Robert Silverberg - We Are for the Dark

It is hard for me to say which I find the most alien, the snowstorms, the packs of fierce beasts running through the town, or the execution.

My food is shoved through a slot in the door. It is rough, simple stuff, stews and soups and a kind of gritty bread. That is all right. Not until the fourth day does anyone come to see me. My first visitor is Marfa Ivanovna, who says, “They think you’re a spy. I told you to tell them the truth.”

“I did.”

“Are you a spy?”

“You know that I’m not.”

“Yes,” she says. “I know. But the voivode is troubled. He thinks you mean to overthrow him.”

“All I want is for him to give me some information. Then I’ll be gone from here and won’t ever return.”

“He is a very suspicious man.”

“Let him come here and pray with me, and see what my nature is like. All I am is a servant of God. Which I hope is true of the voivode as well.”

“He is thinking of having you shot,” Marfa Ivanovna says.

“Let him come to me and pray with me,” I tell her.

The voivode comes to me, not once but three times. We do no praying—in truth, any mention of God, or Darklaw, or even the Mission, seems to make him uncomfortable—but gradually we begin to understand each other. We are not that different. He is a hard, dedicated, cautious man governing a harsh troublesome land. I have been called hard and dedicated and cautious myself. My nature is not as suspicious as his, but I have not had to contend with snowstorms and wild beasts and the other hazards of this place. Nor am I Russian. They seem to be suspicious from birth, these Russians. And they have lived apart from Earth a long while. That too is Darklaw: we would not have the new worlds contaminated with our plagues of the spirit or of the flesh, nor do we want alien plagues of either kind carried back from them to us. We have enough of our own already.

I am not going to be shot. He makes that clear. “We talked of it, yes. But it would be wrong.”

“The man who was? What did he do?”

“He took that which was not his,” says the voivode, and shrugs. “He was worse than a beast. He could not be allowed to live among us.”

Nothing is said of when I will be released. I am left alone for two more days. The coarse dull food begins to oppress me, and the solitude. There is another snowstorm, worse than the last. From my window I see ungainly birds something like vultures, with long naked yellow necks and drooping reptilian tails, circling in the sky. Finally the voivode comes a second time, and simply stares at me as though expecting me to blurt out some confession. I look at him in puzzlement, and after long silence he laughs explosively and summons an aide, who brings in a bottle of a clear fiery liquor. Two or three quick gulps and he becomes expansive, and tells me of his childhood. His father was voivode before him, long ago, and was killed by a wild animal while out hunting. I try to imagine a world that still has dangerous animals roaming freely. To me it is like a world where the gods of primitive man are real and alive, and go disguised among mortals, striking out at them randomly and without warning.

Then he asks me about myself, wanting to know how old I was when I became a priest of the Order, and whether I was as religious as a boy as I am now. I tell him what I can, within the limits placed on me by my vows. Perhaps I go a little beyond the limits, even. I explain about my early interest in technical matters, my entering the Order at seventeen, my life of service.

The part about my religious vocation seems odd to him. He appears to think I must have undergone some sudden conversion midway through my adolescence. “There has never been a time when God has not been present at my side,” I say.

“How very lucky you are,” he says.

“Lucky?”

He touches his glass to mine.

“Your health,” he says. We drink. Then he says, “What does your Order really want with us, anyway?”

“With you? We want nothing with you. Three generations ago we gave you your world; everything after that is up to you.”

“No. You want to dictate how we shall live. You are people of the past, and we are people of the future, and you are unable to understand our souls.”

“Not so,” I tell him. “Why do you think we want to dictate to you? Have we interfered with you up till now?”

“You are here now, though.”

“Not to interfere. Only to gain information.”

“Ah. Is this so?” He laughs and drinks. “Your health,” he says again.

He comes a third time a couple of days later. I am restless and irritable when he enters; I have had enough of this imprisonment, these groundless suspicions, this bleak and frosty world; I am ready to be on my way. It is all I can do to keep from bluntly demanding my freedom. As it is I am uncharacteristically sharp and surly with him, answering in quick snarling monosyllables when he asks me how I have slept, whether I am well, is my room warm enough. He gives me a look of surprise, and then one of thoughtful appraisal, and then he smiles. He is in complete control, and we both know it.

“Tell me once more,” he says, “why you have come to us.”

I calm myself and run through the whole thing one more time. He nods. Now that he knows me better, he tells me, he begins to think that I may be sincere, that I have not come to spy, that I actually would be willing to chase across the galaxy this way in pursuit of an ideal. And so on in that vein for a time, both patronizing and genuinely friendly almost in the same breath.

Then he says, “We have decided that it is best to send you onward.”

“Where?”

“The name of the world is Entrada. It is one of our daughter worlds, eleven light-years away, a very hot place. We trade our precious metals for their spices. Someone came from there not long ago and told us of a strange man named Oesterreich, who passed through Entrada and spoke of undertaking journeys to new and distant places. Perhaps he can provide you with the answers that you seek. If you can find him.”

“Oesterreich?”

“That is the name, yes.”

Can you tell me any more about him than that?”

“What I have told you is all that I know.”

He stares at me truculently, as if defying me to show that he is lying. But I believe him.

“Even for that much assistance, I am grateful,” I say.

“Yes. Never let it be said that we have failed to offer aid to the Order.” He smiles again. “But if you ever come to this world again, you understand, we will know that you were a spy after all. And we will treat you accordingly.”

Marfa Ivanovna is in charge of the Velde equipment. She positions me within the transmitting doorway, moving me about this way and that to be certain that I will be squarely within the field. When she is satisfied, she says, “You know, you ought not ever come back this way.”

“I understand that.”

“You must be a very virtuous man. Ilya Alexandrovitch came very close to putting you to death, and then he changed his mind. This I know for certain. But he remains suspicious of you. He is suspicious of everything the Order does.”

“The Order has never done anything to injure him or anyone else on this planet, and never will.”

“That may be so,” says Marfa Ivanovna. “But still, you are lucky to be leaving here alive. You should not come back. And you should tell others of your sort to stay away from Zima too. We do not accept the Order here.”

I am still pondering the implications of that astonishing statement when she does something even more astonishing. Stepping into the cubicle with me, she suddenly opens her fur-trimmed jacket, revealing full round breasts, very pale, dusted with the same light red freckles that she has on her face. She seizes me by the hair and presses my head against her breasts, and holds it there a long moment. Her skin is very warm. It seems almost feverish.