The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl Page A

people associated with Corsair . I hadn't, though. What I had actually hoped—or would have hoped, if I had known that I was coming here and had given it any thought at all—was that maybe a world with a human population of less than a thousand would have simplified its religious urges.
    It hadn't, though. Denominationally speaking, Freehold seemed to be even more divided than the Moon. I looked at the people in the streets as they stopped whatever they were doing to stare or wave at us, and wondered if there were quite enough of them to go around for the visible number of denominations.
    We stopped in front of a shingled, flat-roofed structure that Theophan Sperlie said was the communal meeting hall, though it looked more like a roller-skating rink in some small town. Its walls didn't seem entirely straight, and the front door had a board nailed across it.
    In fact, what all the buildings had in common was that they were ramshackle wooden affairs, mostly constructed out of that more-or-less bamboo and not in very good repair. A lot of them were propped up by those bamboo columns.
    When Theophan saw what I was looking at, she grinned. "Blame it on the earthquakes," she said. "As I guess you know, we have a lot of them here."
    "I did know, Ms. Sperlie—"
    "Theo."
    "I did know about the earthquakes, Theo. Sort of."
    "Well, anything you don't know I'll tell you. That's my job, seismologist. The situation isn't all that bad, really. The biggest buildings are the ones that give us the most trouble when we get a serious tremor. Like our meeting hall over there. That one got its foundations shifted a while ago, and we haven't made up our minds about whether we should be repairing it or tearing the damn thing down and starting over. Fortunately it's nice weather now, so we meet outdoors mostly."
    I asked the question that had been growing in my mind as we bumped along. "Does it have a men's room?"
    "A what? Oh. I know what you mean. Well, Barry," she said frankly, "you see, that's one of our problems here. We haven't had much luck with sewer systems. But there's an outhouse next to just about every building, so help yourself."
     
    In the thirty-six elapsed years of my life (not counting the time while I was both frozen and time-dilated on the ship) I had never once been anywhere that didn't have a high-tech toilet. On Earth they were mostly flush; on the Moon mostly thermal; but they always took the little contributions from my digestive system and made them disappear.
    That wasn't the way it was on Pava. I didn't even know what an "outhouse" was supposed to look like until a helpful resident pointed me the right way, and then I didn't much like it. It turned out to be a little shanty built around a wooden seat with a hole in it to excrete through, and a bigger hole dug in the ground below to hold the excretions.
    It smelled accordingly. I began to wonder if being on Pava was going to turn out even nastier than I had suspected.
    That led me to wonder what my chances were of getting off it pretty fast. I wasn't really thinking of getting back to my unfinished business with Alma anymore. I had already written that prospect off for good; fifty years was a hell of a lot longer than I could imagine anyone waiting, not to mention what sort of condition Alma might be in after fifty years of elapsed time for her. I wasn't even thinking of getting back to my job. I was just thinking about getting back.
    When I came back, feeling chastened, both cars were pulled up in the square, with our newcomers mingling with a bunch of the Pavan colonists. At least half of the new people, along with a lot of the ones who lived there, were clustered around Captain Tscharka. Some of the blissful smiles on the faces of the newcomers had evaporated.
    It was the first chance I'd had to take a good look at my fellow passengers from Corsair 's deep freeze. I was not impressed. I shook hands with ten or twelve of them—and at least as many of the