Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

Weiner smiled. There was no problem so knotty that it couldn’t be untied. Given a little thought, that is. He felt pleased with himself. If he had been forty years younger, he might have gone out for a roistering celebration. But not now.

“Don’t go,” Martell said.

“Suspicious?” Christopher Mondschein asked. “It’s a chance to see their setup. I haven’t been in Santa Fe since I was a boy. Why shouldn’t I go?”

“There’s no telling what might happen to you there. They’d love to get their hands on you. You’re the kingpin of the whole Venusian movement.”

“And they’ll lase me to ashes with three planets watching, eh? Be realistic, Nicholas. When the Pope visits Mecca, they take good care of him. I’m in no danger in Santa Fe.”

“What about the espers? They’ll scan you.”

“I’ll have Neerol with me as a mindshield,” Mondschein said. “They won’t get a thing. I’ll stack him up—against any esper they have. Besides, I have nothing to hide from Noel Vorst. You of all people ought to realize that. We took you in, even though you were loaded with Vorster spy-commands. It was in our interest to tell Vorst how far we had gone.”

Martell took a different approach. “By going to Santa Fe you’re putting the blessing of our order on this alleged Lazarus.”

“Now you sound like Brother Emory! Are you telling me it’s a phony?”

“I’m telling you that we ought to treat it as one. It contradicts our own legend of Lazarus. It may be a Vorster plant calculated to throw us into confusion. What do we do when they hand us a walking, talking Lazarus and let us try to reshape our entire order around him?”

“It’s a touchy matter, Nicholas. We’ve built our faith on the existence of a holy martyr. Now, if he’s suddenly unmartyred—”

“Exactly. It’ll crush us.”

“I doubt that” Mondschein said. The old Harmonist touched his gills lightly, nervously. “You aren’t looking far enough ahead, Nicholas. The Vorsters have outmaneuvered us so far, I admit. They’ve gained possession of this Lazarus, and they’re about to give him back to us. Very embarrassing, but what can we do? However, the next moves are ours. If he dies, we simply revise our writings a bit. If he lives and tries to meddle, we reveal that he’s some sort of simulacrum cooked up by the Vorsters to do mischief, and destroy him. Score a point for us—our original story stands and we reveal the Vorsters as sinister schemers.”

“And if he’s really Lazarus?” Martell asked.

Mondschein giowered. “Then we have a prophet on our hands, Brother Nicholas. It’s a risk we take. I’m going to Santa Fe.”

On Earth, the Noel Vorst Center throbbed with more-than-usual activity as preparations continued for the arrival of the cargo from Mars. An entire block of the laboratory grounds had been set aside for the resuscitation of Lazarus. For the first time since the founding of the Center video cameras would be allowed to show the worlds a little of its inner workings. The place would be full of strangers—even a delegation of Harmonists. To old-line Vorsters like Reynolds Kirby, that was almost unthinkable. Furtiveness had become a matter of course for him. The command, though, had come from Vorst himself, and no one could quarrel with the Founder. “I believe that it’s time to lift the lid a little,” Vorst had said.

Kirby was doing some lid-lifting of his own as the great day drew near. He was troubled by certain blanks in his own memory, and by virtue of his rank as second-in-command he went searching through the Vorster archives to fill them in. The trouble was, Kirby could not remember much about David Lazarus’s pre-martyrdom career, and he felt that it was important to know something more than the official story. Who was Lazarus, anyway? How had he entered the Vorster picture—and how had he left it?

Kirby himself had enrolled in 2077, kneeling before the Blue Fire of a cobalt reactor in New York. As a new convert, he had not been concerned with the politics of the hierarchy, but simply with the values the cult had to offer: stability, the hope of long life, the dream of reaching the stars by harnessing the abilities of espers. Kirby was willing to see mankind explore the other solar systems, but he did not make that accomplishment the central yearning of his life. Nor did the chance of immortality—the chief bait for millions of Vorster converts—seem all that delicious to him.

What drew him to the movement, at the age of forty, was merely the discipline that it offered. His pleasant life lacked structure, and the world about him was such chaos that he fled from it into one synthetic paradise after another. Along came Vorst offering a sleek new belief that snared Kirby totally. For the first few months he was content to be a worshiper. Soon he was an acolyte. And then, his natural organizational abilities demonstrating themselves, he found himself moving rapidly upward in the movement from post to post until by the time he was eighty he was Vorst’s fight hand, and very much concerned with his own personal survival.

According to the official story, the martyrdom of David Lazarus had taken place in 2090. Kirby had been a Vorster for thirteen years then, and was a District Supervisor in charge of thousands of Brothers.

So far as he could remember, he had never even heard of Lazarus as of 2090.

A few years later the Harmonists, the heretical movement had begun gaining strength, decking themselves in green robes and scoffing at the craftily secular power orientation of the Vorsters. They claimed to be followers of the martyred Lazarus, but even then, Kirby thought they hadn’t talked much about Lazarus. Only afterward, as Harmonist power mounted and they stole Venus from Vorst, did they push the Lazarus mythos particularly hard. Why is it, Kirby wondered, that I who was a contemporary of Lazarus should never have heard his name?

He walked toward the archives building.

It was a milk-white geodesic dome, sheeted with some toothy fabric that gave it a sharkskin surface texture. Kirby passed through a tiled tunnel, identified himself to the robot guardians, moved toward and past a sphincter-door, and found himself in the olive-green room where the records were kept lie activated a query-stud and demanded knowledge.

Lazarus, David.

Drums whirled in the depths of the earth. Memory films came around, offered themselves to the kiss of the scanner, and sent images floating upward to the waiting Kirby. Glowing yellow print appeared on the reader-Screen.

A potted biography, scanty and inadequate:

Born 13 March 2051

Education Primary Secondary Chicago, A.B. Harvard ‘72, Ph.D. (Anthropology) Harvard ’75.

Physical Description (1/1/88) 6 ft. 3 ins., 179 pounds, dark eyes and hair, no dis. scars.

Affiliation Joined Cambridge chapel 4/11/71. Acolyte status conferred 7/17/73…

There followed a. list of the successive stages by which Lazarus had risen through the hierarchy, culminating with the simple entry, Death 2/9/90.

That was all. It was a lean, spare record, not a word of elaboration, no appended commendations such as Kirby knew festooned his own record, no documentation of Lazarus’s disagreement with Vorst. Nothing. It was the sort of record, Kirby thought uncomfortably, that anyone could have tapped out in five minutes and inserted in the archives… yesterday.

He prodded the memory banks, hoping to fish up some added detail about the arch-heretic. He found nothing. It was not really valid cause for suspicion; Lazarus had been dead for a long time, and probably the record-keeping had been sketchier in those early days. But it was upsetting, all the same. Kirby made his way out of the building. Acolytes stared at him as though Vorst himself had gone striding by. No doubt some of them felt the temptation to drop to their knees before him. I/ they only knew, Kirby thought darkly, how ignorant I am. After seventy-five years with Vorst. If they only knew.