To Open the Sky

by Robert Silverberg

  “Nor I of you.”

  The resuscitated man shrugged. “I worked beside Vorst. I had disputes with him. That much is beyond question. Eventually I split with him. I founded the Harmonists. Then I—disappeared. And here I am. Do you have trouble believing in me?”

  “Perhaps I’ve been tampered with,” Kirby said. “I wish I remembered you.”

  Lazarus lay back. He stared at the green, rubbery walls. The instruments monitoring his life-processes whirred and clicked. There was an acrid odor in the air: asepsis at work. Kirby looked unreal. Lazarus wondered what sort of maze of pumps and trestles held him together beneath his thick, warm blue robe.

  Kirby said, “You understand that you can’t remain on Earth, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Life will be uncomfortable for you on Venus unless you’re changed. We’ll do it for you. Your own men can supervise the operation. I’ve talked to Mondschein about it. Are you interested?”

  “Yes,” Lazarus said. “Change me.”

  They came the next day to turn him into a Venusian. He resented the public nature of the operation, but it was idle to pretend that his life was his own any more, anyway. It would take several weeks, they said, to effect the transformation. Once it had taken months to do it. They would equip him with gills, fit him out to breathe the poisonous muck that was the atmosphere of Venus, and turn him loose. Lazarus submitted. They carved him, and put him back together again, and readied him for shipment.

  Vorst came to him, feathery-voiced and shrunken, but still a commanding figure, and said, “You must realize I had no part in your kidnapping. It was totally unauthorized—the work of zealots.”

  “Of course.”

  “I appreciate diversity of opinion. My way is not necessarily the only right way. I’ve felt the lack of a dialogue with Venus for many years. Once you’re installed there, I trust you’ll be willing to communicate with me.”

  Lazarus said, “I won’t close my mind against you, Vorst. You’ve given me life. I’ll listen to what you have to say. There’s no reason why we can’t cooperate, so long as we respect each other’s sphere of interests.”

  “Exactly! Our goal is the same, after all. We can join forces.”

  “Warily,” Lazarus said.

  “Warily, yes. But wholeheartedly.” Vorst smiled and departed.

  The surgeons completed their work. Lazarus, now alien to Earth, journeyed to Venus with Mondschein and the rest of the Harmonist retinue. It was in the nature of a triumphant homecoming, if one can be said to come home to a place where one has never been before.

  Green-robed brethren with bluish-purple skins greeted him. Lazarus saw the Harmonist shrines, the holy ikons of his order. They had carried the spiritualistic element further than he had ever visualized, practically deifying him, but Lazarus did not intend to correct that. He knew how precarious his position was. There were men of entrenched power in his organization who secretly might not welcome a prophet’s return, and who might give him a second martyrdom if he challenged their vested interests. Lazarus moved warily.

  “We have made great progress with the espers,” Mondschein told him. “We’re considerably ahead of Vorst’s work in that line, so far as we know.”

  “Do you have telekinesis yet?”

  “For twenty years. We’re building the power steadily. Another generation—”

  “I’d like a demonstration.”

  “We have one planned,” Mondschein said.

  They showed him what they could do. To reach into a block of wood and set its molecules dancing in flame—to move a boulder through the sky—to whisk themselves from place to place—yes, it was impressive, it defied comprehension. It certainly must be beyond the abilities of the Brotherhood on Earth.

  The Venusian espers cavorted for Lazarus, hour after hour. Mondschein, sedate and complacent, gleamed with satisfaction, spoke of thresholds, levitation, telekinetic impetus, fulcrums of unity, and other matters that left Lazarus baffled but encouraged.

  He who had returned pointed to the gray band of clouds that hid the heavens.

  “How soon?” Lazarus asked.

  “We’re not ready for interstellar transport yet,” Mondschein replied. “Not even interplanetary, though in theory one shouldn’t be any harder than the other. We’re working on it. Give us time. We’ll succeed.”

  “Can we do it without Vorst’s help?” Lazarus asked.

  Mondschein’s complacence was punctured. “What kind of help can he give us? I’ve told you, we’re a generation ahead of his espers.”

  “And will espers be enough? Perhaps he can supply what we’re missing. A joint venture—Harmonists and Vorsters collaborating—don’t you think the possibilities are worth exploring, Brother Christopher?”

  Mondschein smiled blandly. “Why, yes, yes, of course. Certainly they’re worth exploring. It’s an approach we hadn’t considered, I admit, but you give us a fresh insight into our problems. I’d like to discuss the matter with you further, after you’ve had a chance to settle down here.”

  Lazarus accepted Mondschein’s flow of words graciously. He had not, though, been away so long that he had forgotten how to read the meanings behind the meanings.

  He knew when he was being humored.

  nine

  AT SANTA FE, with the unaccustomed invasion of Harmonists at its end, things returned to normal. Lazarus was come forth and loose upon the worlds, and the television men had retreated, and work went on. The tests, the experiments, the probing of the mysteries of life and mind—the ceaseless tasks of the Vorster inner movement.

  Kirby said, “Was there ever really a David Lazarus, Noel?”

  Vorst glowered up at him out of a thermoplastic cocoon. Hardly had the surgeons finished with Lazarus than they had gone to work on the Founder, who was suffering from an aneurysm in a twice-reconstituted blood vessel. Sensors had nailed the spot, subcutaneous scoops had exposed it, microtapes had been slammed into place, a network of thread and looping polymers replacing the dangerous bubble. Vorst was no stranger to such surgery.

  He said, “You saw Lazarus with your own eyes, Kirby.”

  “I saw something come out of that vault and stand up and talk rationally. I had conversations with it. I watched it get turned into a Venusian. That doesn’t mean it was real. You could build a Lazarus, couldn’t you, Noel?”

  “If I wanted to. But why would I want to?”

  “That’s obvious. To get control of the Harmonists.”

  “If I had designs against the Harmonists,” Vorst explained patiently, “I would have blotted them out fifty years ago, before they took Venus. They’re all right. That young man, Mondschein—he’s developed nicely.”

  “He isn’t young, Noel. He’s at least eighty.”

  “A child.”

  “Will you tell me whether Lazarus is genuine?”

  Vorst’s eyes fluttered in irritation. “He’s genuine, Kirby. Satisfied?”

  “Who put him in that vault?”

  “His own followers, I suppose.”

  “Who then forgot all about it?”

  “Well, perhaps my men did it. Without authorization. Without telling me. It happened a long time ago.” Vorst’s hands moved in quick, agitated gestures. “How can I remember everything? He was found. We brought him back to life. I gave him to them. You’re annoying me, Kirby.”

  Kirby realized that he was treading a field salted with mines. He had pushed Vorst as far as Vorst could be pushed, and anything further would be disastrous. Kirby had seen other men presume too deeply on their closeness to Vorst, and he had seen that closeness imperceptibly withdrawn.

  “I’m sorry,” Kirby said.

  Vorst’s displeasure vanished. “You overrate my deviousness, Kirby. Stop worrying about Lazarus’s past. Simply consider the future. I’ve given him to the Harmonists. He’ll be valuable to them, whether they think so now or not. They’re indebted to me. I’ve planted a good, heavy obligation on them. Don’t you think
that’s useful? They owe me something now. When the right time comes, I’ll cash that in.”

  Kirby remained mute. He sensed that somehow Vorst had altered the balance of power between the two cults, that the Harmonists, who had been on a rising curve ever since gaining possession of Venus and its rich lode of espers, had been brought to heel. But he did not know how it had been accomplished, and he did not care to try again to learn.

  Vorst was using his communicator. He looked up at Kirby.

  “They’ve got another burnout,” he said. “I want to be there. Come with me, yes?”

  “Of course,” Kirby said.

  He accompanied the Founder through the maze of tubes. They emerged in the burnout ward. An esper lay dying, a boy this time, perhaps Hawaiian, his body jerking as though he were skewered on cords.

  Vorst said, “A pity you’ve got no esping, Kirby. You’d see a glimpse of tomorrow.”

  “I’m too old to regret it now,” Kirby said.

  Vorst rolled forward and gestured to a waiting esper. The link was made. Kirby watched. What was Vorst experiencing now? The Founder’s lips were moving, almost writhing in a kind of sneer, pulling back from the gums with each twitch of the esper’s body. The boy was shuttling along the time-track, so they said. To Kirby that meant nothing. And Vorst, somehow, was shuttling with him, seeing a clouded view of the world on the other side of the wall of time.

  Now—now—back—forth—

  For a moment it seemed to Kirby that he, too, had joined the linkup and was riding the time-track as the esper’s other passenger. Was that the chaos of yesterday? And the golden glow of tomorrow? Now—now—damn you, you old schemer, what have you done to me?—Lazarus, rising above all else, Lazarus who wasn’t even real, only some android stew cooked up in an underground laboratory at Vorst’s command, a useful puppet, Kirby thought, Lazarus had grasped tomorrow and was stealing it—

  The contact broke. The esper was dead.

  “We’ve wasted another one,” Vorst muttered. The Founder looked at Kirby. “Are you sick?” he asked.

  “No. Tired.”

  “Get some rest. Six history spools and climb into a relaxer tank. We can ease up now. Lazarus is off our hands.”

  Kirby nodded. Someone drew a sheet over the dead esper’s body. In an hour the boy’s neurons would be in refrigeration somewhere in an adjoining building. Slowly, walking as if eight centuries and not just one weighed upon him, Kirby followed Vorst from the room. Night had fallen, and the stars over New Mexico had their peculiar hard brightness, and Venus, low against the mountainous horizon, was the brightest of all. They had their Lazarus, up there. They had lost a martyr and had gained a prophet. And, Kirby was beginning to realize, the whole tribe of heretics had been swept neatly into Vorst’s pocket. The old man was damnable. Kirby huddled down into his robe and kept pace, with an effort, as Vorst wheeled himself toward his office. His head ached from that brief, unfathomable contact with the esper. But in ten minutes it was better.

  He thought of going to a chapel to pray. But what was the use? Why kneel before the Blue Fire? He need only go to Vorst for a blessing—Vorst, his mentor for almost eight decades, Vorst, who could make him feel still like a child, Vorst, who had brought Lazarus forth from the dead.

  FIVE

  To Open the Sky

  2164

  one

  THE SURGICAL AMPHITHEATER was a chilly horseshoe lit by a pale violet glow. At the north end, windows on the level of the second gallery admitted frosty New Mexico sunlight. From where he sat, overlooking the operating table, Noel Vorst could see the bluish mountains in the middle distance beyond the confines of the research center. The mountains did not interest him. Neither did what was taking place on the operating table. But he kept his lack of interest to himself.

  Vorst had not needed to attend the operation in person, of course. He knew already that a successful outcome was improbable, and so did everyone else. But the Founder was 144 years old, and thought it useful to appear in public as often as his strength could sustain the effort. It did not do to have people think he had lapsed into senility.

  Down below, the surgeons were clustered about a bare brain. Vorst had watched them lift the dome of a skull and thrust their scalpels of light deep into the wrinkled gray mass. There were ten billion neurons in that block of tissue, and an infinity of axonal terminals and dendritic receptors. The surgeons hoped to rearrange the synaptic nets of that brain, altering the protein-molecular switchgear to render the patient more useful to Vorst’s plan.

  Folly, the old man thought. He hid his pessimism and sat quietly, listening to the pulsing of the blood in his own glossy artificial arteries.

  What they were doing down there was remarkable, of course. Summoning all the resources of modern microsurgery, the leading men of the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences were altering the protein-protein molecular recognition patterns within a human brain. Twist the circuits about a bit; change the transsynaptic structures to build a better link between pre- and postsynaptic membranes; shunt individual synaptic inputs from one dendritic tree to another; in short, reprogram the brain to make it capable of doing what Noel Vorst wanted it to be capable of doing.

  Which was to serve as the propulsive force needed to hurl a team of explorers across the gulf of light-years to another star.

  It was an extraordinary project. For some fifty years the surgeons here at Vorst’s Santa Fe research center had prepared for it by meddling with the brains of cats and monkeys and dolphins. Now they had at last begun operating on human subjects. The patient on the table was a middle-grade esper, a precog with poor timebinding ability; his life expectancy was on the order of six months, and then a burnout could be anticipated. The precog knew all about that, which was why he had volunteered to be the subject. The most skilful surgeons in the world were at work on him.

  There were only two things wrong with the project, Vorst knew:

  It was not likely to succeed.

  And it was not at all necessary in the first place.

  You did not tell a group of dedicated men, however, that their life’s work was pointless. Besides, there was always the faint hope that they might artificially create a pusher—a telekinetic—down there. So Vorst dutifully attended the operation. The men on the amphitheater floor knew that the Founder’s numinous presence was with them. Though they did not look up toward the gallery where Vorst sat, they knew the withered but still vigorous old man was smiling benignly down on them, cushioned against the pull of Earth by the webfoam cradle that sheltered his ancient limbs.

  The lenses of his eyes were synthetic. The coils of his intestines had been fashioned from laboratory polymers. The stoutly pumping heart came from an organ bank. Little remained of the original Noel Vorst but the brain itself, which was intact though awash with the anticoagulants that preserved it from disabling strokes.

  “Are you comfortable, sir?” the pale young acolyte at his side asked.

  “Perfectly. Are you?”

  The acolyte smiled at Vorst’s little joke. He was only twenty years old, and full of pride because it was his turn to accompany the Founder on his daily round. Vorst liked young people about him. They were tremendously in awe of him, naturally, but they managed to be warm and respectful without canonizing him. Within his body there throbbed the contributions of many a young Vorster volunteer: a film of lung tissue from one, a retina from another, kidneys from a pair of twins. He was a patchwork man, who carried the flesh of his movement about with him.

  The surgeons were bending low over the exposed brain down there. Vorst could not see what they were doing. A pickup embedded in a surgical instrument relayed the scene to a lambent screen on the level of the viewing gallery, but even the enlarged image did not tell Vorst much. Baffled and bored, he retained his look of lively interest all the same.

  Quietly he pushed a communicator stud on his armrest and said, “Is Coordinator Kirby going to get here soon?”

  “He’s t
alking to Venus, sir.”

  “Who’s he speaking to? Lazarus or Mondschein?”

  “Mondschein, sir. I’ll tell him to come to you as soon as he’s off.”

  Vorst smiled. Protocol suggested that such high-level negotiations be carried on at the administrative level, between the executives and not between the prophets. So the second-in-commands were speaking: Hemispheric Coordinator Reynolds Kirby on behalf of the Vorsters of Earth, and Christopher Mondschein for the Harmonists who ran Venus. But in time it would be necessary to close the deal with a conference between those most closely in tune with the Eternal Oneness, and that would be the task of Vorst and Lazarus.

  …to close the deal…

  A tremor pulled Vorst’s right hand into a sudden claw. The acolyte swung around attentively, ready to jab buttons until he had restored the Founder’s metabolic equilibrium. Grimly Vorst compelled the hand to relax.

  “I’m all right,” he insisted.

  …to open the sky…

  They were so close to the end now that it had all begun to seem like a dream. A century of scheming, playing chess with unborn antagonists, rearing a fantastic edifice of theocracy on a single slender, arrogant hope—

  Was it madness, Vorst wondered, to wish to reshape the pattern of history?

  Was it monstrous, he asked himself, to succeed?

  On the operating table, the patient’s leg came swimming up out of a sea of swathing and kicked fitfully and convulsively at the air. The anesthetist’s fingers played over his console, and the esper who was standing by for such an emergency went into silent action. There was a flurry of activity about the table.

  In that moment a tall, weathered-looking old man entered the gallery and presented himself to Vorst.

  “How’s the operation going?” Reynolds Kirby asked.

  “The patient just died,” said Vorst. “Things seemed to be going so well, too.”

  two