The Voices of Heaven (17 page)

So I told him why I was asking—as politely and tentatively as I could, because I didn't want to give the impression of the brash newcomer who thinks he's smarter than anyone who's been there, although, of course, I suppose that's pretty much what I was. Tanner was still polite about it. I was surprised to find out that he was one of those rare creatures, an expert who didn't mind dumb questions—and in fact also one of those even rarer ones, a human native Pavan. Tanner had been born right there on the planet, and he knew everything there was to know about it.

The town of Freehold, he admitted, might not have been settled in the best possible place. The original colonists had picked the site in the first place because orbital surveys had looked good. They'd shown that the locale had decent climate and good soil, as well as the river and all its branches, which would be useful for both drinking water and hydropower—though that last part hadn't worked out all that well when the dam broke. Spectroanalysis and surface geology had shown good indications of extractable minerals within a reasonable distance of the proposed site, even traces of surface hydrocarbon seepage.

That startled me. "Hydrocarbons? Are you talking about oil?"

He nodded. "Sure, there's some oil. We've drilled a couple of little wells in the marshlands downriver, but they don't produce much. What did you think we used for lubrication?"

I had never given a thought to what they used for lubrication. Then, when I pointed out that they could burn the oil to make electricity, he agreed. "We could do that, all right, If we had the furnaces and boilers and generators to build an oil-burning power plant. People have talked about it, but we don't have those things. We can't turn off the biomass plant for a year while we convert it to oil; we'd starve. So we can't use those. The generators from the dam are gone; we haven't been able to get new ones from the orbiting factory because it doesn't have enough copper or silver for the coils—the hydroplant we lost pretty well drained it."

He had hit on a subject I knew something about. "Why would the coils have to be pure metal? The lunar photovoltaic belt uses composites."

He looked at me with a little more respect. "That's true, but composites take a lot of energy to manufacture. The orbiter's running pretty close to capacity already." He thought for a minute, then brightened. "Of course, Tscharka brought back all that antimatter fuel. The factory's equipped to use either antimatter or solar power, provided it hasn't scavenged all its antimatter systems for raw materials. We could have plenty of power that way—Although I don't know how we'd hook it up. Nobody on Pava has any experience with antimatter."

"I do," I pointed out.

"Well, hell," he said, almost getting excited, "that's true. You do, don't you? You should be able to make the conversion. Maybe we could really do it!" He thought for a minute, then grinned sheepishly. He had got carried away. There was still the raw material problem, he told me. Not just for making the current-carrying cables and coils. For a building to house the generators. For the structural parts of the generators themselves. And even if they did get an oil-burning plant built and working, they'd have to get the fuel to the plant. Meaning they'd need to build a fleet of boats to carry the oil upriver—or a pipeline, maybe, though the wells weren't likely to produce enough to fill a pipeline, and then there was the problem of keeping a forty-kilometer pipeline intact in an earthquake region—

By the time we finished breakfast I thought I had Byram Tanner pretty well pegged. Every suggestion I made to him produced a first-rate explanation of why it wouldn't work.

He struck me as a perfect example of a native Pavan. He seemed to be a decent fellow, but he had an endless supply of reasons why nothing could be done.

You know, there's a funny thing there. Listening to myself now I wonder why I was so judgmental of Byram Tanner and the Pavan colonists in general. Not just judgmental, even. Maybe what you could call, well, actually almost racist. Tanner didn't deserve that. Tanner was really a good man, doing his best to do a damn near impossible job. Maybe the Pavans in general didn't deserve that kind of contempt, either . . . though I'm nowhere near as sure of that.

Maybe I was beginning to get some of those mood swings already? I don't know. All the same, right after breakfast I headed for Dr. Billygoat's office. People were beginning to gather for the day's work assignments, and so were a lot of leps—it seemed there were more of them in town almost every day, maybe because they wanted a look at the new human arrivals? I felt I ought to do my part. I wanted to get the visit to the doctor over so I could start doing something productive—even if, this one morning, the most productive thing I could do was to go out again with Theophan Sperlie.

By then I knew my way around Freehold pretty well—not that there was that much to know, in a community of less than a thousand people. I cut through the space between the broken-down meeting hall and the vehicle-repair shed and found the doctor's office without trouble.

Dr. Goethe's office was also his home. He had a whole two-story apartment of his own. His chief medical assistant, who was busy retrieving data from the screen in the front room when I came in, was also his wife, Ann. In fact, they had a one-year-old baby who was snoring bubbles in a crib by her mother's feet while Ann Goethe worked.

Ann put her finger to her lips in the don't-wake-the-baby sign. "Billy?" she whispered. "Oh, no, you can't see Billy right now. He's upstairs in the lab, checking grain samples, and I don't like to bother him there. So unless it's an emergency—? Right, then why don't you come back right after lunch, and I'll tell him you'll be here."

That meant I had to tell Theophan that I wouldn't be going out in the field with her at all today. I thought about skipping the doctor's visit for one more day, but I had the uneasy feeling that I might go on putting it off past the point when it would be purely precautionary any longer. So I went to tell Theophan the news.

When I found her she was sitting on the edge of one of the cleared tables, tapping her heel against the table leg as she waited. There were half a dozen leps a few meters away, whistling softly to each other, and when I told Theophan about my appointment with the doctor she wasn't happy. "Oh, hell, Barry, I wanted to get out there today. Couldn't you take care of your personal stuff after work?"

"I had to take whatever time they gave me," I said.

"For Billygoat? Don't make me laugh. You just let them walk all over you. The trouble is, it makes a problem for me. I need to take these leps along for guides and they'll work better for you than they do for me."

"Sorry about that," I said. She just shook her head. Being annoyed became her, and I wondered why I hadn't taken her up on her pretty clear come-on that first day. (Matter of fact, I still wonder about that, sometimes.)

She thought for a moment. "Well, hell, tomorrow will do, I guess," she said. "I can use a day in my office to work up some of the accumulated data." For that I was not useful, and she left me looking after her as she walked away. She looked good from the back, too.

That left me with a lot of free time. Free time was a no-no for Pava colonists. I thought for a minute about which particular kind of job I should be volunteering for—I heard a power saw in the distance, and of course the repair crews always needed all the help they could get. The little group of leps had moved toward me, eyeing me curiously, and I discovered one of them was speaking to me.

The lep was a female they called Mary Queen of Scots—I don't know why. She was a big, fifth-instar female with a bristle of reddish whiskers around her mouthpart. She humped over toward me with that inchworm stretch-and-retract movement that was the lep method of traveling, and she repeated her question two or three times before I made it out.

What she was saying was, "Does the female destroyer want us to escort you?"

I understood who she was talking about, of course. "Why do you keep on calling Theophan Sperlie a destroyer?" I asked.

The lep twisted her mouthpart—it really did look like a sneer. "We call that person what she is. Answer. Are we to take you?"

"I don't think so. I mean, no, not today; I have to do something else."

That was all the answer she wanted, it appeared. She stretched enough to raise up her head so she could look into my eyes for a moment, but all she said was, "Good-bye." Then she dropped back, twisted her body around in a U-turn and inchwormed away.

"Hey," I called after her. She didn't stop. Most of the other leps followed her, all but one. That one was a fourth-instar male, and he crawled up on the table to study me. He smelled of damp earth and greenery.

"Hello," I said, being polite. "I don't know your name, I'm sorry."

The lep didn't answer, or not in any way that mattered. He made sounds, but they weren't human sounds. That wasn't surprising; there were plenty of leps that didn't speak English, especially not the younger ones. He whistled and blew at me for a while, then he gave up. He slid himself down from the table and inchwormed over to a cart. He wiggled his head into a harness, caught the bit in his mouthpart and started down the street.

Then he paused long enough to twist around and look after me.

I got the idea. He wanted me to follow.

So I followed, and he led me to where a work team was loading foundation bricks onto the carts. I recognized a couple of them—my downstairs neighbors, the Khaim-Novellos, looking as though they hadn't planned on this kind of manual labor on Pava, and the boss of the team, the cheery, chubby Santa Claus chaplain of the interstellar ship
Corsair
. "Hello, di Hoa, I'm glad to see you," Friar Tuck greeted me. "Nice of you to come and help out. We've got to get all this stuff loaded so the leps can drag it to the new building sites."

You know, that's still the thing that puzzles me most about you leps. I mean why you were so nice to these troublesome human beings who invaded your planet and killed off so many of your food animals and cut down so many of your forests—yes, and even managed to kill some of you in the process. You seemed to put up with a lot from us—well, from everybody but Theophan Sperlie, anyway.

Understand, I'm not saying you should have done anything different. I certainly don't mean that you should have attacked our camp one night and wiped us out; I know you wouldn't do that. But you were so damn helpful. It was pretty obvious that the human colony on Pava would have been even worse off than it was without your volunteer labor. You did all kinds of work for us, sometimes very hard work, work that needed to be done for the survival of the colony and that there just weren't enough human hands to do. And you did it for no pay . . . well, except now and then some handouts of odds and ends of discards that even the threadbare colony on Pava didn't think were worth saving.

I couldn't figure your motivation out. It didn't occur to me that it might have been mostly pity.

I wouldn't say the Reverend Tuchman was any kind of friend of mine, but I wasn't sorry when we sat down to eat together. I was still thinking about all the things I thought the colony needed to do, and he was as good a person to bounce my ideas off as any.

For someone who hadn't seen Pava for nearly half a century he seemed pretty well informed on what was going on. He told me about the oil wells—pitiful little pumped-out things—and the fact that, yes, there was a sort of lignite mine two or three valleys away in the woods, but no one had bothered to keep it up. He explained to me about the little hydropower plant by the shuttle landing strip, and why its small electrical output couldn't be used for the town of Freehold—it was built to electrolyze hydrogen out of the river water to make shuttle fuel, and especially now, with
Corsair
's cargo needing to be brought down from orbit, there wasn't any spare power for the town. And then he put the move on me. "I haven't had a chance to ask you, di Hoa, but what's your religious affiliation?"

The only surprise was that he hadn't done it earlier. "I'm more or less Western Orthodox," I said, "at most."

That made him smile. "What a shame," he said gently. "Of course we'd be glad to see you at our services, anytime you want to drop in."

"Not very likely," I said.

He regarded me thoughtfully, the smile still on his face. It wasn't a sneering smile. It was a smile of compassion, the kind of smile I might have given my small son Matthew—if I had been lucky enough to know my son Matthew when he was small—if Matthew had firmly declared that he didn't think the world was round.

Then, just to remind us of other problems, there was a little earth tremor right then. People looked startled; the tall trees around the dining tables swayed; some of the tea in Tuchman's cup slopped over.

I didn't let it spoil my appetite. It was only about a 4.5, I judged, and I was already getting used to them. I took the last mouthful of stew out of my bowl and began nonchalantly to chew.

Tuchman was looking at something behind me, and it turned out to be Becky Khaim-Novello. "Reverend?" she said. "I'm a little worried—"

"It's just a minor quake, Rebecca," he said soothingly.

"I don't mean that. Have you seen Jubal? He went off right after work, I thought maybe to go to the bathroom. But he never came back to eat."

"Perhaps he just wasn't hungry. There's no place for him to get lost, you know. I'm sure he'll be on hand for the afternoon work detail."

"Thank you, Reverend," she said uncertainly, and turned and went back to the serving tables for some fruit, Tuchman looking after her.

"By the way," I said, remembering, "I won't be there. I've got a doctor's appointment."

He ignored that. Earthquakes, doctor's visits and missing husbands did not distract him from his favorite subject. "Don't you believe in God at all?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Maybe I do, sometimes, in a way. But mostly I guess not."

The smile was gone now, and he was looking at me with the kind of tempered pity a driver might give a specimen of roadkill. "What a tragedy," he said. "For you, I mean."