The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  It wasn't. "The son of a bitch!" Theophan shouted, suddenly wide-awake again. She was staring at the sky.

  Then I saw it, too—off toward the downstream horizon, a moving brightness behind the thinning clouds. "What is it? Is that the shuttle?"

  She snarled, "You damn bet it's the shuttle. The bastard's taken off for his ship."

  Jacky said mournfully, "I was afraid of that, when I saw he took Jillen with him when he left. He's gone, Barry. I doubt he'll be coming back to us until he figures out some way to save his ship."

  19

  AGAIN there is a matter that is not understood. You have stated that the "town meeting" prescribed the actions for humans on Pava. Yet you also state that Garoldtscharka did not conform to the decisions that were taken at the meeting. How is that possible?

  Why, that's the easiest thing in the world to understand. Yes, we have laws. But, yes, we also have people who break the laws. That's why all the laws have punishments written into them for the people who break them.

  Then Garoldtscharka was "punished" in some manner?

  Ah, well, no. Not exactly. In order to punish somebody you first have to catch him. Garold had taken himself out of our reach. He and Jillen flew themselves right up to Corsair in the shuttle, and once he was in orbit he stayed there.

  He not only wouldn't come back down, he wouldn't even discuss the subject. He refused to talk on the radio to anybody but Friar Tuck, and whatever was said between them went no further. Their conversations were no one else's business, so the reverend said. All the reverend would add, benevolently smiling, was to tell us to be patient, dear ones, the captain knows what he is doing, he is acting for the best of all of us, and we just have to trust him.

  I didn't, though. For that matter, it seemed that hardly anyone did but the most devoted Millenarists. Those had formed solid ranks behind Captain Tscharka after the meeting in support of his position that nobody had anything to say about Corsair and its cargo but himself. Very few others bought that, and so we were divided into hostile camps.

  That brought a whole bunch of old problems to the fore again.

  What I'm talking about now is religious problems, which are the kind I hate most. There were protest meetings in most of the churches; there were bitter arguments between Millenarists and their supposedly heretical next-door neighbors, and sometimes the arguments got violent.

  Of course, not all the squabbles were serious, or at least I didn't think they were. The one that struck me as funniest was when our tiny band of Wiccas, the old witch-cult people, organized a protest demonstration against Tscharka in the square outside the meeting house.

  No one really minded them demonstrating, at least in principle; that was their right. Besides, there only were about six of the Wiccas altogether, and their demonstration wasn't particularly noisy. What made a problem was that, for religious reasons, they announced they could only demonstrate effectively while they were "skyclad." What they actually meant by "skyclad" turned out to be "naked."

  Even that was no particular problem for most of us—who cared if the Wiccas wanted to display their generally not-very-exciting nude bodies?—but our equally tiny group of hard-shell Baptists got really upset. The Baptists weren't defending Tscharka. They were as mad at him as anybody else, but they also firmly believed that all that bare flesh was inciting to sin. That offended them deeply. They made so much noise about it that cooler heads had to arbitrate. When the Wiccas finally agreed to confine their future skyclad activities to remote areas of the woods that one simmered down.

  But the colony was still seriously divided, and that wasn't funny at all.

  I didn't think so, anyway. I was frustrated and angry. I'd finally got myself started on what I thought was going to be a productive course of action. I wanted to charge ahead with it . . . and that bastard Tscharka had foreclosed it on me without warning.

  Was I going through the beginning of those mood swings that meant trouble was on its way? I don't know. It didn't occur to me at the time. I knew I was in an up-and-down state, but I accounted for that by objective factors.

  But there it was. I don't handle frustration very well, at least not when my medication's running thin. I found the situation depressing. And, as you know, I don't like to be depressed. It scares me.

  The best antidote I know for depression is work, and I made a lot of it for myself.

  The community kept finding jobs for me at its own regular chores, but when those were done I added another job of my own. If I couldn't go up to the orbiter just then I could do the next best thing. So I spent long hours over the screen in Jacky Schottke's apartment, going over and over the specs on the factory orbiter.

  I know you keep saying that you want me to tell you everything, but that includes a lot. Should I mention that the weather stayed bad, cold, wet and windy? Or that a pack of goobers got into one of the riverside farm plots and sucked the juice out of every single tomato and green pepper on the vines? Or that we had a sudden cluster of those little quakes that I thought I had been getting used to, but hadn't? I noticed all those things, of course. You couldn't help it. But my thoughts were all on the orbiter.

  The schematics told me a lot. The factory certainly had been designed to make use of any energy source that came along, including antimatter; there was an antimatter-fueled magnetohydrodynamic power generator built in, just like the ones on spaceships—at least, it had been built in, as part of the original plan.

  But that brought up the question the screen couldn't answer for me. Was that system still there?

  That was the worrisome unknown. I knew that over the years the orbiter had scrounged materials wherever it could find them. I knew it had eaten up parts of itself when its programming allowed it to make the assumption that the scrapped systems were of a lower priority than the new goods it was programmed to make.

  Had some of those recycled parts been in the standby fuel system?

  I could find no way of answering that question—until Madeleine Hartly offered to help me find one.

  We had both been set to checking food stored in the warehouse to make sure none of it was spoiled. When I complained about my problem to her she volunteered to show me how to interrogate the factory itself, so between work and supper we went to her apartment to use her screen—she didn't want to make the trek over to mine.

  Naturally Geronimo trailed along after me, but Madeleine didn't mind. She even rustled through her cupboards and found some raisins to give him—well, I don't suppose they were really raisins. I don't think they'd originally been actual grapes, anyway, but they were little dried fruits that were sweet enough to please Geronimo. Then she sat down at her screen to access the orbiter.

  A moment later she looked up, frowning. "That's funny, Barry. It's asking me for a password," she said. "It never did that before. Wait a minute—"

  And she tried another combination, and this time she did get a response. The legend on the screen said:

  Entrance code required. Access to operating programs is temporarily restricted, pending resolution of new manufacturing instructions.

  "Whatever that means," I said. The operating system in Freehold's computers was pretty ancient, naturally enough, and one that was unfamiliar to me.

  She looked annoyed. "I guess what it means is what it says. We're blocked out. Maybe Jimmy Queng was afraid somebody would sneak in a manufacturing order before we made sure you can fuel it, so he embargoed the system. Or Captain Tscharka did it from his ship."

  "Can he do that?"

  "I guess he can, Barry, because it looks like he—or somebody—did." She tried a couple other combinations without success, then gave up.

  "Well, we're not doing any good here. I'm sorry, Barry. Let's go eat." And then, as we were walking toward the mess, Geronimo loping silently along beside us, she was silent, as though she had something else on her mind. Then she looked up at me quizzically. "Mind if I ask you a question? How're you doing with your problem?"

  "
Which problem is that?"

  "The medical one, Barry."

  I stopped short. Geronimo stopped too, staring up at both of us with those immense eyes. "How did you know I had a medical problem?"

  She shrugged, looking apologetic. "Everybody knows that, Barry. People have been talking about it for days. They say you're unstable, except if you have medication, and Bill Goethe doesn't have the right medication for you."

  I flared up at her. "Damn the man! He's got no right to be spreading that kind of information around. Doctors are supposed to keep their mouths shut about their patients' problems!"

  "Don't blame Billy. It might not be him. Anybody can access his files," she reminded me, and waited for an answer to her question.

  I didn't see any way out of it, so I said unwillingly, "All right. I do have—I used to have—serious mood swings."

  "Bad ones?"

  "Damn bad ones. Incapacitating ones, in fact; I did some pretty crazy things. If they were to come back I'd be in real trouble. I'm in remission right now, though, so it's not an immediate problem. I ought to be good for a couple of months, anyway, and Goethe says he's trying to work up some treatment for me before it gets critical."

  She squeezed my arm. "Let's hope, Barry," she said, and that was the end of the conversation.

  It was not, of course, the end of my thinking about it. Although my head had been full of other things, I had not forgotten how little hope Goethe had offered for his "treatments."

  I wondered if the sudden flare of anger I'd felt when Madeleine told me the news meant anything. It wasn't a good sign; I was supposed to avoid losing my temper as much as possible. Then there was the unexpected new responsibility that had been thrust on me; that was a new stress, too, added to all the other stresses that were working on me.

  I didn't think there was immediate danger. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going off the deep end just then. However, there was no doubt that sooner or later I certainly would . . . unless, against the odds, Goethe came through with what I needed. If he didn't—

  If he didn't, I did not like to think of what my life would be like then.

  Madeleine excused herself to sit with her great-granddaughter at supper. When I'd filled my tray—the cooks were serving something that resembled meat loaf that day—I looked around for a place to sit, and saw Becky Khaim-Novello waving at me.

  I hadn't seen much of Becky, after that one cup of coffee in her apartment. Now and then I'd caught sight of her as our paths crossed, of course, and I'd noticed that she went about the town looking as proud and pleased as the widow of a successful Millenarist suicide should. I didn't know how deep that went. Once or twice in the still night hours I had heard, through the thin flooring, the sound of her uncontrolled weeping.

  She wasn't weeping now. She seemed chipper and inviting, and there was one other thing about her just then that struck me as interesting. She wasn't alone. She was sitting next to Marcus Wendt, and the annoyed look he gave me suggested that the conversation had been personal. And what that suggested was that maybe things hadn't been going very well between him and Theophan Sperlie.

  Between the time I spotted them and the time I was getting ready to sit down across from them, my active imagination went through a whole scenario: Theo and Marcus breaking up; Theo available again; Theo taking a new interest in me; Theo and me maybe making it after all. I know how foolish that sounds. Just remember how many weeks I'd had to get horny, though; I'm really a reasonably serious person, but my glands don't always know that.

  "You've made yourself a stranger," Becky chided me as I started to sit down. "Don't forget that I still have some of that good coffee."

  And Marcus said:

  "Don't sit there. That's Theo's place."

  That took swift care of my fantasies. Sure enough, a minute later Theophan came back with another helping of the something or other loaf for Marcus and a salad for herself. She was not cheerful. "Barry," she said as soon as she caught sight of me, "I'm beginning to get worried. I have to have some new equipment and I can't wait."

  I shrugged, meaning What do you want from me? I'm not responsible for Garold Tscharka.

  She went on regardless: "I've got an ugly feeling. That little cluster of tremors we've been having? I think there's a good chance that they're foreshocks for something a lot bigger. How'm I supposed to do my job? There's all kinds of data that would help. I ought to be measuring radon emissions, checking water-table levels, all that sort of thing—but I don't have the tools to do it with."

  Becky said, in a superior way, "Garold says if Freehold had been established in a better place we wouldn't have that kind of worries."

  Theo gave her an unfriendly look. "I wasn't consulted, was I? I wasn't even here when they picked this place. I'm just the one that gets blamed."

  "So you blame me?" I said, meaning it lightly. It didn't come out that way. It came out defensive.

  "Oh, not really, Barry. I'm sorry if it sounded that way," Theo said. She picked at her salad moodily. "It's just that time passes and nothing happens, and you got my hopes up. It's really Tscharka's fault."

  That stung Becky Khaim-Novello. "Now, really! You mustn't say that. Garold Tscharka knows what's best for all of us. I'm sure that he'll do whatever's necessary."

  "You think so? I wish I had your confidence. And what do we do if Barry here goes off the deep end before he gets around to it?"

  So there it was again.

  I didn't let it pass. By then I figured that it might as well all be out in the open, so I told them what I'd told Madeleine, and then I got up and started back to the apartment. I'd lost my appetite anyway.

  As I left I felt as though everybody at the tables was giving me funny looks. I didn't like it. I didn't like being frustrated about the factory, either, but I was. The longer Tscharka stayed in orbit, the more unlikely it seemed that we'd ever get going on the plan to revitalize the satellite, and the more the colony seemed to revert to its torpor.

  I hardly noticed when Geronimo came galumphing after me—he'd been foraging among the kitchen wastes while I ate—until I heard his whispery voice. "Candy, Barrydihoa?" he coaxed. And I fumbled in my pocket for another of those sour balls and felt a little better. There weren't many bright spots in my life those days, but there was always one, and its name was Geronimo.

  I know that I keep coming back to Geronimo. I even know that I don't really have to tell you everything about him, because you know more than I do about the little guy. He was important to me, though. I never would have guessed that at a critical time in my life my best friend would turn out to be a squirmy, big-eyed caterpillar, but he was.

  I didn't know what made Geronimo adopt me as a pal. He just did. It wasn't only a matter of playing games with him, and neither was it just the candy that he came for. He was there when I needed him, and he helped me. When I was sent out to hoe the garden plots, Geronimo worked right along with me. He didn't have the height or the strength for a man-sized hoe, but he did well enough humping along the muddy rows with a little spudding tool and he didn't mind the wet. When I was assigned to sort over broken tools to see what could be salvaged, he was there to tug the loads to the repair bins for me. And we talked.

  Geronimo was fuller of questions than anyone else I'd ever met—well, except you, that is. The difference between the two of you was that there weren't any wrong answers to his questions. He wasn't grading me, and there wasn't any penalty if I failed.

  What did Geronimo want to know? Everything. He wanted to know what spaceships were, and then what planets were—it astonished him when I told him he was living on one—and then what cities were. When I told him they were a lot like Freehold but a million times bigger he just chewed for a moment in silence on the roseberry branch we were sharing—I was eating the fruit, he was eating the leaves. Then he changed the subject. He didn't say anything directly, but he looked skeptical. I don't think he believed any rational creature would choose to live in a place as grotesquely huge as
New York or Metro Mexico. Not even a human being.

  Then we got into the baffling—to him—subject of human relationships. I told him about my ex-wife, Gina, and my son—you could almost call him my ex-son—Matthew, and then I tried to explain to him what "wife" and "son" meant, which was even harder for him to understand.

  Our talks weren't all one-way. He answered my questions, too—well, some of them. Others just made him change the subject. He refused to talk about Theophan Sperlie, or about the recent suicide of my neighbor, Jubal Khaim-Novello. And he didn't seem to want to tell me very much about the way you people lived in your nests.

  That was all right. I had plenty of other questions. There was a lot about leps that I didn't understand. Like your names, for instance.

  We got to talking about that one evening, when he and I had just brought a carful of windfallen apples back to town and we were killing time while we waited to be told where to store them. It was drizzling again, though not enough to make it worthwhile to look for shelter. The apples were an unfamiliar variety to me, small and hard, but I ate one just for the sake of doing something. While we were sitting there it occurred to me to ask Geronimo why leps adopted human names.

  He took a thoughtful moment to chew, the ragged, round edges of his mouthpart sawing away at the apple he had appropriated as his reward before he answered. Then he said, "I think it is because you could not say our real names."

  "Try me," I said.

  He vibrated his hard, slim tongue rapidly for a moment to clear it of apple pulp, then he made a queer, whistly sound. I got him to repeat it four or five times and copied it as best I could. "Is that right?"

  "No."

  "Is it at least close, anyway?