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

by Brian Stableford

  The soft substance resisted the bite of the blade for a second or two, then yielded. Once cut, the tissue tore easily, and Nita dragged her blade down in a great arc, then brought it up again to slash sideways, rending the skin of the barrier so that the slit became a yawning hole.

  She had no way of knowing how thick the barrier might be, or what lay beyond it, but she had no sooner opened an access when she shoved herself through it. The rubbery tegument through which she had cut was no more than a containing membrane. Beyond it was a loose liquid substance which filled the corridor with foam. It was like walking into a mass of soap bubbles. As she waved her arms before her face, trying to clear a space from which she could breathe, her feet slipped, and she stumbled. The steps were wet, and swarming with vermiform creatures. She fell forward, catching herself on her hands, and the hands, too, crushed the wriggling things. They were several inches long, and three or four in girth, and they were very soft. Wherever her weight fell upon them they burst into liquid slime.

  There was air enough in the foam for her to breathe, though it smelled rank, and as she tried to suck it in her mouth filled with the bubble fluid. Its taste was not bitter, but she had to cough to stop the liquid following the air into her lungs. Desperately, she clambered to her feet, and staggered on through the froth, squashing the larvae to death as she did so. Her passage would probably result in the destruction of the whole nest, in any case, as the gaps she had made in the protective membrane would allow predators to come in and feed on the succulent, but helpless, creatures.

  Within seconds, she was at the second curtain, and again her small weapon was already hacking at the air as she reached it. Her movements were frenzied as she pulled and tore a way through and into the corridor beyond, where the air was once more dry and dust-laden. Still coughing, she did not pause for an instant, but continued to scramble her way up the overgrown steps with all possible speed.

  Her skin and clothing were wet, her feet and hands be-mired with the soft protoplasm of the crushed larvae. There was not an inch of her skin which did not seem to have been tainted in some way by this colossal organism through whose bowels she ran. All the great building seemed to her to be a single entity—a gigantic corpse in which parasites ran wild. All the worms and the insects and the multitudinous algae and fungi which competed to fill up every chamber, use up every surface, seemed to her akin to the tiny organisms which swarm over every corpse, inside and out, greedy for every last vestige of its decaying substance. And she, with them, felt herself reduced in size to a mere insect, something well-nigh invisible, almost unreal.

  Without sight, she could have no real idea of the size and nature of things. There was only touch and smell and hearing, and what these told her was that she was swallowed up by this gigantic creature, that she was one with the cockroaches scrabbling at the walls around her and one with the maggots in their balls of spittle and one with the slithering worms.

  Without sight, there was nothing to tell her that she was human.

  Living in the moment, as she did, with past and future submerged in the subconscious continuity of her life, she was totally subject to unreasoning panic. Once in the grip of the compulsion to run, to surrender everything in flight, she was completely captive. Her brain ceased to think, and merely let her act.

  She was no longer a creature of choice, a thinking being, but only a thing of arms and legs, with a single claw of animal bone.

  She drove herself upwards.

  Up and up.

  A mere handful of compound eyes followed—or tried to follow—the direction of her flight. Most of the creatures who made the staircase—the spinal column of the concrete corpse—their home had no eyes at all. Only the fugitives, the creatures who crept in from outside to shelter and hide, had eyes. There were not many of them. Few sighted creatures will voluntarily venture into a blind world. It is an adaptation which is almost invariably permanent. An organism which is temporarily blind is at a great disadvantage.

  And so a million vibrating membranes recorded her coughing and the scuffling of her feet. The smell of her was heavy in the air with her sweating and her fast breath, and the warmth of her, too, was there for the feeling. The creatures of the darkness were very much aware of her as she scuttled through the lacunae of their world.

  And they reacted. The heat of her flesh drew them. Where she had passed by, her essence lingered in the thick air, an irresistible bait. She ran so fast that she did not signal her coming very far in advance, but every time she passed from one level to the next she sucked something out of the caverns into the zigzag column behind her. They scratched the stairs and they rustled and clicked, but the sound of their hurry meant nothing to Nita, who was simply running.

  Up and up.

  The whole collective organism which had grown on the bones of the great tower could feel her, like a crumb stuck in a gullet, an indigestible fragment of gristle alarming an intestine...the kind of thing which, in a human, might begin a nightmare...just as rats in the walls may haunt a home. The multidimensional creature was, in its way, conscious of her. It knew her. Impassively, it gathered itself around her and contained her.

  She was very tiny.

  As Nita’s mental inertia carried her up and up, and began to relax while the panic ebbed away, sensory impressions of a vague character began to seep into her consciousness again. Her mind lingered in the fringes of wakefulness. She sensed the organism almost as it sensed her. She sensed the whole being as a unit, as a crouching beast.

  She had no destination. There was no meaning in her frenetic action. She had lost the past and the future was a blank wall pressing against her face, in which there was no moment save the one where she was trapped. Time was not passing. Nothing changed, everything was still, constant. The furious effort by which she hurled herself along and up was nothing—merely a steady leakage of energy from her system. As though her lifeblood was flowing steadily away through an open wound, pumped out pulse by pulse with the beating of her faithful heart.

  But she went higher, and still higher. Ultimately, unless the edifice extended forever...even beyond the Face of Heaven, she had to reach the top.

  43.

  In the meantime, Iorga’s situation was not very different. She moved, and he lay still. Otherwise....

  His heart beat steadily, and the blood leaked slowly away from his abdomen. Very slowly, mingling as it ran with the acid juices of his stomach, which was ruptured.

  He hovered on the borderline between consciousness and unconsciousness. He was not wholly aware of the insects which settled on his skin and crawled into the crevices of his clothing. In time, they would use him up: suck out his juices and lay their eggs by the million in his rotting flesh, but for now they were waiting, letting him die in his own time. However, while his awareness of reality was slight, his mind was still active and there was a strange clarity in his thoughts, a definition about his ideas and images which was unusual. He felt little enough pain, though he knew that it would be a brief respite before the burning in his belly as his lights began to dissolve. That would come, in its own time, and dragging death somewhere behind it.

  The gun was in his hand, and it would not have been beyond his power to raise its barrel into his mouth and fire through his brain, but he really could not remember whether there was a bullet left. In any case, the mental image which he still carried of Randal Harkanter’s head exploding stood between himself and any such action. The pain would mean little enough to him when it came, and he was content to live with it, for a little while.

  He felt that he was dying rather easily.

  He knew, somehow, that it should not have been so simple. A couple of cuts with a rough-hewn knife wielded by a savage should not be sufficient to destroy a man like himself. He felt that if the need were more urgent he could shrug off this mortal lassitude, and bring life back into himself by the energy of will. He felt that he still had the power to refuse death. This once, and perhaps several times more. But t
hat power was blocked by an overwhelming indifference—a sense of loss. The creative force that might bring to bear the effort of will and the power of life was not there. The need to create was missing.

  If Iorga had been an animal, he would have crawled away, and if the predators had not taken advantage of his weakness, he would have survived. There is nothing in an animal except that kind of need.

  But Iorga was a man, and between himself and the outside world there was a mind whose decisions were taken according to a whole network of needs and systems. Iorga remembered Aelite, and a long struggle in the Swithering Waste to save her from the cloak-fungus which had grown on her like a cancer. He had that image clear in his mind, and at the same time there were others. The stars in the limitless sky of the Overworld. The blight crawling slowly through the blackland.

  There was no doubt in his mind that Nita and Huldi were dead. Intellectually, there had to be doubt, but in his feelings there was none. He felt that it was ended, and so it was.

  His life had been emptied of all that it contained, and opened to things it could not and would not contain. And so Iorga allowed himself to die.

  44.

  Nita, disgorged by a circular aperture that growth-upon-growth of fungus had not managed to close in thousands of years, stood on flat roof, in the middle of a metal-railed arena, with a hundred thousand ghost-moths startled into the fluttering flight of clamoring alarm making a living halo about the crown of the tower. Likewise, a hundred thousand thoughts hovered in the margins of her startled consciousness. The running was finished, the panic dead, and while her heart roared and rattled in a futile attempt to pay back the energy debt owed by her muscles in her limbs, she felt a sudden tremendous sense of presence. Aliveness surged inside her like sunlight.

  She had never been so close to the stars. Not one of her ancestors, back to the beginning of consciousness, nor their cousins, had ever come so close to the bleak inner face of the world above, the higher world, the world which engulfed her own.

  From where she stood now the stars were each as large as the face of the moon which the heaven-born knew. And they shone so brilliantly white, so completely composed of pure radiance, so steady and so secure. There were ten, or twenty, drawn in a great flat arc across the sky whose black solidity was so close that she felt almost able to feel its metal coldness. Beyond those few, in either direction, they began to blur, to distort, until—ultimately—they faded into a thick line declining to either horizon. Even from a height such as this, she could see no end to the road of stars, in either direction. There was no dead end, and there was no marriage with a radiant horizon. The road of stars was simply swallowed up by the darkness in the maw of the curved world.

  She went to the rail, staggering like a corpse whose brain has somehow failed to understand the message of mortality carried by its servant nerves. She dropped the knife, the better to grip the metal cylinder with her tiny hands. She looked up, and out...and then down.

  She was seized by intense vertigo, and her mind was abruptly spun into a gyroscopic whirl. She tried to snatch herself back from the lip of the abyss, but her hands were convulsed, the ligaments frozen and unyielding, and she was sealed to the rail. She shut her eyes tight, and tried to gain control of the electrical turbulence in her brain.

  Only when she had fainted did her hands let go and leave her lying in the gutter, protected by the raised edge of the roof. She lived for a few moments with the giddy madness of herself before awareness began to return.

  She realized then that tiny clawed feet were swarming all over her, that a living wave had spilled out of the aperture in her wake as, once, she had seen a great worm evert its gut over one of her companions in the Swithering Waste. A living vomit, coppery in color, bright as though burnished in the brilliant light of the beautiful stars, was pouring on to her body, rushing at her from the mouth of the great beast.

  She tried to regain her feet, but it was hopeless.

  The centipedes clung to her, wrapped themselves around her limbs, her neck, dangled from her hair. They were innumerable, and many were several feet in length. They were eyeless, but their heads roamed ceaselessly, the jaws moving with frantic eagerness as the palps guided them to flesh into which they spewed their poison. They covered her, and they covered one another, the heads perpetually burrowing while the myriad legs and the long, segmented bodies writhed like gorgon’s hair around her.

  45.

  Julea was sitting up in bed, listening to music. On the opposite wall film of birds in flight filled an area some eight or ten feet square. The music and the film were unconnected—there was no attempt to synchronize or symbolize. The music was a somber symphony, muted and leisurely. The birds were mostly gulls, soaring on cliff-face updrafts. The combination might have been restful, almost sedative, but Joth found somehow that it conflicted with his mood. It annoyed rather than soothed. Looking at Julea, however, he was uncertain of its effect on her. She seemed completely diffident.

  She had hardly reacted when he had come into the room. It seemed to make no impression whatsoever on her state of mind. It was as if a stone were dropped into a viscous liquid: a brief stir of recognition, a turgid ripple of attention, and then relapse into quietude.

  Ravelvent had warned him in advance that it would not be easy. According to Ravelvent, Julea was emotionally bankrupt. She had stopped caring. She was content simply to live on, without investing anything of herself in anything which might happen or offer itself.

  “It’s settled now,” said Joth, gently. “It’s all over. I’m sorry it couldn’t end when you wanted it to end, but now it’s finished. There’s nothing more.”

  “No,” she said, absently. Her eyes were following a gull round and around in long, slow arcs.

  “At last,” said Joth, “they’re beginning to understand. They’re beginning to see the need to understand, and they’re beginning to want to understand. What my father wanted to do...it’s just beginning now.”

  “It was all because of him,” she said. “All of this. If only he’d taken his sleeping pills....” She laughed, faintly, at the irony.

  Joth was pleased to see the reaction.

  “And no one would have cared,” said Joth. “No one would have done anything...until the platform collapsed.”

  “In a thousand years...,” she murmured.

  “Our children’s children’s children,” said Joth. “But that’s what the Movement stood for. That’s what our civilization meant...the willingness of men to protect the future instead of the present, the surrender of personal objectives to the objectives of the race. Isn’t that what we were taught to believe in—isn’t that what they tried to force us to believe in? And we do believe it...but only in our heads. It’s only an idea, a rule of the game we play....”

  He paused. She said nothing—he had completely lost her attention again.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked her, his voice sharpening a little to cut into her isolation.

  “When?” she said, turning briefly to look at him again.

  “When you get out of bed,” said Joth. “And after that. What are you going to do...ever?”

  “Stay here,” she replied.

  “With Ravelvent?”

  “Abram,” she corrected him.

  He shrugged. “He has something against me. Not just what happened to you...there’s some other reason why he doesn’t like me. Do you know why?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she said: “What are you going to do?”

  “Work.”

  “In the Underworld?”

  “Sometimes. A great many people will have to work in the Underworld for periods of time. Maintenance of the platform’s supporting structures is only a part of it—the easy part. Contact with the people is something else. That will take time, and it won’t be easy.”

  “And that’s what you want to do?”

  “I want to work on the project which will grow out of what Burstone was doing. I wonder what happen
ed to Burstone...they questioned him, I know, but there was never any mention of a trial. I think they must have let him go. He might be useful to the new Hegemony.”

  “He tried to kill you.”

  Joth shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  The music finished, and for a few moments the gulls flew on in a dead, unnatural silence. Then Julea reached out to the selector panel beside her, and another piece began to play.

  Joth nodded toward the film, and said: “How long does this go on for?”

  She smiled, very slightly. “It’s synthesized,” she said. “A basic pattern, repeated with variations. Almost infinite. It can go on forever...just as long as we watch, and our children, and our children’s children....”

  Joth stared at the images of the birds. There seemed to be so many. It all seemed so real. But on the wall, it was only a pattern of light. With the faculties of the cybernet, there was no reason why a pattern of light should be any more than that. A computer simulation. No more limit to its scope than real gulls flying near real cliffs had limits to their scope. The gulls on the film, even though made of light, could dive for fish, could mate, could lay eggs, could fall prey to hawks. But why should they? They could fly forever, if they wanted to.

  “Are there others like that?” asked Joth. “Ones with people? Are there whole catalogues full of pattern-of-light people who can be put up on the screen and then set in motion forever, living pattern-of-light lives?”

  She shook her head. “It only works with things like gulls,” she said. “When it’s people, it becomes absurd.”

  “I wonder why,” he said, drily.

  He watched the wheeling birds in silence, for a few more minutes. He was quite fascinated.

  “I never saw anything like that before,” he said.

  “It’s always been available,” she told him. “The net can do so many things...you simply don’t realize.”

  “No.”

  The music suddenly swelled into a loud, dramatic sequence. For a moment, the music seemed to be carrying the birds. Then it died away again, but the birds were still there, drifting and darting on the unreal air currents.