Robert Silverberg - We Are for the Dark

“Oh, no,” he says, and smiles. “Not a repudiation at all, your grace.”

He has that passionate confidence, that unshakable assurance, that is the mark of the real prophet and also of the true madman. There is something diabolical about him, and irresistible. In these conversations with him I have so far managed to remain outwardly calm, even genial, but the fact is that I am quaking within. I really do believe he is insane. Either that or an utter fraud, a cynical salesman of the irrational and the unreal, and though he is flippant he does not seem at all cynical. A madman, then. Is his condition infectious? As I have said, the fear of madness has been with me all my life; and so my harsh discipline, my fierce commitment, my depth of belief. He threatens all my defenses.

“When do you set out to visit your Goddess Avatar?” I ask.

“Whenever you like, your grace.”

“You really think I’m going with you?”

“Of course you are. How else can you find out what you came out here to learn?”

“I’ve learned that the colonies have fallen away from Darklaw. Isn’t that enough?”

“But you think we’ve all gone crazy, right?”

“When did I say that?”

“You didn’t need to say it.”

“If I send word to Earth of what’s happened, and the Order chooses to cut off all further technical assistance and all shipments of manufactured goods—?”

“They won’t do that. But even if they do—well, we’re pretty much self-sufficient out here now, and getting more so every year—”

“And further emigration from Earth?”

“That would be your loss, not ours, your grace. Earth needs the colonies as a safety valve for her population surplus. We can get along without more emigrants. We know how to reproduce, out here.” He grins at me. “This is foolish talk. You’ve come this far. Now go the rest of the way with me.”

I am silent.

“Well?”

“Now, you mean?”

“Right now.”

There is only one Velde station on Entropy, about three hundred meters from the house where I have been talking with Oesterreich. We go to it under a sky berserk with green lightning. He seems not even to notice.

“Don’t we have to do lambda drills?” I ask.

“Not for this hop,” Oesterreich says. “There’s no differential between here and there.” He is busy setting up coordinates.

“Get into the chamber, your grace.”

“And have you send me God knows where by myself?”

“Don’t be foolish. Please.”

It may be the craziest thing I have ever done. But I am the servant of the Order; and the Order has asked this of me. I step into the chamber. No one else is with us. He continues to press keys, and I realize that he is setting up an automatic transfer, requiring no external operator. When he is done with that he joins me, and there is the moment of flash.

We emerge into a cool, dry world with an Earthlike sun, a sea-green sky, a barren, rocky landscape. Ahead of us stretches an empty plateau broken here and there by small granite hillocks that rise like humped islands out of the flatness.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Fifty light-years from Entropy, and about eighty-five light-years from Earth.”

“What’s the name of this place?”

“It doesn’t have one. Nobody lives here. Come, now we walk a little.”

We start forward. The ground has the look that comes of not having felt rain for ten or twenty years, but tough little tussocks of a grayish jagged-looking grass are pushing up somehow through the hard, stony red soil. When we have gone a hundred meters or so the land begins to drop away sharply on my left, so that I can look down into a broad, flat valley about three hundred meters below us. A solitary huge beast, somewhat like an elephant in bulk and manner, is grazing quietly down there, patiently prodding at the ground with its rigid two-pronged snout.

“Here we are,” Oesterreich says.

We have reached the nearest of the little granite islands. When we walk around it, I see that its face on the farther side is fissured and broken, creating a sort of cave. Oesterreich beckons and we step a short way into it.

To our right, against the wall of the cave, is a curious narrow three-sided framework, a kind of tapering doorway, with deep darkness behind it. It is made of an odd glossy metal, or perhaps a plastic, with a texture that is both sleek and porous at the same time. There are hieroglyphs inscribed on it that seem much like those I saw on the wall of the stone temple in the mural in the Goddess-chapel on Phosphor, and to either side of it, mounted in the cave wall, are the triple six-pointed stars that are the emblem of Oesterreich’s cult.

“What is this here?” I say, after a time.

“It’s something like a Velde transmitter.”

“It isn’t anything like a Velde transmitter.”

“It works very much like a Velde transmitter,” he says. “You’ll see when we step into its field. Are you ready?”

“Wait.”

He nods. “I’m waiting.”

“We’re going to let this thing send us somewhere?”

“That’s right, your grace.”

“What is it? Who built it?”

“I’ve already told you what it is. As for who built it, I don’t have any idea. Nobody does. We think it’s five or ten million years old, maybe. It could be older than that by a factor of ten. Or a factor of a hundred. We have no way of judging.”

After a long silence I say, “You’re telling me that it’s an alien device?”

“That’s right.”

“We’ve never discovered any sign of intelligent alien life anywhere in the galaxy.”

“There’s one right in front of you,” Oesterreich says. “It isn’t the only one.”

“You’ve found aliens?”

“We’ve found their matter-transmitters. A few of them, anyway. They still work. Are you ready to jump now, your grace?”

I stare blankly at the three-sided doorway.

“Where to?”

“To a planet about five hundred light-years from here, where we can catch the bus that’ll take us to the Goddess Avatar.”

“You’re actually serious?”

“Let’s go, your grace.”

“What about lambda effects?”

“There aren’t any. Lambda differentials are a flaw in the Velde technology, not in the universe itself. This system gets us around without any lambda problems at all. Of course, we don’t know how it works. Are you ready?”

“All right,” I say helplessly.

He beckons to me and together we step toward the doorway and simply walk through it, and out the other side into such astonishing beauty that I want to fall down and give praise. Great feathery trees rise higher than sequoias, and a milky waterfall comes tumbling down the flank of an ebony mountain that fills half the sky, and the air quivers with a diamond-bright haze. Before me stretches a meadow like a scarlet carpet, vanishing into the middle distance. There is a Mesozoic richness of texture to everything: it gleams, it shimmers, it trembles in splendor.

A second doorway, identical to the first, is mounted against an enormous boulder right in front of us. It too is flanked by the triple star emblem.

“Put your medallion on,” Oesterreich tells me.

“My medallion?” I say, stupidly.

“Put it on. The Goddess Avatar will wonder why you’re with me, and that’ll tell her.”

“Is she here?”

“She’s on the next world. This is just a way station. We had to stop here first. I don’t know why. Nobody does. Ready?”

“I’d like to stay here longer.”

“You can come back some other time,” he says. “She’s waiting for you. Let’s go.”

“Yes,” I say, and fumble in my pocket and find my medallion, and put it around my throat. Oesterreich winks and puts his thumb and forefinger together approvingly. He takes my hand and we step through.