But Joth and Huldi could only see with their eyes. They had no real conception of what was happening and what was about to happen, and it could not have been explained to them. Camlak was already apart from them in that he was descending into the depths of his mind, guided by the seeing that was not done with eyes alone. The aliens could not participate in the Communion, not even as observers.
The pace of the drums grew slower and slower, and the long crying of the horns began to blend with it into a lethargic undulation of muted sound. The notes were tortured and sonorous, dragged into seemingly infinite extension, and the hollow, indefinite roar of the drums was like the waves of a turbid sea.
In the Star King’s dance, Yami found that his feet would no longer carry him forward. The dance went on, in bizarre slow motion, but now Yami merely writhed, and the sky which he wore was anchored to the spot.
There was still movement in the circle, but it was the movement of another costumed figure. All that Joth and Huldi could see through their slit windows was that the new dancer wore green, and that the mask which topped the robe—a grotesque, huge headpiece shaped like the cap of a mushroom—was striped gray and green. The stripes were curved and uneven, and flowed around and around the mask.
The dance was smooth and graceful, and the cloak hung so sheerly about the body that it was obviously a girl—a slender girl—inside it. The girl slowed in her movements as she came closer to the Star King. By the time that she touched him, she was almost still, and she sank slowly to the earth, so that the outsiders could no longer see her.
The mask that was the face of the Star King dipped, and he too went down, out of sight.
Slowly, Camlak began the long walk of the Sun. In his hands he carried an axe, bladed with stone from the quarry of Stalhelm, honed to a perfect curved edge.
Chapter 50
Yami was blind. Not only blind in his aged, whitening eyes (the mask, in any case, was eyeless) but blind in his inner vision. Yami was alone in that realm of Tartarus called the Underworld. As he went down on top of the girl he reached for his Gray Soul. He reached as far as he could, driven by desperation. He prayed. But he remained alone. He remained trapped in the cage which had closed upon his mind. He was isolated from the Communion of Souls.
He screamed, and listened to his scream echoing in the chasms of his being, but there came no answer. There was no sound at all. He was soulless. Abandoned.
Yami could remember that in the past he had played the part of the Sun, and played it to perfection. He tried to imagine that around him now was the persona of the gaudy, garish yellow sun. But he was imprisoned by the sky, and even his imagination could not set him free. He could not make a Gray Soul out of his wishes. It was beyond his power.
He was old. He had no control over his arms and legs. He had even lost control of his thoughts.
Yami was on his hands and knees, his hands placed in the dirt on either side of the girl’s waist, his knees on either side of her thighs. She was absolutely still beneath him, absolutely quiescent.
He was forgetting who he was.
The Star King leaned forward, until his belly came to touch her breasts. The Star King was not breathing, not even alive. In the vacuum of his mind there was total peace.
Inside the gray-green mask the girl was waiting. Her heart was slow and her breath very faint and easy. She was alive, but lost. Without the juice, she had found her Gray Soul. She was with it now, though perhaps she was only marginally aware. It would be as though she was on the borderline of sleep.
She waited.
The body of the Star King was rigid, like petrified wood.
There was balance.
And the axe came down in a long loose arc, striking Yami’s head from his shoulders.
Chapter 51
The black mask rolled away like a big black ball, the loose earth sticking to it and blotting out the faintest of its stars. The head was still inside it. Blood—a torrent of it—leapt out to flood the stripes of the gray-green Earth-body and turn it deep red. The firelight was very close. The rushing stain turned black in the orange glow of the embers.
The Sun dragged the starlit Night from the clothes of the Earth, and thrust it aside. It slid away, rattling like charred paper crumpled in a fist. The Sun lowered his golden body, reaching to part the gray-green robes of the Earth, thrusting his light and his life into the parting.
The Sun made more life. More growth.
The Sun and the Earth were bound together, the Sun atop the Earth, their vast faces pressed to one another. The face of the Earth ran red with blood, and the polished white face of the Sun was stained, just a little. Smeared, as though by a careless hand. But it would not show until the Sun rose again.
Inside the Sun, Camlak was like ice. Physically cold, rigid.
He had achieved penetration—that was easy, because his penis was equipped with a bone—but as the Earth stirred against him with the oceanic swell of the drums he felt completely unmoved, as if nothing was happening, as if he were remote from himself. His penis felt hard and bone dry. Thin, and steely, like a knife from the upper world.
The Earth worked, and he moved on her, gently, in a rhythm which he only half felt, and hardly meant at all.
He was conscious that the Sun was acting out its role.
But he, inside the Sun, felt nothing like a fire, a source of energy, a bringer of life. He felt instead like a dead thing, trapped inside a womb.
He knew that his mask, on the outside, was white, and that his costume was brightly colored. But inside the Sun there was nothing but darkness. He was still seeing with his own eyes.
Seeing nothing.
His tongue was dry, his mouth gritty.
His spine was like a dry stick.
His ribs were running cold, like icicles.
His arm, splinted and set, was absolutely dead and without feeling. Likewise his heart, his belly and....
Seeing nothing.
And then the horns dragged him away from the unlit womb, dragged him down beneath the surface of an ocean of light. Hot, red-gold light. And through the flickering, radiant matrix the shadows moved.
Silver, called gray: the shadows.
A lighter gray than earth-gray. A softer gray. The gray, not of Earth at all, but of something and somewhere incalculably beyond Earth.
In an aureole of golden light, he came face to face with his Gray Soul.
Chapter 52
Everything was still.
So far as Joth and Huldi could see, there was absolutely nothing happening. The sound of the drums and the horns had died away.
No one in the entranced crowd moved a muscle. Even the small children were silent and still. The priests, with their arms still upraised, seemed as if they had been turned to stone.
Joth felt constrained not to move, and he dared not make the slightest sound. Huldi stirred restlessly, but even she felt the pressure of the occasion. Each of them was alone.
They had no way by which they could take themselves into the presence of their souls—if, in fact, they had souls at all.
Chapter 53
Camlak talked with his Gray Soul as an equal. He faced the being calmly, without the appearance of fear. He asked whether his way was not better than Yami’s way, and the Gray Soul answered evasively. He asked many other questions, but he did not ask favors, nor did he ask advice. He spoke as a man might speak to another man (perhaps of a different race) and he listened as though he listened to the words of a man.
As well as words, they exchanged images, memories and emotional qualities. They conversed in many languages, of many different kinds, which contained many different varieties of meaning.
Chapter 54
The Sun fed the Earth with fuel, and life began within the Earth.
Chapter 55
Carl Magner was a self-haunted man. In a country of the bland he was a man with a very special sight. Not a king, but a victim.
In an age where a man born at his time might hav
e expected to live a hundred and fifty years or more, he suffered sufficient psycho-physiological hardship to cut his expectancy of life to the ancient three score years and ten. Another man born the same day might have expected that his children would live to be two hundred. But Carl Magner had no such hopes of his own children.
Carl Magner was an emotionally isolated man, although it might be argued that the circumstances surrounding the death of his wife and the maiming of his younger son caused him to abandon the love of individuals in favor of a love for humanity in general which carried less immediate risk.
He was always a dedicated Euchronian, and became a fanatical Euchronian. Like any truly dedicated idealist he went far beyond the political boundaries of the doctrine and his beliefs lost their way in the wilderness of pure principle. The concept of Euchronianism which he eventually came to embrace was one which made many members of the Movement his enemy.
He honestly could not tell when his dreams began, or when the focus on a particular species of vision crowded out all other images. In the beginning, the dreams were only dreams, and were forgotten. The pattern, and the awareness of the pattern, took a considerable time to develop. It can be estimated that Carl Magner reached the point of obsession some five or six years before Ryan went into the Underworld in search of the truth. (It should be noted that Ryan’s motives in venturing forth in search of that truth were founded on the hope that the truth would not resemble the dreams in any way, and that the obsessional hold of the dreams might be broken by virtue of that fact.) The dreams, as individual entities, probably began before the tragedies took place. Magner may well have been born with the seeds of conflict tainting his very earliest dreams.
Carl Magner was a big man, and a strong one, but over the years he lost the mental stature which went with his physique. He became increasingly brittle of temperament. One might almost say that in publishing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he was preparing himself for another tragedy, making ready to meet it before its seeds were sown.
It was not Magner’s wish that his son should go down into the Underworld, although at that particular time he did believe that it was important to verify the accuracy of his visions. When Ryan did not come back, Magner decided quite firmly that he would not be responsible for anyone’s following in Ryan’s footsteps. After all, by his visions, he knew. He was not the kind of man who would order another to descend into Hell. If anyone else was to go and discover the truth, it would have to be him, and before he went he had to deliver his message to the world.
His daughter might have told him about Burstone—about the fact that one man, at least, could confirm or deny his visions. But she did not, because she dared not. She was afraid of what might happen to him if he discovered that his visions were false. She was, perhaps, even more afraid of the opposite case.
After the publication of The Marriage, Magner was essentially a doomed man. The truth, whatever it might be, could only hurt him. He was a man at whom Fate had pointed the bone.
Chapter 56
Carl Magner faced the cameras uneasily. He should not have been nervous about his arguments, which he had gone over a hundred times before, nor should he have been nervous about exposure to an audience, which was what he had always intended. But he was definitely uneasy.
Clea Aron was wondering faintly what she was doing in the studio. She had not been interested in the Magner affair and she had no strong opinions about it. It seemed to her that Heres or Ulicon should have been anxious to take her place in the ultimate confrontation, but they had been quite definite in leaving it to her. She had a fairly dogmatic party line ready to deliver—something patched up by Javan Sobol and Luel Dascon, under advice from several interested parties—but she knew that she was not committed enough to attack Magner with any real vehemence.
Yvon Emerich knew that too, but he had no intention of letting his broadcast lack fire. In a sense, the choice of Clea Aron to represent the Movement was a shrewd political move, because Emerich would be forced on to her side in order to add bite to her arguments. He knew that, too, but it did not annoy him. He was content to be used by the Movement tonight, in the confident knowledge that he could balance the account another time. Magner meant nothing to Emerich, one way or the other—if he was against the man it was only because the majority of the audience wanted to see him dissected. Emerich was only his usual clock-watching, super-organized self. It was all under his control: reason, sympathy, charity, morality. They were his to play with, because he was the eye of the people. And the mouth.
The cameras began to roll and Emerich introduced his “guests.” He gave a rapid, inaccurate and rather insulting summary of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and then launched into Magner without further ado. As advised by Ballow he avoided the treacherous ground of how Magner came to write the book and whether the picture of life in the Underworld was factual or fanciful. He went straight to the moral meat of the argument.
“Supposing,” said Emerich, “that there are people living in the old world, why should we let them into the new world which we have built?”
Magner, in closeup, seemed neither aggressive nor fanatical. His unease was under control. He simply said: “We have to recognize that there is only one world, and that we do not own it. We have no right to deny other men sunlight and clean air, and to force them to live in the excreta of our civilization.”
“Isn’t it true,” said Emerich, hurrying along the obvious line which had been laid down for him, “that everyone in the ancient world had the option of remaking the world or dying with it? No man was forced to deny his children a share in the future of Euchronian man.”
“That is what the Movement claims,” said Magner, deliberately but indirectly challenging the truth of the statement, “but that was eleven thousand years ago. There is no justice in demanding that a man should bear the responsibility of his remote ancestors’ decisions.”
“So you believe,” said Emerich, “that the descendants of the men who rejected the new world are just as entitled to enjoy the fruits of that new world as us, whose ancestors spent eleven thousand years in labor, hardship and deprivation.”
“Of course,” said Magner. “The eleven thousand years were years of Purgatory no less for their ancestors than for our own. There was hardship and deprivation for everyone. It is not just that we should inherit Heaven while they are condemned to Hell.”
“You are familiar, are you not,” said Emerich, “with the fable of the ant and the grasshopper? While the ant labored the grasshopper was idle. And when winter came the grasshopper asked to be sheltered in the ant’s nest. The ant refused, and the grasshopper died. Wasn’t that justice? Isn’t the message of the fable the principle that those who provide for themselves are favored over those who do not? Isn’t that the justice of nature? Isn’t it the way things are?”
“It is not the justice of nature,” said Magner. “Only the law. We can make and change laws. We need not be bound by unjust laws. That is what it means to be human.”
Emerich was ready and waiting for the answer. It was all as expected. He turned to Clea Aron.
“You are a member of the Hegemony of the Movement,” he said. “You make and change the laws. What do you say to the argument?”
Clea cleared her throat, preparing herself for the first broadside. She was easy in her mind and comfortable at this stage.
“We are alive today,” she said, “because of the efforts of the Euchronian Movement. If there are men alive today on the old surface, then they too owe their survival to the Euchronian Movement. At the end of the second dark age, the Earth was dying. The human race was foundering in the wreckage of the biosphere. It faced extinction. The Movement was the one force which offered a method and—more important—a motivation for building a new world from the ashes of the old. The Movement made a Plan—a magnificent plan—to build a new biosphere, a new civilization and a new society. The new world was to be a good world, and the new society was to be a sane and stable
society which would never again allow extinction to threaten. The goal of the Movement was not simply survival, but responsible survival, in harmony with the new world which we were to recover from the old.
“We live today in that society. We have sanity, and stability, and comfort, and culture, and peace. Above all else, we have harmony with our new world. We are living up to the responsibility our ancestors accepted. The new world will not be destroyed by an age of psychosis. We will protect it from that possibility.
“The Euchronian Plan has passed the test—it has been fulfilled. We do not have Utopia, because we have not yet become Utopians. Perhaps we never will—that possibility we can accept, because we are human. But the fact that we may never have Utopia does not mean that we must sink to the level of our ancestors. We must accept the place in the scheme of things which we have strived long and hard to attain. We have a responsibility to ourselves, and to our ancestors—but most important of all, we have a responsibility to our unborn children—children born next year and in the next eleven thousand years. The one thing we must not do is abandon the responsibility we owe to our children because eleven thousand years ago the men who opposed Euchronia abandoned theirs.
“We tend to take for granted the countless generations of men who gave their lives so that we could enjoy a new world. The fact that we are here tonight is eloquent testimony to the extent to which we take it for granted. But we must not be allowed to forget that those generations of men worked for a reason—that they dedicated their lives to an ideal. They were building a world which they could not hope to see—for their remote descendants. The original Planners were not working for their children of eleven thousand years in the future, but for their children a hundred thousand years in the future. Thanks to the power and the determination of the Movement we have the world they wanted to build. We might just as easily be building it ourselves. And if we were building it ourselves, then I believe we would be content to do so. We would accept our responsibilities and we would accept them willingly.
The Face of Heaven: The Realms of Tartarus, Book One Page 14
