Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

“Elwhit was one of our finest prospects,” Mondschein said sadly. “But he had this streak of wildness—the thing that brought him to us in the first place. A restless boy’ he was. I wish you had left him alone.”

“I did what I had to do,” Martell replied. ‘I’m sorry it worked out so awfully.” He followed the path of a sinuous black serpent that swept from right to left across the lake. It extended telescoping arms in a sudden terrifying gesture and enveloped a low-flying bird. Martell said carefully, “I didn’t came back here to spy on you. I came back to join your order.”

Moudschein’s domed blue forehead wrinided a little. “Please. We’ve been through all this already.”

“Test me! Have one of your espers read me! I swear it, Mondschein. I’m sincere.”

“They’ve embedded a pack of hypnotic commands in you in Santa Fe. I know. I’ve been through it myself. They sent you here to be a spy, but you don’t know it yourself, and if we probed you, we might have trouble finding out the truth.You’ll soak up all you can about us, and then you’ll return to Santa Fe, and they’ll toss you to a debriefing esper who’ll pump it all out of you. Eh?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Listen,” said Martell, “I don’t think they did anything to my mind in Santa Fe. I came to you because I belong on Venus. I’ve been changed.” He held out his hands. “My skin is blue. My metabolism is a biologist’s night-mare. I’ve got gills. I’m a Venusian, and this is where the changed ones go. But I can’t be a Vorster here, because the natives won’t have it. Therefore I’ve got to join you. Do you see?”

Mondachein nodded. “I still think you’re a spy.”

“I tell you—”

“Stay calm,” said the Harinonist. “Be a spy. That’s quite all right. You can stay. You can join us. You’ll be our bridge, Brother. You’ll be the link that will span the Vorsters and the Harmonists. Play both sides if you like. That’s exactly what we want.”

Once again Martell felt the foundations giving way beneath his feet He imagined himself in a dropshaft with the gravity field suddenly gone—falling, falling, endlessly falling. He peered into the mild eyes of the older man and perceived that Mondschein must be in the grip of some crazy ecumenical scheme, some private fantasy that—

He said, “Are you trying to put the orders back together?”

“Not personally. It’s part of the plan of Lazarus.” Marteil thought Mondschein was referring to his own assistant. He said, “Is he in charge here or are you?”

Smiling, Mondschein replied, “I don’t mean my Lazarus here. I mean David Lazarus, the founder of our order.”

“He’s dead.”

“Certainly. But we still follow the course he mapped for us half a century ago. And that course envisages the eventual reuniting of the orders. It has to come, Martell. We each have something the other wants. You have Earth and immortality. We have Venus and teleportation. There’s bound to be a pooling of interests, and possibly you’ll be one of the men who’ll help to bring it about.”

“You aren’t serious!”

“As serious as I know how to be,” said Mondschein. Martell saw the darkening of his expression; the amiable mask dropped away. “Do you want to live forever, Martell?”

“Tm not eager to die. Except for some overriding purpose, of course.”

“The translation is that you want to live as long as you can, with honor.”

“Right”

“The Vorsters are getting nearer to that goal every day. We have some idea of what’s going on in Santa Fe. Once, about forty years ago, we stole the contents of an entire longevity lab. It helped us, but not enough. We didn’t have the substratum of knowledge. On the other hand, we’ve made some strides, too, as I think you’ve discovered. Will it be worth a reunion, do you think? We’ll have the stars—you’ll have eternity. Stay here and spy, Brother. I think—and I know Lazarus thought—that the fewer secrets we have, the faster our progress will be.”

Martell did not reply. A boy emerged from the woods—a Venusian boy, possibly the one who had saved him from the Wheel, perhaps the dead Elwhit’s brother. They looked so interchangeable in their strangeness. Instantly Mondschein’s manner changed. He donned a bland smile; cosmic matters receded.

“Bring us a fish,” he told the boy.

“Yes, Brother Christopher.”

There was silence. Veins throbbed on the boy’s forehead. In the center of the lake the water boiled, white foam splashing upward. A creature appeared, scaly and dull gold in color. It hovered in the air, ten feet of frustrated fury, its great underslung jaw opening and closing impotently. The beast soared toward the group on the shore.

“Not that one!” Mondschein gasped.

The boy laughed. The huge fish slipped back into the lake. An instant later something opalescent throbbed on the ground at Martell’s feet—a toothy, snapping thing a foot and a half long, with fins that nearly were legs, and a fan-like tall in which wicked spikes stirred and quivered. Martell leaped away, but he was in no danger, he realized. The fish’s skull caved in as though smitten by an invisible fist, and it lay still. Martell knew terror in that moment. The slender, laughing boy, who had so mischievously pulled that monster from the waters and then this equally deadly little thing, could kill with a flicker of his frontal lobes.

Martell stared at Mondschein. “Your pushers—are they all Venusians?”

“All.”

“I hope you can keep them under control.”

“I hope so, too,” Mondschein replied. He seized the dead fish carefully by a stubby fin, holding it so the tail-spikes pointed away from him. “A great delicacy,” he said. “Once we remove the poison sacs, of course. We’ll catch two or three more and have a devilfish dinner tonight to celebrate your conversion, Brother Martell.”

They gave him a room, and they gave him menial jobs to do, and in their spare time they instructed him in the tenets of Transcendent Harmony. Martell found the room sufficient and the labor unobjectionable, but it was a more difficult matter to swallow the theology. He could not pretend, to himself or to them, that it had any meaning for him. Warmed-over Christianity, a dollop of Islam, a tinge of latter-day Buddhism—all spread over a structure borrowed shamelessly from Vorst—it was an unpalatable mixture for Martell. There was syncretism enough in the Vorster teachings, but Martell accepted those because he had been born to them. Schooling himself in heresy was a different matter.

They began with Vorst, accepting him as a prophet just as Christianity respected Moses and Islam honored Jesus. But, of course, there was the later dispensation, represented by the figure of David Lazarus. Vorster writings made no mention of Lazarus. Martell knew of him only from his studies in the history of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, which mentioned Lazarus in passing as a tangential figure, an early supporter of Vorst’s and then an early dissenter.

But Vorst lived, and, so said both groups, he would live forever, in tune with the cosmos, the First Immortal. Lazarus was dead, a martyr to honesty, cruelly betrayed and slain by the domineering Vorsters in their moment of triumph on Earth.

The Book of Lazarus told the sad story. Martell twitched beneath his skin as he read it: Lazarus was trusting and without guile. But the men whose hearts were hard came upon him and slew him in the night, and fed his body to the converter so that not even a molecule remained. And when Vorst learned of their deed, he wept and said, “I wish you had slain me instead, for now you have given him an immortality he can never lose…”