A Glimpse of Infinity: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Three

by Brian Stableford

  The trek along the road of stars had not been without incident—several times (they had not bothered to count how many) they had been forced to defend themselves against slinking predators which had come too close. Some they had killed and eaten. But the predators were relatively few, and they were not the most serious danger. The real threat to the success of their journey was poison. In the blacklands, there was poison everywhere. The land which the Overworlders had left, in and about their cities, had been poisoned ten thousand years before, and as the Underworld life-system had become viable in these areas, as it had everywhere else, it had simply adapted to the poisons. Now, while the Overworld still pumped such wastes that it would not or could not reclaim down to the blackland surface, the life of the Underworld thrived on a constant supply of chemical and radioactive substance which would have been deadly to organisms elsewhere. The Underworld’s life-system was by no means homogeneous. The Overworld had provided itself with a stable biotic environment as well as a mechanical and sociocultural one, but the Underworld could not and had not. Adaptation had required adaptation to a vast range of habitats. Perhaps the blacklands posed less of a threat to the people of the Underworld than to the Overworlders, but its dangers were nonetheless considerable. There was food here that they could eat, and water to be found that they could drink, but it was not easy to find or identify sources of their needs. And the worst of the trouble was that if they were selective, the parasites were not. A hundred or a thousand kinds of worm and winged thing would find them perfect hosts, while they would find the parasites deadly companions simply because of the poisons to which the tiny creatures were so adapted that they carried them around inside them in concentrations which Iorga, Nita and Huldi would find fatally toxic.

  Even in the Swithering Waste, which was a wilderness, but a wilderness of the lightlands, Iorga had failed in a long fight against parasites and lost his mate. Here, the danger was exaggerated and ever-present. That was the true hazard of the blacklands, and that was why no one came here by choice, except perhaps the Cuchumanates, who had used the road for so long that they were probably made of poison themselves.

  A little further along the way, they found one of the Cuchumanates, where rocks had spilled out over the road. One of the trucks had run right over her, and her body was smashed.

  One of the trucks also remained. It had been caught broadside by the full force of the slippage, and had been turned on its side and carried off the road to smack into the slope on the far side, ending up sandwiched between two faces of rock and soil. The tires had not burst, but the suspension of the wheels had been so badly twisted that there had been no possible hope of getting the vehicle going even had the men from Heaven been able to dig it out. The truck had been resealed at the back, and it had obviously defied the attempts of the Cuchumanates to break into it after the convoy had gone. There were scars where the locking mechanism had been attacked with rocks, but it had not yielded.

  Iorga made a brief attempt to do what the Cuchumanates had been unable to do, but it was only a token gesture. The vehicle was built too solidly for his meager resources.

  The proximity of the Cuchumanates—there might be ten or a dozen in the group—was an extra reason for alertness. The species was quite unpredictable, and there was every reason to suppose that having lost at least one of their number recently the group would be ready enough to attack anyone or anything they met. Their weapons would undoubtedly be inferior—Iorga still had a gun—but that would not necessarily be significant in determining the outcome of a pitched battle.

  They had no option but to move on quickly to a place where the road was clear, and not so confined by the looming forest. They walked for many miles before they stopped once more to sleep.

  13.

  Abram Ravelvent came to see Joth face to face, rather than using the cybernet, because he felt an intense personal involvement in the affairs of Joth’s family. He had never met Joth, but had been caught up inextricably in the tangled web of associations which surrounded him. It was Ravelvent who had found for Carl Magner a staircase into the Underworld, and had taken him there, and had seen Simkin Cinner shoot Magner dead. Ravelvent had returned to that same spot, on a different occasion, to find Julea Magner waiting there—waiting for nothing.

  Ravelvent half-hated Joth for what had been done to Julea, but reason would not let him blame the youth. He did not find Joth’s metal face frightening or intimidating. He found it, if anything, more comfortable to face than most faces of flesh. It was a machine, and Ravelvent found the machineness of it easy to deal with. To Ravelvent, all faces were properties of a machine—the cybernet—and they were only difficult to understand when they pretended to be real: flesh and blood instead of image.

  Ravelvent had never married, and had never lived with a woman until he took Julea Magner into his home following her abandonment outside the plexus.

  “How is she?” asked Joth.

  “Hurt.”

  “Why didn’t she come? I tried to call, but the house was empty, and the net couldn’t locate her. You must have done that.”

  “She thinks you’re dead,” said Ravelvent.

  “Why?”

  “You shouldn’t have taken her with you. Why did you let her see what happened at Harkanter’s house?”

  “I didn’t know it was going to happen.”

  “You let her see the one in the cage. And the other one—the cat-man.”

  “I let her see them,” agreed Joth. “I wanted her to see them. I’d have liked the whole world to see them, not as they wanted to see them, but as they are. But the world won’t believe in them. It believes in cats and rats and monsters instead. Is that what she believes too? That’s not what I showed her. I showed her men.”

  “You left her in the car when you went back down.”

  “Should I have taken her with me?”

  “You shouldn’t have gone down. You should have stayed.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Ravelvent shook his head. “You don’t realize what has happened to her. Her whole world has just been screwed up and thrown away. Everything she knew, everything she loved, everything that meant anything to her. It all dissolved, and left nothing but chaos. Ryan went into the Underworld, and never came back. Her father was shot in front of her, and he expended his dying breaths running down a staircase—into the Underworld. She sent you after Ryan, and she thought that you were dead, too. But you came back. You gave her some kind of hope. And what then? You brought the Underworld into her world along with you, and then you went back. You left her in the car and you went back. What had she left? Had she even some vestige of hope? I found her there, and she couldn’t even talk to me. She could speak, and make words, but she had nothing to say. Once she’d told me what happened—some of it—she had no more to say. There’s nothing left of her life, except the dreams which killed her father. You even brought her those.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” said Joth, quietly.

  “No? None of it?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Joth. “You have no idea how sorry I am. She’s my sister. She didn’t want any part of this—she was caught up in it, because she was Carl Magner’s daughter, just as I was caught up in it because I am his son. And the whole world is caught up in it because it was Carl Magner’s world. She was hurt, and I’m bitterly sorry that she’s hurt. She’s lost her world, you say. It’s just been ripped away from her. But remember how easily the world tore, how simple it was to crumple it up and throw it away. Whose fault is that? Nobody’s to blame. All that happened is that we discovered that the Underworld still exists, that the Euchronian Heaven isn’t ten thousand years away from the Hell it ran away from. That’s all. Julea was too close to that discovery. So was I. So were you. But there’s no point in looking around for someone to blame, whether it’s me or my father or Heres or the Children of the Voice or the founder of the Movement of God Almighty. What we have to do is put it right.”

  Ravelvent did not
speak for several minutes. When he did, he said: “Why should she have to suffer?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Joth, again. “I’m sorry I had to use her to get into Harkanter’s house. But what else could I do? Would he have opened the door to me? To Iorga? I was trying to put things right. It wasn’t my fault that everything blew up in my face. I’m still trying to put things right. I’m trying to stop them destroying the Underworld. But they don’t listen. They just won’t see.”

  “They can’t,” said Ravelvent. “You must understand that.”

  “I don’t. I don’t understand it at all.”

  “You’ve been into the Underworld,” Said Ravelvent. “You’ve lived there. I don’t know how, but somehow it’s become real to you. It’s not real to me. I know it’s real, intellectually. I can consider it as a fact, I can think about it with complete rationality. People ask me questions, and I can give them answers. I can offer opinions, make predictions, analyze and theorize. But I can’t make it real.

  “I’m an old man, Joth. Most of us are old, because we can live a long time, and our birth rate isn’t large. Maybe that’s what makes the difference. The Underworld, to me, is just not real. It’s a fantasy. There just is no place in my mind which can accept the reality of the things which you have revealed—or even the things which are happening in the world. Until the last few days I never had a bad dream in my life. Now all my dreams are nightmares. Even while I’m awake, things come into my mind that make me think I’m mad. I don’t accept the reality of these things, because there’s no way I can. To me, it seems that the world is becoming unreal.

  “You don’t understand why people can’t accept what you tell them. I don’t understand it either, but I know that it’s so. The things which you talk about are beyond our conceptual horizons. It was the same with your father’s book. Many of us found it fascinating, but in a purely speculative sense. It wouldn’t have mattered if everything your father wrote had been true, and demonstrably true, because we simply aren’t mentally constructed in order to accept it as true. We can talk about the Underworld, and appear to do so quite sensibly, but it’s as though we were trying to solve a puzzle. What’s worse is the fact that we know we’re wrong—we know that we’re failing to confront the problem, not even beginning to come to terms with it. And we’re frightened. But our minds just aren’t equipped to face up to what’s happening. If it goes on, we’ll all end up like Julea. Our worlds will simply dissolve.”

  For the first time, Joth realized how badly Ravelvent was disturbed. And not just Ravelvent. Rypeck and Ulicon too. Perhaps everyone who had been affected by Camlak’s mindblast. He began to understand why he seemed to be on a totally different wavelength whenever he talked to Rypeck of Ulicon. He discovered a new dimension to the problem. This, he thought, is why they seem to struggle so desperately to understand, and yet never gain any real insight. Ravelvent’s phrase “beyond our conceptual horizons” echoed in his mind.

  “If that’s so,” he whispered, more to himself than to Ravelvent, “what makes me different?”

  14.

  As Rypeck looked at Heres’ image in the screen, he could almost sense the mental blockade which the Hegemon had built. The hostility and rancor which existed between them had supposedly been left behind when the crisis arose, but its legacy was still there. And there was more. It was not simply that Heres did not want to listen to Rypeck. Heres did not want to listen at all. He no longer wanted to hear anything. He had already made up his mind. He was entrenched so deeply and so firmly that no other assault upon his sense of reality could possibly succeed.

  Perhaps he was insane. Or perhaps it was the world which was insane.

  This time, though, it didn’t seem to matter to Rypeck. He no longer wanted to steer Heres away from one course to another. It wouldn’t really matter at all whether Heres listened to him or not.

  “It’s too late,” he said. “We’ve already lost.”

  “If we can muster the powers at our disposal,” said Heres definitely, “then we will be safe. All that we require is the level of commitment that our forefathers gave to the Euchronian Plan. If we can all come together and give our utmost to the project, then we must succeed. We will not fail.”

  “That speech is eleven thousand years out of date,” said Rypeck. “And so are we.”

  “You’re supposed to be reporting to me on what you found out from Joth Magner,” said Heres. “Every time you speak to me you begin like this, with deliberately veiled comments which you hurl at me as if you were throwing stones. It’s only your way, I know, but it’s tiresome. What have you found out?”

  “There are at least three, and probably more, intelligent species in the Underworld. There are humans, and animals which have evolved to mimic humans—rats and cats. All these races share cultural as well as biological similarities. There appears to be no genetic intercourse between the races—that’s almost certainly impossible, because they aren’t related enough to hybridize—but there’s a good deal of intellectual intercourse. Ideas don’t obey the principles of heredity, and cultural evolution isn’t subject to Darwinian selection. So both the cats and the rats have absorbed human culture and habits, once having evolved physically to the point where their brains could take it. It is, therefore, just as meaningful to call Harkanter’s specimen a man as it is to call it a rat. That’s the first thing you should know.

  “Secondly, we have every reason to believe that the mental blast, or invasion, or whatever you want to call it, was not a deliberate act in itself, but the side effect of whatever the rat did to remove itself from that cage. We suggest that what happened was that the rat wanted to escape from its predicament, and it twisted itself into another space parallel to our own. The energy of the translocation manifested itself in the way we experienced.

  “There are several million of these creatures in the Underworld. It is possible that every single one is capable of doing what Harkanter’s specimen did. If you attempt to destroy them, they might very probably do so. On the other hand, if we do nothing, it seems likely that it will happen again anyway. Even if it doesn’t, the evidence is that many people have been sensitized by the experience, and are now in the same situation as Magner—while they sleep their minds can pick up images carried by energy waves of this type radiating from the Underworld—presumably from the brains of the rats.

  “So, as I said, it’s too late. It doesn’t matter what you decide to do. Not anymore. We’re on borrowed time, Rafe.”

  “If what you say is true,” said Heres, “then we must destroy these rats completely.”

  “I doubt whether you can,” said Rypeck. “They received the broadcast from the rat’s mind just as we did—except that they’re in a much better position to make sense of it. They know the trick can be done, and they almost certainly know how to do it now, even if they didn’t before.”

  “There has been no repetition.”

  “Not yet.”

  “So we must act quickly. Germont’s force will move into the lighted area very soon now, and we should also have reports on the effect of the seeding by tonight. It will take some time to achieve the levels of production which we need, even if the seeding experiments are totally successful, but it can be done.”

  “All we have to do is keep mind and body together,” said Rypeck drily.

  “If we remain calm and self-disciplined,” said Heres, “there should be no difficulty.”

  “You’re wrong, Rafe. You’re dead wrong. Our minds just can’t stand up to any of this. We should have guessed earlier. Our fathers and our grandfathers shpuld have guessed. But they only saw the useful aspects of i-minus. For thousands of years now, the i-minus agent has been censoring our dreams, tidying up our minds, making us utterly and completely children of the Euchronian way of life. Maybe i-minus saved the Plan, by shaping the workers so carefully to their purpose in life. But i-minus has made us all into mental cripples. It has bound us so closely to Euchronia that we are no longer capable of
looking beyond Euchronia. We have adapted ourselves too closely, in mind rather than in body, to the Overworld. We’ve become parasites within the cybercomplex, and parasites always evolve to become totally dependent—they lose their adaptability. That’s what’s happened to us, Rafe. We have no mental adaptability. None whatsoever. We believed so utterly and completely in Euchronia and in nothing else that our minds were simply ready to shatter at the discovery of anything new.

  “The disaster has already happened, and there’s no way back. You can try to destroy the universe, Rafe, if you want to. But you can’t remain calm and undisciplined. You can’t face up to the situation. It’s the simplest little things that are beyond you, even though you rule the world.”

  “Eliot,” said Heres, “I think that you’re cracking up. I think you may be going mad.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Rypeck. “For more than a hundred years, I knew nothing but Heaven. Now I have looked into Hell. How can the sanity I had then help me now? Carl Magner wrote a book about The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. That marriage has taken place, in my mind as in yours. There can’t be any divorce. Not ever.”

  Heres never heard the end of that particular speech. He had switched off the cyberlink halfway through.

  15.

  Gregor Zuvara and Felipe Rath, with half a dozen others, were in the largest of the plastic domes in their Underworld city. More than any of the others, this was obviously an extension of the mechanical organism which covered the continents of the world. It was packed with equipment as sophisticated as any in the upper world, and all of the electronic devices were in constant communication with the cybernet and all its facilities. Once inside the dome it was quite easy to imagine that one was on the platform rather than the surface. The only thing which testified clearly to the fact that these men were on an alien and hostile world was the fact that they were physically together, sharing the same space and the same air.