To Open the Sky Page 13

  Martell did not ask questions. Somehow, news had traveled down a chain of espers, and it was his task simply to obey. He entered the car. One of the little Venusian acolytes slipped in beside him.

  “Which way?” Martell asked.

  The boy gestured. Martell thumbed the starter. The car sped down the road, toward the airport. When they had gone two and a half miles, the boy grunted a command to halt. The car stopped.

  A figure in a blue tunic stood by the side of the road, his back to the bole of a mighty tree. Two suitcases lay open on the highway, and a razor-backed beast with a flattened snout and boar-like tusks was rooting through them, while its mate charged the newly arrived Vorster. The beleaguered man was kicking and lashing at the beast.

  The boy hopped from the car. Without sign of strain, he caused the two animals to rise and slam into trees on the far side of the road. They dropped to the ground, looking dazed but determined. The boy levitated them again and struck their heads together. When they fell this time, they swung around and fled into the underbrush.

  Martell said, “Venus always seems to welcome newcomers like that. My greeting committee was a thing called a Wheel, which I hope you never meet. I’d be in ribbons now except that a Venusian boy was kind enough to teleport it over on its side. Are you a missionary?”

  The man seemed too dazed to reply immediately. He knotted his hands together, released them, adjusted his tunic. Finally he said, “Yes—yes, I am. From Earth.”

  “Surgically changed, then?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So am I. I’m Nicholas Martell. How are things in Santa Fe, Brother?”

  The newcomer’s lips tightened. He was a fleshless little man, a year or two younger than Martell. He said, “How can that matter to you if you’re Martell? Martell the heretic? Martell the renegade?”

  “No,” Martell said. “That is—I—”

  He fell silent. His hands tensely smoothed the fabric of his Harmonist green tunic. His cheeks were burning. He realized painfully the truth about himself—that the change in him had worked inward from without—and suddenly he could not meet the gaze of his altered successor in the Venus mission, and he turned, staring into the thicket of the no longer very alien forest.

  FOUR

  Lazarus Come Forth

  2152

  one

  MARS MONOTRACK ONE, the main line, ran from east to west like a girdle of concrete flanking the planet’s western hemisphere. To the north lay the Lake District with its fertile fields; to the south, closer to the equator, was the belt of throbbing compressor stations that had done so much to foster the miracle. The discerning eye could still make out the old craters and gouges of the landscape, hidden now under a dusting of sawtooth grass and occasional forests of pine.

  The gray concrete pylons of the monotrack marched to the horizon. Spurs carried the line to the settlements of the outlands, and they were always adding new spurs as the new settlements sprouted. Logistically, it might have been simpler to have all the Martians live in One Big City, but the Martians were not that sort of people.

  Spur 7Y was being added now, advancing in ungainly bounds toward the new outpost of Beltran Lakes. Already the pylon foundations had gone up three-quarters of the way from Mono One to the settlement; a vast pylon-layer was working its way through the countryside, gobbling up sand from ten yards down and spewing out concrete slabs that it stapled into the ground. Gobble, spew, staple, and move on—gobble, spew, staple. The machine moved rapidly, guided by a neatly homeostatic brain that kept it on course. Behind it came the other machines to lay track between the pylons and string the utility lines that would follow the same route. The Martian settlers had many miracles at their command, but microwave kickover of usable electric power wasn’t one of them—not yet—and so the lines had to get strung from place to place even as in the Middle Ages.

  The monotrack system was intended for heavy-duty transportation. The Martians used quickboats, like everybody else, for getting themselves from place to place. But the slim little vehicles weren’t much use in the shipment of construction materials, and this was a planet under construction. Now that the reconstruction phase was over. The Terraformers were gone. Mars was a bosky dell, here in this year of grace 2152, and now the task was to plant a civilization on the finally hospitable planet. The Martians numbered in the millions. They had passed their frontiersman stage and were settling down to enjoy the pleasures of a good commercial boom. And the monotrack marched on, mile after mile, skirting the seas, rimming the lakes and rivers.

  The dogwork was done by clever machines. Men rode herd on the machinery, though. You never could tell when the homeostasis would slip ever so slightly and your pylon-layer would go berserk. It had happened a few years ago, and somehow the cutoff relays had been blanked out of the circuit, and before anyone could do anything there were sixteen miles of pylons crisscrossing Holliman Lake—eight hundred feet under water. Martians hate wastefulness. The machines had shown that they were not entirely trustworthy, and thereafter they were watched.

  Watching over the construction of this particular spur of Monotrack One was a lean, sun-bronzed man of sixty-eight named Paul Weiner, who had good political connections, and a plump red-haired man named Hadley Donovan, who did not. Redheads were rare on Mars for the usual statistical reasons; plump men were rare, too, but not so rare as they once had been. Life was softer these days, and so were the younger Martians. Hadley Donovan was amused by the antics of his gun-toting elders, with their formal etiquette, their theatrically taut bodies, their sense of high personal importance. Perhaps it had been necessary to wear those poses in the pioneer days on Mars, Donovan thought, but all that had been over for thirty years. He had allowed himself the luxury of a modest paunch. He knew that Paul Weiner felt contempt for him.

  The feeling was mutual.

  The two men sat side by side in a landcrawler, edging through the roadless landscape twenty miles ahead of the pylon-laying rig. Transponders bleeped at appropriate intervals; on the control board in front of them, colors came and went in an evanescent flow. Weiner was supposed to be monitoring the doings of the construction rig behind them; Donovan was checking out the planned route of the track, hunting for pockets of subsurface mushiness that the pylon-builder would not be clever enough to evaluate.

  Donovan was trying to do both jobs at once. He didn’t dare let a political appointee like Weiner have any real responsibility in the work. Weiner was the nephew of Nat Weiner, who stood high in ruling councils, was a hundred-and-some years old, and went to Earth every few years to have the Vorsters pluck out his pancreas or his kidneys or his carotid arteries and implant handy artificial substitutes. Nat Weiner was going to live forever, probably, and he was gradually filling the entire civil service up with members of his family, and Hadley Donovan, trying to oversee a job that really required two men’s full attention, felt vague desperation as he scanned his own board and covertly glanced over at Weiner’s every thirty seconds or so.

  Something was glowing purple on the Anomaly Screen. Donovan wondered about it, but he was too busy with his own part of the job to mention it, and then Weiner was drawling, “I got something peculiar over here, Donovan. What do you make of it, Freeman?”

  Donovan kicked the crawler to a halt and studied the board. “Underground rock vault, looks like. Three—four miles off the track.”

  “Think we ought to take a look?”

  “Why bother?” Donovan asked. “The track won’t come anywhere near it.”

  “You aren’t curious? Might be a treasure vault left by the Old Martians.”

  Donovan didn’t dignify that with a reply.

  “What do you think it is, then?” Weiner asked. “Maybe it’s a cave carved by an underground stream. You think so? All that subsurface water Mars had before they Terraformed it? Rivers flowing under the desert?”

  Feeling the needles, Donovan said, “It’s probably just a crawl-space left by the Terraforming engineers
. I don’t see why—oh, hell. All right. Let’s go investigate. Shut the whole project down for half an hour. What do I care?”

  He began throwing switches.

  It was a foolish, pointless interruption, but the older man’s curiosity had to be satisfied. Treasure cave! Underground stream! Donovan had to admit that he couldn’t think of any rational reason why there’d be such a pocket of open space underground here. Geologically, it didn’t make much sense.

  They cut across to it. It turned out to be about twenty feet down, with undisturbed-looking grass growing above it. Some close-range pinging confirmed that the vault was about ten feet long, a dozen feet wide, eight or nine feet deep. Donovan was convinced that it had been left by the Terraformers. But it wasn’t on the charts, at any rate. He summoned a dig-robot and put it to work.

  In ten minutes the roof of the vault lay bare: a slab of green fusion-glass. Donovan shivered a little. Weiner said, “I think we got ourselves a grave here, you know?”

  “Let’s leave it. This isn’t our business. We’ll report it and—”

  “What do we have here?” Weiner asked, and slipped his hand into an opening. He seemed to be caressing something within. Quickly he drew his hand back as a yellow glow spread over the top of the vault.

  A voice said, “May the blessing of eternal harmony be on you, friends. You have come to the temporary resting place of Lazarus. Qualified medical assistance will revive me. I ask your help. Please do not attempt to open this vault except with qualified medical assistance.”

  Silence.

  The voice said again, “May the blessing of eternal harmony be on you, friends. You have come to the temporary—”

  “A voice-cube,” Donovan murmured.

  “Look!” Weiner gasped, and pointed to the clearing vault-roof. The glass, lit from below, was transparent now. Donovan peered down into a rectangular vault. A thin, hawk-faced man lay on his back in a nutrient bath, feed-lines connected to his limbs and trunk. It was something like a Nothing Chamber, but far more elaborate. The sleeper wore a smile. Arcane symbols were inscribed on the walls of the chamber. Donovan recognized them as Harmonist symbols. That Venusian cult. He felt a stab of confusion. What had they stumbled on here? “The temporary resting place of Lazarus,” the voice-cube said. Lazarus was the prophet of the Harmonists. To Donovan, all of these religions were equally inane. He would have to report this discovery now, and there would be delay in the construction project, and he himself would be pushed unwantedly into prominence, and—

  And none of it would ever have happened if Weiner had been dozing off as usual. Why had he noticed the anomaly on the board? Why?

  “We better tell somebody about this,” Weiner said. “I think it’s important.”

  two

  IN A SMALL jungle-fringed building on Venus, eight men who were not men faced a ninth. All wore the cyanotic blue skins of Venus, though only three had been born with those skins. The others were surgical products, Earthmen converted to Venusians. Not just their bodies had been converted, either. The six changed ones had all been Vorsters at one time in their spiritual development.

  The Vorsters were the most powerful figures on Earth. But this was not Earth but Venus, and Venus was in the hands of the Harmonists, sometimes called the Lazarites after their martyred founder, David Lazarus. Lazarus, the prophet of Transcendent Harmony, had been put to death by Vorster underlings more than sixty years before. Now, to the consternation of his followers—

  “Brother Nicholas, may we have your report?” asked Christopher Mondschein, the head of the Harmonists on Venus.

  Nicholas Martell, a slender, dogged man in early middle age, stared at his eight colleagues wearily. In the past few days he had had little sleep and many profound jolts to his equilibrium. Martell had made the round trip to Mars to check on the astonishing report that had flashed to the three planets not long before.

  He said, “It’s exactly as the news story had it. Two workmen coming upon a vault while supervising the construction of a monotrack spur.”

  “You saw the vault?” asked Mondschein.

  “I saw the vault. They’ve got it cordoned.”

  “What about Lazarus?”

  “There was a figure inside the vault. It matched the image of Lazarus in Rome. It resembled all the portraits. The vault’s a sort of Nothing Chamber, and the figure is hooked up inside. The Martian authorities have checked the circuitry of the vault, and they say that it’s likely to blow sky-high if anybody tampers with it.”

  “And the figure,” persisted a hollow-cheeked man named Emory. “The figure is Lazarus?”

  “Looks like Lazarus,” Martell said. “You must remember I never saw Lazarus in the flesh. I wasn’t born yet when he died. If he died.”

  “Don’t say that,” Emory snapped. “This is a hoax. Lazarus died, all right. He was fed to the converter. There’s nothing left of him but loose protons and electrons and neutrons.”

  “So it says in our Scripture,” declared Mondschein warily. He closed his eyes a moment. He was the oldest man present; he had been on Venus almost sixty years and had built this branch of the movement to its present dominant position. He said, “There is always the possibility that our text is corrupt.”

  “No!” The outburst came from Emory, young and conservative. “How can you say that?”

  Mondschein shrugged. “The early years of our movement, Brother, are shrouded in doubt. We know there was a Lazarus, that he worked with Vorst at Santa Fe, that he quarreled with Vorst over procedure and was assassinated, or at least put out of the way. But all that was a long time ago. There’s no one left in the movement who was directly associated with Lazarus. We aren’t as long-lived as the Vorsters, you know. So if it happened that Lazarus wasn’t stuffed into a converter, but was simply carried off to Mars in suspended animation and plugged into a Nothing Chamber for sixty or seventy years—”

  There was silence in the room. Martell gave Mondschein a sidelong glance of distress. It was Emory who finally said, “What if he’s revived and claims to be Lazarus? What happens to the movement?”

  Mondschein replied, “We’ll face that when we get to it. According to Brother Nicholas, there seems to be some doubt as to whether the vault can be opened at all.”

  “That’s correct,” Martell said. “If it’s wired to explode when tampered with—”

  “Let’s hope it is,” put in Brother Ward, who had not spoken. “For our purposes, the best Lazarus is a martyred Lazarus. We can keep the tomb as a shrine, and send pilgrimages there, and perhaps get the Martians interested. But if he comes back to life and begins to upset things—”

  “What is in that vault is not Lazarus,” Emory said.

  Mondschein stared at him in amazement. Emory seemed ready to crack apart.

  “Perhaps you’d better rest awhile,” Mondschein suggested. “You’re taking this much too much to heart.”

  Martell said, “It’s a disturbing business, Christopher. If you had seen that figure in the vault—he looks so angelic so confident of resurrection—”

  Emory groaned. Mondschein furrowed his brow a moment, and in response the door opened and one of the native Venusians entered, one of the espers the Harmonists had been collecting so long on Venus.

  “Brother Emory is tired, Neerol,” Mondschein said. The Venusian nodded. His hand closed on Emory’s wrist, dark purple against deep indigo. A nexus formed; there was a momentary neural flow; sluices opened somewhere within Emory’s brain. Emory relaxed. The Venusian led him from the room.

  Mondschein looked around at the others. “We have to operate under the assumption,” he said, “that the genuine body of David Lazarus has turned up on Mars, that our book is in error about his fate, and that there’s at least the possibility that the body in that vault can be brought to life. The question is, how are we going to react?”

  Martell, who had seen the vault and who would never be quite the same, said, “You know I’ve always been skeptical of the charismatic
value of the Lazarus story. But I see this as operating to our advantage. If we can gain possession of the vault and make it the symbolic center of our movement—something to capture the public imagination—”

  “Exactly,” Ward said. “It’s always been our big selling point that we’ve got a mythos. The competition’s got Vorst and his medical miracles, Santa Fe and all that, but nothing to stir the heart. We’ve had the martyrdom of Lazarus, and it’s helped us take control of Venus, which the Vorsters never were able to do. And now, with Lazarus himself come forth from the dead—”

  “You miss the point,” said Mondschein thinly. “What turned up on Mars doesn’t tally with the myth. Lazarus isn’t supposed to be resurrected in the flesh. He was blasted to atoms. Suppose archaeologists found that Christ had really been beheaded, not crucified? Suppose it came to light that Mohammed never set foot in Mecca? We’ve been caught with our mythology askew—if this is really Lazarus. It could destroy us. It could wreck all we’ve built.”

  three

  THIRTY miles from the quaint old city of Santa Fe, the sprawling laboratories of the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences rose within a ring of dark mountains. Here surgeons transformed living creatures into alien flesh. Here technicians laboriously manipulated genes. Here families of espers submitted to an endless round of experiments, and bionics men prodded their subjects mercilessly toward a new realm of existence. The Center was a mighty machine, bristling with purposefulness.

  Inconceivably old men were at the heart of the machine.

  The core of the movement was the domed building near the main auditorium, where Noel Vorst lived when at Santa Fe. Vorst, the Founder, acknowledged more than a century and a quarter of life. There were those who said that he was dead, that the Vorst who occasionally appeared at the chapels of the Brotherhood was a robot, a simulacrum. Vorst himself found this amusing. More of him was artificial than flesh, at this point, but he was undeniably alive, with no immediate plans for dying. If he had planned to die, he never would have gone to the trouble of founding the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance. There had been hard years at first. It is not pleasant to be deemed a crackpot.