The Voices of Heaven Read online

  "You wouldn't. Besides, you aren't supposed to. Because of your health," Alma said. I didn't think it was kind of her to remind me of that, although it was certainly more or less true. That was one of the reasons I'd had to give up my career flying a spotter ship, tagging high-value asteroids for the big smelters in the Belt. I wasn't even supposed to go on any long interplanetary trips, because the doctors didn't want me to get too far from the big medical facilities on the Earth or the Moon.

  She probably would have said more, but she stopped, wincing. There was a commotion from the table with the drunken lovers, only they weren't alone anymore. A man in a clerical collar was shouting at them.

  "They got caught," Rannulf said from behind us. He was grinning as he sat down. "I know the preacher; he's a Nation, name is Bryce Challenor. And that's his wife drinking with the other guy."

  "Oh," said Alma. It explained the shouting. If they were Carrie Nation Baptists that meant they were supposed to be dead set against drinking, among other things.

  I didn't want to talk about other people's domestic disturbances, annoying though the noise they were making was. I said to Rannulf, "We've just been having a little talk about you. Alma wants me to talk you out of going to Pava."

  He was pleased about that, I could see. "It's the right thing for me to do," he said, with just enough of a wistful catch in his voice to get his point across.

  "Bullshit," said Alma. "The right thing for you to do is to stay here and work. There's nothing on that dumb planet but bugs and earthquakes."

  He gave her a forgiving look. "Earthquakes, yes," he admitted. "But the autochtons aren't 'bugs,' dear." (I registered the "dear," as I was meant to do.) "They're highly intelligent even if they don't look a bit like human beings. And if Captain Tscharka is willing to fight so hard to keep the colony going, I think people of goodwill should give him all the help they can. Pava is a goodplace to spend your life."

  "The quitters don't think so," Alma said. She was referring to the rejects, the ones who had given up and come back in Corsair.

  Rannulf shrugged. "They just weren't motivated. I am. Pava's going to be a holy place."

  "Ah," I said, the pieces fitting into place. "I didn't know you were still a Millenarist." I knew he had been once—because that was where he and Alma had first got together.

  He turned the forgiving look on me, this time adding a few other ingredients like pity and noble resolve. "It's not just a religious matter, is it? It's for the glory of the human race in general."

  Alma didn't say "bullshit" again this time, although it seemed to me that it was definitely the right word. She said, "There's no life for you on Pava, Rannulf!"

  "How can you say that? It's a pity Pava is so far away, of course, but it's got a nice climate, it's got good air, it's got plenty of raw materials—"

  "And it's got the earthquakes and the bugs."

  He turned the forgiving look back on her and began to explain what he'd learned—what we'd all have learned, if we ever bothered to watch the documentaries—about Pava. Alma was frowning as she listened, but she was listening, though I saw her cover a small yawn.

  The yawn gave me the chance I was looking for. "Honey," I said, interrupting Rannulf's catalogue of the virtues of Pava, "it's getting kind of late for you, isn't it? Why don't I take you home?"

  She shook her head. "I'm worried about Rannulf."

  "But," I said reasonably, "there's nothing to worry about, is there? It's his life, and it's going to be a great adventure. Matter of fact," I said, turning to Rannulf and not being entirely truthful, "I almost envy you. If I just had the chance—"

  I didn't finish that particular lie, wherever it was going to go, because the trouble at the other table suddenly got a lot louder. The irate husband had begun to smash glasses, his wife screaming and trying to stop him. He was shouting, "Drink and drugs, the devil's work. Brothers, sisters, listen! I beg you to leave this place of vice for the sake of your immortal souls!"

  Most of the room was laughing, but then I got personally involved. The waitress was coming through with my drinks, and one of the preacher's flailing arms caught her tray.

  I was on my feet before I knew it.

  I knew that it was a bad idea for me to lose my temper, but everything the doctors had told me vanished from my mind. "Goddamn it," I yelled at the furious husband, "that was my drink you just spilled!"

  And when Alma put her hand on me and said, "Please, Barry," I snapped at her, too.

  "Get your damn hand off me! I'm sick of these religious nuts!"

  She looked strained but determined. "Remember your condition," she said, and then I caught a glimpse of Rannulf. He was looking very pleased.

  That brought me back to present reality.

  I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes, willing myself to be calm. When I opened them again the Security people were leading the Nation couple out of the bar. I wasn't really calm. I was still seething inside, but at least I had control of my temper once more.

  "Sorry," I said. "I guess I don't really want that drink. Alma, let's get out of here."

  And she came along. She hesitated. She looked doubtfully at Rannulf who was looking nobly self-sacrificial, and for a minute I thought it could have gone either way. But then she sighed and got up, and I was the one who took her home.

  Alma's rooms were three tubes and a drop away from the bar, and by the time we got there things were all right between us again. Pretty much all right, anyway. She'd chided me for my silly jealousy, and I'd apologized for it, and then we didn't talk about any subjects that involved Rannulf anymore.

  Because of our schedules Alma and I didn't have much time together just then. That was the only real, tangible problem in our relationship—not counting Rannulf, I mean. It was a matter of timing. Our work shifts clashed. Basically I was coded as being on the A shift, although subject to call anytime when I was needed, while Alma was on C—you understand, "days" and "nights" on the Moon were a matter of arbitrary convenience, because the Moon's real day was so long and, mostly, because we never saw the Sun rise or set anyway.

  So after we had gone to bed in Alma's rooms and finished what we had gone to bed for—as good and rewarding as though Rannulf had never been born—it was still early in my day and I was wide-awake. Alma wasn't. She had rolled comfortably away from me, her face down in the pillows so that only the barrette on the top of her head was visible, and I had my arms around her. I could feel her breathing getting more and more regular.

  I thought for a bit, as I often did at such times, of how nice it would be to stay there. Not just that particular time, but on a regular basis. Nice to keep her cocooned in my arms while we slept the night away in the warm and friendly, faintly fragrant bedclothes. (Only I wasn't at all sleepy.) Nice, too, in the longer-range prospect—by which I meant (but only in my thoughts, and never aloud to Alma) the kind of long-range planning that involved getting married, and spending all our nights sleeping together, and maybe even having a baby together—

  But then I began, as I usually did at that point, to think of all the reasons against.

  The short-range reason against staying on, on this particular occasion, was that, although Alma had eaten a sandwich, I hadn't. I was getting hungry.

  The longer-range reason was that I realized I ought to report to the clinic after that flash of red-hot adrenaline in the bar—and the reasons why that was so. Those theoretical babies could be quite a problem.

  So I slid as quietly as I could out of Alma's bed—she was too sound asleep to notice—and after I had showered and dressed I went back to kiss her good night. She woke up just enough to lift her face to mine for the kiss. But what she said before she sank back was, "G'night, Rannulf." And it wasn't the first time she'd done it, either.

  4

  THERE is concern about the "craziness" you have sometimes exhibited. Perhaps you should give more information on this matter.

  Well, look, it gives me concern, too. Trust me on that poi
nt. But most of the time it isn't too serious, as long as I get treatment. The important thing to understand is that my problem wasn't caused by a desire to have sexual intercourse with my mother, or because I was weaned off the bottle too early. My problem wasn't Freudian at all. It was metabolic.

  So I made sure, all the time I was on the Moon, that I went to see my doctor every time I thought I was behaving in even the least peculiar .way; and as a matter of fact I did right after leaving Alma that night.

  I hadn't made an appointment, so the doctor was busy with another patient. But she flashed me the have-a-seat sign, and I settled down to watch some news broadcasts while I waited. Wouldn't you know it? The first thing I saw was Garold Tscharka and his Santa Claus chaplain being triumphantly interviewed about the victory they had just apparently scored for Pava.

  It really wasn't an issue that interested me a lot. When the Budget Congress had first announced it was going to review the question of continuing to fund the colonies I thought it was sensible of them. Those worlds were no bargains, anyway. But obviously the two Millenarists didn't agree; they were glowing with success. "A victory?" the big preacher was saying—was braying, rather; he had a big, raspy voice when he was orating, and he was taking no trouble to keep the volume down. "Certainly it's a victory, but not just for our heroic pioneers in the Pava colony. The victory is for common sense and freedom!"

  "Just what have you accomplished?" the invisible interviewer asked, and it was Captain Tscharka who answered.

  "They're going to leave us our ships and fill our requisitions. That's all we need. Maybe a couple of hundred years from now, when Corsair is getting rickety, we'll have to take up the question again. But for now the colony is safe."

  Isn't that a killer? He had to be lying through his teeth, even then, but he made everybody believe him. That was the thing about Captain Garold Tscharka. He was wholly wrongheaded in almost every way I can think of—but, even now, I almost miss the man.

  When the doctor let me in she looked up from her screens and said, "You again." But she was smiling when she said it.

  I said, "Yes, me, Helge. I nearly blew my pod a couple of hours ago, so I thought you might want to take a look."

  "Hum," she said, leaning back and looking at me. That tone and posture meant Tell me all about it and don't leave out any details, so I did. Helge got up and walked around. Finally, she perched in silence on the edge of her desk, kicking her heel against it, until I finished. Then she said, "All this happened hours ago?"

  "Well, I would have come right in, Helge, but I had things to do." Like eat. Like Alma, but I didn't specify.

  She said, "Hum," again, but this time it didn't mean anything but Hold still because she was running her sensors over me.

  Helge's always both glad and sorry to see me. She likes me for the novelty, because I'm an interesting case, but she's also a little bit sorry when she sees me because she really can't treat me properly.

  The condition I suffered from was a medical anomaly. The specific ailment I suffered from was so rare that doctors had decided long ago that it didn't exist at all, and even the words used to describe it had been expunged from the medical vocabulary. In the old-fashioned term, I had a "psychosis" that closely resembled "schizophrenia" of the type once called "manic-depressive." It wasn't something they could vaccinate against at birth. It came from my genetic heritage; my mother and my father just happened to carry some very rare recessive genes, and I was the one-in-a-billion lucky lottery winner of the chance to express them.

  In itself that shouldn't have been much of a problem. Metabolic-based loopiness gets cured by changing the body's chemistry around, and that's generally easy to do. The quick and dirty way, what doctors used to do when they first figured out how the body chemistry could mess the mind up, was to deal with the symptoms. When the patient was depressed they'd give him pep-up pills, when he was hyper they'd give him tranquilizers.

  Then, when they began to think about cures, they tried other kinds of treatments. Then they'd inject the protein or other missing chemical into the bloodstream, so that the symptoms wouldn't occur at all. The first disease they did that with, I think, wasn't a mental problem, it was something called diabetes. That kind of treatment was what they called "the needle way," and it worked. The diabetics that stuck themselves with insulin every day lived perfectly normal lives—unless they ran out of insulin.

  So then the doctors began to figure out how to trick the body into making its own insulin, or whatever, as a healthy body was supposed to do in the first place. The theory was that if they could use some carrier to deliver genetically active material to the patient's system they could get the process going. Then, if the stuff they put in was tolerated by the body's system (that is, if it was not inactivated by the body's immune defenses, and if it wasn't causing anything nasty like tumors), the added genetic material would settle down and release the desired recombinant protein (or whatever) at a controllable rate indefinitely. When that happened the patient was "cured." He could forget he'd ever been sick, no needles, no worries, no nothing.

  That was the right way to do it, but it didn't work for me. They couldn't find a carrier that would survive in my body.

  They tried everything they could think of. For instance, one thing they could do would be simply to flood the patient's system with carriers that would just float around in the bloodstream, like bacteria or leucocytes, and do their job. When they tried it on me, though, mine didn't. The carriers were rejected, or they just stopped working. (And all through these trials, you understand, I was going loopy about half the time, depressed to the point of catatonia the rest. There's a special name for that horrid catatonic state; they call it "depressive stupor," and I never want to live through it again. So I lost patience pretty fast. I wanted to get this business finished—at least, I wanted that at such times as I was sane enough to be able to figure out what I did want.)

  Then they tried carriers that would actually bond with working parts of my body, instead of just floating around unattached. They tried immature muscle cells, called myoblasts; they tried immature bone cells; they tried white blood cells, keratinocytes, fibroblasts, liver cells—they tried everything they could think of, and those wonderful strong immune defenses in my body just chewed them all up and spat them right out again. There was more they could do, they told me—when I was in one of my brief lucid periods—like try to turn down my immune defenses enough to tolerate the genes. That had some drawbacks, they admitted. For instance, I'd probably keep on catching a lot of little illnesses, everything from warts to pneumonia, but those could be treated. . . .

  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 h
er 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—"