The Voices of Heaven (9 page)

I swallowed. Alma was playing back to me just about exactly what the doctor told me, almost word for word.

She had been doing some research. Not about genetic defects in general. About me.

I didn't go with her to see the new baby after all, and I didn't try to get myself invited along for the farewell with Rannulf. I was making up my mind, and I wanted to do it on my own time, to be sure.

Isn't it funny how often taking the time to make sure a decision is right can turn out to mean you don't really have to make that decision at all?

By the time I'd finished catching a little sleep—not as much as they had given me time off to do, but enough to get me through the job—it was time for me to go back to
Corsair
for the final loading of its operating fuel supplies. Tscharka watched me at it for a while, but there wasn't much to watch. Actually that was an easier job than dealing with the pods in the cargo hold, because there were only sixteen pods for the ship's drive. Still, it made me a little nervous simply because there was so unusually much antimatter in one place. A hundred and sixteen pods of antimatter is no small amount. It was enough to screw up a whole planet if anything went wrong, so I made damn sure nothing did.

There weren't any real problems in the fueling, except for Rannulf Enderman. I had reconciled myself, very easily, to the thought that I would never see the man again, but he showed up on the last shuttle and he wanted to see me. He chased around until he found where I was, then hailed me. "I'd like to talk to you, Barry."

I gave him a suspicious look. "What about?"

"About Alma," he said, looking somber and self-righteous. "Barry? Alma and I had a little talk. She's a good woman, you know. She wants to be a good mother. I think she ought to get married pretty soon, don't you? Her clock's ticking away, and if she's going to start a family there's no better time than now."

For one nasty, in fact unpardonable, moment I wondered just how he and Alma had said good-bye, but I got that thought out of my head pretty fast. Still, I didn't like the idea of Rannulf giving me advice on whether I should marry his ex-girl. I started to tell him I was too busy, and then I changed my mind. I don't know what made me agree—maybe just good sportsmanship, the winner gracious to the loser—but I said gruffly, "All right, I'll come see you when I'm through."

That didn't mean that I liked the man. I didn't. I especially didn't like his butting in, but what he said about Alma stuck in my mind because it was true. And besides, by then I'd actually made up my mind; as soon as I got back to the lunar surface I would find Alma and ask her to marry me.

All that was a major decision. It filled my thoughts. Rannulf s request for a talk hardly entered my mind. In fact, I might have skipped my date with Rannulf entirely, except that when I was finished I had just missed one possible drop point and had plenty of time before the next one.

So I went to the freezer chambers to look for him, and there he was.

Most of the capsules were already occupied, because all the other volunteers had already been numbed and canned and were in the process of slowly cooling to the liquid-gas temperature that would keep them fresh for their arrival on Pava. Rannulf seemed to be the last one left out. He was hanging to a wall strap with one hand as he waited for me, gazing at a screen that showed the surface of the Moon as it rolled beneath us. His expression was mournful, almost as though he were sentimentally attached to that bleak and gloomy place.

It was a little late, I thought, for Rannulf to be having second thoughts. I interrupted his reverie. "All right," I said. "What was it you wanted to tell me about Alma?"

He sighed and turned toward me. "Have a drink," he said.

"I don't much want a drink," I told him.

"Sure you do," he said, taking two bulbs from a wall rack. "Call it a farewell toast. You're off duty now, aren't you?"

I was. I did what he asked, not for any good reason, just because he'd already filled the bulbs and because I felt sorry for the poor wimp. When I had swallowed most of mine I gave him a get-on-with-it look. "I can't stay here forever," I mentioned.

"I know. I appreciate your taking the time. The thing is, Barry," he said, swallowing the last of his drink, "until you came along Alma was my girl."

"Yes?"

"So if you weren't around," he said, "she probably would be again, don't you think?"

It was around then that I realized the question wasn't entirely hypothetical, because it was around then that I began to feel so very sleepy. Too sleepy to ask him what he was talking about. Too sleepy, in fact, to do anything except go right off to sleep.

I don't know what the little rat put in my drink. I don't remember being prepped, or being lifted into the capsule, or being frozen. The first thing I remember after that was waking up to the sound of Captain Garold Tscharka's angry voice. "Damn," he said. "One more thing gone wrong. What are you doing here, di Hoa?"

When I saw him staring in bafflement down at me, and realized that what I was waking up in was a freezer-thawer capsule and a long time had passed, I got the picture fast.

It was a whole new picture, because it was a whole new life; it was a life that was no longer ever again likely to include Alma or my job or my comfortable existence as a fuelmaster on the Moon, because if I ever saw any of those things again, which I very likely would not, nearly half a century would have passed and I would no longer be involved. "Shit," I said, peering up at Captain Tscharka. "What the hell am I going to be doing on Pava?"

7

THEN you did not voluntarily choose to come to join the human colony on Pava?

Hell, no. I was fucking
shanghaied
by that bastard Rannulf Enderman. The worst part is I should have seen it coming. He practically spelled it all out for me; I guess I just didn't think he had the guts to do anything like that. So I let him dope me and send me off to the stars so he'd have half a century or so to stay back in the plush and comfortable ease of life on the Moon—with my girl.

So I was seriously pissed when I found out I was an inadvertent volunteer to join the colony at Delta Pavonis. For that matter, so was Captain Garold Tscharka. "What's going on here?" he demanded, glaring down at me. And when I told him what Rannulf had done his face got purple. "But you're needed. I mean he is needed. He's supposed to help defreeze the others!" he snapped—by "he," meaning the absent Rannulf, of course. "God," he said—it wasn't meant as a swear word; his eyes were resentfully raised to the skies—"why does everything have to go wrong at once?"

I got out of there. I didn't want any more of Tscharka's bad mood; my own mood was murderous enough for two, and my body was seriously achy from its decades as a corpsicle. When I noticed I was walking on the floor of the ship's passage instead of pulling myself along in micro-G, I realized the ship was in full deceleration mode, killing velocity to achieve a stable orbit around Pava. I climbed to the control-room level and found Jillen Iglesias talking on the radio to somebody on the surface of the planet.

She craned her neck to stare at me in astonished displeasure. "But you're what's-his-name, Barry something? The fuelmaster? What're you doing here?" she demanded.

She looked a little older and a lot more harried than the last time I had seen her, and when I told her my story, she looked even more astonished. "Well, hell," she said, grudgingly sympathetic. "That's tough. But, look, we're kind of busy, so just stay out of the way, okay?" I could see that she'd picked up a lot of habits from her captain. "I've got a little problem here," she added.

"
You
've got a problem?"

She thought that was worth a little smile. "Not like your problem, Barry. It's just that the captain expected that some things would have been done here while we were in transit, and they haven't happened, that's all. Please. Let me get on with it."

At least she'd said please. I did as ordered, pushing myself over to a corner of the room and staying out of the way. I didn't eavesdrop on her radio talk. I had other things on my mind.

I don't know if I can make you understand what a terrible shock it was for an average adult human male like me—set in his ways, with a place in the world and plans for the future—to find himself suddenly twenty-odd years later and eighteen-plus light-years away from everything he cared about. Well, if it happened to you it probably would be just as disorienting, I suppose. But not in the same way, because you don't care about the same things we do.

I cared a lot. The more I thought about all the things I had lost, the more I cared. I thought about my girl, Alma. I thought about my son, Matthew. (Jesus, I thought, the kid's got to be pushing forty years old by now! I've got a son older than I am! I could be a grandfather and not even know it.) I thought about sending them both a message. (But what could I say that they wouldn't long since have known? By the time they got it, Alma could very possibly be a grandmother herself and my teenage son Matthew would be getting along toward sixty!) Mostly I thought about Rannulf Enderman and the various kinds of things I would enjoy doing to him if I could.

Unfortunately, the bastard was clear out of my reach. There was no hope of my ever getting my hands on him again, though that didn't stop me from wishing.

Long before I had finished thinking things through, little groups of defrosted passengers began to wander into the control room, looking scared and hopeful and wanting things done for them right away. Jillen Iglesias had her hands full. All at once she was trying to stay in communication with whoever she was talking to on the surface, as long as possible before the continent rolled out from under us; and checking the elements of the orbit the ship was entering; and dealing with the very talkative newcomers. No, they couldn't have a bath just yet, no matter how grungy they felt. No, nobody was going to cook up a breakfast for them, they'd have to wait until they got down to the surface of Pava. No, they couldn't get at their baggage right away, not even to get out a camera so they could take pictures. Yes, that was Pava down below in the screens, and they could look at it for themselves if only they would for Christ's sake stay the hell out of her way.

I had a pretty good idea of what it was like to try to pilot a ship when people were bothering you, so I took a hand. "Shut up, all of you!" I yelled over the babble. "You have to let the pilot do her work, so clear out of the control room. Everybody! Wait in the passages.
Move
." Of course I had no right to be giving orders, but they didn't know that.

I didn't have any right to stay on after I'd chased the others out, either, but Jillen didn't press the point. "Thanks," she said, and got back to her orbital solutions.

And I got around, at last, to thinking about what was next for me. Pava was my new home. Maybe I wouldn't have to stay on it very long, because I could always take the return trip on
Corsair
. (But was there any point to that?) But in any case I would certainly be spending some time there, and I began to try to contemplate what that was going to mean for me.

In the screen the planet was clear and close up, its image bigger by far than we ever saw Earth from the Moon. We were rolling along over the day side of the planet, which was mostly water, but back toward the sunset horizon I could pick out the disappearing shape of Pava's big central land mass.

What I remembered about Pava wasn't much. I was aware that Pava only had one real continent. That seemed peculiar, compared to present-day Earth, but not unprecedented. After all, Earth too (they said) had once been in the same condition, with a single giant land mass that they called Pangaea, before that big one broke up and formed all the continents you could see when you looked down from the Moon.

If Pava's one big continent had been given a name I didn't know what it was. If there were islands in that endless sea, I didn't see them. Pava wasn't quite as blue as Earth looked from space, but more of a sort of yellowish avocado green. Because the light from Delta Pavonis was a little redder than our Sun's? Because the planet of Pava had more cloud cover? I didn't know the answer to that. I tried to remember what Pava's climate was supposed to be like and drew a blank; I really hadn't paid that much attention.
 

Still—

Still, once my fury at Rannulf's despicable treachery began to subside, and the little chemical factories the doctors had implanted within me began to catch up with my temper, I began to discover that I was feeling a few quite different emotions. They weren't all bad. There was even a kind of tingly little excitement there. After all, this was a whole new planet! Orbiting an entirely different
star
!

Being on Pava could turn out to be quite an adventure, I thought—at least, for a limited time.

It would have been a nicer adventure with Alma along to share it, I thought, and the sensation that abruptly chilled my heart then was a lot sharper pain than I would have expected. I wondered if she missed me as much as I was missing her. . . .

It is a very curious thing that at that moment, when I was so wrapped up in my worries about the things I could do nothing about, it did not occur to me to worry about the nearer and very real problem of my personal medical history.

Corsair
achieved Low Planetary Orbit while we were on Pava's night side. Jillen gave a satisfied grunt and grabbed for a handhold as the drive cut itself off and we were in microgravity again.

A few minutes later—we had done most of another orbit of Pava, and the buzz of chatter from the defrosted colonists outside was getting really loud again—Captain Tscharka finally pulled himself up from the freezer chambers, threading his way past the waiting and complaining colonists. He had Friar Tuck with him. The preacher was looking a little more elderly than I remembered him, with more pink scalp showing under the snow white curls at the top of his head. As soon as they were inside the control room the captain stopped short, giving Jillen Iglesias an inquiring look.