To Open the Sky (5 page)

Weiner remained where he was, shaking his head vaguely. A new figure came forward: a small leathery- faced man, in late middle age. The Martian consul. Kirby felt his belly churn with apprehension.

The consul said, "I'm terribly sorry, Freeman Kirby. He's really been running amok, hasn't he? Well, we'll take jurisdiction now. What he needs is to have some of his own people tell him what a fool he's been."

Kirby stammered, "It was my fault. I lost sight of him. He shouldn't be blamed. He—"

"We understand perfectly, Freeman Kirby." The consul smiled benignly, gestured, nodded as three aides came forward and gathered the fallen Weiner into their arms.

Very suddenly the street was empty. Kirby stood, drained and stupefied, in front of the Vorster chapel, and Vanna was with him, and all the others were gone, Weiner vanishing like an ogre in a bad dream. It had not, Kirby thought, been a very successful evening. But now it was over.

Home, now.

An hour and a half would see him in Tortola. A quick, lonely swim in the warm ocean—then half an hour in the Nothing Chamber tomorrow. No, an hour, Kirby decided. It would take that much to undo this night's damage. An hour of disassociation, an hour of drifting on the amniotic tide, sheltered, warm, unbothered by the pressures of the world, an hour of blissful if cowardly escape. Fine. Wonderful.

Vanna said, "Will you come in now?"

"Into the chapel?"

"Yes. Please."

"It's late. I'll get you back to New York right away. We'll pay for any repairs that—that your face will need. The copter's waiting."

"Let it wait," Vanna said. "Come inside."

"I want to get home."

"Home can wait, too. Give me two hours with you, Ron. Just sit and listen to what they have to say in there. Come to the altar with me. You don't have to do anything but listen. It'll relax you, I promise that."

Kirby stared at her distorted, artificial face. Beneath the grotesque eyelids were real eyes—shining, imploring. Why was she so eager? Did they pay a finder's fee of salvation for every lost soul dragged into the Blue Fire? Or could it be, Kirby wondered, that she really and truly believed, that her heart and soul were bound up in this movement, that she was sincere in her conviction that the followers of Vorst would live through eternity, would live to see men ride to the distant stars?

He was so very tired.

He wondered how the security officers of the Secretariat would regard it if a high official like himself began to dabble in Vorsterism.

He wondered, too, if he had any career at all left to salvage, after tonight's fiasco with the Martian. What was there to lose? He could rest for a while. His head was splitting. Perhaps some esper in there would massage his frontal lobes for a while. Espers tended to be drawn to the Vorster chapels, didn't they?

The place seemed to have a pull. He had made his job his religion, but was that really good enough now, he asked himself? Perhaps it was time to unbend, time to shed the mask of aloofness, time to find out what it was that the multitudes were buying so eagerly in these chapels. Or perhaps it was just time to give in and let himself be pulled under by the tide of the new creed.

The sign over the door said:

BROTHERHOOD OF THE IMMANENT RADIANCE

COME YE ALL

YE WHO MAY NEVER DIE

HARMONIZE WITH THE ALL

"Will you?" Vanna said.

"All right," Kirby muttered. "I'm willing. Let's go harmonize with the All."

She took his hand. They stepped through the door. About a dozen people were kneeling in the pews. Up front the chapel leader was nudging the moderator rods out of the little reactor, and the first faint bluish glow was beginning to suffuse the room. Vanna guided Kirby into the last row. He looked toward the altar. The glow was deepening, casting a strange radiance on the plump, dogged-looking man at the front of the room. Now greenish-white, now purplish, now the Blue Fire of the Vorsters.

The opium of the masses, Kirby thought, and the hackneyed phrase sounded foolishly cynical as it echoed through his brain. What was the Nothing Chamber, after all, but the opium of the elite? And the sniffer palaces, what were they? At least here they went for the mind and soul, not for the body. It was worth an hour of his time to listen, at any rate.

"My brothers," said the man at the altar in a soft, fog-smooth voice, "we celebrate the underlying Oneness here. Man and woman, star and stone, tree and bird, all consist of atoms, and those atoms contain particles moving at wondrous speeds. They are the electrons, my brothers. They show us the way to peace, as I will make clear to you. They—"

Reynolds Kirby bowed his head. He could not bear to look at that glowing reactor, suddenly. There was a throbbing in his skull. He was distantly aware of Vanna beside him, smiling, warm, close.

I'm listening,
Kirby thought.
Go on. Tell me! Tell me! I want to hear. God and the almighty electron help me—I want to hear!

TWO

The Warriors of Light 
2095

One

If Acolyte Third Level Christopher Mondschein had a weakness, it was that he wanted very badly to live forever. The yearning for everlasting life was a common enough human desire, and not really reprehensible. But Acolyte Mondschein carried it a little too far.

"After all," one of his superiors found it necessary to remind him, "your function in the Brotherhood is to look after the well-being of others. Not to feather your own nest, Acolyte Mondschein. Do I make that clear?"

"Perfectly clear, Brother," said Mondschein tautly. He felt ready to explode with shame, guilt, and anger. "I see my error. I ask forgiveness."

"It isn't a matter of forgiveness, Acolyte Mondschein," the older man replied. "It's a matter of understanding. I don't give a damn for forgiveness. What are your goals, Mondschein? What are you after?"

The acolyte hesitated a moment before answering—both because it was always good policy to weigh one's words before saying anything to a higher member of the Brotherhood, and because he knew he was on very thin ice. He tugged nervously at the pleats of his robe and let his eyes wander through the Gothic magnificence of the chapel.

They stood on the balcony, looking down at the nave. No service was in progress, but a few worshipers occupied the pews anyway, kneeling before the blue radiance of the small cobalt reactor on the front dais. It was the Nyack chapel of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, third largest in the New York area, and Mondschein had joined it six months before, the day he turned twenty-two. He had hoped, at the time, that it was genuine religious feeling that had impelled him to pledge his fortunes to the Vorsters. Now he was not so sure.

He grasped the balcony rail and said in a low voice, "I want to help people, Brother. People in general and people in particular. I want to help them find the way. And I want mankind to realize its larger goals. As Vorst says—"

"Spare me the scriptures, Mondschein."

"I'm only trying to show you—"

"I know. Look, don't you understand that you've got to move upward in orderly stages? You can't go leapfrogging over your superiors, Mondschein, no matter how impatient you are to get to the top. Come into my office a moment."

"Yes, Brother Langholt. Whatever you say."

Mondschein followed the older man along the balcony and into the administrative wing of the chapel. The building was fairly new and strikingly handsome—a far cry from the shabby slum-area storefronts of the first Vorster chapels a quarter of a century before. Langholt touched a bony hand to the stud, and the door of his office irised quickly. They stepped through.

It was a small, austere room, dark and somber, its ceiling groined in good Gothic manner. Bookshelves lined the side walls. The desk was a polished ebony slab on which there glowed a miniature blue light, the Brotherhood's symbol. Mondschein saw something else on the desk: the letter he had written to District Supervisor Kirby, requesting a transfer to the Brotherhood's genetic center at Santa Fe.

Mondschein reddened. He reddened easily; his cheeks were plump and given to blushing. He was a man of slightly more than medium height, a little on the fleshy side, with dark coarse hair and close-set, earnest features. Mondschein felt absurdly immature by comparison with the gaunt, ascetic-looking man more than twice his age who was giving him this dressing-down.

Langholt said, "As you see, we've got your letter to Supervisor Kirby."

"Sir, that letter was confidential. I—"

"There are no confidential letters in this order, Mondschein! It happens that Supervisor Kirby turned this letter over to me himself. As you can see, he's added a memorandum."

Mondschein took the letter. A brief note had been scrawled across its upper left-hand corner: "He's awfully in a hurry, isn't he? Take him down a couple of pegs. R.K."

The acolyte put the letter down and waited for the withering blast of scorn. Instead, he found the older man smiling gently.

"Why did you want to go to Santa Fe, Mondschein?"

"To take part in the research there. And the—the breeding program."

"You're not an esper."

"Perhaps I've got latent genes, though. Or at least maybe some manipulation could be managed so my genes would be important to the pool. Sir, you've got to understand that I wasn't being purely selfish about this. I want to contribute to the larger effort."

"You can contribute, Mondschein, by doing your maintenance work, by prayer, by seeking converts. If it's in the cards for you to be called to Santa Fe, you'll be called in due time. Don't you think there are others much older than you who'd like to go there? Myself? Brother Ashton? Supervisor Kirby himself? You walk in off the street, so to speak, and after a few months you want a ticket to Utopia. Sorry. You can't have one that easily, Acolyte Mondschein."

"What shall I do now?"

"Purify yourself. Rid yourself of pride and ambition. Get down and pray. Do your daily work. Don't look for rapid preferment. It's the best way
not
to get what you want."

"Perhaps if I applied for missionary service," Mondschein suggested. "To join the group going to Venus—"

Langholt sighed. "There you go again! Curb your ambition, Mondschein!"

"I meant it as a penance."

"Of course. You imagine that those missionaries are likely to become martyrs. You also imagine that if by some fluke you go to Venus and don't get skinned alive, you'll come back here as a man of great influence in the Brotherhood, who'll be sent to Santa Fe like a warrior going to Valhalla. Mondschein, Mondschein, you're so transparent! You're verging on heresy, Mondschein, when you refuse to accept your lot."

"Sir, I've never had any traffic with the heretics. I—"

"I'm not accusing you of anything," Langholt said heavily. "I'm simply warning you that you're heading in an unhealthy direction. I fear for you. Look—" He thrust the incriminating letter to Kirby into a disposal unit, where it flamed and was gone instantly. "I'll forget that this whole episode ever happened. But don't you forget it. Walk more humbly, Mondschein. Walk more humbly, I say. Now go and pray. Dismissed."

"Thank you, Brother," Mondschein muttered.

His knees felt a little shaky as he made his way from the room and took the spiral slideshaft downward into the chapel proper. All things considered, he knew he had got off lightly. There could have been a public reprimand. There could have been a transfer to some not very desirable place, like Patagonia or the Aleutians. They might even have separated him from the Brotherhood entirely.

It had been a massive mistake to go over Langholt's head, Mondschein agreed. But how could a man help it? To die a little every day, while in Santa Fe they were choosing the ones who would live forever—it was intolerable to be on the outside. Mondschein's spirit sank at the awareness that now he had almost certainly cut himself off from Santa Fe for good.

He slipped into a rear pew and stared solemnly toward the cobalt-60 cube on the altar.

Let the Blue Fire engulf me,
he begged.
Let me rise purified and cleansed.

Sometimes, kneeling before the altar, Mondschein had felt the ghostly flicker of a spiritual experience. That was the most he ever felt, for, though he was an acolyte of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, and was a second-generation member of the cult, at that, Mondschein was not a religious man. Let others have ecstasies before the altar, he thought. Mondschein knew the cult for what it was: a front operation masking an elaborate program of genetic research. Or so it seemed to him, though there were times when he had his doubts which was the front and which the underlying reality. So many others appeared to derive spiritual benefits from the Brotherhood—while he had no proof that the laboratories at Santa Fe were accomplishing anything at all.

He closed his eyes. His head sank forward on his breast. He visualized electrons spinning in their orbits. He silently repeated the Electromagnetic Litany, calling off the stations of the spectrum.