Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

Vorst said, “About this Lazarus thing—”

His voice came from a vocoder box. The larynx had gone sixty years ago. The effect was naturalistic enough, though.

“We can infiltrate our men,” Kirby said. “I can work through Nat Weiner. We’ll get a bomb clapped onto that vault and give Mr. Lazarus his eternal repose.”

“No?”

“Of course not,” Vorst said. He lowered the shutters that lubricated his eyes. “Nothing must happen to that vault or the man who’s in it. We’ll infiltrate, all right. You’ll have to use your pull with Weiner. But not to destroy. We’re going to bring Lazarus back to life.”

“We’re—”

“As a gift to our friends, the Harmonists. To show our enduring affection for our brothers in the Oneness.”

“No,” Kirby said. Muscles roiled in his fleshless face, and Vorst could see him making adrenal adjustments, trying to stay calm in the face of this assault on his sense of logic. “This is the prophet of the heretics,” Kirby said quietly. “I know that you’ve got your reasons for encouraging their growth in certain places, Noel. But to give them back their prophet—it doesn’t make sense.”

Vorst tapped a stud in his desk. A compartment opened and he drew forth the Book of Lazarus, the heretic scripture. Kirby seemed a little startled to find it here, in the stronghold of the movement

“You’ve read this, haven’t you?” Vorst asked.

“Of course.”

“It’s enough to make you weep. How my shameless underlings hunted down this great and good man David Lazarus and did away with him. One of the most blasphemous acts since the Crucifixion, eh? The blot on our record. We’re the villains in the Lazarus story. Now here’s Lazarus, pickled on Mars for the last sixty years. Not physically annihilated after all, despite what this book says. Fine. Splendid! We throw all the resources of Santa Fe into the task of restoring him to life. The grand ecumenical gesture. Surely you know that it’s my hope to reunite the sundered branches of our movement”

Kirby’s eyes flickered brilliantly. “You’ve been saying that for sixty or seventy years, Noel. Ever since the Harmonists split away. But do you mean it?”

“I’m sincere in all things,” said Vursi lightly. “Of course I’d take them back. On my terms, naturally—but they’d be welcome. We all serve the same ends in different ways. Did you ever know Lazarus?”

“Not really. I wasn’t very important in the Brotherhood when he died.”

“I forget that,” Vorst said. “It’s hard for me to keep everyone positioned in his temporal matrix. I keep sliding forward and backward. But certainly—you were coming to the top as Lazarus was moving away. I respected that man, Kirby. I grieved when he died, wrongheaded as he was. I intend to redeem the Brotherhood from its stain by bringing Lazarus back to life. He’s appropriately named, wouldn’t you say?”

Kirby picked up a bright metallic sphere from the desk, a paperweight of some sort, and fingered it. Vorst waited. He kept the sphere there so that his visitors could handle it and discharge their tensions into it; he knew that for many who came before him an interview with Vorst was like a trip to the top of Mount Sinai to hear the Law. Vorst found it charming. He watched Reynolds Kirby struggling with himself.

At length Kirby—the only man on the whole planet who could use Vorst’s first name to him—said thickly, “Damn it, Noel, what kind of game are you playing?”

“Game?”

“You sit there with that grin on your lips, telling me you’re going to revive Lazarus, and I can see you juggling world-lines like billiard balls, and I don’t know what it’s all about. What’s your motive? Isn’t this man better off dead?”

“No. Dead he’s a symbol. Alive he can be manipulated. That’s all I’ll say.” Vorst’s blazing eyes found Kirby’s troubled ones and held them. “Do you think I’m senile at last, perhaps? That I’ve held the plan in my mind so long that it’s rotted in there? I know what I’m doing. I need Lazarus alive, or—or I wouldn’t have begun this. Get in touch with Nat Weiner. Gain possession of the vault, I don’t care how. We’ll do our work on Lazarus here at Santa Fe.”

“All right. Noel. Whatever you say.”

“Trust me.”

“What else can I do?”

Kirby wheeled himself out of the room. Vorst, relaxing, fed hormones to his bloodstream and closed his eyes. The world wavered. For an instant he found himself drifting, and it was 2071 all over again, and he was building cobalt-60 reactors in a sordid basement and renting little rooms as chapels for his cult. He recoiled, and was whirled forward, dizzyingly, toward the border of now and a little beyond it. Vorst was a low-grade esper, his skills humble indeed, but occasionally his mind did strange things. He looked toward the brink of tomorrow and desperately anchored himself.

With a decisive jab of his fingers Vorst opened his desk-communicator and spoke briefly to an intern in the burnout ward, without identifying himself. Yes, the Founder was told, there was an esper on the verge of burnout. No, she wasn’t likely to survive.

“Get her ready,” Vorst said. “The Founder’s going to visit her.”

Vorst’s assistants clustered around, readying him for his journey. The old man refused to accept immobility and insisted on leading the most active kind of existence possible. A dropshaft took him to ground level, and then, sheltered by the cavalcade of flunkies that accompanied him everywhere, the Founder crossed the main plaza of the compound and entered the burn-out ward.

Half a dozen sick espers, segregated by thick walls and shielded by protective members of their own kind, lay at the verge of death. There were always those for whom the powers proved overwhelming, those who eventually seized more voltage than they could handle and were destroyed. From the very beginning Vorst had concentrated on saving them, for these were the espers he needed most badly. The salvage record was good nowadays. But not good enough.

Vorst knew why the burnouts happened. The ones who went were the floaters, insecurely anchored in their own time. They drifted back, forth, seesawing from past to present, unable to control their movements, building up a charge of temporal force that ultimately blasted their minds. It was a dizziness of the time-sense, a deadly vertigo. Vorst himself had felt flashes of it. For ten years, nearly a century ago, he had considered himself insane, until he understood. He had seen the edges of time, a vision of futurity that had shattered him and remade him, and that he knew, had been only a hint of what the real espers experienced.

The burnout case was young and female and Oriental: a fatal combination, it seemed. A good eighty percent of the burnouts were of Mongoloid stock, generally adolescent girls. Those who had the trait didn’t last far into adulthood. This one must have been about sixteen, though it was hard to tell; she could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty-five. She lay twisting on the bed, her body almost bare, clawing at the bedclothes in her agony. Sweat gleamed on her yellow-brown skin. She arched her back, grimaced, fell back. Her breasts, revealed by the dis-array of her robe, were like a child’s.

Blue-clad Vorsters, awed by the presence of the Founder, flanked the bed. Vorst said, “She’ll be gone in an hour, won’t she?”

Someone nodded. Vorst moved himself closer to the bed. He seized the girl’s arm in his wizened fingers. Another esper stepped in, placed one hand on Vorst, the other on the girl, providing the link that Vorst required. Suddenly he was in contact with the dying girl.

Her brain was on fire. She jolted backward and forward in time, and Vorst jolted with her, drawn along as a hitchhiker. Light flared in his mind, as though lightning danced about him. Yesterday and tomorrow became one. His thin body quivered like a buffeted reed. Images danced like demons, shadowy figures out of the past, dark avatars of tomorrow. Tell me, tell me, tell me, Vorst implored. Show me the path! He stood at the threshold of knowledge. For seventy years he had moved step by step this way, using the contorted and tortured bodies of these burnouts as his bridges to tomorrow, pulling himself forward by his own bootstraps along the world-line of his great plan.