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

by Brian Stableford

  It came closer. Soron picked himself up off his back and stared at it, fearfully. He was startled by the calmness in the creature’s bearing. It walked erect, like a man. It was looking at him without fear.

  It was just about four feet tall. It was gray-furred. Its head was large, but somewhat bestial in formation. It was wearing clothes, and in its right hand—it had hands—it was carrying a long and rather wicked-looking knife.

  Harkanter had his finger on the trigger of the rifle, ready to take the risk of firing if there was no other recourse. Was this one of the men of the Underworld? he wondered. It looked more like a giant rat. An obscene parody of a man.

  The pink eyes shifted—together—from Harkanter to Soron. Harkanter was frozen still, Soron was groping at his belt.

  The creature displayed an open palm. “I’ll help...,” it—or he—began, in what appeared to be slurred but perfectly comprehensible English.

  Then Soron shot it. It collapsed, falling backwards. It was not dead, though the dart had taken it full in the chest at short range. Soron’s weapon was designed not to kill. The creature tried once to rise from the ground, but it could not. It lapsed slowly into stillness.

  Soron was shaking uncontrollably.

  “Get up,” hissed Harkanter. “Run. Back to the camp. I’ll be all right. Get men. Quickly.”

  Soron came unsteadily to his feet and set off, moving convulsively for the first few strides.

  “Get that knife,” Harkanter shouted after him.

  Soron returned, hesitated, and then bent hurriedly to pluck the knife from the nerveless fingers of the felled creature.

  “Which way?” he said, uncertainly.

  “That way,” said Harkanter, pointing. “Run!”

  “Suppose more come?” said Soron. “There may be more.”

  Harkanter was shaking the gun, trying to get the mud out of the barrel. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said. “Get moving.”

  Soron nodded, turned, and ran. He was no longer careful of his ground. He had left most of his specimens behind. Impelled by a terror that was almost panic, he ran for the metal wall.

  Harkanter looked after him, for a while, and then put the rifle butt under his armpit, waiting.

  Secure in his hiding place, Chemec also watched. He knew better than to show himself. He had dealt with the Heaven-sent before. They were dangerous, but they were stupid. Smiling to himself, he remembered Yami’s way...and he looked at the fallen Camlak.

  CHAPTER 20

  “It’s very kind of you to see me,” said Warnet.

  “I don’t have many visitors,” said Sisyr. “I wish there were more. Your world long ago lost interest in me. And why not? You are ephemeral beings. We have little enough in common.”

  “You don’t make your existence very noticeable,” commented the Eupsychian.

  “No,” said the alien. “I don’t like to become obvious. There is a possibility of...embarrassment. Of course, this is my world now. I make my home here. But it is not my world in the sense that it is yours. Your people built this world...they have a fierce pride in it. Pride means a great deal to ephemerals. Do you mind my referring to you in that way, though? Perhaps I am careless?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” said Warnet. “I’m used to it. I’ve no wish to live forever.” He stopped, and there was a dragging pause which suggested that he expected Sisyr to make some reply to the comment. But Sisyr said nothing, waiting for Warnet to fill in his own silence. Warnet looked at the alien speculatively, and then let his eyes move around the room as if he were inspecting it closely.

  “I know so very little about you,” said the human. “As...ephemerals...we seem to be very forgetful of our friends—and perhaps our debts.”

  “Your people owe me nothing,” said Sisyr.

  “Life itself,” said the Earthman. He paused again, with the same suggestion of waiting, but again Sisyr did not reply.

  Sisyr was taller than Warnet by a foot, but he did not seem to be a giant. There were a number of humans who topped Warnet by similar margins. The alien’s skin was red-brown; his eyes were pale blue, round, and had no pupils. He had no nose, but there was an area of skin enfolded on his upper lip that was slightly darker than the rest of his skin, and which occasionally fluttered slightly. The mouth had no lower lip to speak of—the lower jaw tucked up neatly behind the upper ridge. No teeth were visible. The whole face was dominated by the eyes, which, though very little larger or more protrusive than their human analogues, stood out by virtue of the striking color difference and the reduced lower jaw. Warnet wondered idly what range of radiation Sisyr could perceive with these eyes, and with what molecular delicacy his chemotactical sense operated. What senses did the alien possess which he had not? And what did he have that the alien did not. The same world, thought Warnet, and yet we might live in quite different worlds, hardly able to perceive one another except as shadows. What do I look like in his eyes? Would I recognize myself. What kind of concept does he have of my identity, or I of his? And yet we sit in the same room, and drink the same wine. We may read the same books and listen to the same music. Two worlds in one, neatly slotted together. But what do we each understand by what we read and hear? Have we so little in common, or so much...?

  Sisyr’s hands, too, were inhuman, although the rest of him, clothed as it was in a manner which concealed rather than exposed, seemed quite ordinary. Warnet considered the hands. Fingers, of a sort, but thin, looking like insect’s legs compared to the short, squat, knuckleboned fingers which twined round his own glass. Webs extended between all the fingers and when the hands were at rest they were folded. The palms were pitted, and there were ridges of what looked like suckers round the pits. The thumb was opposable, and was much more sturdy than the other fingers—strangely jointed, with a hard, horny claw.

  Warnet was particularly fascinated by the hands. They seemed so strange and complex. One could learn so much of a human by looking at the hands—what could one learn of an alien? For what was the hand functionally designed? Why had evolution favored such a grotesque shape? But this question could not be answered. The context in which it might be applied—if it was applicable at all—was something which Warnet knew absolutely nothing about. He did not even know the name of Sisyr’s world.

  The Earthman raised his glass slightly, looking at the clear red liquid within. “It doesn’t come from some faraway world of another star,” he said.

  “Of course not,” said Sisyr. “It is wine of my own world. This one.”

  “Other ships call here occasionally,” Warnet pointed out. “Don’t they bring you gifts...small memories...of an older home?”

  “No,” said the alien, simply.

  “And your own ship? Do you never go into space? Voyages of discovery? Perhaps visits—after all, they come to you...do you never go to them?”

  “You don’t understand,” said the alien. “The voyages in space...they take hundreds of years. The ships are not as fast as light. We have the time...time means little enough to us...but we do not take distance so lightly. Spacefaring is not a matter of pleasure...the kind of...adventure...which you might imagine has no meaning for us. I cannot explain—it is a difference of thought, of nature-with-time. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you know who I am and why I came to see you?” asked Warnet. His voice was even, and there was a hint of humor in it.

  “Yes,” said Sisyr, and paused. His tiny mouth moved slightly, as if he were simulating an Earthly smile. He might almost have been joining in the game of words.

  “How much do you know?” asked the visitor.

  “Enough.”

  “You know that I’m a heretic?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know how I might choose to use the information I have concerning your...activities?”

  Sisyr nodded. A casual, totally human gesture. Implying that he understood politics...that he knew how badly Warnet wanted to break the people’s faith in the Council, in the Movement itself.r />
  Warnet nodded too. “I thought you would. There’s not a lot that escapes your attention, is there? You know a great deal about what goes on in your...our...world.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then,” said Warnet. “Which of us will sum up what we both know so that we can stray into fresh pastures?”

  The alien gestured with his incredible hand.

  “Very well,” said the human. “I’m a Eupsychian. I’d like to be a councillor. The odds are against it. The interest in the Underworld which is being stirred up at the moment interests me greatly. I think there’s potential here for political moves. Heres is ahead of himself—I don’t know why, but I know that he is. There almost seems to be a flutter of panic running through the Hegemony, for some reason that I can’t identify. That beautiful book of Carl Magner’s has made them think. Why? It’s a fine piece of work—a truly revolutionary work—but its face value is zero. It means nothing. Ergo, there must be something beneath the surface if you’ll pardon the word-play. There is more than meets the eye.

  “Burstone, for one thing, meets very few eyes. Magner knows nothing about him. An odd coincidence that two people with such dramatically common interests should be operating in complete ignorance of one another. Another...person...who meets very few eyes is yourself. This world owes its very existence to you, and yet you maintain an existence which is virtually invisible. There are, of course, any number of possible explanations for that. But how many of them also explain that Burstone works for you? He thinks he works for the Movement, but he doesn’t. He thinks his work is part of the Plan...perhaps that is true. You, after all, know far more about the Plan than any of us.

  “So, when the Underworld is suddenly drawn to the attention of people in high places—some low ones, too—it becomes apparent to thinking men that there is some mystery here. What is the whole content of the mystery? Who is involved? I don’t know. I’ve no way of finding out what Heres thinks, or what really happened to Joth Magner, or what Harkanter is in the process of finding out this very moment. I don’t know. But I do know you know. And so I come to you, in search of a solution.

  “Is that a fair summary? Does that exhaust our common ground?”

  Sisyr was still “smiling.” Warnet wondered whether it was a smile at all. Perhaps a deliberate mockery. For a brief moment, he felt a wave of eeriness as he realized that Sisyr might be registering fierce anger or carnal lust, and he—Warnet—could never know. All that passed between them must be words. Outside the words, one could be sure of nothing. Implication and inference might be vastly different. This was an alien being.

  “Were you surprised to discover that there were men in the Underworld?” asked Sisyr.

  “At first,” said the human. “But when I thought about it, why not? I was surprised when I first met the rumor that the Underworld was a living, starlit world, but it wasn’t nonsense, by any means. We didn’t all come up from the surface in a long line, like the animals into Noah’s Ark. The platform was raised from below—it didn’t fall from Heaven. Of course there are lights in the Underworld. And why not leave them on, when the Overworld was sealed? If there were men still on the ground, it would be a gesture of common humanity.

  “While I thought about Magner’s book it occurred to me that there was almost inevitably a living world on the old surface. We left it wrecked, because it could support civilization no longer, but once we were gone from it the situation was vastly different, was it not? A ruined world, from our point of view, would not have to be a dead world, or a destroyed world. We came out of it into our new Heaven not because we desperately wanted life, but because we desperately wanted our descendants to live the kind of life the Planners thought was appropriate to humanity.

  “It suddenly occurred to me while I read Magner’s book how utterly absurd it was that we—the Euchronians—should have taken it so readily for granted that what we left behind was dead and gone for all time. Absurd...but how predictable! How typical of the Euchronian way of thinking. The Planners built their wonderful new world—thanks to you. They fulfilled their ambition of making their children into parasites, completely helpless apart from their custom-designed host. That was their ideal mode of life—the parasitic. Mechanical, undemanding, comfortable, assured not by human effort but by the endeavor—the ceaseless, ultimately reliable endeavor—of the machine. That’s the Overworld: a gigantic, living machine, upon which we humans are content to be parasitic. Of course we forget the world which we left behind—the harsh and hostile real world. What do we care where the monster rests its belly? What do we care how the host has to work to make its living, just so long as it lives well enough for us to supply our own needs from its excesses? That’s why we don’t look up into the sky, either. That’s why there’s been a spaceship and a starman on Earth for ten thousand years, and yet no human has ever been into interstellar space, and no human has ever tried to build his own spaceship.

  “I’m sorry. You asked me whether I was surprised to discover that there were men in the Underworld. No. Not at all. It would be more surprising, if you like, to discover that there are men in the Overworld.”

  Sisyr completely ignored the content of Warnet’s carefully calculated outburst. He had nothing to say about the image of man as a parasite within the metal monster which he had brought into being.

  “Knowledge,” said the alien, apparently speaking with some care, for he spoke slowly, “is always adapted to need. One learns what one needs to know. Forgetfulness is a useful talent, as you must know. You live ephemeral lives. It is necessary that you should have a world which is...to some extent...forgettable. It is simply not possible for you to live in a whole world. Because of what you are, you are less than what you want to be.”

  “And what about you?” demanded Warnet.

  “It is the same.”

  “You’re not ephemeral. You’re immortal.”

  “There are other limits,” said Sisyr.

  “Let’s return to simpler matters,” said Warnet. “I seem to be reaching no better understanding this way. May I, perhaps, be permitted to recall some of the things that Euchronia has found it...necessary...to forget?”

  “I will answer your questions.”

  “You supply the Underworld?”

  “I do. It has been going on for so long...it is almost a ritual now, with us—certainly with them.”

  “You also study the Underworld?”

  “Not closely. My agents bring me their books, their work. It helps me to understand. But there is no direct study. I do not know everything about the Underworld—perhaps very little more than you have already guessed.”

  Warnet came to his big question. “Does the Council know that you are doing these things?”

  “No,” said the alien.

  “Is it part of the Plan?”

  “Perhaps. As you say, some of the Planning was mine. It would not be unrealistic to say that my actions were in accordance with the Plan, that they helped to ensure its completion without too much strife and bloodshed.”

  “You know that I intend to exploit this information in trying to bring down the Council?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why give it to me? You don’t favor the Euchronians, obviously. Are you against them? Do you disapprove of them?”

  “No.”

  “Then why help me? Why tell me this?”

  “I have no secrets. Had the Council wanted to know...knowledge is adapted to need.”

  Warnet had finished his wine some time ago. Now he took the time to put the glass down, pausing for thought. He reminded himself that he could not make assumptions about the alien. The understanding which he had was inevitably an illusion of his own senses, only real in a limited context.

  “This is your world, too,” said Warnet. “Have you no interest in how it is run?”

  “This is my world,” said Sisyr, “but it is your society. No, I have no interest in your politics. They are a purely ephemeral concern. I do not want
that to sound critical...you understand that I am not decrying your motives and your actions. But I think you can see that what is important to you is virtually meaningless to me. The society which you live in will change...is changing. Perhaps you, as an individual, will play a part in that change. That would be good...for you. But the Euchronian Millennium will die, and whatever follows it will die. Ideas will change, the labels will change, humanity will change...and I will be here, as I am. I will not say that I have no interest in change—I am most interested—but it would be pointless for me to involve myself in any way with change. In a sense, I cannot. I am immune to it. I could never be a part of it.”

  “That’s not true,” said Warnet. “You involved yourself with the Plan. If it were not for your involvement, the Overworld would never have been built. Even now, you are involved in the determination of change in the Underworld.”

  “I’m sorry. You misunderstand. It is my use of the words. When I speak of involvement, I speak from my own standpoint—you, of course speak from yours. I helped the Planners—because they asked me to help. I accepted a contract to supply the men on the ground—again, because they asked me for such an undertaking. Men have involved me in what they do. But I do not involve myself. Nor do I involve men in what I do.”

  “Suppose,” said Warnet, “that you were asked to uninvolve yourself with the Underworld. To stop supplying the ground with materials. Would you do that?”

  “If the men on the ground did not want any further aid.”

  “And the Council? Suppose they ordered you to stop?”

  “The Council do not order me to do anything. I am not a part of your society.”

  “There may come a day when the Council does not see it that way.”

  “Then my actions will depend on the way that they see it then.”

  Warnet looked at the alien pensively. “The Euchronians have remembered the Underworld. They’re going to remember you, too. You know that, of course. Maybe from your point of view you don’t have any part to play in our near future. But from our standpoint...you see what I mean?”