The surgeons were bending low over the exposed brain down there. Vorst could not see what they were doing. A pickup embedded in a surgical instrument relayed the scene to a lambent screen on the level of the viewing gallery, but even the enlarged image did not tell Vorst much. Baffled and bored, he retained his look of lively interest all the same.
Quietly he pushed a communicator stud on his armrest and said, “Is Coordinator Kirby going to get here soon?”
“He’s talking to Venus, sir.”
“Who’s ho speaking to? Lazarus or Mondschein?”
“Mondschein, sir. I’ll tell him to come to you as soon as he’s off.”
Vorst smiled. Protocol suggested that such high-level negotiations be carried on at the administrative level, between the executives and not between the prophets. So the second-in-commands were speaking: Hemispheric Coordinator Reynolds Kirby on behalf of the Vorsters of Earth, and Christopher Mondschein for the Harmonists who ran Venus. But in time it would be necessary to close the deal with a conference between those most closely in tune with the Eternal Oneness, and that would be the task of Vorst and Lazarus.
…to close the deal…
A tremor pulled Vorst’s right hand into a sudden claw. The acolyte swung around attentively, ready to jab buttons until he had restored the Founder’s metabolic equilibrium. Grimly Vorst compelled the hand to relax.
“I’m all right,” he insisted.
…to open the sky…
They were so close to the end now that it had all begun to seem like a dream. A century of scheming, playing chess with unborn antagonists, rearing a fantastic edifice of theocracy on a single slender, arrogant hope—Was it madness, Vorst wondered, to wish to reshape the pattern of history?
Was it monstrous, he asked himself, to succeed? On the operating table, the patient’s leg came swimming up out of a sea of swathing and kicked fitfully and convulsively at the air. The anesthetist’s fingers played over his console, and the esper who was standing by for such an emergency went into silent action. There was a flurry of activity about the table.
In that moment a tall, weathered-looking old man entered the gallery and presented himself to Vorst.
“How’s the operation going?” Reynolds Kirby asked.
“The patient just died,” said Vorst. “Things seemed to be going so well, too.”
two
Kirby had not expected much from the operation. He had discussed it fully with Vorst the day before; though he was no scientist himself, the Coordinator tried to keep abreast of the work being done at the research center. His own sphere of responsibility was administrative; it was Kirby’s job to oversee the far-flung secular activities of the religious cult that virtually ruled the planet. It was almost ninety years since Kirby himself had been converted, and had watched the cult grow mighty.
Political power, though it was useful to wield, was not supposed to be the Brotherhood’s goal. The essence of the movement was its scientific program, centering on the facilities at Santa Fe. Here, over the decades, an unsurpassable factory of miracles had been constructed, lubricated by the cash contributions of billions of tithing Vorsters on every continent. And the miracles had been forthcoming. The regeneration processes now insured a predictable life span of three or four centuries for the newborn, perhaps more, for no one could be certain that immortality had been achieved until a few millennia of testing had elapsed. The Brotherhood could offer a reasonable facsimile of life eternal, at any rate, and that was a sufficient redemption of the promissory note on which the whole movement had been founded a hundred years before.
The other goal, though—the stars—had given the Brotherhood a harder pursuit. Man was locked into his solar system by the limiting velocity of light. Chemical-fueled rockets and even ion-drive ships simply took too long to get about. Mars and Venus were within easy reach, but the cheerless outer planets were not, and the round trip to the nearest star would take a few decades by current technology, nine years even at the very best. So man had transformed Mars into a habitable world, and he had transformed himself into something capable of inhabiting Venus. He mined the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, paid occasional visits to Pluto, and sent robots down to examine Mercury and the gas giants. And looked hopelessly to the stars.
The laws of relativity governed the motions of real bodies through real space, but they did not necessarily apply to the events of the paranormal world. To Noel Vorst, it had seemed that the only route to the stars was the extrasensory one. So he had gathered espers of all varieties at Santa Fe, and for generations now had carried on breeding programs and genetic manipulations. The Brotherhood had spawned an interesting variety of espers, but none with the talent of transporting physical bodies through space. While on Venus the telekinetic mutation had happened spontaneously, an ironic byproduct of the adaptation of human life to that world.
Venus was beyond direct Vorster control. The Harmonists of Venus had the pushers that Vorst needed to reach into the galaxy. They showed little interest, though, in collaborating with the Vorsters on an expedition. For weeks now Reynolds Kirby had been negotiating with his opposite number on Venus, attempting to bring about an agreement.
Meanwhile the surgeons at Santa Fe had never given up their dream of creating pushers out of Earthmen, thus making the cooperation of the unpredictable Venusians unnecessary. The synaptic-rearrangement project, flowering at last, had come to the stage where a human subject would go under the beam.
“It won’t work,” Vorst had said to Kirby. “They’re still fifty years away from anything.”
“I don’t understand it, Noel. The Venusians have the gene for telekinesis, don’t they? Why can’t we just duplicate it? Considering all we’ve done with the nucleic acids—”
Vorst smiled. “There’s no ‘gene for telekinesis,’ as such, you know. It’s part of a constellation of genetic patterns. We’ve been trying consciously to duplicate it for thirty years, and we aren’t even close. We’ve also been trying a random approach, since that’s how the Venusians got the ability. No luck there, either.
And then there’s this synapse business: alter the brain itself, not the genes. That may get us somewhere, eventually. But I can’t wait another fifty years.”
“You’ll live that long, certainly.”
“Yes,” Vorst agreed, “but I still can’t wait any longer. The Venusians have the men we need. It’s time to win them to our purposes.”
Patienty Kirby had wooed the heretics. There were signs of progress in the negotiations now. In view of the failure of the operation, the need for an agreement with Venus was more urgent.
“Come with me,” Vorst said, as the dead patient was wheeled away. “They’re testing that gargoyle today, and I want to watch.”
Kirby followed the Founder out of the amphitheater. Acolytes were close by in case of trouble. Vorst, these days, rarely tried to walk any more, and rolled along in his cradling net of webfoam. Kirby still preferred to use his feet, though he was nearly as ancient as Vorst. The sight of the two of them promenading through the plazas of the research center always stirred attention.
“You aren’t disturbed over the failure just now?” Kirby asked.
“Why should I be? I told you it was too soon for success.”
“What about this gargoyle? Any hope?”
“Our hope,” Vorst said quietly, “is Venus. They already have the pushers.”
“Then why keep trying to develop them here?”
“Momentum. The Brotherhood hasn’t slowed down in a hundred years. I’m not closing any avenues now. Not even the hopeless ones. It’s all a matter of momentum.”