To Open the Sky (12 page)

Martell came to a halt as he saw the Wheel hurtling toward him.

His first thought was that it had broken free from some vehicle. Then he realized what it was: no fragment of machinery, but Venusian wildlife. It surged over a crest in the road, a hundred yards in front of him, and came plunging wildly toward him at what must have been a speed of ninety miles an hour. Martell had a clear though momentary glimpse: two wheels of some horny substance, mottled orange and yellow, linked by a box-like inner structure. The wheels were nine feet across, at least; the connecting structure was smaller, so that wheel-rims projected around it. Those rims were razor-sharp. The creature moved by ceaselessly transferring its weight within that central housing, and it developed terrific momentum as it barreled toward the missionary.

Martell leaped back. The Wheel hurtled past him, missing his toes by inches. Martell saw the sharpness of the rim and felt an acrid odor sting his nostrils. If he had been a bit slower, the Wheel would have sliced him in two.

It traveled a hundred yards beyond him. Then, like a gyroscope running amok, it executed a turn in an astonishingly narrow radius and came shooting back toward Martell.

The things hunting me,
he thought.

He knew many Vorster combat techniques, but none of them were designed to cope with a beast like this. All he could do was keep sidestepping and hope that the Wheel could not make sudden compensations in its course. It drew near; Martell sucked in his breath and leaped back once again. This time the Wheel swerved ever so slightly. Its leading left-hand edge sliced through the trailing end of Martell's blue cloak, and a ribbon of cloth fluttered to the pavement Panting, Martell watched the thing swing around for another try, and knew that it could indeed correct its course. A few more passes and it would split him.

The Wheel came a third time.

Martell waited as long as he dared. With the outer blades only a few feet away, he broad-jumped—into the path of the creature. Earthborn muscles carried him twenty feet in the light gravity. He more than half expected to be bisected in mid-jump, but when his feet touched ground he was still in one piece. Whirling, Martell saw that he had indeed surprised the beast; it had turned inward, toward the place where it had expected him to be, and had passed through his suitcase. The suitcase had been sliced as though by a laser beam. His belongings were scattered on the road. The Wheel, halting once more, was coming back for another try.

What now? Climb a tree? The nearest one was void of limbs for the first twenty feet. Martell could not shinny to safety in time. All he could do was keep hopping from side to side in the road, trying to outguess the creature. He knew that he could not keep that up much longer. He would tire, and the Wheel would not, and the slashing rims would pass through him and spill his altered guts on the pavement. It did not seem right, Martell thought, to die purposelessly in this way before he had even begun his work here.

The Wheel came. Martell sidestepped it again and heard it whistle past. Was it getting angry? No, it was just an insensate brute looking for a meal, hunting in the manner some perverse nature had designed for it. Martell gasped for breath. On the next pass—

Suddenly he was not alone. A boy appeared, running out from one of the stockaded buildings at the crest of the hill, and trotted alongside the Wheel for a few paces. Then—Martell did not see how it was done—the Wheel went awry and toppled, landing on one disk with the other in the air. It lay there like a huge cheese blocking the road. The boy, who could not have been much more than ten, stood by it, looking pleased with himself. He was low-caste, of course. A high-caste one would not have bothered to save him. Martell realized that probably the low-caste boy had had no interest in saving him, either, but simply had knocked the Wheel over for the sport of it.

Martell said, "I offer thanks, friend. Another moment and I'd have been cut to ribbons."

The boy made no reply. Martell came closer to inspect the fallen Wheel. Its upper rim was rippling in frustration as it strained to right itself—clearly an impossible task. Martell looked down, saw a dark violet cyst near the center of one wheel writhe and open.

"Look out!" the boy cried, but it was much too late.

Two whip-like threads burst from the cyst. One wrapped itself around Martell's left thigh, the other around the boy's waist. Martell felt a blaze of pain, as though the: threads were lined with acid-edged suckers. A mouth opened on the inner structure of the Wheel. Martell saw milling, grinding tooth-like projections beginning to churn in anticipation.

But this was a situation he could handle. He had no way of stopping the headlong plunge of the Wheel, for that was mere mechanical energy at work, but presumably the creature's brain carried an electrical charge, and the Vorsters had ways of altering current flows in the brain. It was a mild form of esping, within the threshold of nearly anyone who cared to master the disciplines involved. Ignoring the pain, Martell seized the tightening thread with his right hand and performed the act of neutralization. A moment later the thread went slack and Martell was free. So was the boy. The threads did not return to the cyst, but remained lying limp in the roadway. The milling teeth became still; the rippling horny plate of the upper wheel subsided. The thing was dead.

Martell glanced at the boy.

"Fair enough," he said. "I've saved you and you've saved me. So now we're even."

"The debit is still yours," replied the boy with strange solemnity. "If I had not rescued you first, you never would have lived to rescue me. And it would not have been necessary to rescue me, anyway, since I would not have come out onto the road, and therefore—"

Martell's eyes widened. "Who taught you to reason like that?" he asked in amusement. "You sound like a theology professor."

"I am Brother Christopher's pupil."

"And he is—"

"You'll find out. He wants to see you. He sent me out here to fetch you."

"And where will I find him?"

"Come with me."

Martell followed the boy toward one of the buildings. They left the dead Wheel in the road; Martell wondered what would happen if a carload of high-casters came along and had to shove the carcass out of the way with their own aristocratic hands.

Martell and the boy passed through a burnished coppery gate that slid open at the boy's approach. Martell found himself approaching a simple wooden A-frame building. When he saw the sign mounted above the door, he was so amazed that he released his grip on his sundered suitcase, and for the second time in ten minutes his belongings went spilling to the ground.

The sign said:

SHRINE OF THE TRANSCENDENT HARMONY

ALL ARE WELCOME

Martell's knees felt watery. Harmonists?
Here?

The green-robed heretics, offshoots of the original Vorster movement, had made some progress on Earth for a while, and had even seemed to threaten the parent organization. But for more than twenty years now they had been nothing but an absurd little splinter group of no significance. It was inconceivable that these heretics, who had failed so utterly on Earth, could have established a church here on Venus—something that the Vorsters themselves had been unable to do. It was impossible. It was unthinkable.

A figure appeared in the doorway—a stocky man in early middle age, about sixty or so, his hair beginning to gray, his features thickening. Like Martell, he had been surgically adapted to Venusian conditions. He looked calm and self-assured. His hands rested lightly on a comfortable priestly paunch.

He said, "I'm Christopher Mondschein. I heard of your arrival, Brother Martell. Won't you come in?"

Martell hesitated.

Mondschein smiled. "Come, come, Brother. There's no peril in breaking bread with a Harmonist, is there? You'd be mincemeat now but for the lad's bravery, and I sent him to save you. You owe me the courtesy of a visit. Come in. Come in. I won't meddle with your soul, Brother. That's a promise."

Three

The Harmonist place was unassuming but obviously permanent. There was a shrine, festooned with the statuettes and claptrap of the heresy, and a library, and dwelling quarters. Martell caught sight of several Venusian boys at work in the rear of the building, digging what might be the foundations of an extension. Martell followed the older man into the library. A familiar row of books caught his eye: the works of Noel Vorst, handsomely bound, the expensive Founder's Edition.

Mondschein said, "Are you surprised? Don't forget that we accept the supremacy of Vorst, too, even if he spurns us. Sit down. Wine? They make a fine dry white here."

"What are you doing here?" Martell asked.

"Me? That's a terribly long story, and not entirely creditable to me. The essence of it is that I was a young fool and let myself get maneuvered into being sent here. That was forty years ago, and I've stopped resenting what happened by now. It was the finest thing that could have happened to me in my life, I've come to realize, and I suppose it's a mark of maturity that I was able to see—"

Mondschein's garrulity irritated the precise-minded Martell. He cut in: "I don't want your personal history, Brother Mondschein. I meant, how long has your order been here?"

"Close to fifty years."

"Uninterruptedly?"

"Yes. We have eight shrines here and about four thousand communicants, all of them low-caste. The high casters don't deign to notice us."

"They don't deign to wipe you out, either," Martell observed.

"True," said Mondschein. "Perhaps we're beneath their contempt."

"But they've killed every Vorster missionary who's ever come here," Martell said. "Us they devour, you they tolerate. Why is that?"

"Perhaps they see a strength in us that they don't find in the parent organization," suggested the heretic. "They admire strength, of course. You must know that, or you'd never have tried to walk from the landing station. You were demonstrating your strength under stress. But of course it would rather have spoiled your demonstration if that Wheel had slashed you to death."

"As it very nearly did."

"As it certainly would have done," said Mondschein, "if I had not happened to notice your predicament. That would have terminated your mission here rather prematurely. Do you like the wine?"

Martell had barely tasted it. "It's not bad. Tell me, Mondschein, have they really let themselves be converted here?"

"A few. A few."

"Hard to believe. What do you people know that we don't?"

"It isn't what we know," Mondschein said. "It's what we have to offer. Come with me into the chapel."

"I'd rather not."

"Please. It won't give you a disease."

Reluctantly, Martell allowed himself to be led right into the sanctum sanctorum. He looked around with distaste at the ikons, the images, and all the rest of the Harmonist rubbish. At the altar, where a Vorster chapel would have had the tiny reactor emitting blue Cerenkov radiation, there was mounted a gleaming atom-symbol model along which electron-simulacra pulsed in blinding, ceaseless motion. Martell did not think of himself as a bigoted man, but he was loyal to his faith, and the sight of all this childish paraphernalia sickened him.

Mondschein said, "Noel Vorst's the most brilliant man of our times, and his accomplishments mustn't be underrated. He saw the culture of Earth fragmented and decadent, saw people everywhere escaping into drug addictions and Nothing Chambers and a hundred other deplorable things. And he saw that the old religions had lost their grip, that the time was ripe for an eclectic, synthetic new creed that dispensed with the mysticism of the former religions and replaced it with a new kind of mysticism, a. scientific mysticism. That Blue Fire of his—a wonderful symbol, something to capture the imagination and dazzle the eye, as good as the Cross and the Crescent, even better, because it was modern, it was scientific, it could be comprehended even while it bewildered. Vorst had the insight to establish his cult and the administrative ability to put it across. But has thinking was incomplete."

"That's a lofty dismissal, isn't it? When you consider that we control Earth in a way that no single religious movement of the past has ever—"

Mondschein smiled. "The achievement on Earth is very imposing, I agree. Earth was ready for Vorst's doctrines. Why did he fail on the other planets, though? Because his thinking was too advanced. He didn't offer anything that colonists could surrender their hearts and souls to."

"He offers physical immortality in the present body," Martell said crisply. "Isn't that enough?"

"No. He doesn't offer a mythos. Just a cold quid-pro-quo, come to the chapel and pay your tithe and you can live forever, maybe. It's a secular religion, despite all the litanies and rituals that have been creeping in. It lacks poetry. There's no Christ-child in the manger, no Abraham sacrificing Isaac, no spark of humanity, no—"

"No simplistic fairy tales," said Martell in a brusque tone. "Agreed. That's the whole point of our teaching. We came into a world no longer capable of believing the old stories, and instead of spinning new ones we offered simplicity, strength, the power of scientific achievement—"