The Face of Heaven

by Brian Stableford

  He was probably the only man of his age to have struggled for continued existence over a considerable period of time, and to have taken that struggle as it came, as a matter of course. He was one of very few who had to come to terms with difficult circumstances and physical hardship. Not by choice, but by something akin to necessity.

  When Joth was less than a year old a malfunction in a household cyberunit, possibly assisted by some interference at the hands of the older infant Ryan, caused a panel of the unit to explode in his face. He suffered extreme damage to his eyes and his skin was burned away over a considerable area of his scalp and cheeks. Because of the relative softness and flexibility of his skull-bones, and the fact that his brain had not yet grown to fill the skull cavity, Joth’s frontal lobes suffered relatively little damage. Nevertheless, it seemed an open-and-shut case so far as the euthanasia board was concerned. Infancy counted against him severely in that he had no voice in the decision and he was considered to be below the threshold of social consciousness.

  The strenuous arguments of his father, however, delayed the board in coming to a terminal decision. Carl Magner proved dogged, stubborn and extremely determined. By sheer refusal to entertain any arguments in opposition, and inordinate vehemence in putting forward his own opinion over and over again, he prevented the board from making a ruling. While the board was in session, of course, surgeons worked to keep the child alive and to repair the damage done. In the end, with the aid of a clever lawyer, Carl Magner stalled the board long enough for the situation to have changed so materially that the decision went the other way. The baby was permitted to live.

  For many months Joth was sightless and quiescent, and even Carl Magner must have wondered whether he had done the right thing in forcing the euthanasia board to bring in a negative verdict. There was a certain amount of public criticism of the board and of Magner’s lawyer. Relatively little was said about Magner himself, for whom excuses could obviously be made. But controversy ran high for some time until it was extinguished by the surgeons and a series of educational experts who contrived to prove that the boy was neither physically deficient, nor mentally retarded, nor psychologically aberrant. It was not until Joth was four years old that he finally stilled all arguments as to the rights and wrongs of his specific case by demonstrating his ability to use his artificial eyes effectively, and his brain as well as any child of his own age.

  The experience undoubtedly had an effect on Carl Magner, but that was measurable. The effect which it had on Joth, however, was quite unknowable. He grew up to be an intelligent, adaptable and apparently ordinary member of Euchronian Society—ordinary, that is, except for his rather striking physiognomy. But the Euchronian standards of personality assessment were tailored to Euchronian assumptions and criteria. The differences that existed between Joth and other men went somewhat deeper than that. He was different, and he knew that he was different. He had paid a price for his individual survival that no other man of the Overworld could evaluate, or even imagine.

  Perhaps the accident also made an impression of some kind on Ryan Magner. He was three when the accident happened and only he ever knew whether the explosion was partly his fault or not. But even if not he was at an age to be affected by constant contact with Joth and constant awareness of Joth’s difficulties.

  The accident which led to the death of Joth’s mother had happened some months before the explosion and was totally unconnected with it except insofar as it might have affected Carl Magner’s state of mind relative to the euthanasia board. However, it is significant that the family had to endure misfortune that was quite out of proportion with the ordinary flow of life in the Euchronian Millennium.

  Whether the incidence of Carl Magner’s nightmares had anything to do with the stress placed upon him by either accident or their consequences was not known even to the man himself. It seemed possible, to him and to his doctor.

  The adult Joth owed his existence to endurance in conflict. He, in collaboration with others, had fought for life and health throughout his most impressionable years. In a sense, Joth never laid down his arms in that struggle to survive. More than any other man of the Overworld, including the most devout Eupsychians, he felt self-contained and somehow detached from his environment. He was not really a misfit, because he adapted perfectly well to his circumstances.

  But in different circumstances, the difference between Joth Magner and his contemporaries could, and did, prove crucial.

  Chapter 26

  The close council met in Heres’ house, taking advantage of a chamber which was totally isolated from the cybernet. Nothing of what they said went on to any kind of record.

  They were discussing a secret which, though not theirs alone, was theirs to protect as they saw fit. Heres was determined to keep the secret. Eliot Rypeck wanted to reveal it to the world. It was a difficult decision, considering that the close council had no theoretical executive power. Theoretically, the close council had no right to exist.

  “You’re firmly convinced,” Rypeck asked Ulicon, “that the origin of Magner’s data is his dreams?”

  “That’s not possible,” said Clea Aron. Heres gestured with his hand to keep her quiet.

  “I am,” said Ulicon.

  “And are the dreams accurate?” Rypeck followed up.

  “We don’t know. We have no up-to-date information. Offhand, I couldn’t tell you how to get into the Underworld, though I don’t imagine it’s difficult. We must send someone to find out, if we can find anyone willing to go. This is something we need to know.”

  “I’m not so sure that the truth or otherwise of Magner’s visions is a point at issue,” said Heres. “It’s the visions themselves that we ought to be concerned with. One thing we do know is that this man has complained of bad dreams over a very long period of time. What we want to know first and foremost is why. Is he immune to the i-minus agent?”

  “How do you suggest we test him?” said Ulicon.

  “Did you get anything from the doctor?” countered Heres. Ulicon shrugged and shook his head.

  “Wait a moment,” said Rypeck. “Isn’t it more likely that we’ll get useful information from Magner himself? We could ask him instead of conspiring to get information by all sorts of devious means.”

  “We can’t do that,” contributed Acheron Spiro. “Magner’s book is a strong attack on the Movement itself. He has set himself up in extreme opposition to us. We can’t ask him to explain his dreams because we’re worried about them.”

  “Our hands are tied somewhat in the matter of making inquiries,” said Heres. “We can’t tell people what we want without letting out the secret we’re trying to safeguard with the answers. We have to get the answers without exposing the fact that we’re interested.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Rypeck. “Surely it’s clear by now that the i-minus effect is totally and utterly failing to counter the unrest in society. The agent doesn’t work—we already know that, or we should. It’s time to stop playing games with it and bring it out into the open. If Magner is immune, then maybe others are too, and we have a possible explanation of why the agent hasn’t had the effect we’ve been hoping for. But think of the possibilities which are opened up if Magner isn’t immune, if the i-minus agent is working perfectly. In that case we might have something entirely new to deal with, and something vitally important. If Magner is mad, we must know why he is mad. I don’t think we can afford to play this down, to pussyfoot around it, to hesitate and argue and finally fail to reach any meaningful decision. This could be something we ought to know about now—something we ought to have known about years ago. And we have to find out.”

  “Not at the cost of the i-minus plan,” said Heres. “You say that things are going badly for us despite i-minus, and I agree with you. But I think that i-minus is all that’s standing between us and total breakup. Eleven thousand years have gone into the building of this world and eleven thousand years of responsibility rests on our shoulders.”

>   “That’s just my point,” interposed Rypeck. “It shouldn’t rest on our shoulders.”

  “But it does,” said Heres. “Like it or not, we have charge of the i-minus project as it was handed down to us through thousands of years of closed council. To make the project public is to go half way to destroying it. We simply do not have the right to betray the Movement in this way, without full knowledge of what we are doing.”

  “I say that we are betraying the Movement by keeping the secret,” said Rypeck. “The whole concept of a close council is alien to the principles of the Movement, and it’s patently ridiculous that six members of the Hegemony, including the Hegemon, should participate in one.”

  “But nevertheless, a council exists,” said Heres, “and we are that council. We cannot dismiss lightly a decision which was taken so long ago and which has served the movement so well for so long. The i-minus effect has worked—it worked for generations. Without i-minus, the Euchronian Millennium might not exist. If we cannot cope with the responsibility that we have to deal personally with i-minus then we run the risk of destroying Euchronia.”

  “All this is a rather haggard argument,” said Ulicon. “The question is what we do about Magner. It may turn out that we have to reveal or even abandon i-minus. But let’s fight about that when we come to it. And we can’t come to it unless we first make every effort to deal with this matter as it lies. We have to make an effort to come to terms with the situation and get ourselves into a position to end it. We want to know three things: Is the i-minus effect still working? Is it working on Magner? Is the input into Magner’s dreams an accurate statement of reality? The first is relatively easy to answer, but will take too long. The second is more difficult. If, however, we assume that the answers to the first two questions are both ‘yes’ then the third becomes absolutely vital. If the first two answers are ‘no’ then the answer to the third must surely also be ‘no.’ Doesn’t it make sense to mount an expedition to the Underworld at the earliest possible opportunity?”

  “I think there’s more to consider than that,” said Clea Aron. “We shouldn’t be obsessed with the i-minus aspect of this affair. It has other implications as well. We mustn’t overlook the direct challenge to Euchronia because we’re aware of certain deeper issues. Magner wants dealing with purely and simply on political grounds. This plan needs squashing.”

  “Hardly,” said Luel Dascon. “Why should we allow ourselves to look foolish by deigning to take it seriously? I’ve talked to Abram Ravelvent about this and he assures me that any men in the Underworld will be little better than savage wild animals by now. Much better to produce our own counterproposal to sterilize the Underworld completely—wipe out all its vermin. If we’re actually going to send an expedition down there we’ll need some sort of reason.”

  “It would be foolish to take up any such definite stand,” said Heres. “I think the opposite angle would be better. Officially, we don’t believe a word of what Magner says, but out of the kindness of our hearts we’ll send someone down to have a look. We can pretend to have a certain sympathy with him while assuring the world that it’s all a fuss over nothing.”

  “I think Magner could be troublesome,” Dascon persisted. “We shouldn’t offer him any kind of encouragement.”

  “Nobody will encourage him,” said Heres. “We’ll just use him as an excuse to mount our explorations—all of our explorations. Luel—you’d better take charge of mounting the expedition. Enzo—keep following up the medical aspect. Find out all you can about Magner’s dreams and i-minus effects. Clea—you can handle the media. Acheron and I will handle the Hegemony and the political aspects of the argument. Eliot, you’d better find out what you can about the Underworld from the cybernet. Luel’s team will need information as well as equipment.”

  “You do realize,” said Ulicon, “that if there is something in the Underworld transmitting ideas into Magner’s head, then we might have to face the fact that Earth has two worlds and not one.”

  There was a brief period of silence.

  “I just want to make it clear,” Ulicon carried on, “that the implications of Magner’s book go a long way beyond our perennial squabbling over the crime rate and the i-minus problem. After eleven thousand years, we may have to confront the fact that the old world didn’t die after all, and that something down there might actually pose a threat to us. I say this now because I don’t think there’s a single one of you has really absorbed this idea, and I think we ought to get used to it. The Underworld is still there. Remember that.”

  Chapter 27

  Later, Heres ran the whole argument back through his mind, looking for an answer. The important thing, of course, was not to let any part of it get out of hand. Rypeck could be handled—Rypeck had been handled for years. The man lacked a positive side to his character. Argument would never convince him, but it would not be necessary to keep him from acting. Rypeck was not the type to act.

  Ulicon, on the other hand, was more difficult to assess. He too was a man who would appeal to the group for justification rather than take any kind of independent initiative, but he would make his appeal on a rather different level. Rypeck dealt in dilute arguments. Ulicon seemed to be dealing in not-so-dilute scare stories.

  Any kind of a scare had to be avoided at all costs. That went without saying. But the suggestion of a scare was not necessarily a bad thing. A threat to all helped to unite the group, provided that it could be dealt with in the right way, by the right man. When it came down to it, Rypeck and Ulicon could both be given a role to play in Heres’ scheme of things. Ulicon was the man to pose a question, Rypeck to agitate on the basis of the question. Heres, though, was the man to act and answer the question, and by so doing deal with both kinds of opposition. Spiro, Aron and Dascon would thus remain solidly behind him as always, their faith constantly reinforced.

  Since the Millennium had begun, the administration represented by Heres and his predecessors had faced no threat to their power except for the Eupsychians, who were really only a fake threat. Under the current régime Eupsychianism had no chance to spread (so Heres believed) and no chance to topple the Movement even if it did. The real potential threat was the threat of strife within the Movement itself—such strife as would undoubtedly occur if the matter of the close council and its purpose were to be made public. Heres’ first priority was controlling the close council.

  Heres regarded the Magner affair, so far as it had gone, as a regrettable inconvenience of strictly temporary concern. Given time, the man would disappear along with his ridiculous ideas. Once the man was out of sight, he would be easy enough to put out of mind. Another of Eliot Rypeck’s arguments would go stale, and Enzo Ulicon would abandon his worries about the Underworld. The balance would be restored—another victory for stability. Heres believed, absolutely, in stability.

  He also believed quite sincerely in the i-minus effect, which was supposed to control dreams. The fact that Magner was an exception (apparently) to the i-minus rule did not frighten the Hegemon—he believed that every stable situation has room for a handful of misfits, and that stability is enhanced rather than threatened by the visible presence of such wayward factors. Heres, in fact, was quite willing to remain in blissful ignorance of how Carl Magner was beating the system in this respect.

  Somewhere behind all these attitudes lies the true key to Heres’ character. One might describe him as “megaloid”—inferring that he was power-oriented without necessarily being mentally aberrant. In Heres one can definitely see a man who would seek fulfillment through control, control of both environment and situation. This is not to say, however, that Heres had Eupsychian tendencies—quite the reverse. His ideas of control involved a scale of consideration not permitted by a Eupsychian philosophy. He was a lover of pattern and balance, and his efforts were directed to the overall maintenance of pattern rather than to the grasp of personal power of determination.

  As Hegemon of the Euchronian Movement and one of the close council
Heres sat at the apex of a vast pyramid of executive responsibility. He was not really the most powerful man in the world, and his influence over the vast arena of social action was in many ways the most indirect. But he was the fulcrum of the system. His movements might not cause the biggest ripples, but his ministrations served to damp down most big ripples before they had a chance to grow.

  Heres was a vain man—any man with such a degree of self-confidence is necessarily a victim of vanity. But this is one of the so-called “qualities of leadership.” Any Hegemon is essentially a vain man. Heres was also an intelligent man, but it might be argued that he was too intelligent—that his intelligence was so massive as to prove unwieldy when brought to bear on specific problems. Heres’ mind was a mind perennially locked in high gear. Whereas most men despair of the practicality of thinking of two things at once, Heres found difficulty in restraining himself to one. Heres’ intelligence lacked small-scale utility. He would throw himself wholeheartedly into the most complex matter and come up with the solution of dazzling brilliance. But only the most complex matters. Where smaller things were concerned, he was a fumbler. Like a physical giant who cannot help knocking things over, Heres was a mental giant who was also mentally clumsy.

  He was also a dedicated master of the game of Hoh. Hoh, played by novices, can be a competitive affair. Played by experts its competitive aspects are buried in a bewildering range of possibilities. The ideal game of Hoh from the viewpoint of the connoisseur—and far and away the most difficult to play—is the game where all the players win. In this kind of game all the players must play with one another as well as against one another, and must unite against the random factors in the game. (When a Eupsychian plays Hoh he almost always tries to end up the sole winner of the game. Such strategies, while perfectly valid under the rules, are frowned upon as simple-minded and contrary to the real spirit of the game by virtually all purists and experts.)