A Glimpse of Infinity: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Three

by Brian Stableford

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  PART 4

  PART 5

  PART 6

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1977, 2013 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  I am greatly obliged to Heather Datta for her great kindness and consummate efficiency in scanning the text of the first edition of this novel, thus enabling me to get it back into print.

  PART 1

  1.

  In Euchronia, arrest was only a state of mind. There were no prisons. Limitation by confinement was quite unnecessary, because there was nowhere in the world that a man might hide. There was no way to keep secrets within the machine that was host to mankind. There was, of course, escape, but not within the world—only without. In Sanctuary, or in the Underworld, there was no arrest. But in Euchronia, once a man was labeled “arrested,” arrested he was. Joth Magner accepted his arrest, signifying that he wanted to cooperate to the full with those who had so designated him. He took up temporary residence in the headquarters of the Euchronian Movement, in order to make himself available for consultation and interrogation, face to face. There was no real need, because he would have been available anywhere in the world via the screens, but that was the way he wanted it. He wanted to force his physical presence upon the Councilors who wanted his information. He wanted to be free to use all the power of his personality in his arguments.

  Eliot Rypeck and Enzo Ulicon, who became his interrogators primarily because they were interested in hearing what he had to say, unlike the majority of their colleagues, were opposed to direct confrontation. They had adapted themselves, mind and body, to the mediation of machines.

  In addition, they found Joth physically repellent by virtue of the fact that his face was half-metal. Nevertheless, they concurred. They felt that what Joth knew was important, and they wanted to know.

  2.

  “Why did you decide to follow Burstone in the first place?” asked Rypeck.

  “I wanted to find out what happened to my brother. He knew about Burstone. When he went into the Underworld it was by the route that Burstone used.”

  “And what happened?”

  “I followed him down into the lowest levels. He used a cage attached to winding gear in order to go down from the floor of the Overworld to the surface. I waited for him to come back. When he left, I went down myself. I had to see. I hadn’t expected the lights—the stars—beneath the platform. But someone—maybe Burstone—wound the cage back up. I was trapped.” Joth fired these sentences quickly, wanting to race ahead, to get to the arguments he wanted to put, the information that was vital. But he knew that the whole story had to be told, in order to provide a context for his arguments. These people were not merely ignorant, but misled. They had to be guided to understanding. It could not be thrust upon them.

  “You don’t know what Burstone was doing in the Underworld?” put in Ulicon.

  “I know,” said Joth. “I didn’t see him, but I know. He was taking knives and tools and books, to give to the Underworlders.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Carry on,” said Rypeck. “What happened next?”

  “I panicked. I was suddenly completely afraid. Drowning in fear. Not logical. It was like stepping straight into a drug experience. Everything twisted in my mind. I couldn’t think, couldn’t even use my senses. I ran. Anywhere...nowhere. I ran. I fell, and when I got up I ran again. I lost contact with time. And then I ran straight into a man.”

  “Wait,” said Rypeck. “This is one thing that we must have clear. A man, you say. A human being.”

  “So far as I could tell,” said Joth, “he was as human as you or I. He was a savage, but he was a man. But there were others—chasing him, I think. He picked me up, and he made sure that they saw me. They were terrified, because of my face. He got away from them. But he wasn’t terrified—he knew what I was. That’s important. He knew that I was a man despite the face. He knew I came from the Overworld. You must realize that although he was a savage he wasn’t ignorant. He knew what he was doing when he used me as a scarecrow to buy him time.”

  “And the others?” prompted Rypeck.

  “This is the hard part,” said Joth. “They were men, too. But they weren’t like you or me. They were small and strange. Randal Harkanter had one in a cage, but that was wrong. What Harkanter had wasn’t an animal, it was a man.”

  “Soron said that it was a rat,” said Ulicon—not making an assertion, but putting the idea forward so that Joth had to react.

  “What’s a rat?” said Joth. “Have you ever seen one? Maybe they still exist—more likely they don’t. Soron has nothing on which to base his identification except information from the prehistoric past. His opinion means nothing.”

  “He’s an expert in his field,” said Ulicon mildly.

  “That’s nonsense,” Joth told him. “He’s an expert in a field that’s ten thousand years out of date. He knows nothing about life in the Underworld as it really is. Do you really think that a man can walk into a new world, armed with knowledge which pertains to circumstances as they were ten millennia ago, and make meaningful judgments about the nature of that world? Do you think that there is any way that Soron possibly could know anything?”

  “We take the point,” said Rypeck. “But what do you know? How can you contradict what Soron said?”

  “I lived with these people,” said Joth. “The warriors who picked me up took me back to their village. One of them took me into his house. They looked after me while I was convinced that I was dying. They talked to me. The man, Camlak, and his daughter Nita. There was a human girl there, too—Huldi.”

  “You are drawing a distinction between men and humans,” said Rypeck. “How?”

  “There’s no other way,” said Joth. “There’s no word we can apply to these people except men, even though they aren’t truly human. They aren’t animals. To call them ‘rats’ is to make a gross and dangerous error. They call themselves the Children of the Voice. They claim to have souls, and to be able to communicate with those souls on occasion. They speak English, although they call it Ingling. That is to say, it’s a form of English. It’s a language with many new words, and some words we’re familiar with have been abandoned. But they read books from the Overworld. They read them, and they make some use of what they read—when they can. What else can you call someone who reads the same books that you read, speaks the same language as you do, and cares for you when you’re sick? What else but a man. And yet they have gray fur. Their skulls are a strange and grotesque shape. Why should those things make a difference?”

  Rypeck coughed, and hesitated before speaking. “In your father’s book,” he said, tentatively, “there are references to the people of the Underworld. Which people did he mean?”

  Joth waved his hand—a brief, angry gesture. “He didn’t know. He had no possible way of knowing. If some of what he said was true, then it was inspiration or accident. But he didn’t know. You must understand that this has nothing to do with my father. He’s dead. He may have been the trigger which began all this, but now it’s something different. If you confuse what I have to say with what my father said, then we can’t possibly reach any kind of an understanding.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ulicon, “bu
t from our point of view what happened to your father is important. It could be vital. We need to know how your father knew what he did and why he thought what he did. You have no real idea of what happened when the rat or the man or whatever disappeared from Harkanter’s cage. You were there and you saw it, but it knocked you out. You were too close to the blast. That fearful burst of mental energy rocked half the world, and it must, in some way, be related to what your father experienced as a matter of course, in his dreams. We have to fit all the pieces of this jigsaw together, Joth—not just the ones you want to play.”

  Joth shook his head doubtfully.

  “Carry on with the account of what happened to you,” suggested Rypeck. “We can return to these points later.”

  Joth shrugged. “I don’t know how long I was ill,” he said, “or how long I stayed in the village afterwards. Without night and day, time became meaningless. The Underworld runs on subjective time—there are no clocks. From seconds to seasons, all intervals of time are the same to them. The only duration which means anything to them is the time it takes to get tired, or the time it takes to get hungry. Even the length of a man’s life is unimportant, because no one dies of old age—there’s no such thing as a lifespan. Everybody dies, when the time comes, by disease or violence.

  “We—that is, the girl Huldi and I—watched one of their religious festivals—a communion of souls. I can’t pretend to understand it. I wish I did. At the time, I thought I had a certain insight. Now, I’m not sure.

  “There was a ritual, in which Camlak played the part of the sun, while his father—who had been the leader of his people—personified night. Camlak killed his father—executed him according to ritual—and so became the king. But the strange thing is that the ritual mimicked a different world. In their world, there is no sun, and no night. They were acting out a mystery, something which had meaning only within another world—a world which, for them, fulfills all the functions of the supernatural.

  “To the Children of the Voice, the Overworld is both Heaven and Hell. It is the universe outside their own, within which their lives are sealed, and whose forces give structure and purpose and meaning to their own lives. This is completely beyond the scope of my father’s book and its message. If my father, in his dreams, found some way of seeing into the Underworld, perhaps even into the minds of the people who live there, then he could not make use of what he saw. He could not understand. This makes nonsense of his ideas. We could not bring the people of the Underworld out into the light, because everything they are is identified with the darkness—it is not only their bodies which have adapted, but also their minds.

  “You must realize that the inhabitants of the Underworld are not like us. They are alien. And yet they are men. In the Overworld we tend to have a very narrow view of humanity, and of life. We have learned to hate the men on the ground—the men who stayed on the ground in the distant past—because they did not think like Euchronians. Our history makes us hate, despite the hypocritical voice of our reason. But our history is out of date. Our attitudes are out of date. There is another world beneath our feet—and it is not the one we think it is. It is not the one my father wanted to save, and it is not the one Heres wants to destroy.”

  Ulicon and Rypeck exchanged glances. Each suspected that Joth Magner was deranged—that his mind had been somehow twisted by his experiences. But each man was afraid of his own suspicion. Of the ten or twelve men close enough to Heres to influence the Hegemon’s thinking, only these two wanted to believe that the present course of action was wrong. Joth Magner was their one hope of finding a reason which could turn Euchronia aside.

  The plain fact was that from top to bottom, the entire Euchronian Movement—the authentic voice of Euchronian society—was frightened. From the moment when rediscovery of the Underworld had been forced upon them by the publicity given to Carl Magner’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, fear had been building up in virtually every citizen of the new world. At first, the fear had been a source of stimulation, excitement in a world which lacked excitation. Magner’s absurd proposal to open the Overworld in order to allow the inhabitants of the surface to emerge into the daylight had been a fashionable distraction. But once revealed, the Underworld could not be forgotten. Magner had died for what he believed, and his death had underlined effectively the fact that something real was at stake—that the issue, once raised, could not be put away again. The rediscovery of the Underworld put all the old arguments into a new context.

  Rafael Heres, with his position as Hegemon of the Movement under threat, had tried to make political capital out of Magner by making the Underworld a matter of Euchronian concern. Events had turned against him. He had tried to quell the fear by drawing its source into a second Euchronian plan, but the fear had run wild, and could not be contained. Deliberately fed by certain dissatisfied and delinquent elements in the Overworld, the Underworld had become such a bugbear that Heres had been forced to meet it head-on. Instead of recruiting it, he was committed to destroying it. To soothe the troubled mind of Euchronian society, he had undertaken to destroy a world. And Euchronia would accept nothing less. The people of the Overworld knew no way to live with uncertainty—ten thousand years of Euchronian history had made certain of that. If Heres and the Movement had no final answer, then the Movement was finished—and so, perhaps, was the Overworld. Euchronia had always claimed to be the ultimate answer. Now it had to defend its claim. Heres and the vast majority of his followers saw one answer and one only: the Underworld must be destroyed.

  Rypeck and Ulicon, however, believed that there was no such simple answer. But if they were to find an alternative—or even a reason why the obvious answer was no answer at all—they had to know more about the world below the platform. Only Joth Magner could tell them. If anyone could.

  3.

  The convoy came to a halt at midnight. Midnight meant nothing on the road of stars, but Germont, inevitably, had carried the habits and the circadian rhythms of the Overworld with him into the realms of Tartarus.

  He spoke into the microphone which connected him to the other vehicles. “We rest here for the night,” he said. “No one goes outside, for any reason. Alpha-three, Beta-seven and Delta-five will maintain all-night watch using searchlights. Note anything moving, report anything dangerous, keep the lights circling. Do not open fire without orders. That’s all.”

  The driver of the vehicle turned to look down over his shoulder at the commander of the expeditionary force. “Shall I switch off the headlights?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Germont. “And douse the interior lighting as well. I’m coming up to take a look around with the searchlight.” He left the communications network and hauled himself up into the cockpit of the armored car, to take the seat beside the driver.

  High above—he could not estimate how high—the single line of electric stars ran back and forth across the solid sky, becoming a yellow blur in the distance as it faded toward the horizon.

  “It really was a road,” said the driver, quietly. “Ten thousand years ago. A long, straight highway running hundreds of miles. It’s covered now, but it hasn’t been wholly obliterated. It’s an easy ride—the wheels go through this stuff like a knife. We’re so heavy we must be running on the old surface itself.”

  “It was a road,” confirmed Germont. “It’s a road in the Overworld, too. When the platform was Planned, certain basic patterns were retained. This was an important road. That must be why the Planners left it lighted—after a fashion. It must have been a major access right up to the sealing of the platform.”

  They watched the white beam of the searchlight in the third vehicle back as it played across the terrain to the righthand side of the column. The Underworld had not reclaimed the road, but it had reclaimed the city. Even the flat, impermeable apron of the highway had been overgrown, but it had offered little enough encouragement to the fungoid life-forms which predominated here. It had been carpeted, and nothing more. But the old buildings had offered
support and framework to an ecosystem which was not replete with self-supporting structures. The new life of the Underworld had found a use for cities, and it had taken over despite the poisons which often built up there. In time, even the atomic and chemical waste would be co-opted, somehow, into the cycles of life which were adapting to the corpses of civilization. The process was going on, even now. Poison is a temporary thing. It kills, but out of the death it causes there comes new life, ultimately.

  This city had become a forest, its concrete bones substituting for the xylem skeletons which had been lost when the old world was condemned to darkness. All the trees were gone, but the forests simply moved into the cities. Life is never defeated—evolution simply changes gear, and the process of adaptation begins, and continues forever.

  “It’s all so still,” said the driver. “Nothing moves at all.”

  “There’s no wind,” said Germont. “Not here. There must be air currents down here, and fierce ones where the situation is right. But here the air’s quite dead. Stale.”

  “There are no animals,” said the driver. “None at all.”

  Germont shrugged. “They won’t wait for the light. They must have been able to hear the convoy for miles.”

  “But why would they run?” asked the driver. “They sure as hell haven’t learned to be afraid of armored trucks.”

  “They’d be afraid of the noise,” said Germont.

  The driver shook his head. “I don’t like it,” he said. “That line of lights in the sky, these great hulking masses of sponge on either side. It feels as though there’s something different about just here. It’s as if that stuff out there was full of things just sitting on either side of the road but staying clear. Watching us.”

  For a few moments, Germont didn’t reply. His eyes followed the cone of light swinging across the face of the forest. Then he said: “Get some sleep.”

  As the driver clambered down from the cockpit and moved back to the belly of the vehicle, where eight other men were waiting—resting, talking, peeping through the portholes, and trying to hold down the unease in their stomachs, Germont continued to follow the progress of the light.