To Open the Sky (18 page)

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.

Among those who had deemed Vorst a crackpot in those days was his present second-in-command, the Hemispheric Coordinator, Reynolds Kirby. Kirby had stumbled into the Brotherhood at a time of personal stress, looking for something to cling to in a storm. That had been in 2077. He was still clinging, seventy-five years later. By now he was virtually Vorst's alter ego, an adjunct of the Founder's soul.

The Founder had been less than candid with Kirby about this Lazarus enterprise, though. For the first time in many years Vorst had held the details of a project entirely to himself. Some things could not be shared. When they were matters concerning David Lazarus, Vorst held them
in pectore,
unable to take even Kirby into his confidence.

The Founder sat cradled in a webfoam net that spared him most of gravity's pull. Once he had been a vigorous, dynamic giant of a man, and when he had to, he could wear that set of attributes even now, but he preferred comfort. It was necessary to spare his strength. His plan had fulfilled itself well, but he knew that without his guiding presence it might all yet come to nothing.

Kirby sat before him, thin-lipped, grizzled, his body, like Vorst's, a patchwork of artificial organs. The Vorster laboratories no longer needed such clumsy devices to prolong youth. Within the last generation they had managed to stimulate regeneration from within, the body's own rebirth, always the most preferable way. Kirby had come along too early for that; so had Vorst. For them, organ replacement was the road to conditional immortality. With luck, they might last two or three centuries, undergoing periodic overhauls. Younger men, those who had joined the movement in the last forty years, might hope for several hundred years more than that. Some now living, Vorst knew, would never die.

Vorst said, "About this Lazarus thing—"

His voice came from a vocoder box. The larynx had gone sixty years ago. The effect was naturalistic enough, though.

"We can infiltrate our men," Kirby said. "I can work through Nat Weiner. We'll get a bomb clapped onto that vault and give Mr. Lazarus his eternal repose."

"No."

"No?"

"Of course not," Vorst said. He lowered the shutters that lubricated his eyes. "Nothing must happen to that vault or the man who's in it. We'll infiltrate, all right. You'll have to use your pull with Weiner. But not to destroy. We're going to bring Lazarus back to life."

"We're—"

"As a gift to our friends, the Harmonists. To show our enduring affection for our brothers in the Oneness."

"No," Kirby said. Muscles roiled in his fleshless face, and Vorst could see him making adrenal adjustments, trying to stay calm in the face of this assault on his sense of logic. "This is the prophet of the heretics," Kirby said quietly. "I know that you've got your reasons for encouraging their growth in certain places, Noel. But to give them back their prophet—it doesn't make sense."

Vorst tapped a stud in his desk. A compartment opened and he drew forth the Book of Lazarus, the heretic scripture. Kirby seemed a little startled to find it here, in the stronghold of the movement.

"You've read this, haven't you?" Vorst asked.

"Of course."

"It's enough to make you weep. How my shameless underlings hunted down this great and good man David Lazarus and did away with him. One of the most blasphemous acts since the Crucifixion, eh? The blot on our record. We're the villains in the Lazarus story. Now here's Lazarus, pickled on Mars for the last sixty years. Not physically annihilated after all, despite what this book says. Fine. Splendid! We throw all the resources of Santa Fe into the task of restoring him to life. The grand ecumenical gesture. Surely you know that it's my hope to reunite the sundered branches of our movement."

Kirby's eyes flickered brilliantly. "You've been saying that for sixty or seventy years, Noel. Ever since the Harmonists split away. But do you mean it?"

"I'm sincere in all things," said Vorst lightly. "Of course I'd take them back. On my terms, naturally—but they'd be welcome. We all serve the same ends in different ways. Did you ever know Lazarus?"

"Not really. I wasn't very important in the Brotherhood when he died."

"I forget that," Vorst said. "It's hard for me to keep everyone positioned in his temporal matrix. I keep sliding forward and backward. But certainly—you were coming to the top as Lazarus was moving away. I respected that man, Kirby. I grieved when he died, wrongheaded as he was. I intend to redeem the Brotherhood from its stain by bringing Lazarus back to life. He's appropriately named, wouldn't you say?"

Kirby picked up a bright metallic sphere from the desk, a paperweight of some sort, and fingered it. Vorst waited. He kept the sphere there so that his visitors could handle it and discharge their tensions into it; he knew that for many who came before him an interview with Vorst was like a trip to the top of Mount Sinai to hear the Law. Vorst found it charming. He watched Reynolds Kirby struggling with himself.

At length Kirby—the only man on the whole planet who could use Vorst's first name to him—said thickly, "Damn it, Noel, what kind of game are you playing?"

"Game?"

"You sit there with that grin on your lips, telling me you're going to revive Lazarus, and I can see you juggling world-lines like billiard balls, and I don't know what it's all about What's your motive? Isn't this man better off dead?"

"No. Dead he's a symbol. Alive he can be manipulated. That's all I'll say." Vorst's blazing eyes found Kirby's troubled ones and held them. "Do you think I'm senile at last, perhaps? That I've held the plan in my mind so long that it's rotted in there? I know what I'm doing. I need Lazarus alive, or—or I wouldn't have begun this. Get in touch with Nat Weiner. Gain possession of the vault, I don't care how. We'll do our work on Lazarus here at Santa Fe."

"All right, Noel. Whatever you say."

"Trust me."

"What else can I do?"

Kirby wheeled himself out of the room. Vorst, relaxing, fed hormones to his bloodstream and closed his eyes. The world wavered. For an instant he found himself drifting, and it was 2071 all over again, and he was building cobalt-60 reactors in a sordid basement and renting little rooms as chapels for his cult. He recoiled, and was whirled forward, dizzyingly, toward the border of now and a little beyond it. Vorst was a low-grade esper, his skills humble indeed, but occasionally his mind did strange things. He looked toward the brink of tomorrow and desperately anchored himself.

With a decisive jab of his fingers Vorst opened his desk-communicator and spoke briefly to an intern in the burnout ward, without identifying himself. Yes, the Founder was told, there was an esper on the verge of burnout. No, she wasn't likely to survive.

"Get her ready," Vorst said. "The Founder's going to visit her."

Vorst's assistants clustered around, readying him for his journey. The old man refused to accept immobility and insisted on leading the most active kind of existence possible. A dropshaft took him to ground level, and then, sheltered by the cavalcade of flunkies that accompanied him everywhere, the Founder crossed the main plaza of the compound and entered the burnout ward.

Half a dozen sick espers, segregated by thick walls and shielded by protective members of their own kind, lay at the verge of death. There were always those for whom the powers proved overwhelming, those who eventually seized more voltage than they could handle and were destroyed. From the very beginning Vorst had concentrated on saving them, for these were the espers he needed most badly. The salvage record was good nowadays. But not good enough.

Vorst knew why the burnouts happened. The ones who went were the floaters, insecurely anchored in their own time. They drifted back, forth, seesawing from past to present, unable to control their movements, building up a charge of temporal force that ultimately blasted their minds. It was a dizziness of the time-sense, a deadly vertigo. Vorst himself had felt flashes of it. For ten years, nearly a century ago, he had considered himself insane, until he understood. He had seen the edges of time, a vision of futurity that had shattered him and remade him, and that, he knew, had been only a hint of what the real espers experienced.

The burnout case was young and female and Oriental: a fatal combination, it seemed. A good eighty percent of the burnouts were of Mongoloid stock, generally adolescent girls. Those who had the trait didn't last far into adulthood. This one must have been about sixteen, though it was hard to tell; she could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty-five. She lay twisting on the bed, her body almost bare, clawing at the bedclothes in her agony. Sweat gleamed on her yellow-brown skin. She arched her back, grimaced, fell back. Her breasts, revealed by the disarray of her robe, were like a child's.

Blue-clad Vorsters, awed by the presence of the Founder, flanked the bed. Vorst said, "She'll be gone in an hour, won't she?"

Someone nodded. Vorst moved himself closer to the bed. He seized the girl's arm in his wizened fingers. Another esper stepped in, placed one hand on Vorst, the other on the girl, providing the link that Vorst required. Suddenly he was in contact with the dying girl.

Her brain was on fire. She jolted backward and forward in time, and Vorst jolted with her, drawn along as a hitchhiker. Light flared in his mind, as though lightning danced about him. Yesterday and tomorrow became one. His thin body quivered like a buffeted reed. Images danced like demons, shadowy figures out of the past, dark avatars of tomorrow.
Tell me, tell me, tell me,
Vorst implored.
Show me the path!
He stood at the threshold of knowledge. For seventy years he had moved step by step this way, using the contorted and tortured bodies of these burnouts as his bridges to tomorrow, pulling himself forward by his own bootstraps along the world-line of his great plan.

Let me see,
Vorst begged.

The figure of David Lazarus bestrode the pattern of tomorrow, as Vorst knew it would. Lazarus stood like a colossus, come forth to an unexpected resurrection, holding his arms out to the green-robed brethren of his heresy. Vorst shivered. The image wavered and was gone. The frail hand of the Founder relaxed its grip.

"She's dead," Vorst said. "Take me away."

Four

One old man had given the word, and another obeyed, and a third was approached for a favor. Nat Weiner of the Martian Presidium was always willing to oblige his old friend Reynolds Kirby. They had known one another for more years then they cared to admit.

Weiner, like nearly all Martians, was neither Vorster nor Harmonist. Martians had little use for the cults, and steered a neutral and profitable course. On Earth, by now, the Vorsters amounted to a planetary government, since their influence was felt everywhere; it was simple good sense for Mars to retain open lines to the Vorster high command, since Mars had business to do with Earth. Venus, the planet of adapted men, was a different case. No one could be too sure what went on there, except that the Harmonist heresy had established itself pretty securely in the last thirty or forty years, and might one day speak for Venus as the Vorsters spoke for Earth. Weiner had served a tour of duty as Martian Ambassador to Venus, and he thought he understood the blueskins fairly well. He didn't like them very much. But he was past feeling any strong emotion. He had left that behind with his hundredth birthday.

At staggering cost, Reynolds Kirby in Santa Fe spoke face-to-face with Weiner, and begged a favor of him. It was twelve years since they had last met—not since Weiner's last visit to the rejuvenation centers at Santa Fe. It wasn't customary for unbelievers to be granted the use of the rejuvenation facilities there, but Kirby had arranged for Weiner and a select few of his Martian friends to come down for periodic treatments, as a favor.

Weiner understood quite clearly that Kirby was silently accepting promissory notes for those favors, and that the notes would be taken down for repayment one of these days. That was all right; the important thing was to survive. Weiner might even have been willing to become a Vorster, if he had to, in order to have access to Santa Fe. But of course that would have hurt him politically on Mars, where both Vorsters and Harmonists were generally looked upon as subversives. This way he had the benefits, without the risks, and he owed it to his old friend Kirby. Weiner would go quite a distance to repay Kirby for that service.