The Voices of Heaven Page 8

  It was certainly emotional for the eight new colonists who had squeezed into the shuttle with Jillen, the captain and me for the first trip down; they were all excitedly gasping and murmuring among themselves. There was a young couple strapped in next to me for the trip—Becky and Jubal Khaim-Novello, they said their names were—and they were holding hands in trembling bliss. "Oh, Mr. di Hoa," Becky yelled to me over the racket the shuttle made, her huge brown eyes even huger with delight, "isn't it all just wonderful?"

  I didn't answer. If it wasn't that much pure delight for me, it was because I had other things on my mind, and not all of them were abstract worries and regrets. One was the state of my stomach.

  It had been a long time since I'd been down at the bottom of a gravity well any deeper than the Moon's. Even before we got there the shuttle's bouncy, twisty deceleration maneuvers shook me up pretty hard. I was concentrating on trying not to puke when we touched down. Then, after we had landed—all in one piece, wonderfully enough—I was still uncomfortable, but in a new way, because I was being squeezed by nearly normal Earth gravity.

  I had known enough about Pava to expect that. It wasn't a real problem for me in the sense that I couldn't handle it; I'd unfailingly kept up my exercises the whole time I was on the Moon, on the premise that one day I'd probably go back to Earth, and so I hadn't let my muscles deteriorate the way some people do. But that didn't make the new weight feel better. It was a great discomfort to feel the way my belly sagged and the weight of my head pressed down on the unpracticed muscles of my neck.

  When it was my turn to jump down from the shuttle, I staggered and nearly fell as I hit the scorched, rough ground.

  I thought for a moment that my leg muscles hadn't benefited from the stress exercises as much as they were supposed to. Then I noticed that, behind me, the whole big bulk of the shuttle itself was rocking slowly on its stilty landing gear. "Hey," I said, "it's an earthquake!"

  Tscharka, right behind me, laughed out loud. "That's right, di Hoa," he said. "We have earthquakes here, you know. This one's too small to worry about. Jillen? Where's the transportation to take us into Freehold?"

  She waved off toward a cloud of dust rolling toward us. It turned out to be a car with very big wheels, coming along a rutted dirt trail that might have been intended to be a road. It was coming down along a hillside, which led me to notice that we were in fairly mountainous country. The shuttle landing strip had been scratched out beside one fairly straight stretch of a murky but fast-running little river. The scenery didn't look all that unEarthly. There was green stuff on the hills that looked like trees and another kind of green stuff on the ground that looked like grass—well, a little bit like grass. It was all the right color, anyway, although the stuff on the ground was spiky rather than bladed, and there were little pale blue flowers scattered across it, like dandelions on a neglected suburban lawn. The place smelled right—like vegetation growing—and the breeze was warm.

  They say that Pava is the best of the extrasolar colonies, mostly because it has the best star. Alpha Centauri B is part of a binary system, and Epsilon Eridani and Alpha Draconis are variables, so the seasons on their planets can be pretty drastic. I was prepared to admit, on first impression, that Pava wasn't going to be all bad—for those who had chosen to come, anyway.

  You ask what Captain Tscharka was doing. I can answer the question, but it won't be much help. What he was doing was standing off by himself, with Friar Tuck, the two of them muttering to each other about things they clearly didn't want anyone else to hear. I wasn't watching him very closely, though; I was more interested in the approach of our welcoming committee.

  There was another one of those big-wheeled cars following the first one, at a reasonable distance so as to avoid at least some of the dust the wheels kicked up. The two of them rumbled up to the shuttle and four new people jumped out, shaking every hand they could reach, grinning, patting backs, even hugging. The locals had come out to meet us.

  The welcomers consisted of three men and a woman. Two of the men were young, one fair, the other with a dark-haired Oriental sort of look; the third man was older and looking rather abashed. Their names? I rehearsed them three or four times—Jimmy Queng, the tall, black-haired one; Lou Baxto, the one with the pale, bristly mustache; Jacky Schottke, the elderly one who was responding with some embarrassment (or could it almost be guilt?) to Captain Tscharka's surprisingly affectionate greeting. But I forgot all the names again halfway to the town, which was out of sight on the side of a distant hill. I was too busy looking at all the sights, including the one next to me.

  The sight was the driver of the lead car, I was sitting next to her, and she was worth looking at. (I don't want you to think that I had already forgotten Alma. I was working hard at trying to stop remembering Alma.) The person was named Theophan Sperlie, a woman maybe just a little older than myself, who not only had a pleasant, friendly face but smelled nicely of soap and mint. And she kept looking around at me in just the same way that I kept looking at her, as she gave me a running commentary on all the things we were passing.

  Behind us the Khaim-Novellos and a few others were holding hands and singing in the back of the car, still wearing those fuddled grins. "Looks like those guys are happy to be on Pava, anyway," I said to Theophan Sperlie.

  "We'll just have to find some way of making you happy, too, Barry," she said, and took her hand off the wheel long enough to pat my knee. It seemed I had begun to make friends on Pava very quickly.

  To confirm her goodwill, Theophan Sperlie pointed out all the sights on the way in. There was the lumber camp, where they got their wood. (Well, not really wood like pine or oak; most of it was more like bamboo, along with some other "trees" that resembled boxwood hedges but grew ten times taller.) Off across the river there was the road that led up, she said, to the community's mostly disused iron mine. ("But if we ever get our short-range ships going properly we'll get the iron from space, and then we can close that down. People get hurt there.") Some things I saw on my own. Now and then there were things moving in the underbrush—animals, no doubt—but by the time I called Theophan Sperlie's attention to them they were gone, too fast to identify. ("Don't worry, Barry. You'll get plenty of chances to meet the local fauna!") And I saw a nice little waterfall as we passed a narrow valley—a slim stream thirty meters high and splashing prettily on the rocks at the bottom. But when I mentioned it to Theophan she cocked an eye and said, "Must be a new one. I didn't see it last time I came by. I guess a fault let go and opened up a spring."

  It wasn't a long drive, but the large, orange Pava sun was getting low in the sky.

  Civilization on Pava was a town called Freehold. I looked it over with care. At first sight, I wasn't that thrilled with the town—well, call it a town out of courtesy, although a population of 853 hardly even makes a village, does it? Freehold wasn't big. No part of it was much more than ten minutes from the farthest other part of it, and even so it wasn't at all densely built. There were little clusters of what Theophan Sperile said were homes—the places where the Freeholders lived, anyway; each composed of four rickety wooden structures built around a little central yard. The clusters were spaced out every hundred meters or so along the "street"—which was rutted and potholed and had never been paved; I understood why all their vehicles had those giant wheels. In the spaces between buildings were open lots, overgrown with vegetation of no kinds I had ever seen before. About all there was besides was an occasional larger structure, apparently a workplace of some kind—and a lot of churches. I guessed they were churches, though some of them were tiny, from the fact that each one had a cross, star of David, crescent or other religious symbol over its door. The biggest one did have a cross, but as we passed I saw that it also displayed the omega sign of the Millenarists, and from behind me the Khaim-Novellos and the others gave a little cheer.

  I should have expected that, I suppose, from what I knew about so many of the people associated with Corsair. I hadn't, though.
What I had actually hoped—or would have hoped, if I had known that I was coming here and had given it any thought at all—was that maybe a world with a human population of less than a thousand would have simplified its religious urges.

  It hadn't, though. Denominationally speaking, Freehold seemed to be even more divided than the Moon. I looked at the people in the streets as they stopped whatever they were doing to stare or wave at us, and wondered if there were quite enough of them to go around for the visible number of denominations.

  We stopped in front of a shingled, flat-roofed structure that Theophan Sperlie said was the communal meeting hall, though it looked more like a roller-skating rink in some small town. Its walls didn't seem entirely straight, and the front door had a board nailed across it.

  In fact, what all the buildings had in common was that they were ramshackle wooden affairs, mostly constructed out of that more-or-less bamboo and not in very good repair. A lot of them were propped up by those bamboo columns.

  When Theophan saw what I was looking at, she grinned. "Blame it on the earthquakes," she said. "As I guess you know, we have a lot of them here."

  "I did know, Ms. Sperlie—"

  "Theo."

  "I did know about the earthquakes, Theo. Sort of."

  "Well, anything you don't know I'll tell you. That's my job, seismologist. The situation isn't all that bad, really. The biggest buildings are the ones that give us the most trouble when we get a serious tremor. Like our meeting hall over there. That one got its foundations shifted a while ago, and we haven't made up our minds about whether we should be repairing it or tearing the damn thing down and starting over. Fortunately it's nice weather now, so we meet outdoors mostly."

  I asked the question that had been growing in my mind as we bumped along. "Does it have a men's room?"

  "A what? Oh. I know what you mean. Well, Barry," she said frankly, "you see, that's one of our problems here. We haven't had much luck with sewer systems. But there's an outhouse next to just about every building, so help yourself."

  In the thirty-six elapsed years of my life (not counting the time while I was both frozen and time-dilated on the ship) I had never once been anywhere that didn't have a high-tech toilet. On Earth they were mostly flush; on the Moon mostly thermal; but they always took the little contributions from my digestive system and made them disappear.

  That wasn't the way it was on Pava. I didn't even know what an "outhouse" was supposed to look like until a helpful resident pointed me the right way, and then I didn't much like it. It turned out to be a little shanty built around a wooden seat with a hole in it to excrete through, and a bigger hole dug in the ground below to hold the excretions.

  It smelled accordingly. I began to wonder if being on Pava was going to turn out even nastier than I had suspected.

  That led me to wonder what my chances were of getting off it pretty fast. I wasn't really thinking of getting back to my unfinished business with Alma anymore. I had already written that prospect off for good; fifty years was a hell of a lot longer than I could imagine anyone waiting, not to mention what sort of condition Alma might be in after fifty years of elapsed time for her. I wasn't even thinking of getting back to my job. I was just thinking about getting back.

  When I came back, feeling chastened, both cars were pulled up in the square, with our newcomers mingling with a bunch of the Pavan colonists. At least half of the new people, along with a lot of the ones who lived there, were clustered around Captain Tscharka. Some of the blissful smiles on the faces of the newcomers had evaporated.

  It was the first chance I'd had to take a good look at my fellow passengers from Corsair's deep freeze. I was not impressed. I shook hands with ten or twelve of them—and at least as many of the residents—without remembering a name. It struck me that, although the people who had lived here for a while all seemed to have reasonably useful skills, the newcomers were not the kind of prospects I would have chosen to build a new frontier. Two of them described themselves as poets, one was an actor, a couple were so young they were nothing in particular, being just out of school. The young ones, at least, I could see potentially developing into something Pava might need. The others struck me as a good sample of the kind of people who couldn't make it back home and had headed for Pava to change their luck.

  I wondered if their luck was really that likely to change. It seemed a good bet to me that the would-be returnees clamoring for a freezer locker in the next ship home would include at least a few of those who had just got here . . . including, of course, myself.

  Captain Garold Tscharka had detached himself from the cluster of Millenarists by then and left Friar Tuck behind to lead them in a hymn. When I looked around I saw that Tscharka was in what looked like a fairly acrimonious conversation with somebody I recognized; his name was Schottke, and he was one of the people who had come out to meet us. Then Tscharka saw me, and pointed, and Schottke came hurrying over to where I was. "Barry di Hoa? I'm Jacky Schottke—"

  "We met."

  "Right, at the shuttle," he said, being agreeable. He looked a little ruffled, though, and glanced apprehensively back at Tscharka now and then. "Well, Barry, we're a little short of housing here—I guess you can see that—so Garold Tscharka says you're to room with me until we can finish building some more living space. Somehow. So when your stuff comes down from the shuttle—"

  "I don't have any stuff," I told him, and then had to explain that my visit hadn't been premeditated.

  "Oh, hell," he said, "what a lousy deal for you! Still, you'll be all right. This isn't a bad planet. I find it pretty exciting, but then it's my work that makes it interesting, you know. What do you do?"

  "Fuelmaster. Or was. I worked on the Moon, handling antimatter fuel."

  "Oh." He looked pleased. "I imagine Garold is happy about that; he's brought back tons of the stuff, I hear. I'm a taxonomist, with a special interest in trophic food chains—that is, when they'll let me spare the time—though as a matter of fact I used to be—"

  He stopped there, looking quickly again at Captain Tscharka. Then he finished. "I used to be something else, actually. But that was nearly fifty years ago, and I'm not that anymore. I just happened to get interested in taxonomy—you know, scientific ways of describing organisms? Seeing how they relate to each other? And fifty years is a long time, Barry, and I wanted to be here for Garold when he came back, but—well, people change."

  That was about as muddled an explanation as I'd ever heard, especially since I hadn't asked him for any. The man was double-talking me, for what reason I could not guess. "Now," he said briskly, "I'm sure you're hungry, so let's eat. You can meet some of the others—if you're not too tired?"

  Well, I wasn't too tired. Not exactly. What I was was confused. My life had changed too drastically in too short a time, and I was having trouble figuring out where I was going with it.

  I wasn't particularly hungry, either, in spite of what Schottke had said—you don't work up much of an appetite in the deep freeze—but they'd put plates and dishes out on long trestle tables, in the shade of some of those bamboo-like trees, and I was willing to try to eat. I found a seat between Theophan and Jillen and investigated the food.

  We didn't begin eating right away. Before we were allowed to start eating Captain Tscharka climbed on a bench and Reverend Tuchman pounded the table for attention. When the babble dwindled Tscharka gave us all a little speech:

  "It's wonderful to be back on Pava again. In deference to our various differing beliefs I will not ask the Reverend to say a formal grace, but we all, I am sure, want to thank our God for our safe arrival and for the bounty before us. And I would like to announce that for our Millenarist brethren we will hold a special prayer meeting immediately after the meal. Thank you," he said, and sat down.

  A fair number of people applauded, including most of the newcomers from Corsair. So, I noticed, did both Jillen and Jacky Schottke. I didn't. Tscharka hadn't said anything that I particularly agreed to.

&nb
sp; Then we began to eat.

  It doesn't really make much sense to judge a new place by its food, but I guess most of us do it. In this case, the food was not wonderful. Some of the dishes were strange, stringy vegetables that I didn't enjoy and even Jillen refused to put in her mouth. Some were assorted kinds of stew, chicken or unidentified meat, with more of those unappetizing vegetables contaminating it. There were, however, a few better choices—fresh tomatoes, lettuce and fruits, as well as a couple of reasonably decent kinds of bread.

  Meeting the others didn't go particularly well. There were too many of them. The town wasn't full—much of the human population of Pava was off somewhere. Some on their routine work, others checking the damage of a recent earthquake—but there were still nearly five hundred strangers to me milling around the dining tables, and, although I tried to avoid being introduced to all of them, I only partly succeeded.

  By comparison, Jillen and Theophan were old friends. But that wasn't the only reason I had chosen to sit next to Jillen. I had a question to ask her, and first chance I got I popped it.

  "Jillen? When will Corsair go back?"

  She gave me a puzzled, then sympathetic look. "That's up to the captain, I guess. What's the matter, don't you like Pava?"

  I shrugged. "I haven't been here long enough to know, but I'd like to know what my options are. Maybe I should just ask the captain."

  I was craning my neck to see what he was doing; he was talking with Friar Tuck, both of them scowling. Jillen pursed her lips. "Right now might not be the best time," she said. "He's had some disappointments in the last couple of hours. Some of his old friends are dead—well, Millenarists, you know? We do that sometimes." That startled me; apart from the dutiful applause she'd given Tscharka I hadn't had any idea that she was a Millenarist, too. "Oh," she said, correctly reading my expression, "I'm just kind of lukewarm, I'm afraid. But I'm still in the church, yes. I don't think Garold would have kept me on Corsair otherwise. Anyway, a lot of the Millenarists he expected to find have suicided and quite a few others have kind of, well, dropped out. And there haven't been that many new ones joining in. He—" She hesitated, then said it: "He didn't think the colony would have turned so secular. So he's, well, disappointed."