The Voices of Heaven (2 page)

I stared at the captain. "We're requisitioning two hundred extra fuel pods," he said, sounding truculent.

Two hundred extra pods? Nobody needed that much antimatter; I couldn't help asking, "What in God's name for?"

If he had been scowling at something invisible before, now the black look was all aimed at me. "I would be grateful, di Hoa," he said frostily, "if you would refrain from taking the Lord's name in vain before me."

"Sorry. But hell—I mean, but really, you can't carry that many pods!"

"Not on
Corsair
, no. We'll have space for a hundred. The other hundred will follow us on
Buccaneer
."

"
Buccaneer
!"

"
Buccaneer
's another of Pava's colony-support ships. It was still unloading when we left. I'd guess it's about two months behind us from Pava; it'll take the rest of the fuel."

Considering that the very fate of the colony was up for grabs, I admired his confidence. I didn't argue it, but I still had that big question in my mind. "It's not really my department, but what do you want with all that fuel?"

"No," he said, "it isn't your department. It is not your business at all, but I'll tell you anyway. We want the pods to fuel our short-range ships. We're going to begin a program of exploration of the other planets in our system."

Even then, that sounded improbable. I tried to be tactful. "I didn't realize the Pava colony had the resources for exploring other planets."

He gave me an amiable shrug. "I'm just the delivery boy for the message. It's the colony that voted for the ships. Oh," he said fairly, "it's not just exploration. They expect to build some tugs and use them to go out to the asteroids—Delta Pavonis doesn't have as big a belt as Sol, but there are quite a few metal-bearing ones out there—and haul them in to the orbital factory for raw materials. That makes sense, doesn't it? It certainly beats shipping bulk metals out there from Earth."

He made it all sound so plausible. Of course, it was all a lie, but I didn't know it then. Then it was just another surprise. "So you've got a fleet of short-range ships out there?"

He shook his head. "No," he said, sounding pissed off again, "we did not, not when I left. But they should be building now. By the time I get back I expect they will be completed and all set to go—as soon as they get fuel."

It sounded plausible. What you have to keep in mind about these interstellar-ship people is that by the time they get back to where they've come from, half a century or so will have passed. That elapsed time doesn't show on the people themselves, of course—Tscharka didn't look much older than I was. Well, he shouldn't have. In spite of the fact that he had been born maybe a century earlier, he wasn't older in any sense that mattered. He had spent most of the in-flight years at velocities so close to light-speed that time-dilation took over, and although the elapsed time for each trip was close to a quarter of a century, the perceived transit times were cut to not much more than a year or two—even for the ones who had to work while they were aboard and so stayed out of the freezers.

Of course, as we all know by now, there weren't really any short-range ships building out around Delta Pavonis. That was just more of the lie Tscharka and his buddies had cooked up when they had heard about the Congress debates. I don't know what his plan had been before then, but it doesn't really matter anymore anyway, does it?

By then I'd checked everything there was to check. I looked at my watch and said, "Good enough, Captain Tscharka. Let's sign off so we can both get out of here."

"Fine," he said, and led the way back to his cabin. While he was setting up the documentation on his screen a young woman appeared with capsules of coffee. She was part of the standby crew, and pretty, too, I saw at once—though maybe not as pretty as my own girl, Alma.

He introduced her as his copilot, Jillen something-or-other, and then he gave me an embarrassed grin, "Look, di Hoa, I'm sorry if I was a bastard to you. I'm kind of on edge."

"I don't blame you. I mean, if you really care about the colony."

"I do. I hope we can work it out. I'm expecting a call about the Congress." He was looking angry again. "I didn't think I'd find so many heretics on the Congress. It wasn't that way when I left."

I get uneasy around people who use words like "heretics," so I didn't answer that, and he went back to studying his screen.

The copilot had left us, and I "sat" down—you know, latched myself to a wall rest, the way you do in microgravity. I wasn't really thinking about Tscharka anymore. I was thinking about the Earth call I was going to make to wish my son a happy birthday, trying to decide what I was going to say. So I just waited for Tscharka to finish running his program, while I gazed at the wall display that showed the broad gray-brown surface of the Moon rolling under us. It was only a vidscreen, but I could recognize most of the peaks and craters. I could even pick out the narrow, bright line of the immense photovoltaic belt that girdled the Moon and gave us the power to run the accelerators that made the antimatter that fueled ships like the
Corsair
. The Lederman antimatter factory community itself—the place where I lived and worked—was out of sight below the horizon.

When the captain handed me the finished document screen, I read it over quickly; it said what it was supposed to say, namely that I certified that I had examined the
Corsair
and found its antimatter fuel stores empty, except for the small amount left to run the ship's standby systems. I signed it and thumbed it, and added my serial code; and then, just as I was holding it out to him, the captain got a call.

"Wait," he ordered, and turned eagerly to the picture on the wall. The face on the screen belonged to a middle-aged Santa Claus-looking man, fat and bearded, looking tentatively pleased with himself.

"It's not going to be as bad as we thought, Garold," the fat man said. "The Congress has agreed to give us a hearing, and we're on in a little over five hours. Will you be down to get in on it in time?"

"I'll land on the next orbit, Tuck," the captain promised, and signed off.

When he saw that I still had the screen in my hand he actually smiled. "Sorry about that. That was Reverend Tuchman. He's my chaplain."

"It sounded like good news."

"I hope so. If they give us a hearing they won't be able to turn us down. It's not," he explained, "as though we were costing the taxpayers much anymore. All the important money was spent long ago. The ships are all built. The colony's established. All we need is supplies."

"And a lot of antimatter," I reminded him.

He shrugged that off. "God's work must be done whatever it costs," he said. "Are you through with the screen?"

"Almost," I said, but before I handed it over I peeked at his serial code. He had piqued my curiosity, and I wanted a look at his basic data. Particularly his religious affiliation. Not many captains talked so much about God's work and traveled with a chaplain in their entourage, and not many people of any kind called other people heretics in this day and age.

My expression must have shown something, because Tscharka demanded sharply, "Is something wrong?"

"Oh, no," I said. "Not at all." And that was true, because there was nothing wrong about his being registered to the Penitential Church of the Millennium, it was just that I had never encountered a Millenarist space captain before. As it happened, I knew quite a lot about the Millenarists—more than I really wanted to, in fact—because my girl, Alma, had once been one.

I wasn't prejudiced against Millenarists. There were too many religions around—and some of them a lot weirder and nastier than Millenarism—for me to throw a stone at anyone's religious beliefs, especially since I didn't have any to speak of of my own. Millenarists had been around for a long time, one way or another. The current version called itself Penitential, and its adherents certainly were that. The Millenarists believed that the Bible promised the world would come to an end a thousand years after the birth of Christ and then at that Millennium the earth would open and all the dead would rise—the living too, I guess—and they'd all be singing and praising God as they headed straight for heaven's eternal joy.

It was as good a central dogma as any, if you didn't mind that actually it hadn't happened. The year 1000 a.d. had come and gone, and—oops, back to the drawing board—the Second Coming didn't come.

The Millenarists had figured that one out, though. They said the human race had been just too steeped in sin for that promised salvation, and everything that had happened after the year 1000 a.d. had simply added additional sin on top of all the sins that had gone before. That wasn't all of it. The main tenet of their belief was that, although everything was sinful, some things were less sinful than others. In their view, about the least sinful thing any Millenarist could do in this sinful world was to die and get out of it before it got any worse.

That was why you hardly ever saw an
old
Millenarist. They started out as converts—there weren't any born Millenarists, because bringing a child into the world of sin was about the most sinful thing of all—and the converts didn't usually stick around for more than ten or twenty years, tops. By the time they were around fifty they had usually taken their final step—either out of Millenarism, or out of life itself.

My girl Alma's Millenarist period was before I ever met her. She had joined up when she was just recently arrived on the Moon, and therefore naturally a little bit homesick and depressed—in other words, just the kind of person the Millenarists looked for to recruit. They did. They welcomed her, and comforted her, and took her in, and before very long Alma made her confession of faith.

That was that. She was a duly enrolled Millenarist.

When she filed her affiliation the supervisors at the Lederman factory made her sign a guarantee that she wouldn't make trouble by deciding to kill herself while on duty in a sensitive area. That's a standard precaution they take at the Lederman plant. Outside of that her life wasn't much changed. For nearly a year she went to services, until the two Millenarist circuit-riding preachers from Earth showed up one day.

They were red-hots, Alma said. In the jargon of the Millenarist church, they were called "finalists." They were the ones who had passed the point of just
believing
and were getting ready to act their beliefs out. They turned up at one Sunday's services as honored guests, and when they told the congregation what they were going to do they looked (Alma said) so happy and righteous and, well, so saved that she thought for a moment she was going to cry.

What they were going to do was commit suicide.

The younger one said, joyously, that they couldn't escape sin—the whole world was sinning just by being alive—but by dying they could stop being accomplices to sin. The older one said, lovingly, that if any of the lunar congregation wanted to join them they would be glad for the company.

They were very convincing, Alma said. Still, none of the congregation volunteered to remove themselves from this vale of tears with them at that first service.

Alma didn't much want to do that, either. She said she believed at the time that they had the right idea, and she thought that that was going to be the right thing to do, someday or other. Not now, though. And yet they seemed so righteously sure of themselves that at the next Saturday's service, without having planned it, she got carried away with the sermon and the singing and all the hosannahs. "I didn't start out to volunteer for finalization," she told me. "Just all of a sudden, there I was, walking right up to the altar, while the rest of the congregation was smiling and applauding me, and I told them I was ready."

Fine, they said, beaming approval at her. Just sign here.

What she had to sign was the standard release form to say that they had not used any form of coercion on her, as indeed they hadn't unless you consider those brainwashing exercises they called sermons coercion. As soon as her consent was on the screen they said, "All right, then, let's get it done."

And so she went with them to their room. She was the only volunteer.

Alma gets sort of tongue-tied when she gets to that part of the story, but I think I can piece it together. They told her they were really yearning to die, but they couldn't indulge themselves that way because their mission wasn't complete yet. Before they could take that gladsome release for themselves they wanted to make sure any worthy person could join them, so they wouldn't actually keep her company at that moment.

They would, however, help her.

"How?" she asked.

"We'll advise you. Hanging is the best way," they said. "There are hundreds of alternatives, of course, and you can use one of them if you prefer! The reason we recommend hanging is for the church's legal protection, really, so the seculars can't trump up some charge against us. Nobody can try to prove homicide when somebody hangs herself, and you know how the heretics are."

"It made sense," she told me. "At the time."

Then they opened their trunk and handed her a coil of rope, and they showed her how to hook it to the lighting fixture, and how to climb onto the room's one straight-backed chair and kick herself off it. . . .

Of course, the important thing to remember is that these two saviors were just fresh up from Earth.

Alma wasn't. She'd been on the Moon for over a year. She should have known better. On the other hand, as she now says, she wasn't really thinking very clearly at that moment. She was in a sort of trance of exultation, and so she did as they instructed.

And then when she kicked herself loose and fell with the noose around her neck, the Moon's gentle gravity just wasn't strong enough to break her neck.

It didn't even strangle her. It came pretty close, she says, close enough to make her gag and feel as though she were going to pass out for a moment; but not so close that she didn't have time to change her mind and claw the noose off, and push her way out of the room, choking and crying and rubbing her throat and feeling like a fool, with the two finalists reproachfully calling after her; and she never, never went back to the Millenarist services again.