The Voices of Heaven (15 page)

The dam itself was gone.

Downstream, to our left, there were large lumps and chunks of masonry scattered along the sides of the river as far as the eye could see. There weren't any trees there. All I could see was a little regrowth of weeds, nothing big. Where the dam had been there was hardly a trace of, say, the power plant that would have been its purpose. I looked for it. All I could find was the ruined outline of what I supposed once had been a foundation at the foot of the dam structure. The whole space had been swept clean when a couple of cubic kilometers of retained water had decided to push the dam out of its way and move on down the valley.

"Can you imagine how much work they put into building that thing?" she asked, studying the wreckage.

I easily could. "It was an earthquake that did it?" I asked, although I knew the answer.

"Oh, yes. A pretty good one, and not the first. We'd had a couple of hefty foreshocks," Theophan told me, staring out over the flood track. "We were worried about the dam, so Jake and I came up here to try to measure the strains. We had four or five other people with us, and there were about a dozen leps who had trailed along as sightseers—they always seemed to be fascinated by the dam. Naturally enough, I guess. They'd never seen anything built on that scale before. And when the shock hit, Byram Tanner and I were up here with the theodolite, and my husband Jake was right about down there at the foot of the dam with two other men and the leps. Up here it knocked me off my feet. Down there they didn't have a chance. We never even found any of their bodies."

She shook her head and smiled at me. It wasn't a happy smile. "So," she said, "now you know how we lost our hydroelectric power, and why the leps aren't too crazy about me anymore. Eight of them got killed along with Jake. Third- and fourth-instar adults, you see. And that's not counting the ones that died in their home territory when the other fault let go a little later and their nests were flooded. So that's how I happened to become a widow lady and Public Enemy Number One for the leps, all on that same one, really lousy day."

11

THERE is no further need to discuss Theophansperlie at this time. There are other matters that need clarification.

Funny, I had an idea you'd say that. You people have a kind of a guilty conscience about Theophan, don't you?

That is inaccurate, but let us turn to the other questions. First: It is understood that the purpose of the "dam" that caused such great harm was to cause water to flow through its associated machines in order to produce "electricity."

That's right. What don't you understand?

What is not understood is why this was necessary. Why did the humans on Pava not derive their energy from this "antimatter" that you humans employ in other circumstances, instead of building this large and dangerous structure? That is the first question. The second question is more fundamental. Why do humans desire this "electricity" so much in the first place?

Look, point one: Just forget about the idea of using antimatter on Pava. It's impossible. Talk about danger, you just don't have any idea how dangerous that would be. If even the tiniest particle of antimatter got loose on the planet's surface it could cause an explosion that would make your lousy little dam-burst look like a goober's sneeze. It could conceivably kill off everything anywhere near it, yourselves included.

If you want to know why we want all this electricity—well, hell, that's just another of the differences between you and us, isn't it? You don't care to have electrical energy because you don't have the kind of machine civilization that requires it. It's not your nature. But it definitely is ours. We're a high-technology species. Electricity is pretty much the basis for civilization, as we see it. If we don't have electricity we can't run our vidscreens or our communicators or any of the other things that improve our lives. Before you knew it we'd be back to living in sod huts and cooking our food over campfires like our primitive ancestors again. Almost like you people, do you see?

I know what I'm talking about here, because in the first week or two after I arrived on Pava I got a chance to appreciate what a difference technology makes. There were so many things that Pava didn't have! We didn't have air-conditioning! For someone who'd been living in the totally, permanently climate-regulated conditions of the Moon for a large part of his adult life, that was a major shock. I had never found myself sweating before—at least, not outside of the stress gym. Or maybe the bed.

That was only the beginning. We didn't have automatic doors here. We didn't have sensors to turn the lights on and off for us. We didn't even have protected data storage, and that was a real surprise for me—I'd never heard of a storage system where you could lose some of your records when there was a power glitch.

Of course, I'd never heard of power glitches before, either.

I've already mentioned that we didn't have flush toilets, and I think that was the biggest single thing that took the fun out of the adventure for most of the new colonists who had come to Pava on
Corsair
with me. But when I happened to say something about that to Jack Schottke one night he took quick offense. "My God, Barry," he said, looking seriously insulted, "how spoiled are you, exactly? Don't I keep our outhouse clean enough for you?"

I saw that I had hurt his feelings. It wasn't true, either—the outhouse was neat as a pin, and when the lid was down on the seat it hardly even smelled bad. I said, "No, of course not, nothing like that. It's just that it's a pretty unsanitary way to do things, isn't it?"

"No such thing! You people from back home have a lot of wrong ideas. It's your flush toilets that are the ones that are unsanitary. Those things are disgusting. Think about it! You crap into a bowl, then you flush it away with water, and what happens to that filthy water? It goes into a collection pond somewhere, and it's so stinking and foul that it has to be treated with chemicals to try to kill off the stench and the germs. Then the effluent has to be discharged into something after the treatment is over, and what it's usually discharged into is a river or a lake. Then what happens to it? I'll tell you! Then somebody else farther down the stream pumps it out again and drinks it!"

"Well, by then it's safe," I said—not liking the way he put things; on the Moon, recycled water is the only water we ever get.

"Safe," he said, looking as though "safe" were a dirty word. "Safe isn't the same as
good
, is it? Maybe you're willing to drink somebody else's reprocessed piss, but I'm not. What we do here is we just dig a hole in the ground and use it until it's pretty full, then we cover it over and dig a new one next to it. The stuff is never seen again, it just gradually becomes part of the soil. Environmentally, what could be more sound?"

"Well, but doesn't it seep into the underground water?"

"What difference would that make? We don't drink well water, do we? No, we get it from a stream, way upstream, where it's perfectly pure. Take my word for it. Our system is fine. This place is as sanitary as any community on Earth. We have no infectious diseases to speak of here, and if you doubt me, just go over and ask Billygoat to show you his records."

"Billygoat?"

"Bill Goethe. The doctor."

"Oh, yeah, the doctor," I said, remembering—remembering a little bit late, to be sure, because it had been over a week since the doctor had told me to make an appointment. But remembering. And deciding that I'd have to take care of that particular chore real soon, the next morning in fact, because seeing this Doctor Billygoat wasn't really anything I could afford to put off forever.

When I woke up the next morning, though, I was feeling so good I wondered if I really needed to bother to talk to the doctor at all.

It wasn't just the physical kind of good. True, by then my muscles had stopped aching all the time—now it was just
some
of the time—and I didn't get out of breath in the first ten minutes of a hill climb anymore. That was all part of the feeling-goodness. But there was something else that went with it.

Surprisingly, I discovered that I was feeling good about being on Pava. I could see the distant glimmering of a possible purpose in being there.

It almost made me think that maybe I wouldn't take the next ship back after all, and when Schottke came bustling over to me at the breakfast table, our little tiff in the apartment forgotten, he had a receptive audience. "Barry," he said, eagerness and excitement all over him, "Jimmy Queng's getting together a search party; we need to take a launch downstream to pick up some stuff that was dropped from the factory. They're going to let me go along to collect a few specimens—want to join us?"

I forgot all about seeing Dr. Billygoat that morning. I said, "Sure."

You see, I like to work. I guess that's a human trait, too. I like to have the challenge of facing something that's hard to do, and the confidence that, if I work hard enough at it, no matter what unexpected complications turn up, I can probably get it done. And I'd never faced a tougher challenge than the planet of Pava. As long as I was there, I was going to do my best to help. I figured they needed that because, as far as I could see, there were a lot of things that they needed to have done, and maybe even more things they were doing wrong—especially by relying on the orbital factory and shipments from Earth for just about everything they needed.

I was an expert on the subject of what Pava needed by then, of course. I'd been on the planet nearly ten days.

Still, you didn't have to be much of an expert, really, to see that they couldn't rely forever on what slim handouts distant Earth was disposed to send their way. Sooner or later Pava would have to fend for itself. That meant it would have to be able to build everything it needed, in all the many varieties of all those many things, and it would have to build them out of local resources.

I didn't think the orbiting factory was a good answer to the problem, but I realized it probably would be useful for me to try to learn more about it. A nice long boat ride sounded like a good occasion to ask questions, so I let Jacky hustle me through breakfast—"It's a long trip," he kept saying, "and we have to get an early start"—and as soon as the scavenger party's car rolled up I swallowed the last of my food and climbed in.

When the man at the wheel shook my hand I realized I had met him before. He was Lou Baxto, the tall, pale guy with the scraggly pale mustache who had come out to meet the shuttle. What's more, two of the other people in the car were our downstairs neighbors, the Khaim-Novellos. The only stranger was a little man who looked like an old Irish jockey, whose name was Dabney Albright. As Baxto started the car away, all of us busy shaking hands and saying hello, I thought I heard my name called. When I looked up, there was Theophan gesturing to me from outside. She looked annoyed. But it was too late to worry about whatever it was she wanted, so I waved back and turned away and settled myself in for the bumpy run down to the river.

I could see why we had to get an early start. It was a good long trip, first in the car all the way back to the shuttle landing strip (now empty; the shuttle was busy going back and forth to unload
Corsair
's cargo from orbit), and then boarding a kind of clumsy open-decked launch to take the river another dozen kilometers downstream. I had plenty of time to ask questions about the factory, and Baxto was willing enough to answer them.

The orbital factory had been shipped from Earth as a self-propelled vessel long before he was born, he said. It was a neatly designed (if probably by now fairly old-fashioned) piece of equipment. It was still working, and he had no doubt that it would go on working for a good long time, as long as it was supplied with raw materials and power.

But, he admitted, the orbital factory did have its problems. The worst of them was simply that the thing was, after all, in orbit. Everything it manufactured for the colony had to be paradropped or shuttled down to the surface, and that was an expensive procedure. If they used the shuttle they had to provide it with hydrogen fuel, which had to be made on the surface—Baxto pointed out the electrolysis plant that made the fuel from river water just by the landing strip. (The plant was powered by waterpower from turbines in the river, and it was so small and inconspicuous I'd taken it for some kind of storage shed.)

The parafoils were better, but they had their problems, too. The factory made them as needed (the foils themselves became useful structural materials when they were collected) and they didn't require any fuel, but the damn things were hard to control. They were likely to land anywhere within a forty-kilometer radius of Freehold, and sometimes they couldn't be found at all.

"That," Baxto said, "is where we come in. The leps have found a capsule that fell way outside the drop zone, and we're going to retrieve it."

"All of us?" I asked, looking around. We were in the boat by then. The little jockey type, Dabney Albright, was steering and Baxto was sitting in the bow with me. Behind us Jacky was talking consolingly to our downstairs neighbors, who were huddled together and looking dismayed; they were still holding hands, but that joyous flush of anticipated wonderful adventure was gone from their faces.

"Hell, man," Baxto said, "those capsules weigh seven or eight tons each, and Schottke's not going to be much help with heavy lifting, is he? If we can salvage the whole thing that means each one of us is going to have to shift better than a ton from the drop to the boat, and again from the boat to the car when we get back. Want to try it by yourself sometime?"

I could see what he meant, and the morning didn't look like such a peaceful walk in the sun anymore. I persisted. "All right, but what about the other thing? You said there were other problems with the factory."

He looked annoyed, but he answered. The big problems with the factory were energy and raw materials. Energy came mostly from photovoltaics, though he was hopeful that if we could juice it up with additional power from some of Captain Tscharka's antimatter it could do better. The raw-material question was the tough one.