The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  When the captain handed me the finished document screen, I read it over quickly; it said what it was supposed to say, namely that I certified that I had examined the Corsair and found its antimatter fuel stores empty, except for the small amount left to run the ship's standby systems. I signed it and thumbed it, and added my serial code; and then, just as I was holding it out to him, the captain got a call.

  "Wait," he ordered, and turned eagerly to the picture on the wall. The face on the screen belonged to a middle-aged Santa Claus-looking man, fat and bearded, looking tentatively pleased with himself.

  "It's not going to be as bad as we thought, Garold," the fat man said. "The Congress has agreed to give us a hearing, and we're on in a little over five hours. Will you be down to get in on it in time?"

  "I'll land on the next orbit, Tuck," the captain promised, and signed off.

  When he saw that I still had the screen in my hand he actually smiled. "Sorry about that. That was Reverend Tuchman. He's my chaplain."

  "It sounded like good news."

  "I hope so. If they give us a hearing they won't be able to turn us down. It's not," he explained, "as though we were costing the taxpayers much anymore. All the important money was spent long ago. The ships are all built. The colony's established. All we need is supplies."

  "And a lot of antimatter," I reminded him.

  He shrugged that off. "God's work must be done whatever it costs," he said. "Are you through with the screen?"

  "Almost," I said, but before I handed it over I peeked at his serial code. He had piqued my curiosity, and I wanted a look at his basic data. Particularly his religious affiliation. Not many captains talked so much about God's work and traveled with a chaplain in their entourage, and not many people of any kind called other people heretics in this day and age.

  My expression must have shown something, because Tscharka demanded sharply, "Is something wrong?"

  "Oh, no," I said. "Not at all." And that was true, because there was nothing wrong about his being registered to the Penitential Church of the Millennium, it was just that I had never encountered a Millenarist space captain before. As it happened, I knew quite a lot about the Millenarists—more than I really wanted to, in fact—because my girl, Alma, had once been one.

  I wasn't prejudiced against Millenarists. There were too many religions around—and some of them a lot weirder and nastier than Millenarism—for me to throw a stone at anyone's religious beliefs, especially since I didn't have any to speak of of my own. Millenarists had been around for a long time, one way or another. The current version called itself Penitential, and its adherents certainly were that. The Millenarists believed that the Bible promised the world would come to an end a thousand years after the birth of Christ and then at that Millennium the earth would open and all the dead would rise—the living too, I guess—and they'd all be singing and praising God as they headed straight for heaven's eternal joy.

  It was as good a central dogma as any, if you didn't mind that actually it hadn't happened. The year 1000 a.d. had come and gone, and—oops, back to the drawing board—the Second Coming didn't come.

  The Millenarists had figured that one out, though. They said the human race had been just too steeped in sin for that promised salvation, and everything that had happened after the year 1000 a.d. had simply added additional sin on top of all the sins that had gone before. That wasn't all of it. The main tenet of their belief was that, although everything was sinful, some things were less sinful than others. In their view, about the least sinful thing any Millenarist could do in this sinful world was to die and get out of it before it got any worse.

  That was why you hardly ever saw an old Millenarist. They started out as converts—there weren't any born Millenarists, because bringing a child into the world of sin was about the most sinful thing of all—and the converts didn't usually stick around for more than ten or twenty years, tops. By the time they were around fifty they had usually taken their final step—either out of Millenarism, or out of life itself.

  My girl Alma's Millenarist period was before I ever met her. She had joined up when she was just recently arrived on the Moon, and therefore naturally a little bit homesick and depressed—in other words, just the kind of person the Millenarists looked for to recruit. They did. They welcomed her, and comforted her, and took her in, and before very long Alma made her confession of faith.

  That was that. She was a duly enrolled Millenarist.

  When she filed her affiliation the supervisors at the Lederman factory made her sign a guarantee that she wouldn't make trouble by deciding to kill herself while on duty in a sensitive area. That's a standard precaution they take at the Lederman plant. Outside of that her life wasn't much changed. For nearly a year she went to services, until the two Millenarist circuit-riding preachers from Earth showed up one day.

  They were red-hots, Alma said. In the jargon of the Millenarist church, they were called "finalists." They were the ones who had passed the point of just believing and were getting ready to act their beliefs out. They turned up at one Sunday's services as honored guests, and when they told the congregation what they were going to do they looked (Alma said) so happy and righteous and, well, so saved that she thought for a moment she was going to cry.

  What they were going to do was commit suicide.

  The younger one said, joyously, that they couldn't escape sin—the whole world was sinning just by being alive—but by dying they could stop being accomplices to sin. The older one said, lovingly, that if any of the lunar congregation wanted to join them they would be glad for the company.

  They were very convincing, Alma said. Still, none of the congregation volunteered to remove themselves from this vale of tears with them at that first service.

  Alma didn't much want to do that, either. She said she believed at the time that they had the right idea, and she thought that that was going to be the right thing to do, someday or other. Not now, though. And yet they seemed so righteously sure of themselves that at the next Saturday's service, without having planned it, she got carried away with the sermon and the singing and all the hosannahs. "I didn't start out to volunteer for finalization," she told me. "Just all of a sudden, there I was, walking right up to the altar, while the rest of the congregation was smiling and applauding me, and I told them I was ready."

  Fine, they said, beaming approval at her. Just sign here.

  What she had to sign was the standard release form to say that they had not used any form of coercion on her, as indeed they hadn't unless you consider those brainwashing exercises they called sermons coercion. As soon as her consent was on the screen they said, "All right, then, let's get it done."

  And so she went with them to their room. She was the only volunteer.

  Alma gets sort of tongue-tied when she gets to that part of the story, but I think I can piece it together. They told her they were really yearning to die, but they couldn't indulge themselves that way because their mission wasn't complete yet. Before they could take that gladsome release for themselves they wanted to make sure any worthy person could join them, so they wouldn't actually keep her company at that moment.

  They would, however, help her.

  "How?" she asked.

  "We'll advise you. Hanging is the best way," they said. "There are hundreds of alternatives, of course, and you can use one of them if you prefer! The reason we recommend hanging is for the church's legal protection, really, so the seculars can't trump up some charge against us. Nobody can try to prove homicide when somebody hangs herself, and you know how the heretics are."

  "It made sense," she told me. "At the time."

  Then they opened their trunk and handed her a coil of rope, and they showed her how to hook it to the lighting fixture, and how to climb onto the room's one straight-backed chair and kick herself off it. . . .

  Of course, the important thing to remember is that these two saviors were just fresh up from Earth.

  Alma wasn't. She'd been on the
Moon for over a year. She should have known better. On the other hand, as she now says, she wasn't really thinking very clearly at that moment. She was in a sort of trance of exultation, and so she did as they instructed.

  And then when she kicked herself loose and fell with the noose around her neck, the Moon's gentle gravity just wasn't strong enough to break her neck.

  It didn't even strangle her. It came pretty close, she says, close enough to make her gag and feel as though she were going to pass out for a moment; but not so close that she didn't have time to change her mind and claw the noose off, and push her way out of the room, choking and crying and rubbing her throat and feeling like a fool, with the two finalists reproachfully calling after her; and she never, never went back to the Millenarist services again.

  2

  YOU have touched on a principal concern. As you are aware, we have difficulty in understanding why your human custom of "religions" is so important to you. Tell us more about them, your own in particular.

  You're asking me about two different things at the same time. Which one do you want answered?

  Both of them. Please.

  There's not much to tell about my own religion. I don't actually have one, I mean not one that I take very seriously. My parents were Western Orthodox and that's the way I was brought up, but it didn't last.

  Probably my medical problems were what made me drop out, because they were hellish enough for anybody. After you spend a couple of years in the particular hell of a crazyhouse you come out of it one of two ways—either you'll believe with all your heart in anything that sounds as though it gives you some kind of hope, or you won't believe in anything at all. I went the second way. I suppose I was helped in that direction by my main therapist, Dr. Schneyman, who was unregistered himself. (He liked to quote some old guy named Benjamin Franklin, who said, "In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it.") By the time they decided I could be allowed to go out into the world again I'd lost a lot of things. My religious belief was only one of them.

  Of course, you run into a lot of practical problems if you're not registered to some recognized religious denomination—like not having anyone to vote for, for instance. So when I came to start a new life on the Moon I let myself be registered as Orthodox, meaning what they used to call "Easter Duty Orthodox." What that means is that I went to mass on the main church holidays, sometimes—if I happened to think of it at the right time and if I couldn't remember any really private recent sins that I would be embarrassed to have to confess to.

  That brings us to the other part of your question, which is harder. There's no way I could name all the human religions for you. There are too many of them. There are maybe fifteen or twenty main groups, and all kinds of denominations within each group.

  You could start out with the Christians, which is what I more or less was. There are two main classes of Christians: There's the Protestants, which includes the Pentecostals and the Baptists and the Fundamentalists and about forty others, most of them divided into eight or ten different sects, including the Millenarists (like Captain Tscharka) and the four or five varieties of Quakers and Old Believers and Amish and Universalists and so on. Then there's the Orthodox wing of Christianity. The Orthodox have the two big sects, Western and Roman, but there are maybe twenty littler ones there, too, like the Lifers, the True-Lifers and the patriarchates. And somewhere or other you have to put in the Christians that aren't either one or the other, like the Gnostics and Mormons and so on.

  Then we get to the non-Christians, starting with the Jews—I think there are at least fifteen or twenty different varieties of those, ranging from Hassidim (including the Lubavitchers) and the Templars to the Church of Jewish Science—and to Islam, with its three major branches, Shi'ite, Suni and Reformed, and maybe half a dozen divisions of each. Then there are the Eastern religions and the African ones—I don't even remember the names of most of those, apart from Tao, Shinto and Kwanzaa and a few others like Buddhism (both Orthodox and Soka Gakkai) and Ryuho Okawa Happy Science. Most of those don't do much proselytizing, so they're pretty well confined to where they started—where, I guess, they have enough problems to keep themselves occupied. Still, they elect enough Congresspeople to be an important swing vote sometimes.

  Finally we wind up with the exotics—different kinds of Rosicrucians, Spiritualists, Scientologists, Reincarnationists, Astrologists and so on—and the ancient revivals—Druids, Olympians, snake-handlers, Osiris people, Wiccans, Odinists, Pyramiders, Zoroastians, Thugs and about a million others, right down to the devotees of the Karnut Temple Rat Cult. Of course, on the Moon some of the weirder denominations are out of luck (due, for instance, to a local shortage of snakes or rats), and others are hampered because it's against the law to practice some of their commandments. (Like the ZPG-Thugs. Their mixture of Zero Population Growth and Thuggee still has some churches in California, but you never see them on the Moon.) They all get along, more or less. The only sect that I remember making any real trouble in the lunar Lederman colony were the Odinists. That happened when an opera troupe doing Das Rheingold gave the role of Wotan to a Japanese singer. The Odinists called that blasphemy and tried (unsuccessfully) to black out the broadcast, but since there were only seven of the Odinists altogether they couldn't work up a real riot.

  (I won't even mention the secular churches that aren't really religions, exactly. They aren't allowed to have any representatives in the Congresses, but people belong to them so they'll have places to go to when everybody else is going to church; these are the Communals, the Ethicals, the Rationalists, and the Humanists.)

  I don't know what the total number of religious sects is. Maybe there are a thousand or so that are large enough, and well enough organized, to have their own official electoral constituencies, but there are thousands and thousands of splinter groups that are too small or too new to be registered.

  Most of the registered ones, even, are too small to elect their own people to the various world commissions. The legislative commissions are usually dominated by Christians, Muslims and Jews, although there are almost always a sprinkling of Taoists and Buddhists in the major legislative commissions. They are considered less dogmatic than most of the others, so their presence is encouraged to help cool down the steamier arguments. Some of the small ones make common cause with others, too, so they can run what they call a "fusion" ticket. Probably every registered sect has at least a part of an elected legislator somewhere.

  (You haven't asked me just how it happened that the religions ran the governments, but I'll tell you anyway. It wasn't always that way. They say that in the old days people used to vote for "political parties," but all the parties got to look pretty much alike. Whatever people said their "political" principles were, it turned out that they were generally voting their religions and their social and ethnic backgrounds anyway—sometimes with a lot of violence. It was simpler to cut out the middleman, I wouldn't say that solved all the problems, but at least we don't have much "car bombing" or "kneecapping" or "ethnic cleansing" going on anymore. Never mind what those things were. You don't want to know.)

  That's the story on the churches. It may not quite be what you were asking about, I think. Probably what you really want to know is what all these denominations believe in.

  That's a much harder question. I think that the principal thing, for most of them, is that their religious beliefs are tied up in some hope of eternal life. In the Western Orthodox church, for instance, we believe—or probably I should say they believe—that after you die you enter a kind of world of the spirit, and if you're good it's paradise and then you just live on forever in eternal joy of one kind or another. It's pretty much the same with most of the other religions, except that in some of their heavens you don't spend eternity singing hosannahs. Maybe you just get reincarnated and have to go through the whole thing all over again. Or maybe you just abandon all your individual, personal existence entirely and join some kind of universal So
ul—I'm not too clear on some of them.

  On the other hand, a lot of the religions hold that there's a down side to the afterlife, too. That means that if you've been a rotten person in your lifetime—or maybe if you just ate the wrong kind of food, or didn't make the right sacrifices, or missed attending a service even—when you die you are going to pay for it because then you are going to get punished for your sins by roasting (or something) in some kind of totally agonizing hell. Forever.

  I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you, but we ought to be getting used to that by now. You're different from us in too many ways—especially this one, since you people have never had to worry about an afterlife at all.

  3

  IT is not evident that you are helping your case, Barrydihoa. In your description of these humans—Garoldtscharka, the Tuch-man, the two males who proposed suicide to the female—it is clear that their behavior is quite disturbing. Are they "crazy," in the same sense that you your self have been?

  No, of course not. With them it wasn't psychosis. It was their religion.

  This distinction is unclear. You have said that in your illness you are aware of objective events but you interpret them in nonrealistic ways. Does not "religion" also involve nonrealistic belief systems?

  Well, yes, but they're really two different things. I mean, personally, I don't have any doubt that Millenarism is really crazy. I guess most religious people think that all the people who happen to believe in some religion other than their own are pretty loopy. When I was ten years old in catechism class you should've heard what my old parish priest had to say about the Mormons across the street, for instance.

  But that sort of thing is accepted, and my kind of craziness wasn't. Not by anybody. Not even by me.