The Voices of Heaven Page 9

  I was astonished to hear her call this community of endless churches "secular," but the rest of what she said was borne out by the evidence. Captain Tscharka was certainly looking like a disappointed man. A grumpy one, too; not the state you would hope for in someone you might have to ask for a favor. Still, since I didn't have any particular desire to be best friends with the man, his moods were not especially important to me. I was about to get up and go over to him anyway when Theophan announced, "Here comes the dessert."

  And I turned around and looked.

  Something was pulling a little wagon of cakes and pies toward the table, something I'd never seen before. It moved like a mink, twisting like a snake, but it did not look like any mink or snake I'd ever seen a picture of. It was big, too—more than a meter long, I thought, and then, as it extended its body to pull its little wagon, suddenly more than two meters long.

  "My God," I said, "that's a damn big bug."

  "Bug? Oh, no, Barry," Theophan said. "He's not a bug. He's a fifth-instar lep."

  The thing dropped the little harness it was holding in its mouth and came toward us, making a sort of hissing, whispery sound. "Fifth instar," Theophan was saying, "is the last stage before they turn into the winged form and die."

  She went on talking, but I wasn't listening. I was staring at the thing. It was hauling itself up to peer over the table at me, and it looked strange. What it looked like to me then, more than anything else, was the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, all but the hookah. It was dappled in camouflage colors of brown, white and beige, like the meringue on a lemon pie. It had tiny hands on the end of short, double-jointed arms that were gripping the top of the table, and it had huge, faceted eyes that covered half its head, like a fly's. It had a mouth—or, anyway, a mouthpart, round and lipless—that opened and shut like the iris of a camera lens, and it was hissing at me. Its breath was vinegary and warm.

  Theophan looked at me expectantly. "Say hello," she prompted me.

  "Do what?"

  "Say hello to him. That's St. John."

  "That's who?"

  She was laughing at me by then. "St. John isn't his lep name, of course, but they all oblige us by taking names we can pronounce. The leps are very polite people, mostly. St. John is talking to you."

  "He is?" My conversational skills seemed to be getting more and more rudimentary.

  "He wants to know what your job is going to be on Pava. Actually, I was kind of wondering that myself."

  "Oh. Sorry," I said, beginning to recall more of my vocabulary. "Tell him I'm a fuelmaster, if he understands what that means—I don't suppose he speaks English."

  "Barry," she said, looking disappointed in me, "he is speaking English. It's just that leps aren't good at voiced sounds because they don't have much of a larynx."

  And, when I listened more carefully, he actually was. The sound that came out of his mouthpart was a whisper of unvoiced frequencies, as though he were whistling the sentences through teeth he didn't seem to have, but the sentences were definitely composed of English words.

  It took me a while to understand what he was saying, but then that's not so surprising, is it? After all, that was the first time I had ever met any of you.

  9

  IT is interesting that you seem embarrassed when you say we were called "bugs."

  Is that meant to be a question?

  No. The question is this: Do you feel that the term "bug" is a derogatory epithet, meant to give offense to the person named, like some of the terms you humans sometimes apply to each other?

  Well, I guess it is, in a way. It's not as insulting as some of the things we call each other, but it's not meant to be particularly flattering, either—although in your case I would have to say that it's sort of justified because of the way you look. I mean, the closest thing there is on Earth to your kind is the insects. Especially the moths and butterflies that they call "lepidoptera." In your case, "leps" for short.

  Jacky Schottke is the reason I know as much as I do about the subject of you leps (which probably is not all that much, anyway). He did his best to explain the differences between leps and insects after we had gone to his place that night. He was talking about his work as a taxonomist, and how he was mostly self-taught out of the stored datafiles, and how he had come to specialize in the fascinating (he said) dynamics of ecological communities.

  Schottke was a pretty elderly fellow, at least eighty, I judged, but he seemed so enthusiastic about his work that I made the mistake of asking him what the work was, exactly. The result was that I got a twenty-minute lecture on the interactions of Pava's living things—he referred to them as the planet's "biota." The way he organized the data he collected was, he said, in the form of n-dimensional food webs. That was the only rational way to do it, he said, because, after all, when you consider what effects the members of a given clutch of living organisms have on each other, your clearest road map lies in observing who eats whom. Once you had that much straightened out you could group them into what he called "trophic species" and then you could start analyzing how each species affected the others.

  It was all sort of interesting, and I thought it was actually touching to see how Schottke's eyes sparkled when he talked about it. Still, an Entomology 101 lecture wasn't exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear, so I asked him specifically to tell me about you people.

  He stopped in the middle of the lecture. The sparkle went out of his eyes. Then he sighed.

  I could see that he was sorry to abandon the really fascinating subjects of trophic species and reciprocal predation just to give me a simple answer to a dumb question, but he was a good host. "How about a drink, Barry?" he said. I thought that was a fine idea, and so he pulled out a bottle. I looked at the label with a little surprise; it said Moët et Chardonne.

  That made him laugh a little. "Oh, it's not champagne, I'm afraid. We reuse all our old bottles for home brew, but I think it's not bad."

  He waited expectantly while I tasted it. No, it certainly wasn't champagne. Wasn't wine at all; it had been distilled and it had a healthy kick. But it went down all right, and when I acknowledged it was drinkable, he began producing pictures for me on his screen.

  The leps, he said, were something like an Earthly butterfly, not counting the size—well, a little like butterflies—though of course butterflies didn't have lungs and circulatory systems, and certainly weren't as intelligent. Butterflies didn't have language, or laws, or settlements, or well-formed relationships. But butterflies also didn't have much consistency of shape or behavior during their lives, and neither, Schottke told me earnestly, did leps.

  "I guess I knew that, Jacky—sort of. I mean, there used to be all kinds of stories about Pava and the leps when I was a kid."

  He seemed pleased to hear that I was at least that well informed and went on to retrieve images for his screen and tell me the things I hadn't known.

  He showed me pictures of a newly hatched, first-instar baby lep, practically nothing but mouth and digestive system. The new-hatched lep didn't look at all like St. John to me. Schottke told me that was an accurate observation. That was one of the significant morphological differences between leps and human beings, he said. A baby human does look quite a lot like an adult; but what a "one-star," or infant, lep mostly looked like, he pointed out, was a large, messy, cowflop-sized turd, and what it did in that stage, outside of eat and excrete and grow, was basically nothing.

  Then the second-instar lep, a little bigger, a lot more active, began to have the intelligence, say, of a human toddler. What the picture looked like to me was a scaly sort of earthworm, though at that stage their coloring was generally bright red. At the third instar I could see the little "arms" and "hands" developing on the still-wormy torso; the fourth instar looked physically about the same, though now all the adult features were quite visible. Even the fifth looked not that much different to me, until Schottke told me that the fourth instar was full maturity, which would last unchanged for as much
as thirty or forty years, and pointed out that the fifth instar was looking pretty ragged.

  "You could call the five-star leps their senior citizens," he explained. "At the fifth instar they're, as you might say, retired from most activities. They're getting ready to convert to the final winged form, and their minds are beginning to suffer. Their fur gets frayed and their colors fade, and they begin to develop sexual organs—and they go on doing that for a year or so, until they molt into the final, sexual, winged, egg-laying kind."

  He stopped there, thinking.

  "At that point they don't have any intelligence at all left," he went on after a moment—reluctantly, I thought. "In the sixth instar they don't eat, either. They just make love, and fly around, and lay their eggs, until they die." And he stopped again.

  He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring mournfully at the picture on the screen of the sixth-instar lep, with its giant, lacy, all-colored wings. It was a spectacularly beautiful picture, I thought, but Schottke didn't look as though he were enjoying its beauty.

  He looked sadder than I had ever seen a human being look before.

  I didn't know why. Not then, anyway. But I wondered if it had anything to do with his touchy worries about Captain Tscharka (I eventually discovered that it did, though not in any way I could have guessed), and so I thought it might be all right to pry a little. "Jacky?" I began. "What was it you used to be?"

  He blinked and focused on me. "What?"

  "You said you used to be something else before you got into taxonomy. What was it?"

  "Oh." He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm not ashamed of it. When I was young I thought I had the call. I was going to be a Millenarist preacher, like Friar Tuck. As a matter of fact, Tuck was the one who trained me, and not just me, either. There were half a dozen of us young ordained Millenarist ministers then, and we had a lot of people in our church—there were only about four hundred people on Pava at the time, and more than half of them Millenarists. We were all real red-hots. When Tuchman left with Captain Tscharka to make the run to Earth, we all vowed that we would carry on the faith. We knew they'd be gone for nearly half a century. It didn't worry us. We swore we'd stay consecrated, no matter how long we had to wait for their return, and we'd devote ourselves to spreading the word as long as we lived."

  He swallowed, looking guilty. "We didn't, though. After he left things changed. We stopped making so many converts. When new colonists arrived a lot of them just weren't interested. We had a lot of trouble keeping the colony alive, too; this is not the easiest planet to survive on. . . . Well, things happened. A few people made the transition—you know; you call it suicide. Others just drifted away. I got interested in the goobers and the leps, and—well, you know how it is, Barry; fifty years is a long time to expect anybody to keep on burning with a white-hot flame, isn't it? I couldn't make it."

  "I see," I said.

  I didn't, really, of course. Do you ever really see what some other person is thinking in his secret heart? I don't think so. It wouldn't be his secret heart if you did, would it? You think you know somebody pretty well—your parish priest when you're a kid, for instance, or the recent widower who's so hopelessly, terminally devastated because his dear wife of twenty years got herself electrocuted when she fell into the hot leads for the particle accelerator. And then one day when you're not expecting anything of the kind, the priest gets caught buggering a choirboy, and the cops come and pick your friendly mourner up because his wife didn't fall, he pushed her. So what do you know, really?

  Well, I knew there was something going on with Jacky Schottke, something to account for his obvious distress when he talked about the leps or his failed ministry. I just didn't know what it was, and I didn't know what questions to ask. And then, there was one other thing. I had begun to like Jacky Schottke, enough so I didn't want to make him unhappy. And there wasn't any doubt that those subjects were painful for him.

  So I just said, more or less trying to change the subject away from his private pains without being too obvious about it, "I'm a little surprised that there's such a large proportion of Millenarists here on Pava. They're kind of scarce back on Earth."

  He nodded gloomily, looking at the screen again. "There was some great missionary work done here. You have to admit that Garold and Tuchman are pretty convincing people," he said. "It was hard to say no to them. It was for me, anyway. And then—"

  He stopped abruptly. "Damn it. There we go again," he said.

  The picture on the screen had garbled, and the room lights flickered off, then back on. I felt a little quiver in my chair, as though a heavy truck had just run past us on the road . . . although, of course, there wasn't even a road of any kind nearby, much less that heavy a truck.

  "Hell," Jacky said, dismally anticipating what was going to happen next. . . .

  Then the lights went all the way off. We were sitting there in the dark.

  I could hear his sigh of resignation. "Sorry about that, Barry. We've obviously lost our power again. If it's any consolation, I don't think it's serious. It's probably that little tremor just now that got the transmission line. Hang on, I've got a couple of battery lights here—and I've really been a rotten host, haven't I? I haven't even shown you around the apartment yet."

  I know none of this has much to do with Garold Tscharka. I can't help it. If I don't tell it all as I remember it I'll probably leave something out, and then you'll be on my case about that. Bear with me.

  I also know that you people don't take much interest in houses, because you don't live in them. We do. They're important to us. They're one of the things that make us human, so when Jacky Schottke offered me the tour of his apartment I was willing to go along.

  Schottke's place was on the top floor of one of the four buildings that surrounded one of those grassy squares. His was the only two-story one of the four. The apartment wasn't much, even compared with our tight living spaces on the Moon. He had four small rooms. No carpets. The furniture was an odd mixture, some of it obviously homemade, some quite new (from the factory orbiter, I supposed), some old and tattered enough to have been brought by the first settlers. It all evoked memories for me. It took me back to the place Gina and I had lived in right after we were married, before Matthew came, before—well, before everything. True, this place was only one story above ground, and the apartment Gina and I had then had been on the thirty-first floor of the high rise. But it had that same feel—scratched together, making do.

  Schottke lifted his battery lamp to peer into my face. "Is something the matter?" he asked.

  I shook myself. "No, I was just thinking about something." Actually, Schottke's place was quite different. It had two little bedrooms instead of the one Gina and I had shared, and each had two narrow beds that were set against a wall with a ceiling-high clothes-storage chest between them. Schottke's minute living room contained a plastic-upholstered couch, a few odd chairs and a table that bore a screen and workstation. All else the apartment had was a functionally complete but crowded bathroom and an also functionally complete but even more densely crammed kitchen.

  Schottke said, "We've got a new couple moving in below us, the Khaim-Novellos. I guess they're friends of yours from the ship?"

  "You don't get a chance to make friends when you're in the freezer," I told him. "Which room is mine?"

  "The one on the left—I mean, if that's all right with you? They're pretty much identical. And, oh, listen, about the bathroom. There's a toilet there, but we don't use it anymore, until we figure out how to repair the sewerage system. There's something out in back."

  "An outhouse, right. I've already been warned about that."

  "Fine. Well, that's about it, then. God knows when they'll get the power back on, and it's late. We might as well get to bed, if that's all right with you? All right, then. Good night, Barry."

  In the morning Schottke was awake before me, bright-eyed and no longer very interested in conversation. The power was back on and Schottke w
as in a hurry. "You'll have a lot of things you're supposed to be doing today, Barry," he said. "You'll need your shots. Then you'll have to see Jimmy Queng to get your work assignment—"

  "I told you I'm a fuelmaster," I pointed out, a little surprised at the idea that I might be asked to do something different.

  "Yes, but you can't always be shipping antimatter fuel around, can you? And when you're not busy at that you'll have to help with the colony's regular work. We all do, how else could we survive here? Me? Well, certainly, I do my share. Of course I did more when I was younger, just like everybody else. I strung lines, I cooked, I helped build the roads, I farmed for a while, I even spent three months in the mine—it's only now, when I'm getting a little past any kind of rugged outdoor work, that they let me spend most of my time on taxonomy. Come on. I guess you'll want to get cleaned up first, but then we'd better get on down to the commons. They'll have breakfast ready—and then you can get started on your chores."

  By the time we arrived at the open-air dining trestles I'd learned more about Pava's housekeeping practices. There was running water in the little bathroom, at least. It didn't help with the toilet. The lid on that was lowered. Schottke had draped a cloth over the lid and then, to make sure I didn't forget, put a pot of flowers on the cloth. Still, I could wash up, as long as I didn't mind doing it in cold water, although then I had to head for the outhouse.