The Voices of Heaven (13 page)

"Ah," I said, suddenly aware that I did. "Yes. Actually I do have—"

Nobody was letting me finish sentences that morning. "Jesus," she said in dismay, "how come they let you get here with a medical problem? Don't they give physicals anymore? Anyway, that's not my department. Ask Billygoat or his wife about it when they come to you with the shots."

When the shots came they weren't painful, of course, but there were a lot of them—two or three in each arm, a man going down the line on right arms, a woman following him and taking care of the lefts. They both looked harried and not interested in talking to their new patients. When the man began dotting my forearm with his little vaccine spray, I said, "Are you the one they call Billygoat?"

He gave me a frosty look, then a glance of suspected recognition. "Are you the one Sharon says has the medical problem?"

When I said I was, and began to tell him about my little difficulty of occasional loopiness, he looked startled, then resigned. "Oh, hell, this is all I need. I can see you're going to be a real pain in the ass," he told me. "I can't deal with that kind of thing now. You're not likely to go critical right away, are you?"

"I hope not."

"Well, don't. Come around to my office tomorrow—no, wait, better make it next week. I'm pretty busy right now. Next!"

And that was that. I didn't really have time to press the matter, because the gang boss was already whistling and gesturing at us to come over to where he was waiting.

I recognized the gang boss. He was one of the ones who had picked us up at the landing strip, the tall, black-haired fellow named Jimmy Queng. Now he was carrying a handscreen. When we were all gathered around him he stared at whatever was displayed on the screen for a second, then waved it at us for quiet.

"All right, new fellow citizens. Welcome to Pava. We're glad to have you here, we hope you'll find your new lives worthwhile, but we do need to get work done. These first assignments are all temporary, but that doesn't mean they aren't important. Everybody works here, even on the dumb, duty jobs. Especially on those jobs, because they're the ones that nobody wants to do. Our biggest job is keeping ourselves alive, and that takes all of us, okay?" No one answered what evidently had already become a familiar litany for all of us, so he started right in. "Let's see, the first thing we need is about eight or nine good hands for farm work. Any of you interested in a healthy out-of-doors life?"

He waited expectantly. A moment passed, then two women and a man stepped warily forth.

"That's a start, anyway," he said. "What's the matter, does the work sound beneath you? Or just too hard? It's not so bad, you know. You'll just start out with chopping and harvesting, but it doesn't stop there. As soon as we get the new cargoes down from
Corsair
we need to do some more interesting stuff; we've got to inseminate some soil with fungus to make real trees grow, and start some new earthworm colonies to aerate the soil. And, listen, if any of you like good food, some of the fungi will make truffles—you'll be the ones who will know where to find them a couple of years from now."

This time two others began hesitantly to move up—I couldn't guess whether it was because they were truffle fanciers or because they figured some other job might be even worse. Jimmy Queng nodded. "The rest of the farm crew," he said pleasantly, "we'll just have to draft when we finish up asking for volunteers, I guess. How about building maintenance? That means carpentry, repair work, everything we need to put the town back together again every time a quake comes along. We can use about three here?"

He got his three, and he got the three more he wanted for cutting fuel for the power generator. That puzzled me, but I didn't have a chance to ask why they needed to be cutting fuel when, I was pretty sure Tscharka had said, they were supposed to have a perfectly good hydroelectric plant in operation by now. I didn't get a chance to ask any questions at all, because he was already calling for power plant maintenance personnel. That sounded like skilled work, but not drudgery, and I figured I knew enough to get by from my experience as a fuelmaster. I immediately put up my hand.

Jimmy looked up at me approvingly over his glasses, but before he could accept my offer someone whispered in his ear.

"Oh, right," he said. "He's the one, eh?" He shook his head at me. "Not you, di Hoa. We've got something else for you. You're going to be doing seismology."

"I don't know thing one about seismology!" I protested.

"Then you'll never find a better time to start learning about it, will you? Anyway, the seismologist will teach you and I imagine she'll be patient. She asked for you specifically, in fact." And when I looked around somehow I wasn't surprised, and was even less displeased, to find that the seismologist in question was Theophan Sperlie.

10

AT this point we ask that you give us your assessment of Theophansperlie.

Oh, hell, are you still going on about that stuff? Why do you want to know? Is it going to influence you?

Every factor will be weighed by all of us, Barrydihoa, and it is your task to supply all relevant information. Omit nothing.

Well, it would help if I knew whether you wanted my personal or professional opinions about Theophan. There was a lot I liked about her. You had a different opinion, I know that, but that's how I felt. Theophan struck me as a good-natured person, and she had a sense of humor. She was reasonably pretty, too. I know it's sexist to say that. Some of the feminist sects would kick me out for heresy for even mentioning that. But she was.

She also turned out to have another trait that I appreciated very much, and she mentioned it early on: She did not belong to the Millenarist church. By then I had begun to feel a little outnumbered.

The remaining intriguing thing about Theophan was the kind of work she did for the colony. I'd never met a seismologist before. Oh, I knew that such people existed. Even on the Moon we'd hear news stories from Earth about earthquakes, but they had no apparent relevance to our own lives. Earthquakes were things that happened in New Jersey and Italy and China and all those places, not on the dead old Moon. If there was a practicing seismologist anywhere near the Lederman factory, I had never come across him.

So the first thing I said to Theophan that day was, "I appreciate the compliment but you know, don't you, that I don't know anything about seismology."

She looked up from chucking things into a backpack to study my face. Then she grinned. "I didn't expect you to. Whatever you need to know I'll teach you as we go along, if you're interested, and if we have the time. They probably won't let me have you when I'm working in my office anyway, because naturally you'll have to do regular chores. The time I really need help is when I'm in the field. That's the reason I asked for you today. A lot of what I need to do is plain donkey work, resiting strain gauges up in the hills. All that takes is a strong back and good legs. Are you willing to give it a shot?"

"I'm willing as hell, Theo," I told her, "but I've also spent the last eleven years on the Moon."

The grin vanished. "Oh, shit," she said in dismay. "I didn't think of that. Does that mean your muscles have gone all flabby?"

"Maybe not." I told her about how carefully I'd kept up the stress exercises, and I managed to lift the bigger of the backpacks when she gave it to me. So, though still looking doubtful, she requisitioned one of the big-wheeled cars and we started up the mountain.

On the way she started my beginner' s-level course in Earthquakes and Volcanoes. Pava, she explained, was tectonically a very active planet. "Planets are all different, you know. They come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and they all have their own peculiarities. The Moon doesn't have any seismic activity to speak of—well, you know that. Mars used to, look at those bitching big extinct volcanoes there, but it doesn't anymore. But even the planets that ought to be really quite a lot like the Earth aren't—Venus, for instance. That one should be an identical twin to Earth, except for its orbit being closer to the primary. It isn't. Venus certainly does have volcanoes, but what it doesn't have is any sign of plate tectonic activity at all—figure that one out if you can. Then you have a planet like Pava here. It has plenty of volcanoes in some regions, though there aren't any very active ones right near here, and it has the plate tectonics. But, as I guess you've noticed, it just has the one big continent."

"One ought to be enough for us," I said. I wasn't really listening very closely. I was looking out the windows of the car at the woods and the hillsides, wondering just what might be hiding out of sight; but I felt I ought to be taking some part in the conversation.

She picked me up on that chance remark literally. "You mean that's enough living space for the colony right now, while there's less than a thousand of us here. Sure. But Pava wouldn't ever be able to support a population as big as Earth's. The only decent parts of Pava to live on are near the coastlines. In the interior you have brutal weather, burning hot summers and miserably cold winters. That part's got a real continental climate, worse than Chicago."

She stopped the car and turned off the engine. Suddenly it was very quiet all around us, except for occasional sounds of clicking from the cooling motor. She didn't get out from behind the wheel, though. She was finishing her thought.

"That could be part of the reason," she said, gazing out at the hill before us.

"What could? For what? Did I miss something?" "I mean, the fact that there's one big continent could account for the earthquake flux."

"All of Pava's like this, is it?"

"Well, no. Not really. There are comparatively quiet tectonic zones here and there, it's just that the original colonists didn't happen to settle in one. But there's a lot more seismicity than on Earth. The whole planet's off balance because of this continent. Here's this one big lump sticking out kilometers higher than the rest of the planet. It sets up stresses as the planet rotates."
 

"That makes sense," I said.

She gave me an absent, almost annoyed glance, as though I'd offered an opinion where I had no right to have one. "Or," she said thoughtfully, "it could be for a different reason. It might be that all this continental rock acts as an insulator, trapping the internal heat. Ocean crust is thinner, so the heat escapes, but it builds up under the continent. You get hot spots, and they make the strains that make the faults—maybe."

I waited a moment to see if there was going to be more. There wasn't, so I said, "Thank you, Theo. I appreciate your clearing all that up."

She laughed a little at that. "All right, I admit it's not a very exact science here and we don't know all the answers. So let's try to find a few out. This is where we park the car and walk for a while."

I had completely lost my bearings by then. When I looked around there was no sign of the town, nothing but hills and those rough Pavan approximations of trees and underbrush. Although there had been some kind of a rutted path we'd bounced along in the car (I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "road"), it was no help in trying to figure out where we were. It had forked a dozen times and I had not been paying attention.

Theo seemed to know where she was going, so we humped those packs onto our backs and started up the hill.

That put an end to conversation on my part. I was out of breath in the first ten minutes, and pretty soon even Theophan was beginning to pant a little. We weren't in jungle anymore. We were too high for that. The ferny plants were scarce now, and the bamboo-like trees were taller and sparser than they had been by the river. There was all sorts of undergrowth, green and brown and violet. There were different kinds of trees now, and I could hear insects buzzing around.

Breathing hard or not, that amazing woman kept talking, describing all the creatures that were, or might have been, in the woods around us. "You might see some jacks," she gasped. "They're more or less lizards, but they jump like rabbits; they're good eating, but we aren't going to try to catch any because I don't want to have to carry them back to the car. Dangerous? No, they're not dangerous to people. The only kind of animal that might be really dangerous are the dinowolves and the killer ants, but those are just about extinct around here—they attacked children sometimes, so we had a bounty on them for a while."

I listened, really trying to keep track of what she was saying, but I couldn't retain it all. She kept rattling off names of animals—whistling snakes, batosaurs (which I gathered flew like birds), and a dozen others—and didn't skimp on the plant kingdom, either. Those little things like Christmas trees, I found out, were actually a kind of club moss; those hollow drumlike objects were vines (she said the closest Earth relative was the strangler fig) which grew on a tree and choked it out, and then continued to grow in a sort of hollow, basketwork cylinder where the tree had been.

"The leps nest in them sometimes," she said, "or at least they lay their eggs there, if they remember to. Keeps the predators out—or used to; we've pretty well wiped out most of the predators around here. You'd think the leps'd be grateful." The "grass" was actually a ground-covering vine, like kudzu. The spiderlike webs that we had to push out of our way were webs all right, but not made by spiders; they were spun by sessile, placental mammals to catch bugs for their dinners. And the bugs—I didn't even try to keep track of the bugs.

Theophan was quite a one for lecturing. She was exceeding my capacity for taking information in, though. I almost stopped listening entirely, in fact, until I saw a big thing humping across the path in front of us and got Theophan's attention long enough to gasp: "Was that a lep?"

She stopped and stood up straight for a moment, rubbing her hip as she shook her head. "No, that one was just a goober. They do look a little like leps, I guess—if you haven't seen a lot of leps. Maybe they're related, but they're not intelligent. Actually, Barry, you really aren't likely to come across many leps as long as you're with me."