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

by Brian Stableford

  All the plant flesh was gray. There were all shades, but no colors. This was a color-blind world. Even in the lands where the stars were clustered in the sky, Germont thought, the light would be dim enough to rob ordinary human vision of color perception and depth perception. But what about the men who lived here? Perhaps they could see colors. Perhaps not the same colors as the men of the Overworld.

  The most noticeable feature of the plant masses which dressed each of the broken hulks that had once been human habitations was their corporateness. Every one consisted of thousands—perhaps millions—of individuals, and the range of specific types was considerable. And yet all the grays and whites and blacks were blurred. The whole structure was amorphous. All the individual cups and caps, bulbs and wracks, squabs and sacs, were integrated, making use of one another, intertwining with one another, almost blending with one another. Germont knew that the apparent corporate identity was an illusion—that there must be fierce competition, interspecific and intraspecific, for every inch of support and space—but he was not sure that the illusion might not be more real than the reality. The competition was collaboration, of a kind. The vast tangle of shapes, crinose and petinated, aciform and orbicular, was—in some way—a unit. Out of the internal balance of the struggle for existence there was made some kind of entity. The whole forest, which might stretch for ten or fifty miles back on either side of the road, was a colossal life-system, a superorganism. The city had come to life. And the convoy—forty-five vehicles in single file carrying five hundred men to inoculate a whole world with death—was just a worm in its gut. A dangerous invader inside it, waiting to bite.

  Germont’s vehicle was air-tight and armored. Its six huge wheels could cope with virtually any terrain. It carried a flame-thrower and a machine gun in the turret where the searchlight was mounted. It was a sealed package containing a fragment of the Overworld. Nothing could possibly harm him, or any of his men. They could spew out poison to eat up the life of the Underworld’s cities, but the Underworld could do nothing to them.

  And yet Germont was afraid.

  He came down from the cockpit, seated himself in front of the miniature holoscreen at his communications console, and activated it. Some minutes passed before his call was answered. He did not know the woman who answered, and he did not ask her name. She represented the Movement, and that was identity enough so far as Germont was concerned.

  He gave exact details of the convoy’s position and confirmed that he was exactly on schedule.

  “The Delta contingent will remain in this locale,” he said. “They will make preliminary investigations in the morning. Preparations for experimental seeding will take place as per schedule. We have encountered no difficulties. The other three contingents will proceed to the rendezvous with Zuvara at nine A.M. We have seen no sign of any animal life-form. All equipment is functioning, and air filtration is one hundred percent effective. Water purification apparatus has not yet been tested in the field, but contingent Delta will report tomorrow.”

  The woman acknowledged the information, and Germont switched off. There was no conversation. The woman’s presence had been a formality—a concession to the principle of human involvement. The cybernet had recorded his report, and would have acted on it had any action been necessary. It would also have relayed any new instructions. The illusion of human communication was in some ways similar to the illusion of unity in the forest life-system. At the most basic level, no such communication was taking place. But the purpose of human communication was what gave the perfect arbitration of the cybernet a meaning.

  He went back into the belly of the vehicle, and lay on his bunk waiting for sleep. He found difficulty in relinquishing his tight hold on consciousness, and when he finally slept, he dreamed.

  More than once, during the long night, he awoke into his dreams. And what he found there frightened him.

  4.

  “Why didn’t you come back to the Overworld when you had the opportunity?” asked Rypeck.

  Joth put the tips of his fingers to his mouth and pressed his palms together while he contemplated the question.

  “The reasons are complicated,” he said, finally. “They didn’t seem so at the time, but I didn’t think about it much. I just did what I felt I ought to do. I suppose I worked out the reasons subconsciously—or perhaps I invented them later to explain myself. When I found the door in the metal wall, I found my father. He’d finally been compelled to look outside his nightmares, into the substance of his visions. He’d found a way into the world he wanted to save, just as I’d found a way out. We collided. It wasn’t really that much of a coincidence—the same things which moved him moved me, factors external to both of us.

  “He wasn’t quite dead when I found him, but he couldn’t do or say anything. He was still bleeding from a wound—a bullet wound. Finding him there just knocked the bottom out of the world. I was running home, and suddenly there was no home to run to. By then I had other priorities. Nita and Huldi were cut adrift, just as I was. When I buried my father I felt myself thrown back into their predicament. Drifting in the world, with no purpose—cut right out of the cloth of existence. Whether I came back or stayed, I’d have had to start all over again. I stayed, because that’s where I was. I stayed with them.

  “I fell ill again. I just didn’t have the constitution to live down there. They had to cut some parasites out of my back and the wound wouldn’t heal. I got worse. Then we met the hellkin. He joined us. His name was...is...Iorga.”

  Joth paused, expecting some reaction.

  “This is the...man...who killed Harkanter?” asked Ulicon, filling the pause.

  “He had to,” said Joth.

  “Let’s not leap forward now,” said Rypeck, with a hint of impatience in his voice. “We’ll leave the matter of judgment until the proper time. Tell us what happened.”

  “Iorga had seen Camlak, with another man from the village. We went back toward the wall. We found the other, but not Camlak. Camlak had been shot, by the man called Soron. He had come out into the open because Harkanter was trapped in a mud hole. He wanted to help. The other—Chemec—had been more cautious, and had stayed hidden. But Camlak didn’t think there was anything to be afraid of. That was my fault. It was because of me that Camlak wasn’t afraid. But they shot him.”

  “Harkanter claimed that he was attacked—that the rat had a knife.” This interjection came from Ulicon.

  Joth shook his head.

  “There was a misunderstanding,” said Rypeck.

  “I had to get him back,” said Joth, ignoring the remark. “It was up to me. He kept me alive in the village. But for him I’d be dead. If not for me, he wouldn’t have been at the wall. He wouldn’t have tried to help Harkanter. I came up to the Overworld to bring him back. I brought Iorga with me to help.”

  “Why come back in secret?” demanded Rypeck. “Why come to steal the rat? Why break into Harkanter’s house with guns?”

  “Do you honestly think,” said Joth, “that anyone would have listened to me? Was there any other way? The one thing I wanted to do, at that time, was free Camlak. I had no other purpose. I set about doing it in the only way it could be done—by stealth. We didn’t intend to kill anyone—we just wanted to take Camlak off Harkanter and back to the Underworld. When that was done, I intended to come back for the explanations. I had myself patched up by a doctor, and then Julea got Harkanter to open his door to us. It would have gone according to plan. We went down into the cellars. Camlak was in a cage. I saw him there. And then there was an explosion inside my head.”

  There was a brief silence. This was the climactic point. They all knew that this was the fulcrum of the whole matter, but none of them knew how to approach it.

  Eventually, it was Ulicon who spoke.

  “I was sitting in an armchair,” he said. “I was reading some printouts. It was as if I’d been stabbed in the back of my neck, the blade traveling upwards into my brain. I couldn’t hold the pages—I just
lost control of my hands and they shook like leaves in a high wind. My eyes were closed, but I was seeing. The light—or the illusion of light—was almost unbearably bright. Images flashed in an incoherent sequence. It was all too bright and too fast for me to make sense of it, but some of the images I could almost focus, and recall. What I saw was a confused conglomerate of visual memories. I looked—through someone or something else’s eyes—into the Underworld. I saw what your father saw. It took time, but I came to realize that what had happened to me—and hundreds of thousands of others—was no more than what had already happened to your father. With him, it took years; with us, less than a second. He, perhaps, saw through many pairs of eyes, had access to millions of memories. We saw through one pair of eyes one set of visual images.

  “For a while, when I found that these alien memories were imprinted in my mind, I feared that I would go mad. Perhaps, by the standards which were mine a few days ago, I am no longer sane. If so, that is true of fully half the members of our society. Our minds have been invaded. We have memories that are not our own. When we wake, we are constantly aware, but at least we are in control. When we sleep....

  “The citizens of Euchronia have no nightmares. That is the way it was intended to be. Euchronia was intended to be the answer to intellectual unrest. But that is no longer true. We now know that our minds are open. Perhaps we have opened them ourselves—we do not know. But in any case, our inner being can no longer be entirely our own. Our inner space is no longer delimited by the confines of our physical being. We wonder, now, if any one of us can speak of my self, my mind.

  “We now understand The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and why your father wrote it. We think that we understand how the alien ideas coming into his mind comingled and integrated with his own. We now have nightmares, as he did. Some of us—I don’t know how many—now catch, as he did, the leakage of other minds while we sleep. The mindblast has ripped away the shielding around our selves, and we are no longer secure.

  “We know that the focus of the blast was Harkanter’s house. We know that the being in the cage disappeared, and we can only believe that its disappearance was the cause of the blast. We live in desperate fear of this incessant pollution of ourselves which is coming from the Underworld. Our reflex action is to destroy—to obliterate the minds which are invading our personal space. What Eliot and I fear is that the destruction of the Underworld is not a real solution to the problem. We fear that the clock cannot be turned back, and that our minds are permanently altered. What we fear is that in destroying the Underworld we may destroy our chance to find a real answer. There are only two people in the world who might help us find such an answer. You are one. You must tell me everything that you know or suspect about what happened in Harkanter’s cellar.”

  “I thought that he’d destroyed himself,” said Joth, slowly. “I saw him—my eyes were actually upon him in the moment he disappeared. But Nita believes that he is alive. Elsewhere. She spoke about her soul—the festival I saw in the village was called the Communion of Souls. She said that during such a communion she had looked into other worlds, and that her father had gone into one. But the festival was just a ritual—it was a mime. Nothing happened that I was aware of. There must have been so much more—so much that I couldn’t begin to know.

  “Camlak’s memories came into their minds too, but they just accepted it. They weren’t even surprised. Perhaps it happens all the time, to them. But I don’t think so. I think there’s something about the way they live and think that we can never understand—something that is utterly different from us. And yet there’s so much that is the same....

  “I don’t know what happened. What you’ve said may all be true. It seems reasonable. But all I know is what you know—that Camlak’s memories have been blasted into my mind and your mind and many other minds. It could happen again. It probably will. Everything that you and the whole Movement fears could come true. Our minds might be dissolved inside our heads. But there’s one thing that you must consider. Nita and Chemec weren’t surprised. They knew what had happened. And if they, and the Children of the Voice as a whole, really know and understand what happened, then they can do it again. If you try to exterminate the Children of the Voice, then they may react as Camlak reacted when Harkanter put him in a cage. If you start a war with the people of the Underworld, you might lose. They can destroy you.”

  5.

  Abram Ravelvent was tired. Since he had become tangled in this affair through acquaintance with Carl Magner, it had taken years off his life. His initial interest had been mere curiosity—a typical fascination for the unusual. He had once found intellectual puzzles a source of delight. Now he was lost inside one. What had been a game had become a prison. Once, he had been able to choose where he would stand in the argument. He had committed his belief on the instruction of a whim. Now, he was completely bound up. He no longer dared to believe, or even to guess. But still people came to him with questions and arguments. He was still an “expert” to be consulted. People still looked to him for confirmation and correction. They asked nothing of him but certainty, because they so desperately wanted to know that someone, somewhere, had answers in his pocket.

  Even now, he kept up the sham. He would not, could not, bring himself to relinquish the pretense that had sustained him through so many years.

  But the persistent answering, when he knew no answers, made him very tired indeed.

  He stared at the image of Joel Dayling which hovered above his desk. Dayling looked equally tired. His expression was grim.

  “It’s no longer a matter of politics.” he was saying. “I no longer have to defeat Euchronia because Euchronia is dead. It died when its basic premise was overturned. There is no stable future. There is no secure present. It’s no longer a matter of Eupsychians and Euchronians, trying to topple Heres from his pedestal. We’re all in the same boat now, and the Movement is falling apart. Everyone has a voice now, not just the Movement. I’m not interested in getting Heres out of office now—I’m interested in saving the world, if it can be saved. What I want from you is an opinion, that’s all. Not your vote or your endorsement. I just want to know—can Heres destroy the Underworld? Is it possible?”

  Ravelvent didn’t know. He didn’t want to answer. But even while he hesitated and looked for an evasion, the rhetoric was trying to surface inside his skull. He fought, trying to keep perspective.

  “Not the way the world thinks,” he said. “Maybe this world could be destroyed with a snap of the fingers, but not the world down there. The people are used to thinking of the Overworld as one vast unit—one great big machine-wrapped family. That’s their idea of what a world is. But the Underworld is very different. With our resources, perhaps we could destroy it—destroy all the higher life-forms, at any rate. But not in years, or decades, or perhaps centuries. They don’t have a machine-host which can just be switched off. We’ll have to go into that world and spread our poisons and our diseases mile by mile. No one in Euchronia has any idea of the true size of the world. We have instant electronic presence—we can go anywhere in the world by sitting in front of a screen and pressing a switch. You and I are thousands of miles apart, and yet we’re face-to-face. No one understands how big the Underworld is. Not even Heres. He may destroy the Underworld, but I doubt it. You just can’t conceive of the magnitude of the task that he’s set himself.”

  “If what I’ve heard is true,” said Dayling, “Heres’ chief weapon—perhaps the only one that matters—is a virus. Rumor has it that this thing will lay waste the Underworld’s plant life utterly, and that it will spread like wildfire.”

  “I don’t know that I can comment on that,” said Ravelvent.

  “I’m not asking you to give away any secrets,” said the Eupsychian, slightly scornfully. “Even if you know any. I’m not fishing for information I can use in a whispering campaign. I want to know just what kind of a chance Heres’ present policy has of success. Treat the question hypothetically. What would b
e the limitations of such a virus? Can it be made, and if so, will it do what it has to?”

  Ravelvent hesitated, but then carried on. He saw no point at all in concealing the truth as he saw it.

  “What we know so far,” he said, “suggests that the Underworld life-system is, at primary production level, almost totally derived from fungal and algal forms native to the pre-Euchronian era. If these can be successfully attacked, the bottom is knocked out of virtually every food-chain that exists down there. If the fungoids and algoids can be destroyed, animal life will cease to be possible. What Heres’ scientists are trying to do is tailor a family of viruses to attack chemical structures unique to the kinds of cell which are found in the Underworld life-system, but not our own, which is derived from very different kinds of plant. This is not difficult. Fungi and algae survive in the Overworld as pests, and research to weed out such parasites using tailored viruses was going on as far back as the prehistoric ages. It was one of the first fields of research which the Movement reinstituted on the platform.

  “The problems involved are twofold. In the first instance, we have no idea as to the possible reactivity of the Underworld’s life-system, or its capacity for self-repair. We don’t know what degree of immunity to expect, and we don’t know how quickly the organisms in the Underworld will discover immunity. There is reason to believe that the Underworld’s entire ecosystem is in the tachytelic evolutionary phase, which means that its capacity to absorb and withstand attack of this kind could be high.

  “The second problem is transmission of the diseases. This will happen naturally, to some extent. In a given locale, the viruses will—as you put it—spread like wildfire. But introducing a disease into a life-system isn’t like lighting a fuse and waiting for an explosion. Tailored diseases have difficulty in spreading simply because there’s no reservoir of infection within the system as a whole. There is no such thing as an unlimited epidemic. These viruses are going to have to be assisted in their conquest by constant seeding over very wide areas. That will take a great deal of time and a tremendous level of production. A great deal of effort goes into the isolation of one gram of a crystalline virus. When we talk of destroying worlds, we talk in tons rather than grams.