The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Space Colonies, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780812535181
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1994-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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