To Open the Sky (15 page)

"Too transparent, Martell. You came here bristling with the urge to be a martyr. You gave up too soon. Obviously you want to spy on our movement. Conversions are never that simple, and you're not an easily swayed man. I suspect you, Brother."

"Are you esping me?"

"Me? I don't have a shred of ability. Not a shred. But I have common sense. I know a bit about spying, too. You're here to sniff."

Martell studied a gleaming bird high against the dark backdrop. "You refuse to accept me, then?"

"You can have shelter for the night. In the morning you'll have to go. Sorry, Martell."

No amount of persuasion would alter the Harmonist's decision. Martell was not surprised, nor greatly distressed; joining the Harmonists had been a strategy of doubtful success, and he had more than half expected Mondschein to reject him. Perhaps if he had waited six months before applying, the response would have been different.

He remained aloof while the little group of Harmonists performed evening vespers. They were not called "vespers," of course, but Martell could not avoid identifying the heretics with the older religion. Three altered Earth-men were stationed at the mission, and the voices of the two subordinates joined with Mondschein's in hymns that seemed offensive in their religiosity and yet faintly moving at the same time. Seven low-caste Venusians took part in the service. Afterward Martell shared a dinner of unknown meat and acrid wine with the three Harmonists. They seemed comfortable enough in his presence, almost smug. One, Bradlaugh, was slim and fragile-looking, with elongated arms and comically blunt features. The other, Lazarus, was robust and athletic, his eyes oddly blank, his skin stretched mask-tight over his broad face. He was the one who had visited Martell's ill-fated chapel. Martell suspected that Lazarus was an esper. His last name aroused the missionary's curiosity.

"Are you related to
the
Lazarus?" Martell asked.

"His grandnephew. I never knew the man."

"No one seems to have known him," said Martell. "It often occurs to me that the esteemed founder of your heresy may have been a myth."

Faces stiffened around the table. Mondschein said, "I met someone who knew him once. An impressive man, they say he was: tall and commanding, with an air of majesty."

"Like Vorst," Martell said.

"Very much like Vorst. Natural leaders, both of them," said Mondschein. He rose. "Brothers, good night."

Martell was left alone with Bradlaugh and Lazarus. An uncomfortable silence followed; after a while Bradlaugh rose and said coolly, "I'll show you to your room."

The room was small, with a simple cot. Martell was content. Fewer religious symbols decorated the room than there might have been, and it was a place to sleep. He took care of his devotions quickly and closed his eyes. After a while sleep came—a thin crust of slumber over an abyss of turmoil.

The crust was pierced.

There came the sound of laughter, booming and harsh. Something thumped against the chapel walls. Martell struggled to wakefulness in time to hear a thick voice cry, "Give us the Vorster!"

He sat up. Someone entered his room: Mondschein, he realized. "They're drunk," the Harmonist whispered. "They've been roistering all over the countryside all night, and now they're here to make trouble."

"The Vorster!" came a roar from outside.

Martell peered through his window. At first he saw nothing; then, by the gleam of the light-cells studding the chapel's outer walls, he picked out seven or eight titanic figures, striding unsteadily back and forth in the courtyard.

"High-casters!" Martell gasped.

"One of our espers brought the word an hour ago," said Mondschein. "It was bound to happen sooner or later. I'll go out and calm them."

"They'll kill you."

"It's not me they're after," said Mondschein, and left.

Martell saw him emerge from the building. He was dwarfed by the ring of drunken Venusians, and from the way they closed in on him, Martell was certain that they would do him some harm. But they hesitated. Mondschein faced them squarely. At this distance Martell could not hear what they were saying. A parley of some sort, perhaps. The big men were armed and reeling. Some glowing creature shot past the knot of figures, giving Martell a sudden glimpse of the faces of the high-caste men: alien, distorted, terrifying. Their cheekbones were like knifeblades; their eyes mere slits. Mondschein, his back to the window now, was gesticulating, no doubt talking rapidly and earnestly.

One of the Venusians scooped up a twenty-pound boulder and lobbed it against the mission's whitewashed wall. Martell nibbled a knuckle. Fragments of conversation came to him, ugly words: "Let us have him…. We could take you all…. Time we crushed all you toads.

Mondschein's hands were upraised now. Imploringly, Martell wondered, or was he simply trying to keep the Venusians at bay? Martell thought of praying. But it seemed a hollow, futile gesture. One did not pray for direct reward, in the Brotherhood. One lived well and served the cause, and reward came. Martell felt tranquil. He slipped into his robe and went outside.

Never before had he been this close to a group of high-casters. There was a rank odor about them, an odor that reminded Martell of the scent of the Wheel. They stared in disbelief as the Vorster emerged.

"What do they want?" Martell asked.

Mondschein gaped at him. "Go back inside! I'm negotiating with them!"

One of the Venusians unfurled a sword. He drove it a foot into the spongy earth, leaned on it, and said, "There's the priestling now! What are we waiting for?"

Mondschein said helplessly to Martell, "You shouldn't have come out. There might have been a chance to quiet them down."

"Not a chance. They'll destroy your whole mission here if I don't pacify them. I've got no right to bring that on you."

"You're our guest," Mondschein reminded him.

Martell did not care to accept the charity of heretics. He had come to the Harmonists, as they had guessed, in the hope of spying; that had failed, as had the rest of his mission here, and he would not hide behind Mondschein's green robe. He caught the older man's arm and said, "Go inside. Fast!"

Mondschein shrugged and disappeared. Martell swung around to face the Venusians.

"Why are you here?" he asked.

A gob of spittle caught him in the face. Without speaking directly to him, one Venusian said, "We'll skewer him and throw him in Ludlow Pond, eh?"

"Hack him! Spit him!"

"Stake him out for a Wheel!"

Martell said, "I came here in peace. I bring you the gift of life. Why won't you listen? What are you afraid of?" They were big children, he saw, reveling in their power to crush an ant. "Let's all sit down by that tree. Allow me to talk to you for a while. I'll take the drunkenness out of you. If you'll only give me your hand—"

"Watch out!" a Venusian roared. "He stings!"

Martell reached for the nearest of the giants. The man leaped back with a most ungallant display of edginess. An instant later, as though to atone for bolting that way, his sword was out, a glittering anachronism nearly as long as Martell himself. Two Venusians drew their daggers. They strutted forward, and Martell filled his altered lungs with alien air and waited for the shedding of his no-longer-red blood, and then suddenly he was no longer there.

"How did you get here?" Ambassador Nat Weiner asked.

"I wish I knew," said Martell.

The sudden brightness of the Martian's office stabbed at Martell's eyes. He still could see the descending blades of the fearsome swords, and he was rocked by a sensation of unreality, as though he had left one dream to enter another in which he was dreaming yet a different thread.

"This is a maximum-security building," said Weiner. "You have no right to be here."

"I have no right even to be alive," replied the missionary flatly.

Six

Broodingly, Martell considered retreating to Earth to tell Santa Fe what he knew. He could go to the Vorst Center, where, less than a year ago, he had gone into a room as an Earthman, to be turned by whirling knives and lashing lasers into an alien thing. He could request an interview with Reynolds Kirby and let that grizzled, thin-lipped centenarian know that the Venusians had telekinesis, that they could deflect a Wheel or throw an attacker into Trouble Fungus or speed a living human figure safely across five miles and pass him through walls.

Santa Fe would have to know. The situation looked bad. Harmonists snugly established on Venus, and the place chock-full of teleports—it could mean a disastrous blow to Vorst's master plan. Of course, the Vorsters on Earth had made great gains, too. They were masters of the planet. Their laboratories had run simulated life spans that showed a tally of from three to four hundred years, without organ replacement—simple regeneration from within, amounting to a kind of immortality. But immortality was only one Vorster goal. The other was transport to the unreachable stars.

And there the Harmonists had their big lead. They had teleports who already could work miracles. Given a few generations of genetic work, they might be sending expeditions to other solar systems. Once you could move a man five miles in safety, it was only a quantitative jump, not qualitative, to get him to Procyon. Martell had to tell them. Santa Fe called to him—that vast sprawl of buildings where technicians split genes and laboriously pasted them back together, where esper families submitted to an endless round of tests, where bionics men performed wonders beyond comprehension.

But he did not go. A personal report seemed unnecessary. A message cube would do just as well. Earth now was an alien world to Martell, and he was uneasy about returning to it, living in breathing-suits. He balked at making the return journey.

Through the good offices of Nat Weiner, Martell recorded a cube and had it shipped to Kirby at Santa Fe. He remained at the Martian Embassy while waiting for his reply. He had set forth the situation on Venus as he understood it, expressing his great fear that the Harmonists were too far ahead and would have the stars. In time Kirby's reply arrived. He thanked Martell for his invaluable data. And he expressed a calming note: the Harmonists, he said, were men. If they were to reach the stars, it would be a human achievement. Not theirs, not ours, but everyone's, for the way would be opened. Did Brother Martell follow that reasoning, Kirby asked?

Martell felt quicksand beneath him. What was Kirby saying? Means and ends were hopelessly jumbled. Was the purpose of the order fulfilled if heretics conquered the universe? In distress, he stood before the improvised altar in the room Weiner had given him, seeking answers to unaskable questions.

A few days later he returned to the Harmonists.

Seven

Martell stood with Christopher Mondschein by the edge of a sparkling lake. Through the clouds came the dull glow of the masked sun, imparting a faint gleam to the water-that-was-not-water. It was not that trickle of sunlight that made the water sparkle, though; it teemed with luminous coelenterates that lined its shallow bottom. Their tentacles, waving in the currents, emitted a gentle greenish radiance.

There were other creatures in the lake, too. Martell saw them gliding beneath the surface, ribbed and bony, with gnashing jaws and metallic fins. Now and then a snout split the water and a slim, ugly creature whipped twenty yards through the air before subsiding. From the depths came writhing, sucker-tipped tendrils that belonged to monsters Martell did not care to know.

Mondschein said, "I thought I'd never see you again."

"When I went out to face the Venusians?"

"No. Afterward, when you holed up with the Martians. I thought you were making arrangements to go back to Earth. You know it's hopeless to try to plant a Vorster chapel here."

"I know," Martell said. "But I've got that boy's death on my conscience. I can't leave. I lured him into visiting me, and he died for it. He'd be alive if I had turned him away. And I'd be dead if you hadn't had one of your other little Venusians teleport me to safety."

"Elwhit was one of our finest prospects," Mondschein said sadly. "But he had this streak of wildness—the thing that brought him to us in the first place. A restless boy, he was. I wish you had left him alone."

"I did what I had to do," Martell replied. "I'm sorry it worked out so awfully." He followed the path of a sinuous black serpent that swept from right to left across the lake. It extended telescoping arms in a sudden terrifying gesture and enveloped a low-flying bird. Martell said carefully, "I didn't come back here to spy on you. I came back to join your order."

Mondschein's domed blue forehead wrinkled a little. "Please. We've been through all this already."

"Test me! Have one of your espers read me! I swear it, Mondschein. I'm sincere."

"They've embedded a pack of hypnotic commands in you in Santa Fe. I know. I've been through it myself. They sent you here to be a spy, but you don't know it yourself, and if we probed you, we might have trouble finding out the truth. You'll soak up all you can about us, and then you'll return to Santa Fe, and they'll toss you to a debriefing esper who'll pump it all out of you. Eh?"