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

by Brian Stableford

  Heres also knew that he had sidestepped the thorny questions which the Magner affair had initially asked. Those questions, framed by Enzo Ulicon, had seriously disturbed Rypeck (who was, of course, ripe for disturbance). In Heres’ scheme, there were no answers to those questions. Instead, Heres was prepared to hope that he had rendered the questions irrelevant and immaterial.

  Magner had had bad dreams. Terrible dreams. That meant that either the i-minus effect was not effective, in his case, or there was another input into his dreams—presumably telepathic. Ulicon had held the latter alternative to be the more likely. Heres had said nothing, but he had always preferred the former. He had already known—as everyone with eyes to see must have known—that the i-minus effect was not operating as per prescription in the Millennial society. No one knew how, or why, it was going wrong, but it was. Heres was inclined to attribute the deficit not to the i-minus agent but to the social psychology of the people. I-minus favored social adaptation, the establishment of social values as absolutes. If i-minus was failing, then it was for lack of social values rather than lack of adaptive capacity, so Heres thought. Given a plan—an ideal, a great social goal—then i-minus would work again. So Heres believed. He had seen Magner as the tip of an iceberg rather than a unique case of something new.

  Heres was prepared to assume that the second Euchronian Plan would solve everything. His understanding of reality encouraged him to make this assumption. He was aware, however, that it remained an assumption. He was not blind to the possibility that some unforeseen, incalculable factor might yet be thrown into the equation. He was mentally ready for such a thing to happen. It did.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jervis Burstone, whose amusement in life was to play God rather than to play Hoh, was in the Underworld, waiting. Usually, Ermold was at the rendezvous before him, unable to control his eagerness to get hold of the gifts which Burstone brought and dispensed so magnificently. (They were not quite gifts, but neither Ermold nor Burstone knew why the pretense of trading was maintained. They both believed that what Burstone took in return for his goods was worthless.)

  Burstone sighed. He knew that Ermold was not going to come. Late meant never, in the Underworld. It was a world which did not offer second chances to its people.

  Ermold had been a good contact. He had been the nastiest, most vile of all the men that Burstone had had to deal with, and by virtue of that fact he had looked to have a good many years in him. But time seemed to move so quickly here. A man might pass from maturity to senility in a matter of weeks. The people of the Underworld seemed to live their lives inside a span of time which Burstone hardly noticed in passing. Burstone could remember the contact before Ermold as if it were yesterday. And the one before that. He would remember Ermold with crystal clarity when three more contacts had all fulfilled their purpose and rotted into the stinking, polluted dust from which they came. That was the way of things.

  Burstone waited, unwillingly, glancing at his wristwatch every few moments, giving Ermold the time that was his due, but begrudging the filthy savage every second of it. Burstone did not like the stillness and the alienness and—more than anything—the cold, steady perpetual starlight. He sweated, and knew that he was slowly absorbing the stink and the foul taint of the Underworld. Once back on top he would have to slink home like a rat in the shadows, to bathe for an hour and plaster himself with the medicines which would save his skin from rotting away, and save his body from the vile diseases he inhaled with every breath. If only he could wear a mask—a proper mask rather than a wad of cotton wool and a piece of perforated plastic. But he had been warned against masks.

  He was afraid, as well.

  But the thrill of fear, and the rather less conscious thrill of pollution were almost life’s blood to him. He needed them. They gave something to him which he could not hope to find in any other way. The tainting of his body and the washing clean, the scouring of his body with the hormonal cocktail that was fear—these meant something to him. They were real to him in a way that the diversions of the Over-world were not. The ritual descent into Hell, followed by the ascent into Heaven—this was the purpose of life. It was the focal point of his existence. It was the reason that he was needed by the worlds. It was his duty, his honor, and his...joy?

  Burstone was a completely sane man. His dreams never troubled him.

  While he waited, he drifted on an ocean of feeling. An emotional castaway.

  The creatures of the underworld would not come close. The smell of him, in their senses, was just as alien to them as theirs was to him. His sharp, chemical cleanliness was an affront to them. No predator would dare to come close, and the small creatures engaged in the business of survival detoured in order to pass him by. He saw the great ghost moths fluttering between the squabs some yards away, and heard their high-pitched screaming at the very limits of his audible range, but there was not enough light for him to see anything else. He was virtually blind down here. He had a horror of darkness, too. On this, too, his soul fed.

  When the time was up, he simply picked up the suitcase and began the walk back to the cage with which he could hoist himself back to the platform. He walked with an easy, measured stride, unhurried. It took courage—genuine, completely pure courage. It took strength of mind and of character. He never looked around. The thought of finding a new point of entry, of setting up a new contact, and the inevitable risks that would be involved in so doing, did not disturb him. He accepted that part of his role.

  Up on top, clean and healthy, he would still feel good, even though he had not fulfilled his mission on this occasion. He would feel the satisfaction of knowing that his part was played.

  He was only an ordinary man.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Hell beneath Euchronia’s Millennium had not been cut from the cloth of existence in a single piece, or in a single moment. It grew as a patchwork, very slowly. The several evolutions which took place beneath the slowly expanding sections of the Overworld platform had every chance to discover new ways of coping with the conditions of life. The adaptation of surface life to Tartarean circumstances took place according to several different patterns. Each pattern was a collaboration between chance and choice. When the platform was complete and the Underworld was sealed—several thousand years after the process was begun—the patterns came together, and a new collaboration begun. (Collaboration in the Underworld did not take the same form as collaboration among the Euchronians. It took more familiar forms, like war—the war of nature: natural selection.)

  There was no section of the Underworld under which the ecosystem of the old world failed to adapt to new circumstances. The adaptation was costly—the mortality of species was over ninety percent, and the mortality of individuals within species that survived was often on the same sort of scale. Some surviving species, on the other hand, proliferated vastly and enjoyed altogether unprecedented success. All the surviving species were unstable, and remained so. By the time of the Euchronian Millennium, some kind of stability was just beginning to assert itself within many communities of organisms, but on the previous evolutionary scale several eons of progress toward balance had been lost. Curiously, almost half the loss had taken place before the Plan got under way.

  Homo sapiens was the species which adapted most easily to the new regime, and by his active interference he encouraged and assisted many other species to do likewise. (He also discouraged and prevented one or two, but his positive success was much greater than the negative corollary.) The Euchronians had very unkind things to say about the men who stayed on the ground, but it was not the fact that they resented the work and the dedication involved in commitment that made most of them do so. In point of fact, the weak and the degenerate almost invariably joined the Euchronians, fearing the darkness and the wild world more than they hated the work and the regimentation. The Euchronians at least provided food and shelter for their people. On the surface, there were no guarantees. The people who stayed on the ground at the end�
�who actually went into the Underworld rather than join the Plan (as distinct from those who simply retreated from the encroaching platform)—did so because they preferred their own idea of freedom to that of the Euchronians. They wanted freedom from the Plan, and they were prepared to accept Hell instead of the promise of Heaven for their children’s children, in defense of that idea of freedom.

  There was, of course, a great deal of fighting between the Euchronians and the men on the ground while the platform was growing. The supplies which kept the Plan going came from the ground—from the land of the men who could still make the land provide. In return, that land was eaten up as was the derelict land. When the landowners would not supply the Euchronians, the Euchronians took what they needed. When they cooperated, the only gratitude they received was the offer to join the Plan when their land, in its turn, came to be covered over. The Euchronians won every fight. They had the numbers and they had the organization. There was no way the men on the ground could defend their world. They had to take one of the new environments which was offered to them—the proto-Heaven or the neo-Hell. From the Euchronian point of view, that was no choice at all. Not everyone saw it the Euchronian way.

  Hell was not kind to the men who chose it. The old world had been past redemption in terms of the human civilization which had grown up in it. From the point of view of society in the second dark age the world was ended, doom had come. But a derelict world is not a dead world. Life continues, somehow. Always. The old order was finished, and chaos was come, but life went on. Even the imprisonment of the old world—its condemnation to perpetual darkness—could not make life extinct within it. The old species had to die by the thousand, and those which survived did so at tremendous cost, but the cost of evolution in terms of necessary death is always less than the cost of not evolving. The genetic heritage of the survivor species was ruthlessly stripped and rebuilt, with selection operating at very high levels and evolution being forced at a tremendous rate, but they could take it. Just. Adapt, or perish, was the only law. It applied to Homo sapiens no less than to all the other species. The cost of human survival was a complete genetic overhaul of the species. The men who went to Hell wanted freedom. Freedom from Euchronia they won, but freedom from evolution they could not have.

  Evolution in the Underworld was necessarily rapid. A characteristic tachytelic pattern developed: divergent evolution of forms, rapid speciation, a high rate of extinction and specific genesis. An evolutionary explosion. It had happened before, on the Earth before man, but the evolutionary change of gear which took place when the Underworld came into existence saw the greatest-ever increase in the rate of evolution—the biggest explosion of them all. It echoed through the ages which followed, and would echo for many more. The impact was only just beginning to die when the Euchronians, in the Heaven which they had built up above, completed their Plan.

  Man—omnivorous, intelligent, at the very highest level of the biotic hierarchy—changed least of all the species in the Underworld. Even man became not one species, but several.

  The greatest evolutionary boost was evident in the semi-sentient species which had cohabited with man in the concrete jungles of the age of psychosis. They had the capacity to adapt if they could make the leap to full sentience and change their physical form in order to cope with a complete reorientation of their survival strategies. Some of them made that leap. Some became extinct because their gene pools drained dry in the attempt.

  At the lowest strata there was complete reorganization. Millions of years of plant evolution went to waste, and progress began again with the lowest forms—the algae and the fungi. The stratum of the primary consumers in the animal kingdom was likewise completely refurbished, but here there were already patterns of life and forms of being which were useful. The crabs of Tartarus were not the crabs of pre-historic ages, nor the moths, nor the cockroaches, nor even the multitudinous worms, but the names did as well for the new versions. There are only so many ways to design an animal, and most of the models had been ready in the prehistoric world.

  The microbiotica, of course, were reorganized on the same scale as the plants and lower animals, but from the macrobiotic point of view the revision was quite invisible. There are even fewer ways to design a bacterium or a protozoan than there are to design an animal. Form and function survived despite the fact that genetic complements had to be given a complete overhaul. The bacteria had the least difficulty adapting. Bacteria always exist in extreme circumstances.

  From the microbiotic point of view, the division of the world into Heaven and Hell was virtually immaterial. A trivial incident on the path of existence. As if an immortal were stung by a bee....

  CHAPTER 8

  Camlak did not hurry along the road to Lehr. He walked steadily, at a pace which he could sustain for many miles. He was forced to import a rather mechanical quality into both his thoughts and his actions. It was necessary to the situation. He already knew, in his heart, what he was going to see when he finally looked out over Dossal Bog, but he advanced toward that moment nevertheless. He would have to meet it.

  Once he was past the hill called Stiver he left the road proper, and bore slightly southwest, taking higher ground so that he could command a good view of what was ahead of him. He did not climb to the ridges but merely moved as a hunter might, close to the road but not too close, stalking its length, tracking its curves. The stars were less dense in the roof of the world over these dried-up, coarse lands, and the light they shed was not bright, but Camlak had good eyes, and there was light enough for him to see what he needed to see.

  And eventually, his assumed mechanism brought him to the climactic vision. From the slopes of the hill called Solum he could see the road as it straightened out to cross Dossal Bog. He could almost see the shadowed walls of Lehr itself in the furthest distance—or he thought he could. Perhaps it was just a suggestion of shadows—an imaginary goal to draw travelers on ever faster, until they dropped from weariness with the vision no nearer.

  The women fleeing from Shairn had gone a good way down the road. They were nearly a mile away from where he stood.

  The Ahrima had come down on their backs. The bundles they had carried were scattered in a ragged line for a quarter mile behind the place where they had been caught. The crowd had scattered both ways into the bog. Only a handful had died on the road. Camlak knew that the women and the children would have run into a radioactive waste, into a living fire, rather than stand and wait for the Ahrima. And the marauders would have followed them to cut them down. And come back again to join the horde.

  Camlak wished the bog was one vast quicksand, to have sucked the Ahrima down after their prey. But it was not. It was only a bog. The corpses were sprawled across the dark tussocks, half-swallowed by the mud, floating on the pools of stagnant water. The Ahrima had caught their prey, had enjoyed their massacre, and had gone on. Perhaps two or three Ahriman warriors had been trapped in the bog, or knifed by the women, but only two or three. No more. How many of the Children of the Voice had escaped? How many infants had found a hiding place? More than two or three, no doubt. Twelve. Or twenty. But how many of those would survive, in the long run? The same two or three. Maybe none. Wherever they went—forward, or back, or just on the road, there would be enemies enough for all of them.

  Camlak could read the whole story written in the dim scene which extended before his eyes, illumined by starlight. It was no more and no less than he had expected. He had not expected the men of Lehr to come out and try to cover the retreat. But he had had to go on to the end of the story in any case.

  As he stared out from his vantage, he felt very little emotion inside himself. He did not curse, and he certainly did not cry. He merely looked, and let the looking soak into his being. He let the sight imprint itself on his memory, becoming a part of him. That was enough. There was no need for fury or mourning. The time for those was past, left behind in Stalhelm, even before the battle and the burning.

  He would follow
Nita, now. And when he found her....

  He knew no more. The alternatives which he would find then would have to be discovered. They were not ready in his mind. No such alternatives had ever been shown to him, except in his dreams. In his dreams, they were phantoms. He did not know what it took to clothe such phantoms with reality. He would live, but he did not know how, or why. Those answers were lost, lying amid the dead like the trampled, shattered bundles the women had carried out of Stalhelm in the vain attempt to wrap up their lives and steal them away from the Ahrima.

  He could see the Ahrima. He could see their fires, at least. Whether the fires were at the walls of Lehr, or still some miles away, he could not tell. Perhaps it was Lehr, or the fields of Lehr, that was burning. The light was red and blurred, a smudge in the pit of darkness which closed off the world at the limits of his visual range.