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

by Brian Stableford

  “I think it’s gone too far.”

  “We must try.”

  “With this mass of conjecture? We need more than a chain of ideas to persuade people. Not Heres—we’ll never persuade Heres—but the people who might be in a position to halt the panic if Heres can be removed. We need hard evidence, and there’s no way to get it.”

  “There’s one way,” said Ulicon.

  “Repeat the process?” said Rypeck, his lips forming a half-smile at the irony. “That’s what we’re trying to prevent.”

  “We could try to make a contact,” said Ulicon. “We know that the potential exists in people as well as in rats. Carl Magner had that potential. And after the blast...I think there’s a good many of us can now pick up the kind of leakage he did. Joth told us that in the village, they chewed plant pulp to help them communicate with their Gray Souls. We have specimens of that plant, courtesy of Harkanter’s expedition. I think we should try it on a man.”

  “Who?”

  “If he’s willing, the man most likely to succeed. Joth Magner.”

  27.

  Joth’s first reaction, when they came to him with the proposition, was: “Why me?”

  “Two reasons,” Ulicon told him. “First, you are your father’s son. We don’t know that his ability or potential was heritable, but it seems at least possible that there was a genetic predisposition. Secondly, you were closest to Camlak when he disappeared. Whatever effect the event had on our minds, it will have been at a maximum in your case. The only other person with your qualifications is your sister. But you have extra advantages in that you know more than any of us about the kind of context into which any contact you do make is to be put. As well as being the most likely candidate to make the contact, you are the most likely one to make sense of it.”

  “And what will it prove if I do make contact?” asked Joth.

  “What it may prove,” Rypeck interposed, “depends very much on the nature of the contact itself. What we want is to convince ourselves that we are on the road to understanding—that we are beginning to come to terms with the events that have happened. But if we succeed in the experiment, there is no knowing what we may learn. Perhaps very little—I doubt that we are in a position to learn very much because we are so totally naive with regard to the implications of what is going on—but perhaps something very important.”

  “I want to help,” said Joth. “You know that.”

  “But you’re afraid,” added Ulicon. “That’s understandable.”

  “Suppose,” said Joth, “that what happened to Camlak happens to me. We don’t know that what he did was voluntary.”

  “We assume that you will retain a degree of control over what happens,” Ulicon told him. “We think that it’s unlikely that the contact will harm you. By your own evidence, the Children of the Voice are convinced that the intimacy with the Souls is a good thing, that the Souls are benign.”

  “Exactly what do you want to do?” asked Joth.

  “We will inject into your veins an extract from the plant which you have identified as the one used by the villagers to stimulate contact during their Communion. We have tested it, and it seems to be harmless. Then we will induce deep sleep by direct electrical stimulation to the brain. With the encephalographic cyborg we can control the incidence of dream-sleep—can maintain or break it. The i-minus agent is already present in your body, but we will monitor its level continuously, and perhaps boost its concentration. We cannot monitor your dreams, of course, but we can stimulate retention within your own mind. We will always be able to wake you if you show any sign of physiological distress, but we will not do so unless we fear that you will come to some harm. We expect that the experience will be stressful to a degree.

  “Perhaps there is one more thing that you ought to know, and that is that the experiment will be conducted without the knowledge or consent of Rafael Heres. In order to make it meaningful we will have to break the secrecy of the i-minus project. We have already told you that the agent exists—we must also inform the medical and scientific observers we coopt into the experiment. We intend to inform Abram Ravelvent and your own doctor, Joachim Casorati. Clea Aron will also be present, as the only other member of the upper echelons of the Movement who seems likely to be sympathetic toward what we are doing. There may well be others in attendance. In a sense, what we are doing is betraying the system of the Close Council, and Heres may wish to construe this as treason against the Movement, if Heres is still in power when the experiment takes place.”

  “There’s a chance he may be stopped?” asked Joth.

  “A chance,” said Ulicon.

  “Welcome to the revolution,” added Rypeck, drily.

  “Well,” said Joth, quietly. “I’ve already been on one journey through Hell. Wherever this one takes me...I’ll survive.

  “I’ll do it.”

  28.

  Rafael Heres was a man devoted to—and committed to—the principle of a pattern in life. His mind saw Hoh as a perfect analogue of Euchronia, and Euchronia as a perfect analogue of Hoh. Winning, to him, meant the imposition of a pattern, the enforcement of stability, and his idea of fulfilment in life was control over the pattern of life.

  He had a tremendous capacity for finding answers to problems of great complexity (or what appeared to be great complexity), but the basis of this ability was not really intellectual acuity so much as an unbreakable faith in the fact that all problems, no matter how complex, had a single answer which would impose the sacred conformity to pattern. He was not, in any sense, a precise analyst of problems, merely an accomplished solver. Like Alexander confronted with the Gordian knot, he was a great believer in pragmatic solutions: if a knot would not yield to logic, then it must yield to force, it must be severed, even if it could not be untied.

  This insight into Heres’ character goes a long way to explaining his utter helplessness in the face of the circumstances following the Overworld’s vision of Hell. Here was a knot which would not yield to the sword. It could not be forced to comply with Heres’ assumptions about Knots. There was no way that the Euchronian pattern to which Heres was committed could be reconstituted, but Heres was incapable of admitting this. And so the very source of his erstwhile success was the instrument of his total failure. The faith which had served so well in other circumstances now showed itself to be, in the ultimate analysis, inadequate, and even absurd.

  When Luel Dascon came to him and reported that the expeditionary forces in the Underworld were meeting with failure on every front, and asked him to recall the remainder in order to save lives, Heres came face to face with his own fallibility. He saw the negative counterpart to the self-image which, according to the mirror of his mind, had always been the “fairest in the land.”

  “Zuvara’s report,” said Dascon, “indicates that the viruses are not one hundred percent effective, and that their spread is not so rapid as might be desired. The implications of his results, he claims, are ambiguous insofar as our declared program is concerned. Provided that the seeding is heavy enough, there is no way that the higher life-forms in the Underworld can survive the consequent disruption of their ecology. However, such a seeding would have to continue actively on a large scale for many years. The extinction of the people of the Underworld cannot be regarded as imminent, even in the limited areas where heavy seeding has so far taken place.

  “The force now commanded by Gunn Spurner following Jacob Germont’s death has been reunited, but over half the vehicles and men have been lost. The force is no longer proceeding south, but is retreating through the blighted country already seeded. The people of this region are migrating south, and we have evidence which suggests that the rat people are fighting the spread of the plague by burning the blighted areas. The spread of the viruses by wind, water and animal is being limited by this policy, though not completely stopped.

  “The corrosion of the supporting structures of our own world discovered by Vicente Soron is, in some places, advanced enough
to be a danger. The platform is not threatened by small-scale collapses, so far as we can tell, but stress and strain are building up in certain regions which may result in damage to systems. The conclusion here is that intercourse between Overworld and Underworld must be reinstituted on a worldwide basis. The repair of the platform’s supporting structures must, from now on, be regarded as a priority. Bases like Zuvara’s must be established on a permanent basis in many areas. To some extent, their continued existence must depend on their ability to withstand attack not simply from the subhuman inhabitants, but also from the kind of life-form which destroyed the Delta contingent of Germont’s force. Identification of this organism is at present tentative, only mechanical devices having so far been sent to the scene of the disaster.”

  “Is that all?” whispered Heres.

  “There’s a great deal more,” said Dascon. “But these are the most vital points.”

  “And what conclusions do you draw?”

  “We must go back into the Underworld on a big scale,” said Dascon. “That’s vital. The idea we have been nursing that our own activities down there can be kept to a minimum no longer seems tenable. We must conclude that the Planners made a mistake when they sought to shut out all the problems posed by the surface by sealing it up and ignoring it. The Plan must be continued—perhaps on the kind of lines which you proposed in your program for a Second Plan. If we are to begin the reclamation of the surface with the extirpation of the life-system currently dominant there, then we will obviously have to make the extirpation a long-range objective rather than a short-range one. The question is: how can the people be reconciled to these ends. It won’t be easy to persuade them to abandon their Millennium and go back to work. Not this kind of work—dangerous and dirty. Our citizens were born the children of a dream—the ultimately privileged. It isn’t going to be easy to take that privilege away, especially in the current climate of stark terror. All over the world there are people barricading themselves into their houses, trying to requisition supplies for two years or twenty years from the cybernet, because they simply have no confidence that the cybernet is still going to be working next year or next month—no confidence that society will still be functioning next year or next month. All over the world, people are beginning to exempt themselves from Euchronia, trying to retreat into their own tiny corner of it, which they hope they can sustain by their own efforts forever. And in the meantime, we may lose our minds. Tomorrow, or the next day. Not one of us can claim control of his own sanity, his own inner being. Our quasi-Utopian order no longer means a thing.

  “In order to survive at all, we of the Overworld have to rediscover commitment—a commitment far more difficult than that which the original Movement fought for. We cannot offer the same assurances they could. Perhaps we can no longer offer even the hope of Euchronia. We can only try. We must do what we can.”

  “Sisyr is to blame,” said Heres. Dascon had not expected the remark. It seemed to him to be a non sequitur. He had expected an affirmation of determination, support for his own verbally expressed conviction of the need to carry on. Dascon had always looked to Heres for confirmation of his own Euchronian cant—for the ultimate faith which he, in the final analysis, did not have. But Heres’ conviction had come to a dead end. Suddenly, it was no longer there. It is always the deepest faith of all which submits to instantaneous evaporation, when its weakness is finally admitted.

  “Sisyr kept the Underworld alive,” Heres went on, when Dascon failed to reply. “He nurtured it in order that it could become our enemy. While he pretended to help the Plan, he sowed the seeds of Euchronia’s destruction. He never intended that the Plan should succeed. He is the destroyer. All this time, through hundreds and thousands of years, he has been playing a game with us. It was never his intention that we should attain our ends. He has cheated a whole world.”

  “It’s not so,” said Dascon. “It can’t be. He only wanted to keep both worlds alive. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that the proper way? In a game of Hoh, the ideal is for everyone to win.”

  “No!” said Heres. “He never intended that both worlds should become viable. He never intended that the Overworld should succeed. He has said so. He has confessed that he always knew our aims to be unattainable. He knew, because he made it so.”

  For the first time, it was Heres that looked to Dascon for confirmation, for justification. He expected it, for in all the years that Heres had known Dascon, he had seen him as little more than an echo, a testament to his own ability to be unfailingly correct.

  But now Dascon said nothing, because for the first time Heres had failed to stand full-square with Euchronian ideology. For the first time, Heres spoke as a Eupsychian, and there was nothing left to believe in. Nothing at all.

  29.

  The stars stood still in the sky. Bright, clearly defined, pearl-white. The land they illuminated was likewise sharply defined, but somehow unreal and insubstantial, almost two-dimensional. The shapes were shadows, with the thinness of shadows. Bright illusions stood forth while realities hid, cloaked in darkness.

  At one moment he experienced the world as though he were floating in midair, looking out and across the bleak panorama of the realms of Tartarus; and in another he felt himself huddled in the slime, with the touch of the cold, foul earth creeping into his flesh as though licking at him, dissolving him, consuming him. There was sweat on his body, perhaps in the external world as well as the microcosmic existence of the dream.

  He sensed the presence of the Children of the Voice, not through hearing or seeing, but through some mystic sense of collective being: a transcendental sense, the property, perhaps, of the fourfold vision. He was aware of the Children en masse, as a quasi-hive organism, perpetually growing and dying by degrees, but he was also aware of stresses within the whole—tensions and repulsions, the ceaseless effort of exemption, of isolation. The identity of the species seemed, from Joth’s Godlike viewpoint, to be in a state of constant flux, like a chemical reaction in virtual equilibrium, with associations constantly forming and breaking down. But, as well as being outside and above, Joth was also inside and below—if his seeing eye was Godlike, it was also wormlike—and in himself he felt the ebb and flow of their existence. Their fear was his fear, their dream was his dream.

  As he drifted in space, so he began to drift in time. He felt himself caught, as though by a rapid current, and suddenly hurled into a dark corridor, as though falling—but falling through, not down.

  The stars were whirled away with him—they did not leave him but they lost their roundness, like teardrops becoming streaks of silver. He moved as though through a sleeve of shooting stars.

  He began to be overwhelmed by a black absence of any sense of direction, any sense of speed, any sense of distance or location.

  He was not afraid. There was no conscious element in the psychophysiological reaction which entrapped him, and which was shuttling him through the chaos of his inner world—not the surface of consciousness, or even the underlying interface of dream and symbol, but the depths, the Tartarean realms. His movement, his senses and his being were in the grip of something more basic than essential self.

  Joth ran, his heart pumping, his limbs sucking up energy from his physical core. His eyes reflected the whirligig gleam of the stars, but what he saw....

  The Star King, dancing...night, decked with painted stars, the pace of the dance slowing as the rhythm of the drums grew turgid and the King himself could do no more than writhe, his dead legs unable to carry him, but still dancing, dancing....

  The moist hand, lingering on and near his lips, his face hot and dry but the hand moist, tasting of...the lingering echoes of another dream, making his back rigid, the touch of madness....

  An empty, derelict world...forests of shiny fungus hardened like wood...ground ridged and slick with bloated rhizoids and thick, matted humus, covered with cockroaches and small black beetles, and fleshy, squashy insects for eating with dirty, foul-smelling water thickene
d by slime...mud and puffballs and chytrids, monstrous edifices of mutually supportive hydroids...acid burning skin and mucous membrane...soft tentacles waving blindly in the air, sting-cells charged and constantly consuming, constantly sucking, constantly oozing through the morass....

  Broth spooned into his mouth, gulped down and then vomited back, a thin, gray stream running down his cheeks and into the straw...and water pouring, running through him, over him, in baptism...and rebirth...out of the sickness and the wasting, and from the margins of death, the retreat of the world within and the world without...then the healing, the growing anew, the rebuilding and the self-repair, and the finding of fear...and love...One lamp burning on a bracket in the wall, bricks and square stones showing through the plaster, cracks in the ceiling....

  The Star King, leaning forward, his belly touching her breasts...not breathing, not even alive...rigid...and then the Sun, striking like a snake...the flash of the axe as the blade caught and threw the starlight...the black mask rolling like a great black ball....

  A great flat worm flopping like a rubber blanket, spitting out its guts...bubbling fountains of digestive juices...the villi of the blind intestine flapping like tiny grasping fingers...the deadly hiss of the acid in the algal scum...the worm, soft underfoot, writhing and sucking back its gut, sinking away into the ooze....

  Blood, flooding the gray-green colors of the Earth-body...a torrent...a red sheen in the firelight, turning black...sliding the Night from the body, the Sun descending...bound together....

  Metal eyes...are the men of your world made of metal?

  All men are flesh and blood. I was hurt. I have been repaired....

  A strip of darkness in the further sky...the black land...a thin line of light like a road of stars...echoes of an older civilization...the ruins of a city and the relics of an older mankind....

  Torrents of thought, breaking in his mind...the Face of Heaven...the sound of the horn, the sudden face and the sudden fear....

  The stars in the sky, pale and still...his whole body being eaten by pain while cockroaches moved over his body and he could not move...helpless and lost...mental continuity broken...tears in the corners of his eyes....