How art thou fallen from heaven

O day-star, son of the morning!

...And thou saidst in thy heart:

'I will ascend into heaven,

Above the stars of God

Will I exalt my throne;

...I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;

I will be like the Most High.'

Yet thou shalt be brought down to the netherworld,

To the uttermost parts of the pit.

--Isaiah 14xii-xvi

THE FORSAKEN CITY is all one thing and very lovely: a filigree of silver, shadow, light.

Looking across it, Silverman is near to tears, like a green boy flushed with early love, transfigured by a first kiss. His throat knots; for a lingering moment, a heady anaesthesia rebukes his senses. At last joy takes the aging man like pain, compressed and burning beneath his ribs, an exalted melancholy. That bitter joy tells him: cherubim lived here.

It is a reflection scarcely detached and scientific, and there is about it as well more than a whiff of heresy. Yet he can find no safer response rich enough to bear scrutiny. Peace is instinct in the empty City. With absolute conviction he tells himself: It's waiting for them to come home.

Exile with all his Order from High Earth, professed in the Society of Jesus under four solemn vows and five simple, Father Raphael Silverman gazes down with misery. From the edge of the cyclopean cliff he can smell warm wind rising from an unpeopled world of rippled grasses, a breeze that washes through the selective membrane of his filter-skin like memories of boyhood. At the horizon stand blurred violet hills, failing in the distant east to an ocean's cerulean shore. In the crucible of his breast they mingle. They streak into a haze on the moist film of his eye's curve.

Regretfully, then, Silverman turns his back on the dove-grey lace coral of the City and works his way back to the skiff. A sizzle of interference is still the best he can raise from his telemetry systems. Cirrus feathers the sky; from the ground, the forces that shield the City are transparent to the visible spectrum. No doubt a signal impressed upon a maser beam would reach him, but it is unlikely that he could return an answer.

His shadow goes ahead of him, stretched by the slant of the morning sun, gaunt anyway, climbing the hard stone that separates him from the Monastery skiff. Paradox, an internal wound, sends darts to every vital place. The routine trick of scientific analysis is already in play, shredding the City and its planet into notional constituents, worrying with a terrier's impertinence at the anomaly of a structure (A) deserted for aeons which (not-A) bears no sign of decay. And this is the paradox: that from the deeper seat of his being he cries out in pain. Where are they? Silverman demands. Where did they go? Their radiant and sombre City speaks solely of beauty and sanctity. There is no hint of corruption, of vice, even of mere worldly utility. They had known God so well that their dwelling place is a tabernacle, a temple, the New Jerusalem raised three thousand light-years from those dismal hills of Palestine where His Son walked briefly before men slew Him.

The transponder in Silverman's belt sounds as he steps over a modest rise, and the hidden skiff's refraction field collapses. In the centre of a flat clearing the vessel stands on its tail, curved titanium hull catching the planet's sun dazzlingly.

Silverman's joy returns, it has no bounds. The Master of the Universe has extended him a reconciliation. He is fifty-five years old, and has been lost in despair and oppression for the last ten. It seems to him that in this year of our Lord 2040, quincentenary of his Order's foundation under the Bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, a reprieve has been proffered. Silverman will never purge the abomination of Southern Cross, that intolerable memory which crouches always at the shadowed fringes of his being, but now there is a kind of counterweight, and he feels the balance of his soul pivoting once more into light. For there is joy as well as grief in the lambent, empty City. In My Father's house, yes, there are many mansions. The Jesuit smiles gladly within himself.

Without guidance the computer systems of the skiff find their alignment with the Monastery's orbit. And Silverman is floating into the darkening bowl of the sky, balanced in a great arc with the natural forces of the planet. The stars come out, and the City's world is a shimmering crescent beneath him.

'We have reacquired your telemetry,' an urgent voice tells him. Silverman knows that all his vital signs were instantly accessible to the Monastery's computers the moment he came out from behind the City's shield; they cannot fail to realize he is aboard the skiff, in perfect condition. Still, ancient habits place tension in the voice. 'Father, we lost you as you went in. Are you all right?'

'Fine,' he assures them. 'Never been better. It's beautiful. Sorry if I alarmed you. It seemed sensible to take the opportunity to look around.' He wonders if elation is apparent in his tone.

Above and beyond him, the vast light-jeweled Latin cruciform of the St. Ignatius Loyola looms like Constantine's pre-battle vision as the skiff falls up into docking orbit. The sight of the huge weightless icon enters Silverman's heart with the force of a shaft of illumination from the collective unconscious; he expels his breath. Indeed, only Jung among all the tawdry interpreters of mind might have responded with insight to the wisdom which informed the starship's builders. Crux and patibulum, stake and crosspiece, radiate in an archetypal mandala which tells at once of a Man hanged from a tree and a solstice sun reborn in seasonal resurrection. But the image causes a pang. It is too grand, lofty, austere; there is no authentic sense of home.

With lowly autonomic wisdom, the skiff takes itself into the shuttle niche. The bidellus is waiting behind the hermetic seal of his oversight cubicle as Silverman climbs from the lock. In his sleeveless gown, lacking the fabric wings which hang from the shoulders of the clerks-regular, the lay brother could be any stolid porter attending the gate of a Jesuit House on Earth prior to the suppression.

'Laudetur Jesus Christus,' Silverman says in greeting.

'Semper laudetur,' replies the porter. 'The Father General wishes to see you as soon as you've showered. If you're hungry I could have some lunch sent up.'

'Thank you, Brother. I think I'll wait for dinner.'

Only simple decontamination is required for the skiff. For Silverman, more stringent measures are obligatory. Alien infestations are not welcome. Patiently he suffers the irradiations and sluicings which beat down on his filter-skin. Satisfied at grudging length, the computers permit him to peel away the suit and pass into a second snug ceramic chamber where he may attend to his personal hygiene. As always, the ambiance is slightly chilly. He rubs his hairy arms and chest with alcohol, cleaning off the gummy residue where life-sign telltales have been cemented. A gush of tepid water rinses his skin, and blasts of warmer air dry him off. He manages these motions without attention, murmuring the prescribed prayers as he dresses.

Ship-time is late afternoon. He has advanced ten hours in the leap to orbit, and the queasiness of readjustment will have its toll. Silverman considers the elevator but shakes his head minimally with regret. Planar gravity-effect within the Monastery is kept to three-quarters Earth normal due to structural constraints, and a metabolism designed for Earth needs all the extra exercise it can find. At the entrance to the main corridor on this level there is a rack of small-wheeled bicycles. The Jesuit heaves one down from its hook and mounts the saddle, tucking up his cassock, his calves protesting in advance. Like a village abbé displaced a century and a half and trillions of kilometers, he pedals off along the corridor for the ramps which climb five levels to the Father-General's quarters.

The journey leaves him only slightly breathless; he has found a nice compromise between brisk exertion and that sedateness ordained in the Common Rule. Parking the bike, he uses his research-status prerogative to trigger the office door and goes straight in. Monsignor Alvarez, the General's secretary, waves Silverman through with a cordial smile.

Niceto Cardinal Miguel Rodrigues de Madrazo y Lucientes, S. J., Father-General of the remnants of his Order, Prince of the Church, papal elector and councillor bound in duty and privilege to sit in consistory on High Earth yet barred from that assembly by secular ban, the pontiff's legati a latere aboard the exiled starship, sits hunched before a holo reader, his intent eyes darting across the screen. Silverman contains himself in patience. A band of wires crosses the red zucchetto perched on his superior's scalp, strobing alpha-frequency impulses to the cardinal's temporal lobes, enhancing and focusing his attention. There will be no rousing him until the data is digested.

Madrazo is an aristocratic son of Alcala, the Andalusian town which gave St. Ignatius his first theologian, the fiery half-Jew Diego Laynez, second Father-General of the Order, and Silverman cherishes the remote link with his own ornate and bastard spiritual heritage. Now in his seventies, Madrazo retains an intellect certainly as fine as Silverman's and an equanimity unbroken by the tragedy which has diminished his charges from fifty thousand to less than a hundredth of that number, all five hundred of them confined within the hull of Loyola.

'Sit down,' the General says abstractly. 'I shouldn't be a moment.' Pale light from the screen dances in reflection from his checks, the blade of his nose, words flicker frantically. Madrazo stabs with one finger and the light clears. Silverman blinks as dark eyes lift to seize him with electronically augmented force. 'Father Silverman.' The cardinal lifts the band away from his skullcap and settles back, but there is no perceptible dulling of his attention. He straightens his mozetta, the short cape which hangs from his shoulders over his scarlet cassock. 'We're all relieved that you came to no harm. Shall I wait for the digest, or is it worth a full personal report?'

'Your Eminence,' Silverman says, and finds something choking his larynx. 'There's a city down there.'

'So.' Madrazo props his chin on steepled fingers. His ring of office gleams like a living eye. The considerable shock he must feel elicits no more than a moue of interest. 'I've just been studying the final sensor evaluations. They show a profusion of fauna and flora in stationary ecological equilibrium, but no evidence of intelligence. We surmise that the shielded anomaly is of extraplanetary origin.'

'I don't think so. The design of the city is absolutely integral to the mood of the planet.'

Acutely, Madrazo suggests, 'The good stewards.'

'Yes.' Silverman hesitates. 'It's totally deserted.'

'You can see no reason to prevent our sending a team into the ruins?'

His heart stills for an instant close to syncope. It seems that banners of light stream above him. The wonder of the City is a swelling organ note.

'Eminence, there are no ruins. It is perfectly preserved.' Without caution, his heart swollen with excitement, Silverman leans forward and presses his damp hands on the desk. 'it looks as if it's ... waiting for someone.'