The Voices of Heaven (25 page)

I didn't mind the work so much, although it was raining. What I minded was the way Jacky began to pant and turn pale after the first hour. Fortunately Geronimo was loyally there to help out, along with three or four other leps, so I took it upon myself to put Jacky in charge of the leps instead of wearing out his own old muscles. If it hadn't been for the leps we would have been in real trouble, but they pitched in.

When we all took a break I sat down next to Jacky, sharing a bottle of beer. Geronimo slithered around us, listening silently. "You all right?" I asked Jacky.

He took a swig of the beer and passed it back. There was plenty to go around; it was a liter bottle that had once held some kind of liqueur. "I'm fine," he said mournfully.

It didn't surprise me that he was unhappy. I knew that some part of him wished he had gone along on the retreat with the others.

But I had something else on my mind. "Jacky? You know that thing Friar Tuck said, about the martyrs?"

He looked vaguely apologetic. "To tell the truth, Barry, I don't think he cared that much about those guys. I suspect it was just a pretext to postpone the meeting for a while."

"I didn't doubt that for a minute. What I wondered was, have you been following the news from Earth? Do you know what he was talking about?"

He looked surprised. "Of course. It was all in the reports: their names were Bruderkind and Mallory. They were accused of bringing about the death of seven or eight people, two of them minors, and the Lederman council expelled them back to Earth."

"Bruderkind and Mallory, you say." I pondered the names. If Alma had ever told me the names of the two Millenarists who were working on her I'd forgotten them long since. A lot of time had passed since then, even allowing for the fact that any information that got here from Earth was automatically already eighteen and a half years old. There really wasn't much chance these were the same two that had tried to help Alma off herself.

But they could be.

Then I began making up some unpleasant scenarios in my mind. Alma finding out I'd been stolen away from her. Alma heartbroken. Alma seeking comfort anywhere she could find it. Alma returning to the Millenarist church. Alma finally deciding there was only one way out of her sorrow—

No. I didn't believe it. But I made up my mind to check out the newscasts from Earth first chance I got.

By the time the night shift arrived we were all bushed. The rain had stopped, which was a good thing. The other good thing was that the trip back to Freehold only required getting into the boats and letting the current carry us downstream. At the last moment Geronimo flopped himself on board for the ride. Marcus muttered a little about that, and so did one or two of the others, but Geronimo didn't pay them any attention. He was hanging half over the stern of the boat, one of his little hands on the rudder to guide us, watching the ripples that formed in our wake.

I was still concerned for Jacky Schottke, who was slumped over next to the lep with his eyes closed, but when I asked him how he was doing he stirred himself. "I'm all right. I was just thinking about the people on the retreat. I'm afraid they got wet today."

That didn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me, but I didn't say so. Geronimo spoke up, though. He twisted his face around to look at Jacky and said, in that hissy, penetrating voice, "No. Rain was outside, but retreat people were in large cloth house."

"Ah, they took the tent with them, then," Jacky said, looking happier. "It was all so fast, I wasn't sure they'd remembered. You saw them, did you?"

"First thing coming down in early day, yes. Very loud. All saying same words together."

"You mean they were praying, I suppose. They would be." Jacky looked wistful.

He closed his eyes again, and I let the subject drop. What I was thinking was that I really would have been happier if the Millenarists had got themselves good and soaked. I know that's not a very admirable way to feel. It isn't the Christian charity I was taught by the nuns; we were supposed to wish only the best, even for people we didn't like. I guess in that respect I wasn't much of a Christian, but then neither were most of the Christians I knew.

When we pulled up at the town dock most of the biofuel crew headed right for the supper tables, but there was something I wanted to do first.

When Geronimo saw that I was detouring by way of the little station under the big dish antenna he squawked a protest. "Meal time, Barrydihoa," he said reproachfully, his mouthpart working to show how hungry he was.

"In a minute. First I want to see what's been happening on Earth." He hissed reproachfully, but he climbed the hill to the station with me and stayed by my side while I tried to find what I wanted in the tapes.

Although I hadn't been watching them, I knew that Pava got regular news broadcasts from Earth. That wasn't all it got; there were daily transmissions of cultural programs, new performances, personal messages, religious programs—lots of those—and all sorts of other items that some civil servant back in the solar system had decided were worth passing on to the colony. The single channel that carried them all was crowded—especially because every nine-hour segment was repeated three times, to make sure Pava's single receiving station would get it all.

I sat down at one of the screens and selected for major news summaries of the past couple of weeks.

When I filtered out the material I didn't care about there wasn't a whole lot left. Naturally none of the news was "new" anymore by the time it crossed the eighteen and a half light-years to reach Pava, anyway. The elected councils were squabbling day and night, just like always; just like always, major projects like the re-greening of the Sahara and the cleanup of the Arctic were running behind schedule. Nothing had changed. When I selected for "Moon" and "Millenarists" I found what I was looking for. The fifth item that turned up on the screen was about William Bruderkind and Booker T. Mallory, ordained ministers in the Millenarist Penitential Church. Each of them had been arrested twice over a period of several years for improper solicitation of suicide, then finally tried and convicted when two of the suicides turned out to be young teenagers. Their status as naturalized Lunarians was canceled, and they were kicked out.

There were several stories about them, but none that gave the names of any of their victims.

On the way back to the supper tables Geronimo galumphed along beside me, looking up at me curiously with those immense eyes. He didn't speak, and neither did I. I was thinking about how long certain Millenarist ministers were willing to put off their own heavenly graduation in order to talk others into it, and mostly I was trying to persuade myself that there was really no chance that any of those unnamed victims could have been Alma Vendette.

When Geronimo went off to forage in the kitchen wastes I got into the dwindling line at the tables and helped myself to a meal, but I didn't get much chance to eat it. Everybody wanted to talk to me, it seemed. It started in the chow line and kept up on my way to a table and after, endless questions: Wouldn't the pods the antimatter came in themselves be a good source of raw materials for the factory as the fuel was used up, without the unpleasant necessity of scrapping
Corsair
? How long did I think
Corsair
would last as recyclable scrap, anyway? What did I know about asteroidal compositions—wasn't it possible that there'd still be a lot of elements we'd be short of, even if we tapped them?

I didn't forget about Alma, exactly. I never did that. But I did cheer up, because it certainly looked as though more and more of the colony was getting ready to wake up from its deep, unhappy sleep and do something serious about making Pava a decent place to spend the rest of my life.

Something else happened in those three days when all the Millenarists were out of town. I began to discover that the colonists in Freehold all had agenda of their own. They were chronically suppressed and depressed, sure, but never without dreams. It happened when I said something about Jacky Schottke to Dabney Albright and Dabney said contemptuously, "What do you expect from him? He's a mover."

"A what?"

"A mover. Or he used to be, anyway. He used to want to move everybody down to the coast. Just piss away everything we've got here! Start building a whole new town from scratch—can you imagine?"

That was the first time I realized that the Pavan colonists were not the monolithic collection of lumps I'd thought them to be.

I should have expected it; that's the way it always is when you come into some new social group. At first everybody in it looks as though he belongs there. You're you and they're them, and it takes a while to see that each individual member of the them actually considers himself—or herself—to be a more or less unique one.

I had learned that lesson more than once before—in the clinic, for one; again when I first got to the Moon. Earlier than that, even: as far back as when I was eleven years old and my father scraped up the price of a church camp for me one summer. He couldn't afford the whole season, though. I got there two weeks into July, and all the other campers were well broken into their collective identity as the campers. They were all tanned, had all learned the words to the songs to be sung around the sundown campfire; all knew the daily routine, from wakeup bugle and dawn dash to the obligatory swim in Lake de Paul to bedcheck . . . and knew how to avoid either of those obligations when they wanted to. It took time for me to know that some of the boys were there for the canoeing and others for riding the broken-down race horses from the camp's stable—and a lot of them just because their parents couldn't stand having them around the house for another minute—and, most of all, that none of them was exactly like any of the others.

So it was on Pava. The colony was a collection of unconsolidated factions. There were the movers, who wanted to get out of the earthquake zone; the empire builders, who wanted to breed Pava to a billion-strong new Earth; the industrialists, who thought everybody should live on dry bread and hopes until the colony had dug mines and built factories and made itself self-sufficient and strong.

And there was one other group: the defeated. The ones who had put their names on the long list of Pavans who wanted nothing more out of the colony but a trip back home.

They did all have one thing in common, though—I mean the Pavans who weren't Millenarists and hadn't gone off on the retreat. They were beaten down and discouraged, yes, but they still wanted things changed. And I began to feel pretty sure that, when the postponed town meeting did get held, there would be some unpleasant surprises for Captain Garold Tscharka and his buddies.

After the third day of the retreat the work got easier. The Millenarists began to trickle back to their jobs, half a dozen at a time, then forty or fifty in a clump. They looked drained but happy—anyway, they did up to the time when they began getting the feel of the ferment that was building up in Freehold. Then they stopped looking so happy.

Oddly, their leaders hadn't come back with them. Tscharka, Tuchman, Queng and two or three others were still out there in the hills—"Conspiring," Theophan told me darkly at breakfast. "They'll be up to something, Barry."

"Like what? The meeting's only three days away."

She shrugged. Marcus gave me a sunny smile, and to Theophan a look of fond confidence. "We'll be ready for anything they come up with, won't we, Theo? So don't worry." And they left to get a head start on overhauling one of Theophan's cranky remote sensors. I wasn't invited.

I didn't mind. I was just as happy to stay in Freehold, where I could talk to people—especially after I found that I had drawn an easy, if unaesthetic, day's work checking the levels in the town's outhouses.

Geronimo showed up to go the rounds with me, quite curious about the whole procedure. He didn't offer to help. He didn't get in the way, either. He'd caught another of his flying-rat playthings and was tossing the little thing back and forth in his tiny hands, watching silently as I lifted the toilet seats and peered in. When the level was comfortably low there was no problem; when it had risen to anything less than a meter and a half below the seat I made a note on my screen. That meant that someone would have to fill it in and start another hole before long. I hoped it wouldn't be me.

After an hour or so of that I stopped and looked at the lep. "You could give me a hand, you know. How about lifting the lids for me?"

Geronimo turned those huge eyes on me. "Not necessary. Easy work, one person is plenty. Anyway, all humans now returning."

I puzzled out what he was saying. "You mean you leps just came to help out because we were short-handed?"

"That is exact," he agreed.

"Well, thanks," I said, thinking it over. It was true that during the retreat there had been a lot more leps in Freehold than usual, as many as a hundred, I guessed, against what was generally no more than a dozen or two.

I asked idly, "How many leps are there, anyway?"

Geronimo reared back, twisting his body to peer down the street. "Three," he reported.

"No. I don't mean just here. I mean all you leps."

He sank back, plucking a head of fern from the side of the street and nibbling it. "Many, Barrydihoa."

"
How
many?"

"Many," he insisted. "We play gin soon?"

"No, we don't play gin. We work. All day long—well, except right now it's getting about time for lunch, isn't it?" He didn't answer that. He just made an exasperated hissing noise, tossed his flying rat into the air—it wobbled as it flew away, no longer in very good shape—and went off to seek his own food elsewhere.

That was all I could get out of Geronimo on the subject of the lep population, but I was luckier with Jacky Schottke. I saw him sitting by himself, morosely eavesdropping on the conversations of a group of returned Millenarists. They must have known he was there, but they were conspicuously keeping to themselves, ignoring him.

Everybody else was sociable. Half a dozen people wanted to talk to me about the factory orbiter, but when I'd finished with them I joined Jacky. In a way, I thought it was an act of kindness. I didn't think he enjoyed his regrets.