The Face of Heaven

by Brian Stableford

  Chapter 62

  Simkin Cinner was not an important man by anyone’s standards. The actions which he performed were on the whole quite irrelevant to the main current of life in the Overworld. But he was an individual, and not a representative of a particular type, and as an individual he had his own unique role to play in the scheme of things. He was a killer.

  Despite the fact that he was a passionately patriotic Euchronian and fanatically loyal to the people of Euchronia’s Millennium, Simkin Cinner was not a nice man. He was neither stupid nor ignorant, but ideas tended to come into his head from all kinds of peculiar angles, there to be associated into a loose webwork of opinions and motives which had no real relevance to his fanatical faith although they enjoyed its full motive power. He was self-deluded, it is true, but not because he was an idiot. Merely because he was superficial.

  Cinner lived half in and half out of Millennial society. He spent a great deal of his time in the so-called Sanctuaries—the areas specifically designated as outside the organized society of the Overworld. The purpose of the Sanctuaries was to allow any citizen the ultimate freedom to opt right out. They also existed in order to give the Euchronians somewhere to put their criminals. The Sanctuaries were supplied, to some extent, with the raw materials of life by Euchronian Society—a gesture of goodwill and humanity.

  Cinner, of course, had no need of Sanctuary as a retreat from society or a refuge from it, and he was not a criminal. He went into Sanctuary in order that he might appreciate Euchronia even more. He also went in to kill people. (Sometimes, it was expedient to have people removed altogether from the possibility of contact with society. Crime, in theory, was not punished, save by expulsion from society, but occasionally it was deemed convenient to follow up on that sentence. There were, of course, no laws applicable to Sanctuary. Freedom was freedom. Freedom to kill, freedom to be exterminated.)

  Cinner liked violence, for its own sake, but he would never have dreamed of using violence against the Euchronian civilization. On the other hand, he hated to see the Euchronian civilization insulted or threatened in any way. That made him feel very bad. Full of violent feelings.

  Usually someone told Cinner whom to kill. They gave him no direct orders, nor did they have to bribe him. It was sufficient just to indicate that it would be desirable if certain persons did not have the opportunity to “break out” of Sanctuary. The suggestions always came from people he admired and trusted.

  Eventually, however, it was inevitable that Cinner would make a judgment of his own, and would discover his own reasons why a certain person should be removed from a society whose bountiful generosity he patently did not deserve. And it was inevitable, also, that the boundaries of Sanctuary would come to mean less to Cinner as time went by. Sanctuary, after all, is only a state of mind....

  Chapter 63

  Abram Ravelvent drove along the westbound highway. It was night, and there were very few cars on the road. He could make a good one-seventy in perfect comfort and safety.

  “It isn’t far,” he said to his passengers (without taking his eyes off the road). “At this rate we’ll be there in a matter of minutes. There’s definitely a way down. One of a good many, I should think. I found it for Harkanter and his people, but I don’t think they’re going down until after the weekend. They’re still getting together. I’m not actually sure what the thing is for, but the platform wasn’t built in a day, and it wasn’t turned into the Garden of Eden in a day either. There must have been quite adequate provision made for the transport of material from the lower world on a grand scale. I think this is only a door. There are probably much more impressive outlets. Many of the machines are built from the ground up, of course, and we still take quite a lot from the surface—or below the surface, I suppose, would probably be more exact.”

  Carl Magner made no reply. He was in the back seat, leaning back into the soft plastic, staring out through the window into the night, watching the blazing lights which whipped past the car so swiftly that their light became a continuous streak in the sky. He was hardly listening to Ravelvent. Ravelvent was no longer important.

  He was going down into the Underworld.

  Why? he wondered. Do I even know why? Is there a real reason? Is there any real purpose to be served?

  He had no idea what he was going to do when he got down to the door which separated the worlds. Unlock it, if he could. Throw it wide open. And then? And...then?

  Magner knew that the descent into the Underworld had become something of a meaningless ritual. He wanted to know the truth, but he knew—in his heart—that it wasn’t the truth which mattered. Not to him. Ravelvent cared about the truth, and to Ravelvent the truth was important. But Ravelvent wouldn’t go down into the Underworld. He couldn’t. He was a coward, and he just couldn’t face the idea. Ravelvent was scared of the Underworld and what it might contain. Perhaps that was why the truth was important...to him.

  What can a look into the Underworld tell me? Magner asked himself. I have seen the Underworld a thousand times, I know it intimately—far more intimately than any glimpse from a tiny door in the wall of a machine complex. I know its life and its ways. I know it all. So why the door? Why, all of a sudden, do I have to go in search of the door? Never before, never in all the years...not even when Ryan didn’t come back....

  I can only lose, Magner told himself. I can only prove myself a liar. But can even that be said to be meaningful? What does it mean if I am wrong? Is there any meaning in it anymore? Haven’t Yvon Emerich and Clea Aron and all their hungry audience proved my dreams, my hopes, my fears and my determination to be empty? All empty? Is there anything between the world above and the world below except a wall of ignorance and blindness? Can there ever be anything else? The Overworld exists because it rises above the dirt and the decay of the Underworld. The Underworld exists because the Overworld is above it. Is there anything more?

  He could see some stars out of the car window, very faint because of the glare of the lights alongside the road. They were faint, silver points of light. They gave the impression of vast distance. Through the windows of the car, a glimpse of infinity. Beneath the spinning wheels, beneath the thin veneer that was a road and a world, a vision of Hell. In between, Magner. Alone.

  For a moment, Carl Magner wondered what he had been doing, for the past weeks and months and years. But when he shut his eyes, he knew. The very threat of sleep was enough. He had thought his dreams a revelation. He had thought himself...he had to admit it now...privileged, granted a mission. He had seen himself as a kind of Messiah. Perhaps even more than that...perhaps a God. Hadn’t his own sons, Ryan and Joth, gone into the Underworld in answer to his call? Christs, both of them. He had fallen prey to all kinds of vanity when he woke from his dreams. All kinds of blasphemy. He knew that now. He could see that clearly.

  His dreams...even if they were true...especially if they were true...had been a kind of temptation, a temptation with a curse, a curse that had carried him to defeat, humiliation, and now to...what?

  “You know,” said Ravelvent, breaking up the silence with determined verbosity, “it’s very strange. There must be so many ways into the Underworld. All I had to do was look, and they were there. So many. And yet no man of the Underworld has ever ventured up to the world above. Now why would that be? Why has there been no voyage of discovery? Why no invasion? Why no theft? Why have they never come to look at the sun which we took away from them?”

  Magner had no answers. It was Julea who spoke.

  “It isn’t strange,” she said. “They wouldn’t touch the machines. They wouldn’t trust them. They wouldn’t come near them.”

  “That’s possible,” said Ravelvent. “There are so many possibilities, with so many different implications. You know....”

  He carried on talking. He felt obliged to talk, to mask his own confusion and faint trepidation. He felt that there might be some sort of pressure on him—the pressure of conscience—to go down the staircase with Magner.
He knew that he wasn’t going to do that. He felt slight guilt about it. He knew that Julea wouldn’t go down—wouldn’t even think of going down—and that he wouldn’t be left alone no matter what. But he could envisage the long wait, the hours ticking by, the matter of deciding. Magner wouldn’t come back. He was sure of that much. So what could he do? How long should he wait with Julea? Would Julea think that he ought to go down after her father, to search for him?

  Julea didn’t listen to him. She didn’t need to. She knew that Ravelvent wasn’t saying anything she wanted to hear.

  She still hadn’t told anyone except the Eupsychian about the name Ryan had given into her safekeeping, and which she had given to Joth. She didn’t know whether this was right. It was obviously a secret, because nobody knew it. But whose secret? And why? And what did it mean? It was a deadly secret. It had killed Ryan, and Joth, and perhaps it would kill Warnet. One by one, it was subtracting everyone she knew from the fabric of her life. Her father was about to subtract himself. Who was left? What was the remainder? What was the answer?

  All minus. All dead.

  Ravelvent had called their destination a plexus. A nerve center. A vast lattice of nervous metal fiber. A reservoir of functional control for the cybernet. Gleaming threads of neuronal wire. Cytoarchitecture in pressed steel. Synapses in etched microcircuits. Metal-veined glass. Mile on mile of coiled plastic. A tangled knot of metal microorganism. A tiny fraction of the living leviathan corpse that was the cybernet: the Atlas which held the Overworld on its shoulders.

  Ravelvent would send her father down into that. As if he were a bacterium oozing deep into the carcase of a sick body. Down and down and down, into the metal mental wilderness, into the deepest recesses of the Overworld’s subconsciousness: Euchronia’s id.

  She alone understood (and only vaguely, in an instant of vision) the Odyssey which her father was about to undertake. She alone could see where he was going. Ravelvent and Magner were both sidetracked into why.

  “I find it so difficult to understand,” Ravelvent was saying, “why the failure to come to terms with a world which is only just below one’s feet and is so total. I’m a loyal and convinced Euchronian, you know that. I don’t believe for a minute that a society like ours is sterile. It’s free, it’s full of life. It’s active, it’s progressive. We haven’t lost the dynamism of the Euchronian Plan, not by any means.

  “But I could almost believe that there’s some kind of narcotic aspect to the way we live. I could almost believe that there’s something forcing our eyes away from certain directions. I believe, of course, that we must all look to the future, but I think there’s a danger of becoming slightly obsessive, that we may become blind, in some way, to our present and the true extent that it has. I mean, when all said and done, we can’t actually get away from the Underworld....”

  He paused for a breath, waited for an echo of approval, a suggestion of an answer, a murmur of life.

  There was utter silence.

  Chapter 64

  Cinner followed Ravelvent’s car quite openly. He was not afraid that the other driver might realize he was being followed. Nobody would. There was no need to conceal a car on a road. Ravelvent would not even notice that there was another car behind him, and that it was always the same car at the same distance. Suspicious minds were extinct in the Overworld.

  The blood was warm—an alcoholic warmness—as it drained through Cinner’s heart. He felt warm throughout. His heart did not pound. He was not excited, not jittery. Just pleasantly anticipating. He was perfectly assured. He was balancing himself delicately.

  Chapter 65

  Ravelvent pulled his car to a stop, and hesitated. His heart was thumping hard, there was a tightness in his throat. He opened the door, suddenly feeling constrained, and breathed in the cool night air.

  The plexus was set back from the road, nestling between two shallow slopes. It looked very clean.

  Julea got out of the near side rear door. Magner came out after her rather than getting out his own side. There was another car coming.

  Ravelvent saw the other car when he turned to speak to his friends. Carl Magner and Julea were side by side, Julea was shutting the car door. He could see the other vehicle between their shoulders. It was dawdling, still slowing down. Ravelvent thought that it was going to stop.

  For a moment Ravelvent wondered how he was going to explain what it was that the three of them were doing out here. What am I going to say? he asked himself.

  Then Cinner leaned out of the window of the passing car, straightened his arm and shot Carl Magner in the back.

  Chapter 66

  The trek through the wilderness seemed endless, but Nita would not let them rest.

  There was no road, no suggestion of a trail. They had cleared the cultivated fields in less than a mile, and once past the land which was under human governance they were in country which was totally wild. They had to fight their way through knee-high vegetation, wade through stagnant swamp, and scramble up, down and across rocky slopes.

  Always the stars shone upon their efforts with absolute steadiness.

  Their way was made easier by the fact that they had nothing to carry. Joth and Huldi possessed nothing save for the ragged clothes in which they stood, and Nita had brought nothing with her except a small all-purpose knife. She knew well enough how to live off the land. She had not even burdened herself with the map from the long house. That was committed to her memory.

  Nita moved faster than either of her charges, and seemed never to tire. Huldi, of course, proved much more enduring than Joth. Thus it was Joth who determined the pace. It was for his benefit that they rested periodically.

  “What will happen at the village?” asked Joth, while they rested.

  “Most of the men will be killed,” said Nita. “They will not keep off the Ahrima for long. A few will run away. The Ahrima will burn the houses, but they will not stay. They will be angry because the women and children have all gone. The Ahrima prefer to take slaves if they stay for a time in any one place. They will take what they can from Stalhelm, and then go. The work will be all undone, but it can be done again. When the Ahrima are gone, people will begin to come back. The land will still be there.”

  “What will the Ahrima do?” said Joth.

  “Attack. Perhaps Lehr, perhaps Opilion. The Shaira cannot run away from every town. Somewhere they will have to stand. The Ahrima might run through Shairn without taking a town and slaves, but it is more likely that they will capture some good land, use slaves to strip it, and stay until the Shaira have mustered an army large enough to force them out. Then they might run, or they might try to get behind the army, to prey upon the villages whose warriors have been taken away.”

  “Either way,” said Joth, “the country will be desolated. Destroyed.”

  The girl shrugged. “Hurt. No more. Shairn cannot be destroyed. It will always be here.”

  “Will the women and children reach Lehr?” asked Joth.

  Nita shrugged again, apparently caring little either way. “If the fight is long enough, and the road is short enough. If the warriors of Lehr come out to cover their flight. Perhaps. Perhaps not. If the Ahrima catch them they will scatter in Dossal Bog. Many will be killed. Some will not. There are always some who live, some who return. The Ahrima will not be in Shairn forever.”

  “The men who took the mask will die,” said Huldi. “All of them. In time.”

  “Even Ermold?” asked Nita.

  “Even Ermold,” said Huldi. Her voice was flat and self-assured, but Joth could not tell whether she believed it or whether she only wanted to believe it.

  “Ermold could have fought the Ahrima,” said Joth. “The men of Walgo could have warned the Shaira that the horde was on its way. An army might have come to Stalhelm.”

  “Then the Ahrima would have turned back,” said Nita. “They would have taken Walgo, and all its people for slaves.”

  “The women and children could have come to Stalhelm,
as yours went to Lehr.”

  Nita shook her head.

  “They would not,” said Huldi.

  They went on through the empty, derelict world. They ate insects and drank water which tasted filthy. Joth made no complaints, and did as the others did. He no longer payed much attention to what he would once have considered rank foulness of smell and taste, but even so the sickness which had plagued him for a long time in Camlak’s house returned to him, in some measure, in the wilderness. Often, he had to force himself on against the pain and the fever. But it was a battle he was winning, by degrees.

  Joth had lost all notion of time. He had ceased to pay attention to time while he was in the Underworld, and was beginning to acquire the attitude of the people. The three slept when they felt sleep was necessary, and when Nita would permit it.

  For a time they encountered few animals which seemed dangerous. They were menaced by no large predators, and they avoided snakebite and serious parasitism. They were slightly lucky, even in the early stages. But as time and the miles went by, all but unheeded, they penetrated deeper into the heart of the Swithering Waste, and they moved into a world as hostile and deadly as any of the Realms of Tartarus.

  They passed through forests of shiny fungus as hard as wood—mycelia which mimicked trees, fruiting bodies like bushes. The ground was always ridged and slick because the bloated rhizoids and subterranean hyphae lay just beneath the humus. In every crevice there were clusters of small basidiomycetes, usually brightly colored and—so Nita said—poisonous. This multitude of tiny plants filled the air with an inconstant miasma of sporedust, and they all three had to protect their breathing apparatus with masks of cloth. The masks were crude and could not exclude the dust wholly, and all three found their bronchial tubes perpetually choking with phlegm. All three—but particularly Joth—suffered more or less constantly from allergic reactions in their sinuses and other mucous membranes. Nita made them take large doses of an extremely bitter membraneous algoid, which had some antihistamine properties, but it served only to ameliorate the symptoms, not to prevent them.