There was no one working in the fields—in fact, there was no one visible outside the wall. A warning of the approach of the armored cars had been given some time previously, and the villagers had withdrawn. A few scattered heads were just visible at the wall.
A rough road—or, at least, a track rather wider than the footpaths in the fields—led away to the east, but it was impossible to follow its course across the terrain for more than a quarter of a mile.
“Move forward slowly,” said Dascon. “Pass the village on the west side, staying well clear of the walls. Try to follow the paths through the fields, and spray the crop with the virus as you pass. Don’t open fire on the village or the villagers unless they come out to attack. Ignore anything they throw or shoot from the wall.”
“We could raze the village in under an hour,” said Germont.
“That’s the last thing we want at the moment,” said Dascon. “There’s a whole nation to the south of you. We don’t want open war. We just want to destroy their food supply, quietly and completely. No matter how superior your firepower, pitched battles mean losses. You already know that.”
“I’d be happier with them dead,” Germont replied. He was convinced—although there was no evidence—that the contingent left behind in the blacklands had been destroyed by some mysterious mindpower of which the Underworlders were possessed. He was very frightened by the idea of such an insidious threat. Dascon, too, was anxious about the potential power of the Children of the Voice, but his approach to the problem was different. Fear made Germont want to shoot, and keep shooting—to eject the fear with the bullets, to be conscious that he was fighting back, was killing. Dascon was concerned that the rats should not be frightened, that they should be convinced that they had nothing to fear from the Overworld invasion, and would therefore fail to make use of the extraordinary action to which Camlak had been driven. Heres had decided that they should work on the theory that the Children of the Voice would accept the blight of all plant life in their area as a natural occurrence—merely an extension of disasters which must have happened before—and that they would not thereby be prompted into any unusual action.
The column moved forward slowly. Germont’s driver took what seemed to the commander to be elaborate detours in order not to cut across any of the fields, destroying the standing crops. Some of the matchstick plants inevitably got crushed by the great wheels, but the damage was done in a tidy, orderly fashion.
The man at the machine gun was visibly nervous. He was above Germont’s station, and his feet were not far away from Germont’s face. The smell seemed very noticeable.
When they were closest to the village wall they were broadside-on, and the camera eye showed only empty land ahead. Germont moved to where he could see out of the cockpit, and relayed his impressions to Dascon.
“There are thirty or forty of them watching us over the wall,” he said. “They seem patient and relaxed. I don’t understand why there are no signs of fear or hostility. Trucks don’t drive through their agricultural holdings every day—these things can never have seen a vehicle like this in their lives. They can’t have got beyond the wheelbarrow themselves, without horses or cattle. I can’t make out their eyes at this distance, and I presume the expressions on their faces wouldn’t mean much to me anyhow, but the way they stand and watch suggests to me that they know—or think they know—exactly what we are and what we’re doing. But they’re making no move to stop us. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“You’re imagining things,” Dascon told him. “They’re probably scared to death.”
“No,” said Germont. “That’s just not so.” After a pause, he continued: “There’s another gate on the south side, much larger than the ones to north and east. There’s a road—a track of sorts—leading away south. Geographically, that should be the main road. The big gate is white, and looks for all the world to me as if it’s made out of bones. Maybe that’s so.”
“Not necessarily sinister,” said Dascon. “There’s a shortage of woody tissue in the Underworld. They probably can’t afford to waste bones—they have to use them for tools and frames. The supply of animal bones probably isn’t enough.”
“I don’t care why they use bones,” said Germont. “The fact that they do is enough for me. Mine are longer, and maybe tougher than theirs. They aren’t going to lose any opportunities to kill us, once they’re convinced they have a chance.”
“You’re safe enough,” said Dascon drily.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
The column passed by the village without the slightest incident. Not a rock was thrown, nor a spear, nor an arrow loosed.
“I wish they’d come at us,” said Germont. “I really do. That, I can understand. I can understand them coming out and attacking, and getting themselves shot to bits. I can understand them running or hiding. But the way they look says to me that they know something we don’t. They have something all ready. It just looks to me as if they know we can’t hurt them. I feel like a rat in a trap.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Dascon.
“Don’t call me names,” Germont snapped back. “If you want to pour scorn, you come down here and pour it. This is no picnic, Luel, and you know it. We’ve already lost more than a quarter of the force, and for what? Nothing. We don’t even know how they died. We wouldn’t know what killed them if it was inside with us now.
“And I’ll tell you something else. When I look at the map and see what kind of distance we’ve covered these last few days, and what kind of area we might be infecting with these damned virus sprays, I begin to see how little impression we’ve made on this world. I tell you now that I’m not going to be here for years, and I don’t think any of the men along with me are going to take it for much longer either.”
“You won’t need to be there much longer,” said Dascon, soothingly. “Certainly not years. We don’t need you to spread the virus—we need you to tell us what happens. You’re observers. Once we know what to expect of the sprays, the seeding will be handled mechanically. Yours is just the test project. That’s all. If you keep your eyes open, you won’t die. Nothing can get at you inside the vehicles. Nothing at all. We’ll know what happened to the Delta group in a matter of hours. Whatever mistake they made won’t be repeated.”
Germont found the calm voice extremely irritating. He had never liked Dascon. He knew, somewhere inside him, that Dascon was wrong. He was half-convinced that the team sent out to find out why the Delta contingent had disappeared or died would meet exactly the same fate, but he dared not make such a prediction out loud, in case it should be accurate.
He knew, also, by the same mysterious means, that the Children of the Voice could read his mind, and therefore anticipate his actions. It was the only explanation that made sense to him of the fact that the Underworlders were obviously not frightened of him.
He felt—to use the words of his own ironic simile—like a rat in a trap.
18.
There was a single searchlight burning, its beam pointing diagonally upward, like a finger of light. Near to the ground the beam was clear-cut, sharply defined by virtue of the dust that floated in the air. Higher up, it became dissipated, and ultimately lost. The roof of the world was too far away for a circle of reflected light to show upon its dark face.
Iorga knew when he was still a good distance away that the men from Heaven were all dead. There was no sound at all—no clink of metal against metal. Nothing moved in or around the vehicles. Such stillness could only mean death.
There had been a dozen vehicles in the Delta contingent of Jacob Germont’s invasion force. They were huddled together in two lines of six, nose to tail. All the lights were dead except for the one lonely beam.
“Stay here,” said Iorga. “Something bad. Something evil.”
Nita looked around, at the bones of the city, beslimed with what had once been the forest, now decaying and putrefying. She shivered. She had never before been in the presence of su
ch death—such all-consuming blight. She assumed that the death of the Heaven-sent was part and parcel of the death of the forest, and she could find no rationality in it, no meaning.
While Iorga went forward, Huldi and Nita hung back, crouching close together in the star-shadow of a crumbling wall.
The hellkin moved slowly, with the gun in his hands. He had faith in the gun, which had come from Heaven and must therefore be an answer to all possible perils, but he was cautious nevertheless. He did not want to use the weapon.
As he came closer, he saw that the vehicles were no longer tightly sealed. The plastic windows in the front and in the side were gone—removed quite cleanly and totally. Then he noticed the tires. He recalled the truck which had been rendered useless by the landslip. It had had six wheels, all bearing massive black tires—gigantic things, four feet in diameter. The tires of these trucks had lost both shape and size—they had been partially dissolved and were still in the process of being dissolved. On the surface of the plastic mess was a thin silver sheen. Patches of the sheen were on the road, and on the blighted plant tissue which still decked the roadside structures.
When he came closer still, he could see that the interior of the lead vehicles was also covered with the thin slime. In the back of the cockpit of one of them there had been a man attending a gun. He was now a skeleton, but a skeleton which shone, glittering with soft reflected light, perhaps even giving out some light of its own: a bioluminescent glow.
They could not have noticed the invasion. It had come upon them while they rested, perhaps while most of them slept. A living fluid, it had eaten its way into the vehicles, unable to affect the metal but easily digesting the plastics. It had digested everything soft. Silently and painlessly, it had dissolved the men from Heaven.
Iorga realized that the blight which was laying waste the forest was not the agent which had brought death to the convoy. It occurred to him while he stood and looked that what had happened was reciprocal. The men from Heaven had brought the blight which destroyed the plants. The protoplasmic predator which lived on the plants had moved, instead, to the invaders and their vehicles. Poison—the strongest poison—had destroyed them in a matter of hours. Against a liquid life-form with such corrosive power they had no conceivable defense.
Iorga backed away, and returned to his companions.
“We must move,” he said. “Quickly. We must escape the region of the blight, or we will die with the forest. We must not eat, or sleep, or be still.”
“Everything is dying,” said Huldi. The note of fatalism in her voice suggested that she had no faith in her ability to except herself from the condition.
“We must go quickly,” said Iorga.
They went quickly, and carefully. As they passed by the stricken vehicles, they trod with great care, avoiding the silver gel wherever they could see it. They did not run, but they moved swiftly, and when they were tired they continued to move.
Eventually, they felt the pressure of time building up inside them. They needed rest, they needed food and water, but they dared not stop while everything around them was dead or dying. Their minds became confused, and the seconds slowed to become painful. Many hours passed—and, for once, they were conscious of their passing—before they began to outdistance the spread of the viruses that contingent Delta had seeded before meeting its death. But they did, eventually, come once again into land that was free of the blight.
They continued to follow the road of stars, and death followed them, at its own pace.
19.
If the Euchronian Plan, in all its languid majesty, may be considered as a sequence of moves in a game of Hoh, then the i-minus project may be seen as a crucial ploy within the overall strategy: an attempt to “promote” the pieces with which the game was played, an attempt to force human evolution in a calculated manner.
Euchronian history, as represented to the citizens of the Millennium, depicted the Plan triumphant and the commitment of the people to it as absolute. The reality had been somewhat different. The builders had never been happy under the Plan. History admitted that—it was not the purpose of the builders to be happy, but to build so that their descendants should inherit the promised land. Where history evaded the truth was in its suggestion that the builders were always content to be unhappy, to suffer hardship, to give over their entire lives to the great work. They were not. Their willingness to devote themselves entirely to the Plan was perhaps never absent, but it was also never constant. The Movement had its overt rebels, and even within the most devout believers there sheltered doubts, and momentary revolts against the tyranny of the Plan. How could it have been otherwise?
In order that the Plan should not falter, that it should be certain of successful completion, the Euchronians had found themselves required to encourage commitment, and finally to compel it. They found human nature to be against them, and they determined to change human nature. The world which was to be the end-point of the Euchronian Plan had to be worthy of its builders, but its builders also had to be worthy of the world they were to create.
The aim of the Euchronian Movement was education. It wanted to teach its people to be perfect Euchronians. But somehow, the people always seemed to learn different priorities, different standards and different attitudes to stand beside those taught by Euchronia and conflict with them.
The Euchronian psychologists decided that the extra educational input was somehow innate. They theorized that the instinctive programming of the individual was against them. They came to believe that while men were asleep and dreaming, while the programs of the mind were being re played, rehearsed and continually readjusted, the social conditioning which they sought to impose was being infected by instinctive programming and weakened or subverted. To combat this, they designed the i-minus agent—a selective genetic inhibitor which prevented all innate input into dreaming. The programs which were replayed in the dreams of Euchronia’s citizens were those supplied by Euchronia. Theoretically, the psychologists decided, this should lead to perfect social adjustment and effective education.
They were half-right. The instinctive input was muted. But the external input could not be completely unified. The undercurrents of dissatisfaction, of dissent, of rebellion, were sustained—not by constant instinctive reinforcement but simply because of their presence in the social reality at the commencement of the project. The plurality of opinions and the multiplicity of ideas could not be destroyed by the i-minus agent.
But the i-minus agent, administered in secret to all of Euchronia’s citizens, did what was required of it—it ensured the safety of the Plan and the Movement until the completion of the platform and the declaration of the Millennium. The pieces in the game of Hoh were changed, and their inner life was significantly affected. The children of Euchronia did not become children of Reason, but they were very much the children of Intellect. Perhaps for the first time, civilized men broke free from their animal origins, from the evolutionary legacy of mind. They freed themselves from their nightmares.
Then the nightmares came back.
Joth Magner, by escaping into the Underworld where he ate food and drank water which were both innocent of the i-minus agent, recovered the old input—the instinctive input preserved genetically through the relatively few generations which had passed since the beginning of the project. Other men, however, found a new input—a telepathic input receptive to radiation broadcast by the Children of the Voice, or their Souls. Carl Magner was the first, but—at least potentially—there had been many more. The blast of radiation accompanying Camlak’s translocation from his own space into the parallel space where the Gray Souls lived had activated that input in thousands of brains, perhaps millions, in both the Overworld and the Underworld.
The i-minus project was wrecked. The “promotion” of the pieces in the game of Hoh was rendered meaningless. A new evolution was taking place.
PART 3
20.
Heres could not help staring at Sisyr’s fingers
. He felt a lump in his throat, and there seemed to be an incipient tremor welling up inside him. He had to hold himself rigid, and he knew that if his concentration relaxed for a moment some part of him—perhaps his hands—would begin to shake uncontrollably.
The room was featureless. No part of the cybernet extended herein, neither sensors nor receptors. The walls enclosed nothing but empty space. It was deep within the plexus, but in a real sense it was “outside”—beyond the host-machine, a hole in the artificial organism. There was a heavy chair, to which Sisyr was secured by steel manacles. There were men on either side of him. Confronting him were Heres, Luel Dascon and Acheron Spiro. Heres was in control. Only Heres knew what was happening.
Dascon had never seen the alien before. He had never thought about him. He considered the alien a kind of semi-mythical creature, in whose existence he had never quite been able to bring himself to believe. He found Sisyr rather repulsive.
Spiro found the alien frightening. The concept of an immortal creature was, to him, a rather frightening one in itself. Spiro feared death and disease and injury, just as Heres did, and felt an overwhelming bitterness when forced to contemplate the reality of a creature to whom these things meant nothing. Like Heres, Spiro was apprehensive, but not for the same reasons.
“I have considered the demands which we have to make,” said Heres. “In the end, I decided that there are two—only two—which we must put to you. Firstly, you must tell us how to protect our minds against any further invasion of the kind which we have once experienced. Secondly, you must tell us how we can destroy the Underworld in the minimum possible time. We must have a date that we can publish, and a method we can be sure of. There must be no more deaths in the Underworld.”
Sisyr remained silent. Not a muscle in his face moved in the slightest. A minute dragged by.
“Well?” said Heres.
A Glimpse of Infinity Page 7