7
THEN you did not voluntarily choose to come to join the human colony on Pava?
Hell, no. I was fucking shanghaied by that bastard Rannulf Enderman. The worst part is I should have seen it coming. He practically spelled it all out for me; I guess I just didn't think he had the guts to do anything like that. So I let him dope me and send me off to the stars so he'd have half a century or so to stay back in the plush and comfortable ease of life on the Moon—with my girl.
So I was seriously pissed when I found out I was an inadvertent volunteer to join the colony at Delta Pavonis. For that matter, so was Captain Garold Tscharka. "What's going on here?" he demanded, glaring down at me. And when I told him what Rannulf had done his face got purple. "But you're needed. I mean he is needed. He's supposed to help defreeze the others!" he snapped—by "he," meaning the absent Rannulf, of course. "God," he said—it wasn't meant as a swear word; his eyes were resentfully raised to the skies—"why does everything have to go wrong at once?"
I got out of there. I didn't want any more of Tscharka's bad mood; my own mood was murderous enough for two, and my body was seriously achy from its decades as a corpsicle. When I noticed I was walking on the floor of the ship's passage instead of pulling myself along in micro-G, I realized the ship was in full deceleration mode, killing velocity to achieve a stable orbit around Pava. I climbed to the control-room level and found Jillen Iglesias talking on the radio to somebody on the surface of the planet.
She craned her neck to stare at me in astonished displeasure. "But you're what's-his-name, Barry something? The fuelmaster? What're you doing here?" she demanded.
She looked a little older and a lot more harried than the last time I had seen her, and when I told her my story, she looked even more astonished. "Well, hell," she said, grudgingly sympathetic. "That's tough. But, look, we're kind of busy, so just stay out of the way, okay?" I could see that she'd picked up a lot of habits from her captain. "I've got a little problem here," she added.
"You've got a problem?"
She thought that was worth a little smile. "Not like your problem, Barry. It's just that the captain expected that some things would have been done here while we were in transit, and they haven't happened, that's all. Please. Let me get on with it."
At least she'd said please. I did as ordered, pushing myself over to a corner of the room and staying out of the way. I didn't eavesdrop on her radio talk. I had other things on my mind.
I don't know if I can make you understand what a terrible shock it was for an average adult human male like me—set in his ways, with a place in the world and plans for the future—to find himself suddenly twenty-odd years later and eighteen-plus light-years away from everything he cared about. Well, if it happened to you it probably would be just as disorienting, I suppose. But not in the same way, because you don't care about the same things we do.
I cared a lot. The more I thought about all the things I had lost, the more I cared. I thought about my girl, Alma. I thought about my son, Matthew. (Jesus, I thought, the kid's got to be pushing forty years old by now! I've got a son older than I am! I could be a grandfather and not even know it.) I thought about sending them both a message. (But what could I say that they wouldn't long since have known? By the time they got it, Alma could very possibly be a grandmother herself and my teenage son Matthew would be getting along toward sixty!) Mostly I thought about Rannulf Enderman and the various kinds of things I would enjoy doing to him if I could.
Unfortunately, the bastard was clear out of my reach. There was no hope of my ever getting my hands on him again, though that didn't stop me from wishing.
Long before I had finished thinking things through, little groups of defrosted passengers began to wander into the control room, looking scared and hopeful and wanting things done for them right away. Jillen Iglesias had her hands full. All at once she was trying to stay in communication with whoever she was talking to on the surface, as long as possible before the continent rolled out from under us; and checking the elements of the orbit the ship was entering; and dealing with the very talkative newcomers. No, they couldn't have a bath just yet, no matter how grungy they felt. No, nobody was going to cook up a breakfast for them, they'd have to wait until they got down to the surface of Pava. No, they couldn't get at their baggage right away, not even to get out a camera so they could take pictures. Yes, that was Pava down below in the screens, and they could look at it for themselves if only they would for Christ's sake stay the hell out of her way.
I had a pretty good idea of what it was like to try to pilot a ship when people were bothering you, so I took a hand. "Shut up, all of you!" I yelled over the babble. "You have to let the pilot do her work, so clear out of the control room. Everybody! Wait in the passages. Move." Of course I had no right to be giving orders, but they didn't know that.
I didn't have any right to stay on after I'd chased the others out, either, but Jillen didn't press the point. "Thanks," she said, and got back to her orbital solutions.
And I got around, at last, to thinking about what was next for me. Pava was my new home. Maybe I wouldn't have to stay on it very long, because I could always take the return trip on Corsair. (But was there any point to that?) But in any case I would certainly be spending some time there, and I began to try to contemplate what that was going to mean for me.
In the screen the planet was clear and close up, its image bigger by far than we ever saw Earth from the Moon. We were rolling along over the day side of the planet, which was mostly water, but back toward the sunset horizon I could pick out the disappearing shape of Pava's big central land mass.
What I remembered about Pava wasn't much. I was aware that Pava only had one real continent. That seemed peculiar, compared to present-day Earth, but not unprecedented. After all, Earth too (they said) had once been in the same condition, with a single giant land mass that they called Pangaea, before that big one broke up and formed all the continents you could see when you looked down from the Moon.
If Pava's one big continent had been given a name I didn't know what it was. If there were islands in that endless sea, I didn't see them. Pava wasn't quite as blue as Earth looked from space, but more of a sort of yellowish avocado green. Because the light from Delta Pavonis was a little redder than our Sun's? Because the planet of Pava had more cloud cover? I didn't know the answer to that. I tried to remember what Pava's climate was supposed to be like and drew a blank; I really hadn't paid that much attention.
Still—
Still, once my fury at Rannulf's despicable treachery began to subside, and the little chemical factories the doctors had implanted within me began to catch up with my temper, I began to discover that I was feeling a few quite different emotions. They weren't all bad. There was even a kind of tingly little excitement there. After all, this was a whole new planet! Orbiting an entirely different star!
Being on Pava could turn out to be quite an adventure, I thought—at least, for a limited time.
It would have been a nicer adventure with Alma along to share it, I thought, and the sensation that abruptly chilled my heart then was a lot sharper pain than I would have expected. I wondered if she missed me as much as I was missing her. . . .
It is a very curious thing that at that moment, when I was so wrapped up in my worries about the things I could do nothing about, it did not occur to me to worry about the nearer and very real problem of my personal medical history.
Corsair achieved Low Planetary Orbit while we were on Pava's night side. Jillen gave a satisfied grunt and grabbed for a handhold as the drive cut itself off and we were in microgravity again.
A few minutes later—we had done most of another orbit of Pava, and the buzz of chatter from the defrosted colonists outside was getting really loud again—Captain Tscharka finally pulled himself up from the freezer chambers, threading his way past the waiting and complaining colonists. He had Friar Tuck with him. The preacher was looking a little more elderly than I remembered him, with more pink scalp showing under the snow white curls at the top of his head. As soon as they were inside the control room the captain stopped short, giving Jillen Iglesias an inquiring look.
Biting her lip, she said, "It's not so good down there, Captain. Jimmy Queng says the last two ships left for Earth with full freezers. Nearly two hundred quitters gave up and went back, would you believe it? I can't think what went wrong with them. And he says there are still other people who are just waiting for a flight so they can go back, too—and everything's behind schedule."
Tscharka glanced at Friar Tuck and spread his hands in a what-can-you-expect gesture. All he said was, "If those people didn't have the strength to stay we're probably better off without them. Let's get on with it, Jillen. I don't want to miss the daylight. I'll take the first load down to the surface next time we hit the drop point."
"Right, Captain. Captain? I'm sorry that they've lost so much time."
He shook his head. "Lost time doesn't matter, Jillen. What troubles me is that it looks like too many of our people have lost God."