The Voices of Heaven (40 page)

"No, you do not know. There is more than you know about that is not understandable to us."

Naturally I asked what you were talking about, but you wouldn't listen anymore. Certainly you wouldn't let me ask any more questions. You hissed and twittered to Geronimo and Semiramis for a moment. Then you said:

"Go with them, Barrydihoa. See what they will show you. Then think how you can explain this. Then—perhaps—if you think it worthwhile, then you can come back and you will tell me all you think I should know." And that was all you would say.

Neither Geronimo nor Semiramis would say a word to us after that. They simply stretch-slid ahead of us down the hill to the car. It was only when we were in it that Geronimo said, "You must turn upstream when we ford the river. I will show you where to go."

Then he buttoned up again too. It was a silent drive. Alma, in the seat beside me, had nothing to say, and the leps behind us were not even speaking to each other.

Then, a couple of kilometers up along the left bank of the river, I felt some movement from behind. Semiramis was leaning forward, her great head coming cheek-to-cheek with mine, her sweet, grassy breath in my face.

"Turn right," she ordered.

"Why?"

"Turn right! Go on that trail, it is not far."

She was a bossy one. I did as commanded but asked Geronimo, "Won't you tell me why we're doing this?"

"There is a reason," he said. He left it at that, and nobody said anything until Semiramis hissed in my ear again.

"Stop here."

I stopped. Before I could ask any questions Geronimo had slid out of the car, beckoning us to follow.

I looked around. "This doesn't look right. We're nowhere near Freehold, are we?"

"We are not."

"Well, look, Geronimo, they'll be worrying about us. I want to go back to town."

"We will take you there. Not yet. There is the thing you are to see first."

As usual, he wasn't interested in offering explanations. By then both leps had begun slithering away into the woods ahead of us. Alma looked at me. I looked at Alma. I shrugged. We followed.

After five minutes of hard climbing up a hillside, I began to notice things I had seen before. We were somewhere near the glen where the Millenarists had held their retreat, I was pretty sure of that . . . and then I realized I was hearing something, too.

It was a human voice.

It was distant, definitely a voice, but so hoarse and cracked, so low-pitched it hardly registered as belonging to any human being right away.

When we came around a clump of strangler trees there was Friar Tuck, knelt by the side of the trail, his head bowed. It was his voice we were hearing. He was praying aloud, and it seemed he had been doing so for a long time. He didn't bother to look up as we approached. And just beyond him—

"Oh, my sweet little Jesus," Alma whispered.

But Jesus had nothing to do with it, though the man we saw was crucified, all right. He was nailed to a big water tree. Tiny springlets of water—clear to begin with, then tinctured with threads of red blood turning pale as they mixed—were trickling from the places where his hands were pinned to branches and his feet spiked to the trunk. His head was dangling to one side, his eyes were open and unseeing, but the face above his drenched body was radiant.

It seemed the late Captain Garold Tscharka wouldn't have to face any kind of a trial after all. He had reached the state every good Millenarist longed for. He was well and truly dead.

29

YOU have said, quite properly, that there are ways in which humans and leps do not understand each other. This is true. The incident of Garoldtscharka is a case in point. No lep would ever kill himself. The knowledge that humans sometimes do so—and do so in such terribly painful ways, for purposes that cannot be understood—still fills us with shock and repugnance.

Is that a question, Merlin?

No.

Because if it is I have to say that I don't really share your feelings.

Oh, I think Tscharka's crucifixion was really shocking, too. If he wanted to off himself there were certainly better ways—ways that would have seemed better to me, anyway, though I suppose Tscharka had his own ideas about that.

I worry a little about just what those ideas were, as a matter of fact.

But to tell the truth, I didn't give a hoot in hell about Tscharka killing himself. If I'd known he was all that apeshit to get himself crucified, I might have suggested other ways of doing it, but if that didn't go over I probably would have been happy to supply him with the nails myself. The only reason I sent Semiramis back to Freehold to get help was because I thought people would be pleased to hear Tscharka was dead.

I'm sorry if that just makes you feel even worse about the human race, but as I see it—in fact, as most of us see it—there are some people who are just better off dead. That isn't for the sake of punishing them for their crimes, at least not as far as I'm concerned. Not even because that's a good solution to the problem of crime anyway, because I totally agree it isn't. The only reason why that is acceptable at all is just because we have never been able to figure out any better way of dealing with them.

Now, does what I have just said raise a question?

No. There are no more questions, Barrydihoa. You have answered all the questions that have answers of a sort comprehensible to us—answered them in great and fatiguing detail, over this long time. There is nothing left.

Yeah, thanks, but that's not good enough, Merlin. I need to know what you intend. Does that mean you will or won't lift the boycott?

Ah, Barrydihoa, do you not even now see how puzzling this is? There is no "boycott." There has never been a "boycott." If all of our people chose to shun all of yours it was not because of a "law." It was simply because too many of your people had behaved in ways that filled us with horror and disgust. Now you have been heard, and each of us will decide for himself what to do. It appears that some will still prefer to shun you. Some will be willing to visit you, even work with you. Geronimo will certainly be one such. So, sometimes, will I. So will others among us, perhaps an increasing number as time passes. So, you see, your people will no longer be deprived of their laborers.

Ah, Merlin, let me just play your own words back to you: You don't see how puzzling this is to us, either, do you? You've just got the wrong idea about what I'm trying to do.

It isn't for slave labor that we want your friendship, you see. It never was, really—well, not entirely, anyway—and now least of all. We have more human people to do the work now than we did, and it looks as though before long we'll have a lot of new machines to do much of it for us. What we want from you is to be our friends. Or at least our reasonably amicable neighbors, on this planet that we will be sharing for a long time to come.

But I'm glad to hear what you have said. And I'm grateful to you—to all of you—for letting me come up here and try to explain it all. That was a good way to start. I hope we can keep on that same way.

I also hope this. Then there is nothing more that troubles you, Barrydihoa?

Well, no, I wouldn't say that.

There is one other worry in my mind. It's not about you, and it's certainly not an immediately urgent problem. It can't possibly make any real trouble for a good many years. But it does bother me quite a lot. It's about why Tscharka had himself nailed to the wall, and about what Reverend Tuchman might do about it one day.

See, Tuchman isn't here anymore. When Captain Bennetton finally started his
Buccaneer
back to Earth, he had the Reverend Tuchman safely stowed away in his freezer.

It was the only thing that made sense. If Tuchman was going to have to face a murder charge—and there could be no doubt that he was certainly some kind of accomplice, because who else could have hammered the spikes into Garold Tscharka?—no Pavan wanted to have that trial here. No Pavan wanted Reverend Tuchman around at all anymore. We were all delighted to get rid of the sweet-talking old son of a bitch . . . but he had left some pretty hard questions behind.

I don't want you to think that I really believe in very much of this stuff. Whatever crazy notion Tscharka himself might have had, I don't believe for one minute that his self-inflicted crucifixion started that thousand-year clock ticking for Pava. Maybe he thought it would. Alma thinks he might have, and she's got a small guilty feeling that she might have put the idea in his head and thus led to his suicide. That doesn't make sense, though. That crucifixion doesn't even fit the scripture, does it?

Well, that's a rhetorical question, because you certainly wouldn't know whether it did or not, but actually, its circumstances aren't even close. Tscharka was a sort of martyr, okay, but he brought it on himself—I mean, Tuchman never could have nailed him up that way single-handed if Tscharka hadn't helped out. He certainly was no kind of a divine redeemer, except maybe in his own mind. I mean, nobody ever claimed that Garold Tscharka was the son of God, did they? And if Tscharka had ever had any revelations from on high, he had never mentioned them to me—or to anybody else, either, as far as anyone ever said. There was no Sermon on the Mount in Tscharka's resume, no cleaning out the Temple, no miracles. No nothing that fit the biblical pattern of a savior and redeemer. You never heard of Captain Garold Tscharka raising anybody from the dead, did you? (Well, unless you count defrosting the stiffs in
Corsair
's freezer. But I don't think even Friar Tuck could try to stretch it that much.)

The only thing is . . .

The only thing is, when you come to think of it, hardly anybody had ever heard any of those stories about Jesus himself during his lifetime.

Those stories—those scriptures—didn't get spread around until long after Jesus' death, when his disciples began roaming the world and writing all those epistles. Some of those stories didn't get told at all until long after the crucifixion, did they? Fifty years later, some of them. Maybe even later than that.

So I do have this question that lurks in the back of my mind.

It certainly isn't important right now. It probably couldn't matter to anyone until our grandchildren's time and maybe not even then.

But the feeling won't go away. I keep wondering about what will happen when, years and years from now and back on the faraway Moon, they finally defrost Friar Tuck.

He'll have a lot of legal questions to deal with, I'm pretty sure of that. But they'll take time, and while that time is passing he'll have opportunity to make his case. Whatever case he chooses to make. That's part of our constitutional guarantees, you see, and nobody would try to take that privilege away from him . . . and who can guess what kind of epistles Tuchman may be going to write then?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frederik Pohl has been honored with both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for his science fiction, and he was just named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In his long and successful career, he has been the editor of award-winning magazines such as
Worlds of If
and
Galaxy
. His novels
Gateway
and
Man Plus
marked him as one of the all-time great SF writers. He and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Hull, live in Chicago, Illinois.