Vicente Soron entered through the complex doors, disrobing and submitting to sterilization procedure with angry impatience. As soon as those inside saw him it was obvious to them that something was very wrong.
He went to Zuvara and said: “We have to talk in private.”
“Why?”
This question came from Rath, not from Zuvara. Soron looked around, and saw that every eye was upon him, and that every ear was listening. He licked his lips.
“It’s important,” he said.
“If it’s important,” said Rath, cutting in just as Zuvara was about to reply, “then I want to hear it. We all want to hear it.” His voice was strained, and he seemed to be on edge.
“I think you’d better tell us all,” said Zuvara, in a low voice.
Soron looked at Rath, then at Zuvara, and it struck him very suddenly and very strongly that they already knew what he had to say. Something had frightened them, and frightened them badly. The news which he had to impart had been thrusting at his throat, the words waiting to tumble out just as soon as he could get Zuvara alone. But his need to talk died away suddenly.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“You tell us,” said Rath.
Zuvara waved at him impatiently, trying to shut him up. “Something’s wrong, Vicente. If that’s what you’ve come to tell us, don’t bother. We’ve lost contact with Germont’s Delta contingent. We think that they’re all dead.”
For a few seconds, what Zuvara had said simply did not make sense to Soron. He repeated the words over in his mind, but still they evaded him. Then he realized what he had been told. They didn’t know at all. This was different—something entirely unexpected.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” said Rath, again quick to interrupt. “We got no message. Nothing. Whatever it was must have killed them quickly, and without any warning. Now, if there’s anything we should know, you’d better tell us, because if the same thing is going to happen to us, we want warning.”
Soron shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “It’s something entirely different.”
“It’s throwing quite some panic into you,” observed, Rath.
“I can’t tell you,” said Soron. “The Council has to know. It’s for them to decide what’s to be done. I daren’t release the information to anyone except Gregor. Not until the Council knows.”
“You’d better...,” Zuvara began, but again Rath was ahead of him. Rath was almost shaking, and his face was white. Soron realized that the news about the lost vehicles must only just have come in. It must have had a profound effect upon the men in the encampment, who had been in the Underworld for some time now, and were beginning to hate every moment of it as it became obvious that the likelihood of an early return to the Overworld was out of the question. Rath, Zuvara and Soron had all come down with Harkanter’s party—to look around, to see what the Underworld was like. It had been a game then. Now, it was no longer a game. Cut off from the world they knew, with the mechanical extensions of the cybernet more an accentuation of their removal than an amelioration of it, they had begun to sense imminent danger everywhere in the dead, decaying land that surrounded the dome city.
“The Council,” said Rath, “are up there. We’re here. Never mind relaying information to the Council so that they can alert us at their pleasure. We should be the first to know, not the last.”
“This shouldn’t be made public,” insisted Soron.
“Let’s all be the judge of that,” said Rath. “We want to know. Are the plants withstanding the seeding? Don’t the diseases work as well as they should? Is there an army marching from the south? What’s wrong, man?” Soron wiped his mouth, and turned away for a moment. Zuvara said nothing, now that he had the opportunity. He waited, with Rath and the others.
“I’ve been out in the southeast sector,” he said. “Checking the progress of the viruses. Everything seems to be dying, all right. Everywhere is covered in gray slime. Literally everywhere. Including the pillars which support the platform. You know how they have lichens and small prokaryot cells growing all over them. The encrustation on every pillar is dying, and you can just scrape the stuff away. That’s what I did.
“Some of it must have been chemosynthetic. Some of the stuff has eaten its way back into the pillars half an inch or more. The surface under the crust is corroded and pitted.”
He stopped and waited, but no one said a word.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “The columns which support the Overworld are being steadily weakened. And we knew nothing about it. Sections of the platform may already be in danger. It may begin to collapse at any time. Tomorrow, or next year. We simply don’t know.”
16.
“I come to you,” said Heres, “as my ancestors came to you some thousands of years ago. I need your help. The world which you helped to build—your world—needs your help.”
Sisyr’s expression did not change, but he seemed suddenly very thoughtful. The alien was considerably taller than the Hegemon, but they were both seated, and the difference was not obvious. They were dressed in the same type of clothing.
But the alien’s skin was red-brown. His eyes were round, and had no pupils, being uniformly pale blue in color. A darker area of soft tissue served as both nasal organ and upper lip. The lower jaw closed behind this flap of tissue. Nevertheless, the face gave the impression of being “mammalian.” It was not horrifying. The hands were different. There was something about the hands which suggested insects. Their structure was complex—far more so than human hands. The hard, thin fingers looked as if they might snap like pencils if pressure were applied to them.
It struck Heres most forcefully that there was a certain hardness about Sisyr’s whole frame and bearing. He looked strong, not simply because of his height, but because of the way he held himself. Heres, for some reason, always saw human beings as soft creatures. The sensation of wearing his own skin always exaggerated in his mind the delicacy and vulnerability of flesh. Heres hated to scratch himself, and he was hypersensitive to pain.
“How can I help you?” asked Sisyr.
“Exactly as you did before,” Heres replied. “You will advise us, and give us the benefit of your scientific knowledge and technical skill.”
“Toward what end?” asked the alien.
Heres pursed his lips slightly. The alien knew perfectly well what end Heres had in mind. Why was he asking for it to be spelled out?
“Ultimately,” said the Hegemon, “the security of the people of the Overworld. We wish to exterminate all sources of danger or potential danger on the planet.”
“You want to extirpate life in the Underworld,” stated Sisyr.
“It may be necessary,” said Heres, smoothly. “We may be able to save many species of potential usefulness and harmlessness. If, with your help, we can weed out the inimical varieties, we may have the means to begin the work of remaking the surface of the Earth into a habitable environment. I have not abandoned that possibility.”
“The Underworld is habitable now,” said Sisyr.
“By habitable,” Heres said, his voice still smooth and his manner unruffled, “I mean suitable for habitation by the standards of the Overworld.”
“What you want me to do,” said the alien, “is—as I understand it—help you to wage a war of extermination against the people of the Underworld.”
“We need not consider them people,” said the Hegemon. ‘“Even those of apparent human ancestry are now a genetically isolated species. They are not men, as we are men. They are evolutionary side branches. We are engaged in a struggle for existence. We cannot afford to handicap ourselves with philosophical niceties.” While he delivered this speech, Heres recalled the very different ideas he had advanced while proclaiming to the world his Second Euchronian Plan for the reclamation of the Underworld. But circumstances had changed since then, and ideas had to be brought into line with circumstance.
“Why do you think th
at the Planners put lights in the Underworld?” asked Sisyr.
“Because they needed them,” said Heres, “in the days when the platform was under construction, and there was constant intercourse between the two worlds.”
“But the lights still burn.”
“For now,” said Heres, matching words unsaid with words unsaid.
“You know that I have been sending small quantities of material from the Overworld into the Underworld for thousands of years?” asked the alien. Without waiting for an answer, he continued: “Manufactured goods—mostly tools and books. All in the name of the Plan.”
“It has been brought to my attention,” said Heres.
“Do you know why?”
“If you say that it was provided for in the Plan,” said the Hegemon, “then I cannot contradict you. But now the Plan has been changed. It is no longer required that you should distribute necessary materials in the Underworld, helping to keep its people alive and—to some degree—civilized. We have new priorities now.”
Sisyr shook his head deliberately. The calm mimicry of the human gesture alarmed Heres. This creature had perfected a false humanity which existed alongside his real self. Heres, as a human, could confront only the human analogue, never the alien. There was no way to guess what Sisyr’s priorities might be—what he thought and felt. There was no way to answer questions relating to the alien, like why? And who? As Heres watched the red-brown face, he tried to call to his own mind some appreciation of the fact that Sisyr was thousands of years old. He had lived on Earth for nearly ten thousand, and he might have been thousands, or millions of years old before his ship first came to Earth. Was he any nearer to death now? So far as Heres, or anyone else, was aware, the alien might outlast the Earth itself, and the sun, and the galaxy.
But Heres had no sense of the infinite. He could not begin to conceive of a span of time so vast that the things which Heres concerned himself with might be so evanescent as to be meaningless. And yet the alien lived second by second, hour by hour, just as Heres did. His past and his future might be infinitely extended, but his present moved at exactly the same pace from one to the other. Heres’ affairs of the moment were Sisyr’s too. And Sisyr had not been content to stand aside from the problem of the first Planners. He had involved himself. He had tried to become a part of Earth. He had made Earth his world.
“I cannot help you,” said Sisyr.
Although he had expected this, Heres recoiled from the flat statement as if it were a physical blow.
“You must,” he said....
Sisyr shook his head again.
“We have the power to compel you,” said Heres. “You are subject to our laws.”
“I have the right to refuse,” said Sisyr. “I have the right to remain silent. You may pass judgment upon me, and I must accept the judgment. But you cannot compel me to do what I will not do.”
Heres suppressed his anger with the ease of long practice. The anger was not insistent. It died at his command.
“Tell me why,” he demanded.
“You know why,” said the alien.
“You have a duty to us,” said the Hegemon. “You helped us create this society. You have a responsibility toward it. You cannot stand by and see it destroyed. It is your fault that we are in such extreme danger now. Had you not continued to supply the Underworld, had you not provided them with light, they would not have survived. There would be no people of the Underworld. I am not accusing you or blaming you, I am simply stating the facts. No one will hold this against you. But the fact remains that you are responsible for the threat to the world which you helped to create. You cannot simply turn your back and deny involvement. You must take action now, along with the citizens of the Euchronian Millennium, to set aside the earlier actions which have led to this crisis. We demand your assistance. Without your knowledge we may very well fail to overcome the threat to our existence. But with your help we will be able to do what we have to as quickly and as cleanly as possible.”
“I do not deny involvement,” said Sisyr. “But I do deny commitment of the kind which you are trying to thrust upon me.
“I did not design and build the Overworld. That was the work of your Planners. What I did was to put within their reach the means by which they could bring their Plan into effect. I showed them how the platform could become an engineering possibility. I showed them how to make the best use of their raw materials. I showed them how to get the necessary power. But I did not create the Overworld. The world which I created was the Underworld.
“Your Planners were convinced that the surface was irrevocably ruined. They mistook the end of the environment to which they were adapted for the end of life, for the end of the world. They committed themselves entirely to the new world built above the old. That was their only hope—not for mankind, but for their particular image of man, for their particular human ambitions.
“I did for them what they wanted me to do. But at the same time, I took what steps I could to assure the future of the Underworld. Life there would have survived in any case, without any intervention on my part. What would have happened there if I had not done as I did is not very different from what has happened there. Rapid divergent evolution of those forms best equipped to survive would have brought into being much the kind of life-system which has established itself. What I did was to contribute just a little to epiphenomenal continuity. I made certain things happen more quickly. Where chance might have resulted in two or several outcomes I made sure of one particular outcome.
“Your Planners wanted to save the human race which existed in their own imagination. I wanted to save several human races—several potential routes for human evolution. You say that the people of the Underworld need not be considered as people. They might say the same of you. Neither your human race nor any of theirs is the same human race which existed in prehistoric times. Nor was that race static in an evolutionary sense. Indeed, the human race readapted itself throughout its history with remarkable speed. Humanity has always practiced self-change. And it has always been able to pass on this self-change, not by heredity, but by control of the environments which shape the individual.
“Your Euchronians always believed that the process of self-change was directional, and that there was an end-point to it all. I helped them reach that particular end-point. You have found, of course, that there is no such end. Time does not stop. Change does not stop. If you wipe out all life on Earth except yourselves, and make the environment totally unchangeable, and—with the aid of your i-minus drugs—shape every member of your society as completely as possible to the Euchronian ideal, you will still find that there is no end. That is what I believe. I would not be alive if I did not.
“You cannot destroy the Underworld. If you kill every living thing within it, it will return, in time. And even in the meantime it will not be lost, because it exists inside you all, as a potential, as an alternative. In the same way, the Underworld cannot destroy you, even if it kills you all. Euchronia exists, if only as a possibility. No matter who, or where, or what you are, there are always Heaven and Hell. You cannot divide infinity and eternity. Wherever you draw a line, there is always infinity and eternity to either side of it.”
“I’m not concerned with infinity and eternity,” said Heres. “I’m only concerned with now.”
“The identity you have shaped for yourself may not recognize its concern with infinity and eternity,” said the alien, “but it is nevertheless contained therein. I am concerned with infinity and eternity, because I am eternal, and have access to infinity.”
“If this is the way you think,” said Heres, “then why did you help us in the first place?”
“Because I am concerned with preserving real alternatives,” said the alien. “I am concerned with eternity, but I am also concerned with now. The present is where the eternal happens. Everything may come to one who waits, but he need not wait. He may act, and thus control what comes.
“You say I have a duty to m
y world—a duty to save it from destruction. That is what I intend to do. But my world is Earth, not Euchronia. I cannot help you.”
“Then I must place you under arrest,” said Heres. “According to the law, you are guilty of treason. And I warn you that we may be forced to discover ways by which we can make you help us.”
Sisyr stared the Hegemon in the face, and he seemed for a moment to be preternaturally still.
“I doubt it,” he said, quietly. “I doubt it.”
17.
The three remaining contingents of Germont’s force split up in the lightlands, and separated by some twenty or thirty miles, moving southeast into Shairn. Germont’s own third of the force moved slightly ahead of the others, and it was this fraction which first came within sight of one of the villages of the Children of the Voice.
The column halted, and Germont asked for instructions from above.
The man to whom Germont was actually talking was Luel Dascon, who stood, in the present situation, second only to Heres. He was the only man whose loyalty Heres dared trust completely. Dascon could see what the village and its surrounds looked like by means of a camera eye mounted on Germont’s vehicle.
What he saw was a wall of Earth, with the tops of tall conical roofs visible behind it. The land around the village had been divided up into rough squares thirty to a hundred yards in length, which were separated by footworn pathways. In these fields grew an assortment of plants, the most common of which was a dark gray thickset stalk with a paler bulb, rather like a foot-thick matchstick. In some of the fields compounds were divided out by walls of sod daubed with some white substance—apparently to stiffen the barriers. Within these compounds were animals: burly, pallid pigs.
A Glimpse of Infinity Page 6