The Voices of Heaven Page 6

  The reason we can do it so cheaply is, as I say, that we have our own solar power, which we get in copious amount, from the photovoltaic belt that goes all around the Moon.

  I know you don't know what "photovoltaic power" is. Maybe you don't really need to, except that you should understand that electricity is so important to human beings that we're willing to do a lot of damaging things to get it—as you know. Photovoltaics happen to be among the least damaging. What "photovoltaic" means is a way of changing light into electricity. Any kind of light. Sunlight is the best kind of all, because there's so much of it. The way it works, when a particle of light—it's called a "photon"—strikes a photovoltaic cell it knocks an electron loose from one of the atoms in the cell. An electron is a particle of electricity, you see, and when you have enough of them knocked loose you have an electric current.

  So that's what the belt around the Moon is for. It's a continuous ribbon of photovoltaic cells that goes completely around the Moon. The belt is not handicapped by a day and night sequence; it girdles the whole Moon. That means half of it is always in direct sunlight.

  Why put it on the Moon? Partly to get it as far as possible from nervous neighbors, of course, but also because the Moon has no air. The energy from the Sun doesn't lose anything to Rayleigh scattering or cloudy days. (I know you don't know what Rayleigh scattering is either, but anyway.) And every point on the belt is connected to every other point by the superconductor cables that underlie the photovoltaic belt itself.

  The effect is that we can tap all that power at any point. The biggest power draw is at the Lederman antimatter works, where every minute of every day we have several billion megawatts to draw on.

  We draw on them pretty heavily, too. We use that power to run the giant accelerator rings that go all around the crater wall; they're a hundred kilometers in circumference. We smash particles into each other and collect the fragments, and the important part of the fragments that we get out of the rings are antimatter. Antiprotons. Which we convert and chill down to solid antihydrogen; and then we package the antihydrogen and ship it out and get rich.

  Well—the owners get richest of all, of course. But the people who work there, like me, get paid pretty well, too. Hazard pay, you could call it. After all, if anything went wrong we would be the first ones to go.

  The packaging of the antimatter is the hard part—well, one of the hard parts; there aren't any easy ones. Each little lump of antimatter is smaller than the meat of a walnut, but those walnuts have very large shells. The shells have to keep it away from any normal matter, you see, because if any bit of antimatter ever touches any bit of normal matter you get a hell of a big explosion. (These controlled explosions are what make our spaceships run.) So the shells are made up of magnets and vacuum pumps and motors that keep the little nugget of antimatter in suspension; and at the same time they have to be so constructed that the antimatter can be bled off to enter the combustion chambers of the spaceships in just the right measured amounts, with zero leakage at all times. The antimatter is measured in grams, but each shell masses more than six tons.

  Do you get the idea that the Lederman factory was big, expensive, complicated and dangerous? Then you've got it right. It is. But it gives us power—and, you know, power is what makes our world go round. We aren't like you.

  Captain Garold Tscharka wanted to know what the inside of the factory was like, too. I found that out a few days after the drill. I was getting off the shuttle after refueling a Belt transport and he was arriving from Earth, and we met at the Lederman lander pad. We waited for the subway to Lederman Central together. "Well, di Hoa," he said genially, "I've just checked Corsair. We'll be loading soon."

  "I heard. They must like you in the Budget Congress."

  He laughed. "As long as they decided to let the colony live awhile, there wasn't any reason not to finance our supplies fully."

  "Ah," I said, admiring the man's brass. I didn't know Tscharka that well at the time, or I wouldn't have been surprised at his ability to turn defeat into triumph. Later on, of course, it was different.

  By then we were in the Lederman town station, and when I headed for the cars that went through the crater wall he followed me. "Listen," I said, thinking to spare him embarrassment, "you know you can't go inside the factory."

  "Oh, but I can, di Hoa," he said, and proceeded to prove it. When the guards checked our IDs they didn't stop him. In fact, they pinned him with a blue badge, as good as my own.

  "But nobody's allowed to enter but trained technicians," I protested.

  He gave me a look of good-humored tolerance. "I know that. That's why I've been on Earth taking the course. I'm going to inspect the pods that are ready for loading, and I'm going to stay with you and your crew every minute that you're stowing them on my ship."

  "You think we don't know our business?"

  "I want to know your business too." Then he unbent enough to offer a reason—a lying one, as it turned out, but I had no way of knowing that. "When we get to the colony we're going to have to fuel the short-rangers ourselves, aren't we? I want to make sure we do it right."

  It was a plausible explanation, and I let it go at that. By then we were at the main door, and when it opened for us Tscharka looked surprised. "Wait a minute, di Hoa. Aren't we going to put spacesuits on?"

  "Why would we do that?"

  "Don't you keep the area in vacuum? In case some air should penetrate the pods?"

  "Oh, right," I said, trying not to laugh; his course obviously hadn't taught him everything. I shook my head. "There's no point. Even what we have on the Moon's surface isn't a perfect vacuum. There isn't a perfect enough vacuum to be allowed to contact antimatter anywhere in the universe, not even in interstellar space."

  I looked at my watch. I had a little time before I had to sign off, and besides I was still in the stage of thinking that Captain Tscharka was probably a pretty decent guy, underneath it all.

  So I showed him around, first to the fuel-insertion room. No fuel was being inserted at the moment, but next to it was the storage chamber where the prepared pods waited to be filled. And there they were, his first hundred pods, looking like giant steel watermelons, each one already hooked up to the power leads that would run its coolers and magnets when the antimatter was inserted.

  "They're empty," he said, frowning.

  "Of course they're empty. As soon as a pod is full it's out of here; we don't keep antimatter around. As soon as they start filling them for you, we'll shoot them up to the catchers so we can start loading."

  "And when are you going to load?"

  "When I tell them to start filling," I told him.

  He didn't look as though he liked that, but he wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring at the pods, and the expression on his face surprised me. It seemed to reflect a kind of emotion I didn't really associate with Millenarists. If I'd had to put a name to it, I would have called it . . . well . . . love.

  He made me uncomfortable. I said, "I'll probably have the refueling order tomorrow, so you'll be leaving pretty soon."

  He looked up at me, as though I'd interrupted a precious thought. "I suppose so. All the supplies are in, and the personnel list is all set. Not everybody is as hostile to the extrasolar colonies as you, di Hoa. We've had more volunteer colonists than we could carry, with all that load of antimatter."

  I mentioned, "I know one of your volunteers. A man named Rannulf Enderman."

  He thought for a moment, then nodded. "Enderman, yes. A deeply religious young man. You would be a happier man, di Hoa, if you had his faith."

  I didn't know what to say to that. I couldn't tell whether Tscharka really believed what he said about Rannulf—"deeply religious," for God's sake!—or whether he actually remembered Rannulf at all. I took refuge in what my old shrink had told me.

  "A man named Benjamin Franklin said something that makes sense to me," I said. "Franklin said, 'In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack
of it.'"

  I don't know what I expected from him. Maybe a thundering condemnation of Franklin's blasphemy, maybe a supercilious dismissal of his ignorance. What I got surprised me. Tscharka mulled that over for a moment, and then said, "Why, di Hoa, that is a very penetrating observation, for a secular. I must admit that this man, Franklin, is partly right."

  I blinked at him for that.

  "You see, in this world," he explained, "you really can't be saved by faith. You can't be saved at all, except by getting out of it."

  6

  WHAT is the meaning of the word "faith" as it is used in this context? It seems there are many meanings of the term.

  Well, sure, "faith" means lots of different things. I can say I have "faith" in a person. That means I believe that person is decent, and trustworthy, and maybe even kind. Or I can have "faith" that a given action will produce a particular result; that kind of "faith" is based on prior experience.

  Is either of those the kind of "faith" you and Garoldtscharka were discussing?

  "No, of course not. We were talking about religious faith. That's powerful stuff. If a person is serious about his religious faith it takes precedence over anything else. It isn't based on any kind of evidence. It's irrelevant to such things as, say, a person's character, or the things he experiences. It transcends all that real-world stuff. It shapes what you do, in ways that an outsider can't predict, and that's why Tscharka was so good at concealing his intentions.

  Whatever Tscharka's intentions were, as he was getting ready to return to Pava, he didn't communicate them to me. And certainly when I first met him I might not have known how things would go in the long run even if I'd been able to read his mind. I don't know if he even had those intentions yet.

  If you want me to make a guess, I'd say probably Tscharka and his chaplain, the one he called Friar Tuck, cooked their whole plan up somewhere between the time they heard that there was talk about terminating the colony—that would have been as soon as they got within two-way radio range of Earth—and when they appeared before the Budget Congress. Maybe not, though. It could have been after that. There's no way of knowing exactly.

  I didn't see Tscharka again until the actual loading, at least not in person. He did show up on the vidscreen once. Alma and I switched on the screen just before going to sleep. No particular reason; just to see what was on. What was on was Tscharka and his whole group of new colonists being interviewed about their imminent departure. Some of them were looking dedicated, some happy; and there at the end of one row was old Rannulf. Looking, I thought, mostly disgruntled. I didn't say anything. Alma didn't say anything either, though I thought I heard her sigh. And when a different news story came on we turned it off and went to sleep.

  We were both busy then, dealing with Tscharka's hundred pods of stored antimatter, and the sixteen additional pods he needed to run his ship as they were filled and launched. It was about as big an order as any in my experience. Handling that kind of operation takes a lot of work. As soon as each pod was filled it was shot right up into parking orbit, where one of the permanently orbiting catchers collected it.

  That's the most dangerous part of the whole procedure, but this time we had no problems. The fuelmasters on the catchers were first-class, and I was supervising the surface-to-orbit launches myself. It went without incident. Then, once all the requisitioned pods were on the catcher, it was time for me to get down to my real job, and so I took a shuttle up to Corsair.

  "You," said the young woman who greeted me at the ship's lock, "are Barry di Hoa, and you're welcome here."

  I said, "Thanks, and you're—?"

  "Jillen Iglesias," she reminded me. "Copilot."

  "Nice to see you again," I said, remembering as she shook my hand warmly that I'd met her before. I was a little startled. I hadn't expected such a warm welcome on Captain Tscharka's Corsair, but then Tscharka himself wasn't there. He was asleep in his quarters, Jillen said, catching up on his rest so he'd be fresh and alert for the fueling itself, and so she would be the one to accompany me on my final inspection.

  She stuck as close to me as Tscharka ever had as I made my rounds, too. The difference was that with her I didn't mind it. She was helpful rather than interfering. As we poked through the fuel and cargo compartments one more time she answered all my questions, and when I didn't have any questions to ask she kept her mouth shut.

  Everything was spic-and-span. The fuel-storage sections were ready for their pods and the cargo was loaded. The most important cargo was information—recordings of all the latest songs and plays and comedians; manufacturing programs for new machines and instruments and electronic devices; a ten-year supply of journals in all the arts and sciences. None of that took up much space, but there were also bulkier items, starting with the food and supplies to get Corsair's crew through their time-dilated, but still long, voyage to Delta Pavonis. For the colony itself there were ingots of scarce metals, seeds, frozen ova and sperm and, I guess, hundreds of other personal items that were none of my concern. And there were the freezer-sleep capsules, open and waiting for the colonists who would soon be filling them—including, I thought with pleasure, Rannulf Enderman.

  When I had signed off I paused to look at Jillen Iglesias. "You're going back to Pava, then," I said.

  "Yes, of course," she said, surprised, as though that were the most normal thing in the world. It wasn't. Most interstellar crews won't do more than a single voyage, because they get too disoriented.

  "Won't you miss your friends?" I asked.

  "But my friends are right here," she told me. "On this ship, and, yes, a few on Pava, too. Of course, they'll be a little elderly by the time I get back, but Pava's a wonderful planet, di Hoa. Actually, I think I might just stay there this trip—I mean if I can find someone else to take my place on Corsair for the voyage back. See," she said earnestly, doing her best to convince me, "the only thing Pava needs to make it just about perfect is more industry. They're bound to have that taken care of by the time I get back. Power was still kind of short when we left. They were even burning biomass to make electricity, but that's the hard way to do it—but they were starting to build a big hydroelectric plant, with a hundred-meter dam. It'll be operating by now, I'm sure. And we'll still have our orbiting factory working too, probably. I think we'll want to use some of the antimatter there to run it; solar power takes you just so far. Have you ever seen an orbiting factory? It's all computer-controlled, so we can do custom-manufacturing, short runs, building things that we need on the planet. You'd be astonished how many different little machines and devices and chips and gadgets you need to make a planet go, when you can't just call up and get them from Earth."

  I was as convinced as I wanted to be, but I was polite. I said, "And you'll need fuel for those short-range interplanetary exploration ships, too, of course."

  "I guess so. I hope so, anyway. Personally, I'm not so much using them for exploring the other planets in the system as getting some tugs to bring in raw materials from Delta Pavonis's asteroid belt—you need more than energy to make a factory go, you know." She looked wistful. "Of course," she admitted, "there are problems. The quakes can be pretty bad, sometimes."

  "I imagine so," I told her. What I was thinking about was what life was going to be like for her in a place where you had constant earthquakes, and shortages of all kinds, and all the troubles that people who lived in civilization never even gave a thought to. I thought she was a brave woman. I also thought she was a fairly foolish one; but that was none of my business, after all.

  Then it was time for me to drop back to the Moon, and I did.

  What little free time I had in those days I tried to spend with Alma, and so I headed for her rooms. I thought she might still be sleeping, and so I let myself in quietly. She was actually in her bathroom, washing her hair. "Want to go out and get something to eat?" I called.

  "Not right away," she called back, and there was the sound of water running, and a minute later she came out, tow
eling her hair. "I'm waiting for a call," she said. "Remember Renate beha Nard?" I did; Renate was a friend of Alma's, a big, dark woman who the last time I'd seen her had had a belly the size of a watermelon. "Well, she's delivering about now. I'll want to go see the baby when it's born."

  "Ah," I said. "Uh-huh." It wasn't very articulate conversation, but that was because I didn't know exactly what I wanted to say. Then I remembered something about Renate. "She must've quit the Millenarists, too," I said, making a logical deduction from the fact that she and Alma had met at Millenarist services, and now she was having a baby.

  "Right," said Alma. She finished turbaning the towel around her head and sat down to look at me. "She knew when she'd made a mistake. Being alive wasn't really a sin, and so having babies couldn't be, either."

  "Absolutely," I said, to show how much I agreed with her, and then quickly changed the subject to show that I wasn't attaching any particular importance to it. "Well," I said, "if you don't want to go out, should we call up and have something sent in?"

  "I'm not that hungry, actually. Are you?"

  I wasn't, and the conversation began to drag. I was pleased when her phone sounded, a little less so when the face on the screen turned out not to belong to a nurse from the birthing center but to the man who seemed to me to be taking an unconscionable amount of time to get out of our lives, Rannulf Enderman.

  "Hi," he said brightly to Alma. Then, when he saw my face in the background, a little less enthusiastically, "Hi to you, too, Barry. I just called up to say good-bye."

  Alma looked concerned. "You're not leaving right away, are you?"

  "No, but pretty soon. I just finished my course for my work on the ship. It was freezing techniques. I'm going to help tend the stiffs, freezing and thawing out."