Naturally, the entire drive blew itself clear of the ship, the whole thing, reaction block, thrust nozzles and all.
It made a wonderful great bang, and as it went off I was laughing to myself, tickled pink because old Corsair not only wasn't going to be a bomb that wiped out all life on Earth, it wasn't going anywhere at all, ever again.
And, naturally, Tscharka and Friar Tuck came hurtling as fast as they could through the passages to see what the hell was going on. They didn't see, though, because I was ready. I was waiting for them, crouched at the bend of a corridor, with a crowbar in my hand.
I didn't kill them. I just caught them from behind and knocked them spinning—wondering as I did if what I was doing to Captain Tscharka was really quite keeping the promise Jillen had asked me for.
After that it all gets very confused indeed.
I don't really remember tying them up and lugging them into the shuttle, though Jillen says I did. I don't remember the trip down to the surface. I don't remember Buccaneer arriving in orbit, though Jillen tells me we saw it flaring its great plume of exhaust mass on the way down.
I don't, in fact, remember anything much that was real, although I do, sort of, remember a hell of a lot that probably wasn't. I remember Geronimo putting his warm little arms around me and crying—that couldn't have been happening, really; I thought that even at the time because I knew the leps were still staying away from Freehold, but mostly because leps don't cry. I remember everybody crowding around me, except that the part about them being naked and dancing can't be true. I remember screaming in pain while Dr. Billygoat was agonizingly hacking my right arm off above the elbow (he says he did nothing more than give me a shot), and I remember wondering why he was being so mean to somebody who had just been doing the best he could all along.
I even remember my dear lost Alma bending over me and kissing me.
That, of course, was the craziest delusion yet. Even in my far-out loopy state I realized that it was impossible. There was no way that Alma could be bending over me there on Pava, because I knew perfectly well that Alma was still a dozen and a half long light-years away on the Moon.
Only, of course, Alma really was there, really kissing me, really whispering my name . . . because when Buccaneer reached low Pava orbit it arrived there with Alma in its freezer, coming after me to tell me that, no matter what, she wanted the two of us to spend the rest of our lives together. And that was the most wonderful thing of all.
26
IT is correct to state that we do have knowledge of most of these events, but many are still not well understood. For example, there is the question of Garoldtscharka. It is clear that he was a dangerously aberrant individual, and your action in rendering him unconscious and binding him appears to conform to established norms. But what happened subsequently? It is known that the procedure by which humans customarily deal with such persons is to confine them to a small place or even to put them to death. Yet neither was done in this case. Why was it not? Why did you leave Garoldtscharka unpunished?
Well, he wasn't really unpunished, you know, not in the long run. As to what happened when I got him back to Pava, all right, he wasn't actually put in jail, but both he and Tuchman were placed under what we call "house arrest."
Maybe you think that wasn't severe enough. A lot of the colonists would have agreed with you, as a matter of fact, but what else could we do? We didn't have much choice about that, did we? We didn't happen to have a real jail in Freehold to put him in.
There was a more important reason why we didn't do more than we did, too. That was that we human beings have laws, Merlin. Laws are the rules we run our society by. Under our laws we don't ever punish people until they've been convicted of a crime. We can't convict them until they have a trial, either. There was every intention of putting Tscharka on some kind of trial, all right, but first we had to figure out how to do it.
Practically everybody on Pava had a suggestion about that. Captain Bennetton of the Buccaneer, the one who had brought Alma to Pava, wanted to take Tscharka back up aboard his ship and either try Tscharka there at a captain's court-martial—if you can imagine that!—or at least stick him in the freezer, take him back to Earth, and let them figure it out. Jimmy Queng and a number of other steadfast Millenarists—they weren't all steadfast anymore; there were a lot of waverers in the faith after people found out what Tscharka had been up to—anyway, those people wanted to convene an ecclesiastical court to try Tscharka and Tuchman as heretics who had subverted the teachings of the Penitential church. What surprised me there was that so many Millenarists or fellow travelers agreed with them, Jacky Schottke among them. Dr. Billygoat had a suggestion of his own, because all the research he'd done on my own case had got him interested in psychopharmacy and related subjects. He didn't think there was any reason for a legal trial, when Tscharka's actions could just as well be considered as a mere medical problem. What Billy thought was that it might be useful to give Tscharka an experimental dose of one of the pharmaceuticals he had considered giving me (but had too much sense ever to suggest). Or, if not that, then he offered to try a little lop job on Tscharka's prefrontal lobes.
You get the idea. There were plenty of plans. Probably the closest we had to a consensus was among the fairly large number of people who simply wanted to call a town meeting and declare it a trial, but even they couldn't agree on exactly how to run it. There just wasn't any real agreement. If you talked to any ten people in the colony, you'd wind up with eleven different opinions.
While everybody was talking it over, Tscharka stayed right in his house, with no one but Reverend Tuchman for company. It wasn't exactly a jail but—now I'm finally getting around to answering your question—being under "house arrest" meant that they weren't actually free, either. They were ordered to stay in the apartment. They did—well, except for the necessary trips to the outdoor toilet. People even brought their meals in to them. That was a nuisance, but a lot better than having them turn up sitting across the dinner table from you and spoiling your meal. Nobody guarded them. Why would anyone bother? After all (we thought), they didn't have anyplace to go.
I may have been the only human being on Pava who wasn't concerning himself much about what was going to happen to Garold Tscharka. I had other things to think about.
For one splendid and overwhelming thing, Alma was there, right by my side. The love I had thought I had lost forever was wonderfully restored to me.
But there was even more than that, because Alma hadn't come to Pava with empty hands. When she had found out what the bastard Rannulf Enderman had done she had seen at once what that meant for my little medical problems. So she planned ahead. When she had boarded Buccaneer she took along with her a freezerful of the stuff the doctors in the Lederman clinic had prescribed for me, along with the full protocol for using it.
Even a dentist-doctor like Billygoat could handle administering the materials. He was pleased out of his head when he got his hands on the stuff and could actually treat my condition with real success—but, believe me, he was not nearly as pleased as I.
The might-have-beens scared me, though. Since I had had no idea that Alma was on her way, I could easily have screwed things up—in many ways; by maybe settling for Theophan Sperlie, when I had seemed to have that chance, or, if I'd let myself get really desperate, even for Becky Khaim-Novello. Either of those unfortunate misalliances might easily have happened, and either one could have made a mess of my reunion with Alma—not to mention what even crazier things I might have done in my even crazier moments.
When I did finally hint to Alma things might have gone more easily for me if I'd known she was coming, she was indignant. "But I wrote you to say I was going to do all that—you mean you didn't get my messages?" Alma asked reproachfully. "I sent three of them. One was telling you I loved you and I was never going to talk to Rannulf again, then another telling you I was coming out with your medicine on the next ship—are you saying you didn't get any of them?"
She blushed, almost. At least she looked prettily shy. "I was just telling you all the different ways I loved you and missed you, and what I wished the two of us could have been doing. It was kind of embarrassing to send that one. I put in a lot of details—and, Barry, do you have any idea what all those messages cost?"
"Not really," I said, rolling over and putting my arms around her—we happened to be in bed at the time. "But I do have a different idea. Why don't you show me a couple of those things so we can try them out?"
It turned out she had been working up to pretty much the same idea, so we did it. We did it a lot, in fact, Jacky Schottke having been kind enough to move out so we had the apartment to ourselves. I had several months of abstinence to catch up on, after all, and so (I was glad to find out) did Alma.
Oh, I understand that sort of thing doesn't mean much to you. I know how you leps feel about making love. You don't even think about it until your sixth instar and then, I guess, you hardly think about anything else. I'm not knocking that. It's fine, for you. I like our way better.
I don't want you to think that Alma and I concentrated on sex with full sixth-instar devotion. It wasn't like that, exactly.
We couldn't actually be out and about much, though, because neither of us was in shape for it. I'd burned up a lot of reserves over the previous week or two. I needed a lot of rest and recuperation while the new medicines began to work their repair magic, and Alma had her own problems. She'd been living in the light-gravity environment of the Lederman community even longer than I had, and maybe hadn't been as meticulous as she might have been at keeping up her stress exercises. In Pava's Earthlike gravity her Moon-adapted muscles tired easily. That is, they did when she had to be up on her feet for very long at a time, I mean, though she hardly tired at all when she could be lying down. Fortunately.
Well, that's all purely personal stuff, I guess, and maybe not all that important in the larger scheme of things. Plenty was happening all around us. Bennetton's people had decanted most of their cargo of corpsicles, and nearly fifty new immigrants had arrived in Freehold—a little surprised, I think, to find out that their new careers involved hoeing and weeding and carrying large sacks of things from one place to another instead of the more sophisticated work they had intended. But there wasn't any choice about that, either. The work had to be done, because the leps were still absent.
I fretted about that a lot. I felt that it was my fault, in a way, because I'd had a chance to make my case to you, Merlin, and to the others in the nest, and I'd failed to convince you. Now that I was coherent I explained to everyone all over again that it was Becky Khaim-Novello's fault: that she'd actually hit a lep to try to make him do something he didn't want to do, and so you people had all decided to shun us. That didn't make Becky popular (and it certainly didn't make me popular with Becky, who glared spitefully at me every time we passed at the door of the apartment), but it didn't solve the problem, either.
I wished for Geronimo.
I wished a whole lot for Geronimo, and not just because I thought the two of us could talk things over and maybe find a way to heal things. I missed his friendly company. I was pretty sure he was out of his cocoon by then, and I felt, well, rebuffed that he hadn't at least made one quick visit to Freehold to see how I was doing. When both Alma and I were beginning to feel a little better, I made up my mind. "I'm going to go back to the nest," I told her.
She considered that. "But you don't even know where it is," she pointed out.
"I got there twice, I can get there again. Anyway, I can try. Maybe somebody will turn up again to show me the way." I was, of course, thinking of Geronimo. "Anyway, that's what I'm going to do, as soon as I'm up to the hiking."
She said loyally, "I think you should do whatever you think best, Barry, and—oh, hell!" she cried, clutching at me in shock. "What's that?"
I gave her a comforting hug, but I couldn't help grinning, because Alma had just felt her first real quake.
When I had told her what it was she managed a shaky smile back. It was safe enough to smile about, because the tremor was over almost as soon as it began. It wasn't a very big one, either—under a five—but it did knock some things off shelves. And it gave me a chance to show off for Alma some of the seismic expertise I had acquired from Theophan Sperlie.
So I played back about ten minutes' worth of Theophan's lectures for Alma. I told her about faults and displacements, and how they made the earth shake. I told her that the colonists hadn't been too smart about where they located their colony, and how I hoped that sometime soon they would get around to moving Freehold to a better place. I told her how the big quake that wrecked the hydropower dam had harmed a lot of leps, and how hard they'd taken that. I told her what Theophan had explained to me about the coupled faults, and what the fact that Pava had only one big continent meant to its seismic activity. I gave her the full benefit of my wisdom on the subject, and then I waited for questions.
She had one. "This Theophan Sperlie," she said thoughtfully, "is she that kind of middle-aged woman who lives with that phony artist?"
I wondered if somebody had said something to her, or if it was just her well-oiled intuition. I temporized. "Well, Marcus is a novelist, actually," I said. "Or anyway he says he is. Yes." I did not think it was a good idea to challenge the "middle-aged" part of what she had said.
"I see," Alma said, picking up a hairbrush from the floor where it had been thrown and putting it back on the dressing table. She kept on tidying up silently for a moment, then she nodded. "That makes sense," she said.
"Well, maybe he really can write a novel, I don't know—"
"No, that's not what I mean. I wasn't talking about Sperlie's artsy-fartsy boyfriend. I was thinking about what you were saying about coupled faults."
I backtracked over the conversation, trying to see what she was getting at. I failed. I said, "Oh?"
"What I mean is that this coupled-fault thing isn't just about geology, is it? One mistake somewhere can trigger a big mistake somewhere else, like Captain Tscharka and his idea of saving everybody by wiping them out. I've been thinking about that, too."
"About wiping people out?"
"About where Tscharka got that notion. Do you know what I think? I think they just read the Bible wrong."
"Well, I wouldn't doubt that. They did everything else wrong."
"Yes, but—" She had something on her mind, though I wasn't at all sure what. Then she said, "Maybe I ought to talk to him about it. It might make him feel better."
One of the things I'd loved about Alma was her kind heart, but it seemed to me she was pushing it a whole long way too far this time. "Why would you want to make that bastard feel better?"
She flushed and shook her head, but she was obstinate. "I'd like to just meet him, anyway."
That surprised me a little—it hadn't occurred to me that there was anybody on Pava who hadn't met Garold Tscharka. But of course Alma was one. She had hardly seen the man, except when he was being dragged off the shuttle and not really in a condition for introductions.
I didn't say anything to that, and she turned around to look at me. "Would you mind, Barry?"
"Mind what?"
"Would you mind if we went over to see him? I'd like it. After all, I don't often get to meet a would-be mass murderer who thinks he's going to be doing his victims a big favor. What say we volunteer to take him his dinner tonight?"
I wasn't likely to say no to anything Alma wanted right then, but I did have one small, shadowy little concern in the back of my mind.
I knew perfectly well that Alma wasn't a Mil
lenarist anymore. I didn't for one moment believe that exposure to a couple of red-hots like Tscharka and Tuchman would make her backslide. All the same, it made me nervous, and when we knocked on their door I kept an eye on her.
Friar Tuck was the one who answered. "Ah," he said, amiable and at ease—there was nothing in his manner to suggest that he thought of himself as an accused criminal—"you've brought our dinner. Thank you. What have we got tonight?" And he took the tray of covered dishes from my hand as though that were the end of the conversation.
"Would you mind if we come in for a minute?" Alma asked.
He hadn't expected that. He didn't object, though. He just studied her for a moment before he spoke. "Of course," he said graciously then. "Garold is at his prayers, but he'll be out in a minute and I'm sure he'll be glad to see you." And I guess he was, because when Tscharka came out he gave us what looked like a genuine smile.
"Barry di Hoa," he said, shaking my hand before I thought to take it out of reach. "And you must be Alma Vendette. It's a pleasure to meet you, Alma." And he shook her hand, too. "Won't you sit down?" he invited.
We sat, Friar Tuck setting the food on their table, the two of them looking at us hospitably. "I understand you're going to get your way and poor old Corsair's going to be raw materials for the factory now," Tscharka said, making small talk.
That was a pretty self-evident fact. With no drive system anymore, Corsair was no longer useful for anything else so the discussion had been foreclosed. I didn't have any useful comment to make, so I just shrugged. It was Alma who remembered her duties as a good guest who had arrived in someone's house at mealtime. "Why don't you eat before it gets cold?" she said, but Tscharka shook his head humorously.
The Voices of Heaven Page 28
