A Vision of Hell: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Two

by Brian Stableford

  “No, Acheron. It’s necessary. It’s vital. The Millennium, as we have called it, is a failure. It’s a setback to the Plan. We must reinterpret and rethink. The real Millennium is not yet come. We have to face that. Rafael never could and never will.”

  “What makes you think that I could be persuaded to have anything to do with such a platform?” said Spiro. “If it comes to a struggle for power and support between you and Rafael, you can’t win. Surely you must see that. No matter what sort of a tremor Emerich starts tonight you can’t think that Rafael will be beaten. He has loyal support, Eliot, and you can count me in with that loyal support. What’s more, I don’t believe that Enzo and Clea will support you, either. There’s no way you can get a majority of the Close Council. No way.”

  “That’s the way you feel now, Acheron. All right. But you tune in to Emerich tonight and you watch the wind blowing. It’ll blow a scare into you, Acheron. You can be sure of that. And one more thing....”

  “Well?”

  “If Heres goes...and go he will...we’ll be needing a new Hegemon. He’d have to come from the Close Council, Acheron. I don’t want the job. You bear that in mind, Acheron...Enzo and Clea aren’t yet sixty, and I don’t want the job.”

  CHAPTER 33

  They had to take Julea with them. She did not want to go, and Joth would have liked to leave her behind, but it was imperative that they should be admitted to Harkanter’s house. Julea could identify herself at the door and it would be opened to her. Joth could not be sure that the same would hold true for him. Even if Harkanter had not been warned by Rath, he would recognize the metal face, and he would want to know why Joth was alive and well, in the Overworld, and knocking at his door.

  Julea was frightened. Paradoxically, she was frightened not so much by Iorga as by Joth. Iorga she took more or less at face value—he was strange, but in no way hostile. He was not loathsome to look at, and he said and did nothing to inspire fear in her. But Joth was different. She feared the new Joth because he did not match her image of the old. Joth had gone into the Underworld a man of Euchronia, her brother—despite his mental face he had been the least alien of beings. But the Joth who had returned was measurably distant from her. Though he assumed sufficient familiarity to stand naked before her, he did not show that familiarity in his speech or his actions. There was no rapport between them as they talked. The things he said, and the way which he said them, were strange to her, and he made no apparent effort to draw her into his understanding. He spoke to her as he might speak to a stranger, or someone more than strange. They had lost their point of contact. Their mutual understanding counted for nothing, now. The life they had shared had withered inside him, and the life he was living now was something apart. For the first time in her life, Julea thought of the steel face as a mask, and wondered what might lie behind it.

  The long drive through the night reminded her, inevitably, of the night when Abram Ravelvent had taken her father and herself to the lonely plexus through which the staircase to the Underworld descended. The parallel between the memories added to her inner disturbance. She was glad when the destination was finally reached, but her gladness came mixed with a rush of new anxieties as she wondered what might happen now.

  She identified herself at the door, and gave as her reason for presenting herself the eminently credible story that she had come to see if Harkanter knew anything about her father, who had gone into the Underworld by the same door. The intensely personal nature of the inquiry offered some sort of excuse for her presenting herself in the flesh rather than making contact via the cybernet.

  Harkanter unsealed the door for her without question. Joth and Iorga had kept well back from the range of the door’s eye, but when the eye blinked and the door yielded, they hurried forward to pass through with the girl.

  Joth felt good, for the first time in a virtual eternity. His flesh had been repaired with plastic, he was clean and properly clothed, and the possible depressant effect of the antibiotics he had taken were offset by a metabolic stimulator. He felt fast, and alert, and fully alive.

  Iorga was wearing black eyeshades which Joth had modified for him. Outside, in the night, he did not need them, but Harkanter’s house would be full of blazing light, and the cat needed protection from that.

  The room into which they came was large and furnished according to a rather bizarre conglomeration of tastes. There was a great staircase and a balcony. The curtains which decked the windows instead of screens were lush and heavy, colored wine-red. The walls were lavishly decorated with artificially aged designs in metal and smoked glass. The atmosphere of the place was anachronistic, but the release from present time was confused and ill made. It was not a scene from the prehistoric past, but a montage of ideas reflecting wholly imaginary pasts in jigsawed association.

  Harkanter chose to make his appearance on the balcony. On coming through the door, Joth and Iorga had stepped sideways into an alcove in the vestibule, and were not visible from the place where Harkanter stood. Julea, however, went forward into the room. She was nervous, and her steps were tentative.

  Harkanter was puzzled by her apparent trepidation, and when she caught sight of him and looked up he knew that something was wrong. But he was still thinking of the grave and wondering what—and how—to tell her what he believed. He moved to the head of the stairs, useless phrases flowing through his mind.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said. “I had not expected....” He left the sentence hanging, deliberately, but he could see that she was not going to answer. She was not going to say anything. She was waiting, with incipient terror in her eyes. The big man had begun to come down the stairs, but he stopped, suddenly. He curled the fingers of his left hand so that the tips scraped sweat from the palm.

  Joth stepped out of the alcove. He was not carrying the rifle, and the pistol was not visible. There was nothing about his appearance, save for his face, which seemed immediately strange, but Harkanter could almost feel his hostility.

  “Who are you?” the big man demanded.

  “Joth Magner.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Harkanter showed no evidence of surprise.

  “I didn’t know,” said the Negro, finally. “I heard that you were dead. I didn’t see you at the door.”

  “No.”

  Harkanter continued his descent. “You want to know about your father?” he said.

  “I know about my father,” Joth told him. “I buried him.”

  Harkanter continued coming down the stairs. When he reached the bottom he came forward three or four paces to stand facing Joth. They were ten or twelve feet apart.

  “Then what do you want from me?” he asked, quietly.

  “Why did you bring him back?” asked Joth.

  “Your father?”

  “No. You know who I mean. The man you captured in the Underworld.”

  “That wasn’t a man,” said Harkanter. “It was a rat. I brought it back to show the people what the inhabitants of the Underworld are really like.”

  “And you showed them. A rat. Did you let him speak?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I don’t know what you told Emerich,” said Joth, “but it wasn’t true. We’ve been keeping in touch with the holovisual network. They’ve released nothing yet, except hints. But I know that whatever you’ve told them is a handful of lies, and I think you know it too.”

  “I showed them the rat,” said Harkanter blandly. “They were all free to draw their own conclusions.”

  “His name is Camlak,” said Joth, “and he’s a man.”

  “Vicente Soron and the science of biology say it’s a rat,” Harkanter insisted. “We have proof.”

  “So have I,” said Joth. He motioned with his hand. Iorga came out of the alcove. The cat was carrying the rifle. He was quite relaxed, but he was holding the weapon in a manner which suggested unmistakably that he knew how to use it.

  Harkanter stood very still for a long time. Iorga
stood as tall as he, and the shaded eyes stared into his own with calm self-consciousness. But Harkanter did not see a man. He saw a caricature, a travesty. He saw a beast stood erect, clothed and armed. He read viciousness and bestiality in the face. He saw cunning, but not intellect. He saw a big cat, no more.

  The last thing that Harkanter had envisaged was the Underworld extending its claws into the Overworld in order to take him to task for drugging and caging the rat. While he stood and stared, he still considered his world as inviolate—the world. He still considered the Underworld as a sewer, a dark hole filled with vermin. That was what he believed. His belief could not be shaken by what he saw. He could not react to Iorga’s presence. There was no way that he could. Iorga and the rifle were beyond his conceptual boundaries.

  “We want Camlak,” said Joth.

  There was no reply.

  “The man you call a rat. We want him. We want to take him back.”

  Still no reply.

  Julea, very faintly, said: “Please.”

  Harkanter looked at the girl. He was glad to have his attention distracted.

  “It’s a rat,” said Harkanter, with all the force of Vicente Soron’s word of scientific honor behind him.

  “Just show us where you have him,” said Joth. “That’s all. Take us to him. We’ll take care of him then.”

  Harkanter wanted to be stubborn, but when he turned the idea over in his mind he realized that he had no stake in the matter. The rat had fulfilled his purpose. He had played his game. He did not want the rat. Not now.

  “Take him,” said Harkanter. “And welcome.”

  He turned and led the way down to the cellars. Joth and Iorga followed. Julea, after a moment’s hesitation, went after them.

  Vicente Soron moved back from the door at which he had been eavesdropping, and called the police.

  CHAPTER 34

  Camlak was drowning.

  The oceanic swell of the drug was passing a gloved hand through his face, the fingers dragging at the mind behind the eyes, trying to claw him out of himself and spread him like a thin sliver of sunlit water on a pebble beach. It was trying to smear him into a thin sheet of egoic slime, and he felt inside himself that he was gradually melting into malleability. He was having difficulty holding himself together. The cohesive forces joining mind and brain were decaying and denaturing. He had already lost the sensations of gravity and heat to the counteractive gentleness of the drug. Soon, he knew, the force of identity would ebb away. The molecules of his mind would fly apart, their integrity ripped as if by a relentless tide, wrecked, disintegrating like a loose bundle of cotton threads. His being was no longer a knot, merely a tangle.

  “Am I going to die?” he asked his Gray Soul.

  The Soul was a shadow, a patch of darkness on the sun-spun sheen of his slithering thoughts. It was shaped like a dart or a moth at rest. It was steady, but it appeared to waver and ripple because of the pressure that was rippling his consciousness.

  “No,” replied the Soul. “You won’t die.”

  “Must I keep fighting?” asked Camlak.

  “Yes.”

  Camlak did as he was advised. He kept fighting. But he still felt that he was losing the fight. He still felt that he was being dissolved into the thin, shallow waves, diffusing into the liquid layers of the drug which reached for him from the well of his bloodstream.

  He trusted the Soul. He could see the Soul, and while he knew the Soul was there he knew that there was a chance for him to reverse the process of disintegration that was extinguishing him.

  But he did not quite know how.

  He struggled alone, in the abyss, for an eternity, while the molecules shuddered like windblown flags, their structures tottering and their edges crumbling and shattering, undermining him and reshaping him. The clock on the wall was lost to his eyes. The passage of time was no longer a factor in the battle.

  As the pressure upon him grew, so did his own desperation, so did his own reason, and so did his need for faith in himself and in the silhouette of his Soul.

  “Help me,” said Camlak to the moth-shadow.

  “Help yourself,” said the Soul, coaxing him, asking him for an effort.

  “Heal me,” pleaded Camlak, who felt himself torn across.

  “Heal yourself,” demanded the Soul.

  Camlak’s mind made hands in nowhere, and extended them outwards from the thin film of glistering light which spread him over the surface of sucking death. The hands reached into the naked, cold sky beyond his brain. They were reaching into space—a space he had never found before and known only by implication. It was real space, with volume and containment, but it was enfolded inside him, inside his body and his being. He was wrapped around a whole cosmos.

  Soul space.

  He formed hands and his hands formed claws, and the claws formed clutches and they reached up and up, and every shattering, shimmering, thread-held fragment of him cried:

  “Help me!”

  And the Soul said: “Help yourself.”

  The hands continued to ascend into the empty, wasted, derelict sky, feeling the cold and the needles of icelike fire beating into their palms, fraying and cracking the fingers and the claws.

  Blood spilled.

  But the hands did not matter.

  The false flesh peeled off the unreal bones and the whited wreckage of the fingers still reached out into the sky, hauling at false arms and clutching with the rigor of death at the boundaries of the invaginated universe.

  The thin strand of slime burst as the false shoulders erupted, and then, with a single convulsive movement, the real being grew, through the wall between the spaces, through the shattered puppet self, free from its existential womb.

  Camlak opened his mouth to drag in air, gulping and swallowing and sucking. In the cage, the air flooded into the lungs. In the soul-space the ultimate coldness chilled the nascent self.

  The head opened its eyes and felt them burn in the brightness, while the other felt pain and shock.

  In the instant, Camlak was suspended, in transit, caught in the process of metamorphosis, turning himself outside-in like a snake swallowing its tail.

  The mouth screamed: “Help me!”

  And shadows clustered about the eyes, and claws reached out to grip his dead hands and his shoulders. Fingers twined in his hair and a million moth-shapes fluttered round and round his face in black cascades, casting a kaleidoscopic chaos of shadows on the darkening face of the carpet-mist which had been eating Camlak’s mind.

  Camlak was free.

  Reborn, by the power of his will and his need. He burst into nowhere and he screamed in exultation.

  CHAPTER 35

  As Joth reached out to unfasten the door to Camlak’s cage he saw the torpid rat’s eyes whip open. Inside the eyes he watched a sudden flare of light.

  Then Camlak’s scream struck him down.

  Iorga, behind him, suddenly lost control of his body and collapsed to the floor like a puppet with snapped strings.

  Julea folded up without a sound.

  Vicente Soron, who was coming through the door, pitched forward, the momentum of his movement throwing him against the banister of the cellar steps. The gun which he had found flew from his hand, released by limp fingers, and clattered on the tiled floor of the room.

  Only Harkanter had been standing quite still at the instant of the scream. He, too, felt his mind suddenly disconnected from his body, imploded into utter blackness. But he was balanced, and he did not immediately fall. His body stood, held erect and still by muscles that were momentarily frozen.

  Moments later, the muscles relaxed of their own accord, and Harkanter swayed, then rolled over with exaggerated slowness to meet the ground with a solid thump.

  Joth’s eyes did not close immediately. He fell, but he could still see what happened while he fell. He was the only one staring full at the prisoner at the instant of the scream.

  He alone saw the instant of Camlak’s disappearance.<
br />
  The shape of the rat seemed to become completely fluid. The body flowed into a hole that opened a core of cold light somewhere within the space that the body had occupied. Very quickly, but in finite, measurable time, Camlak’s body was collected into that hold and delivered through it.

  The release which Joth had brought came an instant too late.

  CHAPTER 36

  The velocity of the shock wave was rather less than the speed of light. No electromagnetic radiation or sonic vibration was involved. The most sensitive instrumentation in the cybernet recorded only secondary phenomena—secondary, that is, relative to the Earthly continuum. Relative to the other space the wave itself was only an echo.

  But it was an echo that woke a response.

  The intensity of the reaction obeyed the inverse square law. Everyone within a mile or so of the location of the scream was affected in much the same way as those actually in the cellar. The reaction to the wave was the decoupling of all motor responses in the body—the effective isolation of the brain. The mechanism which permits such decoupling is located in the body known as the pons situated beneath the hind brain, and it may be assumed that it was within this body that the signal was received. Many of those affected within this range blacked out completely, and thus experienced nothing in the aftermath of the response. In other cases, however, the brain continued to operate although notionally cut off from all sensory input. The people so affected “dreamed,” but the content of the dreams was only partly the issue of their own (subconscious) minds. A complex series of images transmitted by the modification of the shock wave itself were recorded, transcribed and reechoed within the program store of the subconscious mind. Engrammatic patterns were disturbed, destroyed and created. Almost all were to prove inviable, in the long term, and were broken up and erased by the mind’s own defensive systems and faculties of self-repair. But that process would take time. In the meantime, the whole process of subconscious activity within the brain was disturbed. In no case was the disturbance so great as to cause permanent insanity.