“Bring us a fish,” he told the boy.
“Yes, Brother Christopher.”
There was silence. Veins throbbed on the boy’s forehead. In the center of the lake the water boiled, white foam splashing upward. A creature appeared, scaly and dull gold in color. It hovered in the air, ten feet of frustrated fury, its great underslung jaw opening and closing impotently. The beast soared toward the group on the shore.
“Not that one!” Mondschein gasped.
The boy laughed. The huge fish slipped back into the lake. An instant later something opalescent throbbed on the ground at Martell’s feet—a toothy, snapping thing a foot and a half long, with fins that nearly were legs, and a fan-like tall in which wicked spikes stirred and quivered. Martell leaped away, but he was in no danger, he realized. The fish’s skull caved in as though smitten by an invisible fist, and it lay still. Martell knew terror in that moment. The slender, laughing boy, who had so mischievously pulled that monster from the waters and then this equally deadly little thing, could kill with a flicker of his frontal lobes.
Martell stared at Mondschein. “Your pushers—are they all Venusians?”
“All.”
“I hope you can keep them under control.”
“I hope so, too,” Mondschein replied. He seized the dead fish carefully by a stubby fin, holding it so the tail-spikes pointed away from him. “A great delicacy,” he said. “Once we remove the poison sacs, of course. We’ll catch two or three more and have a devilfish dinner tonight to celebrate your conversion, Brother Martell.”
eight
They gave him a room, and they gave him menial jobs to do, and in their spare time they instructed him in the tenets of Transcendent Harmony. Martell found the room sufficient and the labor unobjectionable, but it was a more difficult matter to swallow the theology. He could not pretend, to himself or to them, that it had any meaning for him. Warmed-over Christianity, a dollop of Islam, a tinge of latter-day Buddhism—all spread over a structure borrowed shamelessly from Vorst—it was an unpalatable mixture for Martell. There was syncretism enough in the Vorster teachings, but Martell accepted those because he had been born to them. Schooling himself in heresy was a different matter.
They began with Vorst, accepting him as a prophet just as Christianity respected Moses and Islam honored Jesus. But, of course, there was the later dispensation, represented by the figure of David Lazarus. Vorster writings made no mention of Lazarus. Martell knew of him only from his studies in the history of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, which mentioned Lazarus in passing as a tangential figure, an early supporter of Vorst’s and then an early dissenter.
But Vorst lived, and, so said both groups, he would live forever, in tune with the cosmos, the First Immortal. Lazarus was dead, a martyr to honesty, cruelly betrayed and slain by the domineering Vorsters in their moment of triumph on Earth.
The Book of Lazarus told the sad story. Martell twitched beneath his skin as he read it: Lazarus was trusting and without guile. But the men whose hearts were hard came upon him and slew him in the night, and fed his body to the converter so that not even a molecule remained. And when Vorst learned of their deed, he wept and said, “I wish you had slain me instead, for now you have given him an immortality he can never lose…”
Martell could find nothing in the Harmonist scriptures that was actually discreditable to Vorst. Even the assassination of
Lazarus itself clearly was shown to be the work of underlings, carried out without Vorst’s knowledge or desire. And through the writings ran an expression of hope that one day the faith would be reunited, though it was stressed that the Harmonists must submit to unity only out of a position of strength, and in complete equality.
A few months before, Martell would have regarded their pretensions as absurd. On Earth they were a pip-squeak movement losing members from year to year. Now, among them if not entirely of them, he saw that he had badly underestimated their power. Venus was theirs. The high-caste natives might boast and swagger, but they were no longer the masters. There were espers among the downtrodden lower-caste Venusians—pushers, no less—and they had given their destinies into Harmonist hands.
Martell worked. He learned. He listened. And he feared.
The stormy season came. From the eternal clouds there burst tongues of lightning that set all Venus ablaze. Torrents of bitter rain flailed the flat plains. Trees five hundred feet tall were ripped from the ground and hurled great distances. From time to time, high-casters arrived at the chapel to sneer or to threaten, and in the shrieking gales they roared their blustering defiance, while within the building grinning low-caste boys waited to defend their teachers if necessary. Once Martell saw three high-caste men thrown twenty yards back from the entrance as they tried to break in. “A stroke of lightning,” they told one another. “We’re lucky to be alive.”
In the spring came warmth. Stripping to his alien skin, Martell worked in the fields, Bradlaugh and Lazarus beside him. He did not yet teach at all. He was well versed by now in the Harmonist teachings, but it was all from the outside in, and a seemingly impermeable barrier of skepticism prevented it from getting deeper.
Then, on a steamy day when sweat rolled in rivers from the altered pores of the four former Earthmen at the Harmonist chapel, Brother Leon Bradlaugh joined the blessed company of martyrs. It happened swiftly. They were in the fields, and a shadow crossed above them, and a silent voice within Martell screamed, “Watch out!”
He could not move. But this was not his day to die. Something plummeted from the sky, something heavy and leather-winged, and Martell saw a beak a yard long plunge into Bradlaugh’s chest, and there was the fountaining of coppery blood. Bradlaugh lay outstretched with the shrike on him, and the great beak was withdrawn, and Martell heard a sound of rending and tearing.
They gave the last rites to what was left of Bradlaugh. Brother Christopher Mondschein presided, and called Martell to his side afterward.
“There are only three of us now,” he said. “Will you teach, Brother Martell?”
“I’m not one of you.”
“You wear a green tunic. You know our creed. Do you still think of yourself as a Vorster, Brother?”
“I don’t know what I am,” answered Martell. “I need to think about this.”
“Give me your answer soon. There’s much to be done here, Brother.”
Martell did not realize that he would know within a day where he really stood. A day after Bradlaugh’s funeral the regular thrice-weekly passenger ship from Mars arrived. Martell knew nothing of it until Mondschein came to him and said, “Take one of the boys in the car, and do it quickly. A man needs saving!”
Martell did not ask questions. Somehow, news had traveled down a chain of espers, and it was his task simply to obey. He entered the car. One of the little Venusian acolytes slipped in beside him.
“Which way?” Martell asked.
The boy gestured. Martell thumbed the starter. The car sped down the road, toward the airport. When they had gone two and a half miles, the boy grunted a command to halt. The car stopped.
A figure in a blue tunic stood by the side of the road, his back to the bole of a mighty tree. Two suitcases lay open on the high-way, and a razor-backed beast with a flattened snout and boar-like tusks was rooting through them, while its mate charged the newly arrived Vorster. The beleaguered man was kicking and lashing at the beast.
The boy hopped from the car. Without sign of strain, he caused the two animals to rise and slam into trees on the far side of the road. They dropped to the ground, looking dazed but determined. The boy levitated them again and struck their heads together. When they fell this time, they swung around and fled into the underbrush.