Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

“You saw the vault?” asked Mondschein.

“I saw the vault. They’ve got it cordoned.”

“What about Lazarus?”

“There was a figure inside the vault. It matched the image of Lazarus in Rome. It resembled all the portraits. The vault’s a sort of Nothing Chamber, and the figure is hooked up inside. The Martian authorities have checked the circuitry of the vault and they say that it’s likely to blow sky-high if anybody tampers with it.”

“And the figure,” persisted a hollow-cheeked man named Emory. “The figure is Lazarus?”

“Looks like Lazarus,” Martell said. “You must remember I never saw Lazarus in the flesh. I wasn’t born yet when he died. If he died.”

“Don’t say that” Emory snapped. “This is a hoax. Lazarus died, all right. He was fed to the converter. There’s nothing left of him but loose protons and electrons and neutrons.”

“So it says in our Scripture,” declared Mondschein warily. He closed his eyes a moment. He was the oldest man present; he had been on Venus almost sixty years and had built this branch of the movement to its present dominant position. He said, “There is always the possibility that our text is corrupt.”

“No!” The outburst came from Emory, young and conservative. “How can you say that?”

Mondschein shrugged. “The early years of our movement Brother, are shrouded in doubt. We know there was a Lazarus, that he worked with Vorst at Santa Fe, that he quarreled with Vorst over procedure and was assassinated, or at least put out of the way. But all that was a long time ago. There’s no one left in the movement who was directly associated with Lazarus. We aren’t as long-lived as the Vorsters, you know. So if it happened that Lazarus wasn’t stuffed into a converter, but was simply carried off to Mars in suspended animation and plugged into a Nothing Chamber for sixty or seventy years—”

There was silence in the room. Martell gave Mondschein a sidelong glance of distress. It was Emory who finally said, “What if he’s revived and claims to be Lazarus? What happens to the movement?”

Mondschein replied, “We’ll face that when we get to it. According to Brother Nicholas, there seems to be some doubt as to whether the vault can be opened at all.”

“That’s correct,” Martell said. “If it’s wired to explode when tampered with—”

“Let’s hope it is,” put in Brother Ward, who had not spoken. “For our purposes, the best Lazarus is a martyred Lazarus. We can keep the tomb as a shrine, and send pilgrimages there, and perhaps get the Martians interested. But if he comes back to life and begins to upset things—”

“What is in that vault is not Lazarus,” Emory said.

Mondachein stared at him in amazement. Emory seemed ready to crack apart.

“Perhaps you’d better rest awhile,” Mondschein suggested… “You’re taking this much too much to heart.”

Marten said, “It’s a disturbing business, Christopher. If you had seen that figure in the vault—he looks so angelic so confident of resurrection

Emory groaned. Mondschein furrowed his brow a moment, and in response the door opened and one of the native Venusians entered, one of the espers the Harmonists had been collecting so long on Venus.

“Brother Emory is tired, Neerol,” Mondschein said. The Venusian nodded. His hand closed on Emory’s wrist, dark purple against deep indigo. A nexus formed; there was a momentary neural flow; sluices opened somewhere within Emory’s brain. Emory relaxed. The Venusian led him from the room.

Mondschein looked around at the others. “We have to operate under the assumption,” he said, “that the genuine body of David Lazarus has turned up on Mars, that our book is in error about his fate, and that there’s at least the possibility that the body in that vault can be brought to life. The question is. how are we going to react?”

Martell, who had seen the vault and who would never be quite the same, said, “You know I’ve always been skeptical of the charismatic value of the Lazarus story. But I see this as operating to our advantage. If we can gain possession of the vault and make it the symbolic center of our movement—something to capture the public imagination—”

“Exactly,” Ward said. “It’s always been our big selling point that we’ve got a mythos. The competition’s got Vorst and his medical miracles, Santa Fe and all that, but nothing to stir the heart. We’ve had the martyrdom of Lazarus, and it’s helped us take control of Venus, which the Vorsters never were able to do. And now, with Lazarus himself come forth from the dead—”

“You miss the point,” said Mondschein thinly. “What turned up on Mars doesn’t tally with the myth. Lazarus isn’t supposed to be resurrected in the flesh. He was blasted to atoms. Suppose archaeologists found that Christ had really been beheaded, not crucified? Suppose it came to light that Mohammed never set foot in Mecca? We’ve been caught with our mythology askew—if this is really Lazarus. It could destroy us. It could wreck all we’ve built.”

Thirty miles from the quaint old city of Santa Fe, the sprawling laboratories of the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences rose within a ring of dark mountains. Here surgeons transformed living creatures into alien flesh. Here technicians laboriously manipulated genes. Here families of espers submitted to an endless round of experiments, and bionics men prodded their subjects mercilessly toward a new realm of existence. The Center was a mighty machine, bristling with purposefulness.

Inconceivably old men were at the heart of the machine.

The core of the movement was the domed building near the main auditorium, where Noel Vorst lived when at Santa Fe. Vorst, the Founder, acknowledged more than a century and a quarter of life. There were those who said that he was dead, that the Vorst who occasionally appeared at the chapels of the Brotherhood was a robot, a simulacrum. Vorst himself found this amusing. More of him was artificial than flesh, at this point, but he was undeniably alive, with no immediate plans for dying. If he had planned to die, he never would have gone to the trouble of founding the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance. There had been hard years at first. It is not pleasant to be deemed a crack-pot

Among those who had deemed Vorst a crackpot in those days was his present second-in-command, the Hemispheric Coordinator, Reynolds Kirby. Kirby had stumbled into the Brotherhood at a time of personal stress, looking for something to cling to in a storm. That had been in 2077. He was still clinging, seventy-five years later. By now he was virtually Vorst’s alter ego, an adjunct of the Founder’s soul.

The Founder had been less than candid with Kirby about this Lazarus enterprise, though. For the first time in many years Vorst had held the details of a project entirely to himself. Some things could not be shared. When they were matters concerning David Lazarus, Vorst held them in pectore, unable to take even Kirby into his confidence.

The Founder sat cradled in a webfoam net that spared him most of gravity’s pull. Once he had been a vigorous, dynamic giant of a man, and when he had to, he could wear that set of attributes even now, but he preferred comfort. It was necessary to spare his strength. His plan had fulfilled itself well, but he knew that without his guiding presence it might all yet come to nothing.

Kirby sat before him, thin-lipped, grizzled, his body, like Vorst’s, a patchwork of artificial organs. The Vorster laboratories no longer needed such clumsy devices to prolong youth. Within the last generation they had managed to stimulate regeneration from within, the body’s own rebirth, always the most preferable way. Kirby had come along too early for that; so had Vorst. For them, organ replacement was the road to conditional immortality. With luck, they might last two or three centuries, undergoing periodic overhauls. Younger men, those who had joined the movement in the last forty years, might hope for several hundred years more than that. Some now living, Vorst knew, would never die.