Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

“We’ve been expecting you,” a Harmonist in flowing green robes told him. “I’ve got instructions to contact my superiors the moment you show up.”

Mondachein was not surprised at that. Nor was he greatly astonished to be told, a short while later, that he was to leave by quickboat for Rome right away. The Harmonists would pay his expenses, he was informed.

A slim woman with surgically-altered eyellds met him at the station in Rome. She did not look familiar to him, but she smiled at him as though they were old friends. She conveyed him to a house on the Via Flaminia, a few dozen miles north of Rome, where a squat, sallow-faced Harmonist Brother with a bulbous nose awaited him.

“Welcome,” the Harmonist said. “Do you remember me?”

“No, I—yes. Yes!”

Recollection flooded back, dizzying him, staggering him. There had been three heretics in the room that other time, not just one, and they had given him wine and promised him a place in the Harmonist hierarchy, arid he had agreed to let himself be smuggled into Santa Fe, a soldier in the great crusade, a warrior of light, a Harmonist spy.

“You did very well, Mondschein,” the heretic said unctuously. “We didn’t think you’d be caught so fast, but we weren’t sure of all their detection methods. We could only guard against the espers, and we did a fair enough job of that. At any rate, the information you provided was extremely useful.”

“And you’ll keep your end of the bargain? I’m to get a tenth-level job?”

“Of course. You didn’t think we’d cheat you, did you? You’ll have a three-month indoctrination course so you can attain in-sight into our movement. Then you’ll assume your new duties in our organization. Which would you prefer, Mondschein—Mars or Venus?”

“Mars or Venus? I don’t follow you.”

“We’re going to attach you to our missionary division. You’ll be leaving Earth by next summer, to carry on our work in one of the colonies. You’re free to choose the one you prefer.”

Mondachein was aghast. He had never bargained for this. Selling out to these heretics, only to get shipped off to an alien world and likely martyrdom—no, he had never expected anything like that

Faust didn’t expect his troubles, either, Mondschein thought coldly.

He said, “What kind of trick is this? You’ve got no right to ask me to become a missionary!”

“We offered you a tenth-level job,” the Harmonist said quietly. “The option of choosing the division it would be remained with us.”

Mondschein was silent. There was a fierce throbbing in his skull. The face of the Harmonist seemed to blur and waver. He was free to leave—to step out the door and merge into the multitudes. To become nothing. Or he could submit and be—what? Anything. Anything.

Dead in six weeks, as likely as not.

“I’ll take it,” he said. “Venus. I’ll go to Venus.” His words sounded like a cage clanging shut.

The Harmonist nodded. “I thought you would,” he said. He turned to leave, then paused and stared curiously at Mondschein. “Did you really think you could name your own position— spy ?”

The Venusian boy danced nimbly around the patch of Trouble Fungus behind the chapel, avoiding the gray-green killer with practiced ease. He hop-skipped past the rubbery bole of the Limblime Tree and approached the serried row of jagged nameless stalks that lined the back garden. The boy grinned at them, and they parted for him as obligingly as the Red Sea had yielded to Moses some time earlier.

“Here I am,” he said to Nicholas Martell.

“I didn’t think you’d be back,” the Vorster missionary said.

The boy—Elwhit—looked mischievous. “Brother Christopher said I couldn’t come back. That’s why I’m here. Tell me about the Blue Fire. Can you really make atoms give light?”

“Come inside,” Martell said.

The boy represented his first triumph since coming to Venus, and a small triumph it was, so far. But Martell did not object to that. A step was a step. There was a planet to win here. A universe to win, perhaps.

Inside the chapel the boy hung back, suddenly shy. He was no more than ten, Martell guessed. Was it just wickedness that had made him come here? Or was he a spy from the chapel of heretics down the road? No matter. Martell would treat him as a potential convert. He activated the altar, and the Blue Fire welled into the small room, colors dancing against the boards of the groined wooden ceiling. Power surged from the cobalt cube, and the harmless, dramatic radiations wrung a gasp of awe from Elwhit.

“The fire is symbolic,” Martell murmured. “There’s an underlying oneness in the universe—the common building blocks, do you see? Do you know what atomic particles are? Protons, electrons, neutrons? The things everything’s made up of?”

“I can touch them,” Elwhit said. “I can push them around.”

“Will you show me how?” Martell was remembering the way the boy had parted those knifeblade-sharp plants In back. A glance, a mental shove, and they had yielded. These Venusians could teleport—he was sure of it. “How do you push things?” Martell asked.

But the boy shrugged the question aside, “Tell me more about the Blue Fire,” he said.

“Have you read the book I gave you? The one by Vorst? That tells you all you need to know.”

“Brother Christopher took it away from me.”

“You showed it to him?” Martell said, startled.

“He wanted to know why I came to you. I said you talked to me and gave me a book. He took the book. I came back. Tell me why you’re here. Tell me what you teach.

Martell hadn’t imagined that his first convert would be a child. He said carefully, “The religion we have here is very much like the one that Brother Christopher teaches. But there are some differences. His people make up a lot of stories. They’re good stories, but they’re only stories.”.

“About Lazarus, you mean?”

“That’s right. Myths, nothing more. We try not to need such things. We’re trying to get right in touch with the basics of the universe. We—”

The boy lost interest. He tugged at his tunic and nudged at a chair. The altar was what fascinated him, nothing else. The glistening eyes roved toward it.

Martell said, “The cobalt is radioactive. It’s a source of betas—electrons. They’re going through the tank and knocking photons loose. That’s where the light comes front”

“I can stop the light,” the boy said. “Will you be angry If I stop it?”

It was a kind of sacrilege, Martell knew. But he suspected that he would be forgiven. Any evidence of teleporting activity that he could gather was useful.

“Go ahead,” he said.

The boy remained motionless. But the radiance dimmed. It was as if an invisible hand reached into the reactor, intercepting the darting particles. Telekinesis on the subatomic level! Martell was elated and chilled all at once, watching the light fade. Suddenly it flared more brightly again. Beads of sweat glistened on the boy’s bluish-purple forehead.

“That is all,” Elwhit announced.

“How do you do it?”

“I reach.” He laughed. “You can’t?”

“Afraid not,” Martell said. “Listen, if I give you another book to read, will you promise not to show it to Brother Christopher? I don’t have many. I can’t afford to have the Harmonists confiscate them all.”

“Next time,” the boy said. “I don’t feel like reading things now. I’ll come again. You tell me all about it some other time.”

He danced away, out of the chapel, and went skipping through the underbrush, heedless of the perils that lurked in the deep-shadowed forest beyond. Martell watched him go, not knowing whether he was actually making his first convert or whether he was being mocked.