“Settler?” they ask me, when I arrive on Eden.
“Traveler,” I reply. “Short-term visit.”
They scarcely seem to care. This is a difficult world and they have no time for bureaucratic formalities. So long as I have money, and I do—at least these strange daughter worlds of ours still honor our currency—I am, if not exactly welcome, then at least permitted.
Do they observe Darklaw here? When I arrive I am wearing neither my robe of office nor my medallion, and it seems just as well. The Order appears not to be in favor, this far out. I can find no sign of our chapels or other indications of submission to our rule. What I do find, as I wander the rough streets of this jerry-rigged town on this cool, rainswept world, is a chapel of some other kind, a white geodesic dome with a mysterious symbol—three superimposed six-pointed stars—painted in black on its door.
“Goddess save you,” a woman coming out says brusquely to me, and shoulders past me in the rain.
They are not even bothering to hide things, this far out on the frontier.
I go inside. The walls are white and an odd, disturbing mural is painted on one of them. It shows what seems to be a windowless ruined temple drifting in blue starry space, with all manner of objects and creatures floating near it, owls, skulls, snakes, masks, golden cups, bodiless heads. It is like a scene viewed in a dream. The temple’s alabaster walls are covered with hieroglyphics. A passageway leads inward and inward and inward, and at its end I can see a tiny view of an eerie landscape like a plateau at the end of time.
There are half a dozen people in the room, each facing in a different direction, reading aloud in low murmurs. A slender dark-skinned man looks up at me and says, “Goddess save you, father. How does your journey go?”
“I’m trying to find Oesterreich. They said he’s here.”
A couple of the other readers look up. A woman with straw-colored hair says, “He’s gone Goddessward.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t under—”
Another woman, whose features are tiny and delicately modeled in the center of a face vast as the map of Russia, breaks in to tell me, “He was going to stop off on Phosphor first. You may be able to catch up with him there. Goddess save you, father.”
I stare at her, at the mural of the stone temple, at the other woman.
“Thank you,” I say. “Goddess save you,” my voice adds.
I buy passage to Phosphor. It is sixty-seven light-years from Earth. The necessary lambda adjustment costs nearly as much as the transit fee itself, and I must spend three days going through the adaptation process before I can leave.
Then, Goddess save me, I am ready to set out from Eden for whatever greater strangeness awaits me beyond.
As I wait for the Simtow reaction to annihilate me and reconstruct me in some unknown place, I think of all those who passed through my House over the years as I selected the outbound colonists—and how I and the Lord Magistrates before me had clung to the fantasy that we were shaping perfect new Earths out there in the Dark, that we were composing exquisite symphonies of human nature, filtering out all of the discordances that had marred all our history up till now. Without ever going to the new worlds ourselves to view the results of our work, of course, because to go would mean to cut ourselves off forever, by Darklaw’s own constricting terms, from our House, from our task, from Earth itself. And now, catapulted into the Dark in a moment’s convulsive turn, by shame and guilt and the need to try to repair that which I had evidently made breakable instead of imperishable, I am learning that I have been wrong all along, that the symphonies of human nature that I had composed were built out of the same old tunes, that people will do what they will do unconstrained by abstract regulations laid down for them a priori by others far away. The tight filter of which the House of Senders is so proud is no filter at all. We send our finest ones to the stars and they turn their backs on us at once. And, pondering these things, it seems to me that my soul is pounding at the gates of my mind, that madness is pressing close against the walls of my spirit—a thing which I have always dreaded, the thing which brought me to the cloisters of the Order in the first place.
Black light flashes in my eyes and once more I go leaping through the Dark.
“He isn’t here,” they tell me on Phosphor. There is a huge cool red sun here, and a hot blue one a couple of hundred solar units away, close enough to blaze like a brilliant beacon in the day sky. “He’s gone on to Entropy. Goddess save you.”
“Goddess save you,” I say.
There are triple-triangle signs on every doorfront in Phosphor’s single city. The city’s name is Jerusalem. To name cities or worlds for places on Earth is forbidden. But I know that I have left Darklaw far behind here.
Entropy, they say, is ninety-one light-years from Earth. I am approaching the limits of the sphere of settlement.
Oesterreich has a soft, insinuating voice. He says, “You should come with me. I really would like to take a Lord Magistrate along when I go to her.”
“I’m no longer a Lord Magistrate.”
“You can’t ever stop being a Lord Magistrate. Do you think you can take the Order off just by putting your medallion in your suitcase?”
“Who is she, this Goddess Avatar everybody talks about?”
Oesterreich laughs. “Come with me and you’ll find out.”
He is a small man, very lean, with broad, looming shoulders that make him appear much taller than he is when he is sitting down. Maybe he is forty years old, maybe much older. His face is paper-white, with perpetual bluish stubble, and his eyes have a black troublesome gleam that strikes me as a mark either of extraordinary intelligence or of pervasive insanity, or perhaps both at once. It was not difficult at all for me to find him, only hours after my arrival on Entropy. The planet has a single village, a thousand settlers. The air is mild here, the sun yellow-green. Three huge moons hang just overhead in the daytime sky, as though dangling on a clothesline.
I say, “Is she real, this goddess of yours?”
“Oh, she’s real, all right. As real as you or me.”
“Someone we can walk up to and speak with?”
“Her name used to be Margaret Benevente. She was born in Geneva. She emigrated to a world called Three Suns about thirty years ago.”
“And now she’s a goddess.”
“No. I never said that.”
“What is she, then?”
“She’s the Goddess Avatar.”
“Which means what?”
He smiles. “Which means she’s a holy woman in whom certain fundamental principles of the universe have been incarnated. You want to know any more than that, you come with me, eh? Your grace.”
“And where is she?”
“She’s on an uninhabited planet about five thousand light-years from here right now.”
I am dealing with a lunatic, I tell myself. That gleam is the gleam of madness, yes.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” he asks.
“How can it be possible?”
“Come with me and you’ll find out.”
“Five thousand light-years—” I shake my head. “No. No.”
He shrugs. “So don’t go, then.”
There is a terrible silence in the little room. I feel impaled on it. Thunder crashes outside, finally, breaking the tension. Lightning has been playing across the sky constantly since my arrival, but there has been no rain.