It was one of the first sixth-instar leps I had ever seen.
I had never met Marc Anthony; he had to have cocooned himself for his final transmogrification right after I landed on Pava. I found out later from Jacky Schottke that he had been a good and loyal friend of the human colony in his fourth and fifth instars, collecting biological samples for Schottke's study, tirelessly helping in whatever work was at hand. Of course, I had to find it out from someone else, since Marc Anthony was no longer able to tell me any of that himself. At his sixth instar he had passed beyond the point when he would ever tell anyone anything again—when he would ever again know anything to tell, for that matter. He fluttered around us for a moment, perhaps sniffing to see if any of us smelled like sixth-instar female lep, and then was gone. Looking, I suppose, for something that did.
Marc Anthony was the first other lep we saw, but soon there were others. I became aware that there were leps moving in the underbrush around us; they didn't approach, but they were watching. Geronimo ignored them, until some of them revealed themselves, joining our procession. They were all wingless ones, in all stages. Theophan was fascinated. "Look," she said, pointing to what looked like a giant cowflop under a moss-covered rock, "there's a first-instar baby." And when I paused to look I could hear the distant locusty chitter and screech of the whole community.
It grew louder, and then we were there.
"This is our nest," Geronimo declaimed proudly. "You are welcome, Barrydihoa. Here, they wish to offer you food."
It seemed they had expected us. Fifteen or twenty of them came crowding around us, mostly three- and four-star leps, stroking my arms with their little hands, smelling like a lawn after mowing on a rainy day. And they did offer food.
It wasn't exactly any kind of food that I wanted to eat. It wasn't lep food, though. It was worse. It was human food. At least it once had been: a soggy loaf of ancient bread, no doubt picked out of the kitchen garbage in town, and a brick of stone-hard goat cheese with bright green-and-orange mold all along one side, I assumed from the same place. I declined with thanks, for both of us, though they hadn't made the offer to Theophan. Evidently they were willing to tolerate the fact that she had come along, but just barely; she remained a nonperson. None of them said a word to her.
"I shall return with Merlin," Geronimo announced, and had slithered away before I could ask him who Merlin was. I didn't have time to worry about it; I was busy trying to take everything in.
I don't know what I had expected the lep nest to be like: A village of wattled huts? A little New England town with a church and a factory and homes with gardens around them? A hive? A giant termite mound? I'd certainly expected a visible community of some sort. What I had not expected was that the "nests" were no more than an arbitrary hectare or two of groves and crops and burrows.
See, there's another big difference between us. Human beings build towns. That's because humans are used to having community projects—places to work or pray or study or to buy and sell things—and they need to cluster around those projects. The only thing leps have to cluster around is themselves. I suppose you people wouldn't bother to live in groups at all except for the fact that you like each other's company.
Well, you know all that.
You also know that that was the occasion when I met Garibaldi and Jefferson and Confucius and eight or nine other leps, fourth and fifth instars mostly—the whole English-speaking population of the community, I guess, or at least all the English-speaking ones who happened to be present in the nests at that time. Well, you know who I met as well as I do, Merlin, because I'm sure you haven't forgotten that one of the ones I met was you.
21
IS it then correct to state that the person of the third instar whom you call "Geronimo" did not inform you that we had proposed to him that you be brought here?
He never said a word. I don't suppose he thought it was necessary. It wasn't. Sour as I felt that day, there wasn't a chance in hell that I would have turned the invitation down, whoever it came from. I knew other human beings had visited your nests before me, Merlin, but I hadn't. I wanted to see for myself.
I hope you won't take it the wrong way, but I have to say that you didn't impress me much on that first meeting, Merlin. That wasn't Geronimo's fault. He was shrilling in my ear that you were very important to him, but all I saw was that you looked pretty funny, and a little pitiful, with your withered left arm and your one cocked eye. I didn't pay a lot of attention to you, though, and you didn't say much. You spent your time just watching—and mostly, I thought, very carefully watching Theophan, although you didn't speak to her, any more than any other lep did.
Theophan wasn't speaking, either. She just sat herself down on a nearly dry log, breaking off the moldier parts of a hunk of that cheese and nibbling at the bits underneath, both watching everything that was happening and looking forlorn and furious at being neglected.
For a while there this new experience was so exciting that I almost forgot to be sour. Not for long, though. I began to find it hard to keep interested, in spite of all your people could do to entertain me. I did my best to keep the conversation with them going—questions about all the things Geronimo had been asking me about all the time, about how I liked Pava, about what I thought the future held. It wasn't easy, though.
I suppose I was a bit of a disappointment to you people. I was to myself. I blamed it on the fact that I was physically tired from all that slippery mountain climbing, but there was more to it than that. I just felt, well, gray.
You'd think I would have recognized depression sooner than I did. I'd had the practice, after all.
To be fair to myself, I have to say that I didn't have the leisure to spend my time analyzing what was going on in my head. The circumstances kept me too busy. I was confused by all you odd creatures talking to me at once—"Is it true you did not intend to come here, Barrydihoa?" and "Will you mate soon, Barrydihoa?" and "Why are you not eating the food we have given you, Barrydihoa? Should we pick some fruits for you?" I was trying to answer, as much as I could answer; and I was also aware of the little distracting worries about whether Theophan and I could find our way back to the car when we wanted to go, and about how tough the hike back to it would be. I even felt a little concern, now and then, about how Theophan felt about being ignored.
Then most of the random questioning dried up, and I noticed that more and more of the leps, even more the senior fourth- and fifth-instar ones, were turning their big eyes expectantly on you.
When they were silent you studied me for a moment, scratching your withered arm with the good one. Then you said, "Is the third-instar person called Geronimo your true friend, Barrydihoa?"
That's the kind of question that I find embarrassing, especially with Geronimo shrunken down on the ground by my side, hissing softly to himself as he listened in. I tried to pull myself together to give an honest answer. I said, "I want to be Geronimo's true friend, anyway. I hope he feels the same about me."
"Do friends force friends to do things they do not wish to do, against their will?"
"Well, no. Of course not." It wasn't a question I had expected.
Besides, I hadn't really thought about that very much, and I didn't know where you were going.
But that turned out to be nowhere. That was the moment when, without warning, all you leps began to hiss and whistle softly at each other.
I could see something had gone wrong. Did you have some advance warning of what was about to happen? I didn't know. All I knew was that abruptly you shrank down to collapsed size and stretch-slipped away without another word, and all the other leps began to leave us, too.
I couldn't tell what was going on, but I had the feeling you get at a party when the hostess yawns and looks at her watch. I started to say to Theophan, "Well, I guess it's getting pretty late—"
Then it happened.
I suddenly felt as though I had tripped over something in my path.
That couldn't be right. I
knew that; I'd been standing still at the time and there was nothing for me to trip over. But I felt myself lurching and had to throw out a hand to grab the shoulder of Theophan, sitting on a tree trunk beside me, to keep from falling.
Then I saw that, overhead, the tree tops had all suddenly whipped over to one side. Before they came back there was a chorus of shrilling yelps from all the leps around, the ones in sight and the scores more that were hidden behind the shrubs. And Theophan, staggering to her feet to clutch at me for support, shouted, "Oh, shit, Barry! This time it's a goddamn big one!"
Up until that moment I had assumed that I knew what an earthquake was like. Why wouldn't I? I had had time to get used to the plentiful little temblors that came every day or so and shook dust out of the buildings and sometimes dropped a tree across a road.
I was wrong about that, though. I didn't have a clue what an earthquake was really like. When it happened it was immensely bigger and slower and worse than I had ever imagined. The ground rippled under me. The trees rippled overhead. I felt seasick, and then I just felt scared. There was a horrible unprecedented grinding, roaring sound from far away . . . and a horrible unexpected sudden mist of water vapor or dust or something that sprang up along invisible lines in the ground.
I had never seen anything like it before. I don't much want to again, either.
The worst part was that I couldn't stand up. I fell to my knees. Would have stayed there, too, but the leps wouldn't let me. Geronimo suddenly appeared on one side, and the lep named Saint John on the other. They grabbed me, shrilling at me, ordering me away from the bigger trees; one huge tree had already toppled over, pulling up a ragged globe of roots. Theophan crawled after me on her knees—unhelped.
Apart from making sure of my own safety, the leps didn't seem really bothered by the quake at all. I suppose earthquakes were no big news to them. Did them no particular harm, either—at least, not when they didn't get that rampaging flood that had drowned out their nests that other time—because they didn't have things like buildings to fall on them, or bridges to crash or gas mains to fracture and burn. Once they were away from under the biggest trees they could simply ride it out.
Which was all Theophan and I could do, for that matter.
The shaking and twitching seemed to go on forever—Theophan later showed me the seismograph chart and clocked it at nine minutes, a long one as well as a big one—7.6 on the Richter scale—and then when it stopped, it just stopped. All at once. It was over.
It might never have happened at all, except that the effects were visible. Some of the trees were bent at a funny angle. The dust was still settling. Some of the branches were still waving about. That was all. The sun was shining. A couple of leps were placidly munching thick leaves from some of their plants, and Theophan said, sounding scared and dismal, "We better get back to Freehold, Barry. If we can."
I stared at her. "What do you mean, if we can? Freehold's kilometers from here!"
"But it's a lot closer to the fault by the dam, and those are the faults that I think are coupled. Come on."
Geronimo conveyed us back to the car—a good thing; we never would have found it without him—but it was hard travel. It wasn't helped by Theophan's obvious worry about what we might find when we got back to Freehold. Her worry made me worry too.
The car was still upright when we got to it. That was one piece of luck. Even better, we found that nothing had fallen across the homebound path that the car's enormous wheels couldn't jolt right over. And when we crossed the ford, it was almost dry.
That looked like good news to me, until Theophan explained that it wasn't at all. "All that means is that a rockfall has dammed the river somewhere upstream. But it isn't going to stay dammed."
"Then what?"
She didn't answer, just shook her head. I figured it out for myself: When the dam broke through, the penned waters would come roaring down. I hoped there was nothing important that would be in their way.
The river stayed dammed long enough for us to get across almost dry, though, and then we were climbing the hill road to Freehold.
The town had taken its own hit. It appeared that Theophan had been quite right about the coupling of faults. The fault up past the old dam had let go an hour after the one in the Rockies—up in the hills we hadn't even felt it, being busy trying to slide down a mountainside at the time. Though the two epicenters were many kilometers apart, the town had been rocked by both quakes. Now the sagging roof of the town hall was rakishly down on the ground on the side facing the street, some windows had splintered, goods had been pitched off the shelves in the storehouse.
But no one had been seriously hurt. It wasn't a calamity. It was just a damn nuisance, and it all seemed very depressing to me.
See, this is where we intermittent nut-cases have a problem. It's hard for us to distinguish our perceptions from objective reality. The objective reality of the earthquake wasn't terribly bad. There was a lot of cleanup work to do around the town, yes. There were also several dozen cases of minor cuts and sprains to keep Dr. Billygoat busy. And when, two days later, that rockfall dam did finally give way again, the resulting flood of the river washed out ten hectares of riverbank crops and even did damage to the foundations of the hydrogen plant by the landing strip. Troublesome, but not really serious, although there was going to be a lot of hard repair work ahead.
But the whole thing laid me low. I didn't feel up to dealing with any of it. Depression hit hard, and what I wanted to do, most of the time, was sleep.
It took me three days before it occurred to me that things weren't really so objectively bad that I should be moping around like that, and another day before I could work up the ambition to decide that maybe all this depression had more to do with what was happening inside me than with the quake itself, and to go and see the doctor.
When I showed up, Dr. Billygoat's wife-nurse Nanny wasn't particularly happy to see me, either. Bill was really busy, she said; all those cuts and scrapes had put him way behind in his real work. When she finally admitted that I probably came under the head of real work after all and let me in, Billy seemed less happy still.
"Oh, right, yes, I know why you're here, di Hoa. I've been working on your case. But look at this place!" he grumbled. "It's just one damn thing after another! Where the hell am I going to get another titrator?" I could see what he meant. Some of his stuff had fallen, too, and he was still busily trying to figure out what all the damage was.
But when he got his mind focused on me he allowed that, well, yes, he had turned up a couple things he could try on me. No, not a long-term implant, for God's sake. We weren't anywhere near that. But he'd put together a menu of a couple of recombinants that should be some use, maybe. Worth trying, anyway.
So it was back to the needle system, and he gave me the first of a series of shots.
They hurt like hell. They didn't work, either.
The first one gave me diarrhea—not a good thing to have when you don't have indoor plumbing—and the second gave me a fever that had me bleary and confused one whole day until Dr. Billygoat decided against a second shot of that particular witches' brew and gave me something to bring the temperature down.
I could stand all that. What I couldn't stand was the conviction, slowly strengthening in my mind, that this bastardly imitation of a real doctor was shooting in the dark. He didn't know what I needed. If he did know, he didn't have it to give me. And the more I thought about it, the more furious I got.
The depression was going away; I was getting into the mild precursors of the manic state.
I was not an easy person to be around those days. I was mad all the time. I cursed Jacky Schottke for snoring when I was trying to sleep. I cursed Theophan for letting the quake hit us unwarned. I cursed the day I'd let Rannulf shanghai me; I cursed Rannulf himself; I cursed—well, almost cursed, but not quite—I came within a hairsbreadth of even cursing my lost, loved, dear Alma because she had provided the temptation that had made Rannulf
do what he did. I cursed Captain Tscharka for flying the ship that took me so far away from where I needed to be, and cursed him again for taking off with the shuttle when I needed it to get something done. I cursed the factory for not working better, I cursed the whole idea of interstellar colonization—why did anybody ever start this stupid Delta Pavonis project in the first place?
I was in a conspicuously bad mood, and I didn't care who knew it.
I should have been sent to my room. Maybe I should have been sent to a room with padded walls. Any way you looked at it, I was pretty close to going really mad.
22
WAS this, then, the onset of your aberration?
It sure was, Merlin. Smart of you to recognize it, considering that I didn't see it myself at the time. Of course, you have a big advantage over me now. You know what came next.
If what you have previously described is understood, presumably you would then have been entering your depressive phase. Is that correct?
Well, no. Or yes and no. I wasn't a predictable textbook case anymore, you see. Maybe it had something to do with metabolic changes from being frozen. More likely all the garbage Dr. Billygoat had been pouring into my blood had screwed my cycle up.
I was more manic than depressive just then, and highly irritable. What I actually did for a day or two was snap everybody's head off, Billygoat's included. I must have been a real pain in the ass, though I didn't remember very well everything I did afterward. In self-defense Billy gave me some Dr. Feelgood pills to take.
They worked very effectively. They did more than that; they mellowed my mood so much that I must have been sickening. I went around apologizing to everybody for my previous bad attitude. I started with Jacky Schottke, who had suffered the worst of my temper because, unluckily for him, I was living in his apartment. Then I apologized to Theophan, whom I vaguely remembered giving a browbeating over the fact that Freehold was sited in a fault zone when there were low-risk areas within a few hundred kilometers. Then I even apologized to Geronimo. Yes, Geronimo. I was so full of that mixture of leftover rage and chemically induced sweetness and light that, after the lep and I had spent a sweaty hour tossing a flying rat back and forth—I was trying to make it up to him—I said remorsefully, "Oh, hell, Geronimo. I'm sorry about all that. Will you forgive me?"
The Voices of Heaven Page 24