Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

The dogwork was done by clever machines. Men rode herd on the machinery, though. You never could tell when the homeostasis would slip ever so slightly and your pylon-layer would go berserk. It had happened a few years ago, and somehow the cutoff relays had been blanked out of the circuit, and before anyone could do anything there were sixteen miles of pylons criss-crossing Holliman Lake—eight hundred feet under water. Martians hate wastefulness. The machines had shown that they were not entirely trustworthy, and thereafter they were watched.

Watching over the construction of this particular spur of Monotrack One was a lean, sun-bronzed man of sixty-eight named Paul Weiner, who had good political connections, and a plump red-haired man named Hadley Donovan, who did not. Redheads were rare on Mars for the usual statistical reasons; plump men were rare, too, but not so rare as they once had been. Life was softer these days, and so were the younger Martians. Hadley Donovan was amused by the antics of his gun-toting elders, with their formal etiquette, their theatrically taut bodies, their sense of high personal importance. Perhaps it bad been necessary to wear those poses in the pioneer days on Mars, Donovan thought, but all that had been over for thirty years. He had allowed himself the luxury of a modest paunch. He knew that Paul Weiner felt contempt for him.

The feeling was mutual.

The two men sat side by side in a landcrawler, edging through the roadless landscape twenty miles ahead of the pylon-laying rig. Transponders bleeped at appropriate intervals; on the control board in front of them, colors came and went in an evanescent flow. Weiner was supposed to be monitoring the doings of the construction rig behind them; Donovan was checking out the planned route of the track, hunting for pockets of subsurface mushiness that the pylon-builder would not be clever enough to evaluate.

Donovan was trying to do both jobs at once. He didn’t dare let a political appointee like Weiner have any real responsibility in the work. Weiner was the nephew of Nat Weiner, who stood high in ruling councils, was a hundred-and-some years old, and went to Earth every few years to have the Vorsters pluck out his pancreas or his kidneys or his carotid arteries and implant handy artificial substitutes. Nat Weiner was going to live forever, probably, and he was gradually filling the entire civil service up with members of his family, and Hadley Donovan, trying to oversee a job that really required two men’s full attention, felt vague desperation as he scanned his own board and covertly glanced over at Weiner’s every thirty seconds or so.

Something was glowing purple on the Anomaly Screen. Donovan wondered about it, but he was too busy with his own part of the job to mention it, and then Weiner was drawling, “I got something peculiar over here, Donovan. What do you make of it, Freeman?”

Donovan kicked the crawler to a halt and studied the board. “Underground rock vault, looks like. Three—four miles off the track.”

“Think we ought to take a look?”

“Why bother?” Donovan asked. “The track won’t come anywhere near it.”

“You aren’t curious? Might be a treasure vault left by the Old Martians.”

Donovan didn’t dignify that with a reply.

“What do you think it is, then?” Weiner asked. “Maybe it’s a cave carved by an underground stream. You think so? All that subsurface water Mars had before they Terraformed it? Rivers flowing under the desert?”

Feeling the needles, Donovan said, “It’s probably just a crawl-space left by the Terraforming engineers. I don’t see why—oh, hell. All right. Let’s go investigate. Shut the whole project down for half an hour. What do I care?”

He began throwing switches.

It was a foolish, pointless interruption, but the older man’s curiosity had to be satisfied. Treasure cave! Underground stream! Donovan had to admit that he couldn’t think of any rational reason why there’d be such a pocket of open space underground here. Geologically, it didn’t make much sense.

They cut across to it. It turned out to be about twenty feet down, with undisturbed-looking grass growing above it. Some close-range pinging confirmed that the vault was about ten feet long, a dozen feet wide, eight or nine feet deep. Donovan was convinced that it had been left by the Terraformers, But it wasn’t on thc charts, at any rate. He summoned a dig-robot and put it to work.

In ten minutes the roof of the vault lay bare: a slab of green fusion-glass. Donovan shivered a little. Weiner said, “I think we got ourselves a grave here, you know?”

“Let’s leave it. This isn’t our business. We’ll report it and—”

“What do we have here?” Weiner asked, and slipped his hand into an opening. He seemed to be caressing something within. Quickly he drew his hand back as a yellow glow spread over the top of the vault.

A voice said, “May the blessing of eternal harmony be on you, friends. You have come to the temporary resting place of Lazarus. Qualified medical assistance will revive me. I ask your help. Please do not attempt to open this vault except with qualified medical assistance.”

Silence.

The voice said again, “May the blessing of eternal harmony be on you, friends. You have come to the temporary—”

‘A voice-cube,” Donovan murmured.

“Look!” Weiner gasped, and pointed to the clearing vault-roof. The glass, lit from below, was transparent now. Donovan peered down into a rectangular vault. A thin, hawk-faced man lay on his back in a nutrient bath, feed-lines connected to his limbs and trunk. It was something like a Nothing Chamber, but far more elaborate. The sleeper wore a smile. Arcane symbols were inscribed on the walls of the chamber. Donovan recognized them as Harmonist symbols. That Venusian cult He felt a stab of confusion. What had they stumbled on here? “The temporary resting place of Lazarus,” the voice-cube said. Lazarus was the prophet of the Harmonists. To Donovan, all of these religions were equally inane. He would have to report this discovery now, and there would be delay in the construction project, and he himself would be pushed unwantedly into prominence, and—And none of it would ever have happened if Weiner had been dozing off as usual. Why had he noticed the anomaly on the board? Why?

“‘We better tell somebody about this,” Weiner said. “I think it’s important.”

In a small jungle-fringed building on Venus, eight men who were not men faced a ninth. All wore the cyanotic blue skins of Venus, though only three had been born with those skins. The others were surgical products, Earthmen converted to Venusians. Not just their bodies had been converted, either. The six changed ones had all been Vorsters at one time in their spiritual development.

The Vorsters were the most powerful figures on Earth. But this was not Earth but Venus, and Venus was in the hands of the Harmonists, sometimes called the Lazarites after their martyred founder, David Lazarus. Lazarus, the prophet of Transcendent Harmony, had been put to death by Vorster underlings more than sixty years before. Now, to the consternation of his followers—“Brother Nicholas, may we have your report?” asked

Christopher Mondschein, the head of the Harmonists on Venus.

Nicholas Martell, a slender, dogged man in early middle age, stared at his eight colleagues wearily. In the past few days he had had little sleep and many profound jolts to his equilibrium. Martell had made the round trip to Mars to check on the astonishing report that had flashed to the three planets not long before.

He said, “It’s exactly as the news story had it. Two workmen coming upon a vault while supervising the construction of a monotrack spur.”