The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  Even so, you shouldn't exaggerate their number. Out of more than eight hundred people on Pava, less than a quarter were really Millenarists. Don't be deceived by how many showed up for the rejoicing. Everybody loves a party. You know the old saying, "Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day." Well, you don't know it, really, I suppose, but you get the idea.

  So the Millenarists were nowhere near a majority, really, and the rest of us were a sampling of all kinds of denominations. We had two or three kinds of Muslims, we had a variety of Christians. We had a clutch of about fifteen or eighteen Mormons, for instance—well, you know about them because the Mormons were about the only ones who really tried hard to convert you people to their religion. Of course they didn't succeed.

  Jacky Schottke was the one who told me about that failed mission to the heathen—I guess because he'd tried his own luck at spreading his own Millenarist gospel, back when he was still a red-hot. He told me sadly that with the leps it was a major flop. He said leps had taken very well to human food and human games, and one or two of them had even tried out human liquor . . . but no lep, ever, had shown any interest at all in being converted to any human religion. Not even my little buddy Geronimo, although he struck me as about as fascinated by human ways as any lep I ever heard of—until I met you, anyway.

  Geronimo was the first lep friend I made. I hadn't really expected to see him again after that day in the woods, in spite of what he had said, but the morning after Jubal's memorial service I was stuck on farm duty, running a tractor plow along what was going to be a potato field near the river. Surprise—when I broke for lunch I saw the little lep humping and hustling up from the riverbank toward me.

  "Good morning, Barrydihoa," he said. "Is there candy today?" I'd forgotten all about him and his sweet mouthpart. "I'm sorry, Geronimo. Maybe I can get some tomorrow."

  He weaved his upper body back and forth for a moment in silence, watching me with those huge fly eyes. "It is okay," he said, in that hissy, whispery voice. "I will be at another place today. Good-bye, Barrydihoa." And he stretched and squirmed his way back down to the riverbank. There he scouted around for a moment until he found a good piece of deadwood. He took the chunk in his teeth—well, in whatever he had to grind things with in his mouthpart—to help him stay above water, and flopped into the stream. I watched him paddling with his little hands and wriggling his body as he swam across, holding on to the log for buoyancy. The current was strong there. It carried him a pretty long way downstream, but I saw him wriggle safely out on the far bank. He didn't look back.

  The other farm workers were looking at me with curiosity. "What did he mean about the candy?" one of them asked—Pasquale Scales, it was; I remembered that he and his wife had come out on Corsair with me.

  "I guess leps like candy." (Of course I was wrong about that; "leps" aren't all the same any more than humans are. Geronimo just happened to have acquired the taste.)

  "Well," Pasquale said, "maybe we can help. Rita and I were talking about making some fudge if we could. I don't know what it's going to be like, with goat milk, but if you come by the kitchens tonight you can have some."

  It was a generous offer. I thanked him, and then I told them about meeting Geronimo up in the hills, and how we'd played Frisbee with one of the flying rats. Pasquale thought that sounded like enough fun to try for ourselves, but although we'd seen some of the rats down by the grain patch we had to get back to work.

  I wondered if I could catch one of the creatures for myself. It might be more interesting than playing pinochle with Jacky Schottke. I didn't expect I'd actually be tossing the thing back and forth with Geronimo again, of course. I still didn't really think I'd see him again.

  But the next morning, as I was getting ready to help replace some of the shorings on the meeting hall, there he was.

  "I will work with you today, Barrydihoa," he said. "Is there candy now?"

  I wasn't surprised at leps helping humans; by then I'd got used to the idea. But this was special. I had no idea why Geronimo picked me out. He didn't say, and I couldn't guess. But there I was, all of a sudden, with a new lep friend and a new interest in life.

  I don't want you to think that I'd given up on my plans to fix whatever was wrong with the Pava colony. I kept on bothering everybody I could find with questions. Wherever I worked—the farms, the biomass power plant, even kitchen detail a couple of times when I didn't duck fast enough—I cross-examined everybody who would talk to me. I doubt there was a person in the colony who hadn't heard that I was this new guy who was obsessed on the subject.

  But Geronimo was my sidekick. Almost every day he showed up wherever I was working and worked right along with me—tending Theophan's seismological stuff when Marcus Wendt was having one of his feeling-poorly days, repairing buildings, clearing roadways after a storm—whatever I had to do, he helped. Or, if that particular task was beyond his physical powers, at least he kept me company.

  When he began humping up the steps to Jacky Schottke's apartment with me after work, I wasn't sure Jacky would be happy about having him there. I mean, that grassy, earthy lep smell could get pretty strong in an enclosed space, and the place was Jacky's apartment before it was mine. Actually Jacky was delighted. He'd talked to any number of leps before, of course—that was one of the things he did as an ethnologist—but seldom, he said, one as willing to spend time conversing with a human being as my Geronimo. A third-instar lep doesn't know as much as a senior, but Geronimo easily remembered things some of the more mature ones forgot—what it was like to be second instar, for instance, basking in the sun for warmth and toddling around in a fumbling search for edible roots and fruits and the slower, softer, least aggressive bugs.

  "The leps," Jacky lectured me one night after Geronimo had crept away home, "along with the goobers and the black crawlers, are a trophic species—"

  "The what?"

  "The goobers and the crawlers. You must have seen them in the woods. No? Well, they look like leps, but they're not intelligent. Anyway, they all eat the same things in the food chain, and I'm pretty sure they're eaten by the same predators—or were, before we wiped out most of the predators in this area. So they're a trophic species. The hard part of figuring out their relationships is that the adult leps don't eat what the young ones do, but Geronimo seems to remember every bite he ever took."

  And was willing to answer all of Jacky's questions about them, too, up to a point . . . although when the questioning stretched out too long Geronimo might rear back and give him a frosty look and screech, "Play cards?"

  That was the other thing Geronimo liked a lot. He liked to play games. He was willing to play indoors when it was dark or raining—he didn't mind being out in the rain, but I did—and he was quick to learn pinochle. He learned it well enough to beat Jacky and me a fair bit of the time.

  He loved the vid games, too, although we didn't let him play them often. It was a drain on Schottke's computer time, and besides, Geronimo would get so wrapped up in piloting his simulated aircraft from simulated Seattle to simulated Singapore (I wondered what he made of the simulated Earthly geography along the way) that he wasn't answering any questions at all. He even tried baseball a time or two, when we could get up a scratch team. He managed surprisingly well with the bat but he couldn't really cover the outfield.

  Geronimo made a big difference for me in my new life on Pava.

  I didn't have that many friends in the colony. Geronimo was a welcome addition to the list—if "friend" is the right word for what Geronimo was to me. Maybe it was more like owning a particularly smart, loyal, affectionate pet . . . although it wasn't always clear to me which was the pet and which the owner.

  As it happened, we had plenty of time for indoor games around then. The weather changed. For a while we were pretty much housebound as Freehold was hit by a nasty three-day storm, wave after wave of thunder-boomers with spectacular lightning displays, high winds and pelting rain. Jacky Schottke and I took turns running to the kitchens t
o bring food back to the apartment, and the outside work of the community had to be done in two-hour snatches between waves. I used the time to work the apartment's screen to catch up on some of the colony's history and technology—not being very impressed with what I found—and to get my notions about bringing it up to speed into some coherent order. The first step, surely, was to get the factory orbiter fueled from Tscharka's antimatter store; after that I was less clear. But no less impatient.

  When the clouds moved out toward the coast and Delta Pavonis beamed again, there was a lot of accumulated work to deal with, I found out that there were some jobs Geronimo didn't care to share with me when Jimmy Queng tagged me for butcher detail. Geronimo was standing right beside me at the morning show-up when I got the call, but by the time I was halfway to the little meadow where Freehold's herd of free-ranging goats grazed he wasn't there anymore. He was sloping off, as fast as he could slither, in the direction of the hills.

  Friar Tuck had drawn the same detail and was just behind me. When he saw where I was looking he gave me a consoling smile. "Leps don't like to kill things," he said.

  "I'm not crazy about it myself," I told him.

  He said mildly, "You eat the meat, though." That was a point for him, all right. When we had stripped to the waist and begun to get into the actual nasty business of slitting throats and spilling out the guts from the body cavities of the animals, I gave serious if brief thought to becoming a vegetarian. The reverend did not appear to have any such thoughts. He waded right in, regardless of struggling animals, bad smells or gore. I suppose that when death is your dearest ambition a little extra slaughter doesn't matter much, one way or the other.

  By the time we had six carcasses skinned and cleaned and cut into quarters Dabney Albright had joined us in his boat, pissing and moaning because he'd had so much trouble dodging floating debris on the way up. All the rivers had risen after the storms, and our little local stream was yellow with mud and full of storm-downed branches and even fair-sized trees.

  "At least it makes it easier for the woodcutters," Tuchman said jovially as we began loading the meat into the boat. The man was determined to be cheerful about everything. He had good ideas, though; when we had all the carcasses loaded and Albright was already pushing off for the downstream run, Tuchman was the first one to get out of his clothes and into the water to get the blood off.

  Although the water was cold, Delta Pavonis was hot. It seemed that Millenarists didn't suffer much from nudity taboos, and when we were reasonably clean Tuchman sprawled naked on the riverbank for a while, unconcerned with his great, pale, bare body, gazing benignly at the rest of us. One of the others, a young dark-skinned man named Phil Pass, threw a stick into the stream and said, "You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to put some trout in these rivers."

  "You know we can't do that," Tuchman reminded him. Well, we all did know that. The colonists were strict about releasing the kinds of Earthly organisms that might go explosively feral in the Pavan environment; there had been too many Hawaiis and Australias in human history to make that particular mistake again. Even our free-ranging goats were all female—fertilized by sperm collected from the few closely guarded males that were allowed to grow to maturity—and kept tightly fenced in until they delivered. But Tuchman wasn't finished. He was gazing at me as he said, "There are a lot of things we'd like to do, but can't."

  I took that to be a challenge. "On the other hand," I said, "there are a lot of things that we can do, and should. Like getting some use out of all that antimatter Tscharka brought."

  "You're so concerned with worldly things," he said gently.

  "Maybe you and Tscharka aren't concerned enough. Where's he been, anyway?"

  "Shuttling cargo down from Corsair, of course."

  "Well, what's going to happen when that's finished? We're not all Millenarists, you know."

  "I do know that," he said earnestly, "and I sorrow for that fact every day of my life." He stood up and began getting dressed. "No," he said, "we're not all Millenarists, but what we are is a democracy. It isn't up to you to decide what the colony does with its resources, my friend Barry. It's up to the colony as a whole, and I have no doubt that that decision will be made in good time. Now I think we should start back to see what else needs doing."

  Before dinner I decided on a social call. I hadn't seen Madeleine Hartly for several days, and I liked the woman. Her house was a one-flat at the opposite end of town from Jacky Schottke and me. I found it without trouble, but when I knocked on the door a tall, skinny young woman answered. She had a big spoon in her hand and I could smell cooking as she shook her head at me. "No, you can't see Gram right now. This weather hasn't been good for her. She's not feeling too well right now."

  I asked her to please tell Madeleine that I'd stopped by and that I hoped she'd be better soon—the things you say when someone's sick. It seemed to me that she'd have to be pretty ill to have someone cooking for her in her own kitchen, and I didn't like that idea. I hadn't thought of Madeleine ever being sick. She was old; I knew that. But the way she'd loped up and down the hillside to gather fruit hadn't suggested an invalid.

  On the way to the mess tables I strolled along the riverbank, enjoying the warm dusk. You could hear the river that night; it was still all yellow with mud brought down from the storm. Bits and pieces of vegetation were floating in it, and Pavans were out walking like myself.

  Halfway there I heard someone calling my name, and it was Theophan. "Listen," she said when she caught up to me, "are you doing anything important tomorrow?"

  I looked around for Marcus Wendt, but she was alone. "Whatever they tell me to do, I guess."

  "Well, this damp is bad for Marcus's shoulder, and I need to get some stuff up to the Rockies in the morning. Want to give me a hand?"

  I promised. I thought for a moment that she might suggest joining her at the meal, but she didn't; she nodded thanks and turned around and left.

  Oddly, Geronimo wasn't with us when Theophan and I met the next morning. That wasn't a total surprise, because there were days when the lep had business of his own, whatever that business was, and never showed up. But I thought I'd seen him out my window, and yet when I came down he wasn't there.

  He wasn't waiting at the car, either, though two other leps were. I didn't give it much of a thought, because I was looking forward to seeing the Rockies close up. Theophan wouldn't even try to do that particular jaunt when it was raining—it was going to be hard enough getting up those hills in dry weather, she promised; if it was raining we'd never make it. So I hadn't been west of the river at all.

  I almost wasn't that day, either, because after we'd taken the long detour upriver to the only place where it could be forded, Theophan stopped the car and got out to stare at the water. It wasn't inviting. The river was several hundred meters broad at that point and obviously flowing fast. "It's still pretty high," she fretted. "What do you think, Barry?"

  I knew my opinion wasn't worth much—what did I know about fording rivers on Pava?—but I didn't want to turn back again. "I think we can make it if we go slow," I said wisely. Theophan knew how little my opinion was worth as well as I did, but I had said what she wanted to hear. She made all the leps get out of the car and gave me a rope; I led them across, each one of them hanging gamely by its mouth-part to the rope and slithering and sliding around in the flow.

  It wasn't any fun for me, either, though my only real personal problems were just the coldness of the water and the necessity for taking care in where I placed my feet. It was a good deal harder for the leps. Their bodies wanted to float. Try as they would, they couldn't keep enough of themselves below water to anchor themselves on the bottom. But we made it safely, and then it was Theophan's turn to drive the car after us.

  That was tricky. There was a minute or two when I could see it beginning to slide, but she jammed on the speed and got clear.

  When she finally crawled out onto the west bank I breathed easier—and, from the str
ained look on her face as she grinned at me, so did she.

  We dried off quickly enough in the warm air as we drove back down along the river. There weren't many new sights for me to see yet. There was only one real difference between the two banks of the river and that was man-made. The colony's farm plots were scattered all along the east bank. There weren't any farms on the west—I thought—and then I began to notice that the occasional leps who raised their heads to stare at us as we passed were usually in the middle of patches of yellowish flowering plants or red-berried green ones.

  That suggested something very close to agriculture to me. When I asked Theophan about them she nodded.

  "Beans and berry roots, that's what they eat. They cultivate them, all right. I don't know if you'd call it real farming, though. They don't have to work very hard at it, because all they do is fling seeds into the ground and come back to collect their crops a few months later."

  She looked over her shoulder at our lep assistants, whistling and snorting interestedly among themselves in the back of the car, and then added, "Now and then we've tried to show the leps how they could increase their productivity—selecting the best strains, fertilizing, and so on—but they just didn't seem to be interested in the idea. Now, with their population explosion, they may begin to pay attention."

  That rang a bell. "Somebody else said something about a lep population explosion," I mentioned.

  "Sure. They're hardly ever eaten by predators anymore. I'd guess there are twice as many leps around this colony now as there were when the first ship arrived," she said with satisfaction. "So they really have something to thank us for, don't they? Only they don't act that way."

  "Well, but they do," I objected. "Look at the way Geronimo works with me, and he's not the only one. I mean, they're always helping out, aren't they? Seems to me that's pretty decent of them." She shrugged. She didn't look at me; we had turned west into the hills and she was concentrating on peering ahead at the rutty track we were following. I persisted. "Wouldn't you call that gratitude?"