The Voices of Heaven (3 page)

2

YOU have touched on a principal concern. As you are aware, we have difficulty in understanding why your human custom of "religions" is so important to you. Tell us more about them, your own in particular.

You're asking me about two different things at the same time. Which one do you want answered?

Both of them. Please.

There's not much to tell about my own religion. I don't actually have one, I mean not one that I take very seriously. My parents were Western Orthodox and that's the way I was brought up, but it didn't last.

Probably my medical problems were what made me drop out, because they were hellish enough for anybody. After you spend a couple of years in the particular hell of a crazyhouse you come out of it one of two ways—either you'll believe with all your heart in anything that sounds as though it gives you some kind of hope, or you won't believe in anything at all. I went the second way. I suppose I was helped in that direction by my main therapist, Dr. Schneyman, who was unregistered himself. (He liked to quote some old guy named Benjamin Franklin, who said, "In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it.") By the time they decided I could be allowed to go out into the world again I'd lost a lot of things. My religious belief was only one of them.

Of course, you run into a lot of practical problems if you're not registered to some recognized religious denomination—like not having anyone to vote for, for instance. So when I came to start a new life on the Moon I let myself be registered as Orthodox, meaning what they used to call "Easter Duty Orthodox." What that means is that I went to mass on the main church holidays, sometimes—if I happened to think of it at the right time and if I couldn't remember any really private recent sins that I would be embarrassed to have to confess to.

That brings us to the other part of your question, which is harder. There's no way I could name all the human religions for you. There are too many of them. There are maybe fifteen or twenty main groups, and all kinds of denominations within each group.

You could start out with the Christians, which is what I more or less was. There are two main classes of Christians: There's the Protestants, which includes the Pentecostals and the Baptists and the Fundamentalists and about forty others, most of them divided into eight or ten different sects, including the Millenarists (like Captain Tscharka) and the four or five varieties of Quakers and Old Believers and Amish and Universalists and so on. Then there's the Orthodox wing of Christianity. The Orthodox have the two big sects, Western and Roman, but there are maybe twenty littler ones there, too, like the Lifers, the True-Lifers and the patriarchates. And somewhere or other you have to put in the Christians that aren't either one or the other, like the Gnostics and Mormons and so on.

Then we get to the non-Christians, starting with the Jews—I think there are at least fifteen or twenty different varieties of those, ranging from Hassidim (including the Lubavitchers) and the Templars to the Church of Jewish Science—and to Islam, with its three major branches, Shi'ite, Suni and Reformed, and maybe half a dozen divisions of each. Then there are the Eastern religions and the African ones—I don't even remember the names of most of those, apart from Tao, Shinto and Kwanzaa and a few others like Buddhism (both Orthodox and Soka Gakkai) and Ryuho Okawa Happy Science. Most of those don't do much proselytizing, so they're pretty well confined to where they started—where, I guess, they have enough problems to keep themselves occupied. Still, they elect enough Congresspeople to be an important swing vote sometimes.

Finally we wind up with the exotics—different kinds of Rosicrucians, Spiritualists, Scientologists, Reincarnationists, Astrologists and so on—and the ancient revivals—Druids, Olympians, snake-handlers, Osiris people, Wiccans, Odinists, Pyramiders, Zoroastians, Thugs and about a million others, right down to the devotees of the Karnut Temple Rat Cult. Of course, on the Moon some of the weirder denominations are out of luck (due, for instance, to a local shortage of snakes or rats), and others are hampered because it's against the law to practice some of their commandments. (Like the ZPG-Thugs. Their mixture of Zero Population Growth and Thuggee still has some churches in California, but you never see them on the Moon.) They all get along, more or less. The only sect that I remember making any real trouble in the lunar Lederman colony were the Odinists. That happened when an opera troupe doing
Das Rheingold
gave the role of Wotan to a Japanese singer. The Odinists called that blasphemy and tried (unsuccessfully) to black out the broadcast, but since there were only seven of the Odinists altogether they couldn't work up a real riot.

(I won't even mention the secular churches that aren't really religions, exactly. They aren't allowed to have any representatives in the Congresses, but people belong to them so they'll have places to go to when everybody else is going to church; these are the Communals, the Ethicals, the Rationalists, and the Humanists.)

I don't know what the total number of religious sects is. Maybe there are a thousand or so that are large enough, and well enough organized, to have their own official electoral constituencies, but there are thousands and thousands of splinter groups that are too small or too new to be registered.

Most of the registered ones, even, are too small to elect their own people to the various world commissions. The legislative commissions are usually dominated by Christians, Muslims and Jews, although there are almost always a sprinkling of Taoists and Buddhists in the major legislative commissions. They are considered less dogmatic than most of the others, so their presence is encouraged to help cool down the steamier arguments. Some of the small ones make common cause with others, too, so they can run what they call a "fusion" ticket. Probably every registered sect has at least a part of an elected legislator somewhere.

(You haven't asked me just how it happened that the religions ran the governments, but I'll tell you anyway. It wasn't always that way. They say that in the old days people used to vote for "political parties," but all the parties got to look pretty much alike. Whatever people said their "political" principles were, it turned out that they were generally voting their religions and their social and ethnic backgrounds anyway—sometimes with a lot of violence. It was simpler to cut out the middleman, I wouldn't say that solved all the problems, but at least we don't have much "car bombing" or "kneecapping" or "ethnic cleansing" going on anymore. Never mind what those things were. You don't want to know.)

That's the story on the churches. It may not quite be what you were asking about, I think. Probably what you really want to know is what all these denominations believe in.

That's a much harder question. I think that the principal thing, for most of them, is that their religious beliefs are tied up in some hope of eternal life. In the Western Orthodox church, for instance, we believe—or probably I should say they believe—that after you die you enter a kind of world of the spirit, and if you're good it's paradise and then you just live on forever in eternal joy of one kind or another. It's pretty much the same with most of the other religions, except that in some of their heavens you don't spend eternity singing hosannahs. Maybe you just get reincarnated and have to go through the whole thing all over again. Or maybe you just abandon all your individual, personal existence entirely and join some kind of universal Soul—I'm not too clear on some of them.

On the other hand, a lot of the religions hold that there's a down side to the afterlife, too. That means that if you've been a rotten person in your lifetime—or maybe if you just ate the wrong kind of food, or didn't make the right sacrifices, or missed attending a service even—when you die you are going to pay for it because then you are going to get punished for your sins by roasting (or something) in some kind of totally agonizing hell. Forever.

I know that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you, but we ought to be getting used to that by now. You're different from us in too many ways—especially this one, since you people have never had to worry about an afterlife at all.

3

IT is not evident that you are helping your case, Barrydihoa. In your description of these humans—Garoldtscharka, the Tuch-man, the two males who proposed suicide to the female—it is clear that their behavior is quite disturbing. Are they "crazy," in the same sense that you your self have been?

No, of course not. With them it wasn't psychosis. It was their religion.

This distinction is unclear. You have said that in your illness you are aware of objective events but you interpret them in nonrealistic ways. Does not "religion" also involve nonrealistic belief systems?

Well, yes, but they're really two different things. I mean, personally, I don't have any doubt that Millenarism is really crazy. I guess most religious people think that all the people who happen to believe in some religion other than their own are pretty loopy. When I was ten years old in catechism class you should've heard what my old parish priest had to say about the Mormons across the street, for instance.

But that sort of thing is accepted, and my kind of craziness wasn't. Not by anybody. Not even by me.

That's why I was so nervous about calling my son, you see. I guess every divorced father is a little tense about his kid's birthday, but not every father has not been in the same room with his son since the boy was two years old, asleep in his bed, and the father was bending over him with a butcher knife.

You heard me, a butcher knife. The kind of thing people kill people with. I don't think I had any actual intention of hurting Matthew. I was just very, very confused.

All the same, I think it was probably pretty lucky that my wife Gina—my then wife Gina, who is not my wife anymore for obvious reasons—happened to look into the bedroom just then. She screamed. I didn't hurt her, either. I just threw the knife into a corner and ran out of the room, babbling.

I couldn't run far enough to keep the police from catching me and putting me away, though; and that was the last time I ever saw my son in the flesh.

So, as I say, I was a little nervous on the flight down to the Lederman landing pad. I didn't talk much to Captain Tscharka, who was full of his own thoughts anyway. When we were docked the man he called his chaplain was waiting for him, looking excited. "It's looking good, Garold," he called, waddling over toward us, and then noticed me. "Who's he?" he demanded.

Tscharka introduced us. "Our fuelmaster, Barry di Hoa. Di Hoa, this is Reverend Tuchman."

He was bigger than he had looked on the screen, at least ten centimeters taller than I was, and he gave me a quick grip that was stronger than I had expected. Then he forgot me, drawing Tscharka away and telling him that he'd reserved telecom time for their testimony at the colony hearing. If I really noticed Tuchman at all, it was only because he was obviously sixty or so and Millenarists don't usually stick around that long. Then I forgot him, too—for the moment, anyway.

Normally I would have taken the subway through the crater wall to my office in the manufacturing compound—the community where Lederman people live is outside the wall for alleged safety reasons—but I was in a hurry. I found a privacy booth and made some calls. I logged in with my reports; I left messages for my crew to tell them that they wouldn't need to decommission
Corsair
's fuel storage because it was already clean; I put through a call to my girlfriend, Alma Vendette.

I caught her just coming out of the shower. "You shouldn't answer the phone when you aren't dressed," I told her.

She looked at me innocently. Innocent is one of Alma's best looks; it goes with her blue eyes and gentle smile. "I put a towel on, didn't I? Anyway, I knew it was you. Are we on for today?"

"Give me half an hour. Meet you in Danny's."

"Danny's in half an hour," she said, blew me a kiss, and blanked the screen.

Then I took a deep breath, checked to make sure the privacy door was closed and put through my call to Earth.

It was my ex-wife who answered the phone.

"Hello, Gina," I said, noticing that, though she had put on a little weight, she still looked good. I didn't exactly love Gina anymore, and I certainly didn't blame her for the divorce (she didn't have much choice about that, with me in the nuthouse) or for remarrying this man Gerard (who, actually, seemed to be a pretty decent guy), but there was still some little strain in talking to her.

"Hi, Barry," she answered, the usual couple of seconds later that you get on a Moon-Earth call. "How've you been?"

I told her how I'd been, while I peered past her. The room behind her wasn't one I'd ever seen before—they'd moved since Christmas—and I was pretty sure it didn't look the way it usually looked anyway. Gerard and their jointly produced three-year-old daughter, Theris, were decorating the wallpic for the occasion. Racing little dots of colored light were spelling out "Happy Birthday Matthew" and the little girl was trying to draw a birthday cake with a penlight.

"I guess you want to talk to Matthew. He's in his room getting dressed, Barry. We're going to have a party. Wait, I'll switch you over."

"Thanks," I said, but she didn't wait to hear. The screen blanked while she told him he had my call, and when it lighted up again he was peering out at me.

"Happy sixteenth birthday, Matthew," I said to my son. He was taller and skinnier, but he still had Gina's clear, brown eyes.

He said politely, "Thank you, and thanks for the check you sent me, too, friend Barry."

"Friend Barry" meant he was still a Quaker; he'd been through five or six denominations since he was twelve. It was his business; I didn't comment. I saw crossed hockey sticks hanging on the wall behind him, so I asked him if he had made the team, and he had, and I asked him how school was going, and he told me his marks, and I asked him if he'd made any decision about college, and then he surprised me.