A Vision of Hell: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Two

by Brian Stableford

  In the emotional battle between the father of the child and the Old Man of Stalhelm, the father really had little chance. That was the way love worked in the Underworld, at least in Shairn. Camlak needed to know what had happened to the people. He could not turn his back on the leadership which he had fought so hard to win. He had to know what happened on the road to Lehr, and he had to know by seeing. There was no other way.

  From the vantage on top of the skull-gate he could see as far as the canal ridge out toward Walgo but only as far as the hilltops in the southwest. The forested slopes cut off his view of Dossal Bog. The Ahrima and the rogue Truemen were well out of sight by now.

  As he went through the skull-gate and turned toward Lehr he reflected that Stalhelm had stood a long time in the farthest reaches of Shairn. By the tally of the gate the people had done well. But he knew that the dead get no credit in the tally of survival, and the contribution of the knitted skulls to the future of the Children of the Voice was purely negative. It was a symbol, not a magical guarantee. Yami’s head-taking ways had not, in the end. preserved Stalhelm forever, even if Yami had not lived to see its fall. Yami, as a good leader, had even known precisely when to die. If anyone remembered Stalhelm at all, they would remember Yami, and the brief hour in which Camlak had reigned would be forgotten as the blackest time in the town’s history. So much for three times lucky.

  Camlak left his home for the first and last time, and went into the Underworld.

  CHAPTER 3

  The history of the Overworld began, according to the Euchronian Movement, at the close of the second dark age (which they also called the age of psychosis). Naturally enough, there was no one to disagree with them. In point of fact, however, an unbiased observer—Sisyr, perhaps—might have traced the Overworld mentality much further back than that. At least a thousand years, and probably two. A devout Euchronian might shrug his shoulders, and point out that an odd millennium or two was little enough compared with the eleven thousand years of the Euchronian Plan (let alone the half a million years the Euchronians were prepared to spend if that were necessary), but a historian would have recognized the flaw in such a comparison of duration. The velocity of history is not uniform. “Progress” (a mythical concept dating back to prehistoric time) is not constant.

  However, it was certainly during the second dark age that the Movement was formed and the Plan was born. According to Euchronia, the Movement and the Plan saved the world. No one would disagree with that, either. By Euchronian standards, Euchronia had saved the world. It had discarded the old world and built a new one, on a platform which was mounted over every convenient acre of the old world’s land surface.

  In the beginning, the Plan had been ludicrous. The Euchronians had accepted that in those days (they denied it now), but they had pointed out with some justice that if ludicrous ambitions were all that were left, they were the only recourse of hope.

  Work on the Plan had been underway for several centuries when Sisyr’s starship arrived in the solar system. The Euchronians never actually found out why Sisyr came to Earth, although they did discover that his arrival at precisely the time when they needed him most was purely fortuitous. Whatever the reason, Sisyr was ready and willing to set it aside in order to provide Euchronia with the technical expertise and the scientific knowledge which they lacked. The margin between failure and success was undoubtedly filled by Sisyr. Without his intervention time would most definitely have run out for the dying Earth. As it was, the assistance of the alien and his home world, though slow to be provided (starships took centuries to cross the interstellar gulf between the two worlds) turned the tide.

  Euchronia was suitably grateful to Sisyr, but it also found it very convenient to forget him. The Movement had its pride, and it needed the credit more than he did. Sisyr went into quiet retirement somewhere on Earth, atop one of the mountains which projected its peak into the Overworld. He asked nothing other than a home and a quiet life. The Euchronians presumed that he would die one day and could then be obliterated entirely from the history of the Earth. They were wrong. While thousands of years rolled by, Sisyr showed not the slightest sign of dying. Earthly memories, however, were short, and Sisyr’s active contribution to the Plan ended long before the platform was complete and the world rebuilt upon it. The only real reminder of his existence was the fact that two or three times a century a star-ship would land, but the aliens were discreet, and they bothered no one except Sisyr.

  The platform was completed in six thousand years. The world in which the Euchronians were destined to live was finally pronounced complete after eleven thousand. The cities were finished, the cybernet which would provide the needs of the community was complete—a gargantuan mechanical beast for the humans to parasitize. The Euchronian Millennium was declared and the people settled down to enjoy it.

  They did not know how. They only knew why.

  Hundreds of generations of Euchronians had spent their entire lives laboring toward an end they knew they would never see. Billions of lives had been given up absolutely to the ideal of the Plan. For eleven thousand years, the purpose of life in Euchronia had been labor, unselfish and unrewarded: the infinitely protracted process of giving birth to a new existence. And when the birth was achieved....

  The purpose of life was lost.

  The Planners had anticipated this. They knew that there would have to be a period of adjustment, and they knew that period would be measured in centuries rather than in years. The Utopian potential of Euchronia’s Millennium would have to be carefully developed and brought to flower. It would take time and effort. The Planners, with the supreme optimism which had guided their forebears out of a ruined Earth and toward a promised land, led them to believe that it could and would be done. It had to be done—to justify the Plan. But when the Millennium came, they only knew what and why. They did not know how. This time, they could only rely on their own resources. They could not ask Sisyr for help.

  The people of Euchronia’s Millennium were living in a functionally designed Utopia, but they had problems. They were not Utopians. They were, in a sense, a society of misfits. Empirically maladjusted. The builders of a new world are ipso facto ill fitted to live in it. The mother cannot be expected to live the life of the child. Mothers who try destroy their children.

  Among the methods adopted by the Planners to facilitate the Plan was the i-minus effect—the chemical control of dreams. I-minus was calculated to exorcize instincts, so that social conditioning—functional social conditioning—might be made one hundred percent effective. It worked. It continued to work after the Millennium, but no one could tell whether the fact that it worked was useful or not. No one could judge the situation well enough to decide whether the effect ought to be continued or not, or even how such a decision might be made. This exemplifies the confusion of the citizens of the Millennium. They were as helpless as newborn children. An infant society. Ignorant, yet not knowing of their ignorance; blind to the contexts of their existence, yet not knowing of their blindness.

  The society of Euchronia’s Millennium was vulnerable. Its vulnerability was exposed by Carl Magner, who rediscovered the Underworld in his nightmares. (How? There was no way of knowing.) Perhaps the rediscovery of the ruined Earth was the last thing the Euchronians needed. Perhaps, on the other hand, the rediscovery of the Hell which the Plan had left behind was the only way in which the people could come to terms with the Heaven it had built.

  Perhaps it would help them to rediscover themselves.

  CHAPTER 4

  Rafael Heres had to make a statement to the Euchronian Council. The pressure on him had grown, and he knew that the current of opinion which was flowing through the Council was set against him. But it had been so before, and he had survived. Usually he stirred up big enough waves to make countercurrents of his own to drown out the others. He had faith in himself now. He knew that the only significant opposition to him, in the past and the present, was Rypeck. He had always controlled Rypeck, a
nd he was sure that he could hold him now.

  He opened his address by telling them that Carl Magner was dead. Some of them already knew, but to most it came as something of a shock. That a man should die was not uncommon, but that a man like Magner should die by assassination beside a public road was a strange and upsetting thing. That fact alone stilled the currents of hostility. It changed the game completely. Almost, if such a thing was conceivable in this day and age, it made it look as if the Magner affair might not be a game at all. (But even in games, pieces lose their lives.)

  Heres talked about Magner, who had somehow become so important that the Hegemon of the Euchronian Movement could deliver an obituary for him. Heres talked calmly about Magner’s background, and the tone of his voice not only expressed his own sympathy but went out into the multilink to grab sympathy from the listeners. He gave little attention to the tragedies which had marred Magner’s life, but simply by numbering them he made certain that everyone appreciated what a hard time the man had had.

  A less subtle man might have used the statement to build a case against Magner—to turn his public image into the effigy of a madman, preparatory to burying his memories and his ideas forever. But that was what many of them expected. That was what most of them already believed. Heres knew, as any leader knows, that it is dangerous to confirm what people already know. A leader should always be ahead, moving amid the ideas that people have not yet discovered. Magner’s death had changed the game, and Heres wanted to be the one to work out the new rules.

  It took Heres a little over an hour to make a martyr out of Magner. Instead of claiming that Magner’s experiences had made him mad, the Hegemon suggested that the pain and the anguish had lent Magner a keener insight into life than was possessed by the majority of the carefully cushioned citizens of Euchronia’s Millennium. He said, in fact, that Magner had become a visionary—a man who saw beyond the present and the legacies of the past to the realms of possibility and the legacies which ought to be put in hand for the future.

  “Before he was killed,” said Rafael Heres, “Carl Magner stood at the focus of a controversy which grew around him like a storm. Some of you may have seen the discussion which took place between Magner, Clea Aron and Yvon Emerich on the holographic network last night. The arguments there made only a beginning in searching out the implications of Magner’s theories, but they will have served to familiarize many of you with the fundamentals of the problem.

  “Carl Magner accused Euchronian society of a crime of omission in that the Movement has, at least since the Millennium, ignored and forgotten the world which still exists beneath us—the surface of the Earth from which our ancestors came. Magner wanted to remind us that the old world, from whose ashes the new one arose, was never totally consumed. He claimed that there are still men in the Underworld, living in the darkness because our world enjoys the sunlight that once was theirs. We know that the sunlight used to be ours too, and some of you would argue that we have merely preserved it while the men on the ground willfully forsook it. That may be, but as Carl Magner has tried to remind us, that was thousands of years ago. The men who live in the Underworld now are not responsible for the decisions of their forefathers.

  “I do not think that there can be any possible question about the actions of the Planners in the remote past. No one was denied the chance to make himself part of the Plan, from the moment that the Movement was founded to the moment when the last section of the platform cut off the last rays of sunlight from the last few acres of the derelict surface of the old world. No decision which we make today or in the future will reflect on the choices made in the past by the men of the past. But the situation today is different. Different circumstances call for new decisions—we cannot simply keep echoing the old ones. The Planners of the Euchronian Movement set out to build a world for us—their ultimate descendants. They did what they set out to do. We inherited that world, we have it now, and there can be no limit to our gratitude toward those who made it for us. We value this world very highly—it is our life and we guard it as we do our lives. We will continue to do so. We will continue to value and protect our own existence and the manner of that existence.

  “Carl Magner asked us to open the doors of our world to the people of the Underworld. This we cannot do. To open our world is to threaten it. But this does not mean that Carl Magner’s accusations were untrue.

  “We have forgotten the Underworld. The people who live in the Underworld today, if people there are, are not the people who refused to join the Plan, who made a free choice and chose to live their lives as they would.

  “We remember the men who stayed on the ground rather than work for a new world as cowards and traitors, and perhaps we have reason for this. But we must not judge too harshly. It was their right to choose, and it remained their right throughout the centuries when the two worlds were coexistent. How many of us are the descendants of late recruits, who joined the Movement a hundred, or a thousand years after the Plan was first put into operation? We do not know. It makes no difference. It does not matter whether our ancestors in the age of psychosis were committed Euchronians, or the grandfathers of converts. Why should it? How can it?

  “I believe that Carl Magner was right to remind us of the world we left behind. I believe he was right to ask us whether there are men on the ground today, and if so, whether we owe them something because we have taken away their sunlight. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which he suggested is not the right answer, but the question which Magner asked remains the right question.

  “The Euchronian ideal—the ideal which built the new world, and which gave us everything that we are and everything that we have—is the principle of working together for the benefit of others. The Planners worked for their children, many generations hence, but how many Planners died childless? How many of the men who worked for our world have no descendants living here? Again, we do not know. Again, what does it matter? For those men, the ideal remained. They still gave their lives to the Plan, if not for their own children, then for the children of their neighbors, and the children of men who lived and worked on the other side of the world.

  “The Euchronian Plan was declared complete two centuries ago. We live now in what we are pleased to call the Euchronian Millennium, the world which is our heritage. But can we really call ourselves Euchronians? We work, we live useful lives. But the people for whom we work, and to whom we offer our resources, are ourselves. If we are Euchronians, then perhaps we should look beyond ourselves. Perhaps we should look beyond our children and our children’s children, whose future, we hope, is secure because of the efforts of the Planners. Perhaps we should remember the Underworld, and ask ourselves whether we might devote something of our effort and endeavor toward doing what even the Planners themselves could not do and did not try. Perhaps, now that we have our world secure in the sky, we should begin to make another new world—another good and safe world, where men can live secure and free lives—out of the surface which languishes beneath our feet.

  “We cannot bring the people of the Underworld into our world. But we can help them to rebuild theirs. We can offer them knowledge and supply them with tools and power. We can give them everything that they need to set in motion their own Euchronian Plan, and we can help them to make it successful. We can give them everything...except the sunlight, the Face of Heaven which Carl Magner wanted to give them. But we can supply light instead of sunlight. We can help them to find a different face for their Heaven. We owe them that. We must owe them that, at least.

  “Members of the Council, I propose that we give our attention, from this moment on, to the making of the new Euchronian Plan.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Heres believed that he had saved the world. Two worlds, in fact. That was—had to be—the perfect solution. The ideal game is the one which everybody wins. Heres, it will be remembered, was a brilliant Hoh player. The idea of a second Plan, to accomplish what even the initial Planners had assumed to be beyond their
talents, was, in Heres’ eyes, the masterstroke.

  Eleven thousand years of history demanded of the people of Euchronia a commitment—a commitment that was clear, altruistic, and ambitious. The declaration of the Millennium had left not only the Movement but the entire civilization stranded on a spiritual desert island. The age of psychosis could never return, and the i-minus effect seemed to assure social adjustment, and therefore social sanity, but Euchronian culture was nevertheless dangerously full of alarm signals. Rypeck had read those signals, and Rypeck had been on the borders of fear and anxiety for years. Heres had read the signals, too, but Heres had a cool head. Heres had faith. And he had found the answer—the political and intellectual coup de grâce. Barring all accidents, not only was his political future as Hegemon secured, but also the future of the Movement and the human race.

  Barring all accidents.

  What accidents? For one thing, of course, he had jumped the gun. There was, as yet, no report from Harkanter and his party regarding conditions in the Underworld. Politically, the right moment had come before he had all the facts at his command, and thus there was a risk—of some kind. But Heres knew what Rypeck had found out about the Underworld—that it lived, that it was lighted, and that the Overworld was geared to resist the invasion of its life-forms. He also knew what Abram Ravelvent had discovered—that materials were constantly exported from the world above to the world below—materials like steel implements and books, which spoke conclusively of human life and some degree of human culture. Heres knew little enough about the Underworld, but it was enough to be sure. It mattered little how severe the conditions in the Underworld might be, or how savage the people. The magnitude of the task was, thanks to the Planners’ precedent, quite irrelevant. Heres was quite confident that any accidents of circumstance could be overcome. He still had faith in himself. Rather more than that, in fact—he had ultimate faith in the essential nature of things, in the fact that the situation (all situations) not only provided an answer by which everybody could win, but were so structured as to demand such an answer. This faith did not arise from the fact that he was a devoted Hoh player—the reverse was actually the case. That was the way Heres conceived of the universe working. It was his understanding of existence. Hoh was only a model—a simulation—of reality.