The Voices of Heaven (33 page)

Maybe "care" is too strong a word. Nothing I felt then was a strong emotion, just a little colorless imitation of a real feeling. First, I felt a little pale gratitude that I had not, after all, crashed to the very bottom of my cycle—not to the sad, sick, foul-yourself-with-your-own-excrement point of despairing catatonia that I'd seen in my days at the clinic, for sure. On the other hand, second, I had a little pale foreboding that dampened any possible feeling of pleasure, because I was beginning to realize that that hopelessly terminal, all-the-way-to-the-absolute-bottom crash had become a very real possibility for me. In fact, it was surely going to happen to me, more likely sooner than later, unless something came along to change it, and nothing of that kind was in sight.

Still, I was waking up fast. Here, again, I have no doubt my speedy wake-up was helped along by something Dr. Billygoat had slipped into my bloodstream while I slept. He put the sensor away and looked at me hopefully. "How are you feeling? Do you feel up to doing a little work?"

I blinked at him. "What kind of work?"

"Any kind. All kinds. Think you could handle it?"

He was not making himself very clear, but when I thought it over I nodded. "I guess so. Sure."

"Good. We need all the help we can get. I guess you wouldn't know because you've been out of it, but the fucking leps have gone on strike."

That was startling enough to penetrate my haze. Naturally I immediately asked questions, but Billygoat didn't want to take the time to discuss it with me. "I'm too busy to chat with you now. So pay attention. What I want you to do is get yourself cleaned up and come over to my office; I've got some stuff there for you to take. I think it might help you—hope so, anyway. Nanny'll probably tell you all about the leps then. Now I've got to get out of here."

Just getting up and dressed was a harder job than I wanted, but I managed it. By the time I was on the street I could see that things had changed. It was true; not a single lep was in sight anywhere. The town seemed oddly empty, as a matter of fact. I saw a couple of teenagers resentfully dragging a cart of kitchen waste to the composting dump—the kind of work leps usually did—and when I asked them they confirmed it.

"Sure, Mr. di Hoa, the leps just went away," the older girl said. "Haven't seen any since day before yesterday. Why did they do it? I don't know why. All I know is there's no school and a lot of the grownups are off gathering fuel and tending the farms, and we've got to do this junk."

"The leps didn't say anything before they left?"

"Not to me, anyway. Excuse us, will you? We have to get this cart back to the kitchen before Mr. Queng gets sore at us."

When I got to the doctor's office Nanny Goethe didn't have anything useful to add to that, except that it was a damned inconvenience, having to do all this extra work when they were so busy anyway. She knocked on the wall to summon her husband and began counting pills out of two jars.

In a moment Billy appeared at the door, holding a spraydermic. "Roll up your sleeve, will you? Okay. This is just a little stimulant, to supplement—to help you out. I want you to have these pills Nan's getting ready for you. You're about as stable as I can get you right now, but who knows? So if you feel yourself getting spacey, take a red one; if you're depressed, one of the white ones. They'll pick you up."

There were three of each. As I was putting them away he said, "And if you find yourself getting really screwed up, come back here and let me look at you, but try not to do that unless you have to, okay? Oh, and you better go see Jimmy Queng, he'll have a work assignment for you. See you later. . . . And, Nan? Leave what you're doing for a minute; I need a little help in the office."

They left me there alone.

I thought for a moment, and then I didn't have to think anymore. I slipped quickly over behind Nanny Goethe's desk and helped myself to a couple dozen more of the white pills.

All right, maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to do. Even a doctor as marginally qualified as Bill Goethe is still the doctor, and I've always accepted the rule that you'd better do what the doctor tells you. Usually, anyway. But I wanted those uppers.

Don't think we're talking about some kind of pitiful drug addiction here. It wasn't anything like that. It was nothing more than that I just hated not being hyper anymore. I liked having that unbeatable vigor that came with the manic phase. When I'm going hyper I have all the energy in the world. I grasp things quickly. I see instant solutions to any problem around. I'm fast as greased lightning, and I don't get tired. It's a remarkably satisfying way to be, actually.

I'm not the only one to feel that way. People have always treasured that state. It's a historical fact that over the years many, many millions of human beings have spent all the money they could get their hands on, and all the health they had, on such ultimately destructive things as alcohol and alkaloids, just so they could get that feeling, or even just the illusion of it, even for just a moment. It's craziness, all right, but while you have it it feels so fine. You can't beat that feeling . . . until you crash.

Jimmy Queng wasn't around, but Dabney Albright was straw-bossing a gang unloading supplies into the kitchen storage. No, he didn't know where the leps had gone. "They got pissed off about something, I guess. Anyway, we're in the deep shit here. You up to a little work? All right, give us a hand getting this stuff stored and then you and Hillary here can go down to the landing strip for another load."

So that was the first I knew that Captain Tscharka had let the shuttle come back.

On the ride down I tried to find out more from the driver—that was Hillary Tetsui; she'd come out with me on
Corsair
, though I'd hardly seen her since. There wasn't much to find out. Yes, because of the emergency Captain Tscharka had agreed to send down food out of the ship's supplies, but he himself was still up there. The leps? No, she didn't know any more than I did, but it was a total nuisance; she was supposed to be a cook, not a longshoreman. And when I tentatively asked her if she had any idea about whether I'd be able to get a ride up to the factory orbiter, seeing as the shuttle was right there on the surface now, she just shook her head.

So did Jillen Iglesias. Jillen was the one who'd brought the shuttle down, and she and two others were shifting its cargo to the ground when we got to the strip—mostly food. There was a lot of it, bags of flour, cartons of cuts of meat in then: sterile pouches, concentrated soups and stews.

Jillen seemed preoccupied, as though she were worrying about something, but she managed to give me a smile—until I asked her the question. "Oh, I don't think there's time to take you to the factory right now, Barry," she said. "Nobody seems to know how long the leps will stay away, so we've all just got to pitch in to keep things going. Are you all right? I heard you've been sick."

"I'm fine," I said. I was, too, because I'd popped an extra one of the white ones on the way down.

"Well," she said, "when I get back to the ship I'll ask the captain what he thinks about getting you to the factory—when things ease up, I mean." But she didn't sound hopeful, and neither was I.

Things had changed while I was out of it. I wasn't the great white hope of the Pava colony any longer. Public opinion had shifted. The mood of the moment wasn't concerned with building for a wonderful future anymore; it was anger at the leps for deserting us without warning.

I don't suppose I'd fully realized until that time just how dependent we were on lep helpers. The leps were there; they helped out; they always had. They were a natural resource, like the rain and the sushi bushes. When they were gone it was a totally unexpected blow, and a serious one.

As I shifted cargo and pondered over this, it seemed to me that I could perhaps be of great use to the community there, too. I was thinking of Geronimo. Geronimo wasn't just my helper when there was drudge work to do, he was my friend. I felt that if I could just have a word with Geronimo, perhaps the whole thing could be straightened out somehow.

I didn't kid myself that that would be easy, maybe not even possible. Geronimo might well be still in his transition cocoon; I knew that, and then of course there would be no way to talk to him. But I kept thinking that maybe, if I just went up to the nest and asked around, somebody would talk to me.

The problem was that I had no real idea of where the nest was, in spite of having been there once, and if anyone else did they wouldn't tell me. Jimmy Queng flatly forbade me to even think about it. "We can't spare anybody for harebrained roaming around the hills. You'd better go up and help cut brush for the power plant."

I tried to be agreeable. "Then, listen, I've been thinking. As long as we've got the shuttle in service again, what about my making a quick trip up to the factory, the way we talked about?"

He groaned. "Look," he said patiently, "maybe we can start thinking about crap like that in a week or so.
Buccaneer
's reported in; they're in full deceleration and they'll be in parking orbit by then. With any luck at all maybe they'll have brought us some extra help for the work that needs doing. Talk to me then. Now there's a boat going upstream to the woodcutters in twenty minutes or so. Be on it. You hear?"

"All right," I said—not because I was giving up on my idea—just trying to be agreeable.

At least twenty minutes meant I had time to go back to the apartment and pick up a couple of changes of clothes. I popped another pill on the way, for extra energy, and got to the boat just as they were beginning to get irritated about waiting for me.

I sat down next to Madeleine Hartly's great-granddaughter, Debbie. The weather had turned decent, and actually the boat ride up to the fuel-cutting area was pleasant enough. "At least we've got a nice day for it," I said to her sociably. "How's Madeleine bearing up?"

She looked startled. "You haven't heard?"

"Heard what?" The expression on her face was making me feel edgy. But I wasn't prepared for what she said.

"She died, Barry. She was out gathering fruit, all by herself, and she must have fallen. When they found her she had a broken ankle and pneumonia, and she died before they could get her to the doctor."

I was cutting fuel for two days before the boat came back with fresh supplies. I wasn't enjoying it, either. I kept going, with the help of some of those little white pills now and then, but they certainly weren't the best two days of my life. There were a lot of reasons for that. I was mourning Madeleine. (And blaming the leps for her death—a little, anyway—if she'd had a lep with her at least he could have gone for help.) It began to rain again, which made the work twice as miserable, but we had to keep on cutting and bundling the fuel into rafts regardless. I was physically exhausted. I wanted to talk to Geronimo. I wanted—

I wanted all kinds of things, but none of them were happening. It was only the pills that kept me going—kept me in high gear, really. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn't overdoing them a bit, because once in a while I could feel myself beginning to get sort of jittery.

It wasn't just me and the pills, though. When I tried talking to the others in the fuel-cutting gang, they weren't any too cheerful, either. Or forgiving. When I ventured the opinion that, really, we shouldn't be blaming the leps so much because they weren't obliged to do our scut work for us, I was drowned out by a chorus of denunciations. When I very tentatively mentioned that, on the other hand, if we'd gone ahead and got the factory working properly we wouldn't need to do so much dreary manual labor, they were positively insulting.

The glory days were over for me. The kindest word I heard was "crackpot."

Well, that's the way humans are. The way they are when they're in groups, anyway. Any single human being can be quite reasonable, at least most of the time, but when they're a pack they can't seem to hold more than one thought at a time in their minds, and the big thought in everybody's head just then was angry resentment.

The person who brought the boat up was Becky Khaim-Novello. As soon as we heard the whine of the hydrogen-fueled motor, we all dropped what we were doing and gathered hopefully at the riverbank. Our hopes weren't gratified. We could see long before she landed that she was alone in the boat. "Where's our relief?" somebody shouted, but all she gave back was a look of dislike—maybe more for me than for the others, because I expect she was remembering our little disagreements, but with plenty for everybody.

She didn't waste any time trying to be conciliatory about it, either. She kicked one of the crates of food. "This is all there is," she said flatly. "If you want it, start unloading, and, no, there's nobody coming up to take over for you."

That just about doubled the complaining, and she doubled her glare at us. "You think I like this goddamn job? You've got complaints, you take them to Jimmy Queng. And, oh," she said, remembering, "he gave me a message for you. He says for Christ's sake, you guys, get your asses in gear, the power plant needs more fuel."

"Then he should send us more people!" someone called. She didn't even answer that. She was in a worse mood even than we were, I thought. She refused to talk anymore. As soon as the supplies were unloaded she cast off and putt-putted away without another word. She seemed to be brooding about something. Well, that didn't surprise me; she wasn't the only one, and if there was something special that was troubling her I didn't know what it was . . . then.

When it was too dark to work anymore we ate and climbed painfully into our sleeping bags, and I sneaked another white pill.

I know that wasn't too smart, even in itself. What I should have been doing was sleeping, and those pills wouldn't help that along. But I had other things on my mind. I lay there, wide-awake, staring up into the far hills to the general area where I thought the nest was; and after a while I couldn't stand it anymore, so I got up.

I was as quiet as I could be as I headed for the slit-trench latrine, in case anybody was wide-awake enough to ask me what I was doing. No one did, and when I got to the latrine area I just kept going.