A Glimpse of Infinity

by Brian Stableford

  “The viruses may do what Heres thinks is necessary, but it won’t be done overnight, and the amount of resistance within the life-system may be far greater than we hope. And in the meantime—while Heres’ grand plan is in progress—new factors may enter the situation. Anything might happen. Heres may have picked the simple answer, but it isn’t an easy one. There are no easy ones.”

  “Thanks,” said Dayling. “That’s what we needed to know.”

  “We?” queried Ravelvent.

  “Don’t worry. We aren’t a revolutionary movement. Not anymore. We don’t have to be. The revolution started without us. Now, we’re the government-in-reserve. When Heres reaches the end of his rope, the Council will have to turn to someone. We intend to be the only people with ideas. If you want a job, Abram, you only have to ask.”

  Ravelvent laughed shortly.

  “You always wanted to be dictator,” he said, with a hint of bitterness.

  “Not at all,” said Dayling. “I always wanted to be messiah.”

  6.

  “Did you see anything which suggested that the rats are telepathic?” demanded Rypeck.

  “They’re not rats,” said Joth.

  “Do they use telepathy?” persisted Rypeck.

  Joth shook his head. “Camlak said nothing to suggest that they could. But afterwards...Nita knew what had happened. Maybe they have telepathy but don’t use it. I don’t know.”

  “They have it,” said Ulicon, quickly. “We know that. Memory images can be transmitted and implanted. What Joth’s evidence suggests is that they can’t control it. In all probability, they’re not even aware of it. They take for granted the fact that their minds spill over from their selves, that there’s some kind of unitary organization within the species—perhaps like a hive of bees. This property of their minds is completely bound up with ritual and religion—to them, it’s natural. They personify the collective as their souls. The communion of souls is a social thing, where the whole social unit shares some experience through invoking this group identity.”

  Rypeck waved a hand angrily. “It doesn’t even begin to look like an explanation,” he said. “Enzo, we must do better than this. You can’t use this garbled nonsense to explain the fact that the rat—or man, or whatever—disappeared from that cage. Where did it go? Did it dissipate itself into your hypothetical superorganism? What happened to its body? We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re dealing with a physical event. The blast of energy was the result of the physical phenomenon. The mental side effect was just that—a side effect. We mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the transmission of memories from the rat to everyone within receiving distance was the purpose of what happened. It wasn’t. It was, in all likelihood, quite accidental. The wave which carried the information is what we should be interested in, and that wave was generated by what we would previously have considered to be an impossible event. The very fact that the intensity of what we felt seems to have depended more or less on the inverse square of the distance between ourselves and the focal point surely suggests that we are dealing with a physical phenomenon whose psychical effects are really secondary.”

  “That kind of division doesn’t make sense,” said Ulicon.

  “Enzo, we communicate via electromagnetic radiation. We speak into a microphone, and at the other end, someone hears our words. The information is in one brain, which translates thought into sound. The microphone translates sound into electricity. The electricity is translated into modified radio waves, which are translated back into electricity, back into sound, and then back into information in another brain. We can’t try to understand such a process by what goes on in the brains, and only what goes on in the brains. Is that telepathy? Of course it is—information is transmitted from brain to brain. But in order to understand it we must understand the physics of it. We can’t consider it simply as a psychic phenomenon. To do so makes nonsense of it.”

  “All right,” said Ulicon. “So it’s a problem in physics. So what?”

  “We’ve already established,” said Rypeck, “that the Children of the Voice don’t use telepathy. What does that mean? It means that they aren’t normally able to translate ideas into a form which can be carried by the kind of energy which is involved in the event we’re trying to understand. It’s as though they were mute—unable to translate ideas into sounds so that they can be transmitted from one brain to another. This failure could be at one of several levels. They might lack the physical apparatus for so doing—as if they had no tongues. Or they might lack the coding capacity—that is to say, they have the tongues but not the language. Or they might lack the power—as if they couldn’t expel the breath through the throat in order to vibrate the vocal cords Any of these might be true. But what we must do is abandon the notion that there is something magical or supernatural about what happened, or about the kind of thing we have to deal with. We may have to introduce a whole new physics into our scientific understanding, but what we must not do is try to make do with a whole new metaphysics.”

  “All that may be true,” complained Joth, “but it doesn’t help. You both seem obsessed with trying to find words to describe what happened. But that isn’t going to stop Heres destroying the Children of the Voice. He must be prevented from committing genocide. Isn’t that what we’re here for? Isn’t that what we’re trying to do. It’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “It’s not so simple,” said Rypeck.

  “It’s simple enough,” said Joth. “It’s saving millions of people from being wiped out because Heres and the Euchronians are scared. If they had been reasonable in the first place—if they’d only been prepared to recognize the fact that there are people in the Underworld who should be dealt with as people—then this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”

  “We cannot simply wait,” said Rypeck. “As Heres and millions of others see it—as Enzo and I see it, even—our minds and our identities are threatened with destruction. We know that it could be done. We want to see that it isn’t. If the threat is not to be faced in Heres’ way—a way which we and others consider to be extremely dangerous—then we must find another way to face it. If we are not to attack the threat at its source, then we must find a defense. That logic may be hard, but it is more appropriate than the ethical logic which you are trying to apply. If Enzo and myself are prepared to hear your case and support you, it is because we are afraid that Heres’ plan may precipitate the destruction it attempts to forestall, not because we want to save the Children of the Voice.”

  Joth felt stricken. “When I was injured,” he said, in a very low voice, “my father fought for my life. He defended me against a medical committee which wanted to put me out of my supposed misery. My father won, and I have a face of steel and plastic. I was allowed to live. Sometimes, it has occurred to me to doubt whether or not my father did the right thing. I believed that the whole argument was one of ethics. After all, this is the Euchronian Millennium—the end-point of human ambition. And when my father wrote his book—I thought the argument then was a matter of ethics.

  It occurs to me to wonder now—who did shoot my father? Who ordered it done?”

  “Your father was killed by a man named Simkin Cinner,” said Ulicon, gently. “No one ordered it done. And you must see that whether you approve of our motives or not, the only way of getting what you want is our way. The only way that the people of the Underworld will be allowed to live is by our proving that the Overworld has nothing to fear from them.”

  Joth looked him in the face, deliberately staring with his cold, metallic eyes. Ulicon could not meet the stare. No one could.

  “I don’t think you can prove that,” said Joth. “Because you’ll always be afraid. The Euchronians have always thought that the world was theirs, because of the platform and the Plan. But now we know that it’s not true. The world belongs to the people of the Underworld. The Underworld is the world. Euchronia is a gigantic castle in the air. A dream. I think that if the Movement tries t
o destroy the Underworld, the Underworld will destroy the Movement, and the Overworld with it.”

  “That,” said Rypeck, “is exactly what we fear.”

  7.

  The driver screamed, and the armored truck swerved to the left. There was a soft sound as the nearside wing sheared fungus, and then a harsher grating noise as the metal met something more solid. The vehicle came back off the wall into the road, its nose swinging as the driver jerked the wheel.

  Germont was into the cockpit in a matter of seconds. By the glare of the headlights he could see something—someone—trying desperately to get out of the path of the vehicle. The driver had not hit the brakes.

  It was too late. The truck hit the running figure and ran over the crushed body. Germont grabbed the wheel and held it steady, holding the vehicle on course. Finally, belatedly, the driver found the brake pedal with his foot, and the truck slowed to a halt.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Germont.

  “He threw something!” gasped the driver, who was shaking like a leaf. “The lights just picked him up, and he threw a rock. It hit the canopy just in front of me—I thought it was coming through. I couldn’t help it.”

  The transparent plastic had taken the blow comfortably—there was no mark. The driver had been startled rather than scared. But the shock had been considerable.

  “Cut the engine,” said Germont curtly, and then turned to call to the men in the back: “Get on that searchlight! And the gun.”

  He dropped back to snatch up the microphone by which he could broadcast to the convoy.

  “Hold your positions,” he said. “Alpha-two, do you see what we ran over?”

  “I see it,” came the reply. “I can’t make it out. Could be human. Do you want me to send someone out for a closer look?”

  “No! No one gets out. Can you maneuver to get the body into the light from your headlights? I want all searchlights on. Scan the forest.”

  “Jacob,” said the driver, speaking with unnatural quietness now that he was past the shock. “The road ahead. There used to be a cutting. The land’s slipped. It’s blocked. We’ll have to go back and around.”

  Germont, with the microphone still in his hand, climbed up to a position from which he could look out of the cockpit. The light of the many searchlights showed that the forest was banked unnaturally high on either side of them. The road ran through a long, shallow canyon. The obstruction in front was steep, but it did not seem impassable.

  “We can climb that,” said Germont. “We don’t need a road. This thing is built to hold a slope.”

  Somewhere back along the line, a machine gun came to life. Almost immediately, searchlight beams converged, and Germont looked back to where tiny white figures were moving on the ridge, while the bullets tore fungal tissue to pieces all around them. The soft, pulpy flesh splashed as the bullets hit, and sections of leathery algal frondescence fluttered in the air and writhed as they slid down the slope, robbed of their support. One of the figures was hurled back, and another. Dead and alive alike, they disappeared as great clouds of spore dust poured from the afflicted area.

  There was a series of dull thuds as rocks hit the plating of Germont’s vehicle. He looked up, trying to locate the throwers, while the searchlight veered back and forth.

  “Stop firing!” he commanded. “They can’t hurt us!”

  Then the land somewhere in the rear began to slide. It was the spot where the firing had been concentrated—the bullets had weakened the ancient structure which supported the forest, and it was tumbling, sliding down into the road.

  Realizing the danger, the trucks which were in the path of the slide came forward in a hurry. The first two or three managed to get far enough. One or two didn’t, and the loose rock, moving with fluid smoothness, washed into them, turned them, shoved them and began to bury them. One was turned over on its side.

  When the slide was over, six vehicles were trapped. Two were breached, and all had some degree of internal damage.

  Angrily, Germont ordered men out of the other trucks to begin digging out the trapped men and freeing the vehicles. They came out in closed-environment suits, and for every two or three men to dig, there had to be one with a rifle. The searchlights continued to scan the slopes for signs of the attackers.

  Germont went out himself, to look at the corpse which lay in the roadway between his vehicle and the second in line. He waited while one of the doctors inspected the body.

  “Is it human?” he asked, when the examination was over.

  “Near enough,” said the doctor.

  “He must have been crazy,” said Germont. “Coming at the truck like that.”

  “It’s not a he,” said the doctor. “It’s a she.” Then the arrow hit him. It went through the plastic suit like paper, between his ribs and deep into his chest. He died instantly.

  8.

  Elsewhere in the Underworld, the men from Euchronia were building a city: a city of hemispherical domes and cylindrical tunnels. The encampment beneath the plexus which had been established by Randal Harkanter and the party which he had led into the Underworld had been packed up and removed to the surface, only to be replaced by a much larger and much better equipped invasion force, whose purpose was to begin seeding the Swithering Waste with the Overworld’s various biological agents of destruction, and to observe the effects thereof. It was one of several such stations—Germont’s convoy was intended to establish three more—set up in a number of rather different habitats.

  The seeding was done from the air, the viruses being laid out along long lines radiating like spokes from the circular metal wall which was the base of the plexus. The “electronic bats” which dispersed the viruses also carried cameras to assist in observation, but small ground-cars were also made available to the observers. This group was headed by Gregor Zuvara, who had become an expert on the Underworld by virtue of having spent a few more days there than most of those called in to assist him.

  As the miniature city grew, Zuvara was forced to make ever-more-plaintive complaints about the inadequacy of his labor force. As soon as the news concerning the attack on Germont’s force and the several deaths among his personnel was made public, the number of volunteers for work in the Underworld fell rapidly.

  Within a matter of days it became obvious both above and below that some form of conscription would have to become effective. The subjugation of the individuals in the society of the Euchronian Millennium to necessity, as defined by the Hegemony of the Movement, became absolute. The clock had been turned right back. For the second time, the Euchronian Movement demanded total loyalty in order that the world might be saved, not for the present generation, but for generations to come.

  Almost everyone expected this mobilization of Euchronia’s manpower to go quite smoothly. This, after all, was the principle on which the world had been made. It had worked once—it had to work again. But Zuvara found his recruits resentful and discontent. The Euchronian spirit—the determination and selflessness that had built a world on the roof of a ruined Earth—was lacking.

  Slowly, Zuvara realized that everything had changed. The Euchronian ideal was not enough. Not this time. Something within society had shattered.

  While he watched the blight he had brought spreading throughout the world, stripping the vast marshland of everything living, reducing all plant tissue to a sort of protoplasmic tar, Zuvara could not help thinking: “We are destroying the world. The whole world. We are doing this to ourselves. Everything will die. There will be nothing left.”

  He told himself over and over that this was merely a nightmare, but he could not rid himself of it.

  9.

  Chemec the cripple had left Shairn with Camlak because the way his mind worked left him little option but to follow his leader. Camlak had been Old Man of Stalhelm—virtually all that was left of Stalhelm. He had been all that was left of Chemec’s life.

  Now Camlak was gone, and there was virtually nothing lef
t of Chemec’s existence. Nothing but his cunning and his failing strength, and his meager identity: Chemec the crab, Chemec the bent-leg. But Chemec hardly felt a sense of loss. Certainly he did not grieve for Camlak. Chemec took life as it came, and accepted events as they happened. He lived neither in his memories nor in his hopes, but stayed always within the moment of the ephemeral present, carried along by the current of life. It was the way of his kind, and Chemec was very much one of his kind. More so than Camlak or Nita, or even Old Man Yami.

  It was because of what he was rather than in spite of it that Chemec became a prophet. He had never been a man at odds with his soul. He coexisted with the Gray Soul inside his mind, in the simplest possible way. It was there, he let it be. He had never tried to be a psychic parasite with regard to his Gray Soul, nor had he attempted any kind of exchange. At Communion, he merely looked his Soul in the face. Nothing more. It was perfect commensalism—Chemec and the Soul shared the body and the mind, and neither troubled the other.

  And because of this, when the Soul began placing motives in his mind, Chemec did not realize what was happening. He accepted the motives as his own, and he obeyed their commands as if they came from his own self.

  He needed the motives. With Camlak gone, he had nothing left to him but to drift back into Shairn, to find a new community or to live alone, existing until he died. The motives made something of him. They repaired the aspect of function in his life. They made him a man again, whereas he might otherwise have contented himself as a rat.

  From the Swithering Waste he went southwest, and came to the townships of northern Shairn: to Isthomi and Escar, to Rocoral and Zeid. In each town, he persuaded the priests to look into their soul-space, and he caused Communions to be called. At the Communions, he preached, and because of the Gray Souls his words were heard and engraved into the minds of his hearers.