Robert Silverberg - We Are for the Dark

“I’m sorry. I don’t under—”

Another woman, whose features are tiny and delicately modeled in the center of a face vast as the map of Russia, breaks in to tell me, “He was going to stop off on Phosphor first. You may be able to catch up with him there. Goddess save you, father.”

I stare at her, at the mural of the stone temple, at the other woman.

“Thank you,” I say. “Goddess save you,” my voice adds.

I buy passage to Phosphor. It is sixty-seven light-years from Earth. The necessary lambda adjustment costs nearly as much as the transit fee itself, and I must spend three days going through the adaptation process before I can leave.

Then, Goddess save me, I am ready to set out from Eden for whatever greater strangeness awaits me beyond.

As I wait for the Simtow reaction to annihilate me and reconstruct me in some unknown place, I think of all those who passed through my House over the years as I selected the outbound colonists—and how I and the Lord Magistrates before me had clung to the fantasy that we were shaping perfect new Earths out there in the Dark, that we were composing exquisite symphonies of human nature, filtering out all of the discordances that had marred all our history up till now. Without ever going to the new worlds ourselves to view the results of our work, of course, because to go would mean to cut ourselves off forever, by Darklaw’s own constricting terms, from our House, from our task, from Earth itself. And now, catapulted into the Dark in a moment’s convulsive turn, by shame and guilt and the need to try to repair that which I had evidently made breakable instead of imperishable, I am learning that I have been wrong all along, that the symphonies of human nature that I had composed were built out of the same old tunes, that people will do what they will do unconstrained by abstract regulations laid down for them a priori by others far away. The tight filter of which the House of Senders is so proud is no filter at all. We send our finest ones to the stars and they turn their backs on us at once. And, pondering these things, it seems to me that my soul is pounding at the gates of my mind, that madness is pressing close against the walls of my spirit—a thing which I have always dreaded, the thing which brought me to the cloisters of the Order in the first place.

Black light flashes in my eyes and once more I go leaping through the Dark.

“He isn’t here,” they tell me on Phosphor. There is a huge cool red sun here, and a hot blue one a couple of hundred solar units away, close enough to blaze like a brilliant beacon in the day sky. “He’s gone on to Entropy. Goddess save you.”

“Goddess save you,” I say.

There are triple-triangle signs on every doorfront in Phosphor’s single city. The city’s name is Jerusalem. To name cities or worlds for places on Earth is forbidden. But I know that I have left Darklaw far behind here.

Entropy, they say, is ninety-one light-years from Earth. I am approaching the limits of the sphere of settlement.

Oesterreich has a soft, insinuating voice. He says, “You should come with me. I really would like to take a Lord Magistrate along when I go to her.”

“I’m no longer a Lord Magistrate.”

“You can’t ever stop being a Lord Magistrate. Do you think you can take the Order off just by putting your medallion in your suitcase?”

“Who is she, this Goddess Avatar everybody talks about?”

Oesterreich laughs. “Come with me and you’ll find out.”

He is a small man, very lean, with broad, looming shoulders that make him appear much taller than he is when he is sitting down. Maybe he is forty years old, maybe much older. His face is paper-white, with perpetual bluish stubble, and his eyes have a black troublesome gleam that strikes me as a mark either of extraordinary intelligence or of pervasive insanity, or perhaps both at once. It was not difficult at all for me to find him, only hours after my arrival on Entropy. The planet has a single village, a thousand settlers. The air is mild here, the sun yellow-green. Three huge moons hang just overhead in the daytime sky, as though dangling on a clothesline.

I say, “Is she real, this goddess of yours?”

“Oh, she’s real, all right. As real as you or me.”

“Someone we can walk up to and speak with?”

“Her name used to be Margaret Benevente. She was born in Geneva. She emigrated to a world called Three Suns about thirty years ago.”

“And now she’s a goddess.”

“No. I never said that.”

“What is she, then?”

“She’s the Goddess Avatar.”

“Which means what?”

He smiles. “Which means she’s a holy woman in whom certain fundamental principles of the universe have been incarnated. You want to know any more than that, you come with me, eh? Your grace.”

“And where is she?”

“She’s on an uninhabited planet about five thousand light-years from here right now.”

I am dealing with a lunatic, I tell myself. That gleam is the gleam of madness, yes.

“You don’t believe that, do you?” he asks.

“How can it be possible?”

“Come with me and you’ll find out.”

“Five thousand light-years—” I shake my head. “No. No.”

He shrugs. “So don’t go, then.”

There is a terrible silence in the little room. I feel impaled on it. Thunder crashes outside, finally, breaking the tension. Lightning has been playing across the sky constantly since my arrival, but there has been no rain.

“Faster-than-light travel is impossible,” I say inanely. “Except by way of Velde transmission. You know that. If we’ve got Velde equipment five thousand light-years from here, we would have had to start shipping it out around the time the Pyramids were being built in Egypt.”

“What makes you think we get there with Velde equipment?” Oesterreich asks me.

He will not explain. Follow me and you’ll see, he tells me. Follow me and you’ll see.

The curious thing is that I like him. He is not exactly a likable man—too intense, too tightly wound, the fanaticism carried much too close to the surface—but he has a sort of charm all the same. He travels from world to world, he tells me, bringing the new gospel of the Goddess Avatar. That is exactly how he says it, “the new gospel of the Goddess Avatar,” and I feel a chill when I hear the phrase. It seems absurd and frightening both at once. Yet I suppose those who brought the Order to the world a hundred fifty years ago must have seemed just as strange and just as preposterous to those who first heard our words.

Of course, we had the Velde equipment to support our philosophies.

But these people have—what? The strength of insanity? The clear cool purposefulness that comes from having put reality completely behind them?

“You were in the Order once, weren’t you?” I ask him.

“You know it, your grace.”

“Which House?”

“The Mission,” he says.

“I should have guessed that. And now you have a new mission, is that it?”

“An extension of the old one. Mohammed, you know, didn’t see Islam as a contradiction of Judaism and Christianity. Just as the next level of revelation, incorporating the previous ones.”

“So you would incorporate the Order into your new belief?”

“We would never repudiate the Order, your grace.”

“And Darklaw? How widely is that observed, would you say, in the colony worlds?”

“I think we’ve kept much of it,” Oesterreich says. “Certainly we keep the part about not trying to return to Earth. And the part about spreading the Mission outward.”

“Beyond the boundaries decreed, it would seem.”

“This is a new dispensation,” he says.

“But not a repudiation of the original teachings?”