I didn't have that chance anyway. I couldn't punch Rannulf Enderman's lights out. I couldn't get back to the Moon in time to make things right with Alma. I couldn't get back to the Moon at all, in fact, until Garold Tscharka, or some other ship's captain, decided to start going that way in a ship that would give me passage. I couldn't do any of the things that I really wanted to do, and that was pretty frustrating. It made me mad.
I didn't stay mad, though. By the time I got to the breakfast tables the next morning, still achy but functioning, I had pushed all the things I couldn't do to the back of my mind, so I could concentrate on what I could do. Give me credit for that. I had made up my mind to quit wasting time on frustrations and concentrate on problems that, maybe, I could have some hope of doing something about. Real problems. Pava's problems. I guess you could even say that I had talked myself into being almost a little obsessive about it.
Theophan was eating a little green melon and talking to someone I faintly recognized—he had come in on Corsair with me, I was pretty sure. I didn't bother with him. I sat down on the other side of Theophan and started right in with what was on my mind. "I've got a question. If you need all those instruments for your work, why don't you get the factory orbiter to make them for you?"
She turned away from the other guy to give me a perplexed and faintly hostile look. "Didn't you ever hear of 'good morning'?" she asked. "And why did you go off without checking with me yesterday?"
"I got ordered to do a different job," I said, stretching the truth a little.
"Well, I needed you to help me on my job, Barry. I had a hard day's work yesterday up in the hills. Since you weren't around I had to ask Marcus to help me." The man beside her leaned forward with a small smile, as though to acknowledge the introduction.
I remembered the rest of his name: Marcus Wendt. He was bigger than I, but he was looking frail; I judged Theophan had worked him out pretty hard. "Sorry about that," I said. "What I'd like to know—"
She didn't let me finish. "So how about helping me out today?" she asked.
"Today? You want me to come out with you today? Why not Marcus?"
She was shaking her head. "Oh, no, Barry, that's out of the question. I can't ask Marcus to do that again. Can't you see he's in pain? He pulled a muscle yesterday; he's not as strong as you, Barry. Will you pick me up at my place?"
I looked Marcus over without seeing any great sign of injury, but it wasn't really my business to diagnose him. Anyway, I remembered what I was supposed to do. "I ought to go to see the doctor this morning, Theo."
"Really?" She frowned, then decided to make the best of it. "Well, how long can that take? It won't hurt if we leave a little late. So, fine, we'll work it out that way, and I'll tell Jimmy Queng you'll be going out with me so he won't put you on something else."
I didn't see any reason to argue. "All right," I said. "What about what I asked you? The factory's supposed to be able to make anything at all; why don't you have it make what you need?"
Marcus was listening in, and he gave a superior little chuckle. "Don't you think Theophan would have thought of that? Of course she did. It probably just can't be done."
I ignored him. "Can it?"
She decided to give me a straight answer. "Sure it could, if it had the raw materials to spare—I guess. But it's pushed to the limit already, just replacing the things that are needed for survival."
"There must be all the raw materials you'd need right here on Pava. It's a whole damn planet."
"But we don't have a factory down here, do we?"
"No," I said, "we don't, and that's something else I don't understand. Why haven't you people built one?"
Marcus was snickering again. He was getting harder to ignore. Theophan gave him a warning look. "Look, Barry, I know you're trying to be helpful, but you just haven't grasped the situation here. We don't have enough power to keep what we've got going, much less get into building a whole damn industrial base. You saw what happened to the dam."
"All right, then maybe the first thing we have to do is to generate more electricity. Maybe we should build a new dam in a better place?"
She shook her head impatiently. "You're really all fired up this morning, aren't you? Look, I can't talk about all this right now. Marcus is pretty well crippled up and I'd better help him back to his room. Anyway, I'm not the one in charge of that sort of thing. You want to go see Byram Tanner—see, over there? The dark-haired man with the beard? He's the power-generation expert."
So I picked up my plate and set it down at an empty place by this Byram Tanner. We shook hands when I introduced myself, and I got right to the point with him, too. "Theophan says the reason you can't build an automated factory, like the orbiter, down here on the surface is that you don't have enough power. Is that right?"
He looked surprised, but he took the question seriously. He thought for a moment. "Well, that's one of the reasons. Losing the hydroelectric plant really set us back, and we aren't really getting much of a net gain of energy from harvesting and burning biomass."
"Right. So I don't see why you're burning biomass for power in the first place," I said. "Has anybody looked to see if there's any coal around?"
Tanner gave me the same sort of faintly hostile look I'd got from Theophan—not unlike, I suppose, the look I would have given any stranger on the Moon who had started a conversation by asking me why we didn't shoot the antimatter direct to the spaceships without bothering with catchers. He didn't tell me to buzz off, though. He reflected for another moment before he answered. "There's supposed to be lignite deposits somewhere in the hills, yes. You know, brown coal? But nobody's ever bothered to try to develop it. Lignite doesn't have much more heat content than biomass, and it'd be a lot harder to dig out and transport. When they cut wood and brush they just float it down the river to the plant. To get the lignite out you'd need to have roads and trucks and all that sort of stuff. Why do you ask?"
So I told him why I was asking—as politely and tentatively as I could, because I didn't want to give the impression of the brash newcomer who thinks he's smarter than anyone who's been there, although, of course, I suppose that's pretty much what I was. Tanner was still polite about it. I was surprised to find out that he was one of those rare creatures, an expert who didn't mind dumb questions—and in fact also one of those even rarer ones, a human native Pavan. Tanner had been born right there on the planet, and he knew everything there was to know about it.
The town of Freehold, he admitted, might not have been settled in the best possible place. The original colonists had picked the site in the first place because orbital surveys had looked good. They'd shown that the locale had decent climate and good soil, as well as the river and all its branches, which would be useful for both drinking water and hydropower—though that last part hadn't worked out all that well when the dam broke. Spectroanalysis and surface geology had shown good indications of extractable minerals within a reasonable distance of the proposed site, even traces of surface hydrocarbon seepage.
That startled me. "Hydrocarbons? Are you talking about oil?"
He nodded. "Sure, there's some oil. We've drilled a couple of little wells in the marshlands downriver, but they don't produce much. What did you think we used for lubrication?"
I had never given a thought to what they used for lubrication. Then, when I pointed out that they could burn the oil to make electricity, he agreed. "We could do that, all right, If we had the furnaces and boilers and generators to build an oil-burning power plant. People have talked about it, but we don't have those things. We can't turn off the biomass plant for a year while we convert it to oil; we'd starve. So we can't use those. The generators from the dam are gone; we haven't been able to get new ones from the orbiting factory because it doesn't have enough copper or silver for the coils—the hydroplant we lost pretty well drained it."
He had hit on a subject I knew something about. "Why would the coils have to be pure metal? The lunar photovoltaic belt uses composi
tes."
He looked at me with a little more respect. "That's true, but composites take a lot of energy to manufacture. The orbiter's running pretty close to capacity already." He thought for a minute, then brightened. "Of course, Tscharka brought back all that antimatter fuel. The factory's equipped to use either antimatter or solar power, provided it hasn't scavenged all its antimatter systems for raw materials. We could have plenty of power that way—Although I don't know how we'd hook it up. Nobody on Pava has any experience with antimatter."
"I do," I pointed out.
"Well, hell," he said, almost getting excited, "that's true. You do, don't you? You should be able to make the conversion. Maybe we could really do it!" He thought for a minute, then grinned sheepishly. He had got carried away. There was still the raw material problem, he told me. Not just for making the current-carrying cables and coils. For a building to house the generators. For the structural parts of the generators themselves. And even if they did get an oil-burning plant built and working, they'd have to get the fuel to the plant. Meaning they'd need to build a fleet of boats to carry the oil upriver—or a pipeline, maybe, though the wells weren't likely to produce enough to fill a pipeline, and then there was the problem of keeping a forty-kilometer pipeline intact in an earthquake region—
By the time we finished breakfast I thought I had Byram Tanner pretty well pegged. Every suggestion I made to him produced a first-rate explanation of why it wouldn't work.
He struck me as a perfect example of a native Pavan. He seemed to be a decent fellow, but he had an endless supply of reasons why nothing could be done.
You know, there's a funny thing there. Listening to myself now I wonder why I was so judgmental of Byram Tanner and the Pavan colonists in general. Not just judgmental, even. Maybe what you could call, well, actually almost racist. Tanner didn't deserve that. Tanner was really a good man, doing his best to do a damn near impossible job. Maybe the Pavans in general didn't deserve that kind of contempt, either . . . though I'm nowhere near as sure of that.
Maybe I was beginning to get some of those mood swings already? I don't know. All the same, right after breakfast I headed for Dr. Billygoat's office. People were beginning to gather for the day's work assignments, and so were a lot of leps—it seemed there were more of them in town almost every day, maybe because they wanted a look at the new human arrivals? I felt I ought to do my part. I wanted to get the visit to the doctor over so I could start doing something productive—even if, this one morning, the most productive thing I could do was to go out again with Theophan Sperlie.
By then I knew my way around Freehold pretty well—not that there was that much to know, in a community of less than a thousand people. I cut through the space between the broken-down meeting hall and the vehicle-repair shed and found the doctor's office without trouble.
Dr. Goethe's office was also his home. He had a whole two-story apartment of his own. His chief medical assistant, who was busy retrieving data from the screen in the front room when I came in, was also his wife, Ann. In fact, they had a one-year-old baby who was snoring bubbles in a crib by her mother's feet while Ann Goethe worked.
Ann put her finger to her lips in the don't-wake-the-baby sign. "Billy?" she whispered. "Oh, no, you can't see Billy right now. He's upstairs in the lab, checking grain samples, and I don't like to bother him there. So unless it's an emergency—? Right, then why don't you come back right after lunch, and I'll tell him you'll be here."
That meant I had to tell Theophan that I wouldn't be going out in the field with her at all today. I thought about skipping the doctor's visit for one more day, but I had the uneasy feeling that I might go on putting it off past the point when it would be purely precautionary any longer. So I went to tell Theophan the news.
When I found her she was sitting on the edge of one of the cleared tables, tapping her heel against the table leg as she waited. There were half a dozen leps a few meters away, whistling softly to each other, and when I told Theophan about my appointment with the doctor she wasn't happy. "Oh, hell, Barry, I wanted to get out there today. Couldn't you take care of your personal stuff after work?"
"I had to take whatever time they gave me," I said.
"For Billygoat? Don't make me laugh. You just let them walk all over you. The trouble is, it makes a problem for me. I need to take these leps along for guides and they'll work better for you than they do for me."
"Sorry about that," I said. She just shook her head. Being annoyed became her, and I wondered why I hadn't taken her up on her pretty clear come-on that first day. (Matter of fact, I still wonder about that, sometimes.)
She thought for a moment. "Well, hell, tomorrow will do, I guess," she said. "I can use a day in my office to work up some of the accumulated data." For that I was not useful, and she left me looking after her as she walked away. She looked good from the back, too.
That left me with a lot of free time. Free time was a no-no for Pava colonists. I thought for a minute about which particular kind of job I should be volunteering for—I heard a power saw in the distance, and of course the repair crews always needed all the help they could get. The little group of leps had moved toward me, eyeing me curiously, and I discovered one of them was speaking to me.
The lep was a female they called Mary Queen of Scots—I don't know why. She was a big, fifth-instar female with a bristle of reddish whiskers around her mouthpart. She humped over toward me with that inchworm stretch-and-retract movement that was the lep method of traveling, and she repeated her question two or three times before I made it out.
What she was saying was, "Does the female destroyer want us to escort you?"
I understood who she was talking about, of course. "Why do you keep on calling Theophan Sperlie a destroyer?" I asked.
The lep twisted her mouthpart—it really did look like a sneer. "We call that person what she is. Answer. Are we to take you?"
"I don't think so. I mean, no, not today; I have to do something else."
That was all the answer she wanted, it appeared. She stretched enough to raise up her head so she could look into my eyes for a moment, but all she said was, "Good-bye." Then she dropped back, twisted her body around in a U-turn and inchwormed away.
"Hey," I called after her. She didn't stop. Most of the other leps followed her, all but one. That one was a fourth-instar male, and he crawled up on the table to study me. He smelled of damp earth and greenery.
"Hello," I said, being polite. "I don't know your name, I'm sorry."
The lep didn't answer, or not in any way that mattered. He made sounds, but they weren't human sounds. That wasn't surprising; there were plenty of leps that didn't speak English, especially not the younger ones. He whistled and blew at me for a while, then he gave up. He slid himself down from the table and inchwormed over to a cart. He wiggled his head into a harness, caught the bit in his mouthpart and started down the street.
Then he paused long enough to twist around and look after me.
I got the idea. He wanted me to follow.
So I followed, and he led me to where a work team was loading foundation bricks onto the carts. I recognized a couple of them—my downstairs neighbors, the Khaim-Novellos, looking as though they hadn't planned on this kind of manual labor on Pava, and the boss of the team, the cheery, chubby Santa Claus chaplain of the interstellar ship Corsair. "Hello, di Hoa, I'm glad to see you," Friar Tuck greeted me. "Nice of you to come and help out. We've got to get all this stuff loaded so the leps can drag it to the new building sites."
You know, that's still the thing that puzzles me most about you leps. I mean why you were so nice to these troublesome human beings who invaded your planet and killed off so many of your food animals and cut down so many of your forests—yes, and even managed to kill some of you in the process. You seemed to put up with a lot from us—well, from everybody but Theophan Sperlie, anyway.
Understand, I'm not saying you should have done anything different. I certainly don't mean that
you should have attacked our camp one night and wiped us out; I know you wouldn't do that. But you were so damn helpful. It was pretty obvious that the human colony on Pava would have been even worse off than it was without your volunteer labor. You did all kinds of work for us, sometimes very hard work, work that needed to be done for the survival of the colony and that there just weren't enough human hands to do. And you did it for no pay . . . well, except now and then some handouts of odds and ends of discards that even the threadbare colony on Pava didn't think were worth saving.
I couldn't figure your motivation out. It didn't occur to me that it might have been mostly pity.
I wouldn't say the Reverend Tuchman was any kind of friend of mine, but I wasn't sorry when we sat down to eat together. I was still thinking about all the things I thought the colony needed to do, and he was as good a person to bounce my ideas off as any.
For someone who hadn't seen Pava for nearly half a century he seemed pretty well informed on what was going on. He told me about the oil wells—pitiful little pumped-out things—and the fact that, yes, there was a sort of lignite mine two or three valleys away in the woods, but no one had bothered to keep it up. He explained to me about the little hydropower plant by the shuttle landing strip, and why its small electrical output couldn't be used for the town of Freehold—it was built to electrolyze hydrogen out of the river water to make shuttle fuel, and especially now, with Corsair's cargo needing to be brought down from orbit, there wasn't any spare power for the town. And then he put the move on me. "I haven't had a chance to ask you, di Hoa, but what's your religious affiliation?"
The only surprise was that he hadn't done it earlier. "I'm more or less Western Orthodox," I said, "at most."
The Voices of Heaven Page 13