The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  That made him smile. "What a shame," he said gently. "Of course we'd be glad to see you at our services, anytime you want to drop in."

  "Not very likely," I said.

  He regarded me thoughtfully, the smile still on his face. It wasn't a sneering smile. It was a smile of compassion, the kind of smile I might have given my small son Matthew—if I had been lucky enough to know my son Matthew when he was small—if Matthew had firmly declared that he didn't think the world was round.

  Then, just to remind us of other problems, there was a little earth tremor right then. People looked startled; the tall trees around the dining tables swayed; some of the tea in Tuchman's cup slopped over.

  I didn't let it spoil my appetite. It was only about a 4.5, I judged, and I was already getting used to them. I took the last mouthful of stew out of my bowl and began nonchalantly to chew.

  Tuchman was looking at something behind me, and it turned out to be Becky Khaim-Novello. "Reverend?" she said. "I'm a little worried—"

  "It's just a minor quake, Rebecca," he said soothingly.

  "I don't mean that. Have you seen Jubal? He went off right after work, I thought maybe to go to the bathroom. But he never came back to eat."

  "Perhaps he just wasn't hungry. There's no place for him to get lost, you know. I'm sure he'll be on hand for the afternoon work detail."

  "Thank you, Reverend," she said uncertainly, and turned and went back to the serving tables for some fruit, Tuchman looking after her.

  "By the way," I said, remembering, "I won't be there. I've got a doctor's appointment."

  He ignored that. Earthquakes, doctor's visits and missing husbands did not distract him from his favorite subject. "Don't you believe in God at all?" he asked.

  I shrugged. "Maybe I do, sometimes, in a way. But mostly I guess not."

  The smile was gone now, and he was looking at me with the kind of tempered pity a driver might give a specimen of roadkill. "What a tragedy," he said. "For you, I mean."

  That was all I wanted of that particular conversation. I got up, stacked my dishes, and headed toward Billygoat's office.

  I don't like discussing religion, especially with religious people. I don't want to argue anybody out of something that gives him comfort, but I just can't make myself believe in the kinds of gods the sects claim, whether of divine wrath or divine love—or, as so many of them so confusingly describe it, of both at once. I mean, why would a divine being bother to throw thunderbolts of hellfire at his own creations? And a god of love is even harder to swallow, because what is there in somebody like Garold Tscharka to love?

  It would be nice if there really were a god. Maybe we just don't deserve one.

  Dr. Billygoat saw me right away, and he wasn't happy with me. The first thing he said, sounding accusatory, was, "I checked the datafile. You don't have any medical profile on file at all, di Hoa." "That's because I wasn't planning to come here at all."

  Of course I had to explain that. He looked surprised but not pleased. "Well," he said grudgingly, "maybe it's not entirely your fault, but Jesus, man! I wonder if you have any idea what a hell of a lot of extra work it means for me. I'll have to create a whole new medical file for you, and when am I going to have the time to do that? I've got three maternity calls and a broken leg to look at just this afternoon. You say you've got some special medical problems?"

  I said, "You bet I do," but when I started to explain what they were he just looked pained.

  "Save your breath. I'll have to have a profile before we get into any of that stuff, so go back and see Ann. I'll take care of you when you're through."

  So I did as ordered, and his wife sighed, looked put upon, but began doing all the routine stuff—weighing me, measuring me, watching the instruments read out my respiration and pulse and blood pressure, getting me to breathe into one instrument and pee into a cup for another—while Billygoat's other patients limped or puffed up the stairs to his office. It was an hour and a half before she'd finished all the tests and had the results entered into the file and he finally let me back upstairs to tell him about my bad genes.

  Then he didn't just look pained anymore, he looked seriously wounded.

  "Hell," he said. "Why would anybody send someone like you out to a colony? No, don't tell me about getting kidnapped again. I just wish you'd been a little more careful."

  He sighed reproachfully, as though he expected me to apologize for it. I didn't, so he began querying his database for some clue about what to do for me. That went on for quite a while.

  Finally he leaned back and stared at me. He said, "Shit."

  That didn't seem to me to be a useful remark. "What's the matter?" I asked.

  He shook his head, meaning, I'm the doctor so I'm the one who asks the questions around here, dammit. "The only good thing," he said irritably, "is that you seem to be in remission right now, but I can't count on that forever, can I? I've never heard of a case like yours before. 'Bipolar affective disorder,' is that what you said they called it?"

  "Among other things, yes. They also called it manic-depressive psychosis."

  "Psychosis!" he said, sounding dismayed.

  "Sorry to inconvenience you," I said politely.

  He gave me a sharp look for that, but all he said was, "Tell me again what they did for you in the clinics."

  I did, starting with the injections that kept me straight for about forty-eight hours each, and then the free-floating cells that survived for maybe a week, and then the implants that were good, usually, for five or six months before they needed to be refreshed.

  He looked glum. "All right," he said. "I've got that much. How did they deliver the genetic material?"

  "How would I know?"

  "Come on, di Hoa! You must know something. Transposons? Fibrils? What?"

  "I have no idea at all. I didn't make up the shots. I just let them give them to me."

  "Oh, man. How do you expect me to treat you? Don't you think you ought to know a little more about your condition?"

  "I never had to. They'd just call up my medical file and there it all was."

  He gave a sort of moan. It was not reassuring. I asked him, "Can't you deal with that sort of thing?"

  "The mood pills, sure. The cell implants—" He shrugged. "We're limited in what we can do about that here, especially when I don't know what's needed. And I didn't come here as a medical doctor, you know."

  That got my full attention. "You what?"

  "Hold your water, di Hoa, I didn't say I couldn't help. When I came here I was an oral surgeon—dentist, if that's what you want to call it. There were three doctors then, and another came on the next ship. But one of them died and all the others hated it here and went home. I'm what's left. Don't blame me. We were all hoping Tscharka would bring a couple of reinforcements with him on Corsair, but I guess he had other things on his mind."

  "I can't tell you," I said, "how happy and comforted you've made me feel."

  He was laughing at me—sourly, I thought. "They didn't take their equipment away with them when they took off, you know. They left all the lab stuff and the pharmaceuticals. I've got all the datafiles, too, and I know how to read them. I can deal with most of the problems I've come across here, di Hoa. I've done it. Even when they were genetically incompetent, like you. I've got two diabetics here. I keep them normo-glycemic just about perfectly with encapsulated islet allografts—they couldn't do any better at Mayo. I've got people with carcinogenous nodes that I suppress with intravascular devices wrapped in permselective membranes; I've got eight or ten others with genetic problems that need the same sort of therapy, and they're all doing all right. You hear how good I've gotten at talking the lingo? It's not just the lingo. I know the techniques for dealing with most any problem that comes along, di Hoa, and when I don't know I can always look it up. Except for your problem. You see, I just don't know what the hell your problem is."

  "Thank you very much, Doctor," I said.

  "Oh, hell, di Hoa, don't be
smart with me. I'll put the datasearches to work, and Nanny'll take some more blood from you, and we'll run some more tests, and we'll see what we can find. I expect we can do something. Hope so, anyway. Come back in a couple of weeks. And please, di Hoa, just do your best not to go round the bend before then."

  So, for lack of anything better to do, I went back to the apartment I shared with Jacky Schottke. That fired-up flush of enthusiasm I had woken up with was all gone. What I intended to do was to lie down and go to sleep and hope it would all go away.

  It wouldn't have worked out that way, of course. I know that. But I never even got a chance to try it out, because just as I was cutting across the viney "grass" to the door, Becky Khaim-Novello came running out of the lower apartment, screaming and screaming. She was worried because she had missed her husband at the afternoon's work detail, and when she came home to see why he was absent she found him.

  Like a good Millenarist he had taken the sure escape from his condition of sin. He had done it in the approved way, with a rope around his neck.

  I've never once thought seriously of committing suicide myself. But I could see how, then and there, it might have seemed like a real good idea to Jubal Khaim-Novello.

  13

  WE are aware that humans do sometimes end their own lives. None of us would do that, of course. How does it happen that your race survives in spite of the fact that so many of you human beings are, as you say, "crazy"?

  Well, thanks a lot, but we're not all that crazy. Honestly. If you come right down to it, I bet that you people have just as many crazies as we do, only you don't notice them because of how you live.

  I don't mean to be insulting. What I'm trying to say is that you live in a kind of culture where craziness just doesn't stand out. It was probably the same with us thousands of years ago, when human beings were hunter-gatherers—when our ancestors lived more or less like the way you do yourselves, I mean. In those days, if old Glaucus from the bog people was kind of slow, even stupid—what we would now call severely retarded—his condition didn't let him off his turn pulling roots. It just meant that the other people probably made fun of him and probably gave him all the dirtiest jobs. If some other guy was, well, psychotically touchy, the kind that's always starting fights, they didn't put him away. They just ganged up on him and beat the hell out of him—unless he was too big and strong—and then, who knows?—maybe they elected him their chief.

  If you think about, say, the famous Greek heroes, the ones that stormed Troy and went around conquering kingdoms and so on, the way they acted would put them in a loony bin these days. Odysseus and Hector and Priam and all those people were a hell of a lot loopier than I ever was at my worst—

  Well, yes. I accept that you don't know much about any of those old Greeks. I even accept that you don't care. The point is that things are different in a more sophisticated society. I'm pretty sure we don't have more crazies than anybody else. They just show more.

  I admit that Jubal Khaim-Novello's suicide shook me up. The man had not been anything you could call a personal friend, exactly, but he wasn't a stranger, either. We'd come out to Pava together and shared some work details, and he was a neighbor, after all—I felt bad that he had decided that he had to kill himself. I thought of maybe dropping in on the widow to express sympathy, ask her to call on me if she needed anything—you know, the sort of ritual thing you're supposed to do when somebody dies?

  Well, no, you don't know, do you? Anyway, I didn't do it that night. Then, the next morning at the breakfast table, there was Becky, sitting next to Friar Tuck at a table raised a little higher than the others, looking pink and flushed and excited. What's more, Tuchman stood up on the table to announce that the Millenarists were going to have a special worship service that night so they could all rejoice together for their dear, departed, fortunate brother who had finally freed himself from the sin of existing, and Garold Tscharka was going to make a special trip down from Corsair to lead it.

  And all the time Becky was smiling tremulously beside him, looking less like a widow than a bride. Go figure.

  It seemed to me I had more or less promised Theophan I would go out with her that day. I found her sitting next to Marcus Wendt and told her I was ready. She gave me a look of surprise. "Why, thanks, Barry," she said, "but I've already arranged with Jimmy Queng for Marcus to go. I wasn't sure what your plans were going to be, you see. And Marcus is feeling a little better today, so he's going to help me out." And Marcus gave me a brave little smile to show agreement.

  So I went over to Jimmy Queng and volunteered for whatever he had open.

  The first thing on the list turned out to be food gathering up in the hills: eleven people in three cars, and leaving right away. It sounded as good as anything else. I jumped in one of the cars, shook hands around, and we took off.

  We drove until the bumpy excuse for a road ran out, at the edge of a grove of the bamboo-like trees. It was warm and pleasant, and the air smelted fresh, and the usual bunch of lep helpers were waiting for us. We took baskets out of the cars and split up into groups of a couple of human beings and a lep. My personal lep reared up to look at me and my partner out of those immense bug-eyes. It didn't speak. It just twisted itself around and went inchworming away into the woods, leaving us to follow.

  The woman who was teamed up with me was an elderly black grandmother named Madeleine Hardy, Pava-born and pushing hard on what would have been retirement age, if anybody had much of a chance to retire on Pava. Whatever her years, Madeleine was spry enough to keep a dozen steps ahead of me as we climbed after the lep through the woods. When the lep stopped, Madeleine did too. She looked around, nodded, and said, "All right, Barry, by now you probably can recognize some of the things you've been eating the last couple of weeks. Nobody's picked this area for a while, so there's plenty of ripe stuff."

  She stopped for a minute, squinting up at the sky, because her voice was almost drowned out by a roar from overhead; the shuttle was sweeping past us in the sky, big, bright and noisy as it came in for a landing. "That's loud enough to be Tscharka himself," I said when the racket had dwindled.

  Madeleine didn't answer that, just gave me a curious look and went on: "What we specially want to harvest are sushi and roseberries, but don't pick the sushi right away. It spoils too fast; we'll have to just mark where it is and come back for it right before we start home, okay? We want all you can find of those, but don't pass up any other fruits that look good. If you're in doubt about anything show it to me or Eleanor of Aquitaine here." She nodded to our lep. "Eleanor doesn't speak our language very well, but she'll stop you if she sees you trying to pick anything poisonous."

  "Poisonous?" I said uncertainly.

  Madeleine laughed. "Don't worry about it. Trust Eleanor. Pick."

  All my life I have taken "Don't worry about it" as a signal to start serious worrying, but Madeleine seemed to know what she was doing. So did the lep. The first time I reached for what looked like a slightly darker-colored roseberry, deep scarlet instead of strawberry red, the lep whistled and slapped at my arm with those little hands of hers and shook her head. (Not easy to do when you don't have a neck; she twisted her whole upper body violently.) I got the idea.

  The sushi fruits were easier—pear-shaped things with a spiny husk, and inside a moist, fishy-tasting pulp that I had not learned to care for but others gobbled up. I found half a dozen bushes loaded with them, several different varieties, and all looking ripe to me. I made a mental note of them, as ordered, and went on to other fruits. The lep was picking away industriously, too, with her agile little hands, and in less than an hour we'd filled our baskets and carried them down to the car to turn them in for empties.

  Picking fruits in a warm, sweet-smelling wood isn't the hardest work I ever did, and it doesn't tax the intellect much. After I'd caught the rhythm I had plenty of time to think while I picked.

  I thought about all kinds of things. I thought about Alma, because I thought about Alma a lot; and
I thought about poor, dumb Jubal Khaim-Novello, and what a waste it had been for him to come eighteen-some light-years just to do what he could have done a lot cheaper and easier back on the Moon. And I thought about the technical problems there might be in getting the factory orbiter refueled, and in commanding it to make a copy of itself to be installed on the surface, and—well—about all the possible plans I could dream up to turn Pava into something as close as the Lederman lunar colony as I could manage.

  Just thinking about those things wasn't good enough. I wanted to talk to someone who might fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge. Like Madeleine Hartly. I tried to pick closer and closer to her, in the hopes of striking up a conversation. She would have none of it. "When we pick we pick. We'll have plenty of time to talk—later. I think these baskets are full enough to take down now."

  By the end of the day I had done that six times. Then Madeleine said we'd done enough; it was time to collect the sushi and go home. For the sushi-picking part of the job Madeleine stuck close beside me while I picked, examining each bush herself. "Red sushi, that's nice, blue, pearblossom—real good, Barry; we don't get pearblossom sushi much, and it's my favorite. You've got a good eye," she complimented me. "Only don't pick the fruits on the bottom branches of the blue."

  "They're not sushi?"

  "They are sushi, but look around the stems. See that grayish, slimy stuff growing on them? That's sort of a fungus. It's hallucinogenic. You can pick some of it for yourself if you want a high tonight—some people do—but don't put it in with the other stuff. Don't try to save it, either. If you don't eat it in twelve hours it'll make you sick as a dog, if it doesn't kill you."

  I didn't pick the hallucinogens; they were never my favorite thing, even on the Moon. When we got back to the cars I took a fast look through the heaped produce in the back just to see if anybody else had, but if there were any secret dopers in our party they had hidden their stash pretty well.