Читать книгу A Glimpse of Infinity - Brian Stableford - Страница 4

PART 1

1.

In Euchronia, arrest was only a state of mind. There were no prisons. Limitation by confinement was quite unnecessary, because there was nowhere in the world that a man might hide. There was no way to keep secrets within the machine that was host to mankind. There was, of course, escape, but not within the world—only without. In Sanctuary, or in the Underworld, there was no arrest. But in Euchronia, once a man was labeled “arrested,” arrested he was. Joth Magner accepted his arrest, signifying that he wanted to cooperate to the full with those who had so designated him. He took up temporary residence in the headquarters of the Euchronian Movement, in order to make himself available for consultation and interrogation, face to face. There was no real need, because he would have been available anywhere in the world via the screens, but that was the way he wanted it. He wanted to force his physical presence upon the Councilors who wanted his information. He wanted to be free to use all the power of his personality in his arguments.

Eliot Rypeck and Enzo Ulicon, who became his interrogators primarily because they were interested in hearing what he had to say, unlike the majority of their colleagues, were opposed to direct confrontation. They had adapted themselves, mind and body, to the mediation of machines.

In addition, they found Joth physically repellent by virtue of the fact that his face was half-metal. Nevertheless, they concurred. They felt that what Joth knew was important, and they wanted to know.

2.

“Why did you decide to follow Burstone in the first place?” asked Rypeck.

“I wanted to find out what happened to my brother. He knew about Burstone. When he went into the Underworld it was by the route that Burstone used.”

“And what happened?”

“I followed him down into the lowest levels. He used a cage attached to winding gear in order to go down from the floor of the Overworld to the surface. I waited for him to come back. When he left, I went down myself. I had to see. I hadn’t expected the lights—the stars—beneath the platform. But someone—maybe Burstone—wound the cage back up. I was trapped.” Joth fired these sentences quickly, wanting to race ahead, to get to the arguments he wanted to put, the information that was vital. But he knew that the whole story had to be told, in order to provide a context for his arguments. These people were not merely ignorant, but misled. They had to be guided to understanding. It could not be thrust upon them.

“You don’t know what Burstone was doing in the Underworld?” put in Ulicon.

“I know,” said Joth. “I didn’t see him, but I know. He was taking knives and tools and books, to give to the Underworlders.”

“Why?”

“Ask him.”

“Carry on,” said Rypeck. “What happened next?”

“I panicked. I was suddenly completely afraid. Drowning in fear. Not logical. It was like stepping straight into a drug experience. Everything twisted in my mind. I couldn’t think, couldn’t even use my senses. I ran. Anywhere...nowhere. I ran. I fell, and when I got up I ran again. I lost contact with time. And then I ran straight into a man.”

“Wait,” said Rypeck. “This is one thing that we must have clear. A man, you say. A human being.”

“So far as I could tell,” said Joth, “he was as human as you or I. He was a savage, but he was a man. But there were others—chasing him, I think. He picked me up, and he made sure that they saw me. They were terrified, because of my face. He got away from them. But he wasn’t terrified—he knew what I was. That’s important. He knew that I was a man despite the face. He knew I came from the Overworld. You must realize that although he was a savage he wasn’t ignorant. He knew what he was doing when he used me as a scarecrow to buy him time.”

“And the others?” prompted Rypeck.

“This is the hard part,” said Joth. “They were men, too. But they weren’t like you or me. They were small and strange. Randal Harkanter had one in a cage, but that was wrong. What Harkanter had wasn’t an animal, it was a man.”

“Soron said that it was a rat,” said Ulicon—not making an assertion, but putting the idea forward so that Joth had to react.

“What’s a rat?” said Joth. “Have you ever seen one? Maybe they still exist—more likely they don’t. Soron has nothing on which to base his identification except information from the prehistoric past. His opinion means nothing.”

“He’s an expert in his field,” said Ulicon mildly.

“That’s nonsense,” Joth told him. “He’s an expert in a field that’s ten thousand years out of date. He knows nothing about life in the Underworld as it really is. Do you really think that a man can walk into a new world, armed with knowledge which pertains to circumstances as they were ten millennia ago, and make meaningful judgments about the nature of that world? Do you think that there is any way that Soron possibly could know anything?”

“We take the point,” said Rypeck. “But what do you know? How can you contradict what Soron said?”

“I lived with these people,” said Joth. “The warriors who picked me up took me back to their village. One of them took me into his house. They looked after me while I was convinced that I was dying. They talked to me. The man, Camlak, and his daughter Nita. There was a human girl there, too—Huldi.”

“You are drawing a distinction between men and humans,” said Rypeck. “How?”

“There’s no other way,” said Joth. “There’s no word we can apply to these people except men, even though they aren’t truly human. They aren’t animals. To call them ‘rats’ is to make a gross and dangerous error. They call themselves the Children of the Voice. They claim to have souls, and to be able to communicate with those souls on occasion. They speak English, although they call it Ingling. That is to say, it’s a form of English. It’s a language with many new words, and some words we’re familiar with have been abandoned. But they read books from the Overworld. They read them, and they make some use of what they read—when they can. What else can you call someone who reads the same books that you read, speaks the same language as you do, and cares for you when you’re sick? What else but a man. And yet they have gray fur. Their skulls are a strange and grotesque shape. Why should those things make a difference?”

Rypeck coughed, and hesitated before speaking. “In your father’s book,” he said, tentatively, “there are references to the people of the Underworld. Which people did he mean?”

Joth waved his hand—a brief, angry gesture. “He didn’t know. He had no possible way of knowing. If some of what he said was true, then it was inspiration or accident. But he didn’t know. You must understand that this has nothing to do with my father. He’s dead. He may have been the trigger which began all this, but now it’s something different. If you confuse what I have to say with what my father said, then we can’t possibly reach any kind of an understanding.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ulicon, “but from our point of view what happened to your father is important. It could be vital. We need to know how your father knew what he did and why he thought what he did. You have no real idea of what happened when the rat or the man or whatever disappeared from Harkanter’s cage. You were there and you saw it, but it knocked you out. You were too close to the blast. That fearful burst of mental energy rocked half the world, and it must, in some way, be related to what your father experienced as a matter of course, in his dreams. We have to fit all the pieces of this jigsaw together, Joth—not just the ones you want to play.”

Joth shook his head doubtfully.

“Carry on with the account of what happened to you,” suggested Rypeck. “We can return to these points later.”

Joth shrugged. “I don’t know how long I was ill,” he said, “or how long I stayed in the village afterwards. Without night and day, time became meaningless. The Underworld runs on subjective time—there are no clocks. From seconds to seasons, all intervals of time are the same to them. The only duration which means anything to them is the time it takes to get tired, or the time it takes to get hungry. Even the length of a man’s life is unimportant, because no one dies of old age—there’s no such thing as a lifespan. Everybody dies, when the time comes, by disease or violence.

“We—that is, the girl Huldi and I—watched one of their religious festivals—a communion of souls. I can’t pretend to understand it. I wish I did. At the time, I thought I had a certain insight. Now, I’m not sure.

“There was a ritual, in which Camlak played the part of the sun, while his father—who had been the leader of his people—personified night. Camlak killed his father—executed him according to ritual—and so became the king. But the strange thing is that the ritual mimicked a different world. In their world, there is no sun, and no night. They were acting out a mystery, something which had meaning only within another world—a world which, for them, fulfills all the functions of the supernatural.

“To the Children of the Voice, the Overworld is both Heaven and Hell. It is the universe outside their own, within which their lives are sealed, and whose forces give structure and purpose and meaning to their own lives. This is completely beyond the scope of my father’s book and its message. If my father, in his dreams, found some way of seeing into the Underworld, perhaps even into the minds of the people who live there, then he could not make use of what he saw. He could not understand. This makes nonsense of his ideas. We could not bring the people of the Underworld out into the light, because everything they are is identified with the darkness—it is not only their bodies which have adapted, but also their minds.

“You must realize that the inhabitants of the Underworld are not like us. They are alien. And yet they are men. In the Overworld we tend to have a very narrow view of humanity, and of life. We have learned to hate the men on the ground—the men who stayed on the ground in the distant past—because they did not think like Euchronians. Our history makes us hate, despite the hypocritical voice of our reason. But our history is out of date. Our attitudes are out of date. There is another world beneath our feet—and it is not the one we think it is. It is not the one my father wanted to save, and it is not the one Heres wants to destroy.”

Ulicon and Rypeck exchanged glances. Each suspected that Joth Magner was deranged—that his mind had been somehow twisted by his experiences. But each man was afraid of his own suspicion. Of the ten or twelve men close enough to Heres to influence the Hegemon’s thinking, only these two wanted to believe that the present course of action was wrong. Joth Magner was their one hope of finding a reason which could turn Euchronia aside.

The plain fact was that from top to bottom, the entire Euchronian Movement—the authentic voice of Euchronian society—was frightened. From the moment when rediscovery of the Underworld had been forced upon them by the publicity given to Carl Magner’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, fear had been building up in virtually every citizen of the new world. At first, the fear had been a source of stimulation, excitement in a world which lacked excitation. Magner’s absurd proposal to open the Overworld in order to allow the inhabitants of the surface to emerge into the daylight had been a fashionable distraction. But once revealed, the Underworld could not be forgotten. Magner had died for what he believed, and his death had underlined effectively the fact that something real was at stake—that the issue, once raised, could not be put away again. The rediscovery of the Underworld put all the old arguments into a new context.

Rafael Heres, with his position as Hegemon of the Movement under threat, had tried to make political capital out of Magner by making the Underworld a matter of Euchronian concern. Events had turned against him. He had tried to quell the fear by drawing its source into a second Euchronian plan, but the fear had run wild, and could not be contained. Deliberately fed by certain dissatisfied and delinquent elements in the Overworld, the Underworld had become such a bugbear that Heres had been forced to meet it head-on. Instead of recruiting it, he was committed to destroying it. To soothe the troubled mind of Euchronian society, he had undertaken to destroy a world. And Euchronia would accept nothing less. The people of the Overworld knew no way to live with uncertainty—ten thousand years of Euchronian history had made certain of that. If Heres and the Movement had no final answer, then the Movement was finished—and so, perhaps, was the Overworld. Euchronia had always claimed to be the ultimate answer. Now it had to defend its claim. Heres and the vast majority of his followers saw one answer and one only: the Underworld must be destroyed.

Rypeck and Ulicon, however, believed that there was no such simple answer. But if they were to find an alternative—or even a reason why the obvious answer was no answer at all—they had to know more about the world below the platform. Only Joth Magner could tell them. If anyone could.

3.

The convoy came to a halt at midnight. Midnight meant nothing on the road of stars, but Germont, inevitably, had carried the habits and the circadian rhythms of the Overworld with him into the realms of Tartarus.

He spoke into the microphone which connected him to the other vehicles. “We rest here for the night,” he said. “No one goes outside, for any reason. Alpha-three, Beta-seven and Delta-five will maintain all-night watch using searchlights. Note anything moving, report anything dangerous, keep the lights circling. Do not open fire without orders. That’s all.”

The driver of the vehicle turned to look down over his shoulder at the commander of the expeditionary force. “Shall I switch off the headlights?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Germont. “And douse the interior lighting as well. I’m coming up to take a look around with the searchlight.” He left the communications network and hauled himself up into the cockpit of the armored car, to take the seat beside the driver.

High above—he could not estimate how high—the single line of electric stars ran back and forth across the solid sky, becoming a yellow blur in the distance as it faded toward the horizon.

“It really was a road,” said the driver, quietly. “Ten thousand years ago. A long, straight highway running hundreds of miles. It’s covered now, but it hasn’t been wholly obliterated. It’s an easy ride—the wheels go through this stuff like a knife. We’re so heavy we must be running on the old surface itself.”

“It was a road,” confirmed Germont. “It’s a road in the Overworld, too. When the platform was Planned, certain basic patterns were retained. This was an important road. That must be why the Planners left it lighted—after a fashion. It must have been a major access right up to the sealing of the platform.”

They watched the white beam of the searchlight in the third vehicle back as it played across the terrain to the righthand side of the column. The Underworld had not reclaimed the road, but it had reclaimed the city. Even the flat, impermeable apron of the highway had been overgrown, but it had offered little enough encouragement to the fungoid life-forms which predominated here. It had been carpeted, and nothing more. But the old buildings had offered support and framework to an ecosystem which was not replete with self-supporting structures. The new life of the Underworld had found a use for cities, and it had taken over despite the poisons which often built up there. In time, even the atomic and chemical waste would be co-opted, somehow, into the cycles of life which were adapting to the corpses of civilization. The process was going on, even now. Poison is a temporary thing. It kills, but out of the death it causes there comes new life, ultimately.

This city had become a forest, its concrete bones substituting for the xylem skeletons which had been lost when the old world was condemned to darkness. All the trees were gone, but the forests simply moved into the cities. Life is never defeated—evolution simply changes gear, and the process of adaptation begins, and continues forever.

“It’s all so still,” said the driver. “Nothing moves at all.”

“There’s no wind,” said Germont. “Not here. There must be air currents down here, and fierce ones where the situation is right. But here the air’s quite dead. Stale.”

“There are no animals,” said the driver. “None at all.”

Germont shrugged. “They won’t wait for the light. They must have been able to hear the convoy for miles.”

“But why would they run?” asked the driver. “They sure as hell haven’t learned to be afraid of armored trucks.”

“They’d be afraid of the noise,” said Germont.

The driver shook his head. “I don’t like it,” he said. “That line of lights in the sky, these great hulking masses of sponge on either side. It feels as though there’s something different about just here. It’s as if that stuff out there was full of things just sitting on either side of the road but staying clear. Watching us.”

For a few moments, Germont didn’t reply. His eyes followed the cone of light swinging across the face of the forest. Then he said: “Get some sleep.”

As the driver clambered down from the cockpit and moved back to the belly of the vehicle, where eight other men were waiting—resting, talking, peeping through the portholes, and trying to hold down the unease in their stomachs, Germont continued to follow the progress of the light.

All the plant flesh was gray. There were all shades, but no colors. This was a color-blind world. Even in the lands where the stars were clustered in the sky, Germont thought, the light would be dim enough to rob ordinary human vision of color perception and depth perception. But what about the men who lived here? Perhaps they could see colors. Perhaps not the same colors as the men of the Overworld.

The most noticeable feature of the plant masses which dressed each of the broken hulks that had once been human habitations was their corporateness. Every one consisted of thousands—perhaps millions—of individuals, and the range of specific types was considerable. And yet all the grays and whites and blacks were blurred. The whole structure was amorphous. All the individual cups and caps, bulbs and wracks, squabs and sacs, were integrated, making use of one another, intertwining with one another, almost blending with one another. Germont knew that the apparent corporate identity was an illusion—that there must be fierce competition, interspecific and intraspecific, for every inch of support and space—but he was not sure that the illusion might not be more real than the reality. The competition was collaboration, of a kind. The vast tangle of shapes, crinose and petinated, aciform and orbicular, was—in some way—a unit. Out of the internal balance of the struggle for existence there was made some kind of entity. The whole forest, which might stretch for ten or fifty miles back on either side of the road, was a colossal life-system, a superorganism. The city had come to life. And the convoy—forty-five vehicles in single file carrying five hundred men to inoculate a whole world with death—was just a worm in its gut. A dangerous invader inside it, waiting to bite.

Germont’s vehicle was air-tight and armored. Its six huge wheels could cope with virtually any terrain. It carried a flame-thrower and a machine gun in the turret where the searchlight was mounted. It was a sealed package containing a fragment of the Overworld. Nothing could possibly harm him, or any of his men. They could spew out poison to eat up the life of the Underworld’s cities, but the Underworld could do nothing to them.

And yet Germont was afraid.

He came down from the cockpit, seated himself in front of the miniature holoscreen at his communications console, and activated it. Some minutes passed before his call was answered. He did not know the woman who answered, and he did not ask her name. She represented the Movement, and that was identity enough so far as Germont was concerned.

He gave exact details of the convoy’s position and confirmed that he was exactly on schedule.

“The Delta contingent will remain in this locale,” he said. “They will make preliminary investigations in the morning. Preparations for experimental seeding will take place as per schedule. We have encountered no difficulties. The other three contingents will proceed to the rendezvous with Zuvara at nine a.m. We have seen no sign of any animal life-form. All equipment is functioning, and air filtration is one hundred percent effective. Water purification apparatus has not yet been tested in the field, but contingent Delta will report tomorrow.”

The woman acknowledged the information, and Germont switched off. There was no conversation. The woman’s presence had been a formality—a concession to the principle of human involvement. The cybernet had recorded his report, and would have acted on it had any action been necessary. It would also have relayed any new instructions. The illusion of human communication was in some ways similar to the illusion of unity in the forest life-system. At the most basic level, no such communication was taking place. But the purpose of human communication was what gave the perfect arbitration of the cybernet a meaning.

He went back into the belly of the vehicle, and lay on his bunk waiting for sleep. He found difficulty in relinquishing his tight hold on consciousness, and when he finally slept, he dreamed.

More than once, during the long night, he awoke into his dreams. And what he found there frightened him.

4.

“Why didn’t you come back to the Overworld when you had the opportunity?” asked Rypeck.

Joth put the tips of his fingers to his mouth and pressed his palms together while he contemplated the question.

“The reasons are complicated,” he said, finally. “They didn’t seem so at the time, but I didn’t think about it much. I just did what I felt I ought to do. I suppose I worked out the reasons subconsciously—or perhaps I invented them later to explain myself. When I found the door in the metal wall, I found my father. He’d finally been compelled to look outside his nightmares, into the substance of his visions. He’d found a way into the world he wanted to save, just as I’d found a way out. We collided. It wasn’t really that much of a coincidence—the same things which moved him moved me, factors external to both of us.

“He wasn’t quite dead when I found him, but he couldn’t do or say anything. He was still bleeding from a wound—a bullet wound. Finding him there just knocked the bottom out of the world. I was running home, and suddenly there was no home to run to. By then I had other priorities. Nita and Huldi were cut adrift, just as I was. When I buried my father I felt myself thrown back into their predicament. Drifting in the world, with no purpose—cut right out of the cloth of existence. Whether I came back or stayed, I’d have had to start all over again. I stayed, because that’s where I was. I stayed with them.

“I fell ill again. I just didn’t have the constitution to live down there. They had to cut some parasites out of my back and the wound wouldn’t heal. I got worse. Then we met the hellkin. He joined us. His name was...is...Iorga.”

Joth paused, expecting some reaction.

“This is the...man...who killed Harkanter?” asked Ulicon, filling the pause.

“He had to,” said Joth.

“Let’s not leap forward now,” said Rypeck, with a hint of impatience in his voice. “We’ll leave the matter of judgment until the proper time. Tell us what happened.”

“Iorga had seen Camlak, with another man from the village. We went back toward the wall. We found the other, but not Camlak. Camlak had been shot, by the man called Soron. He had come out into the open because Harkanter was trapped in a mud hole. He wanted to help. The other—Chemec—had been more cautious, and had stayed hidden. But Camlak didn’t think there was anything to be afraid of. That was my fault. It was because of me that Camlak wasn’t afraid. But they shot him.”

“Harkanter claimed that he was attacked—that the rat had a knife.” This interjection came from Ulicon.

Joth shook his head.

“There was a misunderstanding,” said Rypeck.

“I had to get him back,” said Joth, ignoring the remark. “It was up to me. He kept me alive in the village. But for him I’d be dead. If not for me, he wouldn’t have been at the wall. He wouldn’t have tried to help Harkanter. I came up to the Overworld to bring him back. I brought Iorga with me to help.”

“Why come back in secret?” demanded Rypeck. “Why come to steal the rat? Why break into Harkanter’s house with guns?”

“Do you honestly think,” said Joth, “that anyone would have listened to me? Was there any other way? The one thing I wanted to do, at that time, was free Camlak. I had no other purpose. I set about doing it in the only way it could be done—by stealth. We didn’t intend to kill anyone—we just wanted to take Camlak off Harkanter and back to the Underworld. When that was done, I intended to come back for the explanations. I had myself patched up by a doctor, and then Julea got Harkanter to open his door to us. It would have gone according to plan. We went down into the cellars. Camlak was in a cage. I saw him there. And then there was an explosion inside my head.”

There was a brief silence. This was the climactic point. They all knew that this was the fulcrum of the whole matter, but none of them knew how to approach it.

Eventually, it was Ulicon who spoke.

“I was sitting in an armchair,” he said. “I was reading some printouts. It was as if I’d been stabbed in the back of my neck, the blade traveling upwards into my brain. I couldn’t hold the pages—I just lost control of my hands and they shook like leaves in a high wind. My eyes were closed, but I was seeing. The light—or the illusion of light—was almost unbearably bright. Images flashed in an incoherent sequence. It was all too bright and too fast for me to make sense of it, but some of the images I could almost focus, and recall. What I saw was a confused conglomerate of visual memories. I looked—through someone or something else’s eyes—into the Underworld. I saw what your father saw. It took time, but I came to realize that what had happened to me—and hundreds of thousands of others—was no more than what had already happened to your father. With him, it took years; with us, less than a second. He, perhaps, saw through many pairs of eyes, had access to millions of memories. We saw through one pair of eyes one set of visual images.

“For a while, when I found that these alien memories were imprinted in my mind, I feared that I would go mad. Perhaps, by the standards which were mine a few days ago, I am no longer sane. If so, that is true of fully half the members of our society. Our minds have been invaded. We have memories that are not our own. When we wake, we are constantly aware, but at least we are in control. When we sleep....

“The citizens of Euchronia have no nightmares. That is the way it was intended to be. Euchronia was intended to be the answer to intellectual unrest. But that is no longer true. We now know that our minds are open. Perhaps we have opened them ourselves—we do not know. But in any case, our inner being can no longer be entirely our own. Our inner space is no longer delimited by the confines of our physical being. We wonder, now, if any one of us can speak of my self, my mind.

“We now understand The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and why your father wrote it. We think that we understand how the alien ideas coming into his mind comingled and integrated with his own. We now have nightmares, as he did. Some of us—I don’t know how many—now catch, as he did, the leakage of other minds while we sleep. The mindblast has ripped away the shielding around our selves, and we are no longer secure.

“We know that the focus of the blast was Harkanter’s house. We know that the being in the cage disappeared, and we can only believe that its disappearance was the cause of the blast. We live in desperate fear of this incessant pollution of ourselves which is coming from the Underworld. Our reflex action is to destroy—to obliterate the minds which are invading our personal space. What Eliot and I fear is that the destruction of the Underworld is not a real solution to the problem. We fear that the clock cannot be turned back, and that our minds are permanently altered. What we fear is that in destroying the Underworld we may destroy our chance to find a real answer. There are only two people in the world who might help us find such an answer. You are one. You must tell me everything that you know or suspect about what happened in Harkanter’s cellar.”

“I thought that he’d destroyed himself,” said Joth, slowly. “I saw him—my eyes were actually upon him in the moment he disappeared. But Nita believes that he is alive. Elsewhere. She spoke about her soul—the festival I saw in the village was called the Communion of Souls. She said that during such a communion she had looked into other worlds, and that her father had gone into one. But the festival was just a ritual—it was a mime. Nothing happened that I was aware of. There must have been so much more—so much that I couldn’t begin to know.

“Camlak’s memories came into their minds too, but they just accepted it. They weren’t even surprised. Perhaps it happens all the time, to them. But I don’t think so. I think there’s something about the way they live and think that we can never understand—something that is utterly different from us. And yet there’s so much that is the same....

“I don’t know what happened. What you’ve said may all be true. It seems reasonable. But all I know is what you know—that Camlak’s memories have been blasted into my mind and your mind and many other minds. It could happen again. It probably will. Everything that you and the whole Movement fears could come true. Our minds might be dissolved inside our heads. But there’s one thing that you must consider. Nita and Chemec weren’t surprised. They knew what had happened. And if they, and the Children of the Voice as a whole, really know and understand what happened, then they can do it again. If you try to exterminate the Children of the Voice, then they may react as Camlak reacted when Harkanter put him in a cage. If you start a war with the people of the Underworld, you might lose. They can destroy you.”

5.

Abram Ravelvent was tired. Since he had become tangled in this affair through acquaintance with Carl Magner, it had taken years off his life. His initial interest had been mere curiosity—a typical fascination for the unusual. He had once found intellectual puzzles a source of delight. Now he was lost inside one. What had been a game had become a prison. Once, he had been able to choose where he would stand in the argument. He had committed his belief on the instruction of a whim. Now, he was completely bound up. He no longer dared to believe, or even to guess. But still people came to him with questions and arguments. He was still an “expert” to be consulted. People still looked to him for confirmation and correction. They asked nothing of him but certainty, because they so desperately wanted to know that someone, somewhere, had answers in his pocket.

Even now, he kept up the sham. He would not, could not, bring himself to relinquish the pretense that had sustained him through so many years.

But the persistent answering, when he knew no answers, made him very tired indeed.

He stared at the image of Joel Dayling which hovered above his desk. Dayling looked equally tired. His expression was grim.

“It’s no longer a matter of politics.” he was saying. “I no longer have to defeat Euchronia because Euchronia is dead. It died when its basic premise was overturned. There is no stable future. There is no secure present. It’s no longer a matter of Eupsychians and Euchronians, trying to topple Heres from his pedestal. We’re all in the same boat now, and the Movement is falling apart. Everyone has a voice now, not just the Movement. I’m not interested in getting Heres out of office now—I’m interested in saving the world, if it can be saved. What I want from you is an opinion, that’s all. Not your vote or your endorsement. I just want to know—can Heres destroy the Underworld? Is it possible?”

Ravelvent didn’t know. He didn’t want to answer. But even while he hesitated and looked for an evasion, the rhetoric was trying to surface inside his skull. He fought, trying to keep perspective.

“Not the way the world thinks,” he said. “Maybe this world could be destroyed with a snap of the fingers, but not the world down there. The people are used to thinking of the Overworld as one vast unit—one great big machine-wrapped family. That’s their idea of what a world is. But the Underworld is very different. With our resources, perhaps we could destroy it—destroy all the higher life-forms, at any rate. But not in years, or decades, or perhaps centuries. They don’t have a machine-host which can just be switched off. We’ll have to go into that world and spread our poisons and our diseases mile by mile. No one in Euchronia has any idea of the true size of the world. We have instant electronic presence—we can go anywhere in the world by sitting in front of a screen and pressing a switch. You and I are thousands of miles apart, and yet we’re face-to-face. No one understands how big the Underworld is. Not even Heres. He may destroy the Underworld, but I doubt it. You just can’t conceive of the magnitude of the task that he’s set himself.”

“If what I’ve heard is true,” said Dayling, “Heres’ chief weapon—perhaps the only one that matters—is a virus. Rumor has it that this thing will lay waste the Underworld’s plant life utterly, and that it will spread like wildfire.”

“I don’t know that I can comment on that,” said Ravelvent.

“I’m not asking you to give away any secrets,” said the Eupsychian, slightly scornfully. “Even if you know any. I’m not fishing for information I can use in a whispering campaign. I want to know just what kind of a chance Heres’ present policy has of success. Treat the question hypothetically. What would be the limitations of such a virus? Can it be made, and if so, will it do what it has to?”

Ravelvent hesitated, but then carried on. He saw no point at all in concealing the truth as he saw it.

“What we know so far,” he said, “suggests that the Underworld life-system is, at primary production level, almost totally derived from fungal and algal forms native to the pre-Euchronian era. If these can be successfully attacked, the bottom is knocked out of virtually every food-chain that exists down there. If the fungoids and algoids can be destroyed, animal life will cease to be possible. What Heres’ scientists are trying to do is tailor a family of viruses to attack chemical structures unique to the kinds of cell which are found in the Underworld life-system, but not our own, which is derived from very different kinds of plant. This is not difficult. Fungi and algae survive in the Overworld as pests, and research to weed out such parasites using tailored viruses was going on as far back as the prehistoric ages. It was one of the first fields of research which the Movement reinstituted on the platform.

“The problems involved are twofold. In the first instance, we have no idea as to the possible reactivity of the Underworld’s life-system, or its capacity for self-repair. We don’t know what degree of immunity to expect, and we don’t know how quickly the organisms in the Underworld will discover immunity. There is reason to believe that the Underworld’s entire ecosystem is in the tachytelic evolutionary phase, which means that its capacity to absorb and withstand attack of this kind could be high.

“The second problem is transmission of the diseases. This will happen naturally, to some extent. In a given locale, the viruses will—as you put it—spread like wildfire. But introducing a disease into a life-system isn’t like lighting a fuse and waiting for an explosion. Tailored diseases have difficulty in spreading simply because there’s no reservoir of infection within the system as a whole. There is no such thing as an unlimited epidemic. These viruses are going to have to be assisted in their conquest by constant seeding over very wide areas. That will take a great deal of time and a tremendous level of production. A great deal of effort goes into the isolation of one gram of a crystalline virus. When we talk of destroying worlds, we talk in tons rather than grams.

“The viruses may do what Heres thinks is necessary, but it won’t be done overnight, and the amount of resistance within the life-system may be far greater than we hope. And in the meantime—while Heres’ grand plan is in progress—new factors may enter the situation. Anything might happen. Heres may have picked the simple answer, but it isn’t an easy one. There are no easy ones.”

“Thanks,” said Dayling. “That’s what we needed to know.”

“We?” queried Ravelvent.

“Don’t worry. We aren’t a revolutionary movement. Not anymore. We don’t have to be. The revolution started without us. Now, we’re the government-in-reserve. When Heres reaches the end of his rope, the Council will have to turn to someone. We intend to be the only people with ideas. If you want a job, Abram, you only have to ask.”

Ravelvent laughed shortly.

“You always wanted to be dictator,” he said, with a hint of bitterness.

“Not at all,” said Dayling. “I always wanted to be messiah.”

6.

“Did you see anything which suggested that the rats are telepathic?” demanded Rypeck.

“They’re not rats,” said Joth.

“Do they use telepathy?” persisted Rypeck.

Joth shook his head. “Camlak said nothing to suggest that they could. But afterwards...Nita knew what had happened. Maybe they have telepathy but don’t use it. I don’t know.”

“They have it,” said Ulicon, quickly. “We know that. Memory images can be transmitted and implanted. What Joth’s evidence suggests is that they can’t control it. In all probability, they’re not even aware of it. They take for granted the fact that their minds spill over from their selves, that there’s some kind of unitary organization within the species—perhaps like a hive of bees. This property of their minds is completely bound up with ritual and religion—to them, it’s natural. They personify the collective as their souls. The communion of souls is a social thing, where the whole social unit shares some experience through invoking this group identity.”

Rypeck waved a hand angrily. “It doesn’t even begin to look like an explanation,” he said. “Enzo, we must do better than this. You can’t use this garbled nonsense to explain the fact that the rat—or man, or whatever—disappeared from that cage. Where did it go? Did it dissipate itself into your hypothetical superorganism? What happened to its body? We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re dealing with a physical event. The blast of energy was the result of the physical phenomenon. The mental side effect was just that—a side effect. We mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the transmission of memories from the rat to everyone within receiving distance was the purpose of what happened. It wasn’t. It was, in all likelihood, quite accidental. The wave which carried the information is what we should be interested in, and that wave was generated by what we would previously have considered to be an impossible event. The very fact that the intensity of what we felt seems to have depended more or less on the inverse square of the distance between ourselves and the focal point surely suggests that we are dealing with a physical phenomenon whose psychical effects are really secondary.”

“That kind of division doesn’t make sense,” said Ulicon.

“Enzo, we communicate via electromagnetic radiation. We speak into a microphone, and at the other end, someone hears our words. The information is in one brain, which translates thought into sound. The microphone translates sound into electricity. The electricity is translated into modified radio waves, which are translated back into electricity, back into sound, and then back into information in another brain. We can’t try to understand such a process by what goes on in the brains, and only what goes on in the brains. Is that telepathy? Of course it is—information is transmitted from brain to brain. But in order to understand it we must understand the physics of it. We can’t consider it simply as a psychic phenomenon. To do so makes nonsense of it.”

“All right,” said Ulicon. “So it’s a problem in physics. So what?”

“We’ve already established,” said Rypeck, “that the Children of the Voice don’t use telepathy. What does that mean? It means that they aren’t normally able to translate ideas into a form which can be carried by the kind of energy which is involved in the event we’re trying to understand. It’s as though they were mute—unable to translate ideas into sounds so that they can be transmitted from one brain to another. This failure could be at one of several levels. They might lack the physical apparatus for so doing—as if they had no tongues. Or they might lack the coding capacity—that is to say, they have the tongues but not the language. Or they might lack the power—as if they couldn’t expel the breath through the throat in order to vibrate the vocal cords Any of these might be true. But what we must do is abandon the notion that there is something magical or supernatural about what happened, or about the kind of thing we have to deal with. We may have to introduce a whole new physics into our scientific understanding, but what we must not do is try to make do with a whole new metaphysics.”

“All that may be true,” complained Joth, “but it doesn’t help. You both seem obsessed with trying to find words to describe what happened. But that isn’t going to stop Heres destroying the Children of the Voice. He must be prevented from committing genocide. Isn’t that what we’re here for? Isn’t that what we’re trying to do. It’s what I’m trying to do.”

“It’s not so simple,” said Rypeck.

“It’s simple enough,” said Joth. “It’s saving millions of people from being wiped out because Heres and the Euchronians are scared. If they had been reasonable in the first place—if they’d only been prepared to recognize the fact that there are people in the Underworld who should be dealt with as people—then this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”

“We cannot simply wait,” said Rypeck. “As Heres and millions of others see it—as Enzo and I see it, even—our minds and our identities are threatened with destruction. We know that it could be done. We want to see that it isn’t. If the threat is not to be faced in Heres’ way—a way which we and others consider to be extremely dangerous—then we must find another way to face it. If we are not to attack the threat at its source, then we must find a defense. That logic may be hard, but it is more appropriate than the ethical logic which you are trying to apply. If Enzo and myself are prepared to hear your case and support you, it is because we are afraid that Heres’ plan may precipitate the destruction it attempts to forestall, not because we want to save the Children of the Voice.”

Joth felt stricken. “When I was injured,” he said, in a very low voice, “my father fought for my life. He defended me against a medical committee which wanted to put me out of my supposed misery. My father won, and I have a face of steel and plastic. I was allowed to live. Sometimes, it has occurred to me to doubt whether or not my father did the right thing. I believed that the whole argument was one of ethics. After all, this is the Euchronian Millennium—the end-point of human ambition. And when my father wrote his book—I thought the argument then was a matter of ethics.

It occurs to me to wonder now—who did shoot my father? Who ordered it done?”

“Your father was killed by a man named Simkin Cinner,” said Ulicon, gently. “No one ordered it done. And you must see that whether you approve of our motives or not, the only way of getting what you want is our way. The only way that the people of the Underworld will be allowed to live is by our proving that the Overworld has nothing to fear from them.”

Joth looked him in the face, deliberately staring with his cold, metallic eyes. Ulicon could not meet the stare. No one could.

“I don’t think you can prove that,” said Joth. “Because you’ll always be afraid. The Euchronians have always thought that the world was theirs, because of the platform and the Plan. But now we know that it’s not true. The world belongs to the people of the Underworld. The Underworld is the world. Euchronia is a gigantic castle in the air. A dream. I think that if the Movement tries to destroy the Underworld, the Underworld will destroy the Movement, and the Overworld with it.”

“That,” said Rypeck, “is exactly what we fear.”

7.

The driver screamed, and the armored truck swerved to the left. There was a soft sound as the nearside wing sheared fungus, and then a harsher grating noise as the metal met something more solid. The vehicle came back off the wall into the road, its nose swinging as the driver jerked the wheel.

Germont was into the cockpit in a matter of seconds. By the glare of the headlights he could see something—someone—trying desperately to get out of the path of the vehicle. The driver had not hit the brakes.

It was too late. The truck hit the running figure and ran over the crushed body. Germont grabbed the wheel and held it steady, holding the vehicle on course. Finally, belatedly, the driver found the brake pedal with his foot, and the truck slowed to a halt.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Germont.

“He threw something!” gasped the driver, who was shaking like a leaf. “The lights just picked him up, and he threw a rock. It hit the canopy just in front of me—I thought it was coming through. I couldn’t help it.”

The transparent plastic had taken the blow comfortably—there was no mark. The driver had been startled rather than scared. But the shock had been considerable.

“Cut the engine,” said Germont curtly, and then turned to call to the men in the back: “Get on that searchlight! And the gun.”

He dropped back to snatch up the microphone by which he could broadcast to the convoy.

“Hold your positions,” he said. “Alpha-two, do you see what we ran over?”

“I see it,” came the reply. “I can’t make it out. Could be human. Do you want me to send someone out for a closer look?”

“No! No one gets out. Can you maneuver to get the body into the light from your headlights? I want all searchlights on. Scan the forest.”

“Jacob,” said the driver, speaking with unnatural quietness now that he was past the shock. “The road ahead. There used to be a cutting. The land’s slipped. It’s blocked. We’ll have to go back and around.”

Germont, with the microphone still in his hand, climbed up to a position from which he could look out of the cockpit. The light of the many searchlights showed that the forest was banked unnaturally high on either side of them. The road ran through a long, shallow canyon. The obstruction in front was steep, but it did not seem impassable.

“We can climb that,” said Germont. “We don’t need a road. This thing is built to hold a slope.”

Somewhere back along the line, a machine gun came to life. Almost immediately, searchlight beams converged, and Germont looked back to where tiny white figures were moving on the ridge, while the bullets tore fungal tissue to pieces all around them. The soft, pulpy flesh splashed as the bullets hit, and sections of leathery algal frondescence fluttered in the air and writhed as they slid down the slope, robbed of their support. One of the figures was hurled back, and another. Dead and alive alike, they disappeared as great clouds of spore dust poured from the afflicted area.

There was a series of dull thuds as rocks hit the plating of Germont’s vehicle. He looked up, trying to locate the throwers, while the searchlight veered back and forth.

“Stop firing!” he commanded. “They can’t hurt us!”

Then the land somewhere in the rear began to slide. It was the spot where the firing had been concentrated—the bullets had weakened the ancient structure which supported the forest, and it was tumbling, sliding down into the road.

Realizing the danger, the trucks which were in the path of the slide came forward in a hurry. The first two or three managed to get far enough. One or two didn’t, and the loose rock, moving with fluid smoothness, washed into them, turned them, shoved them and began to bury them. One was turned over on its side.

When the slide was over, six vehicles were trapped. Two were breached, and all had some degree of internal damage.

Angrily, Germont ordered men out of the other trucks to begin digging out the trapped men and freeing the vehicles. They came out in closed-environment suits, and for every two or three men to dig, there had to be one with a rifle. The searchlights continued to scan the slopes for signs of the attackers.

Germont went out himself, to look at the corpse which lay in the roadway between his vehicle and the second in line. He waited while one of the doctors inspected the body.

“Is it human?” he asked, when the examination was over.

“Near enough,” said the doctor.

“He must have been crazy,” said Germont. “Coming at the truck like that.”

“It’s not a he,” said the doctor. “It’s a she.” Then the arrow hit him. It went through the plastic suit like paper, between his ribs and deep into his chest. He died instantly.

8.

Elsewhere in the Underworld, the men from Euchronia were building a city: a city of hemispherical domes and cylindrical tunnels. The encampment beneath the plexus which had been established by Randal Harkanter and the party which he had led into the Underworld had been packed up and removed to the surface, only to be replaced by a much larger and much better equipped invasion force, whose purpose was to begin seeding the Swithering Waste with the Overworld’s various biological agents of destruction, and to observe the effects thereof. It was one of several such stations—Germont’s convoy was intended to establish three more—set up in a number of rather different habitats.

The seeding was done from the air, the viruses being laid out along long lines radiating like spokes from the circular metal wall which was the base of the plexus. The “electronic bats” which dispersed the viruses also carried cameras to assist in observation, but small ground-cars were also made available to the observers. This group was headed by Gregor Zuvara, who had become an expert on the Underworld by virtue of having spent a few more days there than most of those called in to assist him.

As the miniature city grew, Zuvara was forced to make ever-more-plaintive complaints about the inadequacy of his labor force. As soon as the news concerning the attack on Germont’s force and the several deaths among his personnel was made public, the number of volunteers for work in the Underworld fell rapidly.

Within a matter of days it became obvious both above and below that some form of conscription would have to become effective. The subjugation of the individuals in the society of the Euchronian Millennium to necessity, as defined by the Hegemony of the Movement, became absolute. The clock had been turned right back. For the second time, the Euchronian Movement demanded total loyalty in order that the world might be saved, not for the present generation, but for generations to come.

Almost everyone expected this mobilization of Euchronia’s manpower to go quite smoothly. This, after all, was the principle on which the world had been made. It had worked once—it had to work again. But Zuvara found his recruits resentful and discontent. The Euchronian spirit—the determination and selflessness that had built a world on the roof of a ruined Earth—was lacking.

Slowly, Zuvara realized that everything had changed. The Euchronian ideal was not enough. Not this time. Something within society had shattered.

While he watched the blight he had brought spreading throughout the world, stripping the vast marshland of everything living, reducing all plant tissue to a sort of protoplasmic tar, Zuvara could not help thinking: “We are destroying the world. The whole world. We are doing this to ourselves. Everything will die. There will be nothing left.”

He told himself over and over that this was merely a nightmare, but he could not rid himself of it.

9.

Chemec the cripple had left Shairn with Camlak because the way his mind worked left him little option but to follow his leader. Camlak had been Old Man of Stalhelm—virtually all that was left of Stalhelm. He had been all that was left of Chemec’s life.

Now Camlak was gone, and there was virtually nothing left of Chemec’s existence. Nothing but his cunning and his failing strength, and his meager identity: Chemec the crab, Chemec the bent-leg. But Chemec hardly felt a sense of loss. Certainly he did not grieve for Camlak. Chemec took life as it came, and accepted events as they happened. He lived neither in his memories nor in his hopes, but stayed always within the moment of the ephemeral present, carried along by the current of life. It was the way of his kind, and Chemec was very much one of his kind. More so than Camlak or Nita, or even Old Man Yami.

It was because of what he was rather than in spite of it that Chemec became a prophet. He had never been a man at odds with his soul. He coexisted with the Gray Soul inside his mind, in the simplest possible way. It was there, he let it be. He had never tried to be a psychic parasite with regard to his Gray Soul, nor had he attempted any kind of exchange. At Communion, he merely looked his Soul in the face. Nothing more. It was perfect commensalism—Chemec and the Soul shared the body and the mind, and neither troubled the other.

And because of this, when the Soul began placing motives in his mind, Chemec did not realize what was happening. He accepted the motives as his own, and he obeyed their commands as if they came from his own self.

He needed the motives. With Camlak gone, he had nothing left to him but to drift back into Shairn, to find a new community or to live alone, existing until he died. The motives made something of him. They repaired the aspect of function in his life. They made him a man again, whereas he might otherwise have contented himself as a rat.

From the Swithering Waste he went southwest, and came to the townships of northern Shairn: to Isthomi and Escar, to Rocoral and Zeid. In each town, he persuaded the priests to look into their soul-space, and he caused Communions to be called. At the Communions, he preached, and because of the Gray Souls his words were heard and engraved into the minds of his hearers.

All had heard Camlak’s scream and knew intuitively that something of moment had happened at that moment. They were ready to hear—and so were the Gray Souls.

Chemec warned of the coming of the men from Heaven—of the impending destruction of the world. This was prophecy. He described things which he had seen, and things which were yet to be seen. What he said was true.

He did no more than this—his function was to spread the word, and no more. His function was to alert the Children of the Voice in Shairn. Others took his warnings beyond Shairn, into other parts of the world. While Chemec prepared for the uniting of a nation, others made way for the uniting of a race.

And in all parts of the world, while the warning was carried, the priesthood of the Children of the Voice, in rapport with their Gray Souls, attempted to decide and define what role the Children of the Voice were to play in the coming climax of their world.