The Voices of Heaven (21 page)

As it happened, we had plenty of time for indoor games around then. The weather changed. For a while we were pretty much housebound as Freehold was hit by a nasty three-day storm, wave after wave of thunder-boomers with spectacular lightning displays, high winds and pelting rain. Jacky Schottke and I took turns running to the kitchens to bring food back to the apartment, and the outside work of the community had to be done in two-hour snatches between waves. I used the time to work the apartment's screen to catch up on some of the colony's history and technology—not being very impressed with what I found—and to get my notions about bringing it up to speed into some coherent order. The first step, surely, was to get the factory orbiter fueled from Tscharka's antimatter store; after that I was less clear. But no less impatient.

When the clouds moved out toward the coast and Delta Pavonis beamed again, there was a lot of accumulated work to deal with, I found out that there were some jobs Geronimo didn't care to share with me when Jimmy Queng tagged me for butcher detail. Geronimo was standing right beside me at the morning show-up when I got the call, but by the time I was halfway to the little meadow where Freehold's herd of free-ranging goats grazed he wasn't there anymore. He was sloping off, as fast as he could slither, in the direction of the hills.

Friar Tuck had drawn the same detail and was just behind me. When he saw where I was looking he gave me a consoling smile. "Leps don't like to kill things," he said.

"I'm not crazy about it myself," I told him.

He said mildly, "You eat the meat, though." That was a point for him, all right. When we had stripped to the waist and begun to get into the actual nasty business of slitting throats and spilling out the guts from the body cavities of the animals, I gave serious if brief thought to becoming a vegetarian. The reverend did not appear to have any such thoughts. He waded right in, regardless of struggling animals, bad smells or gore. I suppose that when death is your dearest ambition a little extra slaughter doesn't matter much, one way or the other.

By the time we had six carcasses skinned and cleaned and cut into quarters Dabney Albright had joined us in his boat, pissing and moaning because he'd had so much trouble dodging floating debris on the way up. All the rivers had risen after the storms, and our little local stream was yellow with mud and full of storm-downed branches and even fair-sized trees.

"At least it makes it easier for the woodcutters," Tuchman said jovially as we began loading the meat into the boat. The man was determined to be cheerful about everything. He had good ideas, though; when we had all the carcasses loaded and Albright was already pushing off for the downstream run, Tuchman was the first one to get out of his clothes and into the water to get the blood off.

Although the water was cold, Delta Pavonis was hot. It seemed that Millenarists didn't suffer much from nudity taboos, and when we were reasonably clean Tuchman sprawled naked on the riverbank for a while, unconcerned with his great, pale, bare body, gazing benignly at the rest of us. One of the others, a young dark-skinned man named Phil Pass, threw a stick into the stream and said, "You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to put some trout in these rivers."

"You know we can't do that," Tuchman reminded him. Well, we all did know that. The colonists were strict about releasing the kinds of Earthly organisms that might go explosively feral in the Pavan environment; there had been too many Hawaiis and Australias in human history to make that particular mistake again. Even our free-ranging goats were all female—fertilized by sperm collected from the few closely guarded males that were allowed to grow to maturity—and kept tightly fenced in until they delivered. But Tuchman wasn't finished. He was gazing at me as he said, "There are a lot of things we'd like to do, but can't."

I took that to be a challenge. "On the other hand," I said, "there are a lot of things that we can do, and should. Like getting some use out of all that antimatter Tscharka brought."

"You're so concerned with worldly things," he said gently.

"Maybe you and Tscharka aren't concerned enough. Where's he been, anyway?"

"Shuttling cargo down from
Corsair
, of course."

"Well, what's going to happen when that's finished? We're not all Millenarists, you know."

"I do know that," he said earnestly, "and I sorrow for that fact every day of my life." He stood up and began getting dressed. "No," he said, "we're not all Millenarists, but what we are is a democracy. It isn't up to you to decide what the colony does with its resources, my friend Barry. It's up to the colony as a whole, and I have no doubt that that decision will be made in good time. Now I think we should start back to see what else needs doing."

Before dinner I decided on a social call. I hadn't seen Madeleine Hartly for several days, and I liked the woman. Her house was a one-flat at the opposite end of town from Jacky Schottke and me. I found it without trouble, but when I knocked on the door a tall, skinny young woman answered. She had a big spoon in her hand and I could smell cooking as she shook her head at me. "No, you can't see Gram right now. This weather hasn't been good for her. She's not feeling too well right now."

I asked her to please tell Madeleine that I'd stopped by and that I hoped she'd be better soon—the things you say when someone's sick. It seemed to me that she'd have to be pretty ill to have someone cooking for her in her own kitchen, and I didn't like that idea. I hadn't thought of Madeleine ever being sick. She was old; I knew that. But the way she'd loped up and down the hillside to gather fruit hadn't suggested an invalid.

On the way to the mess tables I strolled along the riverbank, enjoying the warm dusk. You could hear the river that night; it was still all yellow with mud brought down from the storm. Bits and pieces of vegetation were floating in it, and Pavans were out walking like myself.

Halfway there I heard someone calling my name, and it was Theophan. "Listen," she said when she caught up to me, "are you doing anything important tomorrow?"

I looked around for Marcus Wendt, but she was alone. "Whatever they tell me to do, I guess."

"Well, this damp is bad for Marcus's shoulder, and I need to get some stuff up to the Rockies in the morning. Want to give me a hand?"

I promised. I thought for a moment that she might suggest joining her at the meal, but she didn't; she nodded thanks and turned around and left.

Oddly, Geronimo wasn't with us when Theophan and I met the next morning. That wasn't a total surprise, because there were days when the lep had business of his own, whatever that business was, and never showed up. But I thought I'd seen him out my window, and yet when I came down he wasn't there.

He wasn't waiting at the car, either, though two other leps were. I didn't give it much of a thought, because I was looking forward to seeing the Rockies close up. Theophan wouldn't even try to do that particular jaunt when it was raining—it was going to be hard enough getting up those hills in dry weather, she promised; if it was raining we'd never make it. So I hadn't been west of the river at all.

I almost wasn't that day, either, because after we'd taken the long detour upriver to the only place where it could be forded, Theophan stopped the car and got out to stare at the water. It wasn't inviting. The river was several hundred meters broad at that point and obviously flowing fast. "It's still pretty high," she fretted. "What do you think, Barry?"

I knew my opinion wasn't worth much—what did I know about fording rivers on Pava?—but I didn't want to turn back again. "I think we can make it if we go slow," I said wisely. Theophan knew how little my opinion was worth as well as I did, but I had said what she wanted to hear. She made all the leps get out of the car and gave me a rope; I led them across, each one of them hanging gamely by its mouth-part to the rope and slithering and sliding around in the flow.

It wasn't any fun for me, either, though my only real personal problems were just the coldness of the water and the necessity for taking care in where I placed my feet. It was a good deal harder for the leps. Their bodies wanted to float. Try as they would, they couldn't keep enough of themselves below water to anchor themselves on the bottom. But we made it safely, and then it was Theophan's turn to drive the car after us.

That was tricky. There was a minute or two when I could see it beginning to slide, but she jammed on the speed and got clear.

When she finally crawled out onto the west bank I breathed easier—and, from the strained look on her face as she grinned at me, so did she.

We dried off quickly enough in the warm air as we drove back down along the river. There weren't many new sights for me to see yet. There was only one real difference between the two banks of the river and that was man-made. The colony's farm plots were scattered all along the east bank. There weren't any farms on the west—I thought—and then I began to notice that the occasional leps who raised their heads to stare at us as we passed were usually in the middle of patches of yellowish flowering plants or red-berried green ones.

That suggested something very close to agriculture to me. When I asked Theophan about them she nodded.

"Beans and berry roots, that's what they eat. They cultivate them, all right. I don't know if you'd call it real farming, though. They don't have to work very hard at it, because all they do is fling seeds into the ground and come back to collect their crops a few months later."

She looked over her shoulder at our lep assistants, whistling and snorting interestedly among themselves in the back of the car, and then added, "Now and then we've tried to show the leps how they could increase their productivity—selecting the best strains, fertilizing, and so on—but they just didn't seem to be interested in the idea. Now, with their population explosion, they may begin to pay attention."

That rang a bell. "Somebody else said something about a lep population explosion," I mentioned.

"Sure. They're hardly ever eaten by predators anymore. I'd guess there are twice as many leps around this colony now as there were when the first ship arrived," she said with satisfaction. "So they really have something to thank us for, don't they? Only they don't act that way."

"Well, but they do," I objected. "Look at the way Geronimo works with me, and he's not the only one. I mean, they're always helping out, aren't they? Seems to me that's pretty decent of them." She shrugged. She didn't look at me; we had turned west into the hills and she was concentrating on peering ahead at the rutty track we were following. I persisted. "Wouldn't you call that gratitude?"

She said shortly, "For some people, maybe. Shut up for a minute, will you? so I won't run us into some damn ditch."

I shut up, and we were both silent for half an hour or so as we climbed along the slope of one of the mountains. I was glad Theophan was doing the driving; if she seemed touchy, I put it down to the difficulty of the job. There wasn't any road. There wasn't really even the kind of primitive track we'd followed to the old hydroelectric dam; Theophan was steering us across meadows and through clearings in wooded areas that became harder and harder to penetrate. Then she put on the brakes and killed the motor.

She looked around to make sure of her bearings, then nodded. "This is as far as we can go in the car," she said. "Let's unload the gear."

And so we did, Theophan passing the bits of equipment to me from the back of the car, I handing them down to the leps outside. The leps seemed to know the drill better than I did. They took the sleds and instruments in their little hands and organized them—stringing the harnesses to the sleds, tying the sensor parts securely in place. Then they stopped, looking up at me out of those remarkable eyes.

Theophan followed me out of the car. She looked up at the hill ahead of us and sighed. "All right," she said, "let's go."

Nothing happened. The leps stayed there, silent and staring.

Theophan looked grim but not surprised. "Damn them," she said. "Barry, tell them to get going."

I wasn't quite clear what was happening, but I tried it. "Let's get going," I said . . . and each of the leps picked up its harness and began tugging the sleds up along the slippery vegetation.

It was like that all day. Theophan would tell me what the leps were supposed to do. Then I would tell the leps. Then they would do it.

I didn't have the breath to ask her what that was all about while we were lugging the equipment up the mountain. I hardly had the breath to crawl through the slick, damp undergrowth, with the pack on my back weighing about one ton more with every hundred meters we climbed. The leps didn't seem bothered by the climb. They inched smoothly along, sliding through whatever gaps presented themselves in the brush, pulling those runnered sleds after them as though they were toys. The only good part of that climb was the scenery, and the only word for that was "spectacular." We stopped to catch our breaths at the edge of a huge rock amphitheater, and although I was panting and sore I couldn't help staring at it: vertical walls of something like limestone or marble, a tiny trickle of waterfall sparkling out of a cliff top.

Theophan noticed it. "Pretty, isn't it? The Millenarists call it The Cathedral—they come up to have their retreats here sometimes."

"It's a long climb," I said. If I'd been the Millenarists I would have picked somewhere closer.

She laughed. "I guess that's what they like best about it. Nobody comes to bother them here. Let's go."

We went. It didn't get easier. When we did finally reach the top I fell flat on the ground, sweating cold sweat—it was windblown and chilly on the peak—and trying to get my heart to stop pounding. I wondered if this sort of exertion were going to accelerate my need for a booster. Then I wondered if Dr. Billygoat would have something for me next time I saw him. Then I wondered what I would do if he didn't.

Then I got up and got busy, because I didn't want to do any of that wondering anymore.

If it hadn't been for the chill and Theophan's mood, it might have been real nice to be up high in the Pavan Rockies that day. It was different from the places on the east side of the river. There weren't any traces of human activity here, no roads, no leftover debris from food-gathering parties, nothing but what we had brought with us. And correspondingly there was more wildlife; I saw a couple of jacks, the little kangaroo-like lizards that hopped like bunnies, and heard whistling snakes all around me, and saw flocks of the flyers. I even thought I saw a red-marked third-instar lep looking out from the trees at us once. It seemed to me that it might possibly be Geronimo, but it disappeared before I could call to it.