The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  I didn't let him finish. I said, "Sure. The answer's yes. I'll vote for everything you want. I'll vote for everything everybody wants." And when he gave me a look, partly hurt because I didn't seem to be taking him seriously, partly puzzled, I laid it all on him.

  If I expected him to jump with joy I was disappointed. He listened quietly while I spelled the plan out, then he sighed. "Poor Garold," he said.

  "The hell with Garold. He'll just have to get used to it. Everybody's got to make a few sacrifices for the common good. Anyway, there's supposed to be another ship coming along pretty soon."

  "Of course. Well, perhaps we'd better get over there. I'd like to get a good seat."

  The good feeling was still with me as we cut between buildings on the way to the meeting place. Jacky wasn't talkative. I noticed clouds building up overhead and tried some neutral conversation—"It's a good thing we're getting the meeting in now, looks like we're due for some more rain"—but he just sighed again. He was looking at a group of three or four people talking earnestly together: Captain Tscharka, Tuchman, Jimmy Queng. They glanced at me, then turned away.

  "What's the matter?" I asked Jacky.

  "I think it's that story from the Moon," he said.

  "What story?"

  Jacky shook his head. "You don't follow the news from Earth much, do you? Well, never mind. Maybe it's not important."

  I let it go at that. I shouldn't have, of course, but I wanted to be up front, while Jacky's idea of a good seat was something inconspicuous in the background.

  The place was all set up for the meeting. All the tables had been carted away, and most of the benches were already full. I took an open seat next to Theophan Sperlie, who gave me an encouraging wink and patted my hand. That seemed promising, too, especially because, for a wonder, Marcus wasn't with her. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him hurrying in a moment later; but then he came to a stop, looking chagrined. If Theo had been saving the seat next to her for him to occupy it wasn't saved anymore.

  Things were looking up in more ways than one. I kept her hand in mine, but I had other things to deal with. I marshalled my arguments in my mind: the fuel; the plan of scrapping Corsair to feed the orbiter's production machines; the possibility of exploring for asteroidal metals and ending Pava's dependency on Earth once and for all. It all made sense to me. I was ready to get up in meeting and propose it for everybody.

  I didn't even notice that Jimmy Queng had taken his place on the tabletop that served as a platform until he began to speak. "Quiet down, please," he said, looking somber and angry. "Reverend Tuchman has something to say to you."

  That was when I began to realize that something was going wrong. So did most of the Freeholders at the same time; there was a buzz all around the audience as Friar Tuck climbed up on the table. He looked even more grim than Jimmy Queng while he waited for the noise to die down. Then he said:

  "I speak particularly to our penitential brethren, but I fear this affects everyone here on Pava. As some of you know, we have had saddening news from Earth. We cannot let it pass unobserved. So, in mourning for our martyred brothers, I am declaring a retreat for three days effective at once. The congregation is asked to return here in one hour to proceed to the retreat site."

  That made for some real muttering in the crowd—surprised, angry, generally upset. The only ones who seemed to know just what to do were the well-disciplined Millenarists, all of whom stood up and began to leave to get their possessions for the retreat. Jimmy Queng pounded the seat of the chair next to him for silence. "I think you'll all agree that it wouldn't be fair to continue with the meeting when so many must leave. Under the circumstances, this meeting is canceled. We will reschedule it as soon as possible."

  That was that.

  Five minutes later the Millenarists were all gone and most of the rest of us were just standing around trying to make sense of what had happened. "The bastards," Theo said, but without much emotion—as though she'd expected something of the kind.

  Marcus nodded. "I knew it. I bet it's because of those two Millenarists on the Moon."

  I blinked at him. "What two Millenarists?"

  "The ones that were arrested and deported. What's the matter, Barry? It was all on the news reports; haven't you seen them?"

  I hadn't, of course; I'd been too busy with my own worries and plans. Theo patted my hand again. "This whole thing is just a pretext, of course. Tscharka must have known what we were going to propose, so he wanted to stall as long as he could. 'Martyrs,' for God's sake. Nobody but Tuchman would have the nerve to call those two creeps martyrs."

  She gave me a curious look, as though I were looking unusually stupid. As I guess I was.

  "Well," she said consolingly, "we'll just have to take it up when the meeting's rescheduled. Don't worry, Barry. Our time is going to come." And she gave my arm a friendly squeeze . . . before turning away and leaving with Marcus, hand in hand. It was beginning to rain again, too.

  And that's what happened that night. Now you can ask your question if you still want to.

  17

  THE question that is still to be asked concerns the "town meetings."

  Really? I thought I answered all that already. The town meetings were the place where the colonists got together to decide on their priorities and pass their laws—I hope you're not going to ask me what "laws" are now, are you? We were able to run our government that way on Pava because there were so few human beings here. If there had been more of us we probably would have had to elect people to do all that sort of thing for us, the way it's done back in the solar system, but with a total population of less than a thousand we could all get together and hash everything out. Was that your question?

  No. The question is this: Is it because of such "town meetings" that so many actions of the human persons on our planet work out so poorly?

  You know, you surprise me sometimes. For somebody with no measurable sense of humor, you do manage to get a zinger in every once in a while.

  Anyway, the answer to your question is no. I admit that when we try to plan ahead we don't always agree on what the plan should be—that's why we have these meetings, to try to get a consensus that everybody can live with—and even when we do agree we often make mistakes. We try things, and then maybe for one reason or another they don't work out—like that big hydropower dam that was supposed to solve all the colony's energy problems, but didn't. Then we just try something else. It may take us a while to get up the will for another effort. But we never do stop trying.

  What we're always trying to do, one way or another, is to make things better.

  It's true that some of the things people do try actually wind up making things a hell of a lot worse instead—I'm talking now about wars, and terrorism, and crime, and all the other bad things that human beings have been known to try. As some famous person said long ago—maybe it was somebody like George Washington, or possibly, what was his name, Winston Churchill—every time we take two steps forward we also take one step back. Hell, that's not the half of it. Sometimes it's more like ten or twenty steps back. Over the years human beings have done some of the most catastrophically nutty things you can imagine, in the attempt to make what they think is going to be some kind of improvement.

  But we never give up.

  Let me repeat that: We never give up. Not permanently, anyway. We never stop wanting to improve the way things are. I know that's not your nature. But it's ours.

  Friar Tuck's little surprise set me back, all right. It was a shocker. I'd been all juiced up for confrontation, and he cheated me of it.

  But it didn't mean that the town meeting wouldn't happen, only that it would be postponed for a few days. (Well, actually for one whole calendar week. Have I mentioned that the town meetings were always on Tuesdays? That was because Tuesdays were among the very few days of the week that were not somebody's Sabbath.)

  It turned out to be a tough week in Freehold for the rest of us, though. For the duration of the retre
at every Millenarist was off in the hills, and there were a lot of Millenarists. When you take a quarter of the population out of a community—more than a quarter, if you only count the adults—you leave a big hole in the work force. So all the nonessential activities of the colony had to be deferred.

  There was a good part to that; with all the Millenarists out of the way, the situation began to settle down as a clear case of "us against them." Most everybody left behind was in favor of change, and we did outnumber them, after all.

  Workwise, though, we were stressed. Theophan had to put off one of her seismology runs so that she and half a dozen others could go out to collect a couple of new parafoils from the factory orbiter. She swore a lot about it, but she went. Without Marcus, though, because he was sent, along with Jacky Schottke and me, upriver to the biofuel generating station, to replace the firemen who had taken off on the retreat. That was hard work for me—twice as hard for Jacky. We had to fish out the rafts of brush and logs that floated down the river, as well as the random flotsam that was still coming down from the storms. Then we had to dragline them, by sweat and muscle, to stack under the canopies in the drying yards. When we got a good supply of that on hand we weren't through, we just had to switch to the other part of the job. That was taking the dry stuff, as dry as it was ever going to get, and loading it into the hoppers that would feed it into the conveyors that would dump it into the furnaces that generated the steam that turned the turbine that made the electricity for Freehold.

  I'd seen the smoke from the power plant's stacks, but this was the first time I'd come close to it. I wasn't impressed. It produced about 1.8 megawatts—about one meg for domestic consumption, which meant a little over one kilowatt per colonist, and the rest for "industry." But it was a pretty primitive affair. The only energy the turbine extracted was from the primary expansion of the steam; it could have produced twice as much with a low-pressure addition, and more than that with a hotter fuel. Which I didn't fail to point out to everyone who would listen: that was just one more thing the orbiter could make for us. They listened, too. I could see that I was beginning to consolidate my reputation—as a potential leader, maybe, or maybe just as a know-it-all pain in the ass.

  I didn't mind the work so much, although it was raining. What I minded was the way Jacky began to pant and turn pale after the first hour. Fortunately Geronimo was loyally there to help out, along with three or four other leps, so I took it upon myself to put Jacky in charge of the leps instead of wearing out his own old muscles. If it hadn't been for the leps we would have been in real trouble, but they pitched in.

  When we all took a break I sat down next to Jacky, sharing a bottle of beer. Geronimo slithered around us, listening silently. "You all right?" I asked Jacky.

  He took a swig of the beer and passed it back. There was plenty to go around; it was a liter bottle that had once held some kind of liqueur. "I'm fine," he said mournfully.

  It didn't surprise me that he was unhappy. I knew that some part of him wished he had gone along on the retreat with the others.

  But I had something else on my mind. "Jacky? You know that thing Friar Tuck said, about the martyrs?"

  He looked vaguely apologetic. "To tell the truth, Barry, I don't think he cared that much about those guys. I suspect it was just a pretext to postpone the meeting for a while."

  "I didn't doubt that for a minute. What I wondered was, have you been following the news from Earth? Do you know what he was talking about?"

  He looked surprised. "Of course. It was all in the reports: their names were Bruderkind and Mallory. They were accused of bringing about the death of seven or eight people, two of them minors, and the Lederman council expelled them back to Earth."

  "Bruderkind and Mallory, you say." I pondered the names. If Alma had ever told me the names of the two Millenarists who were working on her I'd forgotten them long since. A lot of time had passed since then, even allowing for the fact that any information that got here from Earth was automatically already eighteen and a half years old. There really wasn't much chance these were the same two that had tried to help Alma off herself.

  But they could be.

  Then I began making up some unpleasant scenarios in my mind. Alma finding out I'd been stolen away from her. Alma heartbroken. Alma seeking comfort anywhere she could find it. Alma returning to the Millenarist church. Alma finally deciding there was only one way out of her sorrow—

  No. I didn't believe it. But I made up my mind to check out the newscasts from Earth first chance I got.

  By the time the night shift arrived we were all bushed. The rain had stopped, which was a good thing. The other good thing was that the trip back to Freehold only required getting into the boats and letting the current carry us downstream. At the last moment Geronimo flopped himself on board for the ride. Marcus muttered a little about that, and so did one or two of the others, but Geronimo didn't pay them any attention. He was hanging half over the stern of the boat, one of his little hands on the rudder to guide us, watching the ripples that formed in our wake.

  I was still concerned for Jacky Schottke, who was slumped over next to the lep with his eyes closed, but when I asked him how he was doing he stirred himself. "I'm all right. I was just thinking about the people on the retreat. I'm afraid they got wet today."

  That didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me, but I didn't say so. Geronimo spoke up, though. He twisted his face around to look at Jacky and said, in that hissy, penetrating voice, "No. Rain was outside, but retreat people were in large cloth house."

  "Ah, they took the tent with them, then," Jacky said, looking happier. "It was all so fast, I wasn't sure they'd remembered. You saw them, did you?"

  "First thing coming down in early day, yes. Very loud. All saying same words together."

  "You mean they were praying, I suppose. They would be." Jacky looked wistful.

  He closed his eyes again, and I let the subject drop. What I was thinking was that I really would have been happier if the Millenarists had got themselves good and soaked. I know that's not a very admirable way to feel. It isn't the Christian charity I was taught by the nuns; we were supposed to wish only the best, even for people we didn't like. I guess in that respect I wasn't much of a Christian, but then neither were most of the Christians I knew.

  When we pulled up at the town dock most of the biofuel crew headed right for the supper tables, but there was something I wanted to do first.

  When Geronimo saw that I was detouring by way of the little station under the big dish antenna he squawked a protest. "Meal time, Barrydihoa," he said reproachfully, his mouthpart working to show how hungry he was.

  "In a minute. First I want to see what's been happening on Earth." He hissed reproachfully, but he climbed the hill to the station with me and stayed by my side while I tried to find what I wanted in the tapes.

  Although I hadn't been watching them, I knew that Pava got regular news broadcasts from Earth. That wasn't all it got; there were daily transmissions of cultural programs, new performances, personal messages, religious programs—lots of those—and all sorts of other items that some civil servant back in the solar system had decided were worth passing on to the colony. The single channel that carried them all was crowded—especially because every nine-hour segment was repeated three times, to make sure Pava's single receiving station would get it all.

  I sat down at one of the screens and selected for major news summaries of the past couple of weeks.

  When I filtered out the material I didn't care about there wasn't a whole lot left. Naturally none of the news was "new" anymore by the time it crossed the eighteen and a half light-years to reach Pava, anyway. The elected councils were squabbling day and night, just like always; just like always, major projects like the re-greening of the Sahara and the cleanup of the Arctic were running behind schedule. Nothing had changed. When I selected for "Moon" and "Millenarists" I found what I was looking for. The fifth item that turned up on the screen was
about William Bruderkind and Booker T. Mallory, ordained ministers in the Millenarist Penitential Church. Each of them had been arrested twice over a period of several years for improper solicitation of suicide, then finally tried and convicted when two of the suicides turned out to be young teenagers. Their status as naturalized Lunarians was canceled, and they were kicked out.

  There were several stories about them, but none that gave the names of any of their victims.

  On the way back to the supper tables Geronimo galumphed along beside me, looking up at me curiously with those immense eyes. He didn't speak, and neither did I. I was thinking about how long certain Millenarist ministers were willing to put off their own heavenly graduation in order to talk others into it, and mostly I was trying to persuade myself that there was really no chance that any of those unnamed victims could have been Alma Vendette.

  When Geronimo went off to forage in the kitchen wastes I got into the dwindling line at the tables and helped myself to a meal, but I didn't get much chance to eat it. Everybody wanted to talk to me, it seemed. It started in the chow line and kept up on my way to a table and after, endless questions: Wouldn't the pods the antimatter came in themselves be a good source of raw materials for the factory as the fuel was used up, without the unpleasant necessity of scrapping Corsair? How long did I think Corsair would last as recyclable scrap, anyway? What did I know about asteroidal compositions—wasn't it possible that there'd still be a lot of elements we'd be short of, even if we tapped them?

  I didn't forget about Alma, exactly. I never did that. But I did cheer up, because it certainly looked as though more and more of the colony was getting ready to wake up from its deep, unhappy sleep and do something serious about making Pava a decent place to spend the rest of my life.

  Something else happened in those three days when all the Millenarists were out of town. I began to discover that the colonists in Freehold all had agenda of their own. They were chronically suppressed and depressed, sure, but never without dreams. It happened when I said something about Jacky Schottke to Dabney Albright and Dabney said contemptuously, "What do you expect from him? He's a mover."