The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  I know what I'm talking about here, because in the first week or two after I arrived on Pava I got a chance to appreciate what a difference technology makes. There were so many things that Pava didn't have! We didn't have air-conditioning! For someone who'd been living in the totally, permanently climate-regulated conditions of the Moon for a large part of his adult life, that was a major shock. I had never found myself sweating before—at least, not outside of the stress gym. Or maybe the bed.

  That was only the beginning. We didn't have automatic doors here. We didn't have sensors to turn the lights on and off for us. We didn't even have protected data storage, and that was a real surprise for me—I'd never heard of a storage system where you could lose some of your records when there was a power glitch.

  Of course, I'd never heard of power glitches before, either.

  I've already mentioned that we didn't have flush toilets, and I think that was the biggest single thing that took the fun out of the adventure for most of the new colonists who had come to Pava on Corsair with me. But when I happened to say something about that to Jack Schottke one night he took quick offense. "My God, Barry," he said, looking seriously insulted, "how spoiled are you, exactly? Don't I keep our outhouse clean enough for you?"

  I saw that I had hurt his feelings. It wasn't true, either—the outhouse was neat as a pin, and when the lid was down on the seat it hardly even smelled bad. I said, "No, of course not, nothing like that. It's just that it's a pretty unsanitary way to do things, isn't it?"

  "No such thing! You people from back home have a lot of wrong ideas. It's your flush toilets that are the ones that are unsanitary. Those things are disgusting. Think about it! You crap into a bowl, then you flush it away with water, and what happens to that filthy water? It goes into a collection pond somewhere, and it's so stinking and foul that it has to be treated with chemicals to try to kill off the stench and the germs. Then the effluent has to be discharged into something after the treatment is over, and what it's usually discharged into is a river or a lake. Then what happens to it? I'll tell you! Then somebody else farther down the stream pumps it out again and drinks it!"

  "Well, by then it's safe," I said—not liking the way he put things; on the Moon, recycled water is the only water we ever get.

  "Safe," he said, looking as though "safe" were a dirty word. "Safe isn't the same as good, is it? Maybe you're willing to drink somebody else's reprocessed piss, but I'm not. What we do here is we just dig a hole in the ground and use it until it's pretty full, then we cover it over and dig a new one next to it. The stuff is never seen again, it just gradually becomes part of the soil. Environmentally, what could be more sound?"

  "Well, but doesn't it seep into the underground water?"

  "What difference would that make? We don't drink well water, do we? No, we get it from a stream, way upstream, where it's perfectly pure. Take my word for it. Our system is fine. This place is as sanitary as any community on Earth. We have no infectious diseases to speak of here, and if you doubt me, just go over and ask Billygoat to show you his records."

  "Billygoat?"

  "Bill Goethe. The doctor."

  "Oh, yeah, the doctor," I said, remembering—remembering a little bit late, to be sure, because it had been over a week since the doctor had told me to make an appointment. But remembering. And deciding that I'd have to take care of that particular chore real soon, the next morning in fact, because seeing this Doctor Billygoat wasn't really anything I could afford to put off forever.

  When I woke up the next morning, though, I was feeling so good I wondered if I really needed to bother to talk to the doctor at all.

  It wasn't just the physical kind of good. True, by then my muscles had stopped aching all the time—now it was just some of the time—and I didn't get out of breath in the first ten minutes of a hill climb anymore. That was all part of the feeling-goodness. But there was something else that went with it.

  Surprisingly, I discovered that I was feeling good about being on Pava. I could see the distant glimmering of a possible purpose in being there.

  It almost made me think that maybe I wouldn't take the next ship back after all, and when Schottke came bustling over to me at the breakfast table, our little tiff in the apartment forgotten, he had a receptive audience. "Barry," he said, eagerness and excitement all over him, "Jimmy Queng's getting together a search party; we need to take a launch downstream to pick up some stuff that was dropped from the factory. They're going to let me go along to collect a few specimens—want to join us?"

  I forgot all about seeing Dr. Billygoat that morning. I said, "Sure."

  You see, I like to work. I guess that's a human trait, too. I like to have the challenge of facing something that's hard to do, and the confidence that, if I work hard enough at it, no matter what unexpected complications turn up, I can probably get it done. And I'd never faced a tougher challenge than the planet of Pava. As long as I was there, I was going to do my best to help. I figured they needed that because, as far as I could see, there were a lot of things that they needed to have done, and maybe even more things they were doing wrong—especially by relying on the orbital factory and shipments from Earth for just about everything they needed.

  I was an expert on the subject of what Pava needed by then, of course. I'd been on the planet nearly ten days.

  Still, you didn't have to be much of an expert, really, to see that they couldn't rely forever on what slim handouts distant Earth was disposed to send their way. Sooner or later Pava would have to fend for itself. That meant it would have to be able to build everything it needed, in all the many varieties of all those many things, and it would have to build them out of local resources.

  I didn't think the orbiting factory was a good answer to the problem, but I realized it probably would be useful for me to try to learn more about it. A nice long boat ride sounded like a good occasion to ask questions, so I let Jacky hustle me through breakfast—"It's a long trip," he kept saying, "and we have to get an early start"—and as soon as the scavenger party's car rolled up I swallowed the last of my food and climbed in.

  When the man at the wheel shook my hand I realized I had met him before. He was Lou Baxto, the tall, pale guy with the scraggly pale mustache who had come out to meet the shuttle. What's more, two of the other people in the car were our downstairs neighbors, the Khaim-Novellos. The only stranger was a little man who looked like an old Irish jockey, whose name was Dabney Albright. As Baxto started the car away, all of us busy shaking hands and saying hello, I thought I heard my name called. When I looked up, there was Theophan gesturing to me from outside. She looked annoyed. But it was too late to worry about whatever it was she wanted, so I waved back and turned away and settled myself in for the bumpy run down to the river.

  I could see why we had to get an early start. It was a good long trip, first in the car all the way back to the shuttle landing strip (now empty; the shuttle was busy going back and forth to unload Corsair's cargo from orbit), and then boarding a kind of clumsy open-decked launch to take the river another dozen kilometers downstream. I had plenty of time to ask questions about the factory, and Baxto was willing enough to answer them.

  The orbital factory had been shipped from Earth as a self-propelled vessel long before he was born, he said. It was a neatly designed (if probably by now fairly old-fashioned) piece of equipment. It was still working, and he had no doubt that it would go on working for a good long time, as long as it was supplied with raw materials and power.

  But, he admitted, the orbital factory did have its problems. The worst of them was simply that the thing was, after all, in orbit. Everything it manufactured for the colony had to be paradropped or shuttled down to the surface, and that was an expensive procedure. If they used the shuttle they had to provide it with hydrogen fuel, which had to be made on the surface—Baxto pointed out the electrolysis plant that made the fuel from river water just by the landing strip. (The plant was powered by waterpower from turbines in the r
iver, and it was so small and inconspicuous I'd taken it for some kind of storage shed.)

  The parafoils were better, but they had their problems, too. The factory made them as needed (the foils themselves became useful structural materials when they were collected) and they didn't require any fuel, but the damn things were hard to control. They were likely to land anywhere within a forty-kilometer radius of Freehold, and sometimes they couldn't be found at all.

  "That," Baxto said, "is where we come in. The leps have found a capsule that fell way outside the drop zone, and we're going to retrieve it."

  "All of us?" I asked, looking around. We were in the boat by then. The little jockey type, Dabney Albright, was steering and Baxto was sitting in the bow with me. Behind us Jacky was talking consolingly to our downstairs neighbors, who were huddled together and looking dismayed; they were still holding hands, but that joyous flush of anticipated wonderful adventure was gone from their faces.

  "Hell, man," Baxto said, "those capsules weigh seven or eight tons each, and Schottke's not going to be much help with heavy lifting, is he? If we can salvage the whole thing that means each one of us is going to have to shift better than a ton from the drop to the boat, and again from the boat to the car when we get back. Want to try it by yourself sometime?"

  I could see what he meant, and the morning didn't look like such a peaceful walk in the sun anymore. I persisted. "All right, but what about the other thing? You said there were other problems with the factory."

  He looked annoyed, but he answered. The big problems with the factory were energy and raw materials. Energy came mostly from photovoltaics, though he was hopeful that if we could juice it up with additional power from some of Captain Tscharka's antimatter it could do better. The raw-material question was the tough one.

  For instance, just to make the parafoils the factory needed high-strength carbon filaments, and for that the factory needed some kind of a source of carbon to process. It also needed all the other raw materials that its smelter and refiners would turn into whatever the people of Pava wanted made, and where were all those raw materials going to come from? It would be terribly uneconomic to try to shuttle them up from the surface. There was, he admitted, one obvious source. There were plenty of useful minerals aloft in Delta Pavonis's skimpy asteroid belt, but the Pavans didn't have the space tugs to bring those megaton-mass objects to Pava orbit.

  "Right," I said, remembering what Captain Tscharka had told me long before. "That's what you built those short-range tugs for."

  He gave me a dubious look. "The what?" And when I explained what Tscharka had said, he scowled. "Garold gets carried away sometimes," he said. "Did you see any space tugs in orbit when you came in? Well, there aren't any."

  I mulled that over. Tscharka hadn't seemed to me like the kind of man who got carried away, but there didn't seem to be any point in arguing it. "So what do you do for raw materials, then?" I asked, and Baxto shrugged.

  They did the best they could. Even some pretty crazy things. They'd actually once taken the radical step of hijacking one of the interstellar ships to strip it down and convert it into raw materials, because they needed its metals more than they needed the ship. That worked fine for a while, but even the materials in the structure of a giant interstellar spaceship didn't last forever.

  I chewed that over, and for a while we didn't talk. I was watching the scenery along the riverbanks as we cruised, but I was also wondering if maybe Baxto was thinking that it was about time to hijack another spaceship—say, Captain Tscharka's Corsair—and what Tscharka might think of that if the question came up.

  That was kind of an amusing thought. Thinking about what Captain Tscharka might say if anybody proposed it seriously kept me entertained until I noticed that Dabney Albright had slowed the launch and we were heading into shore. Then we all stood up while he ran the launch up onto the bank and jumped out to drag it far enough out of the water so the current wouldn't pull it away.

  A lep was waiting for us there on the bank. Its forepart was elevated so its bug eyes could look us over.

  Baxto greeted the lep and introduced us. "This is Simon Bolivar," he said. "He'll lead us to the capsule."

  I was standing right next to the thing. I sort of half extended my hand, so it was there to be available in case handshaking was a custom with you leps, or to be ignored if not. Simon Bolivar ignored it.

  "I expected you earlier," he shrilled. "Come. I will show you where the object is."

  The good part was that it wasn't far from the river; as we pushed through the brush toward it I was counting every step, thinking about how much work it was going to be to hand-carry seven or eight tons back to the launch. The bad part was that, when we did reach it, it was a mess. It had hit hard, the capsule had split open on impact, and it had rained.

  Baxto and Albright were swearing to each other as they looked it over. Unfortunately a lot of that batch of material had been programmable chips, and they were ruined. "Tough break, but we'll salvage what we can," Baxto said finally. "Leave the spoiled chips here, but we want everything else."

  "Even the capsule itself, Mr. Baxto?" Jubal Khaim-Novello ventured.

  "Especially the damn capsule. That's good building material, isn't it? So if we want to get home by dark, let's start taking it apart."

  If I had been in any doubt about the troubles with Pava's supply system, the next five or six hours of backbreaking labor convinced me. The system sucked. First there was the job of cutting the shell of the capsule into ragged hunks about the size of a wheelbarrow. Then there was picking up the containers of other kinds of goods that might, Baxto thought, still be worth salvaging and hauling them down to the launch. Then there was trying to carry or drag those wheelbarrow-sized, jagged-edged hunks of shell and lifting surface through those clustered vines and bushes, two or three of us sweating over each one. We didn't have real wheelbarrows, but then we couldn't have got real wheelbarrows through the brush anyway.

  All those good physical feelings I'd woken up with that morning were gone long before we took our first break. I have never been more tired. I flung myself down and didn't even look up until Jacky Schottke came over with a cup of water for me.

  He beamed down at me expectantly while I raised the cup to my lips. It tasted funny, quite sweet, and almost fruity. "What are you giving me?" I demanded.

  "It's sap," he said proudly, showing me a thing like a beer-keg spigot. "It comes from the water tree over there—see it? With the purple fronds? If you're ever caught out in the woods without anything to drink, you just punch into one of those and you'll get all the water you want."

  "All I want is to go home," I told him, but I did sit up straighter and finish the drink. Because of his age Jacky had been exempted from most of the lifting and hauling, so he'd been off in the woods with the lep, collecting biological samples for his taxonomy work. It was light labor, and he seemed fresh and eager to get on with it. I almost envied him. The lep, Simon Bolivar, was an old friend of his, he told me; they had been out on foraging trips many times before, and this time the lep had led him to a brand-new variety of edible root.

  "Now," Jacky said eagerly, "I can start a new trophic tree. I'll have to see what organisms eat this root; then I can match it against the other systems, and with a little luck I'll be able to—hey," he said, stopping in the middle of a thought. "What was that?"

  I'd heard it to, a female scream from the brush. When I looked around I saw that Becky Khaim-Novello was missing—gone off, I assumed, to answer a call of nature in private. She wasn't gone long, though. She came blundering through the bushes, holding up her slacks, and yelling for her husband. When he had caught her in his arms she blubbered, "Dear heaven, Jubal, has anyone got a gun? There's the biggest damn bug you ever saw out there! It was eating some other kind of animal, and I thought it was going to come after me!"

  That got me on my feet. Lou Baxto gave her a disgusted look. "You're too big and tough for it to bother chasing," he said, "unless
it was really starving, maybe. It was probably just a killer ant. It won't come near us—there are too many of us here."

  I turned to Jacky Schottke, who was looking apologetic. "They do look a little frightening," he admitted. "They're more than a meter long, the full-grown ones."

  "Maybe we ought to put out some poison bait down here," Dabney Albright said.

  Jacky looked shocked at the idea. "Oh, why would we have to do that, Dabney? They hardly ever attack an adult human being—well, they can, but small children mostly. There aren't any children here, and we've already poisoned the ants all out anywhere near Freehold."

  Lou Baxto took over. "Can we hold the debate until we're back home?" he asked reasonably. "Break's over; let's get some of this stuff on the launch."

  And so we did—for another four or five hours; during which I kept my eyes open for anything that looked like it might be a killer ant.

  None showed up. We finally got everything salvageable salvaged, but we didn't make it back to Freehold before dark. By the time we got there I was aching and tired and the last of that morning's good feelings were all used up.

  It was a very lucky thing for Rannulf Enderman that he wasn't where I could get my hands on him that night.

  12

  THIS is not understood. This concept of doing purposeful harm to another is not comprehensible.

  Oh, now what? Are you talking about what I said about Rannulf Enderman? You shouldn't take that kind of offhand remark so seriously. It's just something we say when we get mad. I wouldn't really have done anything fatal to the son of a bitch, you know.

  No, this is not known. It is well established that other humans have in fact taken the lives of their conspecifics.

  Well, sure, others have; that's one of the things about us humans. Sometimes people kill other people. I don't like it any more than you do, but it's a fact of life. But I haven't done that, even at my very craziest, and I'm not crazy now. I don't think I actually could—not even with Enderman, although I have to admit I would certainly have been capable of beating the pee out of him if I had the chance.