The Voices of Heaven (16 page)

For instance, just to make the parafoils the factory needed high-strength carbon filaments, and for that the factory needed some kind of a source of carbon to process. It also needed all the other raw materials that its smelter and refiners would turn into whatever the people of Pava wanted made, and where were all those raw materials going to come from? It would be terribly uneconomic to try to shuttle them up from the surface. There was, he admitted, one obvious source. There were plenty of useful minerals aloft in Delta Pavonis's skimpy asteroid belt, but the Pavans didn't have the space tugs to bring those megaton-mass objects to Pava orbit.

"Right," I said, remembering what Captain Tscharka had told me long before. "That's what you built those short-range tugs for."

He gave me a dubious look. "The what?" And when I explained what Tscharka had said, he scowled. "Garold gets carried away sometimes," he said. "Did you see any space tugs in orbit when you came in? Well, there aren't any."

I mulled that over. Tscharka hadn't seemed to me like the kind of man who got carried away, but there didn't seem to be any point in arguing it. "So what do you do for raw materials, then?" I asked, and Baxto shrugged.

They did the best they could. Even some pretty crazy things. They'd actually once taken the radical step of hijacking one of the interstellar ships to strip it down and convert it into raw materials, because they needed its metals more than they needed the ship. That worked fine for a while, but even the materials in the structure of a giant interstellar spaceship didn't last forever.

I chewed that over, and for a while we didn't talk. I was watching the scenery along the riverbanks as we cruised, but I was also wondering if maybe Baxto was thinking that it was about time to hijack another spaceship—say, Captain Tscharka's
Corsair
—and what Tscharka might think of that if the question came up.

That was kind of an amusing thought. Thinking about what Captain Tscharka might say if anybody proposed it seriously kept me entertained until I noticed that Dabney Albright had slowed the launch and we were heading into shore. Then we all stood up while he ran the launch up onto the bank and jumped out to drag it far enough out of the water so the current wouldn't pull it away.

A lep was waiting for us there on the bank. Its forepart was elevated so its bug eyes could look us over.

Baxto greeted the lep and introduced us. "This is Simon Bolivar," he said. "He'll lead us to the capsule."

I was standing right next to the thing. I sort of half extended my hand, so it was there to be available in case handshaking was a custom with you leps, or to be ignored if not. Simon Bolivar ignored it.

"I expected you earlier," he shrilled. "Come. I will show you where the object is."

The good part was that it wasn't far from the river; as we pushed through the brush toward it I was counting every step, thinking about how much work it was going to be to hand-carry seven or eight tons back to the launch. The bad part was that, when we did reach it, it was a mess. It had hit hard, the capsule had split open on impact, and it had rained.

Baxto and Albright were swearing to each other as they looked it over. Unfortunately a lot of that batch of material had been programmable chips, and they were ruined. "Tough break, but we'll salvage what we can," Baxto said finally. "Leave the spoiled chips here, but we want everything else."

"Even the capsule itself, Mr. Baxto?" Jubal Khaim-Novello ventured.

"Especially the damn capsule. That's good building material, isn't it? So if we want to get home by dark, let's start taking it apart."

If I had been in any doubt about the troubles with Pava's supply system, the next five or six hours of backbreaking labor convinced me. The system sucked. First there was the job of cutting the shell of the capsule into ragged hunks about the size of a wheelbarrow. Then there was picking up the containers of other kinds of goods that might, Baxto thought, still be worth salvaging and hauling them down to the launch. Then there was trying to carry or drag those wheelbarrow-sized, jagged-edged hunks of shell and lifting surface through those clustered vines and bushes, two or three of us sweating over each one. We didn't have real wheelbarrows, but then we couldn't have got real wheelbarrows through the brush anyway.

All those good physical feelings I'd woken up with that morning were gone long before we took our first break. I have never been more tired. I flung myself down and didn't even look up until Jacky Schottke came over with a cup of water for me.

He beamed down at me expectantly while I raised the cup to my lips. It tasted funny, quite sweet, and almost fruity. "What are you giving me?" I demanded.

"It's sap," he said proudly, showing me a thing like a beer-keg spigot. "It comes from the water tree over there—see it? With the purple fronds? If you're ever caught out in the woods without anything to drink, you just punch into one of those and you'll get all the water you want."

"All I want is to go home," I told him, but I did sit up straighter and finish the drink. Because of his age Jacky had been exempted from most of the lifting and hauling, so he'd been off in the woods with the lep, collecting biological samples for his taxonomy work. It was light labor, and he seemed fresh and eager to get on with it. I almost envied him. The lep, Simon Bolivar, was an old friend of his, he told me; they had been out on foraging trips many times before, and this time the lep had led him to a brand-new variety of edible root.

"Now," Jacky said eagerly, "I can start a new trophic tree. I'll have to see what organisms eat this root; then I can match it against the other systems, and with a little luck I'll be able to—hey," he said, stopping in the middle of a thought. "What was that?"

I'd heard it to, a female scream from the brush. When I looked around I saw that Becky Khaim-Novello was missing—gone off, I assumed, to answer a call of nature in private. She wasn't gone long, though. She came blundering through the bushes, holding up her slacks, and yelling for her husband. When he had caught her in his arms she blubbered, "Dear heaven, Jubal, has anyone got a gun? There's the biggest damn bug you ever saw out there! It was eating some other kind of animal, and I thought it was going to come after me!"

That got me on my feet. Lou Baxto gave her a disgusted look. "You're too big and tough for it to bother chasing," he said, "unless it was really starving, maybe. It was probably just a killer ant. It won't come near us—there are too many of us here."

I turned to Jacky Schottke, who was looking apologetic. "They do look a little frightening," he admitted. "They're more than a meter long, the full-grown ones."

"Maybe we ought to put out some poison bait down here," Dabney Albright said.

Jacky looked shocked at the idea. "Oh, why would we have to do that, Dabney? They hardly ever attack an adult human being—well, they can, but small children mostly. There aren't any children here, and we've already poisoned the ants all out anywhere near Freehold."

Lou Baxto took over. "Can we hold the debate until we're back home?" he asked reasonably. "Break's over; let's get some of this stuff on the launch."

And so we did—for another four or five hours; during which I kept my eyes open for anything that looked like it might be a killer ant.

None showed up. We finally got everything salvageable salvaged, but we didn't make it back to Freehold before dark. By the time we got there I was aching and tired and the last of that morning's good feelings were all used up.

It was a very lucky thing for Rannulf Enderman that he wasn't where I could get my hands on him that night.

12

THIS is not understood. This concept of doing purposeful harm to another is not comprehensible.

Oh, now what? Are you talking about what I said about Rannulf Enderman? You shouldn't take that kind of offhand remark so seriously. It's just something we say when we get mad. I wouldn't really have done anything fatal to the son of a bitch, you know.

No, this is not known. It is well established that other humans have in fact taken the lives of their conspecifics.

Well, sure, others have; that's one of the things about us humans. Sometimes people kill other people. I don't like it any more than you do, but it's a fact of life. But
I
haven't done that, even at my very craziest, and I'm not crazy now. I don't think I actually could—not even with Enderman, although I have to admit I would certainly have been capable of beating the pee out of him if I had the chance.

I didn't have that chance anyway. I couldn't punch Rannulf Enderman's lights out. I couldn't get back to the Moon in time to make things right with Alma. I couldn't get back to the Moon at all, in fact, until Garold Tscharka, or some other ship's captain, decided to start going that way in a ship that would give me passage. I couldn't do any of the things that I really wanted to do, and that was pretty frustrating. It made me mad.

I didn't stay mad, though. By the time I got to the breakfast tables the next morning, still achy but functioning, I had pushed all the things I couldn't do to the back of my mind, so I could concentrate on what I could do. Give me credit for that. I had made up my mind to quit wasting time on frustrations and concentrate on problems that, maybe, I could have some hope of doing something about. Real problems. Pava's problems. I guess you could even say that I had talked myself into being almost a little obsessive about it.

Theophan was eating a little green melon and talking to someone I faintly recognized—he had come in on
Corsair
with me, I was pretty sure. I didn't bother with him. I sat down on the other side of Theophan and started right in with what was on my mind. "I've got a question. If you need all those instruments for your work, why don't you get the factory orbiter to make them for you?"

She turned away from the other guy to give me a perplexed and faintly hostile look. "Didn't you ever hear of 'good morning'?" she asked. "And why did you go off without checking with me yesterday?"

"I got ordered to do a different job," I said, stretching the truth a little.

"Well, I needed you to help me on my job, Barry. I had a hard day's work yesterday up in the hills. Since you weren't around I had to ask Marcus to help me." The man beside her leaned forward with a small smile, as though to acknowledge the introduction.

I remembered the rest of his name: Marcus Wendt. He was bigger than I, but he was looking frail; I judged Theophan had worked him out pretty hard. "Sorry about that," I said. "What I'd like to know—"

She didn't let me finish. "So how about helping me out today?" she asked.

"Today? You want me to come out with you today? Why not Marcus?"

She was shaking her head. "Oh, no, Barry, that's out of the question. I can't ask Marcus to do that again. Can't you see he's in pain? He pulled a muscle yesterday; he's not as strong as you, Barry. Will you pick me up at my place?"

I looked Marcus over without seeing any great sign of injury, but it wasn't really my business to diagnose him. Anyway, I remembered what I was supposed to do. "I ought to go to see the doctor this morning, Theo."

"Really?" She frowned, then decided to make the best of it. "Well, how long can that take? It won't hurt if we leave a little late. So, fine, we'll work it out that way, and I'll tell Jimmy Queng you'll be going out with me so he won't put you on something else."

I didn't see any reason to argue. "All right," I said. "What about what I asked you? The factory's supposed to be able to make anything at all; why don't you have it make what you need?"

Marcus was listening in, and he gave a superior little chuckle. "Don't you think Theophan would have thought of that? Of course she did. It probably just can't be done."

I ignored him. "Can it?"

She decided to give me a straight answer. "Sure it could, if it had the raw materials to spare—I guess. But it's pushed to the limit already, just replacing the things that are needed for survival."

"There must be all the raw materials you'd need right here on Pava. It's a whole damn planet."

"But we don't have a factory down here, do we?"

"No," I said, "we don't, and that's something else I don't understand. Why haven't you people built one?"

Marcus was snickering again. He was getting harder to ignore. Theophan gave him a warning look. "Look, Barry, I know you're trying to be helpful, but you just haven't grasped the situation here. We don't have enough power to keep what we've got going, much less get into building a whole damn industrial base. You saw what happened to the dam."

"All right, then maybe the first thing we have to do is to generate more electricity. Maybe we should build a new dam in a better place?"

She shook her head impatiently. "You're really all fired up this morning, aren't you? Look, I can't talk about all this right now. Marcus is pretty well crippled up and I'd better help him back to his room. Anyway, I'm not the one in charge of that sort of thing. You want to go see Byram Tanner—see, over there? The dark-haired man with the beard? He's the power-generation expert."

So I picked up my plate and set it down at an empty place by this Byram Tanner. We shook hands when I introduced myself, and I got right to the point with him, too. "Theophan says the reason you can't build an automated factory, like the orbiter, down here on the surface is that you don't have enough power. Is that right?"

He looked surprised, but he took the question seriously. He thought for a moment. "Well, that's one of the reasons. Losing the hydroelectric plant really set us back, and we aren't really getting much of a net gain of energy from harvesting and burning biomass."

"Right. So I don't see why you're burning biomass for power in the first place," I said. "Has anybody looked to see if there's any coal around?"

Tanner gave me the same sort of faintly hostile look I'd got from Theophan—not unlike, I suppose, the look I would have given any stranger on the Moon who had started a conversation by asking me why we didn't shoot the antimatter direct to the spaceships without bothering with catchers. He didn't tell me to buzz off, though. He reflected for another moment before he answered. "There's supposed to be lignite deposits somewhere in the hills, yes. You know, brown coal? But nobody's ever bothered to try to develop it. Lignite doesn't have much more heat content than biomass, and it'd be a lot harder to dig out and transport. When they cut wood and brush they just float it down the river to the plant. To get the lignite out you'd need to have roads and trucks and all that sort of stuff. Why do you ask?"