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

by Brian Stableford

  “What will you do now?” he asked. “Will you stay, or will you leave us to our miserable inheritance? We can’t really protect you.”

  “If you will let me,” said the alien, “I will stay.”

  “Why?”

  “This is my home.”

  Warnet eased forward. “You once told me that you had no secrets. But you do. Perhaps you are not absolutely determined to conceal things from us, but there are things which are concealed, nevertheless. Will you reveal those things, if I ask you?”

  “I will tell you anything I can,” said Sisyr.

  “The trouble is,” said the Eupsychian, “that I’m not quite sure what it is that I want to know. I can only ask you again: why do you stay here on Earth?”

  Sisyr considered the question. Eventually, he said: “You understand, I think, why that is such a difficult question. I do not think as you do. My reasons would not necessarily sound like reasons to you. The way I see reality and the way you see it are not the same. Obviously, you would consider it frivolous if I were simply to say that I have to live somewhere—here, or on another world—and that I am here. You would want to know whether I might not find it more pleasant living with others of my kind. I would not. It is, in fact, necessary that I live apart from others of my own kind. We...meet...occasionally, and that is good. But we cannot stay together. We are, by nature, solitary.”

  “Shall I tell you why I think you are here on Earth?” asked Warnet.

  “It may make things easier,” said the alien. “Or more difficult.”

  Warnet smiled. “I think you are here because Earth is your experiment. I know that for many centuries you have been observing life in the Underworld, and I think that during the same period of time you have been observing the Overworld also. Discreetly, of course, with the help of the machine you helped to create.

  “I think you are—playing Hoh. I think you understand what I mean by that. Perhaps even playing god. I think you came to Earth in the beginning because you were looking for it, and I think you stay because you are still looking. You are waiting for something to happen—something which is important to you by virtue of what you are.”

  “There is truth, of a kind, in what you say,” said Sisyr. “You see me, perhaps, as a lonely wanderer adrift in the universe, searching for some ideal...a holy grail. And perhaps that is what I am. But there is a flaw in that idea, just as there is a flaw in every analogy you might draw. You think, you see, in finite terms. You think of experiments and results, of searches and goals. You know that I am immortal, and you see this planet as a stage in my life, something with a beginning and an end. A game of Hoh reaches a conclusion—inevitably, for that is the kind of game it is. The conclusions may be widely various, but there is always an end-point of some kind. In all your games there is some state which you play toward.

  “All the games that my people play are infinitely extended in time. There is never beginning, and never end, but only change. I am involved in the quality and nature of eternal change, whereas you—an ephemeral being—are concerned with abstractions from that change.

  “You have a concept called infinity, but you are not infinite. Your infinity is a logical artifact. Mine is a reality. You cannot discover an end or a beginning to time—so far as you can imagine, the universe always has existed and always will. But you experience duration as finite. There was a time before you existed, and there will be a time after you are dead. You accept this, but you do not experience it. That is your nature.

  “By virtue of your nature, you cannot comprehend mine. I do not wish to claim that I understand yours—perhaps the way I see you is only a logical artifact. But you must be able to accept the idea that what time is to me is not what time is to you. And because time is different, so is space. And because space is different, so is the very nature of existence.

  “I will offer you another analogy. You are a three-dimensional being. I am a four-dimensional being. What you see of me is only a cross-section through me. You perceive me as an actor in your reality, an actor who can interact meaningfully with you on your terms. But there is more to me than that. I can attempt to simulate your kind of consciousness, and succeed—to some extent. I am not sure whether you can attempt to simulate mine. Perhaps not.

  “You ask me: why am I here? What is your world to me? I can only begin to make an answer.

  “Your scientists have put a great deal of effort into the extension of the human life-span. That research shows results—you might expect to live twice or three times as long as your prehistoric forefathers. Your social philosophers—most especially the Euchronians, but also the Eupsychians, to a lesser extent—have embraced similar aims: they have tried to design and make societies with longer life-spans, for the long-lived people. You have always fought for stability, because in stability you see the antidote to death.

  “But even within your own people, there has always been a dissenting voice—or its echo—which holds that a longer, more stable lifetime is not—and cannot be—any richer in experience than a shorter, less stable one. I do not wish to say that this dissenting voice contains the truth, because your truth is not my truth, and I cannot judge. But consider my viewpoint.

  “I am not merely long-lived, but eternal—if I so choose. I can accept death if I wish, and many of my people do. We are a declining race, ever becoming fewer. You may find an irony in that—the idea of an immortal race dwindling slowly into extinction. But this is so. The reason is stability. Once life becomes stable, it becomes empty—that is what we think and that is what we feel. Those of us who elect to die do so because of an overwhelming feeling that they have exhausted life, that it has nothing more to offer them, and that it is pointless to continue.

  “You think that I came to Earth in search of something. I came in search of instability. But you will, perhaps, be able to understand that instability is not a goal, in the sense that you have goals. In searching for instability, it is not enough to find...one has to keep on finding, forever. The discovery has to be made over and over again, with each new day and each new year. For me and my people, it is not enough that the universe should be infinite in extent, either in time or in space. It must also be infinite in experience—for otherwise, how can we find a purpose in our infinite lives? Perhaps there is no such purpose. Perhaps we are doomed to failure in the search for it. Perhaps, in a million or a million million of your lifetimes, we will all have chosen mortality, and died. But in the meantime...the effort continues.

  “My kind have lived so much longer in the universe than yours that you find it almost inconceivable that we have little more scientific knowledge than you. When your people have lately come to me demanding help, they have taken it for granted that any miracle they could ask, I could perform. It is not so. My kind have no more scientific knowledge now than we had billions of years ago, because we found that science had very little to offer us beyond the tools to move about the universe. Beyond that, we found science an embarrassment. Science, you see, is founded upon the basic assumption that the universe is an ordered and systematic place, whose principles of organization are both rational and comprehensible. But what good was that assumption to us? What we needed was not science, but anti-science. We needed to proceed on the exactly opposite assumption that the universe was not wholly ordered— that there was an element of irrationality. Without that element of irrationality, you see, there could be no ultimate escape from stability.

  “We had to abandon religion as well as science, for the fundamental assumption there is not so very different—it argues rationality but incomprehensibility. The last god which my people worshipped, so very long ago, was an insane god. There seemed to be no other trust that we could place in a god beyond the hope that he was insane. But we find too much rationality to believe in such a deity. Our best hope seems to be the flaw underlying scientific philosophy, a wholly secular belief that beneath the facade of reason and natural law the universe, in the final analysis, does not make sense.
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  “I think that you may be able to see, now, what I am doing on Earth. It is, if you like, my experiment—an attempt to test my belief. But you will notice that it is an experiment that can only fail. If it succeeds, it proves nothing beyond the fact that I can continue.

  “I helped your people to build the Overworld, knowing that it would fail...ultimately. I helped to make the Underworld what it is: a cauldron of evolutionary turmoil, where change is near to its most extreme. I will confess to you now that I contributed to that change by genetic engineering. The Children of the Voice are a collaboration between myself and chance, just as the Overworld is a collaboration between myself and order. In the end, I must believe, chance and change will win. They cannot be defeated. They must win, not only on Earth, but everywhere.

  “Having said that, I must risk your anger. This, you will say, is interference...I have been intruding into the substance of your lives, threatening the very pattern of your existence. You may, perhaps, feel that what I have done—what I am doing—is evil. But I must say this: that I am dealing with factors which belong to a far greater time-scale than the one by which you live your lives. What I have done is negligible, in your terms. Your quest for stability is a purely temporary thing. You can find stability, if that is what you want, within a historical pattern which, from my viewpoint, is eternally chaotic. Because you ask so little, you have every chance of success. Because you are so transient, you have the opportunity to make whatever you want out of your lives: you do not have my limitations.

  “Perhaps you will be unable to understand what it is that I have been trying to achieve here on Earth. I do not know that there is any way I can tell you which will help you to understand, because it is something which has virtually no meaning so far as you are concerned. But I will say it this way: what I have sought to gain from Earth is a glimpse of infinity—some hint of evidence that the universe is not only infinite in size, but infinite in incident. I have tried to find something new, in pursuit of the faith that there is always something new...something beyond. Beyond the shape and form of the universe there has to be shapelessness and formlessness, and there had to be a way to see and to know that chaos here on Earth. That is what the Children of the Voice mean to me: they may give me a glimpse of infinity.

  “Perhaps I should add just one more thing, with reference to that point, and it is this: for you, too, what has happened and is happening may provide a window into new possibilities. Your people, unlike mine, have so many choices, so many opportunities. But here are more, opening up before you.

  “You cannot know how much I envy you.”

  PART 6

  50.

  The road went over the edge of the world. Joth braked, and got out. He went to the brink of the Overworld, and looked down, following the sweep of the highway as it slanted down the metal face in a vast, shallow arc. The face was concave—headlands to north and south carried spurs of the overworld out beyond the expanse of sandy beach, and only dissolved into irregular masses of bare black rock some way out to sea. But the road curved out and looped back on itself, disappearing into a black semicircle cut out of the steel cliff.

  The sun was setting into the sea, its light turning the sea gold and the hazed air pink. The great wall which enclosed the Underworld was fiery with reflected glare. Joth watched the garish display until the sun was gone and the colors began to drown. He knew that the afterglow would last for a long time, and even when he looked back over his shoulder to the eastern horizon, he could see no stars. Nor was there a moon.

  He went back to the car, and drove it over the edge of the world, following the long decline. There were no seabirds—they found the metal cliffs too inhospitable. Seabirds lived almost entirely on uninhabited offshore islands—miniature sanctuaries.

  Gradually, the sky darkened, and he switched on the headlights of the car. Cut into the saline dirt which had been deposited on the road over a great many years he could see the imprints left by Germont’s ill-fated convoy not so very long ago.

  When he reached the bottom, he switched off the lights and got out of the car again. He did not drive into the tunnel. He did not even look at the tunnel, at first, but walked off the causeway on to the sand, and looked out over the sea. The weed and detritus which marked the last high tide was only thirty or forty feet from the edge of the road, and he walked out to stir the stinking wrack with his feet. Tiny crustaceans squirmed in the wet sand he exposed. He looked at them, and wondered which of Earth’s two worlds they belonged to: the old, or the new. Perhaps they, and everything within the ocean, were part of a third world, neither old nor new, neither Under nor Over—an eternal womb of life undisturbed by magnificent Plans and huge steel follies.

  Overhead, the stars began to shine through. The night was cloudless, and they shone in their thousands. Behind him, his footprints, imprinted in the wet sand, gradually filled up with water, and their edges began to crumble. The footmarks lost their shape, and became mere puddles. He walked on a little way, toward the sea, looking for small pools held by the rippled sand and the thin ridges of rock. But the loneliness and the darkness quickly became oppressive, and he turned back.

  From the back of the car he collected a heavy flashlight, and armed with this he directed his attention to the tunnel into the Underworld.

  Curiously, although this was undoubtedly the end-point of the road of stars, there seemed to be no light in the great corridor for the first few hundred yards. Without the beam of the torch, he could see nothing in the tunnel except the merest gleam of distant light. There was nothing that might attract a man—or even an animal—into its depths. From inside, though, the red glow of the setting sun might be clearly visible during certain seasons.

  Joth walked into the tunnel mouth, playing the light of his torch all around and up above. He did not go far. He intended to wait—perhaps sitting in the car—for an hour or two, and then drive away. He would return, at the same time of day, in a few days’ time, and he would continue to return again and again, until something happened, or until he became convinced that nothing ever would. He had chosen evening, and the hours that followed twilight, because he knew that people waiting within would only venture out after the sun was gone.

  But these intentions were not necessary. He did not have to wait, because someone was already there, waiting for him. She came to him cautiously, with her weapon drawn, because she could not see him while he stood behind the light, and she could not be sure that it was him. But she allowed herself to be caught by the beam, so that he could see her.

  Only when he spoke, saying “Huldi!”, did she know for certain who it was.

  He questioned her. She told him all she knew about Iorga and Nita—the encounter with the Cuchumanates...her fall...and her recovery to find herself alone. She had not dared to go into the building in search of the others. She had waited outside until she was sure that they were not coming. She had killed the last of the Cuchumanates with her knife.

  And she had followed the road of stars to its ultimate end.

  Joth led her outside, and showed her the stars in the sky. But she was so frightened by the ocean and the towering metal face, and the illimitable depth of the sky, that she really saw very little. Iorga had seen so much more, and Nita, if only she had lived....

  But the merest glimpse of infinity was, to Huldi, a terrifying thing.

  She would not get into the car, and so they went back into the tunnel, together. He asked her what she would do now, and she could not tell him. She had not thought, but had merely followed the road to its end. He wanted to take her to another part of the world, to deliver her into lands which were lighted by many stars, where people of her own kind lived, but there was no way that he could do that. The only way she would go was back, into the blacklands. He told her to go south rather than following the road east, because his map assured him that there were lighted lands that way, and not too far distant. He gave her the flashlight. Whether she would take his advice, he did n
ot know. She said she would go south, but he did not know whether she was telling the truth.

  Before they parted, they made love—for the second time.

  51.

  The sentence of exile which Heres had passed on Sisyr was confirmed, and he left Earth. He never returned.

  52.

  In time, all Chemec’s prophecies came true.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations

  Asgard’s Conquerors (Asgard #2)

  Asgard’s Heart (Asgard #3)

  Asgard’s Secret (Asgard #1)

  Balance of Power (Daedalus Mission #5)

  The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

  Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

  Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales