The Voices of Heaven

by Frederik Pohl

  He reared back to stare at me, the rat clutched in one little hand. "Have you done something improper?" he asked.

  "Of course I have. I've been giving you a hard time, and I had no right do that—especially after you took us to your nests. That was kind of you. I hope I didn't disappoint you."

  "No person was disappointed."

  "Well, I hope not. I'd like to go back again sometime, and anyway I shouldn't have been on your case the last few days. You didn't deserve it. I was just in a hell of a foul mood."

  "I do not understand 'hell of a foul mood,' Barrydihoa,"

  "Well—mean-tempered, don't you know? I mean, acting as though I just couldn't stand having you around. The same way you people treat Theophan."

  He worked his mouthpart thoughtfully, as though chewing that over. At last he declared, "The cases are not the same. The reason we do not wish friendship with Theophansperlie is not because of 'hell of a foul mood.' It is because Theophansperlie was implicated in causing death to some and injury to many, even serious injury, as with Merlin."

  I was all set to tell him all over again that nothing that Theophan did could actually cause earthquakes, but the last thing he said sidetracked me, "What do you mean, with Merlin?"

  "You saw Merlin for yourself, did you not? His injuries were quite serious and long-lasting. He was unfortunate enough to be in transition state when the quake came, causing the floods. Merlin was not then ready to emerge. He should have remained in his cocoon for days more; but the floods made that impossible since he would have drowned. He had to be opened untimely and so did not have sufficient cocooning to complete his metamorphosis to the fifth instar."

  "I didn't know," I said humbly—humility was big with me just then. I tried to make him understand. "All right. That's a pity. One person got hurt—"

  "It was not one person only. Others were also harmed, some even more severely. Some died." He raised himself up, his great blotchy eyes peering into mine. "I name Merlin in particular because Merlin is my mentor. He taught me to speak your language and much else. I value Merlin very much."

  "Oh," I said, and didn't know what to say after that. It had never occurred to me that there were special relationships among leps; if I had thought about it at all, which I don't suppose I ever had, I guess I would have thought that leps were all interchangeable units, like potato bugs in a field. I settled for, "Well, I'm sorry about that, but you're still all wet about Theophan,"

  "I do not understand 'all wet,' either. Barrydihoa? This game cannot continue, as I observe this flying rat has died through overuse. Can we not therefore go inside and play cards now?"

  We didn't do that, though, in spite of the fact that after a moment he remembered to add, "Please." I was too restless to sit at a card table. I wanted action. I was hyper as hell.

  I realize now that I was going into a different part of the manic phase. My mind was going all the time, churning up lists of things that really ought to be done, and I had this burning urge to see them accomplished. All the solutions to all the problems were suddenly crystal-clear to me.

  If I'd been thinking clearly I would have known what was going on. I should have remembered that I'd had precisely that same churning, driving, hurry-up feeling before, way back on Earth when I first got sick.

  Matthew was tiny then, but his arrival had been the one small straw that had made our old apartment too small. Even with the baby, Gina and I still considered ourselves more or less newly weds, and so after he was born we bought ourselves a newlyweds' kind of home. It was a sixty-year-old fixer-upper condo on the thirty-first floor over an old shopping mall. The previous owners hadn't taken care of it—that's why it was cheap enough for us to afford—and I took getting it into shape as a personal challenge. The climate system was feeble, so I installed new thermostatic air pumps over all the registers, with self-contained humidifiers and filters; we could have any air we wanted in any room. The optical cables had dirt in their junctions, so I pulled them all out and replaced them with multistrand film—way more capacity than any private home ever needed; we could have run half the machines of the Census Bureau off our power system.

  All of that was reasonably sensible behavior, if a little over-enthusiastic. Even Gina thought so. She cheered me on at first, because naturally she wanted our new house to be perfect, too. She began to get edgy, though, when she came home from her job one night and found Matthew cooing in his bassinet on the kitchen table, surrounded by forty liters of chili that I'd cooked up that afternoon.

  It all seemed logical to me at the time, of course. I tried to explain to her that it made no sense to cook one meal's worth at a time, when we had plenty of freezer capacity. Why, I told her, we could eat chili from that batch every Thursday for the next six months.

  I don't know if I convinced her. I do know what happened a couple of hours later, after she'd gone to bed. That was when I found myself standing over Matthew's crib with the butcher knife in my hand.

  I don't know what I had planned to do. I only knew, from the way Gina screamed when she saw me, that something had gone wrong; and that's when I finally got taken in for medical help.

  Of course, things were different now. That was Earth. This was Pava. There were big differences between them. But the biggest difference was that when I went for help on Earth the doctors there had had help to give me.

  Dr. Billygoat did not. He told me that himself after I crashed.

  I woke up out of a long, leaden sleep to find the doctor bent over me, looking both worried and exasperated. "What's going on now?" he asked. "Is your depressive phase starting already?"

  It was, of course—brought on early by the drugs, unpredictable now because of the drugs. I didn't answer him. If I had been my normal self I would have had some smart-ass answer for him, starting with the thesis that he was the doctor, after all, so why was he asking me the questions? I didn't have those resources. I was barely able to register the fact that I was in my own bed. I was really down.

  He was shaking his head. "Fascinating," he said, but not in any admiring way. "You go so fast from one to the other. Yesterday you were Mr. Speedy Fix-it, running around town and telling everybody how to do everything. Do you remember any of that? Do you even remember trying to call Captain Tscharka and order him to come back?"

  I blinked at him. I didn't remember. Oh, I hadn't forgotten, exactly, either. The memories were there, if I had been willing to try to retrieve them; I had some faint recollection of a radio conversation with Jillen Iglesias, and her hanging up on me. I just didn't have the ambition to reach into the memory stores of my mind and pull out very many of those recollections.

  "Making Theophan hunt through her datastore until the two of you located an earthquake-shadow place on the coast? Yelling at Jimmy Queng because that site was right on the equator, so if the first settlers had sited Freehold there, someday we could even have a skyhook in our backyard?"

  I didn't answer. He sighed. "Barry," he said, "this just isn't working out. I hate to give up on some kind of a cure for you, but I don't see that I have a choice."

  Then he brightened. "Fortunately now we've got the solution to your problem—oh, not a cure, but the next best thing, and it's right at hand. Buccaneer has called in. They're decelerating. They'll be here in a few days. So we can stick you in their freezer, and let somebody back home fix you up when you get there."

  That made me—or almost made me—answer. I think all it came down to was a little beetling of my brows and a faint shake of my head, but I meant it for a "no" and Billygoat understood it that way. "What's the matter? Didn't you say you were going to go back first chance you got, anyway?"

  I didn't answer that, because answering was too hard for me, but I knew what the answer would have been.

  It was no.

  I seemed to have changed my mind about that. Depressed as I was, I knew that much. I didn't actually want to go back anymore. Not to Earth. Not even to the Moon.

  It was a definite decision
, though not a particularly rational one. I hadn't come to it after careful weighing of the facts. I knew that the rational factors all pointed the other way, the biggest one being that on Earth I could get help; here I couldn't.

  But I didn't want to leave Pava, and the only reason was just that, somewhere along the line, I had decided that I wanted to stay there. Forever. For better or for worse. For the rest of my life.

  23

  YOUR statements do not seem complete at this point, Barrydihoa. You are omitting much.

  Well, sure I am. I can't help it. I already told you—I was beginning those damned mood swings; I was forgetting a lot; I was really getting pretty mixed up, and I'm afraid it'll get worse before it gets better. Is there some particular part you want to know about?

  Yes: the reasons for your actions at this point. They are not clear. You would have benefited by returning to your own planet, yet you chose to stay here. Why?

  I just told you that, too, Merlin. Weren't you listening? I wanted to stay on Pava because it was the only game left in town for me, and anyway I just wanted to be part of making this colony work. Pava had everything it needed to be a fine place for human beings to live if it were developed properly, and I saw a chance to be part of building it.

  Now you have touched on a more important question, and one that concerns us greatly. In just what ways do you believe our planet should be "developed"? To be more explicit, since your language contains ambiguities, it is to be understood that the "you" we are asking about refers not simply to the singular Barrydihoa, "you" alone, but to all you human beings who have come to live on our planet. What are your collective intentions for Pava?

  Well, now, that's the really tough question, isn't it?

  I'm not exactly sure how to answer it. Believe me, Merlin, I would do that in a hot minute if I could. Honest to God I would.

  (Don't catch me up on that "honest to God," because that's just another little peculiarity of our language. When I say "honest to God" it does not imply that I have the religious conviction that a supernatural supreme being is listening to what I say and will do me some serious harm if I then lie. The phrase is just a sort of linguistic intensifier. What it means is that I really want you to believe that what I have just said is a statement of exact truth.)

  Anyway, I just can't promise what the human race will do here on Pava. I know what we did on Earth. I hope we'll have enough sense to do better here, so that you won't regret our coming.

  But that's only what I hope. I wish I could say I was sure, but I don't want to lie to you. Honest to God.

  After I crashed, I slept for a long time—a very long time.

  It is my suspicion that that pill-pushing, incompetent dentist-doctor Billygoat helped that process along. I know he was there at my bedside sometimes, to check up on me, because I remember seeing him there. I also know that if I had been in his position I'm pretty sure I would have sneaked in a little shot of sleepytime medicine to keep me from being a nuisance, whether that was approved by the Hippocratic oath or not. I don't doubt Billy had the same idea.

  I did wake up now and then, briefly and blurrily. Once Jacky Schottke was sitting there to watch over me; I remember him helping me down the stairs and out to the toilet—and back to bed after that, too, I guess, though I don't remember that part at all. Another time it was the widow lady from downstairs, Becky Khaim-Novello. She was standing by the window, glaring sullenly out at the rain. When she noticed I was awake she groaned. "I guess you've got to go to the goddamn john again," she said. (That's not a religious reference either, but never mind.) She wasn't a bit flirtatious this time. She sounded pretty glum about the whole thing, and when she'd escorted me downstairs she waited impatiently outside the door, and when I came out again she said ungraciously, "I suppose you're going to want me to dig up some food for you now. It beats me why they can't get some damn slug to do this sort of crap."

  I didn't comment on the fact that she was a lot less ladylike than before. I just told her I wasn't hungry. Then, as I was getting back into bed, I remembered to ask, "Isn't Geronimo here?"

  "Your pet worm? Don't ask me. You never can find the stupid things when you want them." And she kept on complaining about the work she had to do, and why the hell they had insisted she take time off from her other jobs just to keep an eye on me, for God's sake, and how nobody would give her any help. I don't know how long her monologue lasted. I fell asleep again while it was still going on, and was glad enough to do it.

  When I woke up again Dr. Billygoat was beside me, holding his sensor thing against my throat. "Is Geronimo around?" I asked. I was still pretty fuzzy, and I guess I'd been dreaming about him.

  "If you're talking about your lep," Billy said, "you can forget him. You won't be seeing him for a while." Billy was giving me a good deal less than half his attention, being busy studying his sensor and making notes on a pocket screen. I stretched and sat up and began to feel a little more alert. That had been a silly question. Of course Geronimo wouldn't be there, I told myself. He'd told me that it was time for his change. He was probably rolled up in his cocoon, getting ready for his next instar. Although I still hadn't got all my marbles rolling in the same direction, I definitely wished Geronimo were there. I missed his company. It was about the only thing I seemed to care much about, actually.

  Maybe "care" is too strong a word. Nothing I felt then was a strong emotion, just a little colorless imitation of a real feeling. First, I felt a little pale gratitude that I had not, after all, crashed to the very bottom of my cycle—not to the sad, sick, foul-yourself-with-your-own-excrement point of despairing catatonia that I'd seen in my days at the clinic, for sure. On the other hand, second, I had a little pale foreboding that dampened any possible feeling of pleasure, because I was beginning to realize that that hopelessly terminal, all-the-way-to-the-absolute-bottom crash had become a very real possibility for me. In fact, it was surely going to happen to me, more likely sooner than later, unless something came along to change it, and nothing of that kind was in sight.

  Still, I was waking up fast. Here, again, I have no doubt my speedy wake-up was helped along by something Dr. Billygoat had slipped into my bloodstream while I slept. He put the sensor away and looked at me hopefully. "How are you feeling? Do you feel up to doing a little work?"

  I blinked at him. "What kind of work?"

  "Any kind. All kinds. Think you could handle it?"

  He was not making himself very clear, but when I thought it over I nodded. "I guess so. Sure."

  "Good. We need all the help we can get. I guess you wouldn't know because you've been out of it, but the fucking leps have gone on strike."

  That was startling enough to penetrate my haze. Naturally I immediately asked questions, but Billygoat didn't want to take the time to discuss it with me. "I'm too busy to chat with you now. So pay attention. What I want you to do is get yourself cleaned up and come over to my office; I've got some stuff there for you to take. I think it might help you—hope so, anyway. Nanny'll probably tell you all about the leps then. Now I've got to get out of here."

  Just getting up and dressed was a harder job than I wanted, but I managed it. By the time I was on the street I could see that things had changed. It was true; not a single lep was in sight anywhere. The town seemed oddly empty, as a matter of fact. I saw a couple of teenagers resentfully dragging a cart of kitchen waste to the composting dump—the kind of work leps usually did—and when I asked them they confirmed it.

  "Sure, Mr. di Hoa, the leps just went away," the older girl said. "Haven't seen any since day before yesterday. Why did they do it? I don't know why. All I know is there's no school and a lot of the grownups are off gathering fuel and tending the farms, and we've got to do this junk."

  "The leps didn't say anything before they left?"

  "Not to me, anyway. Excuse us, will you? We have to get this cart back to the kitchen before Mr. Queng gets sore at us."

  When I got to the doctor's office Nanny Goethe di
dn't have anything useful to add to that, except that it was a damned inconvenience, having to do all this extra work when they were so busy anyway. She knocked on the wall to summon her husband and began counting pills out of two jars.

  In a moment Billy appeared at the door, holding a spraydermic. "Roll up your sleeve, will you? Okay. This is just a little stimulant, to supplement—to help you out. I want you to have these pills Nan's getting ready for you. You're about as stable as I can get you right now, but who knows? So if you feel yourself getting spacey, take a red one; if you're depressed, one of the white ones. They'll pick you up."

  There were three of each. As I was putting them away he said, "And if you find yourself getting really screwed up, come back here and let me look at you, but try not to do that unless you have to, okay? Oh, and you better go see Jimmy Queng, he'll have a work assignment for you. See you later. . . . And, Nan? Leave what you're doing for a minute; I need a little help in the office."

  They left me there alone.

  I thought for a moment, and then I didn't have to think anymore. I slipped quickly over behind Nanny Goethe's desk and helped myself to a couple dozen more of the white pills.

  All right, maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to do. Even a doctor as marginally qualified as Bill Goethe is still the doctor, and I've always accepted the rule that you'd better do what the doctor tells you. Usually, anyway. But I wanted those uppers.