The last statue is the most appalling. This third alien commits no immediate crime against his brother, or his own flesh, yet his absolute ruin is scored in the tension of every muscle, the mask of his feline face, the upraised brandished fists. In his over-weening arrogance the creature rails against dependence, against limitation, against his creator. His fanatical eyes burn with his own glory. There is no nobility to him: he is Lucifer standing against God, doomed and laughing, sick with a pride which would eat and vomit back the universe.
Silverman hunches into himself, stricken. Unbidden, the Krias Shema prayer from his childhood comes to his lips: ‘May Michael be at my right hand; Gabriel at my left; before me, Uriel; behind me, Raphael; and above my head the divine presence of God.’
If the holograms had been desolating, this direct impact is entirely devastating. And yet the builders of the City had known and faced the sin which lay within their species, the sin of Satan and Adam repeated without end on world after world, Silverman guesses now, wasting the promise and freedom of creation. If they have surmounted the outward and compulsive expression of that primal crime, their partial victory has not allowed them to conceal that central corruption from themselves.
Abruptly, the Jesuit understands the source of his bitter pain. Between the horror of the sculpture and the grandeur of their temporal dwelling, there is no hint of immanent transcendence. Where is the Redeemer in this City? They hunger for salvation in every tormented guilty line of their art, as Silverman’s own butchered people had cried for the coming of the moshiach, and He has left them comfortless, stumbling in the wilderness.
‘This is our self-portrait,’ the City tells Silverman, compassionately closing away the vile things in lucent banners. ‘And the Star was manifest to us in the sky, showing the path we must follow.’
Bowed in humility, Silverman listens to the assent of the pagan Magi. For him there is no return to rapture: he is beyond all the emotions of joy. He listens, and he accepts. Finally, like his baptismal namesake, Thomas, shown a sign, he accepts.
‘So we are leaving our world,’ the voice says. ‘We are embarked on a pilgrimage which perhaps only our farthest descendants will see completed. But we are going, for He has shown us His truth, and directed us to the world of His incarnation. We leave our City in gift to you, brother wayfarer, in memory of our youth, as a compass to any who have not yet received the gift of His envoy.’
Even without the star-drive they have gone, Silverman tells himself again and again. They have cast themselves trustingly into an Exodus two thousand years in the going and hardly begun. His eyes burn with tears. He looks at the sky, at the stars beyond the bright sky, to the boundless dark desert where a race of men follow the Star of Bethlehem to their journey’s end.
‘It is our glory,’ whispers the City, ‘that He has chosen us to follow His Sign—for we are the least of His children.’
Raphael Silverman is oblivious to the City’s splendour. He sees in imagination only the dust-pitted ships, and the beings who will come like great pumas to High Earth, or its successor, to find their God murdered and risen from the impotent clutch of the sitra achra, the Other Side.
‘We will be waiting for you,’ Silverman cries aloud, to the City, the stars, to his alien kin. It is a promise he makes them. ‘We will be waiting.’
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The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 25
