Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

Martell glanced at the boy.

“Fair enough,” he said. ‘I’ve saved you and you’ve saved me. So now we’re even.”

“The debit is still yours,” replied the boy with strange solemnity. “If I had not rescued you first, you never would have lived to rescue me. And it would not have been necessary to rescue me, anyway, since I would not have come out onto the road, and therefore—”

Martell’s eyes widened. “Who taught you to reason like that?” he asked in amusement. “You sound like a theology professor.”

“I am Brother Christopher’s pupil.”

“And he is—”

“You’ll find out. He wants to see you. He sent me out here to fetch you.”

“And where will I find him?”

“Come with me.”

Martell followed the boy toward one of the buildings. They left the dead Wheel in the road. Martell wondered what would happen if a carload of high-casters came along and had to shove the carcass out of the way with their own aristocratic hands.

Martell and the boy passed through a burnished coppery gate that slid open at the boy’s approach. Martell found himself approaching a simple wooden A-frame building. When he saw the sign mounted above the door, he was so amazed that he released his grip on his sundered suitcase, and for the second time in ten minutes his belongings went spilling to the ground.

The sign said:

Shrine of the Transcendent Harmony

All Are Welcome

Martell’s knees felt watery. Harmonists? Here?

The green-robed heretics, offshoots of the original Vorster movement, had made some progress on Earth for a while, and had even seemed to threaten the parent organization. But for more than twenty years now they had been nothing but an absurd little splinter group of no significance. It was inconceivable that these heretics, who had failed so utterly on Earth, could have established a church here on Venus—something that the Vorsters themselves had been unable to do. It was impossible. It was unthinkable.

A figure appeared in the doorway—a stocky man in early middle age, about sixty or so, his hair beginning to gray, his features thickening. Like Martell, he had been surgically adapted to Venusian conditions. He looked calm and self-assured. His hands rested lightly on a comfortable priestly paunch.

He said, “I’m Christopher Mondschein. I heard of your arrival, Brother Martell. Won’t you come in?”

Martell hesitated.

Mondschein smiled. “Come, come, Brother. There’s no peril in breaking bread with a Harmonist, is there? You’d be mince-meat now but for the lad’s bravery, and I sent him to save you. You owe me the courtesy of a visit. Come in. Come in. I won’t meddle with your soul, Brother. That’s a promise.”

The Harmonist place was unassuming but obviously permanent. There was a shrine, festooned with the statuettes and claptrap of the heresy, and a library, and dwelling quarters. Martell caught sight of several Venusian boys at work in the rear of the building, digging what might be the foundations of an extension. Martell followed the older man into the library. A familiar row of books caught his eye: the works of Noel Vorst, handsomely bound, the expensive Founder’s Edition.

Mondschein said, “Are you surprised? Don’t forget that we accept the supremacy of Vorst, too, even if he spurns us. Sit down. Wine? They make a fine dry white here.”

“What are you doing here?” Martell asked.

“Me? That’s a terribly long story, and not entirely creditable to me. The essence of it is that I was a young fool and let myself get maneuvered into being sent here. That was forty years ago, and I’ve stopped resenting what happened by now. It was the finest thing that could have happened to me in my life, I’ve come to realize, and I suppose it’s a mark of maturity that I was able to see—”

Mondschein’s garrulity irritated the precise-minded Martell. He cut in: “I don’t want your personal history, Brother Mondschein. I meant how long has your order been here?”

“Close to fifty years.”

“Uninterruptedly?”

“Yes. We have eight shrines here and about four thousand communicants, all of them low-caste. The high-casters don’t deign to notice us.”

“They don’t deign to wipe you out either,” Martell observed.

“True,” said Mondschein. “Perhaps we’re beneath their contempt.”

“But they’ve killed every Vorster missionary who’s ever come here,” Martell said. “Us they devour, you they tolerate. Why is that?”

“Perhaps they see a strength in us that they don’t find in the parent organization,” suggested the heretic. “They admire strength, of course. You must know that, or you’d never have tried to walk from the landing station. You were demonstrating your strength under stress. But of course it would rather have spoiled your demonstration if that Wheel had slashed you to death.”

“As it very nearly did.”

“As it certainly would have done,” said Mondschein, “if I had not happened to notice your predicament. That would have terminated your mission here rather prematurely. Do you like the wine?”

Martell had barely tasted it. “It’s not bad. Tell me, Mondschein, have they really let themselves be converted here?”

“A few. A few.”

“Hard to believe. What do you people know that we don’t?”

“It isn’t what we know,” Mondschein said. “It’s what we have to offer. Come with me into the chapel.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Please. It won’t give you a disease.”

Reluctantly, Martell allowed himself to be led right into the sanctum sanctorum. He looked around with distaste at the ikons, the images, and all the rest of the Harmonist rubbish. At the altar, where a Vorster chapel would have had the tiny reactor emitting blue Cerenkov radiation, there was mounted a gleaming atom-symbol model along which electron-simulacra pulsed in blinding, ceaseless motion. Martell did not think of himself as a bigoted man, but he was loyal to his faith, and the sight of all this childish paraphernalia sickened him.

Mondschein said, “Noel Vorst’s the most brilliant man of our times, and his accomplishments mustn’t be underrated. He saw the culture of Earth fragmented and decadent, saw people everywhere escaping into drug addictions and Nothing Chambers and a hundred other deplorable things. And he saw that the old religions had lost their grip, that the time was ripe for an eclectic, synthetic new creed that dispensed with the mysticism of the former religions and replaced it with a new kind of mysticism, a scientific mysticism. That Blue Fire of his—a wonderful symbol, something to capture the imagination and dazzle the eye, as good as the Cross and the Crescent, even better, because it was modern, it was scientific, it could be comprehended even while it bewildered. Vorst had the insight to establish his cult and the administrative ability to put it across. But has thinking was incomplete.”

“That’s a lofty dismissal, isn’t it? When you consider that we control Earth in a way that no single religious movement of the past has ever—”

Mondschein smiled. “The achievement on Earth is very imposing, I agree. Earth was ready for Vorst’s doctrines. Why did he fail on the other planets, though? Because his thinking was too advanced. He didn’t offer anything that colonists could surrender their hearts and souls to.”

“He offers physical immortality in the present body,” Martell said crisply. “Isn’t that enough?”

“No. He doesn’t offer a mythos. Just a cold quid-pro-quo, come to the chapel and pay your tithe and you can live forever, maybe. It’s a secular religion, despite all the litanies and rituals that have been creeping in. It lacks poetry. There’s no Christ-child in the manger, no Abraham sacrificing Isaac, no spark of humanity, no—”