I hesitate.
“A fact-finding mission,” I say.
“Ah. Is that really so? Can I be of any help, d’ye think?”
It is several more winy lunches, and a little boat-trip to some nearby islands fragrant with masses of intoxicating purple blooms, before I am willing to begin taking Sandys into my confidence. I tell him that the Order has sent me into the Dark to study and report on the ways of life that are evolving on the new worlds. He seems untroubled by that, though Ilya Alexandrovitch might have had me shot for such an admission.
Later, I tell him about the apparent deviations from the planned scope of the Mission that are the immediate reason for my journey.
“You mean, going out beyond the hundred-light-year zone?”
“Yes.”
“That’s pretty amazing, that anyone would go there.”
“We have indications that it’s happening.”
“Really,” he says.
“And on Zima,” I continue, “I picked up a story that somebody here on Entrada has been preaching ventures into the far Dark. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”
His only overt reaction is a light frown, quickly erased. Perhaps he has nothing to tell me. Or else we have reached the point, perhaps, beyond which he is unwilling to speak.
But some hours later he revives the topic himself. We are on our way back to harbor, sunburned and a little tipsy from an outing to one of the prettiest of the local islands, when he suddenly says, “I remember hearing something about that preacher you mentioned before.”
I wait, not saying anything.
“My wife told me about him. There was somebody going around talking about far voyages, she said.” New color comes to his face, a deep red beneath the bronze. “I must have forgotten about it when we were talking before.” In fact he must know that I think him disingenuous for withholding this from me all afternoon. But I make no attempt to call him on that. We are still testing each other.
I ask him if he can get more information for me, and he promises to discuss it with his wife. Then he is absent for a week, making a circuit of the outer rim of the archipelago to deliver freight. When he returns, finally, he brings with him an unusual golden brandy from one of the remote islands as a gift for me, but my cautious attempt to revive our earlier conversation runs into a familiar sort of Entradan evasiveness. It is almost as though he doesn’t know what I’m referring to.
At length I say bluntly, “Have you had a chance to talk to your wife about that preacher?”
He looks troubled. “In fact, it slipped my mind.”
“Ah.”
“Tonight, maybe—”
“I understand that the man’s name is Oesterreich,” I say.
His eyes go wide.
“You know that, do you?”
“Help me, will you, Sandys? I’m the one who sent you to this place, remember? Your whole life here wouldn’t exist but for me.”
“That’s true. That’s very true.”
“Who’s Oesterreich?”
“I never knew him. I never had any dealings with him.”
“Tell me what you know about him.”
“A crazy man, he was.”
“Was?”
“He’s not here any more.”
I uncork the bottle of rare brandy, pour a little for myself, a more generous shot for Sandys.
“Where’d he go?” I ask.
He sips, reflectively. After a time he says, “I don’t know, your grace. That’s God’s own truth. I haven’t seen or heard of him in a couple of years. He chartered one of the other captains here, a man named Feraud, to take him to one of the islands, and that’s the last I know.”
“Which island?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think Feraud remembers?”
“I could ask him,” Sandys says.
“Yes. Ask him. Would you do that?”
“I could ask him, yes,” he says.
So it goes, slowly. Sandys confers with his friend Feraud, who hesitates and evades, or so Sandys tells me; but eventually Feraud finds it in him to recall that he had taken Oesterreich to Volcano Isle, three hours’ journey to the west. Sandys admits to me, now that he is too deep in to hold back, that he himself actually heard Oesterreich speak several times, that Oesterreich claimed to be in possession of some secret way of reaching worlds immensely remote from the settled part of the Dark.
“And do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. He seemed crazy to me.”
“Crazy how?”
“The look in his eye. The things he said. That it’s our destiny to reach the rim of the universe. That the Order holds us back out of its own timidity. That we must follow the Goddess Avatar, who beckons us onward to—”
“Who?”
His face flushes bright crimson. “The Goddess Avatar. I don’t know what she is, your grace. Honestly. It’s some cult he’s running, some new religion he’s made up. I told you he’s crazy. I’ve never believed any of this.”
There is a pounding in my temples, and a fierce ache behind my eyes. My throat has gone dry and not even Sandys’ brandy can soothe it.
“Where do you think Oesterreich is now?”
“I don’t know.” His eyes are tormented. “Honestly. Honestly. I think he’s gone from Entrada.”
“Is there a Velde transmitter station on Volcano Isle?”
He thinks for a moment. “Yes. Yes, there is.”
“Will you do me one more favor?” I ask. “One thing, and then I won’t ask any more.”
“Yes?”
“Take a ride over to Volcano Isle tomorrow. Talk with the people who run the Velde station there. See if you can find out where they sent Oesterreich.”
“They’ll never tell me anything like that.”
I put five shining coins in front of him, each one worth as much as he can make in a month’s ferrying.
“Use these,” I say. “If you come back with the answer, there are five more for you.”
“Come with me, your grace. You speak to them.”
“No.”
“You ought to see Volcano Isle. It’s a fantastic place. The center of it blew out thousands of years ago, and people live up on the rim, around a lagoon so deep nobody’s been able to find the bottom. I was meaning to take you there anyway, and—”
“You go,” I say. “Just you.”
After a moment he pockets the coins. In the morning I watch him go off in one of his boats, a small hydrofoil skiff. There is no word from him for two days, and then he comes to me at the hospice, looking tense and unshaven.
“It wasn’t easy,” he says.
“You found out where he went?”
“Yes.”
“Go on,” I urge, but he is silent, lips working but nothing coming out. I produce five more of the coins and lay them before him. He ignores them. This is some interior struggle.
He says, after a time, “We aren’t supposed to reveal anything about anything of this. I told you what I’ve already told you because I owe you. You understand that?”
“Yes.”
“You mustn’t ever let anyone know who gave you the information.”
“Don’t worry,” I say.
He studies me for a time. Then he says, “The name of the planet where Oesterreich went is Eden. It’s a seventeen-light-year hop. You won’t need lambda adjustment, coming from here. There’s hardly any differential. All right, your grace? That’s all I can tell you.” He stares at the coins and shakes his head. Then he runs out of the room, leaving them behind.
Eden turns out to be no Eden at all. I see a spongy, marshy landscape, a gray sodden sky, a raw, half-built town. There seem to be two suns, a faint yellow-white one and a larger reddish one. A closer look reveals that the system here is like the Lalande one: the reddish one is not really a star but a glowing substellar mass about the size of Jupiter. Eden is one of its moons. What we like to speak of in the Order as the new Earths of the Dark are in fact scarcely Earthlike at all, I am coming to realize: all they have in common with the mother world is a tolerably breathable atmosphere and a manageable gravitational pull. How can we speak of a world as an Earth when its sun is not yellow but white or red or green, or there are two or three or even four suns in the sky all day and all night, or the primary source of warmth is not even a sun but a giant planet-like ball of hot gas?