The Voices of Heaven (20 page)

Then it was Tscharka who thundered at us: "What Jubal Khaim-Novello knew is what we all must learn, my brothers and sisters! We rejoice together tonight in his deliverance, but all the joys of the world are a trap. The real joy is not here, for as long as we are here we all share the certainty of sin. We did not seek to be shiners, but we cannot avoid it; we are stained with it as long as we draw breath. While we live we must do the work God has given us; but, oh, how we long to escape this vile world and enter into His holy kingdom!"

And Friar Tuck told us, grinning ruefully, apologetically, at his own weakness, how many times he had taken out his flask of sacred release—he held it up to show us, a bottle of poison pills for God's sake!—because he was weak and yearned for his own escape . . . but, he said sternly, then he had put it away again, because there were still souls to be saved.

That was when he surprised me. Two men, in different parts of the crowd, suddenly began struggling forward, reaching for the deadly little bottle. And, to my surprise, Tuchman held it high away from them, refusing them their escape into death—I'd been prepared, for one shocking second, to see a couple of additional suicides right in front of me.

Tuchman denied them their chance, sorrowfully shaking his old white mane. He stood tall and silent for a moment, the bottle of poison pills high over his head.

Then he brought his arm slowly down. Gazing reverently upon the bottle of poison pills, he said, in tones of mourning, "The time for us is not yet, my beloved ones. We must be strong awhile, so that we may carry the word to our brothers and sisters. We must rescue as many as God gives us the power to do . . . and
then
we can cleanse ourselves all at once, rejoicing. Until that blessed day, in the name of Saint Jones, be strong."

It was really astonishing how cuddly-warm the Millenarists could make the idea of mass suicide sound.

That was when I got up and left. People looked at me in disapproving surprise, but I didn't meet their eyes. I just took off. I didn't wait for the promised refreshments. I didn't have any appetite for them, and even less for listening to more of that sad, horrid preaching—maybe, I think, a little bit because it was all beginning to sound almost reasonable to me.

I still say human beings aren't basically insane, but I can see how you might think they are.

I walked around the empty streets of Freehold for a while, looking for lighted windows. There weren't many. Most of the people I knew, Millenarists or not, had been at the services; the party part had begun, and I could hear singing and laughter from it.

I wasn't really sure I wanted to talk to anybody just then anyway. When I found myself on the bank of our little branch of the river I sat down and tossed a few rocks into the water, listening to the distant chirps and hoots from the forest. Nobody was around.

It was a pleasant, warm night, and Pava's constellations were bright in the sky overhead. I wondered which star was Earth's sun, but couldn't find it. Perhaps it was on the other side of Delta Pavonis in that season, I thought. Very likely it would be too faint to pick out, at eighteen-plus light-years away.

That pleasant day in the woods had faded from my memory. I was—not depressed; certainly not in that clinical sense that came with my little genetic problem—but pretty thoroughly dejected. I had, I have to say to you, some pretty dismal feelings about my own human race.

After a while I persuaded myself that things would look better in the morning, so I stood up and headed home. When I got back to the apartment I turned on the vid without looking at it. It was some sort of musical story, out of Pava's huge library of old recorded performances. People in bright costumes were laughing and dancing on the screen, but I cannot tell you what the story was about.

I turned it off when I heard Jacky Schottke coming in. "Oh," I said. "Is the rejoicing over?"

He looked shamefaced. "I guess so. I wasn't exactly there. I was listening to most of it, though. I hid behind the toolshed."

I didn't need to ask him why—because, no doubt, as a backslider he wasn't sure of his right to be there. I didn't even ask him if he'd been tempted by Friar Tuck's little bottle of lethal joy. But I couldn't let go of the subject. "Is it possible," I asked him, as the closest available expert to help me confirm my suspicions, "that what Tuchman and the captain really want to do is convert everybody—and then try to get everybody here all to commit suicide at once?"

He looked unhappy. He didn't deny it, though.

"That's really insane," I said. "No group of normal people would do that."

"Oh, yes," he said quickly. "It's happened before. Didn't you hear what he said about Saint Jones?"

"I don't know who Saint Jones is."

"Well, you would if you'd ever been a Millenarist. Jones was one of the early prophets, a long time ago. He took his whole flock to someplace in Central America, and they all swallowed poison together. Even the babies. Saint Jones is one of the central martyrs in the church, you know."

I said, "That's bloody sickening."

"Only if you don't believe," he said, looking mournful. "They're not going to force anybody to do it. Only—well," he said, his voice tragic, "it would certainly be pretty lonesome for the survivors."

14

YOU have stated that the Millenarists are only one "religious" sect among many such, and not a large one at that. Why then are there so many on this planet?

Yes, well, when I got here that struck me as pretty strange, too. I'd never seen so many Millenarists in one place.

The thing is, there are a hell of a lot of human beings—more than you can imagine—so even a tiny splinter cult like the Millenarists probably has hundreds of thousands of members.

No more than that, of course; their doctrines don't encourage growth. Millenarists don't want to inflict original sin on any helpless infants, so they hardly ever have children.

But a few hundred thousand are barely a pimple on the human race. We are both numerous and diverse. There are probably a hundred thousand or so of almost any kind of improbable human being you wanted to name—left-handed albinos who are more than two meters tall, for instance—and still you'd be pretty surprised if you saw very many of those people in one place.

Even so, you shouldn't exaggerate their number. Out of more than eight hundred people on Pava, less than a quarter were really Millenarists. Don't be deceived by how many showed up for the rejoicing. Everybody loves a party. You know the old saying, "Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day." Well, you don't know it, really, I suppose, but you get the idea.

So the Millenarists were nowhere near a majority, really, and the rest of us were a sampling of all kinds of denominations. We had two or three kinds of Muslims, we had a variety of Christians. We had a clutch of about fifteen or eighteen Mormons, for instance—well, you know about them because the Mormons were about the only ones who really tried hard to convert you people to their religion. Of course they didn't succeed.

Jacky Schottke was the one who told me about that failed mission to the heathen—I guess because he'd tried his own luck at spreading his own Millenarist gospel, back when he was still a red-hot. He told me sadly that with the leps it was a major flop. He said leps had taken very well to human food and human games, and one or two of them had even tried out human liquor . . . but no lep, ever, had shown any interest at all in being converted to any human religion. Not even my little buddy Geronimo, although he struck me as about as fascinated by human ways as any lep I ever heard of—until I met you, anyway.

Geronimo was the first lep friend I made. I hadn't really expected to see him again after that day in the woods, in spite of what he had said, but the morning after Jubal's memorial service I was stuck on farm duty, running a tractor plow along what was going to be a potato field near the river. Surprise—when I broke for lunch I saw the little lep humping and hustling up from the riverbank toward me.

"Good morning, Barrydihoa," he said. "Is there candy today?" I'd forgotten all about him and his sweet mouthpart. "I'm sorry, Geronimo. Maybe I can get some tomorrow."

He weaved his upper body back and forth for a moment in silence, watching me with those huge fly eyes. "It is okay," he said, in that hissy, whispery voice. "I will be at another place today. Good-bye, Barrydihoa." And he stretched and squirmed his way back down to the riverbank. There he scouted around for a moment until he found a good piece of deadwood. He took the chunk in his teeth—well, in whatever he had to grind things with in his mouthpart—to help him stay above water, and flopped into the stream. I watched him paddling with his little hands and wriggling his body as he swam across, holding on to the log for buoyancy. The current was strong there. It carried him a pretty long way downstream, but I saw him wriggle safely out on the far bank. He didn't look back.

The other farm workers were looking at me with curiosity. "What did he mean about the candy?" one of them asked—Pasquale Scales, it was; I remembered that he and his wife had come out on
Corsair
with me.

"I guess leps like candy." (Of course I was wrong about that; "leps" aren't all the same any more than humans are. Geronimo just happened to have acquired the taste.)

"Well," Pasquale said, "maybe we can help. Rita and I were talking about making some fudge if we could. I don't know what it's going to be like, with goat milk, but if you come by the kitchens tonight you can have some."

It was a generous offer. I thanked him, and then I told them about meeting Geronimo up in the hills, and how we'd played Frisbee with one of the flying rats. Pasquale thought that sounded like enough fun to try for ourselves, but although we'd seen some of the rats down by the grain patch we had to get back to work.

I wondered if I could catch one of the creatures for myself. It might be more interesting than playing pinochle with Jacky Schottke. I didn't expect I'd actually be tossing the thing back and forth with Geronimo again, of course. I still didn't really think I'd see him again.

But the next morning, as I was getting ready to help replace some of the shorings on the meeting hall, there he was.

"I will work with you today, Barrydihoa," he said. "Is there candy now?"

I wasn't surprised at leps helping humans; by then I'd got used to the idea. But this was special. I had no idea why Geronimo picked me out. He didn't say, and I couldn't guess. But there I was, all of a sudden, with a new lep friend and a new interest in life.

I don't want you to think that I'd given up on my plans to fix whatever was wrong with the Pava colony. I kept on bothering everybody I could find with questions. Wherever I worked—the farms, the biomass power plant, even kitchen detail a couple of times when I didn't duck fast enough—I cross-examined everybody who would talk to me. I doubt there was a person in the colony who hadn't heard that I was this new guy who was obsessed on the subject.

But Geronimo was my sidekick. Almost every day he showed up wherever I was working and worked right along with me—tending Theophan's seismological stuff when Marcus Wendt was having one of his feeling-poorly days, repairing buildings, clearing roadways after a storm—whatever I had to do, he helped. Or, if that particular task was beyond his physical powers, at least he kept me company.

When he began humping up the steps to Jacky Schottke's apartment with me after work, I wasn't sure Jacky would be happy about having him there. I mean, that grassy, earthy lep smell could get pretty strong in an enclosed space, and the place was Jacky's apartment before it was mine. Actually Jacky was delighted. He'd talked to any number of leps before, of course—that was one of the things he did as an ethnologist—but seldom, he said, one as willing to spend time conversing with a human being as my Geronimo. A third-instar lep doesn't know as much as a senior, but Geronimo easily remembered things some of the more mature ones forgot—what it was like to be second instar, for instance, basking in the sun for warmth and toddling around in a fumbling search for edible roots and fruits and the slower, softer, least aggressive bugs.

"The leps," Jacky lectured me one night after Geronimo had crept away home, "along with the goobers and the black crawlers, are a trophic species—"

"The what?"

"The goobers and the crawlers. You must have seen them in the woods. No? Well, they look like leps, but they're not intelligent. Anyway, they all eat the same things in the food chain, and I'm pretty sure they're eaten by the same predators—or were, before we wiped out most of the predators in this area. So they're a trophic species. The hard part of figuring out their relationships is that the adult leps don't eat what the young ones do, but Geronimo seems to remember every bite he ever took."

And was willing to answer all of Jacky's questions about them, too, up to a point . . . although when the questioning stretched out too long Geronimo might rear back and give him a frosty look and screech, "Play cards?"

That was the other thing Geronimo liked a lot. He liked to play games. He was willing to play indoors when it was dark or raining—he didn't mind being out in the rain, but I did—and he was quick to learn pinochle. He learned it well enough to beat Jacky and me a fair bit of the time.

He loved the vid games, too, although we didn't let him play them often. It was a drain on Schottke's computer time, and besides, Geronimo would get so wrapped up in piloting his simulated aircraft from simulated Seattle to simulated Singapore (I wondered what he made of the simulated Earthly geography along the way) that he wasn't answering any questions at all. He even tried baseball a time or two, when we could get up a scratch team. He managed surprisingly well with the bat but he couldn't really cover the outfield.

Geronimo made a big difference for me in my new life on Pava.

I didn't have that many friends in the colony. Geronimo was a welcome addition to the list—if "friend" is the right word for what Geronimo was to me. Maybe it was more like owning a particularly smart, loyal, affectionate pet . . . although it wasn't always clear to me which was the pet and which the owner.