The Master says, “I was too harsh yesterday, and even blasphemous.” The map behind him is aglow once again, displaying the inner sphere of the galaxy and the lines marking the network of the Mission, as it had the day before. The Master himself is glowing too, his soft skin ruddy as a baby’s, his eyes agleam. How old is he? A hundred fifty? Two hundred? “The map, after all, shows us the face of God,” he says. “If the map is inadequate, it simply reveals the inadequacies of our own perceptions. But should we condemn it, then? Hardly, any more than we should condemn ourselves for not being gods. We should revere it, rather, flawed though it may be, because it is the best approximation that we can ever make of the reality of the Divine.”
“The face of God?”
“What is God, if not the Great Totality? And how can we expect to see and comprehend the Totality of the Totality in a single glance?” The Master smiles. These are not thoughts that he has just had for the first time, nor can his complete reversal of yesterday’s outburst be a spontaneous one. He is playing with me. “God is eternal motion through infinite space. He is the cosmos as it was twelve billion years ago and as it was twelve billion years from now, all in the same instant. This map you see here is our pitiful attempt at a representation of something inherently incapable of being represented; but we are to be praised for making an attempt, however foredoomed, at doing that which cannot be done.”
I nod. I stare. What could I possibly say?
“When we experience the revelation of God,” the Master continues softly, “what we receive is not the communication of a formula about a static world, which enables us to be at rest, but rather a sense of the power of the Creator, which sets us in motion even as He is in motion.”
I think of Dante, who said, “In His will is our peace.” Is there a contradiction here? How can “motion” be “peace”? Why is the Master telling me all this? Theology has never been my specialty, nor the specialty of my House in general, and he knows that. The abstruse nature of this discussion is troublesome to me. My eyes rest upon the Master, but their focus changes, so that I am looking beyond him, to red Antares and blue Rigel and fiery blue-white Vega, blazing at me from the wall.
The Master says, “Our Mission, you must surely agree, is an aspect of God’s great plan. It is His way of enabling us to undertake the journey toward Him.”
“Of course.”
“Then whatever thwarts the design of the Mission must be counter to the will of God, is that not so?”
It is not a question. I am silent again, waiting.
He gestures toward the screen. “I would think that you know this pattern of lights and lines better than you do that of the palm of your hand.”
“So I do.”
“What about this one?”
The Master touches a control. The pattern suddenly changes: the bright symmetrical network linking the inner stars is sundered, and streaks of light now skid wildly out of the center toward the far reaches of the galaxy, like errant particles racing outward in a photomicrograph of an atomic reaction. The sight is a jarring one: balance overthrown, the sky untuned, discordancy triumphant. I wince and lean back from it as though he has slapped my face.
“Ah. You don’t like it, eh?”
“Your pardon. It seems like a desecration.”
“It is,” he says. “Exactly so.”
I feel chilled. I want him to restore the screen to its proper state. But he leaves the shattered image where it is.
He says, “This is only a probability projection, you understand. Based on early fragmentary reports from the farther outposts, by way of the Order’s relay station on Lalande 21185. We aren’t really sure what’s going on out there. What we hope, naturally, is that our projections are inaccurate and that the plan is being followed after all. Harder data will be here soon.”
“Some of those lines must reach out a thousand light-years!”
“More than that.”
“Nothing could possibly have gotten so far from Earth in just the hundred years or so that we’ve been—”
“These are projections. Those are vectors. But they seem to be telling us that some carrier ships have been aimed beyond the predetermined targets, and are moving through the Dark on trajectories far more vast than anything we intend.”
“But the plan—the Mission—”
His voice begins to develop an edge again. “Those whom we, acting through your House, have selected to implement the plan are very far from home, Lord Magistrate. They are no longer subject to our control. If they choose to do as they please once they’re fifty light-years away, what means do we have of bringing them into check?”
“I find it very hard to believe that any of the colonists we’ve sent forth would be capable of setting aside the ordinances of Darklaw,” I say, with perhaps too much heat in my voice.
What I have done, I realize, is to contradict him. Contradicting the Master is never a good idea. I see the lightnings playing about his head, though his expression remains mild and he continues to regard me benignly. Only the faintest of flushes on his ancient face betrays his anger. He makes no reply. I am getting into deep waters very quickly.
“Meaning no disrespect,” I say, “but if this is, as you say, only a probability projection—”
“All that we have devoted our lives to is in jeopardy now,” he says quietly. “What are we to do? What are we to do, Lord Magistrate?”
We have been building our highway to the stars for a century now and a little more, laying down one small paving-block after another. That seems like a long time to those of us who measure our spans in tens of years, and we have nibbled only a small way into the great darkness; but though we often feel that progress has been slow, in fact we have achieved miracles already, and we have all of eternity to complete our task.
In summoning us toward Him, God did not provide us with magical chariots. The inflexible jacket of the relativistic equations constrains us as we work. The speed of light remains our limiting factor while we establish our network. Although the Velde Effect allows us to deceive it and in effect to sidestep it, we must first carry the Velde receivers to the stars, and for that we can use only conventional spacegoing vehicles. They can approach the velocity of light, they may virtually attain it, but they can never exceed it: a starship making the outward journey to a star forty light-years from Earth must needs spend some forty years, and some beyond, in the doing of it. Later, when all the sky is linked by our receivers, that will not be a problem. But that is later.
The key to all that we do is the matter/antimatter relationship. When He built the universe for us, He placed all things in balance. The basic constituents of matter come in matched pairs: for each kind of particle there is an antiparticle, identical in mass but otherwise wholly opposite in all properties, mirror images in such things as electrical charge and axis of spin. Matter and antimatter annihilate one another upon contact, releasing tremendous energy. Conversely, any sufficiently strong energy field can bring about the creation of pairs of particles and antiparticles in equal quantities, though mutual annihilation will inevitably follow, converting the mass of the paired particles back into energy.
Apparently there is, and always has been since the Creation, a symmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe, equal quantities of each—a concept that has often been questioned by physicists, but which we believe now to be God’s true design. Because of the incompatibility of matter and antimatter in the same vicinity, there is very little if any antimatter in our galaxy, which leads us to suppose that if symmetry is conserved, it must be through the existence of entire galaxies of antimatter, or even clusters of galaxies, at great distances from our own. Be that as it may: we will probably have no way of confirming or denying that for many thousands of years.