Warm wind threw salt spray into Ondro’s face. Dark clouds stabbed the sea with lightning. Rain swept across the reef, raced the breakers and dotted the half-moon beach with a million drops. He held his face up to the wash, inhaling land odors from the shower, imagining the continent where all that would have been his went on without him.
He had taken to going out to the beach just before a storm, to be alone when reproaching Josepha. Are you alone now, my love? Do you suffer for what you did? Had she done anything?
He sat down as thunder rolled over the sea. A bolt burned the sand near him, but he felt only a feeble fear at its illusory show of purpose. Those who had arranged his end would not be so easily cheated. The lightning seemed to know enough to avoid that. It both amused and dismayed him that the other exiles preferred inevitable drowning later to a quick, merciful bolt sooner. Hope breathed beneath their daily resignation. They could not help it. What was reason, after all, but a gray counsel. Tomorrow the ocean might dry up and they could all walk home—and be met halfway by white horses to ride the rest of the way.
He clenched his teeth and shook with the sudden tropical chill as low clouds pulled in over the island. He shivered into sorrow, then lay back and stared up into the hurrying gray masses, seeing Josepha and himself in their first moments together, regarding each other with interest, even wariness, as if each already knew what was to come—she looking tall and slim, long dark hair down her back, he stocky, light-haired, healthy—and felt love for their shy innocence, and despair for the wreck of himself now, for what she was now. Kill me today, he said to the approaching storm. Today.
Her disappearance a week before his arrest, her failure to search him out in prison, had convinced him that she had been a loyal cleric’s daughter. Her dark-eyed looks of devotion and tender words had been false from the start, his love for her a leash placed around his neck by the secret police; and instead of the consummation of a marriage night, he had been given only the memories of longing for her pale body.
They had met in their first year at New Vatican University, among the sons and daughters of the professional class—merchants, artisans, engineers, lawyers, and physicians—who had come for their grudging chance at learning, even though their choice of professions was restricted to that of a student’s parents.
He had trained in architecture and had planned to return as his father’s apprentice. Josepha had studied theology and moral law, hoping to become a lawyer. She had told him that she was being sponsored by a papal official who wished to remain anonymous. Later, she had confided to him that this official was probably her father, but he had been skeptical; the illegitimate children of clerics had been known to make exaggerated claims about their anonymous fathers in the hope of advancement.
In their second year, Josepha had drawn him into a clandestine group that had access to the restricted papal library, where he had learned something of Earth’s history, and had come to believe that the papacy had to be abolished, by force if necessary. The very existence of the concealed library, cut out of the rock beneath New Vatican, had convinced him of the urgent need for change. Knowledge that could change the world for the better had been hoarded for three centuries. There was no need for people to work so hard on farms and in the townships. A better and longer life was possible. The endlessly repeated idea of a difficult daily trial as preparation for a life beyond the world began to seem cruel to him, and his faith had been replaced by contempt for the Church. The life it had made for its people was the Way of the Cross, with no reward but death for the common man, while the elite enjoyed temporal power. The fact that the library could be penetrated had convinced him of the regime’s fatal weakness.
At the center of the papal library sat a duplicate of the control room from the starship that had brought the original refugees from Earth. The ship itself had been left in high orbit around Ceti IV, but the duplicate control room had been built to transfer from orbit the ship’s artificial intelligence and database. Yet millions of books had never been printed out and could be viewed only on aging equipment. The corridors around the central bank were filled with thousands of hastily bound volumes that had been retrieved as they were needed, or as a hedge against failing information storage, or because a cleric had become curious. Pornographic volumes lay tucked away here and there, and sometimes, when Ondro looked for them again, he found they had disappeared. His overwhelming first impression had been that almost no one knew what was in the library anymore and that this amnesia would one day become complete. No one knew if the artificial intelligence still spoke to anyone, but he doubted it; the heavy door to the central control area was locked, and it appeared not to have been opened in many decades.
The official doctrine of the Church was that slow changes were best. The catastrophic example of Earth’s brief technological history was to be avoided by educating only a small technical class that would maintain a stable economic government under the Church’s moral guidance. In practice, the official doctrine of change meant no change at all.
The library group became a revolutionary cadre at the end of the second year, when Ondro’s brother Jason had arrived, but its only aim was to continue learning against the day when the papacy could be brought down. The creation of effective cells that would include members in high positions would take many years, perhaps longer than the lifetimes of the original members.
“We’re being too cautious,” Jason had said one day. “We should strike at the top as soon as possible, take their lives with one blow. They’ve been secure so long that it will come as a shock, and before they can rally we’ll have control.”
“But what if public support fails?” Josepha had asked.
“The public will know nothing about it. We’ll simply replace the gang at the top, and the others will follow, scarcely realizing there has been a change. Then we’ll start replacing from the top down, keeping our group a secret, so that we can continue no matter what happens.”
It had all been so halfhearted, Ondro realized with a renewed dismay as he sat in the downpour. Renunciation was the only balm left for his regrets and lingering ambition. Here there was no future to build, no past to tend. The night’s starry immensity seduced him into a sublime self-sufficiency, and by day the sunlit intimacy of trees, sand, and water lulled him into forgetfulness.
But a durable peace eluded him. Thoughts of death brought back the icy resolve of his first convictions. He still wished for the end of Bely’s theocracy, the death of Bely himself, if necessary, and would gladly plot again if he were ever given a place from which to strike.
But that place was not here. These islands were only sandbars. Sooner or later a hurricane would sweep the entire archipelago clean of life, as it had done in the past. Josephus Bely, His Holiness Peter III, who hid the knowledge that would topple him inside a rock, had chosen these islands as the final place for both criminals and political exiles, where the great sun-engine of weather would do his killing for him.