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

by Brian Stableford

  The second of the three was Eliot Rypeck. His job was to define the problem. It was up to him to destroy the old patterns of thought, to expose ruthlessly the error and the hopelessness of the old regime. He represented the problem, building an edifice of fear and naked truth, defining a fire-breathing dragon to threaten the world.

  The third man required by the scheme was, of course, the hero—a new figurehead. He was not required to do anything at all, but simply to be. He (the image, not the man) would become the new focus of hope, the new organizing principle within the mechanical mind of the Overworld. His name, of course, was Joel Dayling.

  35.

  “What happened to Camlak,” said Joth, “wasn’t simply a translocation. He...twisted himself...out of our space into another but there was more to it than that. In a way, it was also a metamorphosis, a transfiguration. Camlak now is not the same kind of being that he was. He has transcended that whole mode of being, and now he is something new. He retains aspects of himself, and it is through these aspects that he was able to make contact with me, and to transfer ideas from his mind into mine. But there’s more to it than that...more that is beyond our understanding. I can’t explain because there is no explanation. It is outside what we know and understand.”

  “I want you to go over the things which you said while you were still unconscious,” said Ulicon. “Expand on them any way you can. We don’t want exact explanations—we simply want to know the contexts in which the words are to be set.”

  “All right,” said Joth. “One by one. Give them to me.”

  “Soul space,” said Ulicon.

  “That’s what I’ve just been trying to tell you about,” said Joth. “There are other spaces, outside, or perhaps alongside, this one. But the space where Camlak is is not only apart from ours—it’s intrinsically different from it. There seems to be less fixity in it, the reality is less solid, less unitary. It’s as though several possibilities may exist simultaneously...except that there’s no simultaneity...go on to the next.”

  Ravelvent obviously wanted to interrupt, to ask for clarification, but Ulicon signaled him to be still.

  “Child two,” he said.

  “That’s simple,” said Joth. “It simply means that the Children of the Voice are two beings in one. They have a human-like aspect, but they also have a Gray Soul—they aren’t individuals.”

  “One and one,” read Ulicon.

  “The same point. Meant to convey, I think, some kind of equality of the creature which we see and understand, and the Soul. We mustn’t think of the Soul as being ‘in’ the person—there is simply a touching point between them: an interface, not in the brain, but in the mind.”

  “You’re making a clear distinction between the two?” asked Ulicon.

  “I think we have to.”

  “Very well. Link chain.”

  Joth considered for a moment. “I think this refers to the fact that the nature of the relationship between the Children of the Voice and their Gray Souls, the potential exists for the linking of minds in some kind of linear fashion. I can’t quite see how.”

  “What about ‘Change mind’?”

  “Just what it says, I think. Minds can be changed—they have the power of metamorphosis, though I don’t know how or why. The act itself seems rather self-evident, but I think I that’s all there is.”

  “All Soul.”

  This time, Joth paused for a long time before answering. “All I can make of that,” he said, finally, “is that we can all become like the Souls. But that may simply be a rationalization of the statement itself. I don’t remember anything in connection with the phrase.”

  “Child shadow.”

  Joth shook his head. “I think I’m losing it,” he said. “These things must have meant something then—during the contact. But I’ve lost the meaning now. It seems to me to suggest that the Children of the Voice are in some sense shadows—perhaps from the viewpoint of the Souls. There’s an old saying—something about our world, as we see it, being only the shadows of reality...perhaps that’s the perspective the phrase is intended to convey.”

  Ulicon nodded. “I think you may be right. The next phrase is ‘Shape wall’, which seems to tie in.”

  “It may,” said Joth. “We are merely the shapes on the wall—the shadows cast by the firelight. I think that’s right—it’s just an image, to help us think.”

  “There are two syllables in the final jumble of words,” said Ulicon. “After ‘hill’ and ‘sun’ you said ‘fireli.’ That may be the beginning of ‘firelight.’ And at that point the verbal thinking seems to be giving way to visual imagery. ‘Shi,’ which came next, might be the beginning of ‘shining.’ But there are two more distinct phrases yet. The first is ‘Flow all.’“

  Joth rubbed his eyes, and tensed the muscles of his face as though to force reluctant ideas into his head. “It could mean so many things,” he said. “I have no intuition...I honestly think that at this stage I’m no more competent to interpret than you are. It might mean that in the other space everything can flow...nothing is fixed. But it may mean something else entirely. It’s just gone from my mind. There’s nothing there to echo.”

  “Try the last,” said Ulicon, kindly. “Soul through.”

  Joth was shaking his head even as the words were spoken.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It means nothing. The only thing I can think of is that the Souls can come through into our space just as Camlak went into theirs...no, I’m sure that’s not it. It’s something else. But something I can’t reach....”

  “Relax,” said Ulicon. “There’s no hurry. It may come to you some other time—it may even come back to you in your dreams. You’ve done magnificently—far better than we could have hoped. You established contact, and you brought something back from the contact. Perhaps we can’t understand, but we know that we’re on the way to understanding. We’ve brought this thing into the realm of things we can study, things we can work with. We may not know what we’re doing, but we can begin to feel our way.”

  “It’s dangerous,” said Ravelvent, no longer able to contain his impatience. “You seem to have become so wrapped up in this that you’ve forgotten that we’re playing with forces that could destroy the world.”

  “We already have those,” retorted Ulicon, calmly. “We’ve been living with atomic power for millennia. To an extent, we run the world on forces which—if we couldn’t control them—could destroy it. Such forces exist, and we can’t pretend we live in a world without them.” He paused to glance at his wristwatch. “And now, I think we must return to the real world. We’ve exempted ourselves for a considerable time, in order to conduct this experiment. If you, Joachim, would activate the holovid, I think we can listen to what Eliot has to say.”

  He looked round at the expressions of startled puzzlement.

  “There’s no need to be alarmed,” he assured them. “The world simply has a new messiah. Like all the others, he’s only going to promise to save us from ourselves.”

  36.

  “The objectives of the Euchronian Movement,” Rypeck was saying, “were both clear and narrow. They were products of the age that we now call the age of psychosis, or the Second Dark Age. In earlier periods of history there had been no clear and narrow objectives adopted and accepted by any substantial and cosmopolitan body of men. This is not to say that individuals lacked any sense of purpose, but that the race as a whole lacked any unified concept of historical ambition. The Euchronian Movement set forth a system of priorities which, for the first time, provided a focus for the whole of mankind.

  “We still live with the objectives and priorities of the Movement of eleven thousand years ago. We have the world that they designed. In order to build the world we now inhabit, the Movement changed mankind. The Movement became mankind, first of all, by so defining itself—the men who would not accept commitment to the Movement’s ends were abandoned, and left to die on the surface, entombed by the platform.

  “B
ut that was not enough. Mankind had to be changed in order that the Movement’s evaluation of itself should be justified. The Movement had defined the destiny of man—plotted his future history. It had designed the world he must live in, and prescribed total commitment to the Plan as the only means of achieving that world-vision. Having defined the Plan as the perfect statement of human need, it proceeded to adapt mankind to the Plan. Having defined clear and simple objectives, the Movement set out to manufacture a clear and simple human race.

  “One of the instruments which the Movement found in order to further this end—to protect the Plan against human weakness—was a drug known as the i-minus agent. This drug was administered to the builders in both food and water. Its purpose was to eliminate the instinctive element in human nature, to make men more pliable, more easily indoctrinated—to make them, in fact, better servants of the Plan. This was done in secret, and the secret entrusted to a handful of men—not even to the whole Council of the Movement.

  “That drug is still being administered today. The motives behind the i-minus project were good. The Movement saw the Plan as the only hope for humanity, and human nature as the only threat to the Plan. In attempting to enslave humanity to their particular set of ideals they were—by their own definition—’right.’ And in some measure, they succeeded in enslaving mankind to their particular set of ideals. We still hold, for the most part, to the set of values established by the planners. Such dissent as there is among us is not due to the instinctive, animal qualities which the Movement sought to exorcise, but to variance in what we learn, what we think, and what we come to believe.

  “But it is surely time, now, to ask questions about this drug, and what it has made of us. Such questions have always been asked, but they have been asked and answered in secret, debated by a handful of individuals. While this has been going on, our world has come to the brink of disaster. It is my conviction that part of the reason why we seem so completely helpless in the face of our present circumstances is the work of the i-minus agent. We have been fitted to the well-defined and narrow concept of what a human being should be, as decided by the Euchronian Movement. But the problems we face at this time are not problems which—according to Euchronian philosophy—human beings ought to face. In defining man as they did, the Euchronian Movement also defined the world in which he existed. We have discovered that the world is simply not like that.

  “We live in the Overworld designed by the Planners. But the Planners saw the Overworld as the whole world, the limits of existence. Outside the walls of Utopia, there is supposedly nothing. If the vast universe of the stars exists, then it is somehow apart from human life: quintessential. If the world within—the Underworld—exists, then that, too, is apart from human life and completely irrelevant to it.

  “We have found that this is not so. Outside the walls of Utopia, the world goes on. We have found that the Universe is real, that the stars have worlds and peoples. We have contrived to ignore that, despite the fact that had it not been for the people of another world the Plan could not have been brought to its conclusion in the manner that it was. We also contrived to ignore the Underworld, doubting its reality, for thousands of years. But now we can no longer ignore it. We can no longer retain even the illusion of our total isolation from anything beyond the machine in which we live. We have been invaded—we can be invaded. We have reacted to the first of these, but it is really the second which concerns us.

  “The fact is very simply that we have been wrong. The Movement defined humanity and human life too narrowly. In trying to shape man to the mold which it made for him, the Movement robbed him of an adaptability which may have prevented our ever reaching the predicament in which we now find ourselves. Of all the people on the platform, only one—the alien, Sisyr—remembered the Underworld. Had there been more—if the Planners, too, had remembered—then the terrible shock of confrontation which we have suffered could not have happened.

  “The aims of the Movement were a response to the situation of the Second Dark Age. They were designed to end that Second Dark Age and prevent any such age of psychosis from recurring. Now, we need a new set of priorities—a new prescription for action—which is a response to our present circumstances. Rafael Heres reacted to what has happened in the manner of a man totally committed to the ideas which are now out of date. His only answer was to destroy—to fulfill the assumptions which had proved unjustified by destroying the proof. It was his belief that the Overworld was the whole world, and he attempted to confirm that belief by destroying everything else. At first, he wanted to make the Underworld an extension of the Overworld—to convert it into a human world for human beings. When he found that that was simply not possible, he found no other alternative but to exterminate all life within it, to render it inert.

  “But even if that were possible, it would not be an answer. We know now what we ought to have known all the time—that the Overworld is not all that exists. It is not the whole Earth, and it is certainly not the whole Universe.

  “It is we who must change. It is we who must adapt to what we know, rather than wasting ourselves in the futile attempt to adapt what really exists to our narrow concept of existence.

  “We should be grateful for the fact that this revelation has been forced upon us now, and that we did not endure in our state of willful ignorance for a few centuries more. If we had continued as we were, the realization that the Overworld is not inviolable would have come to us in a manner even more frightening than the way in which it has.

  “The pillars which support the platform—the structures which hold up our world—have been corroded and weakened. At the present, there seems to be little danger of imminent collapse, but it is clear that the supporting structure not only needs rapid repair, but constant attention thereafter. If we had not been forced to look into the world beneath our feet we would not have discovered this until it was too late.

  “We must, therefore, in order to maintain our existence, go back into the Underworld—not as invaders or exterminators of vermin, but as workers and builders. We will be forced to come to terms with the Underworld and its peoples, and those terms cannot and must not be the terms of total war, because our total war is a failure.

  “The reactivity of the life-system in the Underworld is such that the viruses with which we sought to destroy it are by no means effective. If all that we had to do was kill, perhaps, in a very long time, we might succeed in wiping out the life of the Underworld. But we have much more to think about than killing. We have to think about repairing the pillars—all the pillars, in all quarters of the globe. The work that needs to be done is tremendous, and it will require a concerted effort on the part of our society. We cannot do this work if we are simultaneously to wage an all-out global war with the Underworld. Rather, we need to make peace with the people of the Underworld, to cooperate with them, and—if possible—to enlist their help. This will not be easy, and in some respects it may be as difficult as our attempt to wage war, but this is what needs to be done if we are to adapt ourselves to reality. We must come to understand the people of the Underworld, and find a means of coexisting with them. We must cease to think of them as ‘the men on the ground’—Euchronia’s enemies— because they are something different, something new. Carl Magner tried to tell us that we must show the Face of Heaven to the people of the Underworld, because we were wrong to deny them the sight of it. I think that we must also show ourselves the Face of Heaven, because we have been wrong to refuse to look at it.”

  37.

  It was not until Rypeck was replaced by Dayling that Ulicon’s companions fully understood what had happened. Clea Aron had known what would happen, in an approximate sense, but she had not been involved in any way with the transfer of authority—she had merely agreed to remain passive. Ravelvent was not surprised by the turn taken by events, although he was somewhat startled by the apparent smoothness of the operation, which had happened virtually while his back was turned.

  Cas
orati was the only one who expressed his surprise:

  “You knew this was happening!” he said to Ulicon.

  Ulicon nodded. “I think it was well done,” he said. “Eliot was perfect. Long-winded and dry, but casual and rhetorical. Then Dayling, to repeat the same message in brief, emotional tones.”

  “And that’s it?” asked Clea Aron. “That’s going to change the world, overnight.”

  “Oh yes,” said Ulicon. “You shouldn’t assume that because the Movement held total control for thousands of years, and claimed absolute stability, that it can’t be set aside. Its very constancy has led to its being taken wholly for granted. The people had simply become unconscious of government—so far as their everyday lives are concerned the machine rules, and the mind behind it is totally invisible. They’ll accept the change. All, perhaps, except the hierarchy of the Movement, many of whom will find themselves out of a job. But it’s only political positions that will be affected —the civil services will simply carry on. I doubt if there will be any more unrest in the world tonight than there was last night—perhaps less, now that the people have some new hope of order being recovered out of the confusion.”

  “But you just carried on with the experiment,” said Casorati, as though he was almost unable to conceive of it.

  “The experiment was important,” said Ulicon. “More important, perhaps, than what was happening out there.”

  “It won’t work,” said Ravelvent. “The new program is as helpless as the old in dealing with the one thing which really matters—the fact that the people are desperately afraid of a recurrence of the mental invasion.”

  “There will be no recurrence,” said Ulicon.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the i-minus project is finished. The i-minus agent which, we have reason to believe, enabled the event to take place and—perhaps more important—helped render people vulnerable to the event when it did. The cessation of the project will minimize the effect of the telepathic input, and may even stop it altogether.”