Robert Silverberg - We Are for the Dark

At length I say bluntly, “Have you had a chance to talk to your wife about that preacher?”

He looks troubled. “In fact, it slipped my mind.”

“Ah.”

“Tonight, maybe—”

“I understand that the man’s name is Oesterreich,” I say.

His eyes go wide.

“You know that, do you?”

“Help me, will you, Sandys? I’m the one who sent you to this place, remember? Your whole life here wouldn’t exist but for me.”

“That’s true. That’s very true.”

“Who’s Oesterreich?”

“I never knew him. I never had any dealings with him.”

“Tell me what you know about him.”

“A crazy man, he was.”

“Was?”

“He’s not here any more.”

I uncork the bottle of rare brandy, pour a little for myself, a more generous shot for Sandys.

“Where’d he go?” I ask.

He sips, reflectively. After a time he says, “I don’t know, your grace. That’s God’s own truth. I haven’t seen or heard of him in a couple of years. He chartered one of the other captains here, a man named Feraud, to take him to one of the islands, and that’s the last I know.”

“Which island?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think Feraud remembers?”

“I could ask him,” Sandys says.

“Yes. Ask him. Would you do that?”

“I could ask him, yes,” he says.

So it goes, slowly. Sandys confers with his friend Feraud, who hesitates and evades, or so Sandys tells me; but eventually Feraud finds it in him to recall that he had taken Oesterreich to Volcano Isle, three hours’ journey to the west. Sandys admits to me, now that he is too deep in to hold back, that he himself actually heard Oesterreich speak several times, that Oesterreich claimed to be in possession of some secret way of reaching worlds immensely remote from the settled part of the Dark.

“And do you believe that?”

“I don’t know. He seemed crazy to me.”

“Crazy how?”

“The look in his eye. The things he said. That it’s our destiny to reach the rim of the universe. That the Order holds us back out of its own timidity. That we must follow the Goddess Avatar, who beckons us onward to—”

“ Who? ”

His face flushes bright crimson. “The Goddess Avatar. I don’t know what she is, your grace. Honestly. It’s some cult he’s running, some new religion he’s made up. I told you he’s crazy. I’ve never believed any of this.”

There is a pounding in my temples, and a fierce ache behind my eyes. My throat has gone dry and not even Sandys’ brandy can soothe it.

“Where do you think Oesterreich is now?”

“I don’t know.” His eyes are tormented. “Honestly. Honestly. I think he’s gone from Entrada.”

“Is there a Velde transmitter station on Volcano Isle?”

He thinks for a moment. “Yes. Yes, there is.”

“Will you do me one more favor?” I ask. “One thing, and then I won’t ask any more.”

“Yes?”

“Take a ride over to Volcano Isle tomorrow. Talk with the people who run the Velde station there. See if you can find out where they sent Oesterreich.”

“They’ll never tell me anything like that.”

I put five shining coins in front of him, each one worth as much as he can make in a month’s ferrying.

“Use these,” I say. “If you come back with the answer, there are five more for you.”

“Come with me, your grace. You speak to them.”

“No.”

“You ought to see Volcano Isle. It’s a fantastic place. The center of it blew out thousands of years ago, and people live up on the rim, around a lagoon so deep nobody’s been able to find the bottom. I was meaning to take you there anyway, and—”

“You go,” I say. “Just you.”

After a moment he pockets the coins. In the morning I watch him go off in one of his boats, a small hydrofoil skiff. There is no word from him for two days, and then he comes to me at the hospice, looking tense and unshaven.

“It wasn’t easy,” he says.

“You found out where he went?”

“Yes.”

“Go on,” I urge, but he is silent, lips working but nothing coming out. I produce five more of the coins and lay them before him. He ignores them. This is some interior struggle.

He says, after a time, “We aren’t supposed to reveal anything about anything of this. I told you what I’ve already told you because I owe you. You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“You mustn’t ever let anyone know who gave you the information.”

“Don’t worry,” I say.

He studies me for a time. Then he says, “The name of the planet where Oesterreich went is Eden. It’s a seventeen-light-year hop. You won’t need lambda adjustment, coming from here. There’s hardly any differential. All right, your grace? That’s all I can tell you.” He stares at the coins and shakes his head. Then he runs out of the room, leaving them behind.

Eden turns out to be no Eden at all. I see a spongy, marshy landscape, a gray sodden sky, a raw, half-built town. There seem to be two suns, a faint yellow-white one and a larger reddish one. A closer look reveals that the system here is like the Lalande one: the reddish one is not really a star but a glowing substellar mass about the size of Jupiter. Eden is one of its moons. What we like to speak of in the Order as the new Earths of the Dark are in fact scarcely Earthlike at all, I am coming to realize: all they have in common with the mother world is a tolerably breathable atmosphere and a manageable gravitational pull. How can we speak of a world as an Earth when its sun is not yellow but white or red or green, or there are two or three or even four suns in the sky all day and all night, or the primary source of warmth is not even a sun but a giant planet-like ball of hot gas?

“Settler?” they ask me, when I arrive on Eden.

“Traveler,” I reply. “Short-term visit.”

They scarcely seem to care. This is a difficult world and they have no time for bureaucratic formalities. So long as I have money, and I do—at least these strange daughter worlds of ours still honor our currency—I am, if not exactly welcome, then at least permitted.

Do they observe Darklaw here? When I arrive I am wearing neither my robe of office nor my medallion, and it seems just as well. The Order appears not to be in favor, this far out. I can find no sign of our chapels or other indications of submission to our rule. What I do find, as I wander the rough streets of this jerry-rigged town on this cool, rainswept world, is a chapel of some other kind, a white geodesic dome with a mysterious symbol—three superimposed six-pointed stars—painted in black on its door.

“Goddess save you,” a woman coming out says brusquely to me, and shoulders past me in the rain.

They are not even bothering to hide things, this far out on the frontier.

I go inside. The walls are white and an odd, disturbing mural is painted on one of them. It shows what seems to be a windowless ruined temple drifting in blue starry space, with all manner of objects and creatures floating near it, owls, skulls, snakes, masks, golden cups, bodiless heads. It is like a scene viewed in a dream. The temple’s alabaster walls are covered with hieroglyphics. A passageway leads inward and inward and inward, and at its end I can see a tiny view of an eerie landscape like a plateau at the end of time.

There are half a dozen people in the room, each facing in a different direction, reading aloud in low murmurs. A slender dark-skinned man looks up at me and says, “Goddess save you, father. How does your journey go?”

“I’m trying to find Oesterreich. They said he’s here.”

A couple of the other readers look up. A woman with straw-colored hair says, “He’s gone Goddessward.”