Sailing to Byzantium (48 page)

There are half a dozen people in the room, each facing in a different direction, reading aloud in low murmurs. A slender dark-skinned man looks up at me and says, “Goddess save you, father. How does your journey go?”

“I’m trying to find Oesterreich. They said he’s here.”

A couple of the other readers look up. A woman with straw-colored hair says, “He’s gone Goddessward.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t under—”

Another woman, whose features are tiny and delicately modeled in the center of a face vast as the map of Russia, breaks in to tell me, “He was going to stop off on Phosphor first. You may be able to catch up with him there. Goddess save you, father.”

I stare at her, at the mural of the stone temple, at the other woman.

“Thank you,” I say. “Goddess save you,” my voice adds.

I buy passage to Phosphor. It is sixty-seven light-years from Earth. The necessary lambda adjustment costs nearly as much as the transit fee itself, and I must spend three days going through the adaptation process before I can leave.

Then, Goddess save me, I am ready to set out from Eden for whatever greater strangeness awaits me beyond.

As I wait for the Simtow reaction to annihilate me and reconstruct me in some unknown place, I think of all those who passed through my House over the years as I selected the outbound colonists—and how I and the Lord Magistrates before me had clung to the fantasy that we were shaping perfect new Earths out there in the Dark, that we were composing exquisite symphonies of human nature, filtering out all of the discordances that had marred all our history up till now. Without ever going to the new worlds ourselves to view the results of our work, of course, because to go would mean to cut ourselves off forever, by Darklaw’s own constricting terms, from our House, from our task, from Earth itself. And now, catapulted into the Dark in a moment’s convulsive turn, by shame and guilt and the need to try to repair that which I had evidently made breakable instead of imperishable, I am learning that I have been wrong all along, that the symphonies of human nature that I had composed were built out of the same old tunes, that people will do what they will do unconstrained by abstract regulations laid down for them
a priori
by others far away. The tight filter of which the House of Senders is so proud is no filter at all. We send our finest ones to the stars and they turn their backs on us at once. And, pondering these things, it seems to me that my soul is pounding at the gates of my mind, that madness is pressing close against the walls of my spirit—a thing which I have always dreaded, the thing which brought me to the cloisters of the Order in the first place.

Black light flashes in my eyes and once more I go leaping through the Dark.

“He isn’t here,” they tell me on Phosphor. There is a huge cool red sun here, and a hot blue one a couple of hundred solar units away, close enough to blaze like a brilliant beacon in the day sky. “He’s gone on to Entropy. Goddess save you.”

“Goddess save you,” I say.

There are triple-triangle signs on every doorfront in Phosphor’s single city. The city’s name is Jerusalem. To name cities or worlds for places on Earth is forbidden. But I know that I have left Darklaw far behind here.

Entropy, they say, is ninety-one light-years from Earth. I am approaching the limits of the sphere of settlement.

Oesterreich has a soft, insinuating voice. He says, “You should come with me. I really would like to take a Lord Magistrate along when I go to her.”

“I’m no longer a Lord Magistrate.”

“You can’t ever stop being a Lord Magistrate. Do you think you can take the Order off just by putting your medallion in your suitcase?”

“Who is she, this Goddess Avatar everybody talks about?”

Oesterreich laughs. “Come with me and you’ll find out.”

He is a small man, very lean, with broad, looming shoulders that make him appear much taller than he is when he is sitting down. Maybe he is forty years old, maybe much older. His face is paper-white, with perpetual bluish stubble, and his eyes have a black troublesome gleam that strikes me as a mark either of extraordinary intelligence or of pervasive insanity, or perhaps both at once. It was not difficult at all for me to find him, only hours after my arrival on Entropy. The planet has a single village, a thousand settlers. The air is mild here, the sun yellow-green. Three huge moons hang just overhead in the daytime sky, as though dangling on a clothesline.

I say, “Is she real, this goddess of yours?”

“Oh, she’s real, all right. As real as you or me.”

“Someone we can walk up to and speak with?”

“Her name used to be Margaret Benevente. She was born in Geneva. She emigrated to a world called Three Suns about thirty years ago.”

“And now she’s a goddess.”

“No. I never said that.”

“What is she, then?”

“She’s the Goddess Avatar.”

“Which means what?”

He smiles. “Which means she’s a holy woman in whom certain fundamental principles of the universe have been incarnated. You want to know any more than that, you come with me, eh? Your grace.”

“And where is she?”

“She’s on an uninhabited planet about five thousand light-years from here right now.”

I am dealing with a lunatic, I tell myself. That gleam is the gleam of madness, yes.

“You don’t believe that, do you?” he asks.

“How can it be possible?”

“Come with me and you’ll find out.”

“Five thousand light-years—” I shake my head. “No. No.”

He shrugs. “So don’t go, then.”

There is a terrible silence in the little room. I feel impaled on it. Thunder crashes outside, finally, breaking the tension. Lightning has been playing across the sky constantly since my arrival, but there has been no rain.

“Faster-than-light travel is impossible,” I say inanely. “Except by way of Velde transmission. You know that. If we’ve got Velde equipment five thousand light-years from here, we would have had to start shipping it out around the time the Pyramids were being built in Egypt.”

“What makes you think we get there with Velde equipment?” Oesterreich asks me.

He will not explain. Follow me and you’ll see, he tells me. Follow me and you’ll see.

The curious thing is that I like him. He is not exactly a likable man—too intense, too tightly wound, the fanaticism carried much too close to the surface—but he has a sort of charm all the same. He travels from world to world, he tells me, bringing the new gospel of the Goddess Avatar. That is exactly how he says it, “the new gospel of the Goddess Avatar,” and I feel a chill when I hear the phrase. It seems absurd and frightening both at once. Yet I suppose those who brought the Order to the world a hundred fifty years ago must have seemed just as strange and just as preposterous to those who first heard our words.

Of course, we had the Velde equipment to support our philosophies.

But these people have—what? The strength of insanity? The clear cool purposefulness that comes from having put reality completely behind them?

“You were in the Order once, weren’t you?” I ask him.

“You know it, your grace.”

“Which House?”

“The Mission,” he says.

“I should have guessed that. And now you have a new mission, is that it?”

“An extension of the old one. Mohammed, you know, didn’t see Islam as a contradiction of Judaism and Christianity. Just as the next level of revelation, incorporating the previous ones.”

“So you would incorporate the Order into your new belief?”

“We would never repudiate the Order, your grace.”

“And Darklaw? How widely is that observed, would you say, in the colony worlds?”

“I think we’ve kept much of it,” Oesterreich says. “Certainly we keep the part about not trying to return to Earth. And the part about spreading the Mission outward.”

“Beyond the boundaries decreed, it would seem.”

“This is a new dispensation,” he says.

“But not a repudiation of the original teachings?”

“Oh, no,” he says, and smiles. “Not a repudiation at all, your grace.”

He has that passionate confidence, that unshakable assurance, that is the mark of the real prophet and also of the true madman. There is something diabolical about him, and irresistible. In these conversations with him I have so far managed to remain outwardly calm, even genial, but the fact is that I am quaking within. I really do believe he is insane. Either that or an utter fraud, a cynical salesman of the irrational and the unreal, and though he is flippant he does not seem at all cynical. A madman, then. Is his condition infectious? As I have said, the fear of madness has been with me all my life; and so my harsh discipline, my fierce commitment, my depth of belief. He threatens all my defenses.

“When do you set out to visit your Goddess Avatar?” I ask.

“Whenever you like, your grace.”

“You really think I’m going with you?”

“Of course you are. How else can you find out what you came out here to learn?”

“I’ve learned that the colonies have fallen away from Darklaw. Isn’t that enough?”

“But you think we’ve all gone crazy, right?”

“When did I say that?”

“You didn’t need to say it.”

“If I send word to Earth of what’s happened, and the Order chooses to cut off all further technical assistance and all shipments of manufactured goods—?”

“They won’t do that. But even if they do—well, we’re pretty much self-sufficient out here now, and getting more so every year—”

“And further emigration from Earth?”

“That would be your loss, not ours, your grace. Earth needs the colonies as a safety valve for her population surplus. We can get along without more emigrants. We know how to reproduce, out here.” He grins at me. “This is foolish talk. You’ve come this far. Now go the rest of the way with me.”

I am silent.

“Well?”

“Now, you mean?”

“Right now.”

There is only one Velde station on Entropy, about three hundred meters from the house where I have been talking with Oesterreich. We go to it under a sky berserk with green lightning. He seems not even to notice.

“Don’t we have to do lambda drills?” I ask.

“Not for this hop,” Oesterreich says. “There’s no differential between here and there.” He is busy setting up coordinates.

“Get into the chamber, your grace.”

“And have you send me God knows where by myself?”

“Don’t be foolish. Please.”

It may be the craziest thing I have ever done. But I am the servant of the Order; and the Order has asked this of me. I step into the chamber. No one else is with us. He continues to press keys, and I realize that he is setting up an automatic transfer, requiring no external operator. When he is done with that he joins me, and there is the moment of flash.

We emerge into a cool, dry world with an Earthlike sun, a sea-green sky, a barren, rocky landscape. Ahead of us stretches an empty plateau broken here and there by small granite hillocks that rise like humped islands out of the flatness.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Fifty light-years from Entropy, and about eighty-five light-years from Earth.”

“What’s the name of this place?”

“It doesn’t have one. Nobody lives here. Come, now we walk a little.”

We start forward. The ground has the look that comes of not having felt rain for ten or twenty years, but tough little tussocks of a grayish jagged-looking grass are pushing up somehow through the hard, stony red soil. When we have gone a hundred meters or so the land begins to drop away sharply on my left, so that I can look down into a broad, flat valley about three hundred meters below us. A solitary huge beast, somewhat like an elephant in bulk and manner, is grazing quietly down there, patiently prodding at the ground with its rigid two-pronged snout.

“Here we are,” Oesterreich says.

We have reached the nearest of the little granite islands. When we walk around it, I see that its face on the farther side is fissured and broken, creating a sort of cave. Oesterreich beckons and we step a short way into it.

To our right, against the wall of the cave, is a curious narrow three-sided framework, a kind of tapering doorway, with deep darkness behind it. It is made of an odd glossy metal, or perhaps a plastic, with a texture that is both sleek and porous at the same time. There are hieroglyphs inscribed on it that seem much like those I saw on the wall of the stone temple in the mural in the Goddess-chapel on Phosphor, and to either side of it, mounted in the cave wall, are the triple six-pointed stars that are the emblem of Oesterreich’s cult.

“What is this here?” I say, after a time.

“It’s something like a Velde transmitter.”

“It isn’t anything like a Velde transmitter.”

“It works very much like a Velde transmitter,” he says. “You’ll see when we step into its field. Are you ready?”

“Wait.”

He nods. “I’m waiting.”

“We’re going to let this thing send us somewhere?”

“That’s right, your grace.”

“What is it? Who built it?”

“I’ve already told you what it is. As for who built it, I don’t have any idea. Nobody does. We think it’s five or ten million years old, maybe. It could be older than that by a factor of ten. Or a factor of a hundred. We have no way of judging.”

After a long silence I say, “You’re telling me that it’s an alien device?”

“That’s right.”

“We’ve never discovered any sign of intelligent alien life anywhere in the galaxy.”

“There’s one right in front of you,” Oesterreich says. “It isn’t the only one.”

“You’ve found aliens?”

“We’ve found their matter-transmitters. A few of them, anyway. They still work. Are you ready to jump now, your grace?”

I stare blankly at the three-sided doorway.

“Where to?”

“To a planet about five hundred light-years from here, where we can catch the bus that’ll take us to the Goddess Avatar.”

“You’re actually serious?”

“Let’s go, your grace.”

“What about lambda effects?”

“There aren’t any. Lambda differentials are a flaw in the Velde technology, not in the universe itself. This system gets us around without any lambda problems at all. Of course, we don’t know how it works. Are you ready?”