Kirby remained mute. He sensed that somehow Vorst had altered the balance of power between the two cults, that the Harmonists, who had been on a rising curve ever since gaining possession of Venus and its rich lode of capers, had been brought to heel. But he did not know how it had been accomplished, and he did not care to try again to learn.
Vorst was using his communicator. He looked up at Kirby.
“They’ve got another burnout” he said. “I want to be there. Come with me, yes?”
“Of course,” Kirby said.
He accompanied the Founder through the maze of tubes. They emerged in the burnout ward. An esper lay dying, a boy this time, perhaps Hawaiian, his body jerking as though he were skewered on cords.
Vorst said, “A pity you’ve got no esping, Kirby. You’d see a glimpse of tomorrow.”
“I’m too old to regret it now,” Kirby said.
Vorst rolled forward and gestured to a waiting caper. The link was made. Kirby watched. What was Vorst experiencing now? The Founder’s lips were moving, almost writhing in a kind of sneer, pulling back from the gums with each twitch of the esper’s body. The boy was shuttling along the time-track, so they said. To Kirby that meant nothing. And Vorst, somehow, was shuttling with him, seeing a clouded view of the world on the other side of the wall of time.
Now—now—back—forth—
For a moment it seemed to Kirby that he, too, had joined the linkup and was riding the time-track as the esper’s other passenger. Was that the chaos of yesterday? And the golden glow of tomorrow? Now—now—damn you, you old schemer, what have you done to me?—Lazarus, rising above all else, Lazarus who wasn’t even real, only some android stew cooked up in an underground laboratory at Vorst’s command, a useful puppet, Kirby thought, Lazarus had grasped tomorrow and was stealing it—The contact broke. The esper was dead.
“We’ve wasted another one,” Vorst muttered. The Founder looked at Kirby. “Are you sick?” he asked.
“No. Tired.”
“Get some rest. Six history spools and climb into a relaxer tank. We can ease up now. Lazarus is off our hands.”
Kirby nodded. Someone drew a sheet over the dead esper’s body. In an hour the boy’s neurons would be in refrigeration somewhere in an adjoining building. Slowly, walking as if eight centuries and not just one weighed upon him, Kirby followed Vorst from the room. Night had fallen, and the stars over New Mexico had their peculiar hard brightness, and Venus, low against the mountainous horizon, was the brightest of all. They had their Lazarus, up there. They had lost a martyr and had gained a prophet. And, Kirby was beginning to realize, the whole tribe of heretics had been swept neatly into Vorst’s pocket. The old man was damnable. Kirby huddled down into his robe and kept pace, with an effort, as Vorst wheeled himself toward his office. His head ached from that brief, unfathomable contact with the esper. But in ten minutes it was better.
He thought of going to a chapel to pray. But what was the use? Why kneel before the Blue Fire? He need only go to Vorst for a blessing—Vorst, his mentor for almost eight decades. Vorst, who could make him feel still like a child, Vorst, who had brought Lazarus forth from the dead.
Five
To Open the Sky
2164
one
The surgical amphitheater was a chilly horseshoe lit by a pale violet glow. At the north end, windows on the level of the second gallery admitted frosty New Mexico sun-light. From where he sat, overlooking the operating table, Noel Vorst could see the bluish mountains in the middle distance beyond the confines of the research center. The mountains did not interest him. Neither did what was taking place on the operating table. But he kept his lack of interest to himself.
Vorst had not needed to attend the operation in person, of course. He knew already that a successful outcome was improbable, and so did everyone else. But the Founder was 144 years old, and thought it useful to appear in public as often as his strength could sustain the effort, it did not do to have people think he had lapsed into senility.
Down below, the surgeons were clustered about a bare brain. Vorst had watched them lift the dome of a skull and thrust their scalpels of light deep into the wrinkled gray mass. There were ten billion neurons in that block of tissue, and an infinity of axonal terminals and dendritic receptors. The surgeons hoped to rearrange the synaptic nets of that brain, altering the protein-molecular switchgear to render the patient more useful to Vorst’s plan.
Folly, the old man thought. He hid his pessimism and sat quietly, listening to the pulsing of the blood in his own glossy artificial arteries.
What they were doing down there was remarkable, of course. Summoning all the resources of modem microsurgery, the leading men of the Noel Vorst Center for the Biological Sciences were altering the protein-protein molecular recognition patterns within a human brain. Twist the circuits about a bit: change the transsynaptic structures to build a better link between pre- and postsynaptic membranes; shunt individual synaptic inputs from one dendritic tree to another; in short, reprogram the brain to make it capable of doing what Noel Vorst wanted it to be capable of doing.
Which was to serve as the propulsive force needed to hurl a team of explorers across the gulf of light-years to another star.
It was an extraordinary project. For some fifty years the surgeons here at Vorst’s Santa Fe research center had prepared for it by meddling with the brains of cats and monkeys and dolphins. Now they had at last begun operating on human subjects. The patient on the table was a middle-grade esper, a precog with poor timebinding ability; his life expectancy was on the order of six months, and then a burnout could be anticipated. The precog knew all about that, which was why he had volunteered to be the subject. The most skilful surgeons in the world were at work on him.
There were only two things wrong with the project, Vorst knew: It was not likely to succeed.
And it was not at all necessary in the first place.
You did not tell a group of dedicated men, however that their life’s work was pointless. Besides, there was always the faint hope that they might artificially create a pusher—a telekinetic—down there. So Vorst dutifully attended the operation. The men on the amphitheater floor knew that the Founder’s numinous presence was with them. Though they did not look up toward the gallery where Vorst sat, they knew the withered but still vigorous old man was smiling benignly down on them, cushioned against the pull of Earth by the webfoam cradle that sheltered his ancient limbs.
The lenses of his eyes were synthetic. The coils of his intestines had been fashioned from laboratory polymers. The stoutly pumping heart came from an organ bank. Little remained of the original Noel Vorst but the brain itself, which was intact though awash with the anticoagulants that preserved it from disabling strokes.
“Are you comfortable, sir?” the pale young acolyte at his side asked.
“Perfectly. Are you?”
The acolyte smiled at Vorst’s little joke. He was only twenty years old, and full of pride because it was his turn to accompany the Founder on his daily round. Vorst liked young people about him. They were tremendously in awe of him, naturally, but they managed to be warm and respectful without canonizing him. Within his body there throbbed the contributions of many a young Vorster volunteer: a film of lung tissue from one, a retina from another, kidneys from a pair of twins. He was a patchwork man, who carded the flesh of his movement about with him.