Sailing to Byzantium (42 page)

A path strewn with glossy green leaves takes me to an overlook point at the cliff’s edge, where I can see the broad bay far below, at the foot of Sanctuary Mountain. The water gleams like a burnished shield, or perhaps it is more like a huge shimmering pool of quicksilver. I imagine myself leaping from the stone balcony where I stand and soaring outward in a sharp smooth arc, striking the water cleanly, knifing down through it, vanishing without a trace.

Returning to the main Sanctuary complex, I happen to glance downslope toward the long narrow new building that I have been told is the detention center. A portcullis at its eastern end has been hoisted and a procession of prisoners is coming out. I know they are prisoners because they are roped together and walk in a sullen, slack way, heads down, shoulders slumped.

They are dressed in rags and tatters, or less than that. Even from fairly far away I can see cuts and bruises and scabs on them, and one has his arm in a sling, and one is bandaged so that nothing shows of his face but his glinting eyes. Three guards walk alongside them, carelessly dangling neural truncheons from green lanyards. The ropes that bind the prisoners are loosely tied, a perfunctory restraint. It would be no great task for them to break free and seize the truncheons from the captors. But they seem utterly beaten down; for them to make any sort of move toward freedom is probably as unlikely as the advent of an army of winged dragons swooping across the sky.

They are an incongruous and disturbing sight, these miserable prisoners plodding across this velvet landscape. Does the Master know that they are here, and that they are so poorly kept? I start to walk toward them. The Lord Invocator Kastel, emerging suddenly from nowhere as if he had been waiting behind a bush, steps across my path and says, “God keep you, your grace. Enjoying your stroll through the grounds?”

“Those people down there—”

“They are nothing, Lord Magistrate. Only some of our thieving rabble, coming out for a little fresh air.”

“Are they well? Some of them look injured.”

Kastel tugs at one ruddy fleshy jowl. “They are desperate people. Now and then they try to attack their guards. Despite all precautions we can’t always avoid the use of force in restraining them.”

“Of course. I quite understand,” I say, making no effort to hide my sarcasm. “Is the Master aware that helpless prisoners are being beaten within a thousand meters of his lodge?”

“Lord Magistrate—!”

“If we are not humane in all our acts, what are we, Lord Invocator Kastel? What example do we set for the common folk?”

“It’s these common folk of yours,” Kastel says sharply—I have not heard that tone from him before—“who ring this place like an army of filthy vermin, eager to steal anything they can carry away and destroy everything else. Do you realize, Lord Magistrate, that this mountain rises like a towering island of privilege above a sea of hungry people? That within a sixty-kilometer radius of these foothills there are probably thirty million empty bellies? That if our perimeter defenses were to fail, they’d sweep through here like locusts and clean the place out? And probably slaughter every last one of us, up to and including the Master.”

“God forbid.”

“God created them. He must love them. But if this House is going to carry out the work God intended for us, we have to keep them at bay. I tell you, Lord Magistrate, leave these grubby matters of administration to us. In a few days you’ll go flying off to your secluded nest in the Outback, where your work is undisturbed by problems like these. Whereas we’ll still be here, in our pretty little mountain paradise, with enemies on every side. If now and then we take some action that you might not consider entirely humane, I ask you to remember that we guard the Master here, who is the heart of the Mission.” He allows me, for a moment, to see the contempt he feels for my qualms. Then he is all affability and concern again. In a completely different tone he says, “The observatory’s scanning equipment will be back in operation again tonight. I want to invite you to watch the data come pouring in from every corner of space. It’s an inspiring sight, Lord Magistrate.”

“I would be pleased to see it.”

“The progress we’ve made, Lord Magistrate—the way we’ve moved out and out, always in accordance with the divine plan—I tell you, I’m not what you’d call an emotional man, but when I see the track we’re making across the Dark my eyes begin to well up, let me tell you. My eyes begin to well up.”

His eyes, small and keen, study me for a reaction.

Then he says, “Everything’s all right for you here?”

“Of course, Lord Invocator.”

“Your conversations with the Master—have they met with your expectations?”

“Entirely so. He is truly a saint.”

“Truly, Lord Magistrate. Truly.”

“Where would the Mission be without him?”

“Where will it be,” says Kastel thoughtfully, “when he is no longer here to guide us?”

“May that day be far from now.”

“Indeed,” Kastel says. “Though I have to tell you, in all confidence, I’ve started lately to fear—”

His voice trails off.

“Yes?”

“The Master,” he whispers. “Didn’t he seem different to you, somehow?”

“Different?”

“I know it’s years since you last saw him. Perhaps you don’t remember him as he was.”

“He seemed lucid and powerful to me, the most commanding of men,” I reply.

Kastel nods. He takes me by the arm and gently steers me toward the upper buildings of the Sanctuary complex, away from those ghastly prisoners, who are still shuffling about like walking corpses in front of their jail. Quietly he says, “Did he tell you that he thinks someone’s interfering with the plan? That he has evidence that some of the receivers are being shipped far beyond the intended destinations?”

I look at him, wide-eyed.

“Do you really expect me to violate the confidential nature of the Master’s audiences with me?”

“Of course not! Of course not, Lord Magistrate. But just between you and me—and we’re both important men in the Order, it’s essential that we level with each other at all times—I can admit to you that I’m pretty certain what the Master must have told you. Why else would he have sent for you? Why else pull you away from your House and interrupt what is now the key activity of the Mission? He’s obsessed with this idea that there have been deviations from the plan. He’s reading God knows what into the data. But I don’t want to try to influence you. It’s absurd to think that a man of your supreme rank in the second House of the Order can’t analyze the situation unaided. You come tonight, you look at what the scanner says, you make up your own mind. That’s all I ask. All right, Lord Magistrate? All right?”

He walks away, leaving me stunned and shocked. The Master insane? Or the Lord Invocator disloyal? Either one is unthinkable.

I will go to the observatory tonight, yes.

Kastel, by approaching me, seems to have broken the mysterious spell of privacy that has guarded me all afternoon. Now they come from all sides, crowding around me as though I am some archangel—staring, whispering, smiling hopefully at me. They gesture, they kneel. The bravest of them come right up to me and tell me their names, as though I will remember them when the time comes to send the next settlers off to the worlds of Epsilon Eridani, of Castor C, of Ross 154, of Wolf 359. I am kind with them, I am gracious, I am warm. It costs me nothing; it gives them happiness. I think of those bruised and slump-shouldered prisoners sullenly parading in front of the detention center. For them I can do nothing; for these, the maids and gardeners and acolytes and novitiates of the Sanctuary, I can at least provide a flicker of hope. And, smiling at them, reaching my hands toward them, my own mood lightens. All will be well. God will prevail, as ever. The Kastels of this world cannot dismay me.

I see the little girl at the edge of the circle, the one whom I had taken, for a strange instant, to be my daughter. Once again I smile at her. Once again she gives me a solemn stare, and edges away. There is laughter. “She means no disrespect,” a woman says. “Shall I bring her to you, your grace?” I shake my head. “I must frighten her,” I say. “Let her be.” But the girl’s stare remains to haunt me, and I see snow about me once more, thickening in the sky, covering the lush gardens of the Sanctuary, spreading to the rim of the world and beyond.

In the observatory they hand me a polarizing helmet to protect my eyes. The data flux is an overpowering sight: hot pulsing flares, like throbbing suns. I catch just a glimpse of it while still in the vestibule. The world, which has thawed for me, turns to snow yet again. It is a total white-out, a flash of photospheric intensity that washes away all surfaces and dechromatizes the universe.

“This way, your grace. Let me assist you.”

Soft voices. Solicitous proximity. To them, I suppose, I am an old man. Yet the Master was old before I was born. Does he ever come here?

I hear them whispering: “The Lord Magistrate—the Lord Magistrate—”

The observatory, which I have never seen before, is one huge room, an eight-sided building as big as a cathedral, very dark and shadowy within, massive walls of some smooth moist-looking greenish stone, vaulted roof of burnished red metal, actually not a roof at all but an intricate antenna of colossal size and complexity, winding round and round and round upon itself. Spidery catwalks run everywhere to link the various areas of the great room. There is no telescope. This is not that sort of observatory. This is the central gathering-point for three rings of data-collectors, one on the Moon, one somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter, one eight light-years away on a world of the star Lalande 21185. They scan the heavens and pump a stream of binary digits toward this building, where the data arrives in awesome convulsive actinic spurts, like thunderbolts hurled from Olympus.

There is another wall-sized map of the Mission here, the same sort of device that I saw in the Master’s office, but at least five times as large. It too displays the network of the inner stars illuminated in bright yellow lines. But it is the old pattern, the familiar one, the one we have worked with since the inception of the program. This screen shows none of the wild divagations and bizarre trajectories that marked the image the Master showed me in my last audience with him.

“The system’s been down for four days,” a voice at my elbow murmurs: one of the astronomers, a young one, who evidently has been assigned to me. She is dark-haired, snub-nosed, bright-eyed, a pleasant-faced girl. “We’re just priming it now, bringing it up to realtime level. That’s why the flares are so intense. There’s a terrific mass of data backed up in the system and it’s all trying to get in here at once.”

“I see.”

She smiles. “If you’ll move this way, your grace—”

She guides me toward an inner balcony that hangs suspended over a well-like pit perhaps a hundred meters deep. In the dimness far below I see metal arms weaving in slow patterns, great gleaming disks turning rapidly, mirrors blinking and flashing. My astronomer explains that this is the main focal limb, or some such thing, but the details are lost on me. The whole building is quivering and trembling here, as though it is being pounded by a giant’s hand. Colors are changing: the spectrum is being tugged far off to one side. Gripping the rail of the balcony, I feel a terrible vertigo coming over me. It seems to me that the expansion of the universe has suddenly been reversed, that all the galaxies are converging on this point, that I am standing in a vortex where floods of ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays come rushing in from all points of the cosmos at once. “Do you notice it?” I hear myself asking. “The violet-shift? Everything running backwards toward the center?”

“What’s that, your grace?”

I am muttering incoherently. She has not understood a word, thank God! I see her staring at me, worried, perhaps shocked. But I pull myself together, I smile, I manage to offer a few rational-sounding questions. She grows calm. Making allowances for my age, perhaps, and for my ignorance of all that goes on in this building. I have my own area of technical competence, she knows—oh, yes, she certainly knows that!—but she realizes that it is quite different from hers.

From my vantage point overlooking the main focal limb I watch with more awe than comprehension as the data pours in, is refined and clarified, is analyzed, is synthesized, is registered on the various display units arrayed on the walls of the observatory. The young woman at my side keeps up a steady whispered flow of commentary, but I am distracted by the terrifying patterns of light and shadow all about me, by sudden and unpredictable bursts of high-pitched sound, by the vibrations of the building, and I miss some of the critical steps in her explanations and rapidly find myself lost. In truth I understand almost nothing of what is taking place around me. No doubt it is significant. The place is crowded with members of the Order, and high ones at that, everyone at least an initiate, several wearing the armbands of the inner levels of the primary House, the red, the green, even a few amber. Lord Invocator Kastel is here, smiling smugly, embracing people like a politician, coming by more than once to make sure I appreciate the high drama of this great room. I nod, I smile, I assure him of my gratitude.

Indeed it is dramatic. Now that I have recovered from my vertigo I find myself looking outward rather than down, and my senses ride heavenward as though I myself am traveling to the stars.

This is the nerve-center of our Mission, this is the grand sensorium by which we keep track of our achievement.

The Alpha Centauri system was the starting-point, of course, when we first began seeding the stars with Velde receivers, and then Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Lalande 21185, and so on outward and outward, Sirius, Ross 154, Epsilon Indi—who does not know the names?—to all the stars within a dozen light-years of Earth. Small unmanned starships, laser-powered robot drones, unfurling great lightsails and gliding starward on the urgent breath of photonic winds that we ourselves stirred up. Light was their propulsive force, and its steady pressure afforded constant acceleration, swiftly stepping up the velocity of our ships until it approached that of light.