The strangers walked all the way to the earthwall as if they expected the gates to be opened before them and the people of the village to come out crying welcome. But the gates remained firm, and half a hundred arrows were already notched to bowstring. The warriors of Stalhelm waited, but they were anxious, and when the smell took over their nostrils they would be keen to kill. The aliens had no chance at all of life. If they had not worn masks....
Yami, brave Yami, testing his own patience and his own courage, because he was full of confidence, let them come to the very threshold of his village.
It was a fine and beautiful gate that opened the way into Stalhelm, sown with the bones of a hundred and fifty men, with every skull set in the wall on the grand curve. Every skull was an honest one—or no man would admit otherwise, if it were not so. (In Walgo, so Chemec and every man in the village firmly believed, they sowed their gate with the bones of their own dead. Even their women. But the men of Walgo had no Souls, by definition, and so—to them—it probably did not matter.)
The strangers muttered among themselves as they stood before the skull-gate. Chemec was astonished to hear that they spoke his own language. Real Ingling. He could understand every word they said.
How, he wondered, could aliens know the language of the Underworld? Even the men of the Underworld could not all speak Ingling—not good Ingling, at any rate. The Cuchumanates, for instance, had only a few words, and the harrowhounds had some foul barking-language that was exclusively their own (or so it was said).
Chemec moved closer to the strangers, confident by now that they were practically deaf and without the sense of smell, and they would not know that he was right behind them unless they turned round. They did not turn, but they did stop talking before he had caught the real thread of what they were saying. The great gate of Stalhelm was opening, just a crack.
Chemec had not expected it. He stopped dead, and waited.
Old Man Yami...brave Yami...came out. Only Camlak, hardly more than a boy, was with him. Yami felt the need to stand a test. Perhaps it was wise, bearing in mind the rumors about Ermold’s bloodthirst. It did seem that much time had gone into memory since the last Communion of Souls. Yami was preparing in advance for the inevitable challenges. He was dressed in his Oracle clothes, and he was emptyhanded. (But his boy-son Camlak carried a long steel knife. Heaven-sent tool to carve Heaven-come meat.)
A row of faces gradually filled itself in along the earth-wall, fleshed faces mingling with the ice-white skulls. A few children climbed bodily on to the stockade, greedy for the sight and smell of some Heavenly blood. It was probably the only chance they would ever get.
Yami sat on the ground, and indicated that Camlak should sit beside him. Camlak, who was studying the art of leadership in preparation for the day when he would try to take the Old Man’s place, took up his assigned position with alacrity, showing no fear whatsoever.
The bone-woven gate oozed shut behind them.
Chemec crouched, eager to see with what kind of mockery the Old Man was going to taunt the strangers before they were slaughtered.
The strangers squatted in a semicircle, waiting for Yami to speak.
“We have come here from the world above,” said one of the strangers, pointing, first at himself and then at the sky, as if he thought that Yami was a fool.
“I know that,” said Yami calmly.
“My name is Ryan Magner,” said the stranger.
“And what have you brought to give us?” demanded Yami.
“We have come to talk to you,” said Ryan. “We want to learn about you.”
Yami laughed, sharply at first, and then authoritatively, until the warriors on the wall, and the women behind it, and the children swarming everywhere all took up the note and screamed their derision.
The laughter went on for a long time.
Chapter 4
In his dreams Carl Magner was drowning. He was dying, and he knew it. The pressure of....
The pressure was intolerable.
Waking, Carl Magner preserved his fear. He was really afraid. Afraid in reality. Something was very wrong.
He knew the secrets of Hell. He did not know that the stars stood still in the sky beneath his feet in the same way that he knew the stars above his head were distant suns, but nevertheless....
The consequences of the knowledge were by no means equivalent. He knew about the excrement and the hothouse effect and the radioactive waste and the wrecked world of prehistory. One way or another, he knew. Such knowledge was not censored from the learning of the citizens of Euchronia’s Millennium, but only from the myths. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was complete and plucked clean out of the closets of his mind. He had drawn some inspiration and a vestige of understanding from a study of Blake, but in the end his need to misread and misinterpret the original and twist it to his own purposes had proved unconquerable. He believed in his own fourfold vision, not in Blake’s.
Carl Magner was still afraid.
The pressure was forcing him to....
Chapter 5
At the end of the second dark age, when the coldness of imminent exterminability became just a little too much to bear, and the clothes of madness too thin to wear (the second dark age is also known as the age of psychosis) it became clear that the world was irrevocably lost. The surface of the Earth was ruined.
The Euchronian Movement became the only significant form of protest against the extinction of knowledge, culture, civilization and other things which human beings might then have called humanity. The Movement specialized in cold equations—for years it had been quoting cold equations as recruitment propaganda and protest against the continuing furious spoilage of the world. In the end, the cold equations became simultaneous, and combined into a single absolute equation. The world was dying. A new world would have to be built. The Movement put in hand plans to construct a shell which would enclose the entire land surface of the Earth: a gigantic platform upon which a new civilization could be built from first principles.
The idea was ludicrous. The equation, however, was capable of only the one solution. In addition, the idea of starting afresh was both exciting and attractive. Most telling of all, it came to represent hope. The Movement adopted a political attitude of casual optimism and continued to play its figures icy cool. It might take a million years. But things might get easier as time went by. Perhaps five hundred thousand would suffice.
The Plan (The Euchronian Plan) got under way. Earth and Earth’s humanity did not possess the technology required to raise the platform, nor could they imagine where they were going to get the necessary power. But they began work anyhow.
Even as a gesture, the project was a worthwhile endeavor, and even as a failure it would be quite some gesture. There was no shortage of manpower placed at the disposal of the Planners. The operation began at a thousand points all over the globe. The Movement gobbled up governments and nations, and took over a dispirited world by bloodless revolution. The whole human race, insofar as it was organized, became Euchronia. The rebels were neither expelled nor hated, but merely ignored, as though they had forfeited their humanity.
Work went on, calmly, implacably. Progress was made. And the end remained quite patently impossible. It was not so much that the project was beyond all human ambition and ability, merely that time was so completely set against them. They had not the time to learn because they had not the time to live. The world could not support their effort. The exhausted world simply could not meet its deadlines.
Sisyr’s starship arrived on Earth during the first century of the Plan. It was pure coincidence. Reason (cold equations) said that a technology which could build starships could also build a new world, and so Euchronia asked Sisyr for help. He considered the problem in all its aspects and finally declared that the job could be done and that he would take the responsibility on a contractual basis.
He sent a message back to his own people asking for supplies and for technical assistance. The message t
ook decades to cross the interstellar gulf, the supplies and assistance took centuries. In the meantime, Sisyr and several generations of Euchronians collaborated in revising the Plan, educating the labor force and discovering new potentials in the wasted lands of Earth. There might, at this point, have been a hypothetical choice between building the new world and reclaiming the old. If so, the commitment of the human race to Euchronia was such that no choice ever became obvious.
Sisyr and a small army of helpers of his own kind supervised the construction of the platform over the next few thousand years. By the time it had grown to cover the Earth’s land surface, most of the aliens had gone back to the distant stars.
Sisyr remained to coordinate the rebuilding of a viable civilization on that surface. He assisted in the modeling of the Earth’s new surface, he collaborated on the scheme of land management, and he provided designs for the entire pattern of the maintenance of life. The social system itself was designed by the Movement, but it was designed to fit the world and the environment which had been built largely to Sisyr’s specifications.
In return for his services, Sisyr was allowed to make his home on the remade Earth. He remained isolated from the Euchronian community, but pledged to keep its laws. He built himself a palace and retired. Some eight or nine hundred years before the Euchronian Plan, in its final form, came to fruition Sisyr had ceased to take any active part in it. Starships called at Earth three or four times each century, but they called on Sisyr, not the people of Earth. The people of Earth had nothing at all to do with starships once all the necessary aid from the star-worlds had been delivered.
Sisyr’s contribution to the Plan resulted in its successful completion in a little over eleven thousand years—a short time, comparatively speaking. The Euchronians, of course, claimed the triumph as their own—as, indeed, it was. Theirs had been the vision, theirs the labor, theirs the will. Sisyr had only lent them time which they needed badly.
Sisyr, like the Underworld the Euchronians had left behind, remained known to every citizen. But only as a fact, and an irrelevant fact at that. He had no part in the mythology of the New World.
The Euchronian Millennium was finally declared, and the people became free of their total obligation to the Plan. They were released, to enjoy its fruits, to make what they would of their new life. The Movement did not claim that the society it had designed was Utopian, but it did claim that it had Utopian potential. All that was needed to make perfection was the will of the people. The society was designed to be stable, but not sterile. Euchronia’s stability was dynamic stability. Neither perfect happiness nor perfect freedom was immediately on tap, but Euchronia did what it could, and waited—with casual optimism—for the reheated equations of life and death to work themselves out.
The completion of the Plan had demanded—indeed, the whole philosophy of Euchronia had demanded—that while the Plan was incomplete the people should remain single-minded, working together to the same end. The Movement had helped single-mindedness along somewhat, by devious means which seemed to have excellent results. When the Millennium began, the hegemony of the Movement retained those same devious means in order to assist society in its first, difficult years of freedom and readjustment.
The single most remarkable fact about Euchronia’s Millennium, about Euchronia itself and its leaders in particular, was the apparent blindness—willful blindness—exhibited with respect to the wider contexts of existence. They lived in a thin stratum, paying no heed whatsoever to the realms of Tartarus below, nor to the infinite universe above. But they lived in the early years of the Millennium in the heritage of eleven thousand years of narrow-mindedness, in which the only fragment of existence which mattered was that thin stratum. It took time for them even to begin to realize that such tight boundaries could not contain them.
Chapter 6
The strangers tried to communicate with the Old Man, but he was not interested in communication. He was not interested in their questions or in their reasons. He was interested primarily in showmanship. The aliens were merely the means to his end.
He exposed himself to them, and they did not kill him. He laughed at them, and they were patently hurt by his laughter. Then he made silence fall, and he began to put his patience on show, knowing that the silent waiting would ultimately hurt the invaders as much as the laughter.
Chemec knew that when the silence had stretched far enough, Yami would have the aliens killed. There was no possible question about that. Chemec saw no other way. Nor did the warriors at the wall. There were some inside who did see things another way, who might have wished that the demands upon Yami were not as they were. The readers, undoubtedly, saw the advantages implicit in making friends with the men from Heaven. They would have wished to do just that. But they knew as well as Yami did that life was simply not like that. There were ways of doing things which had been well tried.
Outside the gate the boy Camlak probably had more sympathy with the readers’ point of view than he had with his father’s. He was studying statecraft carefully, but he was still at the stage when he thought that the Old Man was obeyed because it was simply right that others should obey him. He had no conception of the delicate matters of deciding fitness to rule and make decisions. Decisions came hard to Camlak because his judgment was always crowded with motives and reasons and possibilities. His head would have to be clear of all that before he was allowed to take Yami’s place.
The silence which Yami had made grew old, and finally died.
“I am Yami,” said the Old Man. They were the only words he spoke. He knew the value of words and the majesty of simplicity.
The strangers had grown visibly uneasy once their initial attempts to kill the silence had faded away into muttering confusion and final bewilderment. When Yami spoke, they relaxed as if some wonderful thing had happened. They smiled beneath their macabre masks. One of them reached forward, his hand open as though he wished to take hold of Yami. The Old Man remained still, and stared the hand away as though he were outfacing a snake.
The alien withdrew his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.
The great gate opened again behind the sitting men. Evidently Yami had been playing a prepared part. The end had been decided before he had stepped out of the gate. The strangers sat, quietly and comfortably, seemingly content, while the young woman Myddal fetched bowls of warm liquid, one by one, and placed one in front of each of the aliens. Eventually, she gave the last bowl to Yami. It obviously contained something different because it was not steaming. The strangers saw this, and even though their minds were crippled they evidently suspected something. But the one who had called himself Ryan Magner sipped from his own bowl and signaled with his hand. The others did the same.
Yami drained his bowl, and watched while his victims did the same. Then he laughed again—not loudly, this time, nor insistently. No one joined in. It was the laugh of a private moment—a gesture of personal satisfaction. The laugh was low, and it bubbled over the Old Man’s tongue.
“It’s poison, Ryan,” said one of the strangers, bitterly. Three of them—all except the leader—knew then that they had been murdered. The leader would not admit it, though he must have felt it to be true, by now.
“You bastards,” said one of the men, as they all struggled to rise. Only one actually managed to make it to his feet.
As the man stood tall, Chemec raised himself to the full extent of his three feet ten inches and reached up to kill the man. He was careful to smash the spine below the atlas vertebra, so as to preserve the skull unblemished.
Chapter 7
Burstone dragged the heavy suitcase along the catwalk to the head of the ladder which descended into the depths of the pit. The steady throb of the great machine filled his ears and blotted out the soft footfalls of the man who was following him.
When he reached the ladder Burstone secured the case to a chain which dangled from a wide axle. He pushed it clear of the catwalk and began to wind the handle on the axle, p
aying out the chain. The lamps which were arrayed in a long line beside the ladder (for the benefit of the maintenance men who occasionally had to attend the machine) were dim and yellow, and the suitcase soon became a blur in the half-light.
Joth paused to wait for Burstone to finish lowering the case. He was perhaps forty or fifty yards away, and he held himself flat against the body of the machine. He was not quite invisible, but Burstone showed no inclination to look back—he had no reason to think that anyone might follow him down here. Hardly anyone ever came down this low. The machine never went wrong and routine checks were made only twice a year or thereabouts.
Joth was sweating quite heavily. He could feel the heat of the machine through the thin cloth of his shirt, and his own flesh seemed to be very hot, glowing with insistent excitement. He had expected it to be warm down here, but he had not expected anything of the quality of his own reaction. The pressure of his heartbeat sent thin waves of nausea through his body. He could not explain himself.
Burstone was also hot, but he had been through this operation a hundred times before. His reactions to what he was doing and how were qualitatively somewhat different from Joth’s, but it was in the integration of his psyche with the physiological symptoms that the real difference lay. Joth was experiencing a mixture of fear and excitement, and to him it was raw sensation. Burstone’s mixture of feeling was rather more complex, and he was savoring the delicate blend and balance. To him, this was good. This was the fulfilment of a real purpose.
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