The Voices of Heaven (6 page)

I said no. I said no more experimenting, please. I said I was tired of those terrible, wild mood swings, and I wanted out of the clinic.

So they sighed and went back to the quick and dirty. The needles.

They made it as easy on me as they could, with time-release material so that I only needed a shot about once every three or four months . . . but I would, they said, always need the shots. Unless I wanted to alternate between zombie and lunatic for the rest of my life.

"You better have some blood work," Helge decided when she was through poking me. She sent me off to the medtech, who greeted me like an old friend. I didn't have to be told what to do. I had my arm stretched out for the needles before the nurses said a word. When the machine had taken its blood and finished its workup Helge called me back. "You're all right, Barry," she said, watching the colored lines on her diagnostic screen swirl around. "You didn't actually go round the bend and hurt anybody when you had that little flare-up, did you?"

I shook my head. "Well, then," she said. "I don't think that was a manic spell. I think it was just the same normal kind of spell of aggravation that I might have myself. Everybody has them. Just don't get yourself excited anymore, all right?"

That was a dismissal, but I didn't get up. "There's something else," I said.

"Hum," she said, patting a couple of strands of hair into place behind her ear. What "hum" meant this time was,
I thought so, so get on with it.

"I've been thinking about getting married," I told her. "I think the woman I want to marry is likely to want to have children. I want to know if that's a good idea."

She looked annoyed, because she'd been all set to see the last of me and get off to her coffee break, but she looked interested, too. She frowned, trying to remember something. "Barry? Don't you have a son somewhere?"

"I do. He's sixteen."

"And he didn't inherit?"

"Thank God, no. He's been tested."

"Hum." She turned back to the screen. When it displayed my entire chart, she said, "Do you want to see where your problem is?"

"No," I said. I'd been shown those charts before.

She wasn't listening, though. "Look here," she said, moving the cursor across the screen. "That's the gene locus, in the arm of the chromosome there, do you see? That's where the little bugger is that does you in."

I wasn't even looking. "And if I have another child and this time I pass that gene on—?"

She leaned back thoughtfully. The strand of her hair had come loose again and she was twisting it around her finger. "I can only talk probabilities, Barry. You know these mental disorders aren't transmitted as classical Mendelian traits. You need both the genetic predisposition and the triggering environmental stimulus for them to appear."

"But that stimulus could happen."

"Well, sure it could. So you don't want to pass those genes along. Naturally. But there's no problem in preventing the transmission. Oh, there's a little
nuisance
, of course, but the procedure's straightforward. What I mean by 'straightforward,'" she went on kindly, "is that impregnation occurs in the normal way—I mean whatever way you and your partner consider normal. Then, as soon as she's pregnant, she comes in to see us and we flush out the fertilized ovum and examine it. The nuisance part is that she'll have to give a urine sample every morning, because we have to get that ovum as soon as we can, while it's still floating free and hasn't attached itself to the womb yet. We want to get it after the third division, when it's a cluster of eight cells. We take one of the cells and test it. That testing takes an expert, because the genes are only about a thousand base pairs apart—"

I stirred to keep her from going on forever. "Then what?"

"Then it's simple. If the gene is absent, we reimplant the rest of the cluster and pregnancy goes on normally. But if the bad gene's there. well, then we discard the cluster and you try again next month. We do it all the time—oh," she said, having switched back to my chart. "Sorry. I didn't notice you were Orthodox."

"Western Orthodox. And not very."

"Then you don't have a problem, Barry. Unless your fiancée—?"

"She isn't my fiancée yet. I haven't asked her."

"Well," she said, "I guess it wouldn't be your classic, romantic, on-bended-knee proposal, but when you do you'd better tell her all this stuff. You can send her to me for more information, if you want to. Some denominations don't like the idea of discarding a fertilized ovum, and then, too, some people think it's dangerous. It isn't, though. At that stage all the cells are still undifferentiated. The embryo won't notice that we've taken one to look at. You'll have a healthy baby. If your own parents had done that—"

"I know. I wouldn't have this problem. On the other hand, I wouldn't ever have been born, either, would I?"

She didn't respond to that. She mulled for a second, then said, "I should mention that there are other ways of going about it."

"Like what?"

"Complete genetic suppression. You go in for twenty-four hours, they destroy your spermatophiles—"

"Hey!"

"It doesn't hurt, Barry. And it's reversible. But that means you're sterile; then they give you an implant and you're in business again. Only the implant is tailored to suppress your bad genes." She saw the face I was making and laughed. "Men," she said. "Trust me. It doesn't affect your sex life at all."

I thought that over. "You said it only takes twenty-four hours?"

"That's all—except, of course, we don't do that here. You'd have to go to one of the big clinics on Earth."

I got up. "Thanks," I said, not meaning it, and left.

On the way out I played back some of the things Helge had said. It seemed to me that Helge was right. The only way I could find out how Alma would feel about these questions would be to ask her.

Right after that I began to wonder how I myself really felt about that other big question, the one that comes with the word "commitment."

If I asked Alma questions about how she felt about dealing with my genetic problems, there would then be only one way the conversation could go from there. That would be to propose marriage to her.

I didn't know if I was ready.

I don't know what would have happened to my life if I had got my courage together and taken that next step. My life would have been different, all right. But would it have been better?

I don't think I've succeeded even yet in giving you a very accurate idea of what our lives were like, back on the Moon. They were very different from what we have now. They were certainly a lot more comfortable.

It's true that they weren't perfect, though. When I think back to those carefree days on the Moon I have a tendency to forget that at the time I didn't think they were really carefree at all. What I remember is that the only real cares I had were the personal worries I made up for myself. Like what it meant when Alma called me by the wrong name. Like whether or not I would lose her—and whether I could somehow figure out a way to both keep her and simultaneously keep open the option to lose her, painlessly and without recrimination, if I ever decided that that was what I wanted to do.

Apart from those self-inflicted wounds—and, well, yes, apart from the faint but real worry nobody on the Moon was ever completely without, namely, that someday somebody might accidentally push the wrong button inside the crater and the whole Lederman antimatter factory would go up in a ball of plasma, of which I would myself be a tiny part—apart from that sort of thing, I mean to say, we didn't have any worries. The Moon was rich. We all had jobs. Anybody who didn't have one was shipped instantly back to Earth, and the jobs at Lederman were both interesting and paid well. The factory did everything possible to make our lives palatable because that was good business for them; they didn't want any disgruntled workers doing anything terminally stupid. Everything that state-of-the-art technology could provide, the lunar authorities had bought for us. They were clearing and lining additional lava tubes all the time. That meant that there were new housing units, bigger and more comfortable, appearing on the market regularly. One tube was even being half-filled with expensively manufactured water to make a swimming pool. Even the Lederman management couldn't give us solitude, of course. But we could get something close to it by taking a stroll through the farm tubes, steamy and warm with their crop racks green and sweet-smelling all around us and only a rare glimpse of a distant farm worker to disturb our privacy; Alma and I had made love two or three times in those jungly recesses. We had the best of medical care, and the best of food, and all the entertainment the networks could provide. We were spoiled rotten, in fact. I loved it.

The next day I had a date with Alma to go down to the grand concourse to watch the Taoist New Year celebration. It was kind of a personal anniversary for us—we'd met at the same event the year before. Besides, the Taoists put on a great show. They all get dressed up in red and gold, with dancing and chanting, firing off their acoustic poppers and electronic flares.

Alma loved all that kind of thing. She was flushed and happy, but something was bothering her. She kept giving me looks out of the corner of her eye until she finally said, "Barry? Have you got something on your mind?"

I leaned over to kiss her ear. "Just you," I said. That was true, it just wasn't
specific
. The specific thing on my mind was that I was wondering whether, when we got back to her room, I should start on that line of conversation that would end up with "Will you marry me?" It was a warming kind of thought, and an appropriate time to pop the question—our anniversary, after all. And then I began to wonder why I wanted to wait until we got to her room. And then I actually opened my mouth to say something—I'm not sure what, but I had the feeling it was going to be a step along that road. . . .

And then, "Watch it," she said, pulling me out of the way as three or four lion dancers pranced by. One of them lifted up the skirt of his lion suit to toss a handful of sticky poppyseed candies at us.

"Oh, great," Alma said, putting a couple in her pouch. "Rannulf loves these things."

That stopped me cold.

I hadn't wanted to think about Rannulf just then. After a moment, chewing happily, Alma gave me another of those looks. "Were you going to say something?"

"Right," I said. "I was going to say it's winding down here. Let's go back to your place." We did; and then it was easy enough to stop talking and start making love.

Yes, I know I shouldn't have been so easily put off. On the other hand, Alma could have been a little more tactful, too. Faults on both sides, I suppose.

Then we didn't have much chance to talk for a few days, because I got real busy. One of the orbiter pod-catchers began to leak propellant and had to be replaced. The catchers are where the antimatter goes to be transshipped to the customers, and they're part of a fuelmaster's responsibility—in this case, mine.

While I was busy at that, another interstellar ship, the
Jean Bart
, came in from the Alpha Draconis colony with a load of returnees. The quitters had been dropped off at the Skyhook to Earth before we ever saw them, of course. By the time the ship got to lunar orbit for deluding, the crew had had plenty of time to adjust to the fact that their colony had been almost terminated and then given a new lease on life; I wondered what they made of it, but didn't ask.

Then that second ship appeared from Pava, the one called
Buccaneer
. I didn't board it myself—another fuelmaster was servicing it—but I caught a glimpse of its captain at the landing pad, a man named Bennetton. He didn't stay on the Moon. He took right off for Earth to join Garold Tscharka at whatever Tscharka was doing while he waited for
Corsair
to be refitted.

Then I got a surprise. Two ships that serviced the Martian colonies were in orbit, and when I defueled mine I expected to be right back within a day or two for refueling—the short-run solar-system ships don't usually need repairs or anything much in the way of refitting between voyages. But its captain told me they were going to be delayed in getting fuel for a week because a big new two-hundred-pod order for antimatter fuel was coming through.

Naturally I checked it out. It was what I guessed. Captain Tscharka had got his wish, and the destination for all those extra pods was Pava.

That night Alma and I watched an operetta on the screen. Neither of us was enjoying it much. Alma seemed unusually thoughtful, and I was making up my mind about whether I wanted to discuss Tscharka, the
Corsair
, the fuel pods—and Rannulf Enderman—with her. As we were drinking a nightcap after the show she brought it up herself.

"I guess
Corsair
will be leaving soon," she said, meaning that she wanted to know if I'd heard anything.

I hadn't; it wasn't yet on my worklog. "Kept you busy making the stuff, has it?" I asked; that was Alma's job at Lederman, guiding the particle beams through the accelerator rings, and she knew better than I how much antimatter was being manufactured for what purpose.

She didn't answer the question, except with another question—a trait I've never approved of. "I wonder what they want with all that antimatter."

Well, Tscharka had told me his answer to that—true or not, I didn't know—so I repeated it for her. She didn't look impressed. "They're going to do more exploration around Delta Pavonis? What for? So they can set up more colonies? I don't see the point."

That was another trait in Alma Vendette that I hadn't entirely enjoyed in recent days. She'd seemed down. I don't mean clinically depressed—no, that was my own specialty—but more abstracted than I liked. I didn't want to think that it was because Rannulf was on his way to another star, but I took the chance of asking. "What's the matter? Is something worrying you?"

She considered. "Nothing specific, I think," she said at last. "It's just that nothing we do seems to be particularly important."

"You mean here at Lederman? But we
are
important. If we didn't make the fuel the colonies would just die."