To Open the Sky

by Robert Silverberg

  Supervisor Magnus said, “This is the man. What do you read in him?”

  “Fear. Hatred. Defiance.”

  “How about disloyalty?”

  “His highest loyalty is to himself,” the esper said, clasping her hands complacently over her belly.

  “Has he betrayed us?” Magnus demanded.

  “No. I don’t see anything that says he has.”

  Mondschein said, “If I could ask the meaning of—”

  “Quiet,” Magnus said witheringly.

  Another of the Supervisors said, “The evidence is incontrovertible. Perhaps the girl’s making a mistake.”

  “Scan him more closely,” Magnus directed. “Go back, day by day, through his memory. Don’t miss a thing. You know what you’re looking for.”

  Baffled, Mondschein looked in appeal at the steely faces about him. The girl seemed to be gloating. Stinking voyeur, he thought. Have a good scan!

  The girl said thinly, “He thinks I’m going to enjoy this. He ought to try swimming through a cesspool sometime, if he wants to know what it’s like.”

  “Scan him,” Magnus said. “It’s late and we have many questions to answer.”

  She nodded. Mondschein waited for some sensation telling him that his memories were being probed, some feeling as of invisible fingers going through his brain. There was no such awareness. Long moments passed in silence, and then the girl looked up in triumph.

  “The night of March thirteenth’s been erased.”

  “Can you get beneath the erasure?” Magnus asked.

  “Impossible. It’s an expert job. They’ve cut the whole night right out of him. And they’ve loaded him with countermnemonics all the way down the track. He doesn’t know a thing about what he’s been up to,” the girl said.

  The Supervisors exchanged glances. Mondschein felt perspiration soaking through his robe. The smell of it stung his nostrils. A muscle throbbed in his cheek, and his forehead itched murderously, but he did not move.

  “She can go,” Magnus said.

  With the esper out of the room, the atmosphere grew a little less tense, but Mondschein did not relax. In a bleak, hopeless way, he felt that he had been tried and condemned in advance for a crime whose nature he did not even know. He thought of some of the perhaps apocryphal stories of Brotherhood vindictiveness: the man with the pain centers removed, the esper staked out to endure an overload, the lobotomized biologist, the renegade Supervisor who was left in a Nothing Chamber for ninety-six consecutive hours. He realized that he might find out very shortly just how apocryphal those stories were.

  Magnus said, “For your information, Mondschein, someone broke into the longevity lab and shot the whole place up with a holograph. It was a very neat job, except that we’ve got an alarm system in there, and you happened to trip it.”

  “Sir, I swear, I never set foot inside—”

  “Save it, Mondschein. The morning after, we ran a neutron activation analysis in there, just as a matter of routine. We turned up traces of tungsten and molybdenum that brushed off you while you were taking those holograms. They match your skin pattern. It took us awhile to track them to you. There’s no doubt—same neutron pattern on the camera, on the lab equipment, and on your hand. You were sent in here as a spy, whether you know it or not.”

  Another Supervisor said, “Kirby’s here.”

  “I’d like to know what he’s got to say about this,” Magnus muttered darkly.

  Mondschein saw the lean, long-limbed figure of Reynolds Kirby enter the room. His thin lips were clamped tightly together. He seemed to have aged at least ten years since Mondschein had seen him in Langholt’s office.

  Magnus whirled and said with open irritation, “Here’s your man, Kirby. What do you think of him now?”

  “He’s not my man,” said Kirby.

  “You approved his transfer here,” Magnus snapped. “Maybe we ought to run a scan on you, eh? Somebody worked a loaded bomb into this place, and the bomb’s gone off. He handed a whole laboratory away.”

  “Maybe not,” Kirby said. “Maybe he’s still got the data on him somewhere.”

  “He was out of the center the day after the laboratory was entered. He and another acolyte went to visit some ancient Indian ruins. It’s a safe bet that he disposed of the holograms while he was out there.”

  “Have you tracked the courier?” Kirby asked.

  “We’re getting away from the point,” said Magnus. “The point is that this man came to the center on your recommendation. You picked him out of nowhere and put him here. What we’d all like to know is where you found him and why you sent him here. Eh?”

  Kirby’s fleshless face worked wordlessly for a moment. He glowered at Mondschein, then stared in even greater hostility at Magnus. At length he said, “I can’t take responsibility for shipping this man here. It happens that he wrote to me in February, asking to be transferred out of normal chapel duties and sent here. He was going over the heads of his local administrators, so I sent the letter back suggesting that he be disciplined a little. A few weeks later I received instructions that he be transferred out here. I was startled, to say the least, but I approved them. That’s all I know about Christopher Mondschein.”

  Magnus extended a forefinger and tapped the air. “Wait one moment, Kirby. You’re a Supervisor. Who gives you instructions, anyway? How can you be pressured into making a transfer when you’re in high authority?”

  “The instructions came from higher authority.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Magnus said.

  Mondschein sat stock-still, enthralled despite his own predicament by this battle between Supervisors. He had never understood how he had managed to get that transfer, and now it began to seem as though no one else understood it, either.

  Kirby said, “The instructions came from a source I’m reluctant to name.”

  “Covering up for yourself, Kirby?”

  “You’re taking liberties with my patience, Supervisor Magnus,” said Kirby tightly.

  “I want to know who put this spy among us.”

  Kirby took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. All of you be my witness to this. The order came from Vorst. Noel Vorst called me and said he wanted this man sent here. Vorst sent him. Vorst! What do you make of that?”

  nine

  THEY WERE NOT finished interrogating Mondschein. Waves of espers worked him over, trying to get beneath the erasure, without success. Organic methods were employed, too: Mondschein was shot full of truth serums old and new, everything from sodium pentothal on up, and batteries of hard-faced Brothers questioned him rigorously. Mondschein let them strip his soul bare, so that every bit of nastiness, every self-seeking moment, everything that made him a human being stood out in bold relief. They found nothing useful. Nor did a four-hour immersion in a Nothing Chamber yield results; Mondschein was too wobbly-brained to be able to answer questions for three days afterward, that was all.

  He was as puzzled as they were. He would gladly have confessed the most heinous of sins; in fact, several times during the long interrogation he did confess, simply to have it over with, but the espers read his motives plainly and laughed his confessions to scorn. Somehow, he knew, he had fallen into the hands of the enemies of the Brotherhood and had concluded a pact with them, a pact which he had fulfilled. But he had no inner knowledge of any of that. Whole segments of his memory were gone, and that was terrifying to him.

  Mondschein knew that he was finished. They would not let him remain at Santa Fe, naturally. His dream of being on hand when immortality was achieved now was ended. They would cast him out with flaming swords, and he would wither and grow old, cursing his lost opportunity. That is, if they did not kill him outright or work some subtle form of slow destruction on him.

  A light December snow was falling on the day that Supervisor Kirby came to tell him his fate.

  “You can go, Mondschein,” the tall man said somberly.

  “Go? Where?”
r />   “Wherever you like. Your case has been decided. You’re guilty, but there’s reasonable doubt of your volition. You’re being expelled from the Brotherhood, but otherwise no action will be taken against you.”

  “Does that mean I’m expelled from the church as a communicant, too?”

  “Not necessarily. That’s up to you. If you want to come to worship, we won’t deny our comfort to you,” Kirby said. “But there’s no possibility of your holding a position within the church. You’ve been tampered with, and we can’t take further chances with you. I’m sorry, Mondschein.”

  Mondschein was sorry, too, but relieved, as well. They would not take revenge on him. He would lose nothing but his chance at life everlasting—and perhaps he would even retain that, just as any other common worshiper did.

  He had forfeited, of course, his chance to rise in the Vorster hierarchy. But there was another hierarchy, too, Mondschein thought, where a man might move more swiftly.

  The Brotherhood took him to the city of Santa Fe proper, gave him some money, and turned him loose. Mondschein headed immediately for the nearest chapel of the Transcendent Harmony, which turned out to be in Albuquerque, twenty minutes away.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” a Harmonist in flowing green robes told him. “I’ve got instructions to contact my superiors the moment you show up.”

  Mondschein was not surprised at that. Nor was he greatly astonished to be told, a short while later, that he was to leave by quickboat for Rome right away. The Harmonists would pay his expenses, he was informed.

  A slim woman with surgically-altered eyelids met him at the station in Rome. She did not look familiar to him, but she smiled at him as though they were old friends. She conveyed him to a house on the Via Flaminia, a few dozen miles north of Rome, where a squat, sallow-faced Harmonist Brother with a bulbous nose awaited him.

  “Welcome,” the Harmonist said. “Do you remember me?”

  “No, I—yes. Yes!”

  Recollection flooded back, dizzying him, staggering him. There had been three heretics in the room that other time, not just one, and they had given him wine and promised him a place in the Harmonist hierarchy, and he had agreed to let himself be smuggled into Santa Fe, a soldier in the great crusade, a warrior of light, a Harmonist spy.

  “You did very well, Mondschein,” the heretic said unctuously. “We didn’t think you’d be caught so fast, but we weren’t sure of all their detection methods. We could only guard against the espers, and we did a fair enough job of that. At any rate, the information you provided was extremely useful.”

  “And you’ll keep your end of the bargain? I’m to get a tenth-level job?”

  “Of course. You didn’t think we’d cheat you, did you? You’ll have a three-month indoctrination course so you can attain insight into our movement. Then you’ll assume your new duties in our organization. Which would you prefer, Mondschein—Mars or Venus?”

  “Mars or Venus? I don’t follow you.”

  “We’re going to attach you to our missionary division. You’ll be leaving Earth by next summer, to carry on our work in one of the colonies. You’re free to choose the one you prefer.”

  Mondschein was aghast. He had never bargained for this. Selling out to these heretics, only to get shipped off to an alien world and likely martyrdom—no, he had never expected anything like that.

  Faust didn’t expect his troubles, either, Mondschein thought coldly.

  He said, “What kind of trick is this? You’ve got no right to ask me to become a missionary!”

  “We offered you a tenth-level job,” the Harmonist said quietly. “The option of choosing the division it would be remained with us.”

  Mondschein was silent. There was a fierce throbbing in his skull. The face of the Harmonist seemed to blur and waver. He was free to leave—to step out the door and merge into the multitudes. To become nothing. Or he could submit and be—what? Anything. Anything.

  Dead in six weeks, as likely as not.

  “I’ll take it,” he said. “Venus. I’ll go to Venus.” His words sounded like a cage clanging shut.

  The Harmonist nodded. “I thought you would,” he said. He turned to leave, then paused and stared curiously at Mondschein. “Did you really think you could name your own position—spy?”

  THREE

  Where the Changed Ones Go

  2135

  one

  THE VENUSIAN BOY danced nimbly around the patch of Trouble Fungus behind the chapel, avoiding the gray-green killer with practiced ease. He hop-skipped past the rubbery bole of the Limblime Tree and approached the serried row of jagged nameless stalks that lined the back garden. The boy grinned at them, and they parted for him as obligingly as the Red Sea had yielded to Moses some time earlier.

  “Here I am,” he said to Nicholas Martell.

  “I didn’t think you’d be back,” the Vorster missionary said.

  The boy—Elwhit—looked mischievous. “Brother Christopher said I couldn’t come back. That’s why I’m here. Tell me about the Blue Fire. Can you really make atoms give light?”

  “Come inside,” Martell said.

  The boy represented his first triumph since coming to Venus, and a small triumph it was, so far. But Martell did not object to that. A step was a step. There was a planet to win here. A universe to win, perhaps.

  Inside the chapel the boy hung back, suddenly shy. He was no more than ten, Martell guessed. Was it just wickedness that had made him come here? Or was he a spy from the chapel of heretics down the road? No matter. Martell would treat him as a potential convert. He activated the altar, and the Blue Fire welled into the small room, colors dancing against the boards of the groined wooden ceiling. Power surged from the cobalt cube, and the harmless, dramatic radiations wrung a gasp of awe from Elwhit.

  “The fire is symbolic,” Martell murmured. “There’s an underlying oneness in the universe—the common building blocks, do you see? Do you know what atomic particles are? Protons, electrons, neutrons? The things everything’s made up of?”

  “I can touch them,” Elwhit said. “I can push them around.”

  “Will you show me how?” Martell was remembering the way the boy had parted those knifeblade-sharp plants in back. A glance, a mental shove, and they had yielded. These Venusians could teleport—he was sure of it. “How do you push things?” Martell asked.

  But the boy shrugged the question aside. “Tell me more about the Blue Fire,” he said.

  “Have you read the book I gave you? The one by Vorst? That tells you all you need to know.”

  “Brother Christopher took it away from me.”

  “You showed it to him?” Martell said, startled.

  “He wanted to know why I came to you. I said you talked to me and gave me a book. He took the book. I came back. Tell me why you’re here. Tell me what you teach.”

  Martell hadn’t imagined that his first convert would be a child. He said carefully, “The religion we have here is very much like the one that Brother Christopher teaches. But there are some differences. His people make up a lot of stories. They’re good stories, but they’re only stories.”

  “About Lazarus, you mean?”

  “That’s right. Myths, nothing more. We try not to need such things. We’re trying to get right in touch with the basics of the universe. We—”

  The boy lost interest. He tugged at his tunic and nudged at a chair. The altar was what fascinated him, nothing else. The glistening eyes roved toward it.

  Martell said, “The cobalt is radioactive. It’s a source of betas—electrons. They’re going through the tank and knocking photons loose. That’s where the light comes from.”

  “I can stop the light,” the boy said. “Will you be angry if I stop it?”

  It was a kind of sacrilege, Martell knew. But he suspected that he would be forgiven. Any evidence of teleporting activity that he could gather was useful.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  The boy remained motionless. But th
e radiance dimmed. It was as if an invisible hand reached into the reactor, intercepting the darting particles. Telekinesis on the subatomic level! Martell was elated and chilled all at once, watching the light fade. Suddenly it flared more brightly again. Beads of sweat glistened on the boy’s bluish-purple forehead.

  “That is all,” Elwhit announced.

  “How do you do it?”

  “I reach.” He laughed. “You can’t?”

  “Afraid not,” Martell said. “Listen, if I give you another book to read, will you promise not to show it to Brother Christopher? I don’t have many. I can’t afford to have the Harmonists confiscate them all.”

  “Next time,” the boy said. “I don’t feel like reading things now. I’ll come again. You tell me all about it some other time.”

  He danced away, out of the chapel, and went skipping through the underbrush, heedless of the perils that lurked in the deep-shadowed forest beyond. Martell watched him go, not knowing whether he was actually making his first convert or whether he was being mocked.

  Perhaps both, the missionary thought.

  Nicholas Martell had come to Venus ten days before, aboard a passenger ship from Mars. He had been one of thirty passengers aboard the ship, but none of the others had cared for Nicholas Martell’s company. Ten of them were Martians, who did not care to share the atmosphere Martell breathed. Martians, now that their planet had been cozily Terraformed, preferred to fill their lungs with an Earthside mix of gases. So had Martell, once, for he was a native Earthman himself. But now he was one of the changed ones, equipped with gills in good Venusian fashion.

  Not gills, truly: they would serve no function under water. They were high-density filters, to strain the molecules of decent oxygen from the Venusian air. Martell was well adapted. His metabolism had no use for helium or the other inerts, but it could draw sustenance from nitrogen and had no real objections to fueling on CO2 for short spells. The surgeons at Santa Fe had worked on him for six months. It was forty years too late to make adjustments on Martell-ovum or Martell-fetus, as was the normal practice in fitting a man for life on Venus, so they had done their work on Martell the man. The blood that flowed in his veins was no longer red. His skin had a fine cyanotic flush. He was as a Venusian born.