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

by Brian Stableford

  Outside the critical radius at which the decoupling reaction was triggered there was no less of consciousness. By the same token, however, there was no immunity to the inflow of images. The extent to which the induced “dreams” interfered with the normal processes of brain activity varied according to the sensitivity of the individual, the type of activity ongoing in the particular brain at that moment, and—of course—the intensity of the stimulus as defined by the inverse-square law. The experiential blackout which defended many minds within the critical zone operated in a very few cases outside that zone, the strength of the signal being insufficiently strong, in most cases, to activate such a response even where available. Even so, a rather large number of individuals remained unaware that their brains had, in fact, been affected by the wave. Until these people began, in the near future, to suffer from “bad dreams” there would be no manifestation of the consequences of the event available to the conscious memory. Outside a radius of approximately twelve hundred miles, virtually all affected people fell into this category.

  CHAPTER 37

  Clea Aron, who was preparing for sleep, lying still in the darkness, allowing her thoughts to wander, actually felt the invasion of her mind like the blow of a fist to the back of her head. As the blow rocked her the blaze of confused images flooded her senses, causing her to gasp with pain.

  She sat up and clutched her head in both hands. Following the initial shock there was a period of recoil, and then the images flooded her senses for a second time, more slowly, expanding and fragmenting. The experience was still too fast, and too complex, for her to sort out the imprints which were being stamped on the molecules which programmed her being, but she felt a few moments of utter strangeness that were beyond understanding. During those few moments she lived as an alien being with a wholly new identity.

  She burst into tears and cried out aloud for someone to help her. Her own self reasserted itself, quickly and strongly, but the effects of the shock were absorbed.

  That night, and every other night for many months, she would dream, and the dreams would belong only partly to herself.

  CHAPTER 38

  Enzo Ulicon was sitting in a chair examining printout from the supply unit at his deck when the wave hit. He felt it as a stabbing sensation at the base of his skull. His hands shook, briefly but violently, and the thin paper of the printout crumpled and ripped.

  His eyes closed, reflexively, isolating him with the pain, so that he could concentrate his control. A series of patterns blossomed on the closed eyelids, and rushed back into his mind. The patterns swirled into pictures and for several minutes he became delirious, hurtled through a sequence of visionary instants which flared and were gone. It was barely possible to extract any sense from the flickering confusion, but Ulicon was calm and undisturbed. He identified the sensation, initially, as an ordinary headache—it did not occur to him that it was anything unfamiliar. He saw, therefore—and knew that he saw—the burning town, the firelit masks, the long, straight, corpse-littered road through the dark wilderness. He saw the fire-illumined cat face, and the multimillion-colored cankers, sills, dendrites, drapes and frills that comprised the life-system of the Swithering Waste. There was no sense in the sequence—no causality, no logic. It was simply an imaginative mosaic.

  But Ulicon knew that he had looked into Hell.

  He felt very frightened for a few moments, afterwards. But it was gone, and—so far as he knew—finished. The fear drained away. His hands were still unsteady, but they trembled very slightly, and he found that he could make them still by an effort of will.

  Later in the night, he attempted to recall some of the images, reaching back into his memory. They rushed at him from the caverns of his mind, and once again he became the focus of the display. It was then that he realized that it was not finished, and perhaps never would be. Hell had been revealed, and he could not unlearn the revelation.

  He, of all people, should have been able to cope with this discovery. It was he that had insisted so strongly that Rafael Heres and the others should become aware that there were two worlds of Earth, and not one.

  Nevertheless, he doubted his sanity and he was suddenly possessed with the curious feeling that the floor beneath his feet was not secure, that at any moment it might begin to fracture, and precipitate him down, into darkness....

  CHAPTER 39

  Eliot Rypeck was already asleep, already dreaming. He was quiescent, save for his eyes, which moved beneath closed lids while his mind ran through its sequence of programs, its patterns of life, rehearsing them subconsciously and modifying them slightly by correlation with lately gained experience.

  When the wave came he felt neither shock nor pain, but the mechanical process which occupied his brain was completely disrupted. The dream which was playing through his gray cells was shattered, the cytoarchitectural limitation of the process was lost, the neuronal messages were scrambled. He was ripped back into wakefulness by a sensory hurricane.

  Within his dream, Rypeck howled in anguish. There was a momentary sensation of flight which quickly became one of falling, falling into a black vortex while the whirling world closed in and reached out a multitude of claws. As consciousness returned to flush out the aborted program, wipe the circuits clean, sweat stood out on his face and he felt the compulsion to move. He sat up in bed, as if jerked erect by strings.

  He rocked slowly back and forth as he felt the whole garbled mess ebbing from his mind. He felt his body coming back to him, his sense of being swelling like a balloon to occupy every inch of his living frame.

  The realization came to him that he had had a nightmare. That realization was infinitely more frightful than the thing itself. The connective routes in his thought processes were already well established. Nightmare...i-minus...Carl Magner.

  The moment had come.

  For a few seconds, the images returned, dancing at the threshold of consciousness. They flew all around him like fluttering moths, striking at his eyes from within.

  Ulicon was right, he said, silently, chasing away the fugitive ideas with cold, vocalized thought. They came from outside. They came from outside into his mind.

  One word swelled to the forefront of his mind, and would not die, dragging itself out and finally yielding only to an endless chain of echoes.

  ...invasion....

  He lay back, and tried to force sleep to return. He was struck by the silly illusion that his whole awakening had been a fake, that he had merely reentered the macabre theater of his nightmare, enfolding himself within. But if this was a nightmare, it was real. He knew full well as he fought against wakefulness that he was not asleep, not dreaming, not hallucinating.

  He was covered with sweat, and the sheets felt unbearably, glutinously warm against his body. After a few minues, he sat up again and mopped his face. He sat still, staring out into the darkness, at the thin sliver of the night sky which filtered in through the screened window. While he waited, his heartbeat began to settle.

  But he could not get rid of the obsessive word which still ran faint echoes tumbling round the inside of his skull.

  It turned out to be a very long night....

  CHAPTER 40

  The Ahrima were encamped to the south and west of Sagum, though parties of warriors covered north and east as well. The people of Sagum, forewarned by runners from Lehr, had elected to defend their town rather than desert it. They had stripped what they could from the fields, and strengthened the wall wherever significant improvement could be made in the time available. Even while the Ahrima rested before the assault the Children of the Voice worked ceaselessly, determined to hold the Ahrima and divert the horde if it were possible.

  So far as they knew, no army was gathering in Shairn. The men of the towns were looking to their own and placing their faith in chance or destiny. The people of Sagum knew, however, that if they held the Ahrima for any length of time, warriors would come to them, in small groups, to harry the invaders from without, killing one
or two at a time, destroying their supplies and poisoning their animals. If Sagum could hold, the Ahriman strength would be whittled away. The heartland of Shairn would grow relatively stronger. Stalhelm and Lehr had already taken some toll of the enemy’s numbers.

  On the other hand, if Sagum fell, the Ahrima would stay there, growing strong again on the produce of Shairan land, until they broke out to go whichever way they cared, with no town that would dare to stand against them. They would ravage the heartland and destroy the nation.

  The fate of Sagum, therefore, seemed likely to determine the fate of Shairn.

  Until the wave came.

  The visions struck at the Ahrima, in sleep and in wakefulness. They saw what happened not as individual experience, but as collective experience. Every man knew that the visitation had come to all men, because not one warrior of the Ahrima was alone when the visions came.

  There was not one among the Ahrima who could make sense of the “package” of images. To them, it was simply something that struck at the core of their being, something hostile and alien. It panicked them.

  They turned away from Sagum, south to burned Lehr, and further south still, passing beyond the boundaries of Shairn into the lands of the Cuchumanate migration paths, and the isolated strongholds of the Men Without Souls.

  Within the walls, however, the reaction was very different. The wave was no less a revelation to the Children of the Voice than to the Ahrima, but to them it was a revelation of an entirely different kind. They could see the images for what they were: the tangled memory web of one of their own kind. And more than that, they knew what had happened.

  They knew it inside themselves, because they too had Gray Souls. When the impact of the wave turned their consciousness in upon itself, they did not find themselves isolated with confusion and fear. The Gray Souls were there. Even the Warriors and the little children achieved communion of a sort, without the aid of music or trance or the mind-smoothing juice of the weepweed. Those who knew how to use the communion, who already had the most effective rapport with the symbiotic Souls, discovered the whole truth. They learned that Camlak had broken the barrier, had everted himself into Soul space.

  It was a miracle. Of course it was a miracle. Shairn was saved from the Ahrima, Camlak was free from a cage in Heaven, and a wave of force was traveling across and through the world and out into space announcing that Camlak and the Souls, together, had transcended the tyranny of space.

  For the Children of the Voice, it was the advance warning of a new threshold in evolution, which was there to be crossed.

  The realms of Tartarus were no longer imprisoned by the rotten Earth and the sky of steel.

  CHAPTER 41

  Rafael Heres was duelling with his doubts. He was alone, his mind was racing. He had advance warning of the various forces gathering about him. He knew that he had to face a revolt in his own ranks as well as the Eupsychian assault. He knew that the gloss had been taken off his Second Euchronian Plan in no uncertain terms by Harkanter’s showmanship. He knew that he was deep in trouble, and that it might well take a miracle to save his political future.

  The images came to him softly and quietly. There was no violence in the way they seeped into his mind. For a few moments, he lived within a mental environment where two realities conflicted for his attention. The safe, sane structures of his knowledge and his ego were forced to compete, for a few seconds, with the ghost of another being, the fragments of whose identity were strewn across the regions of Heres’ inner world. It was neither startling nor particularly disturbing. Merely strange. Only shadows, in his mind.

  He was awake, rational and quick to realize that something had happened—something utterly new, for which he had no name and no explanation. He relaxed, and waited, observing himself closely to see if anything more was to come. Minutes passed, but he could find no further trace of strangeness.

  He was prepared to forget the moment of weirdness. There seemed so little to it, and there was so much that he needed to think about.

  Then the telephone began to ring. Urgently.

  CHAPTER 42

  Thorold Warnet experienced little more than a momentary tiredness and a slight sensation of dullness in the back of his head, which lasted less than a minute.

  He set down his pen, and sat back in his chair, allowing himself to relax.

  When he closed his eyes, pictures seemed to form in his mind, but they flitted so quickly through his thoughts that he could not focus on them. He was, however, moved to put his hand to his head and exert gentle pressure on his eyeballs with the thumb and forefinger.

  It never occurred to him that anything dramatic had happened. But within minutes he, too, was called to his main deck and coopted into the worldwide scare.

  CHAPTER 43

  Sisyr was too far away for the wave to hit him with much force, but he picked it up faintly, and reacted immediately. He immediately sat up in bed and put his hands to his forehead, summoning his concentration as he came to his feet.

  He was unable to recall the signal in detail, but when he exerted the full power of his faculties he was able to achieve playback of a kind. The images were blurred, and quite unidentifiable individually, but from the incomplete information he was able to gain a general impression of the sort of mind from which the message came, and the sort of sensory impressions which it contained.

  He was, in any case, not really interested in the images carried by the wave—his principal concern was the fact that the wave had been broadcast at all.

  He knew that this broadcast was intrinsically different from the kind of infiltration which had made Carl Magner’s dreams into chaos. That, he felt sure, had been the leakage of images from a multitude of minds, which had at first irritated Magner’s mind and gradually made it more and more sensitive as time went on. How Magner would have experienced the telepathic scream Sisyr did not know. Perhaps it would have destroyed his mind altogether.

  The alien was certain that the wave had been generated by a single mind, amplified tremendously. How? Sisyr dismissed the idea that there had been supplementary augmentation. The sheer intensity of the experience which had torn the scream from the sender must have boosted the power of the broadcast.

  Using the facilities of the cybernet it took Sisyr only a few moments to discover the focal point of the disturbance. The signal which he had picked up had traveled two thousand miles. He tried to estimate the power of the impulse at source, but could not make anything like an accurate guess. Obviously, however, the event which had been responsible for the generation of the wave was highly unusual.

  Sisyr had not expected the manifestation to take this form. Nor had he expected it quite so soon, although the Magner phenomenon had been encouraging. He could not estimate the effect that the all-too-sudden revelation might have on the people of Earth. Not merely the Children of the Voice, but the humans. The people of the Overworld must have received a shock which could revise their whole attitude to life. No doubt they would get over the shock itself, but once the barrier was breached....

  Once started, these processes did not stop.

  Sisyr felt no excitement as he compiled the message which he would transmit to the stars. It was not a time for congratulations. Not yet. It was a delicate time, for close observation, for patience and for careful action.

  The message which he transmitted would not reach the outpost for forty years or more. It would take even longer for the answer to come back—they would bring it in person.

  The contents of the message were simple enough. It was simply to say that the gateway was there, and that it had opened for the first time.

  He wasted no time in sending it, but there was no hurry. It was not an urgent message. Sisyr had all the time in the world. This world.

  His world.

  CHAPTER 44

  Randal Harkanter was a strong man. He was a brave man and a determined one. But these are relative terms. Among the listless citizenry of the Overworld he was virtuall
y a man alone, an altogether exceptional case. By other standards, perhaps he was only a man with some kind of drive.

  Of those in the cellar, however, he was the first to begin to recover from the effects of the mental explosion. He regained consciousness before Joth, and before Iorga (who was, by any human standards, tough and strong). The distance between them may have played some part. Joth, a mere arm’s length away from Camlak, had taken the full intensity. Iorga was a pace or two behind Joth. Harkanter had been hanging back, and to the side—perhaps twice as far away as the cat. While Harkanter was beginning to rediscover his arms and legs, the hellkin’s brain and body were still at odds, the brain in turmoil and the motor nerves switched off.

  Harkanter was quick to realize his advantage. He looked both forward and back, and could see no sign of life anywhere. Apparently, neither Julea nor Soron was making any attempt to recover themselves, but Soron might have been knocked out when he fell on the steps.

  The big man tried to raise his body, but the moment he lifted his head there was a wave of dizziness which threatened to black him out. Instead, he began to crawl, hauling himself slowly and painfully across the tiles. His arms and legs would not work as he commanded them, but he moved by virtue of a series of convulsive jerks. He found himself breathing very heavily, sweating cold, with faintness ebbing up within him every time he made any sort of real effort. His body did not want to obey his mind, and the instructions were somehow garbled in between thought and action, but he moved, gradually.

  He moved toward the gun which had flown from Vicente Soron’s hand to land on the floor of the cellar.

  It was a small handgun, but it was a genuine weapon, not the anesthetic dart-gun which the naturalist had carried in the Underworld. It was not one of Harkanter’s guns—Soron had apparently been sufficiently frightened by his experiences in the Underworld to obtain one of his own.