Читать книгу The Face of Heaven - Brian Stableford - Страница 9

Chapter 5

At the end of the second dark age, when the coldness of imminent exterminability became just a little too much to bear, and the clothes of madness too thin to wear (the second dark age is also known as the age of psychosis) it became clear that the world was irrevocably lost. The surface of the Earth was ruined.

The Euchronian Movement became the only significant form of protest against the extinction of knowledge, culture, civilization and other things which human beings might then have called humanity. The Movement specialized in cold equations—for years it had been quoting cold equations as recruitment propaganda and protest against the continuing furious spoilage of the world. In the end, the cold equations became simultaneous, and combined into a single absolute equation. The world was dying. A new world would have to be built. The Movement put in hand plans to construct a shell which would enclose the entire land surface of the Earth: a gigantic platform upon which a new civilization could be built from first principles.

The idea was ludicrous. The equation, however, was capable of only the one solution. In addition, the idea of starting afresh was both exciting and attractive. Most telling of all, it came to represent hope. The Movement adopted a political attitude of casual optimism and continued to play its figures icy cool. It might take a million years. But things might get easier as time went by. Perhaps five hundred thousand would suffice.

The Plan (The Euchronian Plan) got under way. Earth and Earth’s humanity did not possess the technology required to raise the platform, nor could they imagine where they were going to get the necessary power. But they began work anyhow.

Even as a gesture, the project was a worthwhile endeavor, and even as a failure it would be quite some gesture. There was no shortage of manpower placed at the disposal of the Planners. The operation began at a thousand points all over the globe. The Movement gobbled up governments and nations, and took over a dispirited world by bloodless revolution. The whole human race, insofar as it was organized, became Euchronia. The rebels were neither expelled nor hated, but merely ignored, as though they had forfeited their humanity.

Work went on, calmly, implacably. Progress was made. And the end remained quite patently impossible. It was not so much that the project was beyond all human ambition and ability, merely that time was so completely set against them. They had not the time to learn because they had not the time to live. The world could not support their effort. The exhausted world simply could not meet its deadlines.

Sisyr’s starship arrived on Earth during the first century of the Plan. It was pure coincidence. Reason (cold equations) said that a technology which could build starships could also build a new world, and so Euchronia asked Sisyr for help. He considered the problem in all its aspects and finally declared that the job could be done and that he would take the responsibility on a contractual basis.

He sent a message back to his own people asking for supplies and for technical assistance. The message took decades to cross the interstellar gulf, the supplies and assistance took centuries. In the meantime, Sisyr and several generations of Euchronians collaborated in revising the Plan, educating the labor force and discovering new potentials in the wasted lands of Earth. There might, at this point, have been a hypothetical choice between building the new world and reclaiming the old. If so, the commitment of the human race to Euchronia was such that no choice ever became obvious.

Sisyr and a small army of helpers of his own kind supervised the construction of the platform over the next few thousand years. By the time it had grown to cover the Earth’s land surface, most of the aliens had gone back to the distant stars.

Sisyr remained to coordinate the rebuilding of a viable civilization on that surface. He assisted in the modeling of the Earth’s new surface, he collaborated on the scheme of land management, and he provided designs for the entire pattern of the maintenance of life. The social system itself was designed by the Movement, but it was designed to fit the world and the environment which had been built largely to Sisyr’s specifications.

In return for his services, Sisyr was allowed to make his home on the remade Earth. He remained isolated from the Euchronian community, but pledged to keep its laws. He built himself a palace and retired. Some eight or nine hundred years before the Euchronian Plan, in its final form, came to fruition Sisyr had ceased to take any active part in it. Starships called at Earth three or four times each century, but they called on Sisyr, not the people of Earth. The people of Earth had nothing at all to do with starships once all the necessary aid from the star-worlds had been delivered.

Sisyr’s contribution to the Plan resulted in its successful completion in a little over eleven thousand years—a short time, comparatively speaking. The Euchronians, of course, claimed the triumph as their own—as, indeed, it was. Theirs had been the vision, theirs the labor, theirs the will. Sisyr had only lent them time which they needed badly.

Sisyr, like the Underworld the Euchronians had left behind, remained known to every citizen. But only as a fact, and an irrelevant fact at that. He had no part in the mythology of the New World.

The Euchronian Millennium was finally declared, and the people became free of their total obligation to the Plan. They were released, to enjoy its fruits, to make what they would of their new life. The Movement did not claim that the society it had designed was Utopian, but it did claim that it had Utopian potential. All that was needed to make perfection was the will of the people. The society was designed to be stable, but not sterile. Euchronia’s stability was dynamic stability. Neither perfect happiness nor perfect freedom was immediately on tap, but Euchronia did what it could, and waited—with casual optimism—for the reheated equations of life and death to work themselves out.

The completion of the Plan had demanded—indeed, the whole philosophy of Euchronia had demanded—that while the Plan was incomplete the people should remain single-minded, working together to the same end. The Movement had helped single-mindedness along somewhat, by devious means which seemed to have excellent results. When the Millennium began, the hegemony of the Movement retained those same devious means in order to assist society in its first, difficult years of freedom and readjustment.

The single most remarkable fact about Euchronia’s Millennium, about Euchronia itself and its leaders in particular, was the apparent blindness—willful blindness—exhibited with respect to the wider contexts of existence. They lived in a thin stratum, paying no heed whatsoever to the realms of Tartarus below, nor to the infinite universe above. But they lived in the early years of the Millennium in the heritage of eleven thousand years of narrow-mindedness, in which the only fragment of existence which mattered was that thin stratum. It took time for them even to begin to realize that such tight boundaries could not contain them.