The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  I guess that's the kind of thing you're interested in about Theophan, but that was all she said on the subject right then. I did not, at the time, know what she meant by it, and she didn't amplify it. She didn't talk anymore at all for the next few minutes of our climb. Then she stopped and looked around, and announced, "Here we are."

  "Here" didn't look much different than any of the other heres we'd already climbed past. We hadn't reached the top of our mountain, just had entered a small clearing with a good view off to the west. It seemed to satisfy Theophan. She set her pack down, lifted her field glasses to her eyes and swept a distant hillside with them.

  When she put them down she looked satisfied. "There's my corner reflector, right where I set it up," she said, "and here's a good outcrop of solid rock, just what we need. You can catch your breath for a minute now, Barry. What we do then," she said, pointing to the rock face, "we drill a couple of bolt holes in that, then we set up the laser rangefinder and align it to the station on that far hill. Then we're done. How are you with a hammer?"

  As it turned out, not very good. We tried it that way for a while, Theophan holding the drill in place while I hammered it, but when she saw my aim wasn't that great we switched. I hit harder than she did, even with my Moon-softened muscles, but at least when she was doing it I didn't have to drop the drill and jerk my hand out of danger quite as often.

  It sounded quick and easy enough when she said it. It wasn't. It took us an hour's hard work to drill the holes to bolt the instrument down, and then another half an hour to put it in place and for Theophan to sight it in.

  "What we're doing here is measuring creep," she explained. "If the distance between two points changes, or if one point rises or falls, then we know something's happening in the crust. Then I plug the data into the models and see if I can figure out what the something is." She sighed. "It works pretty well—on Earth. If we had enough of these things in place maybe we could tell when the earthquakes were due as well as we used to at CalTech South. Only we don't. We don't even have enough of them to keep a decent number of plots measured on a regular basis, so I have to keep moving the instruments around." She looked up at the expression on my face, and then laughed.

  "Sorry, Barry," she said. "I'm laughing at me, not you. I felt the same way when I came here. It's a real culture shock, trying to get along where everything's always scarce—when I was doing my post-doc we didn't bother with crap like this; we had satellite rangers that could fix any point on the surface, in three dimensions, to a millimeter. But here—" She made a face. "You can't really understand how hard it is to keep a civilization going when you don't have many people until you get here and see for yourself, can you? Listen, sit down, I've got a thermos of coffee in my bag, we can take a little break before we start back."

  I was glad enough to do that. Glad enough for the coffee, too, although the first taste startled me until I realized Theophan had spiked it with a touch of their homestilled popskull.

  "It's not so bad," she said, apropos of nothing—except that it startled me, because she'd been reading my thoughts. "We do have just about everything we really need here, you know. Not enough of everything to be comfortable, no, and some things we just don't have at all—God, I'd kill for a chocolate ice-cream soda sometimes!"

  I took a swig of the coffee. "But people have been here for a hundred years. Couldn't you make ice cream by now?"

  "Sure we could. We even do, sometimes—though it's not as easy as you might think, because where do we get the cows to give the milk to make it with? Goat's milk isn't the same." She pursed her lips, then added, "I don't want to give you the wrong idea. There are substitutes for most things, yes, and they do well enough. The thing is, we can't make everything, not in forty different flavors and five hundred different varieties and a new model of everything every year. It's better now, though. It's even better now than the way it was when my husband and I first came here on Avenger, eleven years ago. We were really green. We were two kid seismologist volunteers fresh out of graduate school, ready to solve all the problems of Pava." She shook her head. Then she said, "You ready for another seismology lesson?"

  What I actually wanted to hear about was this husband no one had happened to mention to me before, but I let her go on.

  I listened while she was talking, but I was also studying her. The funny thing was that I'd had the ghost of an idea, when I took that first swig of the spiked coffee, that just possibly maybe one idea she might have had in the back of her head when she arranged all this was that it might have been fun for the two of us to get off together in a romantic and private place for a while. The word "husband" had changed my perspective on that. It didn't mean the idea was now out of the question, but it put a somewhat different spin on a possible rendezvous. Before I let the conversation get too personal I wanted to know just who this invisible husband was and at least the important things about him—like how big he was.

  She didn't seem to be heading in any very personal direction, though. What was on Theophan's mind just then was seismology, and she clearly loved her subject. "See over there?" she asked, pointing to the ridge of mountains purplish on the horizon where her "corner reflector" was mounted. "Those hills are what we call the Rockies—no particular reason, they aren't actually any rockier than any other mountains around here, just I guess some of the original colonists were from Colorado. There's a south-dipping fault along that range that's maybe forty-five kilometers long. That one is the kind we call left-stepping, same as the one in these hills we're standing on. And neither one of them is real deep—I think."

  She paused to take a drink of her cooling coffee. I didn't interrupt her. It was cool and pleasant up on the hill, and I wasn't looking forward to schlepping those tools back down to the car. I wasn't really listening, either, but that didn't matter much because when she started again she was really talking mostly to herself. She couldn't really know what she was dealing with, she said, without knowing more than she did about the composition of Pava's mantle and the forces that drove it—which were not exactly the same as on Earth, of course, because after all, the tidal forces of Earth's Moon had a lot to do with churning up Earth's mantle and Pava didn't happen to have a big moon. And then she got into the chemistry of mantle rock and I must have looked as though my mind was wandering. She stopped and gave me a stare. "Are you following any of this?" she demanded.

  "Not much," I admitted. "Only you're saying you don't know enough to predict earthquakes very reliably."

  "Right. I don't. I won't until we get the facilities for some deep-down drilling, for instance. Which we don't have. Jesus, Barry! I'm trying to make do with surface instruments, when what we really ought to be doing is sinking some shafts a kilometer or so down, plugged with concrete. Then we could measure some shear strain—but, hell, I don't even have enough dilatometers on the surface for decent volumetric studies, much less being able to identify force vectors—"

  She stopped and gave me one of those half-apologetic, half-angry looks. "Am I going too fast for you again?"

  "Yes, but that's not what's on my mind. I've got a question to ask you."

  "Spill it."

  "Well, no offense, but why? I mean, you people have been living with these problems for a hundred years. Not you personally, of course. But the colony's had them all for a long time. I'd think you'd be used to them. So why do you get so excited about it now?"

  She exploded. "Because we're not living all that well, idiot! Every time we get a little bit ahead along comes a quake and we're back in the soup again! We're always losing power"—I nodded, remembering the lights going out at Jacky Schottke's place—"and every time that happens we have to stop some operations. We've even lost computer data when it wasn't protected fast enough. Christ, Barry! It was a quake that cost us the dam. Why do you think we're burning trash to make electricity?"

  "I was going to ask about that. Tscharka said you had a hydroelectric plant."

  "Did have. Until a tremor colla
psed it."

  I said, "Oh, right, I remember that one. I guess you mean the one that hit us right when we landed—"

  "Hell, Barry, I'm not talking about that little tremor. That was nothing. The one that took the dam out was nearly a year ago. It was the worst day of my life. That was the day when—"

  She stopped there. Her lips were clamped tight, and she was staring at the rangefinder as though she hated it. She almost looked as though she wanted to cry.

  Then she tossed the dregs of her coffee on the ground and stood up.

  "Look, do you want to see what's left of the dam? It's not much out of the way."

  "Sure."

  "Then let's go. I'll tell you all about it when we get there."

  So we scrambled back down to the car, and when we'd driven about half a kilometer down the hill Theophan took a sharp turn into a different goat path. She wasn't talking. Only when we hit a bigger boulder than usual and I grunted did she glance at me and relax a little. A very little. "Sorry about this. The road gets better past the dam," she said, the words jolting out of her.

  I didn't try to answer, just held tight. I was glad for the seat harness—mostly glad—less than totally glad, maybe, because the waist belt was digging into my kidneys as I was thrown from side to side with every jolt. Theophan seemed to anticipate each dip and twist, but then she had the steering wheel to hang on to.

  The other thing on my mind was that I caught another wisp of that sweet, feminine scent of hers. Whatever Earthly comforts they were missing on Pava, it seemed Theo managed to keep well stocked with perfume.

  It's surprising how much smell has to do with the way the mind works. This time it started me wondering if I was blowing a good chance here. I wondered if it was time for me to put Alma out of my mind on a permanent basis. I wondered exactly what Theophan's marital condition was. I wondered just how old she was, too. The arithmetic was easy enough; say, twenty-five years to get to finish graduate school plus eleven years on Pava. About thirty-six? (Not counting the twenty-odd years in time-dilated flight.) She looked a bit older than that, I thought. Maybe plus a couple more years that I hadn't counted on. Still, however I figured it, right in the target range for me.

  Besides, all that bumping around was making me horny.

  I suppose that's something else you'll never understand, because you people just don't think about sex at all until you're in your sixth instar, and then I guess you just about stop thinking about anything else at all, don't you? Well, human beings are different. We think about it all our lives. What I was thinking about was partly how good it would be to take this sweet-smelling, warm-bodied woman to bed, and partly how if I did that it might easily cause more problems than it solved.

  I hadn't stopped mourning the loss of Alma, but that wasn't the problem that was on my mind. There was more to it than that.

  See, what I wanted was not just a quick roll in the hay. My glands certainly did want that, and they were nagging me about it pretty insistently. But human beings are more complicated than leps in that way. Our glands drive us in one direction, our reasoning facilities tell us to go another. Maybe it isn't reason; maybe it's some other glands that I'm just not as aware of, the ones that lead to having children by choice instead of as an inevitable by-product of our other urges. Anyway, besides wanting the screwing I also wanted something more permanent. Something committed, even—my failures with Alma had reformed me, I guess. Certainly something longer term.

  And I did not plan to have a longer term on Pava.

  I thought it was time to take my thoughts as far away from my genitals as I could. I cleared my throat. When Theophan glanced at me inquiringly, I said, "Tscharka said it was going to be a big dam. A hundred meters high, he said."

  She seemed willing to break her silence, but all she said, scornfully, was, "Tscharka."

  "You don't think much of him, maybe?"

  "I think he's a shit. What'd he bring back for us? No new instruments for me, no equipment, no seismological programs I can use. Outside of bare necessities, about all he brought was the damned antimatter, and he's stalling about shipping that to the factory, where we might have some use for it." Having got back the habit of speech, she went on: "If you want to know what I think, I think Tscharka expected Pava would be a hundred percent Millenarist when he got back and we'd all be so full of the consciousness of sin that we wouldn't worry about earthquake prediction or getting more industry going or—or anything except praying and begging God for forgiveness for the sin of being alive. Don't talk to me about Tscharka. He makes me sick, and there are too many like him here. I'd take the next ship back if it didn't mean spending twenty-five years with him."

  "You wouldn't know it if you were. Because you'd be frozen, I mean."

  She gave me a sort of grin—not big, but going in the right direction. "I'd know. The son of a bitch probably molests the corpsicles along the way."

  Then the grin faded. "We're getting close. This is the valley where they put the dam."

  So I began to pay attention to my surroundings again. What we were seeing was a pretty river valley between the hills—broad downstream, narrowing sharply to our right, but it was obvious something big and bad had happened here. The rough track we were following abruptly became a two-lane road—unpaved, yes; partly grown over; but easily capable of handling a lot more traffic than it seemed to be getting. And that road became the top of a dam, only the dam wasn't there anymore. The road stopped three or four meters out over the valley. It began again on the far side, with another few meters going on to the other slope. In between was nothing. There had been something there once, and quite a big something. Maybe not Tscharka's hundred-meter height, but the place where the dam had spanned a throat in the valley was considerably more than a hundred meters across.

  The dam itself was gone.

  Downstream, to our left, there were large lumps and chunks of masonry scattered along the sides of the river as far as the eye could see. There weren't any trees there. All I could see was a little regrowth of weeds, nothing big. Where the dam had been there was hardly a trace of, say, the power plant that would have been its purpose. I looked for it. All I could find was the ruined outline of what I supposed once had been a foundation at the foot of the dam structure. The whole space had been swept clean when a couple of cubic kilometers of retained water had decided to push the dam out of its way and move on down the valley.

  "Can you imagine how much work they put into building that thing?" she asked, studying the wreckage.

  I easily could. "It was an earthquake that did it?" I asked, although I knew the answer.

  "Oh, yes. A pretty good one, and not the first. We'd had a couple of hefty foreshocks," Theophan told me, staring out over the flood track. "We were worried about the dam, so Jake and I came up here to try to measure the strains. We had four or five other people with us, and there were about a dozen leps who had trailed along as sightseers—they always seemed to be fascinated by the dam. Naturally enough, I guess. They'd never seen anything built on that scale before. And when the shock hit, Byram Tanner and I were up here with the theodolite, and my husband Jake was right about down there at the foot of the dam with two other men and the leps. Up here it knocked me off my feet. Down there they didn't have a chance. We never even found any of their bodies."

  She shook her head and smiled at me. It wasn't a happy smile. "So," she said, "now you know how we lost our hydroelectric power, and why the leps aren't too crazy about me anymore. Eight of them got killed along with Jake. Third- and fourth-instar adults, you see. And that's not counting the ones that died in their home territory when the other fault let go a little later and their nests were flooded. So that's how I happened to become a widow lady and Public Enemy Number One for the leps, all on that same one, really lousy day."

  11

  THERE is no further need to discuss Theophansperlie at this time. There are other matters that need clarification.

  Funny, I had an idea you'd say that. Y
ou people have a kind of a guilty conscience about Theophan, don't you?

  That is inaccurate, but let us turn to the other questions. First: It is understood that the purpose of the "dam" that caused such great harm was to cause water to flow through its associated machines in order to produce "electricity."

  That's right. What don't you understand?

  What is not understood is why this was necessary. Why did the humans on Pava not derive their energy from this "antimatter" that you humans employ in other circumstances, instead of building this large and dangerous structure? That is the first question. The second question is more fundamental. Why do humans desire this "electricity" so much in the first place?

  Look, point one: Just forget about the idea of using antimatter on Pava. It's impossible. Talk about danger, you just don't have any idea how dangerous that would be. If even the tiniest particle of antimatter got loose on the planet's surface it could cause an explosion that would make your lousy little dam-burst look like a goober's sneeze. It could conceivably kill off everything anywhere near it, yourselves included.

  If you want to know why we want all this electricity—well, hell, that's just another of the differences between you and us, isn't it? You don't care to have electrical energy because you don't have the kind of machine civilization that requires it. It's not your nature. But it definitely is ours. We're a high-technology species. Electricity is pretty much the basis for civilization, as we see it. If we don't have electricity we can't run our vidscreens or our communicators or any of the other things that improve our lives. Before you knew it we'd be back to living in sod huts and cooking our food over campfires like our primitive ancestors again. Almost like you people, do you see?