a moment. Then, "You are human," he pointed out. "Humans have behaved in unacceptable ways."

"Not all of us!"

"Some are too many."

I couldn't argue with that. I just said, "Please, Geronimo. I'd like to try to see if we can work things out at least."

No answer to that. He just shrank back down a little farther, turned, and began to slide away. I called after him. "At least you and I can see each other now and then, can't we? Geronimo? Don't let them make you stop that."

He didn't answer that one, either. He just kept on squirming away for a couple more meters. Then he paused. "The two God persons are at the place of their retreat," he called, and was gone.

28

YOU surprise us once again, Barrydihoa. Is it possible you believed one of us would "forbid" another to do anything?

Indeed I did. Isn't that what happened?

Of course not. No one attempted to prevent Geronimo from seeing you. It is inconceivable that any one of us would ever try to prevent any other from returning to your community if he wished to.