Free The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl Page B

on Pava, too. Of course, they'll be a little elderly by the time I get back, but Pava's a wonderful planet, di Hoa. Actually, I think I might just stay there this trip—I mean if I can find someone else to take my place on Corsair for the voyage back. See," she said earnestly, doing her best to convince me, "the only thing Pava needs to make it just about perfect is more industry. They're bound to have that taken care of by the time I get back. Power was still kind of short when we left. They were even burning biomass to make electricity, but that's the hard way to do it—but they were starting to build a big hydroelectric plant, with a hundred-meter dam. It'll be operating by now, I'm sure. And we'll still have our orbiting factory working too, probably. I think we'll want to use some of the antimatter there to run it; solar power takes you just so far. Have you ever seen an orbiting factory? It's all computer-controlled, so we can do custom-manufacturing, short runs, building things that we need on the planet. You'd be astonished how many different little machines and devices and chips and gadgets you need to make a planet go, when you can't just call up and get them from Earth."
    I was as convinced as I wanted to be, but I was polite. I said, "And you'll need fuel for those short-range interplanetary exploration ships, too, of course."
    "I guess so. I hope so, anyway. Personally, I'm not so much using them for exploring the other planets in the system as getting some tugs to bring in raw materials from Delta Pavonis's asteroid belt—you need more than energy to make a factory go, you know." She looked wistful. "Of course," she admitted, "there are problems. The quakes can be pretty bad, sometimes."
    "I imagine so," I told her. What I was thinking about was what life was going to be like for her in a place where you had constant earthquakes, and shortages of all kinds, and all the troubles that people who lived in civilization never even gave a thought to. I thought she was a brave woman. I also thought she was a fairly foolish one; but that was none of my business, after all.
    Then it was time for me to drop back to the Moon, and I did.
     
    What little free time I had in those days I tried to spend with Alma, and so I headed for her rooms. I thought she might still be sleeping, and so I let myself in quietly. She was actually in her bathroom, washing her hair. "Want to go out and get something to eat?" I called.
    "Not right away," she called back, and there was the sound of water running, and a minute later she came out, toweling her hair. "I'm waiting for a call," she said. "Remember Renate beha Nard?" I did; Renate was a friend of Alma's, a big, dark woman who the last time I'd seen her had had a belly the size of a watermelon. "Well, she's delivering about now. I'll want to go see the baby when it's born."
    "Ah," I said. "Uh-huh." It wasn't very articulate conversation, but that was because I didn't know exactly what I wanted to say. Then I remembered something about Renate. "She must've quit the Millenarists, too," I said, making a logical deduction from the fact that she and Alma had met at Millenarist services, and now she was having a baby.
    "Right," said Alma. She finished turbaning the towel around her head and sat down to look at me. "She knew when she'd made a mistake. Being alive wasn't really a sin, and so having babies couldn't be, either."
    "Absolutely," I said, to show how much I agreed with her, and then quickly changed the subject to show that I wasn't attaching any particular importance to it. "Well," I said, "if you don't want to go out, should we call up and have something sent in?"
    "I'm not that hungry, actually. Are you?"
    I wasn't, and the conversation began to drag. I was pleased when her phone sounded, a little less so when the face on the screen turned out not to belong to a nurse from the birthing center but to the man who seemed to me to be taking an unconscionable amount of time to get out