To Open the Sky (19 page)

The Vorster said, "Have you seen the alleged Lazarus vault yet, Nat?"

"I was out there two days ago. We've got a tight security guard on it. It was my nephew who found it, you know. I'd like to kill him."

"Why?"

"All we need is finding the Harmonist muck-a-muck out by Beltran Lakes. Why couldn't you people have buried him on Venus, where his own people are?"

"What makes you think we buried him, Nat?"

"Aren't you the ones who killed him? Or put him into a freeze, or whatever you did to him?"

"It all happened before my time," Kirby said. "Only Vorst knows the real story, and maybe not even he. But surely it's Lazarus's own supporters who tucked him away in that vault, don't you think?"

"Not at all," Weiner replied. "Why would they get their own story garbled? He's their prophet. If they put him there, they should have remembered it and preached his ressurrection, yes? But they were the most surprised ones of all when he turned up." Weiner frowned. "On the other hand, the message that was recorded with him is full of Harmonist slogans. And there are Harmonist symbols on the vault. I wish I understood. Better still: I wish we'd never found him. But why are you calling, Ron?"

"Vorst wants him."

"Wants Lazarus?"

"That's right. To bring him back to life. We'll take the whole vault to Santa Fe and open it and revive him. Vorst wants to make the announcement tomorrow, all-channel hookup."

"You can't, Ron. If anybody gets him, it ought to be the Harmonists. He's their prophet. How can I hand him to you boys? You're the ones who supposedly killed him in the first place, and now—"

"And now we're going to revive him, which, as everyone knows, is beyond the capabilities of the Harmonists. They're welcome to try, if they want, but they simply don't have our kind of laboratory facilities. We're ready to revive him. Then well turn him over to the Harmonists and he can preach all he wants. Just let us have access to that vault."

"You're asking for a lot," Weiner said.

"We've given you a lot, Nat."

Weiner nodded. The promissory notes had fallen due, he realized.

He said, "The Harmonists will have my head for this."

"Your head's pretty tightly attached, Nat. Find a way to give us the vault. Vorst will be pretty rough on us all if you don't."

Weiner sighed. "His will be done."

But how, the Martian wondered when contact had broken? By
force majeure?
Hand over the vault and to hell with public opinion? And if Venus got nasty about it? There hadn't been an interplanetary war yet, but perhaps the time was ripe. Certainly the Harmonists wanted—and had every right to have—their own founder's body. Just last week that convert Martell, the one who had come to Venus to plant a Vorster cell and ended up in the Harmonist camp, had been here to see the vault, Weiner thought, and had tentatively sketched out a plan for taking possession. Martell and his boss Mondschein would explode when they found out that the relic of Lazarus was being shipped to Santa Fe.

It would have to be handled delicately.

Weiner's mind whirred and clicked like a computer, presenting and rejecting alternate possibilities, opening and closing one circuit after another. It was not seniority alone that kept the Martian in power. He was agile. He had gained considerably in craftiness since the night when, a drunken young yokel, he ran amok in New York City.

Three hours and a great many thousand dollars' worth of interplanetary calls later, Weiner had his solution worked out satisfactorily.

The vault was Martian governmental property, as an artifact. Therefore Mars had an important voice in its disposal. However, the Martian government recognized the unique symbolic value of this discovery, and thus proposed to consult with religious authorities of the other worlds. A committee would be formed: three Harmonists, three Vorsters, and three Martians of Weiner's selection. Presumably the Harmonists and Vorsters would look out only for their own cult's welfare, and the Martians on the committee would maintain an imperturbable neutrality, assuring an impartial judgment.

Of course.

The committee would meet to deliberate on the fate of the vault. The Harmonists, naturally, would claim it for themselves. The Vorsters, having made public their offer to employ all their superscience to bring Lazarus back to life, would ask to be given a chance to do so. The Martians would weigh all the possibilities.

Then, Weiner thought, would come the vote.

One of the Martians would vote with the Harmonists—for appearance's sake. The other two would come out in favor of letting the Vorsters work on the sleeper, under rigorous supervision to prevent any hanky-panky. The five-to-four vote would give the vault to Vorst. Mondschein would yelp, of course. But the terms of the agreement would allow a couple of Harmonist representatives to get inside the secret labs at Santa Fe for a little while, and that would soothe them somewhat. There would be a little grumbling, but if Kirby kept his word, Lazarus would be revived and turned over to his partisans, and how could the Harmonists possibly object to that?

Weiner smiled. There was no problem so knotty that it couldn't be untied. Given a little thought, that is. He felt pleased with himself. If he had been forty years younger, he might have gone out for a roistering celebration. But not now.

Five

"Don't go," Martell said.

"Suspicious?" Christopher Mondschein asked. "It's a chance to see their setup. I haven't been in Santa Fe since I was a boy. Why shouldn't I go?"

"There's no telling what might happen to you there. They'd love to get their hands on you. You're the kingpin of the whole Venusian movement."

"And they'll lase me to ashes with three planets watching, eh? Be realistic, Nicholas. When the Pope visits Mecca, they take good care of him. I'm in no danger in Santa Fe."

"What about the espers? They'll scan you."

"I'll have Neerol with me as a mindshield," Mondschein said. "They won't get a thing. I'll stack him up against any esper they have. Besides, I have nothing to hide from Noel Vorst. You of all people ought to realize that. We took you in, even though you were loaded with Vorster spy-commands. It was in our interest to tell Vorst how far we had gone."

Martell took a different approach. "By going to Santa Fe you're putting the blessing of our order on this alleged Lazarus."

"Now you sound like Brother Emory! Are you telling me it's a phony?"

"I'm telling you that we ought to treat it as one. It contradicts our own legend of Lazarus. It may be a Vorster plant calculated to throw us into confusion. What do we do when they hand us a walking, talking Lazarus and let us try to reshape our entire order around him?"

"It's a touchy matter, Nicholas. We've built our faith on the existence of a holy martyr. Now, if he's suddenly unmartyred—"

"Exactly. It'll crush us."

"I doubt that," Mondschein said. The old Harmonist touched his gills lightly, nervously. "You aren't looking far enough ahead, Nicholas. The Vorsters have outmaneu- vered us so far, I admit. They've gained possession of this Lazarus, and they're about to give him back to us. Very embarrassing, but what can we do? However, the next moves are ours. If he dies, we simply revise our writings a bit. If he lives and tries to meddle, we reveal that he's some sort of simulacrum cooked up by the Vorsters to do mischief, and destroy him. Score a point for us—our original story stands and we reveal the Vorsters as sinister schemers."

"And if he's really Lazarus?" Martell asked.

Mondschein glowered. "Then we have a prophet on our hands, Brother Nicholas. It's a risk we take. I'm going to Santa Fe."

Six

On Earth, the Noel Vorst Center throbbed with more-than-usual activity as preparations continued for the arrival of the cargo from Mars. An entire block of the laboratory grounds had been set aside for the resuscitation of Lazarus. For the first time since the founding of the Center video cameras would be allowed to show the worlds a little of its inner workings. The place would be full of strangers—even a delegation of Harmonists. To old-line Vorsters like Reynolds Kirby, that was almost unthinkable. Furtiveness had become a matter of course for him. The command, though, had come from Vorst himself, and no one could quarrel with the Founder. "I believe that it's time to lift the lid a little," Vorst had said.

Kirby was doing some lid-lifting of his own as the great day drew near. He was troubled by certain blanks in his own memory, and by virtue of his rank as second-in-command he went searching through the Vorster archive to fill them in. The trouble was, Kirby could not remember much about David Lazarus's pre-martyrdom career, and he felt that it was important to know something more than the official story. Who was Lazarus, anyway? How had he entered the Vorster picture—and how had he left it?

Kirby himself had enrolled in 2077, kneeling before the Blue Fire of a cobalt reactor in New York. As a nev convert, he had not been concerned with the politics of the hierarchy, but simply with the values the cult had to offer stability, the hope of long life, the dream of reaching the stars by harnessing the abilities of espers. Kirby was willing to see mankind explore the other solar systems, but he did not make that accomplishment the central yearning of his life. Nor did the chance of immortality—die chief bait for millions of Vorster converts—seem all that delicious to him.

What drew him to the movement, at the age of forty, was merely the discipline that it offered. His pleasant life lacked structure, and the world about him was such chaos that he fled from it into one synthetic paradise after another. Along came Vorst offering a sleek new belief that snared Kirby totally. For the first few months he was content to be a worshiper. Soon he was an acolyte. And then, his natural organizational abilities demonstrating themselves, he found himself moving rapidly upward in the movement from post to post until by the time he was eighty he was Vorst's right hand, and very much concerned with his own personal survival.

According to the official story, the martyrdom of David Lazarus had taken place in 2090. Kirby had been a Vorster for thirteen years then, and was a District Supervisor in charge of thousands of Brothers.

So far as he could remember, he had never even heard of Lazarus as of 2090.

A few years later the Harmonists, the heretical movement, had begun gaining strength, decking themselves in green robes and scoffing at the craftily secular power-orientation of the Vorsters. They claimed to be followers of the martyred Lazarus, but even then, Kirby thought, they hadn't talked much about Lazarus. Only afterward, as Harmonist power mounted and they stole Venus from Vorst, did they push the Lazarus mythos particularly hard.
Why is it,
Kirby wondered,
that I who was a contemporary of Lazarus should never have heard his name?

He walked toward the archives building.

It was a milk-white geodesic dome, sheeted with some toothy fabric that gave it a sharkskin surface texture. Kirby passed through a tiled tunnel, identified himself to the robot guardians, moved toward and past a sphincter- door, and found himself in the olive-green room where the records were kept. He activated a query-stud and demanded knowledge.

LAZARUS, DAVID.

Drums whirled in the depths of the earth. Memory films came around, offered themselves to the kiss of the scanner, and sent images floating upward to the waiting Kirby. Glowing yellow print appeared on the reader-screen.

A potted biography, scanty and inadequate:

BORN 13 March 2051

EDUCATION Primary Secondary Chicago, A.B. Harvard '72, Ph.D. (Anthropology) Harvard '75.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION (1/1/88) 6 ft. 3 ins., 179 pounds, dark eyes and hair, no
dis.
scars.

AFFILIATION Joined Cambridge chapel 4/11/71. Acolyte status conferred 7/17/73….

There followed a list of the successive stages by which Lazarus had risen through the hierarchy, culminating with the simple entry, DEATH 2/9/90.

That was all. It was a lean, spare record, not a word of elaboration, no appended commendations such as Kirby knew festooned his own record, no documentation of Laz- arus's disagreement with Vorst. Nothing. It was the sort of record, Kirby thought uncomfortably, that anyone could have tapped out in five minutes and inserted in the archives... yesterday.

He prodded the memory banks, hoping to fish up some added detail about the arch-heretic. He found nothing. It was not really valid cause for suspicion; Lazarus had been dead for a long time, and probably the recordkeeping had been sketchier in those early days. But it was upsetting, all the same. Kirby made his way out of the building. Acolytes stared at him as though Vorst himself had gone striding by. No doubt some of them felt the temptation to drop to their knees before him.
If they only knew,
Kirby thought darkly,
how ignorant I am. After seventy-five years with Vorst. If they only knew.

Seven