But there was a little delay there. Before Byram could call the meeting to order Jacky Schottke came fluttering up, waving his hands at us. He had news. "I just brought dinner over for Tscharka and Tucnman, and they weren't mere. They've gone AWOL!"
Byram swore.
"But where in the world could they go?" Alma asked.
"That's just it," Jacky cried. "There isn't anywhere. They can probably stay alive wherever they are, I guess—there's food to be found in the woods, and if they went far enough away they could probably find leps who never heard of them, and maybe the leps would help. But they're definitely gone."
Byram thought fast. "The hell with them," he decided. "There's nothing they can do but disappear or die, and either way we're well rid of them. Let's get on with the meeting."
When he announced that the two had broken their house arrest, there were groans and catcalls from me audience, but as there was nothing to be done no one demanded we do anything. Then the meeting went really swiftly.
There wasn't really much to decide. Most of the questions had been voted on already: Recharge the factory with antimatter fuel from Corsair and Buccaneer, use what was left of Corsair for feedstock, start building a space tug to check out the asteroids. A few people raised objections—mostly on the grounds that we really shouldn't be making long-range plans, since we had no guarantee that Earth would continue funding us—but they were howled down by the majority, and then Captain Bennetton got up and settled it.
"Don't worry about the Budget Congress," he said. "They'll give you whatever you need."
Dabney Albright called sourly, "That's easy to say, but they never have."
"That was then," Bennetton said. "This is now. Things have changed. Barry here saved all their lives, remember, so they owe you now—they don't know that they do yet, but I give you my word they will. I'll tell them. And, trust me, I'll make sure they listen."
After that it was just a matter of voting, and then it was time for Alma and me to do our thing.
It was a nice wedding. Captain Bennetton gave the bride away. Jacky Schottke was my best man, and Madeleine Hartly's great-granddaughter stood up for Alma as maid of honor, and most of the colony joined in the extemporaneous party that formed around us afterward. The only thing we left out was going on a honeymoon. There wasn't really anyplace for honeymooners to go, and besides we'd pretty much had it already.
So the next morning Alma and I went back to hauling crops from the farm plots. Everything was just the way it had been before, except that now we were married. I think I was grinning a lot, all day long.
And at the end of the day Alma and I checked the place where I'd left a couple of hard candies.
The candies were gone.
There was no doubt in my mind about that. I'd left them in plain sight on the stump of a storm-killed tree. Now the stump was bare.
Of course, that didn't prove that Geronimo had been there. It was perfectly possible, I told myself, that some other creature with a sweet tooth had come by—
"Ugh," Alma said. "What's that thing?"
She was pointing to the ground at the base of the stump, and what she was pointing at was the crumpled corpse of a small flying rat.
That was enough for me. There was only one person on Pava who would have left that particular token for me.
I climbed up on the narrow stump and peered around. There wasn't any sign of Geronimo, but then I hadn't really expected there would be. I funneled my hands and called, "Geronimo?"
Alma stood quiet, watching; I didn't have to explain to her what was going on. I listened for an answer. There was no sound but the usual distant chirps and shrills, and an occasional unintelligible word coming up from the fields as one farm worker called to another. I tried again: "Geronimo, please talk to me."
Nothing but more nothing, but I was determined. I called, "Geronimo, I'm sure you're there. Come out, will you? I want you to meet my, uh, wife."
I stammered over that because it was almost the first time I'd said it. It felt good. And a moment later there was movement inside the hollow trunk of an old strangler tree, and a lep slid out. The colors were a little different than I remembered, and the shape was longer and slimmer, but I was in no doubt. This fourth-instar lep was Geronimo, all right.
He slid right up to Alma and raised his body to full elevation to study her. Then he said, "Hello, wife of Barrydihoa."
He was the first lep Alma had seen. I wondered for a moment if she would be able to understand what he was saying in that breathy, hissy lep voice, but she was equal to the challenge. "Hello, Geronimo," she said, unfazed. "I've been looking forward to meeting you." And she shook his tiny hand.
By then I had hopped down from the stump for my turn, but I wasn't willing to settle for a handshake. I caught him at full elevation, and I put my arms around him for a hug.
Hugging, of course, is not a lep custom. I took him by surprise. He made a little gaspy squawk and started to shrink away, but then he changed his mind. As best he could, with what his lep anatomy had provided him for arms, he actually hugged me back.
"I've missed you," I told him. "I wasn't sure I'd ever see you again."
"Yes," he said, and this time he did shrink back down. He even retreated a few steps.
I thought there might be more to come of that, but there wasn't. So I went on: "I need to talk to you—all of you. Please? I know what Becky Khaim-Novello did. There's no excuse for it, but it shouldn't poison our relations forever. I'd like to try to straighten things out."
That didn't produce any reaction at all. Geronimo just rocked slowly back and forth, regarding me with those enormous eyes. I persevered. "You don't have to worry about Becky. She won't be here anymore. She's going back to Earth, and—Do you know who Captain Tscharka and Reverend Tuchman are?"
"The God persons. Yes."
"Well, they were just as bad as she—No. They were a hell of a lot worse than Becky ever was, but they're probably going to be sent away too. Matter of fact, they're hiding in the woods somewhere right now. So I'm asking for a favor. I'd like you to take me back to the lep nest so we can talk it over.' *
He rocked silently for a moment. Then, "You are human," he pointed out. "Humans have behaved in unacceptable ways."
"Not all of us!"
"Some are too many."
I couldn't argue with that. I just said, "Please, Geronimo. I'd like to try to see if we can work things out at least."
No answer to that. He just shrank back down a little farther, turned, and began to slide away. I called after him. "At least you and I can see each other now and then, can't we? Geronimo? Don't let them make you stop that."
He didn't answer that one, either. He just kept on squirming away for a couple more meters. Then he paused. "The two God persons are at the place of their retreat," he called, and was gone.
28
YOU surprise us once again, Barrydihoa. Is it possible you believed one of us would "forbid" another to do anything?
Indeed I did. Isn't that what happened?
Of course not. No one attempted to prevent Geronimo from seeing you. It is inconceivable that any one of us would ever try to prevent any other from returning to your community if he wished to.
All right, I take your word for it. We were wrong about that.
That's the whole point, isn't it? We don't understand everything about you, and you don't understand everything about us. That leaves us with one big question to answer, Merlin. Can't we try to get along anyway?
We're just about up to present time now, you know. I don't have much more to say. Then the rest is up to you—or, I guess I should say, to you-all.
At supper that night Alma and I reported that we thought we knew where our two absent felons were hiding out.
There wasn't any wild excitement over the news. No one really seemed to care. Dabney Albright cackled, "They can stay out there until they starve, far as I care," and somebody else offered, "I hope they do." But when I said that we'd
heard it from Geronimo they perked up.
"I knew the leps would come around," somebody said smugly.
"Well, they haven't, really," I warned. "That was just one-on-one with my friend Geronimo. That doesn't mean they're coming back. They still don't trust us."
At the far end of the table Marcus Wendt, who hardly ever failed to talk when he should have been listening, stood up to get his own contribution into the discussion. He called, "The hell with them. Who cares who they trust? If the damn bugs are so temperamental that they're going to get their feelings hurt anytime anybody loses his temper a little we don't want them around anyway."
Theophan grabbed his elbow to pull him back to his seat. "Oh, shut up," she said, not in any kind tone. "You don't know anything about it."
Marcus looked confused. "But hell, Theo, look at the way they treated you—"
"That was stupid of them, right. They just made a mistake. This time is a whole different thing; Becky had no right to hit that lep."
Everybody else was talking, too, because everybody had an opinion, but I was paying particular attention to what was going on between Theophan and Marcus. It looked like there were strains in the relationship. I have to say that didn't displease me at all. I suspect I was smiling.
Alma was watching. "I think," she said, "that I'd like to go back to the apartment now."
She didn't put any particular stress on the words, but it seemed to me that it was a good idea to do what she said. I went. Whatever Alma had heard about me and Theophan I never did find out; maybe she just intuited that there might once have been a hint of something.
There was certainly no reason why Alma should have felt jealous of Theophan Sperlie. I surely didn't have any romantic interest in Theo anymore. The way things had worked out, I didn't in the least regret that Theo had picked Marcus Wendt over me . . . but I would be lying if I said I didn't take a little pleasure out of the thought that maybe sometimes Theo did.
You will remember what happened the next day, Merlin. Not the very first part of it, of course, but certainly the important parts—since you are the one who made that day important.
Before we got to those parts the day started out pretty nicely for us anyway. Martine Grossman had brought the shuttle back with another load of goodies from Earth, and Captain Bennetton caught us at breakfast. He had a smile for Alma and a suggestion for both of us. "How would you like to do a little pilot training today, Barry?" he asked.
"You mean you want me to fly the shuttle back to Buccaneer?"
"No, not that. They haven't finished unloading. Anyway, the shuttle's going to have to be refueled before it goes anywhere. What I thought was that Alma might like a dry run. Begin familiarizing herself with the controls, that sort of thing."
"Let's do it," Alma said with enthusiasm. So the three of us checked a car out, and, an hour later, Alma and I were sitting in the pilot seats of the shuttle and I was explaining the instruments to her. Bennetton hovered around for a few minutes, then announced that he and Martine were going back to town with the next load of goods from the shuttle. "I guess I can leave this part to you, Barry," he said. "See you later."
That suited me. I was pretty sure that when it came time for Alma actually to fly the thing it would be Bennetton in the seat next to her instead of me, but I was glad enough to be the one who started her out.
As I've said before of my dear Alma, she was a quick study. We didn't have power, so I couldn't activate the screens, but she learned what all the little keys were for quickly enough. I had her run through the drill half a dozen times: engine start, instrument check, main propulsion, side thrusters, landing gear up. Within an hour she was doing everything in the right order, at least. Of course, the real thing would be very different in a lot of ways. When we got up for a break we stood on the sill, catching breezes from upriver, and I tried to tell her what it was going to feel like at takeoff. That was harder than the dry run. Alma had been in shuttles before, of course—I'd taken her up to a ship in lunar orbit myself once or twice, in the old days. "It's a little different here," I said. "Pava's a lot bigger than the Moon, so it takes a lot more thrust to get into orbit. Your takeoff surge runs to three or four gees, sometimes more than that. That'll throw your reactions off if you're not ready for it. Then, the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere but Pava does. That means you have a problem with friction."
"Because it heats the shuttle up?"
"It does, yes, but the shuttle's capable of withstanding that. It isn't the heat you have to worry about. It's the turbulence. You'll be thumping and bumping in ways you never get around the Moon. You'll find out."
"Sure," she said vaguely, shading her eyes and peering out at the brush at the end of the strip. "Barry? Am I seeing things or is that your lep in the shade of those trees?"
It was. By the time we had trotted to the edge of the woods I was in no doubt. Geronimo was waiting there for us, all right. He wasn't alone. I thought I recognized the lep with him, a female fifth instar whom I'd occasionally seen around Freehold. Her human name was Semiramis.
Semiramis shook hands politely with Alma as I was getting right to the point with Geronimo. "What about it? Will Merlin talk to me now?"
He hissed reproachfully. "Some of us will talk to you, Barrydihoa."
"Not Merlin? But he's your leader—"
"I have told you before that we have no 'leader,' Barrydihoa, but Merlin will certainly be present. They are waiting. We should go."
The car we'd come down in was still there, parked right next to the stilly legs of the shuttle. I didn't ask anybody's permission. I took it, and the four of us, human and lep, went bouncing up along the riverside with Geronimo beside me to give directions.
In the seat behind us Alma was peering around in fascination. This was, after all, almost her first venture outside the well-traveled areas right around Freehold. For that matter it was her first experience ever, anywhere, of being out in a wilderness where there were no buildings or people or machines. It startled her. It didn't frighten her, though. She liked it.
I didn't have time for sightseeing. Besides doing the driving, I was trying to talk to Geronimo. With him so close beside me I noticed some of the changes that had come with his new development phase: He even had tiny little things like horns now over his great eyes, precursors of the feathery antennae that would be there later. He seemed less, well, childish, too: no requests for candy, though I had some in my pocket; no talk about games.
But in some respects he hadn't changed at all. When I asked him questions I got only highly selective answers. Yes, Merlin was willing to hear what I wanted to say, but it wouldn't be just him. Any lep who was interested would sit in; Merlin was in no sense a leader, only a lep like any other lep. Well, not exactly only that, Geronimo admitted. "Merlin is the person who has studied your people most carefully. It has been his main interest, since his injuries have prevented him from doing other things."
"I hope he isn't still sore about that," I offered.
Geronimo disregarded that. "For this reason," he went on, "it is Merlin who knows most about you people. It was he who taught me your language long ago, Barrydihoa. Here, we must cross the river now. Stop the car so the rest of us can get out,"
Actually, I had already begun to slow down, because I recognized the ford Theo and I had taken. The crossing was no problem, though Alma and the leps got pretty wet. Then Geronimo took charge. There was a shorter way to the nests, he said, and as a matter of fact we made it in less than an hour.
I don't have to tell you about that meeting, do I, Merlin? You were there. In spite of all you people say, I still think you were the main participant, as a matter of fact. Of the dozen or so leps who were waiting for us in your nests, you were the one I saw first. Even Alma picked you out right away; I'd told her about your accident, and what it had done to your eye and your bad hand.
And you were the one who did most of the talking—as much as there was.
I had expected more. I don't me
an I thought you'd welcome me with open arms, crying, "Yes, it was all a mistake, Barrydihoa, now the scales have fallen from our eyes and we will come back and be your friends forever." Actually, you were pretty hospitable, even as it was; several leps offered us food, and as we sat there two or three bright red, little second-instar infants were happily crawling over both Alma and me. What none of you offered was encouragement.
On the way up I'd rehearsed what I was going to say. You let me say it: I was sorry for what had happened, we were all sorry, we would take steps to see that nothing like it would happen again—
You did respond to that, though not in a promising way. You simply asked, "How can you be sure of that, Barrydihoa?" And I had to admit that I couldn't really guarantee it.
"All right," I admitted, "some of us do things we shouldn't. Even to each other, not just to you leps. Maybe especially to each other. But you have to understand that you people haven't exactly seen the best of us. The Pava colonists have had a pretty hard life—"
One of the other leps erected herself to interrupt with a question then. "The term 'hard life' is not understood," she pointed out. "Life is life. One eats and grows; that is all of it."
"Ah," I said triumphantly—it was the point I was coming to. "It isn't all of it for us. We want more than just to survive. We want to do things. If you understood us better you'd see that that's not a bad trait, because some of the things we do are pretty important."
Alma cut in then. "Not just 'important,'" she said. "A lot of things we do are really good. Barry says the colonists have actually helped you all already, by killing off predators and the like."
You were polite about that. "That is understood, Almavendettedihoa. You have also killed off some of our own people as well."
"Not as—" I think she had been going to say "Not as many," but she changed it in midstream. "Not on purpose!" she said.
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