“I cannot see the future,” said Sisyr, who appeared to be smiling. “And if I could, I am sure I would not see the kind of future that you see. I cannot decide on the kind of criteria by which you make your decisions. But I will say this. You think of two worlds, where I see only one. You have forgotten the Underworld, but it is still there, and whether you remember it or not, it is still a component of your past, your present, and your future. It is real. You have only rediscovered it in your imagination. Do not make the mistake of assuming that what you find there is real.
“I am not the only alien on Earth.”
CHAPTER 26
Iorga looked up at the stars. The real stars, unsteady in the sky. He watched the racing clouds, which dressed and undressed the pockmarked face of the moon. He breathed the fresh, clean, cold air.
And he shivered.
Joth stood by the roadside and watched him, impassive but keenly observant.
He isn’t overcome with awe or fear, thought Joth. Does he feel fear? Of course. But he knows fear. He lives in constant company with it. It is under control. It’s a healthy fear. There’s no trace of superstitious terror in him. He knows this world is real. What he sees, he can name, even if he can’t understand. This is a savage, and perhaps an ignorant savage, but his mind isn’t so limited. He knew this world was here, and he knew something of its nature. He isn’t shocked. This is no challenge to his erstwhile understanding of the universe.
And yet, Joth’s thoughts continued, this is his Heaven. This is what supplies, for him, the image of the other world. This is his Valhalla, his Olympus. Only it’s not populated by gods and the spirits of the departed. Men live here. Ordinary men...and one or two with metal faces. He accepts even that. His world is a complex place—inherently strange enough to include men with steel faces...friends with steel faces. This world is real to him. Strange, but not alien. In prehistoric times, when the farmers came to the city, when the poor invaded the land of the rich, or the rich the realms of the poor, they may have felt as he feels now.
Alone and afraid, but still entombed in reality. In a world unknown, but knowable. Genuine.
Joth’s interpretation of Iorga’s feelings was, perhaps, accurate enough. Iorga could not have discovered words to give an alternative account. But Joth could not really know. He could understand, but only according to his own way of seeing. In the final analysis, his analogies were limited, as all analogies are.
“We must hurry,” said Joth. “There’s not enough time left to do what we must tonight, so we have to find shelter for the day. A hiding place. If the people down below alert Harkanter, that’s too bad. I hope they won’t. Either way, if I can get to a public phone I’ll requisition transport from the net. We’ll go home. You can lie up in a dark room, and I can get a doctor for my back. After nightfall, we go find Camlak.”
Iorga signaled his agreement without speaking.
“If the sun comes up,” said Joth, “shield your eyes. If you look at it you’ll be blinded.”
Iorga nodded again.
Joth balanced the two guns which he had stolen from Rath in his two hands.
“You take the pistol,” he said. “You know how it works?”
“No.”
“That’s a catch to stop it firing. Keep it sealed until you want to use the gun. Then release it, point the barrel, and press the trigger. Be careful. Don’t shoot unless someone points one at you. It shouldn’t be necessary to kill anyone. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. All right?”
They moved off together, away from the plexus and into the night.
CHAPTER 27
Randal Harkanter shook hands all around. There were a lot of hands to shake. He had invited a lot of people to his little surprise.
Vicente Soron fluttered round like a butterfly, nervous and excited. No one in the crowd knew who he was. Nobody cared. All eyes were on Harkanter, the man with charisma.
Among the guests, it was Yvon Emerich who naturally assumed the lead. Of all the people there he was the only one used to real crowds. For gathering in this fashion was not customary. People who live their lives by courtesy of machines gradually become...sensitive...to the proximity of large quantities of flesh. It seems unnatural. But Emerich knew the small skills of organizing crowds in order to keep uneasiness at bay. His aide, Alwyn Ballow, was a tower of strength in his support.
There was one member of the Council present—Javan Sobol—but the Euchronian Movement was conspicuously underrepresented relative to prominent anti-Euchronians. Sobol had observed this discrepancy within minutes, but he read nothing into it. Harkanter was not popular with the average Hoh-playing, propriety-observing Euchronians. Sobol had no idea what Harkanter planned to show them, but it did not occur to him for a moment that it might be a revelation which intimately concerned Council decisions. Joel Dayling, who considered himself the leader of the Eupsychian opposition to the Council, was equally unaware of the nature and magnitude of the planned surprise. Harkanter, who slotted naturally and comfortably into the role of showman, had given out no hints, except perhaps to Ballow, who needed some leverage in order to make sure that Yvon Emerich would be sufficiently interested to turn up.
“You didn’t stay long downstairs,” said Emerich to his host, loud enough for anyone interested to hear. “What brought you back? Or sent you back? Have you had a revelation like Magner’s?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Harkanter answered.
“Then you’ve come to propose marriage,” said Emerich. “Tell us, please, whether Euchronia is to be the bride or the groom?” Emerich was being deliberately trivial and inane. He liked to appear something of the eccentric, something of the clown, in his private persona. He believed it necessary to retain what he saw as his real self (incisive, brilliant and destructive) for “his” public, who met him only through the medium of their holovisual pseudoreality. He was their idol and their champion—his facade was theirs, packaged and distributed by the machine.
“If what you have to say concerns the Underworld,” said Sobol, “I’m not sure that we’d rather not hear it. We’ve heard far too much of late, and we’d have been perfectly pleased if your little party down there had gone on for a year or two before coming back to bore us with all the latest news from Tartarus.”
“That will be heresy this time next week,” Dayling intervened. “Now we have a Second Euchronian Plan any negative thought regarding the Underworld will be anti-Euchronian. If I were you, Javan, I’d be careful what I said. You might end up driving a tractor instead of running the world.”
“It will all be done by remote control,” said Sobol. “This isn’t the age of psychosis. We have the resources of the Cybernet behind us. The machines will roll out of the factories and into the Underworld, and they’ll all be controlled by a handful of men in a handful of control rooms. There will have to be a few men to go down to ground level, but I assure you that no one will need to get their hands dirty. It will all go very smoothly. It won’t take ten thousand years, either. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of us live to see the job nearly done.”
For the most part, the speech fell on deaf ears. Most of the audience deserted him before he closed, and independent conversation sprang up in two or three places. One man, however, could not resist pointing out to Sobol the error of his assumptions. That was Vicente Soron. Ironically, he was one of the few people in the gathering who were actually more dedicated to Euchronia than the councillor himself.
“Javan,” said Soron, in a low voice, “there isn’t going to be a Second Euchronian Plan. You don’t understand.”
“Nonsense,” said Sobol, whose faith in Heres was implicit.
“It’s all a terrible mistake,” said Soron, the intensity of his voice making little impact on his listener’s conviction. “A terrible mistake. You’ll see....”
He drifted off, carried away by a current of movement which began as Harkanter ended the preliminaries and led the group into another room. Here there was room fo
r them to sit, while Harkanter explained. They did so, arranging themselves most carefully. Emerich sat off to one side, and Sobol was content to stay back. Lesser individuals were permitted to gather at the big man’s feet. Dayling sat in the center, staring Harkanter full in the face. He wondered what it was all about. Harkanter seemed to be building up to a trick of some kind—a big joke. He could practically see the laugh poised in Harkanter’s throat. Knowing the big man as he did, Dayling wondered who that laugh was going to hurt.
Harkanter began to tell them about his experiences in the Underworld. He was by no means an orator, and his descriptive powers were decidedly poor, but he rushed at his story with evident enthusiasm, and those present were prepared to bear with him for a while.
He was vague about the results of Rath’s work in surveying the territory, principally because he had not waited for the results to turn up anything worthwhile. He left out the matter of the mysterious grave altogether. He concentrated on his own viewpoint and his own actions, and he succeeded in giving the impression that the whole Underworld was a gigantic polluted swamp teeming with crabs and less pleasant life-forms of lowly and loathsome nature.
He set out on a description of his walk with Soron, which Soron found to be somewhat embarrassing, and then he gave a wordy account of his own lack of good sense in getting himself stuck in the mud.
Then he paused. Knowing it was for effect, the crowd waited politely.
“It was then,” concluded Harkanter, “that we found what we were really looking for.”
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was referring to the much-discussed people of the Underworld.
“He came out of the bushes,” said Harkanter, “with a dagger the length of my forearm. I was helpless—the gun was in the mud with me and if I fired it I was as likely to get killed as he was. But Vicente was magnificent. Up like a cat, with his gun in hand. One shot—all it took. Full in the chest. Went down all in a heap and never raised a finger again. Then Vicente went off like a hare to get the men out of camp to drag me out of the mudhole and cart the carrion home. Only it’s not carrion. It’s alive. And it’s here.”
The silence did not last long.
“Here?” said Emerich. “You mean, in the house.”
“I brought him back,” said Harkanter. “I thought you all ought to get a look at him. A good, long look. It will tell you better than I, or any man, could tell you the truth about the Underworld.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Sobol. “You can’t....”
But Harkanter was already leading the way down to the cellars of his house.
CHAPTER 28
Camlak was in a cage surrounded by screens. He had been shot full of sedatives half a dozen times since Soron had first knocked him out. Soron had been unable to estimate the dosage with much accuracy, and had been prepared to overdo things rather than run any risks. Camlak felt that he was not quite wearing his body. His mind was so sluggish that the hands on the clock on the wall, which he could just see over the top of the screens, and which was the only feature of the room accessible to his eyes, seemed to be moving very quickly indeed. He felt as if he were wholly immersed in a viscous liquid, and stretched out over a large area, yet not drawn taut. His mouth was bone dry and he felt infinitely heavy. He had been given neither food nor water since he had first been taken.
His eyes were open but they seemed to be stuck that way. He could see, but he was unable to focus his attention or withdraw his stare. The hands of the clock held his gaze absolutely.
That was time. Time passing. He knew.
He felt an odd echo somewhere inside himself, as though the knowledge was highly significant.
He heard the clatter of many pairs of feet coming down the stairway, but it seemed like a distant rumble, unimportant and irrelevant. In many parts of the Underworld, he knew, one could hear an omnipresent whisper which indicated the working of machinery above the sky. It was one of those things that had to be blotted out of consciousness. Real, but without meaning.
Then the screens were snatched away dramatically, and he was exposed, naked and only half alive, to the shocked stare of the people of the Overworld.
The suddenness of it was a dull jerk in his mind, to which he tried very hard to react, but he could neither move nor alter the direction of his stare. He tried to speak, but he was quite incapable of it. Only a hollow rattle passed his lips as the breath oozed out of his throat.
“I have to tell you,” Randal Harkanter was saying to his guests, in a loud and commanding voice, “that the ‘people’ of the Underworld—the only people of the Underworld—are giant rats!”
CHAPTER 29
The sun was rising just as Joth came home.
He indicated that Iorga should follow closely, and they went upstairs, quietly and carefully. No stealth was necessary, and he could not have explained why it came so naturally to him. But at present, even within his own home, the Overworld seemed to be a strange and unfamiliar place. He had entered it an invader, covertly.
He found his own room empty and he told Iorga to stay there. The windows were screened and only thin lines of light filtered through. Iorga would find it safe enough, if not exactly comfortable. The cat’s eyes continually moved around the room, as if they felt the solidity of the walls and the perfect angularity of its construction. Unlike the Men Without Souls and the Children of the Voice, the Hellkin were not town-dwellers but nomads, who found natural shelter preferable to the crude brick and chitinous lath which provided basic material for virtually all Underworld builders.
The eyes were the only betrayal of Iorga’s unease. He still moved with perfect balance and grace, he still said nothing. But inside himself, he had never felt more alone. That was particularly bad for him, because he belonged to a race which did not court loneliness, like the Cuchumanates, and possessed no foil against it, as did the Children of the Voice. A rat could never be alone while he held inside himself the access to the being which he called his Gray Soul. But if the cats had such souls, they had found no way to reach and commune with them.
Joth went into his sister’s room. She was there, asleep, alone in the house. Her face on the pillow was not peaceful. How could it be? For her, this house must now be filled with ghosts. Her long-dead mother she would not remember, but Ryan and Joth, and finally her father, had all been taken from her, one after the other, in relentless succession. She had been the agent of Joth’s disappearance—at least in her own mind, and the witness to her father’s murder. She did not need instinct to be frightened by what she found in her dreams. She was haunted.
Joth would not have been surprised to find the house empty and deserted, with Julea gone. Why had she stayed? What was there here to hold her except memory and misery?
It was an easy answer. She was waiting. Waiting, perhaps without hope, because she had to wait. Because she did not know, for sure, that all the ghosts were the ghosts of the dead.
The ghost reached out to switch on the lamp beside the bed, turning down its intensity so that it became a dull yellow glow. He did not need to adjust his own eyes, once he had reduced the intensity. He had not yet seen the sun.
Julea awoke, her eyes flying to the light switch, and she saw Joth. Though his body and his clothing were beyond recognition his metal face stood out starkly clear as his one most meaningful feature. She knew him immediately, but she did not scream. Perhaps she had seen him hours, or even minutes, before, while she slept. The shock seemed to come slowly, but it struck deep into her, and paralyzed her body. Tears came to the corners of her eyes, but they did not fall. There was a brief period of silence, which seemed to both of them to be very long.
In the end of the silence, deep in the well of her emotions, there was utter turmoil. She did not know what to feel or to believe.
“I’m all right,” said Joth, in a whisper. “I wasn’t killed. I found my way back. Just take it easy.”
He waited for her reply. He could have said more, but he wanted to h
ear her voice before he went on. The sight of her, haloed by the reflected gleam of the dim light, had reminded him that he had come back to his beginning, that this was his world, and that this was where he belonged, if he belonged anywhere.
“I thought you were dead,” she said.
“Ryan’s dead,” he told her. “Our father died, too. I saw him die.”
“So did I,” she whispered.
He accepted the statement without surprise. He knew what she meant.
“But we were in different worlds,” he said. Then, after a pause: “It isn’t Hell. Sometimes we can come back. It’s only another world.”
“You’re hurt,” she said. Her voice was strangely cold and metallic. But she was no longer whispering, and the tautness was leaving her body.
“That’s right,” he said. “I want you to call a doctor. But don’t tell him why. Just tell him to come.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want any record of my return to go into the cybernet. I requisitioned transport by remote. No voice. No one can know I’m here, yet. I want it to stay that way.”
“The doctor....”
“He won’t tell anyone. If I ask him not to. It doesn’t matter so much about people—it’s the net that I’m worried about. Once the net has the information, it’s there for anyone to recall.”
She said nothing, but she was searching his face with her eyes. She thought—she had always thought—that even the metal and the false flesh could contain meaning. But she could find nothing, and her face was clouded with uncertainty.
“It’s all right,” he said, gently. “There’s something that I have to do, first. I’m not going back, I promise you. When I’ve done what I came to do, I’ll declare myself. But for now, for today and tonight, I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.
A Vision of Hell: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Two Page 11
