The Voices of Heaven (11 page)

I wondered if their luck was really that likely to change. It seemed a good bet to me that the would-be returnees clamoring for a freezer locker in the next ship home would include at least a few of those who had just got here . . . including, of course, myself.

Captain Garold Tscharka had detached himself from the cluster of Millenarists by then and left Friar Tuck behind to lead them in a hymn. When I looked around I saw that Tscharka was in what looked like a fairly acrimonious conversation with somebody I recognized; his name was Schottke, and he was one of the people who had come out to meet us. Then Tscharka saw me, and pointed, and Schottke came hurrying over to where I was. "Barry di Hoa? I'm Jacky Schottke—"

"We met."

"Right, at the shuttle," he said, being agreeable. He looked a little ruffled, though, and glanced apprehensively back at Tscharka now and then. "Well, Barry, we're a little short of housing here—I guess you can see that—so Garold Tscharka says you're to room with me until we can finish building some more living space. Somehow. So when your stuff comes down from the shuttle—"

"I don't have any stuff," I told him, and then had to explain that my visit hadn't been premeditated.

"Oh, hell," he said, "what a lousy deal for you! Still, you'll be all right. This isn't a bad planet. I find it pretty exciting, but then it's my work that makes it interesting, you know. What do you do?"

"Fuelmaster. Or was. I worked on the Moon, handling antimatter fuel."

"Oh." He looked pleased. "I imagine Garold is happy about that; he's brought back tons of the stuff, I hear. I'm a taxonomist, with a special interest in trophic food chains—that is, when they'll let me spare the time—though as a matter of fact I used to be—"

He stopped there, looking quickly again at Captain Tscharka. Then he finished. "I used to be something else, actually. But that was nearly fifty years ago, and I'm not that anymore. I just happened to get interested in taxonomy—you know, scientific ways of describing organisms? Seeing how they relate to each other? And fifty years is a long time, Barry, and I wanted to be here for Garold when he came back, but—well, people change."

That was about as muddled an explanation as I'd ever heard, especially since I hadn't asked him for any. The man was double-talking me, for what reason I could not guess. "Now," he said briskly, "I'm sure you're hungry, so let's eat. You can meet some of the others—if you're not too tired?"

Well, I wasn't too tired. Not exactly. What I was was confused. My life had changed too drastically in too short a time, and I was having trouble figuring out where I was going with it.

I wasn't particularly hungry, either, in spite of what Schottke had said—you don't work up much of an appetite in the deep freeze—but they'd put plates and dishes out on long trestle tables, in the shade of some of those bamboo-like trees, and I was willing to try to eat. I found a seat between Theophan and Jillen and investigated the food.

We didn't begin eating right away. Before we were allowed to start eating Captain Tscharka climbed on a bench and Reverend Tuchman pounded the table for attention. When the babble dwindled Tscharka gave us all a little speech:

"It's wonderful to be back on Pava again. In deference to our various differing beliefs I will not ask the Reverend to say a formal grace, but we all, I am sure, want to thank our God for our safe arrival and for the bounty before us. And I would like to announce that for our Millenarist brethren we will hold a special prayer meeting immediately after the meal. Thank you," he said, and sat down.

A fair number of people applauded, including most of the newcomers from
Corsair
. So, I noticed, did both Jillen and Jacky Schottke. I didn't. Tscharka hadn't said anything that I particularly agreed to.

Then we began to eat.

It doesn't really make much sense to judge a new place by its food, but I guess most of us do it. In this case, the food was not wonderful. Some of the dishes were strange, stringy vegetables that I didn't enjoy and even Jillen refused to put in her mouth. Some were assorted kinds of stew, chicken or unidentified meat, with more of those unappetizing vegetables contaminating it. There were, however, a few better choices—fresh tomatoes, lettuce and fruits, as well as a couple of reasonably decent kinds of bread.

Meeting the others didn't go particularly well. There were too many of them. The town wasn't full—much of the human population of Pava was off somewhere. Some on their routine work, others checking the damage of a recent earthquake—but there were still nearly five hundred strangers to me milling around the dining tables, and, although I tried to avoid being introduced to all of them, I only partly succeeded.

By comparison, Jillen and Theophan were old friends. But that wasn't the only reason I had chosen to sit next to Jillen. I had a question to ask her, and first chance I got I popped it.

"Jillen? When will
Corsair
go back?"

She gave me a puzzled, then sympathetic look. "That's up to the captain, I guess. What's the matter, don't you like Pava?"

I shrugged. "I haven't been here long enough to know, but I'd like to know what my options are. Maybe I should just ask the captain."

I was craning my neck to see what he was doing; he was talking with Friar Tuck, both of them scowling. Jillen pursed her lips. "Right now might not be the best time," she said. "He's had some disappointments in the last couple of hours. Some of his old friends are dead—well, Millenarists, you know? We do that sometimes." That startled me; apart from the dutiful applause she'd given Tscharka I hadn't had any idea that she was a Millenarist, too. "Oh," she said, correctly reading my expression, "I'm just kind of lukewarm, I'm afraid. But I'm still in the church, yes. I don't think Garold would have kept me on
Corsair
otherwise. Anyway, a lot of the Millenarists he expected to find have suicided and quite a few others have kind of, well, dropped out. And there haven't been that many new ones joining in. He—" She hesitated, then said it: "He didn't think the colony would have turned so secular. So he's, well, disappointed."

I was astonished to hear her call this community of endless churches "secular," but the rest of what she said was borne out by the evidence. Captain Tscharka was certainly looking like a disappointed man. A grumpy one, too; not the state you would hope for in someone you might have to ask for a favor. Still, since I didn't have any particular desire to be best friends with the man, his moods were not especially important to me. I was about to get up and go over to him anyway when Theophan announced, "Here comes the dessert."

And I turned around and looked.

Something was pulling a little wagon of cakes and pies toward the table, something I'd never seen before. It moved like a mink, twisting like a snake, but it did not look like any mink or snake I'd ever seen a picture of. It was big, too—more than a meter long, I thought, and then, as it extended its body to pull its little wagon, suddenly more than two meters long.

"My God," I said, "that's a damn big bug."

"Bug? Oh, no, Barry," Theophan said. "He's not a bug. He's a fifth-instar lep."

The thing dropped the little harness it was holding in its mouth and came toward us, making a sort of hissing, whispery sound. "Fifth instar," Theophan was saying, "is the last stage before they turn into the winged form and die."

She went on talking, but I wasn't listening. I was staring at the thing. It was hauling itself up to peer over the table at me, and it looked strange. What it looked like to me then, more than anything else, was the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, all but the hookah. It was dappled in camouflage colors of brown, white and beige, like the meringue on a lemon pie. It had tiny hands on the end of short, double-jointed arms that were gripping the top of the table, and it had huge, faceted eyes that covered half its head, like a fly's. It had a mouth—or, anyway, a mouthpart, round and lipless—that opened and shut like the iris of a camera lens, and it was hissing at me. Its breath was vinegary and warm.

Theophan looked at me expectantly. "Say hello," she prompted me.

"Do what?"

"Say hello to him. That's St. John."

"That's who?"

She was laughing at me by then. "St. John isn't his lep name, of course, but they all oblige us by taking names we can pronounce. The leps are very polite people, mostly. St. John is talking to you."

"He is?" My conversational skills seemed to be getting more and more rudimentary.

"He wants to know what your job is going to be on Pava. Actually, I was kind of wondering that myself."

"Oh. Sorry," I said, beginning to recall more of my vocabulary. "Tell him I'm a fuelmaster, if he understands what that means—I don't suppose he speaks English."

"Barry," she said, looking disappointed in me, "he
is
speaking English. It's just that leps aren't good at voiced sounds because they don't have much of a larynx."

And, when I listened more carefully, he actually was. The sound that came out of his mouthpart was a whisper of unvoiced frequencies, as though he were whistling the sentences through teeth he didn't seem to have, but the sentences were definitely composed of English words.

It took me a while to understand what he was saying, but then that's not so surprising, is it? After all, that was the first time I had ever met any of you.

9

IT is interesting that you seem embarrassed when you say we were called "bugs."

Is that meant to be a question?

No. The question is this: Do you feel that the term "bug" is a derogatory epithet, meant to give offense to the person named, like some of the terms you humans sometimes apply to each other?

Well, I guess it is, in a way. It's not as insulting as some of the things we call each other, but it's not meant to be particularly flattering, either—although in your case I would have to say that it's sort of justified because of the way you look. I mean, the closest thing there is on Earth to your kind is the insects. Especially the moths and butterflies that they call "lepidoptera." In your case, "leps" for short.

Jacky Schottke is the reason I know as much as I do about the subject of you leps (which probably is not all that much, anyway). He did his best to explain the differences between leps and insects after we had gone to his place that night. He was talking about his work as a taxonomist, and how he was mostly self-taught out of the stored datafiles, and how he had come to specialize in the fascinating (he said) dynamics of ecological communities.

Schottke was a pretty elderly fellow, at least eighty, I judged, but he seemed so enthusiastic about his work that I made the mistake of asking him what the work was, exactly. The result was that I got a twenty-minute lecture on the interactions of Pava's living things—he referred to them as the planet's "biota." The way he organized the data he collected was, he said, in the form of
n
-dimensional food webs. That was the only rational way to do it, he said, because, after all, when you consider what effects the members of a given clutch of living organisms have on each other, your clearest road map lies in observing who eats whom. Once you had that much straightened out you could group them into what he called "trophic species" and then you could start analyzing how each species affected the others.

It was all sort of interesting, and I thought it was actually touching to see how Schottke's eyes sparkled when he talked about it. Still, an Entomology 101 lecture wasn't exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear, so I asked him specifically to tell me about you people.

He stopped in the middle of the lecture. The sparkle went out of his eyes. Then he sighed.

I could see that he was sorry to abandon the really fascinating subjects of trophic species and reciprocal predation just to give me a simple answer to a dumb question, but he was a good host. "How about a drink, Barry?" he said. I thought that was a fine idea, and so he pulled out a bottle. I looked at the label with a little surprise; it said
Moët et Chardonne
.

That made him laugh a little. "Oh, it's not champagne, I'm afraid. We reuse all our old bottles for home brew, but I think it's not bad."

He waited expectantly while I tasted it. No, it certainly wasn't champagne. Wasn't wine at all; it had been distilled and it had a healthy kick. But it went down all right, and when I acknowledged it was drinkable, he began producing pictures for me on his screen.

The leps, he said, were something like an Earthly butterfly, not counting the size—well, a little like butterflies—though of course butterflies didn't have lungs and circulatory systems, and certainly weren't as intelligent. Butterflies didn't have language, or laws, or settlements, or well-formed relationships. But butterflies also didn't have much consistency of shape or behavior during their lives, and neither, Schottke told me earnestly, did leps.

"I guess I knew that, Jacky—sort of. I mean, there used to be all kinds of stories about Pava and the leps when I was a kid."

He seemed pleased to hear that I was at least that well informed and went on to retrieve images for his screen and tell me the things I hadn't known.

He showed me pictures of a newly hatched, first-instar baby lep, practically nothing but mouth and digestive system. The new-hatched lep didn't look at all like St. John to me. Schottke told me that was an accurate observation. That was one of the significant morphological differences between leps and human beings, he said. A baby human does look quite a lot like an adult; but what a "one-star," or infant, lep mostly looked like, he pointed out, was a large, messy, cowflop-sized turd, and what it did in that stage, outside of eat and excrete and grow, was basically nothing.

Then the second-instar lep, a little bigger, a lot more active, began to have the intelligence, say, of a human toddler. What the picture looked like to me was a scaly sort of earthworm, though at that stage their coloring was generally bright red. At the third instar I could see the little "arms" and "hands" developing on the still-wormy torso; the fourth instar looked physically about the same, though now all the adult features were quite visible. Even the fifth looked not that much different to me, until Schottke told me that the fourth instar was full maturity, which would last unchanged for as much as thirty or forty years, and pointed out that the fifth instar was looking pretty ragged.