Seeing the bright rectangle of the open lock had revived his spirits. He permitted hope to touch him. A disaster of the first magnitude had smitten the vessel, there was no denying that. Yet intelligence remained alive inside the crippled ship. The multiple star system which had been her goal now hung more than four light-years astern, lost in the deep infrared. We are as far from the Centauri suns as that barren triumvirate is from our sun, the priest told himself. But the crew of the Cross have not abandoned themselves totally to despair.
His sled’s vector altered marginally, and his velocity vanished back into the fabric of spacetime. With the faintest clink, magnetic docking rods joined their counterparts jutting from the rim of the lock.
‘I’ve arrived. Nobody in sight. Do you want me to wait?’
‘There’s been no further word from the crew, Father.’ Only once had the eerie dirge from the ship given way to sense, and that had been to insist that only one visitor would be permitted to enter the Cross. The Monastery was hardly equipped to mount a boarding party against the will of the incumbents. Silverman heard the clear Latin of Cardinal Madrazo come into his channel. ‘I doubt that anything will be gained by lingering at this point, Father Silverman. Go with God.’
‘Deo gratias,’ said Silverman, releasing his webbing.
As planned, the craft had been rotated two light-years from Earth so that its engines faced the direction of flight. The axial shaft was a cylinder seven hundred metres long. Its huge docking station was not pressurized, nor was the shaft itself, with its twin maglev buckets capable of zooming like bullets from the dock to the drive engineering sections. This air lock, though, gave directly into a curved corridor leading radially to the first of the twenty contiguous inflated toroids, the tyre-shaped habitats which made up the outer shell of the starship.
Silverman placed one of several radio repeaters on the inner wall of the airlock. The instruments would maintain his direct link with the Loyola despite the massive shielding that otherwise would block his broadcast. Invisibly, the repeater began diffusing its multiplex threads of conducting crystal through the hull. The lock cycled shut. Silverman waited for his radio to come back on line.
Air hissed into the compartment. He declined to shed his suitskin. The absence of rotation on the habitat was alarming, perhaps even more so than the crew’s silence. During the one g acceleration which had brought the Cross to half the velocity of light no spin was needed: ceilings became temporary floors. But burn had terminated in the first year of flight. Now, in free fall, pseudo-gravity was essential to both physical and mental health. Perhaps spin had been taken off to effect repairs, but that dismal attempt must have been made a decade previously. Who would live in free fall by choice?
A frantic voice told him: ‘Maintain your suit integrity! Don’t go ambient, there’s something wrong with the air.’
‘Okay, I’m fine, still sealed. My gross readouts show normative on pressure, constituents and ionization. What do you have?’
‘Protein decomposition products. Something’s rotting, Father. It can’t be the algae beds.’
‘Toxicity?’
‘We’re waiting for the micro-organisms. But even if the air’s not poisonous, the stench’d have you puking your guts out.’ There was a pause. The same voice, thin with self-reproach, added: ‘Sorry, Father.’
Fear spurted in Silverman’s blood. Not only are they all dead, he thought numbly, but they have perished within sight of rescue. How long? Days? A week? The coincidence crushed his spirit. Flexing his legs against the slight resistance of the suitskin, the priest launched himself into the narrow corridor and ascended, in a space with only a single polarity of direction, toward the corpses of mankind’s first stellar dream.
‘They must have been dead for years,’ a voice rebuked him. ‘Our analysis suggests that hibernation failed when the crew died, but that one or more individuals survived. Temperature was run down throughout the ship to arrest decay. Our arrival triggered the resuscitation of the man who warned us off. With the Cross back to operational status, the remains have begun to putrefy. The shock has almost certainly unhinged him, Father Silverman. We advise caution in your approach.’
The first five habitat rings were unbreached but vacant to quick inspection. Silverman passed from one to the next through locks designed to seal rigidly if a ring were ruptured. The sixth torus was not empty. Gigantic translucent jellyfish hung in the air, globes of dead, pale tissue like masses of frog spawn. He battered his way through the extraordinary bubbles of decaying organic matter. At the touch of his hand a globe would tremble, shatter, spill into spherical fragments and glistening streamers. There were no corpses, but his sensors told him that death was everywhere. His mind closed in on itself, awash with dread.
In the next ring, and the one after that, the slimy organic substance was confined by surface tension to vast plastic sheets arrayed on stanchions in labyrinthine three-dimensional tunnels like an Escher paradox. Bulkheads of polyurethane foam had been torn out, equipment unbolted where possible and shoved aside to make room for this surreal handiwork.
It could not have been done in days, or months. The Monastery’s analysis was wrong. Clearly, someone had laboured for years to construct the maze. Tubes strung across and between the sheets leaked a colourless liquid onto the living culture. It was a kind of hydroponic nurturing apparatus, built in a hurry with no concern for aesthetics or rational planning beyond some incomprehensible urge to get. the maximum amount of biotic material into production.
Near the lock giving onto the ninth ring, a hairless man floated upside down. With fantastic agility, he righted himself as Silverman pushed into the new labyrinth. He wore an old-fashioned hard suit with its own oxygen supply. ‘I know, messy I agree, it’s getting a bit beyond me,’ he said apologetically to the priest, his voice going out through the beamcast to interception by the Monastery’s remote sensors and coming back through the repeaters. ‘It’s a good thing someone’s here finally to help me. I recycle the tissue every few months, but it does pile up. You’re just in time, actually.’ The tone of lament was quite gone. He stopped speaking and regarded Silverman suspiciously. ‘You’re not a Muslim, are you?’
Sickened with pity, the priest told him: ‘No. My name is Raphael Silverman. What happ—’
The man’s toes touched the deck for an instant and propelled him away like an aerial fish. ‘A perfidious Jew! Ah, now I see it. Lucifer has his minions. But these little ones are God’s.’
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Silverman said. His tongue and mouth were dry. The Monastery whispered to him: ‘We have voiceprint identification. He’s Dr Martin Herbert Baldwin, one of the four reproduction engineers. Stress Evaluator indicates acute paranoia. His records list Dr Baldwin as a practising Catholic, which might facilitate matters.’
‘Martin, I’m a priest.’ He put authority into his tone. ‘A Jesuit. I’m also a physicist. There’s nothing to fear.’
Baldwin’s body convulsed. Before he could tumble, he stilled the motion with one lightning touch to a stanchion. ‘That’s impossible. I’m hallucinating. Say something in Latin.’
Horror was building in Silverman. ‘Gloria Patri,’ he said, making a slow sign of the cross, ‘et Filio, et Spiritu Sancto.’
‘Amen,’ said the biologist, voice trembling. He lifted up his eyes and clasped his gloved hands. ‘O Lord, thank Thee for this miracle. May Thy work always be done. Now we can get through it in half the time,’ he explained sunnily to Silverman.
The priest asked, gently: ‘Is anyone else alive?’
Baldwin laughed uproariously, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ With a lurch of mood, he snapped: ‘Are you blind, your Holiness? These are the generations of Moab. Was it Moab? They’re all dead, your Grace. Even the frozen ones. God spared me alone, you see, in His great and bitter mercy. I was working in the shielded stock room when the magnets went. He has placed His mitre upon my head for the completion of
the universe. The number of the elect shall be one hundred and forty four thousand. I can assure you, we’ve passed that tally by a long chalk. How terrible was that fall, when one third of the hosts of heaven went unto perdition. And it is left to us to replace their number. Frail mortals, doomed by Adam’s curse to damnation unless we are reborn of water and the spirit. If I am to be damned to Hell everlasting for the work of purification I count it a fair exchange, to have brought so many to His glory. Romans 9: iii. Now you must help me with this batch. You know the words, of course. I’ll start the water running. We must use a general rite, the bare matter and form, you’d need a bloody microscope and a thousand years to do it on an individual basis.’
The madman darted to a jumble of hastily welded taps and altered the flow. Turning his back on Silverman, he faced the glistening sheets of organic culture and raised his right hand in a blessing. ‘Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii—’
A frenzy of revulsion and grief swept through Silverman as at last he understood what abomination the engineer had contrived. With a frigid, will-less clarity, he grasped that Southern Cross had become the vastest slaughterhouse ever imagined by the human mind. When his paralysis had passed, he moved with clumsy force, tears pouring unchecked, to hold down the demented biologist.
‘They’re human zygotes. Aren’t they?’ Silverman wept. ‘Master of the Universe, why have You permitted this atrocity?’
Baldwin offered no resistance. The two men spun, locked together. One heavy boot swung inadvertently in the restricted space to catch and rip a sagging plastic sheet. Jelly peeled slowly from it in an obscene pale flap.
‘Blastulas,’ the man agreed with some pride. ‘A hundred billion of them to the square metre. I cloned them from the frozen embryos. Trillions of separate human souls conceived each week and dispatched to the heavenly ranks in a state of grace. They never know sin, poor little things—’
‘Shut up!’ Silverman shrieked.
Grief and horror possessed him utterly. How long had this holocaust persisted? Years? It was inconceivable. It was diabolical, literally. His hand rebounded from a sheet coated with microscopic cloned human embryos, and he drew it back in a paroxysm of distress.
If a single abortion was the murder of a defenceless infant, how much more unspeakably appalling was this manufacture and destruction of numberless human lives? And the ghastly rationality of it stopped his throat, came near to stopping his heart.
For Baldwin’s rite of baptism was theologically sound, efficacious, capable according to doctrine and dogma of ushering these teeming trillions of souls into God’s grace and salvation. Human volition had been stolen from them, but they were spared the torments of temptation and mortal sin. When Baldwin sluiced them away, his monstrous murder would dispatch more souls into the Kingdom of Heaven than the instantaneous extermination of all life on Earth.
If the insignia of sanctity was the number of souls one fetched to God during one’s span, he thought with a terrible comedy close to insanity, then Dr Baldwin was overdue for canonization as the premier saint of Mother Church.
It can’t be true, Silverman cried within his soul. That cannot be the meaning of it. I repudiate You. If You exist, if You have allowed this, that must be its meaning, and You are indeed from the sitra achra. From the Other Side it is Your Face I see leering. No. This meat is no more than the simulacrum of human flesh. It has never been quickened with spirit. Doctrine and dogma are mistaken. Your universe is a cesspool. You are the Master of Lies, the Father of Dung.
Damned in his own apostasy, Raphael Silverman, S.J., permitted his last hold on consciousness to slip free.
~ * ~
IX
Atta vechartanu mikol ba’amim Thou hast chosen us from all peoples
Hebrew holy-day prayer
~ * ~
Silverman walks steadily into the City.
Like a compulsive tropism acting at the level of his cells, the imperative tug of its architecture draws him in toward its centre.
It is a maze of sensuous delights. If, earlier, its design has seemed monumental, integral, now his perspective discovers fine detail endlessly ornamented, an intoxicating contrast to the barren confines of steel and glass which extend without longing into the grey skies of High Earth. Chan is correct: this is a place meant to be lived in, by beings not utterly different from humanity. Silverman passes through merry forums open to the breeze and galleries spiny as the skeletons of abyssal fish, through alleys crooked and charming as any in a medieval town, crowded with what can only be tiny shops and inns, and bowers meant to be choked with blooms; arcades and cloisters he finds on every side; shadowed snuggeries which tempt him to enter for refreshment; gabled porches and piazzas decorated as lavishly as St Maclou in Rouen, drapes of electric flame which do not burn, like autumn leaves burnished by the sun, filigrees of brass and iron and silver and gold and platinum, tenements which stand soothingly apart in their own breathing space, and towers which might contain opera halls or automated factories or power stations or themselves simply be works of civic art; minarets that rise in dappled courtyards and shafts shot with delicate veins like translucent marble.
Silverman comes into the heart of the City.
The loveliness of the place has overwhelmed him. He weeps like a child. Light cascades: it is a vision of the City of God.
And he finds that he is motionless. Here the City has permitted wild grass to grow and blow unhindered. He waits in despair.
The City speaks. It is like joyous thunder, yet it enters his mind with the fragile clarity of a single silver bell. Silverman knows that he is listening to the ones who have left the City behind them.
‘Brother: welcome!’ says the voice of the City, and in a blinding moment of understanding the Jesuit realizes for the first time in his life, in its assuaging, the height and depth of his arid loneliness. Light enfolds him.
‘There was a star,’ the City says.
—and the poignance of that simplicity has the sweet melancholy of a lover’s cry in the room of his absent beloved.
‘Look upon our City,’ the cherubim instruct him. ‘We have put into its making everything of ourselves, for it was our home and the expression of our being. It is the sun’s bright warmth, and sweet air, and food shared amid laughter with friends. It is the glory of discovery always renewed. It is everything we have worshipped: grace and joy and virtue. For this was how we saw ourselves, and the universe which gave us birth.
‘But look again, for this also is the City—’
For an instant the campaniles stand brighter against the sky. And then they are gone. All the City is expunged.
Silverman jerks his lids closed against a reeling world. Vertigo brings bile to his throat. Slowly he opens his eyes again, and the malevolent statues glare down on him like demons.
Against the orange slash of the distant bluff, the other Jesuits are small figurines frozen in convulsive astonishment. The priest forces himself to regard the statues, to engage their depravity.
Tsung-Dao Chan has compared the creatures to gargoyles, but that is wide of the mark: there is nothing innately distorted or grotesque in the lean torsos. The builders of the City had been tailless pumas endowed with passion and intelligence: sleek, dark as night, bipedal, powerfully clawed, dexterous and able.
The first effigy depicts callous, brutal murder.
That it shows cats instead of human beings detracts not one atom from its force. Head thrown back on his iron-sinewed neck, the killer crouches over his small defenceless victim, excited to a pitch of cruel pleasure. In one taloned fist his serrated blade seems almost redundant; it sings toward the fallen cub’s throat, pent in mid-stroke only by the artisan’s eye, lusting without pity for the blood of the innocent. Silverman retches from the nightmare of Southern Cross, for the murderer’s victim is plainly a child. The statue is an archetypal slaughter of the innocent, the sin above all against Charity, against love.
The
Jesuit wrenches his gaze away. The second work strikes equally to his heart. From a clumsy scaffold jerks a gagging, swollen-eyed being, savage claws kicking uselessly for the support he has kicked away, his neck fractured and painfully twisted, the breath choking in his constricted breast. The creature has rejected Hope; he hurtles into oblivion and damnation by his own hand.
The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 24
