The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl

wouldn't have this problem. On the other hand, I wouldn't ever have been born, either, would I?"
    She didn't respond to that. She mulled for a second, then said, "I should mention that there are other ways of going about it."
    "Like what?"
    "Complete genetic suppression. You go in for twenty-four hours, they destroy your spermatophiles—"
    "Hey!"
    "It doesn't hurt, Barry. And it's reversible. But that means you're sterile; then they give you an implant and you're in business again. Only the implant is tailored to suppress your bad genes." She saw the face I was making and laughed. "Men," she said. "Trust me. It doesn't affect your sex life at all."
    I thought that over. "You said it only takes twenty-four hours?"
    "That's all—except, of course, we don't do that here. You'd have to go to one of the big clinics on Earth."
    I got up. "Thanks," I said, not meaning it, and left.
    On the way out I played back some of the things Helge had said. It seemed to me that Helge was right. The only way I could find out how Alma would feel about these questions would be to ask her.
    Right after that I began to wonder how I myself really felt about that other big question, the one that comes with the word "commitment."
    If I asked Alma questions about how she felt about dealing with my genetic problems, there would then be only one way the conversation could go from there. That would be to propose marriage to her.
    I didn't know if I was ready.
    I don't know what would have happened to my life if I had got my courage together and taken that next step. My life would have been different, all right. But would it have been better?
     
    I don't think I've succeeded even yet in giving you a very accurate idea of what our lives were like, back on the Moon. They were very different from what we have now. They were certainly a lot more comfortable.
    It's true that they weren't perfect, though. When I think back to those carefree days on the Moon I have a tendency to forget that at the time I didn't think they were really carefree at all. What I remember is that the only real cares I had were the personal worries I made up for myself. Like what it meant when Alma called me by the wrong name. Like whether or not I would lose her—and whether I could somehow figure out a way to both keep her and simultaneously keep open the option to lose her, painlessly and without recrimination, if I ever decided that that was what I wanted to do.
    Apart from those self-inflicted wounds—and, well, yes, apart from the faint but real worry nobody on the Moon was ever completely without, namely, that someday somebody might accidentally push the wrong button inside the crater and the whole Lederman antimatter factory would go up in a ball of plasma, of which I would myself be a tiny part—apart from that sort of thing, I mean to say, we didn't have any worries. The Moon was rich. We all had jobs. Anybody who didn't have one was shipped instantly back to Earth, and the jobs at Lederman were both interesting and paid well. The factory did everything possible to make our lives palatable because that was good business for them; they didn't want any disgruntled workers doing anything terminally stupid. Everything that state-of-the-art technology could provide, the lunar authorities had bought for us. They were clearing and lining additional lava tubes all the time. That meant that there were new housing units, bigger and more comfortable, appearing on the market regularly. One tube was even being half-filled with expensively manufactured water to make a swimming pool. Even the Lederman management couldn't give us solitude, of course. But we could get something close to it by taking a stroll through the farm tubes, steamy and warm with their crop racks green and sweet-smelling all around us and only a rare glimpse of a distant farm worker to disturb our privacy; Alma and I had made love two or three times in those jungly recesses. We had the best of medical care, and the