Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

Perhaps both, the missionary thought.

Nicholas Martell had come to Venus ten days before, aboard a passenger ship from Mars. He had been one of thirty passengers aboard the ship, but none of the others had cared for Nicholas Martell’s company. Ten of them were Martians, who did not care to share the atmosphere Martell breathed. Martians, now that their planet had been cozily Terraformed, preferred to fill their lungs with an Earthside mix of gases. So had Martell, once, for hewas a native Earthman himself. But now he was one of the changed ones, equipped with gills in good Venusian fashion.

Not gills, truly: they would serve no function under water. They were high-density filters, to strain the molecules of decent oxygen from the Venusian air. Martell was well adapted. His metabolism had no use for helium or the other inerts, but it could draw sustenance from nitrogen and had no real objections to fueling on CO2 for short spells. The surgeons at Santa Fe had worked on him for six months. It was forty years too late to make adjustments on Martell-ovum or Martell-fetus, as was the normal practice in fitting a man for life on Venus, so they had done their work on Martell the man. The blood that flowed in his veins was no longer red. His skin had a fine cyanotic flush. He was as a Venusian born.

There had been nineteen Venusians of the true blood aboard the ship, too. But they felt no kinship for Martell and had forced him to withdraw from their presence. The crewmen had set up Martell’s cradle in a storage chamber, with gentle apologies: “You know those arrogant Venusians, Brother. Give them the wrong kind of look and they’re at you with their daggers. You’ll stay here. You’ll be safer here.” A thin laugh. “You’ll be even safer, Brother, if you head for home without ever setting foot on Venus.”

Martell had smiled. He was prepared to let Venus do its worst.

Venus had martyred several dozen members of Martell’s religious order in the past forty years. He was a Vorster, or, more formally, a member of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, and he had attached himself to the missionary wing. Unlike his martyred predecessors, Martell was surgically adapted to live on Venus. The others had had to muffle themselves in breathing-suits, and perhaps that had limited their effectiveness. The Vorsters had made no headway on Venus at all, though they were the dominant religious group on Earth, and had been for more than a generation. Martell, alone and adapted, had taken upon himself the long-delayed task of founding a Venusian order of the Brotherhood.

Martell had had a chilly welcome from Venus. He had blanked out in the turbulence of the landing as the ship plunged through the cloud layer. Then he had recovered. He sat patiently, a thin man with a wedge-shaped face and pale, hooded eyes. Through the port he had his first glimpse of Venus: a flat, muddy-looking field, stretching perhaps half a mile, with a bordering fringe of thick-trunked, ugly trees whose massed bluish leaves had a sinister glint. The sky was gray, and swirling clumps of low-lying clouds formed whorling patterns against the deeper background. Robot technicians were bustling from a squat, alienlooking building to service the ship’s needs. The passengers were coming forth.

In the landing station a low-caste Venusian stared at the Vorster with blank indifference, taking his passport and saying coolly, “Religious?”

‘That’s right.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Treaty of 2128,” Martell said. “A limited quota of Earthside observers for scientific, ethical, or—”

“Spare me.” The Venusian pressed his fingertip to a page of the passport and a visa stamp appeared, glowing brilliantly. “Nicholas Martell. You’ll die here, Martell. Why don’t you go back where you came from? Men live forever there, don’t they?”

“They live a long time. But I have work here.”

“Fool!”

“Perhaps,” Martell agreed caimly. “May I go?”

“Where are you staying? We have no hotels here.”

‘The Martian Embassy will look after me until I’m established.”

“You’ll never be established,” the Venusian said.

Martell did not contradict him. He knew that even a low-caste Venusian regarded himself as superior to an Earthman, and that a contradiction might seem a mortal insult. Martell was not equipped for dagger-dueling. And, since he was not a proud man by nature, he was willing to swallow any manner of abuse for the sake of his mission.

The passport man waved him on. Martell gathered up his single suitcase and passed out of the building. A taxi now, he thought. It was many miles to town. He needed to rest and to confer with the Martian Ambassador, Weiner. The Martians were not particularly sympathetic to his aims, but at least they were willing to countenance Martell’s presence here. There was no Earth Embassy, not even a consulate. The links between the mother planet and her proud colony had been broken long ago.

Taxis waited at the far side of the field. Martell began to cross to them. The ground crunched beneath his feet, as though it were only a brittle crust. The planet looked gloomy. Not a hint of sun came through those clouds. His adapted body was functioning well, though.

The spaceport, Martell thought, had a forlorn look. Hardly anyone but robots seemed to be about. A staff of four Venusians ran the place, and there were the nineteen from his ship, and the ten Martians, but no one else. Venus was a sparsely populated planet, with hardly more than three million people in its seven widely spaced towns. The Venusians were frontiersmen, legendary for their haughtiness. They had room to be haughty, Martell thought. Let them spend a week on teeming Earth and they might change their ways.

“Taxi!” Martell called.

None of the robocars budged from their line. Were even the robots haughty here, he wondered? Or was there something wrong with his accent? He called again, getting no response.

Then he understood. The Venusian passengers were emerging and crossing to the taxi zone. And, naturally, they had precedence. Martell watched them. They were high-caste men, un-like the passport man. They walked with an arrogant, swaggering gait, and Martell knew they would slash him to his knees if he crossed their path.

He felt a bit of contempt for them. What were they, anyway, but blue-skinned samurai, border lairds after their proper time, childish, self-appointed princelings living a medieval fantasy? Men who were sure of themselves did not need to swagger, nor to surround themselves with elaborate codes of chivalry. If one looked upon them as uneasy, inwardly uncertain hotheads, rather than as innately superior noblemen, one could surmount the feeling of awe that a procession of them provoked.

And yet one could not entirely suppress that awe.

For they were impressive as they paraded across the field. More than custom separated the high-caste and the low-caste Venusians. They were biologically different. The high-caste ones were the first comers, the founding families of the Venus colony, and they were far more alien in body and mind than Venusians of more recent vintage. The early genetic processes had been unsubtle, and the first colonists had been transformed virtually into monsters. Close to eight feet tall, with dark blue skins pocked with giant pores, and pendulous red gill-bunches at their throats, they were alien beings who gave little sign that they were the great-great-grandchildren of Earthmen. Later in the process of colonizing Venus, it had become possible to adapt men for the second planet without varying nearly so much from the basic human model. Both strains of Venusians, since they arose from manipulation of the germ plasm, bred true; both shared the same exaggerated sense of honor and the same disdain for Earth; both were now alien strains, inwardly and outwardly, in mind and in body. But those whose ancestry went back to the most changed of the changed ones were in charge, making a virtue of their strangeness, and the planet was their playground.