What he was trying to say was that at last he had been able to share his father’s dream—the dream which had led Carl Magner to his death. He knew it, though, for what it was. Not a dream, but a jumble of sense-impressions. Leakage from a million minds.
His attempt to communicate with Huldi faded away as the sickness left him, ebbing from his mind and allowing him to fall into real and natural sleep.
He dreamed. Normally.
CHAPTER 14
“I presume that you have no intention whatsoever of trying to find out what went wrong with Magner’s mind?” Rypeck asked of Heres.
“It’s no longer important,” said the Hegemon. “Magner is presumably dead, the body has not yet been recovered. If and when it is the risk of contamination may be too great to warrant doing anything with it but burning it, and even the most thorough autopsy might reveal absolutely nothing. As an individual case, it isn’t worth making a big issue out of.”
“You seem to have made a big enough issue out of his wretched book without very much encouragement.”
“I thought you would have approved,” lied Heres. “You complained about our ignorance of the Underworld. You brought to light the fact that measures were apparently taken by the Planners to secure the existence of human life in the Underworld even after the Overworld was sealed. You complain about the tentative nature of the contemporary Council’s government and its lack of ideas. The second Plan is the answer to all your criticisms.”
“I don’t want to reclaim the Underworld,” said Rypeck. “If you want to know, I’d rather see it dead. I don’t believe that you want to reclaim the Underworld either. I don’t think that your interest in and involvement with this crazy second Plan is serious. I think it’s a political move, and twice as dangerous to us because it’s not sincere.
“I can see the sense in a second Plan. You may be right in saying that it’s exactly what we need. We need to rebuild the Movement to replace some real and literal movement. But not into the Underworld. Why couldn’t you look outwards, to the planets and the stars?”
Rypeck knew why. First, because Magner and his book had given Heres a convenient launching pad for the second Plan. It had allowed him to get the timing right. Secondly, the alternative plan—the outward-looking plan—was a Eupsychian catch-phrase. The conquest of space. The Eupsychians had laid claim to that idea and used it as if they alone had a right to it. Heres had let them take it. Heres had no use for space travel—he associated it with the age of psychosis. Heres’ brand of Euchronianism recognized one Earth and one alone, the most precious of all things.
“We have been reminded of the Underworld,” said Heres. “We have rediscovered it. We can’t forget it again—not overnight. We mustn’t forget it again. It ought to be the next thing on the list of our priorities. How can we lay claim to a new world with the ruins of the old one still beneath our feet. The Underworld may be a sewer but we owe it to ourselves—never mind the people who live down there—to make it a clean sewer, hygienic.”
“Do you honestly see this as a real solution? To our problems?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re lying,” said Rypeck. “Or blind.”
“You’ve no right to say that to me,” Heres told him. “You’re letting your bitterness run clean away with you. You’re an old man, Eliot. If you continue this way you’re going to make yourself look like a senile fool. Not only to me, but to the Council—to the whole Movement.”
“I’m sorry, Rafael,” said Rypeck. He was genuinely sorry. His head had run away with him. But he was seriously troubled by the course of events. He was sure that there was something in the pattern which was more serious than Heres had ever considered.
“Can’t we hold back?” Rypeck continued. “Can’t we wait for a while, until we have a chance to look at the situation from all sides? Do we have to commit ourselves now?”
“We’re already committed,” said Heres, positively.
“Rafael,” said Rypeck, “I’m going to keep on looking for the truth in this matter. If I find that the i-minus effect is going wrong, I’ll break the secret. I’ll have to. Maybe you can survive that, now, and maybe I can’t. I don’t know. But I can’t let it go on.”
“If you broke the secret tomorrow,” said Heres, with a confidence which he did not quite feel, “it wouldn’t matter. I can justify it, now. You can’t hurt me, Eliot.”
Rypeck was tempted to say: “I can try.” Instead, he made what seemed to be a gesture of defeat. He allowed Heres to end the interview. But in Rypeck’s eyes, he could never really be defeated, because—unlike Heres—he was really not fighting for his own ends. Like Heres, he was trying to play the game the ideal way—with everybody winning—but while Heres wanted to be the architect of victory, Rypeck only wanted the answer to come out right. He needed help—not to provide the answers, but to arm him with the right questions. He needed to turn to someone outside the situation, who could see into it without necessarily being a part of it. There was one person who might be able to do that—to tell him whether Heres was steering Euchronia into disaster, and if so, why.
That person was the alien, Sisyr.
CHAPTER 15
They tried to keep going, but it soon became clear that it was a losing battle. Joth had not the strength, and the demands which walking put upon his body detracted seriously from the slow healing processes working on his wound. In any case, they were not sure that they were going the right way, or that they were going anywhere at all.
Nita thought that they should have stayed with the wall, and gone east, rather than striking southeast into the Waste for a second time. It was quite unnecessary for them to retrace their steps—when they had come into the Waste they were in a hurry, and had accepted the need to take a direct route. There was no urgency now. In addition, there was no real reason why they should accept automatically that they were going back to Shairn. In many ways it might be a bad idea. The whole of Shairn might be in thrall to the Ahrima by now.
Huldi, on the other hand, had been all too ready to take the obvious path, and she was prepared to be obstinate in defense of the easy decision. The unknown held no attraction for Huldi—she had launched herself into it initially merely to escape from Ermold. She felt the need of a destination of some kind for the security which the idea offered. While she was going somewhere she knew where she was and why. The direct way was the only way she could really be sure of. She thought in straight lines. Once she arrived in Shairn, the problem would remake itself—the security of traveling disappears upon arrival—but that was not an immediate concern. She lived each moment as it came.
They did not know what Joth thought. He did not say. When he had encountered his father at the doorway to the upper world, the whole purpose of returning had seemed to drain away. Unlike Huldi, Joth felt his identity extended in time. He lived as much in remembrance of the past and in anticipation of things to come as in the present—perhaps far more. The death of Carl Magner had taken away both his past and his future insofar as he could perceive meaning therein. Such things are not uncommon among people who live strung out in time rather than day by day. A factor in their life is erased, and the whole integrity of life simply disappears. All the threads fall loose, no longer knitted together. The bottom falls out of the world. It is a temporary effect, in most cases—it merely requires time for the threads of existence to clot, to reintegrate into a whole. In the meantime, however, the sense of purposelessness can be overwhelming, leading to almost total loss of the sense of being in the world, of being a part of the course of events.
Joth had fallen out of his role in the pattern of life as he perceived it. He was cut adrift, and he was drifting.
There is an analogy to be drawn between Joth’s situation and Nita’s. She, too, had lost her father, and with him her whole life. Like him, she was drifting. Huldi, though, had cut herself out of the cloth of her existence. She had exempted herself by an act of will. Of the three, only Huldi really felt th
e compulsion to refabricate a pattern, to decide on a destination, to know what she was doing and why. Only she felt the need to rediscover a purpose in life. It was largely her instigation, therefore, which had provided the motive force to take them back into the Waste toward Shairn.
It was largely her motive force, also, which knitted them together as a group. There was no thought in her head, or in Nita’s, of abandoning Joth, or each other. The three of them were bound together. The binding force might as well be called love as anything else, but it was integrative love rather than directional. Like the tension in a stretched string, it pulled in both directions—action and reaction equal and opposite. The generation of the bond of love was very largely a response to Huldi’s need—she brought it into being.
CHAPTER 16
Joth’s wound had opened, and blood was leaking slowly from the surface of the damaged flesh.
“It won’t heal,” said Nita, trying to mop up the blood with a soft pad of matted fungus, with little success.
“Let it dry,” said Huldi. She was spearing crabs which scuttled across the broad algal fronds dipping into the water. They were resting on a patch of raised ground, but though it was raised it was by no means dry. Ideally, they needed somewhere better to rest, but the swamp was completely inhospitable in this region.
“It’ll never heal in the Waste,” said the girl.
“Nothing but Waste for hundreds of miles,” Huldi pointed out, unnecessarily. She speared another crab which came too close. As she looked out over the vast network of green strips resting on and just below the water surface, she saw that more crabs were visible, and that they all seemed to be working their way closer. They were small, blue-gray creatures with small, ineffectual pincers. They were not a common species but they seemed to be swarming in this particular area.
“Something’s attracting them,” said Nita.
“It’s the blood,” said the human girl. “Joth.” As she spoke she kicked at a pair of the bolder crabs, and sent them flying through the air, to land in among the green fronds with a double splash.
“They won’t bother us,” said Nita, albeit slightly uneasily. “They’re too small.”
“But what comes after the crabs?”
Huldi had a valid point. Scavengers which converge on wounded prey are themselves a temptation to other predators, quite apart from the fact that where one carrion-eater leads, others tend to follow. The blue-gray crabs would not feed until their target was dead, but by seeking it out and pointing the way for stronger creatures they might get to eat all the sooner. Evolution favors collaboration as well as competition.
Neither Nita nor Huldi had a weapon likely to prove very effective against larger predators. Nita had a thin-bladed knife of Heaven-metal, Huldi a larger, heavier one, but made of poor iron, dull and rusted.
“We had no trouble coming the other way,” said Nita, trying to use words as a shield against fear.
“We spread no smell of blood,” said Huldi. “And we were much further to the west, almost on the fringes of the poisoned land. Here it is not so dead.”
“Look around for stones,” said Nita. “Smash the crabs and let them eat their own kind.”
But the area was not the place where stones might be found. That there was solid ground here at all was due to the proliferating plant life, which had raised itself up out of the mud, binding it and making layers of humus as one generation followed another in chaotic confusion. They were on a hummock in between two dendritic monsters whose multi-hydral branches supported vast colonies of passenger-plants and whose long, spatulate leaves and creepers formed the basis for webs and mats of lacy leaf-creatures and carpets of clinging, jelly-like tissue that was almost the texture of raw protoplasm. Such a vast profusion of life-forms inevitably attracted a complex complement of insects, and no doubt sheltered numerous potentially dangerous creatures.
“We have to carry on,” said Huldi.
“It’s no use,” Nita told her. “He’s exhausted. He’s barely conscious.”
Joth was not even aware of the danger. He only wanted to lie down. Had he known that his life was threatened, he would have been unable to react. He would have simply waited for death to come to him.
“We can make him move,” said Huldi. “Between us.”
“He’s too heavy.” Huldi had already known that—her statement had been wishful thinking rather than a declaration of intent. Joth was not unduly large, but Huldi was shorter and lighter. Nita was less than four feet tall, and though not delicately built, could hardly support even a quarter of Joth’s weight. Though she was near maturity, by the standards of her kind, she had the strength of a ten-year-old child by the standards of Joth’s kind.
So they fought the crabs, as best they could, with hands and feet. It was not difficult. But in reality they were waiting, waiting to see whether crabs were all that they would have to deal with.
CHAPTER 17
Huldi screamed as something surfaced thirty or forty feet away. It was a reptile of some kind, with an elongated crocodilean snout and two rows of tiny needle-like teeth spilling out of its mouth. Water streamed from its warty skin, splashing from its ridged back as it shivered deliberately.
Its forelegs were longer than the hinder pair, and armed with vicious claws. As it stood erect in the shallow water it measured five feet from hip to neck, ten or twelve from its snout to the tip of the coiling tail, still invisible beneath the frothing water. With a few quick strokes of its arms it brushed away the bulk of the weed that had clung to its body.
It moved forward.
Its large, black-slitted yellow eyes were set in the sides of its head, in raised orbits—again like those of a crocodile or a frog. It did not appear to be looking at Huldi. Instead, it followed the movements of the scattering crabs. In chasing them, however, it came closer to the two humans and the rat. It stooped forward, and its long snout went perpetually back and forth as the foremost teeth snapped up the crabs and the tongue threw them back to be crunched by the jaws. It came forward, looking grotesquely like a chicken pecking for corn. It retained its upright posture, its arms waving to maintain its balance.
It flopped forward, creating a massive splash and stirring the green water-borne carpet for yards around. In the water, it came on, with a snake-like twist and then a glide like an arrow. There was no doubt now that its attention had been caught by something larger than crabs. And yet its eyes still did not seem to look directly at Huldi or Nita. It seemed to be looking all ways at once. Its jaws half-opened in a macabre smile.
Neither Huldi nor Nita felt the urge to run. Instead, they reached for their knives.
There was a momentary flurry as the long head darted sideways to snap up another crab, and the long forelimbs surfaced to rip yet again at the clinging weed. The gliding motion ceased, and once again the great beast paused to haul itself up on to the triangle of its back legs and tail. It was slow in rearing up, and this time it had to reach out with one of its claws to grip, just for a moment, a high branch of one of the dendrite colonies.
As it steadied itself, the whole of its yellow underbelly gleamed wet in the pale starlight.
Almost without thinking, Nita threw the small knife with all her strength into the center of the yellow expanse. It penetrated, but not far enough. The hide, even there, was too thick.
The crocodilean snorted, spraying thin mucous from its nostrils. It looked down, seeming suddenly unsteady again. Its jaws yawned and one claw brushed the knife from its lodgment into the water. No blood flowed.
“Throw it!” Nita howled, as Huldi moved forward with iron dagger extended, as though she intended to engage the monster hand-to-hand. The human girl stopped, and moved back, but she did not throw the weapon. She could not bring herself to release it.
Nita went to her knees beside Joth’s supine form, groping for his pack in search of something—anything hard or sharp—with which she could attack the creature.
It was moving forward again, and Huldi
was moving back from it, but too slowly. It would have her within the swing of its arms in a matter of seconds.
Then an arrow smashed into the reptile’s belly just above the point at which the knife had gone in. The velocity of impact was akin to that of a bullet, the momentum of the shaft somewhat greater. If the crocodilean had been a man it would have been hurled backwards. As it was, it simply lost balance and teetered. Its claws waved in the air, making circles as they searched for something to grip. One found the dendrite branch again, but it was not enough. The beast fell, twisting as it did so, coiling even as it hit the water. This time there was blood—the water where it fell roiled, and the foam which flew up was flecked with red.
It thrashed in the water, and another arrow hissed through the air. Nita and Huldi watched it plow uselessly into the water, and Nita screamed, very faintly, having little breath to spare.
But the second arrow was unnecessary. The crocodilean wanted no more. The pain of the one sound blow was enough.
It was off through the water, horizontally, its body snaking and its four limbs thrashing back and forth in a mad, uncoordinated attempt to add to its velocity. It hesitated once, and Nita gasped again, thinking that it was about to turn and attack, but it was only the arrow catching on a submerged root. The wrench had hurt the creature, but had only made it more determined to get away.
It might survive, but the odds were probably against it. The arrowhead would remain in its flesh, though the wooden shaft would be easy enough to tear away. The wound would prove troublesome and fester. Ultimately, in its own time, the poisons in the wound would spread to the whole system. In all likelihood, the beast would end up prey for the little blue crabs. In the meantime, it would be very hurt and very dangerous, but it would not be back.
Iorga had fired from no more than twenty feet. He had come from behind the larger dendrite. He, too, had smelled blood, but he had not come to claim his share.
A Vision of Hell: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Two Page 6
