The Voices of Heaven (12 page)

"You could call the five-star leps their senior citizens," he explained. "At the fifth instar they're, as you might say, retired from most activities. They're getting ready to convert to the final winged form, and their minds are beginning to suffer. Their fur gets frayed and their colors fade, and they begin to develop sexual organs—and they go on doing that for a year or so, until they molt into the final, sexual, winged, egg-laying kind."

He stopped there, thinking.

"At that point they don't have any intelligence at all left," he went on after a moment—reluctantly, I thought. "In the sixth instar they don't eat, either. They just make love, and fly around, and lay their eggs, until they die." And he stopped again.

He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring mournfully at the picture on the screen of the sixth-instar lep, with its giant, lacy, all-colored wings. It was a spectacularly beautiful picture, I thought, but Schottke didn't look as though he were enjoying its beauty.

He looked sadder than I had ever seen a human being look before.

I didn't know why. Not then, anyway. But I wondered if it had anything to do with his touchy worries about Captain Tscharka (I eventually discovered that it did, though not in any way I could have guessed), and so I thought it might be all right to pry a little. "Jacky?" I began. "What was it you used to be?"

He blinked and focused on me. "What?"

"You said you used to be something else before you got into taxonomy. What was it?"

"Oh." He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm not ashamed of it. When I was young I thought I had the call. I was going to be a Millenarist preacher, like Friar Tuck. As a matter of fact, Tuck was the one who trained me, and not just me, either. There were half a dozen of us young ordained Millenarist ministers then, and we had a lot of people in our church—there were only about four hundred people on Pava at the time, and more than half of them Millenarists. We were all real red-hots. When Tuchman left with Captain Tscharka to make the run to Earth, we all vowed that we would carry on the faith. We knew they'd be gone for nearly half a century. It didn't worry us. We swore we'd stay consecrated, no matter how long we had to wait for their return, and we'd devote ourselves to spreading the word as long as we lived."

He swallowed, looking guilty. "We didn't, though. After he left things changed. We stopped making so many converts. When new colonists arrived a lot of them just weren't interested. We had a lot of trouble keeping the colony alive, too; this is not the easiest planet to survive on. . . . Well, things happened. A few people made the transition—you know; you call it suicide. Others just drifted away. I got interested in the goobers and the leps, and—well, you know how it is, Barry; fifty years is a long time to expect anybody to keep on burning with a white-hot flame, isn't it? I couldn't make it."

"I see," I said.

I didn't, really, of course. Do you ever really see what some other person is thinking in his secret heart? I don't think so. It wouldn't be his secret heart if you did, would it? You think you know somebody pretty well—your parish priest when you're a kid, for instance, or the recent widower who's so hopelessly, terminally devastated because his dear wife of twenty years got herself electrocuted when she fell into the hot leads for the particle accelerator. And then one day when you're not expecting anything of the kind, the priest gets caught buggering a choirboy, and the cops come and pick your friendly mourner up because his wife didn't fall, he pushed her. So what do you know, really?

Well, I knew there was something going on with Jacky Schottke, something to account for his obvious distress when he talked about the leps or his failed ministry. I just didn't know what it was, and I didn't know what questions to ask. And then, there was one other thing. I had begun to like Jacky Schottke, enough so I didn't want to make him unhappy. And there wasn't any doubt that those subjects were painful for him.

So I just said, more or less trying to change the subject away from his private pains without being too obvious about it, "I'm a little surprised that there's such a large proportion of Millenarists here on Pava. They're kind of scarce back on Earth."

He nodded gloomily, looking at the screen again. "There was some great missionary work done here. You have to admit that Garold and Tuchman are pretty convincing people," he said. "It was hard to say no to them. It was for me, anyway. And then—"

He stopped abruptly. "Damn it. There we go again," he said.

The picture on the screen had garbled, and the room lights flickered off, then back on. I felt a little quiver in my chair, as though a heavy truck had just run past us on the road . . . although, of course, there wasn't even a road of any kind nearby, much less that heavy a truck.

"Hell," Jacky said, dismally anticipating what was going to happen next. . . .

Then the lights went all the way off. We were sitting there in the dark.

I could hear his sigh of resignation. "Sorry about that, Barry. We've obviously lost our power again. If it's any consolation, I don't think it's serious. It's probably that little tremor just now that got the transmission line. Hang on, I've got a couple of battery lights here—and I've really been a rotten host, haven't I? I haven't even shown you around the apartment yet."

I know none of this has much to do with Garold Tscharka. I can't help it. If I don't tell it all as I remember it I'll probably leave something out, and then you'll be on my case about that. Bear with me.

I also know that you people don't take much interest in houses, because you don't live in them. We do. They're important to us. They're one of the things that make us human, so when Jacky Schottke offered me the tour of his apartment I was willing to go along.

Schottke's place was on the top floor of one of the four buildings that surrounded one of those grassy squares. His was the only two-story one of the four. The apartment wasn't much, even compared with our tight living spaces on the Moon. He had four small rooms. No carpets. The furniture was an odd mixture, some of it obviously homemade, some quite new (from the factory orbiter, I supposed), some old and tattered enough to have been brought by the first settlers. It all evoked memories for me. It took me back to the place Gina and I had lived in right after we were married, before Matthew came, before—well, before everything. True, this place was only one story above ground, and the apartment Gina and I had then had been on the thirty-first floor of the high rise. But it had that same feel—scratched together, making do.

Schottke lifted his battery lamp to peer into my face. "Is something the matter?" he asked.

I shook myself. "No, I was just thinking about something." Actually, Schottke's place was quite different. It had two little bedrooms instead of the one Gina and I had shared, and each had two narrow beds that were set against a wall with a ceiling-high clothes-storage chest between them. Schottke's minute living room contained a plastic-upholstered couch, a few odd chairs and a table that bore a screen and workstation. All else the apartment had was a functionally complete but crowded bathroom and an also functionally complete but even more densely crammed kitchen.

Schottke said, "We've got a new couple moving in below us, the Khaim-Novellos. I guess they're friends of yours from the ship?"

"You don't get a chance to make friends when you're in the freezer," I told him. "Which room is mine?"

"The one on the left—I mean, if that's all right with you? They're pretty much identical. And, oh, listen, about the bathroom. There's a toilet there, but we don't use it anymore, until we figure out how to repair the sewerage system. There's something out in back."

"An outhouse, right. I've already been warned about that."

"Fine. Well, that's about it, then. God knows when they'll get the power back on, and it's late. We might as well get to bed, if that's all right with you? All right, then. Good night, Barry."

In the morning Schottke was awake before me, bright-eyed and no longer very interested in conversation. The power was back on and Schottke was in a hurry. "You'll have a lot of things you're supposed to be doing today, Barry," he said. "You'll need your shots. Then you'll have to see Jimmy Queng to get your work assignment—"

"I told you I'm a fuelmaster," I pointed out, a little surprised at the idea that I might be asked to do something different.

"Yes, but you can't
always
be shipping antimatter fuel around, can you? And when you're not busy at that you'll have to help with the colony's regular work. We all do, how else could we survive here? Me? Well, certainly, I do my share. Of course I did more when I was younger, just like everybody else. I strung lines, I cooked, I helped build the roads, I farmed for a while, I even spent three months in the mine—it's only now, when I'm getting a little past any kind of rugged outdoor work, that they let me spend most of my time on taxonomy. Come on. I guess you'll want to get cleaned up first, but then we'd better get on down to the commons. They'll have breakfast ready—and then you can get started on your chores."

By the time we arrived at the open-air dining trestles I'd learned more about Pava's housekeeping practices. There was running water in the little bathroom, at least. It didn't help with the toilet. The lid on that was lowered. Schottke had draped a cloth over the lid and then, to make sure I didn't forget, put a pot of flowers on the cloth. Still, I could wash up, as long as I didn't mind doing it in cold water, although then I had to head for the outhouse.

Incoming water, Schottke explained, was taken care of by flexible piping from the central water tower, and outgoing water was allowed to drain away in back, as long as it didn't come from the toilet. The trouble with the toilet was that they hadn't been able to arrange any underground waste pipes that didn't fracture every time there was a temblor. "And one time the town water tower itself fell over," he said gloomily. "We had real problems for a while then, but now we've got the new one pretty well braced—it's stayed up through our eight-point-one shake, which is more than a lot of the houses did."

"Grand," I said, still chewing, and got up to locate Captain Tscharka.

He wasn't hard to find, and evidently his temper had not improved overnight. As I was finishing eating Jillen came away from an interview with him, looking scalded. "Don't ask him anything now," she warned me. "He's still furious about the way the colony has backslid."

There are some things I'm good at and some things I'm not, and one of the things I'm particularly bad at is following advice I don't like. I didn't really care about how Captain Garold Tscharka felt about the religious failings of his colony. But Jillen's advice hadn't been entirely wrong, either, because by the time I got to him he was out of his seat at the breakfast table and heading rapidly toward one of the offices.

"Tscharka," I called, and finally had to trot after him and catch his arm before he stopped. He gave me a very hostile look.

"What the hell do you want?"

"Just one question, Captain. When are you going to take off for the return flight to the Moon?"

The look turned even more hostile. "Tired of the planet already? Well, don't hold your breath.
Corsair
isn't going to leave until
Buccaneer
arrives. At least."

"But I don't want to stay here. I wasn't supposed to come to Pava in the first place," I protested.

That didn't interest him. "You can file a complaint with the authorities on the Moon when you get back," he said, "assuming any of the people involved are still alive. Quit bitching, will you? It's not so bad here on Pava, di Hoa, and besides you can make yourself useful. As long as you're here you'll have to work, you know. We don't have any loafers on Pava."

I didn't take any pleasure in being reminded of that again. In fact, nothing the man said made me like him any better, but it seemed like a good idea to start lining myself up for an interesting job. "I'm a qualified pilot," I reminded him. "If there's time before I leave I guess I could take one of those exploring ships out."

He blinked at me. "What kind of ships?"

"The ships you requisitioned all that antimatter for. To explore the Delta Pavonis system."

"Oh," he said, "those." He studied me for a while, then gave me a really unfriendly scowl. "Have you seen any short-range ships in orbit? No, you haven't. There aren't any. Nobody bothered to build them."

"But—"

"But we'll probably find another use for the antimatter—maybe in the factory orbiter. If that happens you can help me transship the pods, as soon as
Buccaneer
arrives."

"But—" I began again, and never got past that "but," either, because he had pulled his arm free and was already a meter away and moving fast. I turned to Jillen. "Hell," I said.

She shrugged. "There isn't any daily shuttle service between here and Earth, you know."

I surrendered to the inevitable. "It's funny, though," I said. "Why's he going to wait until
Buccaneer
arrives to ship the fuel to the factory orbiter?"

"You'd have to ask him," she said, "and I still don't recommend doing that. Give me a hand with these dishes, will you?"

That was when I found what my first real job on Pava was going to be. It was kitchen police.

Well, not quite. I didn't have to do the washing up. As soon as the tables were clear I, with all the other new arrivals, was ordered—"invited" might have been a politer word, because at least they were smiling when they said it—to get out in front of the hall again for our prophylactic shots and our turn in the daily job lineup.

Shots for what? I asked the woman who was shepherding us out, name of Sharon something. Shots against native diseases, she said, and when I asked her what kind of diseases those were, she said, "How would I know? Nobody ever gets them anymore, because we all get the shots." Then she looked at me more carefully. "Do you have any special reason for asking? Like some medical problem the doctor ought to hear about?"