“I think your father destroyed himself,” Joth told her.
She shook her head.
“He was in the cage, and then he was gone. Absolutely. The force hit us, took our bodies away from our minds, left us fallen and helpless. It wasn’t the force of an explosion. It didn’t hurt us, but Camlak just disappeared.”
“We felt it too,” said Huldi.
“Camlak didn’t die,” Nita explained. “He found something the priests have always told us about. No one ever found it before. The priests couldn’t know. But they were right. It was there.”
“What did he find?” asked Joth.
“A way between the worlds,” she said. “Not your world and mine. Another world.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere. Enclosed within us. Deep. We can look into it sometimes, at the Communion of Souls. You remember. You saw.”
Joth stared at her, uncomprehending. He had seen the Communion of Souls. He had interpreted it, to his own satisfaction. And he had been right—he was sure of that. Now he realized that he had not been right enough. He had seen only the tiniest fraction of the reality. He wondered where he could find the help which he needed in order to begin to know the truth. Huldi knew nothing—hers was only an animal mind whose sentience served animal purposes. She never asked herself questions, let alone created answers. Iorga, too, had little or no use for words except as signals. If he used them within himself, to try to come to terms with the reality in which he was a prisoner, he showed no outward sign of it. Chemec might some day come to understand what Nita knew now, but it would mean nothing to him. His way of life was Yami’s way—the way that answered all challenges with the will to kill. And the people of the Overworld...how could they ever begin to understand, while they had made of themselves what they were?
Joth abandoned the tangled web of thought, without surrendering to the insidious despair.
“What will you do now?” he asked Nita.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Will you do something for me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m going back, now. I want to put right all the lies and the mistakes. I don’t know what will happen to me, but I don’t think they’ll blame me for what Iorga did. I want to find out all they know, and why they know so little when men like Burstone must know so much more. But there’s something else I want to know—something else I think is important. I want to know why there is a road of stars which leads from the edge of the Waste into the black lands. A road must lead somewhere, and it’s a road that was left for you to follow, not for me. I can track it, from above—I think. If not, I’ll come back and follow you down here, if I can. Either way, I’ll try to find you at the other end.”
They did not ask him for a reason. They lived their lives, for the most part, without reasons. Because they lived almost without time, they did not need to make plans out of their lives. Only Chemec had enough fear of the black lands to refuse what Joth had asked.
Chemec did not go. He went, alone, back to the country called Shaira. Nita, Huldi and Iorga took the Road of Stars. They all loved one another.
Joth, whom they also loved, went home.
CHAPTER 51
The head of Rafael Heres hung like a bloated balloon in every home in Euchronia. Somewhere in the world it was midnight, somewhere else it was noon. It made no difference. The head was there, and the whole world was listening, watching the bloodless lips move. No one was missing out on sleep to listen. Wherever it was night, in Euchronia, it was a sleepless night.
“The purpose of the Euchronian Movement and the Euchronian Plan,” Heres was saying, “was to build a world for men to live in peace. From the wreckage of a dying world the Euchronians made a new world grow. They designed that world for mankind, because they wanted their children—their ultimate children—to be able to live the kind of lives they wanted to live, but could not. They wanted to build a paradise for their children, and they did.
“We are those children. We live in the world that they made for us. We have used it as well as we could, and perhaps we have not used it as well as they would have wanted us to. But this is a new world, and there is time yet. There is time for us to become the children that the Euchronian Planners would have wished to inherit the new Earth.
“Our fathers wanted to give us a world which was not merely ideal for the purposes of mankind, but a world which was secure—whose own future was guaranteed. They designed our world to be stable—in a state of balance. They never claimed—they were never arrogant enough to claim—that ours would be a perfect world, but they wanted it to be a world where we could live our lives completely safe from the tragedies which they suffered as a matter of course. They wanted it to be a world where men could be free, and free forever.
“Our freedom is threatened now.
“Our stability is threatened now.
“Our world is threatened now.
“The Planners gave to us all that we have, to hold for all time. They never envisaged—they never could have envisaged—that a terrible threat to our way of life might emerge, not from within our society, nor from the infinite reaches of space in which our Earth is only a mote of dust, but from the old world—the world they interred as a failure, a disaster, and a ruin. The Euchronians left the past behind them, thinking that it was obliterated, cut off forever from the light of the sun and the face of Heaven. But that past has caught up with Euchronia.
“Our minds are no longer completely our own. We have been invaded, not merely by alien beings from an alien world coming into our world, but by an alien state of being which has come into our very selves, into our minds. Can we, at this moment, say that we have sovereignty over our own being? Do we have the power of self-determination, the power to shape our own identity? Perhaps we do...for the moment. But while our minds are threatened by the kind of invasion which we have already suffered once, we cannot be sure. We can never be sure, until we have removed that threat.
“The course of action which is forced upon us is not one that we would take lightly. What we have to do now is cause for regret, and sadness, and guilt, and shame. I do not seek to avoid these truths. But we have no choice. In order that we may preserve our selves against destruction—individually and collectively—we must take steps to assure that no such invasion of our being can ever take place again.
“Not long ago, I proposed the establishment of a Second Euchronian Plan, directed toward the reclamation of the Underworld. That Plan has been changed. We now know that there exists in the Underworld a menace to everything that we have, and everything that we are. That menace must be destroyed, and we can take no chances whatsoever in the matter of its destruction.
“I must tell you now that the Euchronian Council has already decided, and plans have already been put in progress, to take the necessary steps, with all attendant precautions.
“All life in the Underworld is to be extirpated. The surface of the ancient Earth is to be absolutely and completely sterilized. This will be accomplished with all possible speed.”
CHAPTER 52
The camp was ablaze with light, while the technical staff who had spent so many patient hours setting up the tents and the complex equipment now dismantled and disassembled them again. This time, there was not so much patience about the way they worked, and rather more unseemly haste.
There was little enough opportunity to talk to one another. When they stopped for food and rest they did so in small groups and they took their breaks seriously. For the most part, they had little to say to one another. They had talked themselves to a standstill in the fearful hours following the wave. They were tired men, now, moving like machines, with a permanent haze behind their eyes that was compounded of exhaustion and anxiety.
The exception was Felipe Rath. He wanted to talk. He was no less tired and no less distracted than his companions, but he had something niggling at his mind that he wanted to let out—that he felt compelled to set free. He chose to t
ell Zuvara, because he felt that Zuvara was likely to understand—and also because Zuvara was peripherally involved, via a small sin of omission.
“Harkanter’s dead,” said Rath.
“I know,” said Zuvara. “We all know.”
“But I’m partly responsible, in a way. In a way, you are too.”
Zuvara stared at him. There was no emotion in his eyes, but with the mask obscuring his features and the strangeness of his manner due to fatigue, Rath fancied that he could see loathing in the stare.
“The other night,” Rath explained, hesitantly. “You were...on guard. You must have fallen asleep.”
“What has that to do with Harkanter? I don’t remember falling asleep.”
“You must have. They came into the camp. Joth Magner and...the one that killed him. It was my gun—the one that shot Harkanter. They came right into the camp and took it. You let them in. I let them out. That’s what I mean when I say that we helped to kill him. If you hadn’t fallen asleep, or let them through behind your back, or whatever...and if I hadn’t let them go....”
“They stole your gun,” said Zuvara. His voice was faint and monotonous, as though it came from a long distance. “So what? I didn’t know that someone was going to steal a gun to kill Harkanter. Neither did you.”
“But I did.”
“You knew they were going to kill Harkanter?”
“No. But I let them take the gun. I knew they were going after Harkanter, because they wanted to rescue the rat. I could have warned him, but I didn’t. I just let them go. I didn’t tell anyone. Of course, I didn’t know they’d kill Harkanter. How could I? But I didn’t warn him. If I had, he wouldn’t be dead.”
Zuvara felt completely at a loss.
“Why tell me now?” he asked. “What difference does it make?”
“I just wanted to explain,” said Rath. “I wanted to explain why I didn’t warn him. Magner threatened me, but it wasn’t that. He couldn’t carry out any threats. But I still didn’t warn Harkanter.”
“Why?” Zuvara felt compelled to ask.
“Because he didn’t have any right. Harkanter. He didn’t have any right to go back like that, with the rat, to shout out loud to the whole world that he knew it all. He didn’t know it all—my pictures proved that. He didn’t know anything. So I let them go, to steal his prize specimen, because he didn’t have any right.
“But I didn’t know they’d kill him.”
Rath looked into Zuvara’s eyes, to see what he could read there now. But he couldn’t read anything. Zuvara wasn’t looking at him. In fact, he seemed not to have been listening to Rath at all. He was looking at something over Rath’s shoulder—something in the wilderness.
For one brief moment, Rath felt angry. Then the anger died, and the scientist reasserted his will over the tired, self-pitying man.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Then he turned.
Joth Magner was walking into the camp. His pace was measured. He was unarmed. His metal eyes—steel globes with horizontal slits, behind which ranged the artificial retinae and the circuitry which filtered and coded the information—searched the masked faces of the men who watched him.
The camp was suspended in a moment of stillness and silence. It was a moment carved right out of time: an encounter utterly strange because it did not involve a meeting of alien worlds or alien minds.
Joth’s eyes found Rath, despite the mask, and it was to him that Joth came.
“I’m coming back with you,” he said. “It’s all done now. All finished.”
Rath had to turn away from the stare of the steel eyes.
“It’s finished,” he agreed.
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.
A Vision of Hell: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Two Page 17