Robert Silverberg - To Open the Sky

“Perhaps that’s it,” admitted Kirby. “But whose fault is that? You’ve surrounded yourself with yes-men. You’ve made yourself indispensable. Here you sit at the heart of the movement like a sacred fire, and none of us can get close enough to be singed. Now you’re taking the fire away.”

“Transferring it,” said Vorst. “Here, I’ve got a job for you. The members of the council will be arriving in six hours. I’m going to make my announcement, and I suppose it’ll shake everybody else the way it shook you. Go off by yourself for the next six hours and think about all I’ve just said. Reconcile yourself to it. More, don’t just accept it, but approve of it. At the meeting stand up and explain not simply why it’s all right if I go, but why it’s necessary and vital to the future of the Brotherhood that I go.”

“You mean—”

“Don’t say anything now. You’re still hostile. You won’t be after you’ve examined the dynamics of it. Keep your mouth closed till then.”

Kirby smiled. “You’re still pulling strings, aren’t you?”

“It’s an old habit by now. But this is the last one I’ll ever pull. And I promise you, your mind will change. You’ll see my point of view in an hour or two. By nightfall you’ll be willing to stuff me in that capsule yourself. I know you will. I know you.”

In a leafy glade on Venus, the pushers were at their sport.

An avenue of vast trees unrolled toward the pearly horizon. Their jagged leaves met overhead to form a thick canopy. Below, on the muddy, fungus-dotted ground, a dozen Venusian boys with bluish skins and green robes exercised their abilities. At a distance several larger figures watched them. David Lazarus stood in the center of the group. About him were the Harmonist leaders: Christopher Mondschein, Nicholas Martell, Claude Emory.

Lazarus had been through a great deal at the hands of these men. To them, he had been only a name in a martyrology, a revered and unreal figure by whose absent power they governed a creed. They had had to adjust to his return, and it had not been easy. There had been a time when Lazarus thought they would put him to death. That time was past now, and they abided by his wishes. But because he had slept so long, he was at once younger and older than his lieutenants, and sometimes that interfered with the exercising of his full authority.

He said, “It’s settled. Vorst will leave and the schism will end. I’ll work something out with Kirby.”

“It’s a trap,” said Emory gloomily. “Keep away from it, David. Vorst can’t be trusted.”

“Vorst brought me back to life.”

“Vorst put you in that crypt in the first place,” Emory insisted. “You said so yourself.”

“We can’t be sure of that,” Lazarus replied, though it was true that Vorst himself had admitted the act to him in a their last conversation. “We’re only guessing. There’s no evidence that—”

Mondschein broke in, “We don’t have any reason to trust Vorst, Claude. But if he’s really and verifiably aboard that capsule, what do we have to lose by pushing him to Betelgeuse or Procyon? We’re rid of him, and we’ll be dealing with Kirby. Kirby’s a reasonable man. None of that damnable superdeviousness about him.”

“It’s too pat,” Emory insisted. “Why should a man with Vorst’s power just step down voluntarily?”

“Perhaps he’s bored,” said Lazarus. “There’s something about absolute power that can’t be understood except by someone who holds it. It’s dull. You can enjoy moving and shaking the world for twenty years, thirty, fifty—but Vorst’s been on top for a hundred. He wants to move along. I say take the offer. We’re well rid of him, and we can handle Kirby. Besides, he’s got a good point: neither his side nor ours can get to the stars without the help of the other. I’m for it. It’s worth the try.”

Nicholas Martell gestured toward the pushers. “We’ll lose some of them, don’t forget. You can’t push a capsule to the stars without overloading the pushers.”

“Vorst has offered rehabilitation services,” said Lazarus.

“One other point,” Mondschein remarked. “Under the new agreement, we’d have access to Vorster hospitals ourselves. Just as a purely selfish matter, I’d like that. I think the time has come to turn away from haughtiness and give in to Vorst. He’s willing to cheek out. All right. Let him go, and look for our own advantage with Kirby.”

Lazarus smiled. He had not hoped to win Mondschein’s support that easily. But Mondschein was old, past ninety, and he was hungry for the care that Vorster medics could give him, care that was not to be had on rugged Venus. Monschein had seen the Santa Fe hospitals himself when he was a young man, and he knew what miracles they could perform. It was not a terribly worthy motive, thought Lazarus. But it was a human motive, at least, and Mondschein was human behind his gills and blued skin. So are we all, Lazarus realized. Though they aren’t.

He looked toward the pushers. They were fifth- and sixth-generation Venusians. The seed of Earth was in them, but they were far removed from the original stock. The genetic manipulations that had first adapted mankind for life on Venus bred true; these boys were something other than human by this time. They were intent on their games. It was little effort for them to transport objects great distances now. They could send each other around Venus virtually instantaneously, or hurl a boulder to Earth in an hour or two. What they could not do was transport themselves, for they needed a fulcrum to do their pushing with. But that was minor. They could not flit from place to place on the strength of their own powers, but they could thrust each other about.

Lazarus watched them: appearing, disappearing, lifting, throwing. Only children, not yet in full command of their powers. What strengths would be theirs when they were fully mature, he wondered?

And how many would die to send mankind beyond his present boundaries?

A saw-winged bird, faintly luminous in the midday dusk, shot diagonally across the sky just above the treetop canopy. One of the young pushers looked up, grinned, caught the bird and sent it whirling half a mile through the clouds. A squawk of rage, distant but audible, filtered back.

Lazarus said, “The deal is closed. We help Vorst, and Vorst goes. Done?”

“Done,” said Mondschein quickly.

“Done,” Martell murmured, scuffing at the grayish moss that festooned the ground.

“Claude?” Lazarus asked.

Emory scowled. He peered at a long-limbed boy, returning from a jaunt to some other continent, who materialized no more than six yards away. Emory’s narrow-featured face looked dark with tension.

“Done,” he said.

The capsule was an obelisk of beryllium steel, fifty feet high, an uncertain ark to send across the sea of stars. It contained living quarters for eleven, a computer of uncomfortably awe-inspiring abilities, and a subminiaturized treasury of all that was worth salvaging from two billion years of life on Earth.

“Prepare the capsule,” Vorst had instructed Brother Capodimonte, “as though the sun were going nova next month and we had to save what was important.”

As a former anthropologist, Capodimonte had his own ideas about the contents of such an ark, but he kept them separate from his concept of what Vorst required. Quietly, a subcommittee of Brothers had planned the interstellar expedition on a someday-far-away basis decades ago, and had replanned it several times, so that Capodimonte had the benefit of the thinking of other men. That was a comfort to him.

There were troublesome elements of mystery about the project. He did not, for example, know the nature of the world to which the pioneers were bound. No one did. There was no telling, at this distance, whether it really could harbor Terran-style life.