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

by Brian Stableford

  “If anyone asks,” he added, remembering Rath, “then deny that you’ve seen me. I’ll keep out of range of the decks and the holographic units.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “Just call the doctor,” said Joth. “The quicker he gets to me, the sooner I can get my back patched up.”

  Julea got out of bed and dressed slowly. Then they went downstairs together, and Joth waited while his sister put a call through from the central unit to the doctor. Julea only had to ask him to come. He was ready enough to jump to the conclusion that she was in need of attention. He knew that she had been alone in the house for some time, and the unfortunate circumstances of her loneliness.

  “I’ve got to clean myself up,” said Joth. “I’ve been like this for so long I just don’t get any dirtier. I must stink.”

  She followed him upstairs again, and into the bathroom. She helped him peel off the remnants of his clothing, and she removed the makeshift bandage which concealed and protected the greater part of the vast open wound on his back. She felt sickened by the ugliness of the tormented flesh, but she tried hard not to react.

  He could not lie down in the bath, and he could not bear the direct impact of the hot water. She began to sponge him with lukewarm water, without soap.

  “What happened?” she asked, faintly, not knowing whether or not she wanted to know.

  “I followed Burstone. I went down to take a look around. He cut me off. Lifted the cage and left me stranded. I’ve been there...how long have I been there?”

  “Months,” she said.

  “Like years,” he murmured. “I’ve aged years.”

  “How did you live?”

  He laughed, quietly. The laughter was forced. “One lives,” he said. “It’s easy. You just go on. You start out alive and you just carry straight on. They made me live...but how? I don’t know how. I ate dirt, I breathed foul air, I drank foul water. And I just kept going, through all the fevers and the pains. I don’t know the way. I just kept on. They brought me through.”

  “The people of the Underworld?”

  “The people. The men in Hell.”

  “How did this happen?” She was referring to the wound.

  “Never mind,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It must hurt terribly.”

  “It hurts,” he told her, flatly. “But there comes a time when things hurt and you just say ‘so what.’ Things hurt. Life hurts, down there. You live with it.”

  “The book,” she said. “It was all true. The dreams told the truth.”

  “The dreams...yes, the dreams told the truth. The dreams were real. But the book—that wasn’t true. He couldn’t understand, you see. What he saw was just a confused mess of images, what he felt was just a boiling sea of feeling. Everything all mixed up. He couldn’t entangle it, because he didn’t understand. He couldn’t. There was no way. The book is a mistake, Julea. It’s their world. It does hurt, but it’s their world. We can’t open it to the sun. We’ve masked the Face of Heaven, just as he said, but the mask has become the face. There’s no other face, so far as they’re concerned. He didn’t understand what’s happened down there in ten thousand years. They have a new world of their own. They’re new people. The men on the ground that he believed in don’t exist. There are no people like us—just people unlike us. Whatever we do about the Underworld, it will be an invasion. There’s nothing we can do, except keep to the world we have made for ourselves. That’s what I’ll have to make them understand...afterwards.”

  “After what?”

  “Our father,” he said, oblivious to her remark, following his own train of thought, “wanted to be a saint. He wanted to open up the old world as if it were the same as ever, entombed and waiting, ripe for resurrection. He wanted to go down there, a saint from Heaven to forgive and reclaim the condemned of Hell. Don’t you see that the book is about him, not about them? They have no need of saints. The living can’t be resurrected. There may be a hundred or a thousand doors to the Underworld, but it doesn’t matter whether they’re open or shut. Not to us, not to them. There are two worlds. Alive, different, touching. Nothing can change that. The doors can’t be used. Not really.”

  “You used one,” she said. “Burstone uses one. Back and forth, many times. Ryan said so.”

  “For nothing,” Joth said. “It’s all pointless. A thousand years ago...five thousand years ago...the job that Burstone does meant something. Not any more. The world is new. Burstone’s a relic—a vestige of something that was once worthwhile but is now useless. I used a door, but it didn’t make a difference. Not a meaningful difference. Camlak came through, too, but that won’t mean anything either.”

  “Camlak?”

  “A friend. My friend.”

  “A man from the Underworld?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. No one can.”

  “Is that what you have to do? Find your friend?”

  “And take him back. In the long run, it makes no difference, but for his sake. For the sake of his child. I have to undo all the trouble my father caused. I have to make sure the Underworld is left alone.”

  “They’re going to reclaim it,” she said.

  “What!”

  “The Hegemon announced a second Plan. We can’t bring the people of the Underworld up here, so we’re going to remake their world. Like ours.”

  “They don’t know what they’re doing,” he whispered.

  “No,” she said.

  There was silence. His skin was clean—relatively. He was drying himself gently, trying desperately not to tear the skin where it was scabbed and scratched.

  Julea stood up. “I’ll get you some clean clothes.”

  She was halfway into the corridor when he shouted “No!”

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “In my room....”

  Her eyes opened wide. She was staring at him. From where she stood she could see all of his naked body, ravaged by the Underworld. It looked completely out of place in the clean, smooth environment which surrounded it. Everything was neat, everything shaped perfectly, surfaced brightly, angled precisely. Joth had brought into it the filth and the ugliness of elsewhere. For a fleeting instant, he seemed, himself, to be a kind of wound. A living scar.

  “There’s one of them here,” she said. “A man from the Underworld.”

  Joth did not dare to nod or shake his head.

  He said: “It’s not exactly a man.”

  CHAPTER 30

  When Joachim Casorati arrived Joth was downstairs, lying full-length on a couch, face downwards. He was still unclothed, but his body was covered by a large towel.

  The doctor stared at him for some moments.

  “Joth,” he said, finally. His tone was neutral. It was almost a formal greeting. He had defeated both his surprise and his curiosity, for the time being.

  “Joachim,” Joth returned the greeting. “I want you to dress some wounds. Some may need cleaning out, if there’s danger of infection. I’ll need some shots, but don’t give me anything which will put me to sleep or slow me down. I can’t wait to be put back together inch by inch. Patch me up so I work. That’s all.”

  The doctor lifted up the towel to look at Joth’s back, and then flipped back the edge to expose the big wound.

  “What did this?” he asked.

  “A surgeon with a knife,” said Joth.

  “A surgeon,” repeated the doctor, blankly.

  “An amateur,” Joth told him. “It needed doing. I was growing something nasty and it had to be taken out. The operation was a success, the patient lived, but the healing was slow.”

  “I can’t patch that up,” said the doctor. “You need two weeks in a medical unit. How long have you been walking around in this condition? You could have died.”

  “You know where I’ve been,” said Joth.

  “The Underworld.”

  “I hadn’t any
choice but to walk around, just as I had no choice about the butchering.”

  “Did Harkanter find you?”

  “No.”

  “Does anyone know you’re back? Does anyone know where you’ve been?”

  “No. And I don’t want them to know. I’ll explain it to you later. Not today, but someday soon. You’ll have your chance to reassemble me. But I can’t talk now. Patch me up so that I can keep going for a couple more days. Don’t ask me any more questions now. All right?”

  The doctor shook his head. “It’s not all right,” he said. He knelt to examine the wounds with his eyes and his fingers. Joth winced at every touch, but did not cry out.

  Casorati removed the towel altogether and looked at the abrasions on Joth’s legs. Once or twice he looked more closely at specific injuries.

  “I’ve had feelers out from the Council,” commented the doctor. “About you. About your father. About your ancestry and every bug you’ve picked up in twenty years. They’re very interested in you.”

  “The Council?”

  “Somebody on the Council. I don’t know what they wanted because I couldn’t tell them.”

  “Don’t tell them I’m back. Not yet.”

  Casorati shook his head again. “This is going to take time,” he said. “If I do what you want I’ll have to put plastic on your shoulder and back. If you wait, we can restore it. You’ll lose some of the use of your left arm if I patch it. You’ve got enough plastic already, Joth. I don’t want to put any more on if I can help it. You’ll regret it later if I do. You’ll have to live a hundred years with a bad arm, unless you let it heal properly.”

  “I want it patched.”

  “I’ll have to requisition equipment.”

  “Just don’t mention my name.”

  “What’s it all for? The secrecy, the cloak-and-dagger game?”

  “It’s important. Requisition your equipment. How long will it take?”

  “Could be hours. I’ll have to give you antibiotics for some of these infections. If I dress all the wounds you’ll have gel all over you.”

  “Just do it,” said Joth. “Please.”

  CHAPTER 31

  “A rat?” said Warnet, incredulously.

  “That’s right,” Dayling told him. “We all saw it. It was a rat all right. But what a rat! More than four feet long. With hands—tiny, but real. And Harkanter showed us the knife. Some weapon! Emerich was there, and ten or fifteen others. The only councillor was Sobol, but by now the news will be all through the Movement. Heres must be sweating. This has ruined him. His precious speech making Magner a martyr has made an absolute fool of him. When Emerich gets on the air tonight Heres will be dead and buried, politically. If we petition for an election now we’re made. The platform is already cut and dried.”

  “Exterminate the vermin,” said Warnet, drily.

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t.”

  Dayling reached out and grasped the younger man by the arm. Warnet recoiled slightly from the violation, but did not shake off the grip.

  “This is it,” he insisted. “There’s going to be a wave of hysteria rippling all round the world tonight. Into every home in the world. Emerich is recording right now. He took film of the specimen while we were there last night, and he was interviewing Harkanter in the early hours. All day he’ll be putting together a broadcast that will rock Euchronia on its stilts. This is our chance.”

  “No, Joel,” said Warnet. “You don’t understand. You’ve missed the point. Harkanter has made a mistake. You want to rush headlong after Heres. Don’t you see? Heres jumped the gun, and you want to do exactly the same. We don’t know about the Underworld. A rumor here, a specimen there, a compendium of chopped logic and uninspired guesses...can’t you see how inadequate it all is? What sort of conclusions can we draw? If someone came up here and kidnapped a street cleaner would they conclude that nothing exists here except machines? Think about what you’re doing, Joel. We need more information.”

  “We need to hit Heres,” Dayling retorted. “Someone has to be prepared to go up against him now and make him out a fool and a traitor to the whole human race. He has to be obliterated. If we sit back and wait for more information, he’ll regroup. He’ll revise all his ideas and come out with more talk by the mile, and while time drags by he’ll get himself out of it. Even if his head rolls do you think the Movement can’t afford to lose him? We have to act now. We have to lead the attack. It’s the best chance we’ll ever have. Maybe the only chance. We’d be fools to lose it.”

  Warnet would not agree. “We’d be fools to commit ourselves. We already know better than that. We know full well that Harkanter has his facts cockeyed. Burstone wasn’t trading with any rats. Sisyr was talking about humans. They know. Harkanter doesn’t. If we start howling for the sealing of the Underworld we could run right into a trap. Heres will shift his ground. We know that. All right, where to? I’ll tell you where—he’ll say that Harkanter’s find makes our intervention in the Underworld all the more necessary. He’ll say that it is our duty to save the people of the Underworld from the menace of the rats.”

  “But that’s just it,” said Dayling. “Emerich is going on the air tonight to show that the so-called people of the Underworld are rats. That’s Harkanter’s claim!”

  “Joel, he’s wrong.”

  “The world doesn’t know that.”

  “It soon will. Once Harkanter’s through with his big show, what then? Do you think Burstone and others like him will sit still while this stupid lie is broadcast? What about the scientists down below? The ones who are really trying to find out what the Underworld is like?”

  “Then will be later,” Dayling persisted. “We can smash the Movement—the Council, at least—right now.”

  “For the sheer pleasure of breaking it? Do you think you’d last a day longer than the man you displaced when the truth finally comes out?”

  “What do you propose?”

  “That we adopt the course no one else can. We criticize Heres for rushing his fences. We criticize Harkanter for rushing his. We plead for sweet reason and time. We place ourselves in the right. In the long term, that will be far better for us than any panic-buying we can do now.”

  “Half the Euchronians will take exactly the same stance. What advantage is there in doing exactly what they do?”

  Warnet paused for a moment. He took time out to dislodge Dayling’s hand from his forearm. “I’m not sure that they will,” he said. “Heres is in deep. He can’t play for time now. He’s spent all his. And the others...it seems to me they’re far more likely to take Harkanter’s evaluation of the situation at face value than we are. Most of them will want to believe it—they never wanted the Underworld to be resurrected at all. I think the Council might well go over like a pendulum and vote to seal it up forever. I think they may fight more bitterly between themselves than we ever thought possible.”

  “But if you’re wrong...,” said Dayling.

  CHAPTER 32

  “We’re getting deeper into trouble every minute,” said Rypeck. “We’ve got to start pulling ourselves out now. This situation has complicated itself far too rapidly, thanks to Rafael’s supposed masterstroke. I’ve tried to call him and he’s just not available.”

  “We can ride out this ridiculous affair,” said Acheron Spiro confidently. “Who listens to Emerich?”

  “About half the world.”

  “Yes, but not the Movement. You’ve got to remember, Eliot, that the Movement is much bigger than this kind of scare-mongering. We work on a much vaster scale. We’ve had these waves of hysteria before, on a smaller scale, and none of them has amounted to anything. They pass, Eliot, they pass.”

  Rypeck swore silently. He felt like screaming at the other man’s complacency.

  “In the wider context, the problem is just the same,” said Spiro, attempting to explain. “What we are facing is a loss of faith. This rumor about the rats is simply another symptom of it. The people have
no direction. This is what Rafael’s trying to give them. He’s trying to give them a goal—a new vision.”

  “It’s the vision of a blind man,” said Rypeck. “I’ve tried to convey to all of you that we are abysmally ignorant as regards the true state of affairs, not only in the Underworld but in our world. The real reason that Rafael has embarked upon this idiot crusade on behalf of the Underworlders is purely and simply to evade the question of the i-minus agent.”

  “It’s irrelevant, Eliot.”

  “It’s not dead simply because Magner has been removed from the arena of decision. He may not have been the only one. There may be ten or ten thousand. We have to find out.”

  “This is an old argument, Eliot. I’ve heard it all before. Why did you call me?”

  “I called you to suggest to you that it’s time to pull out. It’s time to leave Heres on his own and go our separate way.”

  “Who is we?”

  “To begin with, the members of the Close Council. Enzo will be willing, and so—I think—will Clea. Dascon we don’t need—he’d go down with Heres in any case. Sobol is already creating chaos outside the Close Council, and if we provide him with a base he’ll come to us, and drag two-thirds of the Council with him.”

  “And what is this action supposed to achieve?” said Spiro, obviously unsympathetic.

  “We call for a referendum on the Underworld question. We disassociate ourselves from Heres’ statement in Council. We reject his Second Plan completely.”

  “And do...we...have any ideas of our own to propose as an alternative?”

  “The cure of our own society. Isn’t that our real aim? The abandonment of i-minus. A reexamination of the status quo. We don’t need a second Euchronian Plan, because the first one hasn’t yet been brought to its conclusion. That’s our platform.”

  “You can’t. It would be tantamount to undeclaring the Millennium. That’s ridiculous.”