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

by Brian Stableford

  Suddenly—almost absurdly—Joth thought of Enzo Ulicon. He almost laughed, but then lost the humor of the juxtaposition of ideas as he realized why the image had come into his mind. Trying to put it into words, he drew Julea’s attention with a quick gesture of the hand.

  “For the last few days,” he said, speaking slowly, feeling his way, “I’ve been trying to convince Eliot Rypeck and Enzo Ulicon that they must stop the plan to destroy the Underworld. I talked to them endlessly, and in the end, I went through a kind of experiment, trying to make contact with someone or something in the Underworld, to prove that such a contact could be made, and was only an extension of the kind of thing which is already happening in our dreams.

  “When all that was over, Ulicon questioned me. I thought...I was convinced...that he was trying as hard as anyone possibly could to find out exactly what had happened, and how, and why. But when it was over...when he’d asked the questions he had to ask...he just switched off. Just like that. All of a sudden, he began talking and thinking about something quite different—Heres’ removal and Dayling’s takeover. And the way he talked, and what he said, suddenly seemed to me to be so utterly child-like, so completely detached from reality.

  “I suppose I might have seen the same thing a hundred times before, but that particular moment I was completely wrapped up in what I’d been trying to do, trying to understand and to remember and to evaluate. I thought he was, too. I thought that what we were saying and doing was vitally important. But it wasn’t—not to him. He just wasn’t involved with it...not really. When he wanted to, he could deliberately involve himself—throw himself into the problem—but he could just as easily disassociate himself again. And that, just at that moment, appalled me. I just couldn’t see how....

  “But I think I do, now. Perhaps. I think I may have been just the same, once, but what happened to me in the Underworld changed me. Permanently. It wiped out the person there used to be, and made a new one, and even coming back to the machine and the i-minus drug couldn’t change me back again.

  “You see, to Ulicon, reality is just patterns of light. It’s all superficial, all a matter of appearances. There’s no difference, so far as he’s concerned, between those gulls on the wall and real ones. The quality of his experience is precisely the same in either case. But I feel a difference. I don’t see it, in the film, but I feel it.

  “And...as you say...I can’t help feeling that when it’s people, it’s absurd.”

  She looked at him blankly. She had not even tried to follow the argument. It would have been no use if she had.

  “It’s just that...he doesn’t seem to live inside his head. He lives...inside the machine. The cybernet’s senses are more important than his own.”

  As the words drained away, he looked into her eyes. He tried to look through them, into her mind. He tried to see what she was thinking. But he couldn’t. Her life, like Ulicon’s, like Ravelvent’s, like all the rest, was contained in the four walls which enclosed her and the electronic brain which made them what they were.

  46.

  The roofs of gleaming silver, domed and arched, peaked and tented, stretched endlessly away into the distance. Sunlight glittered in windows scattered like flotsam over the rippled surface. In grooves and slits, and over threads and bridges, moved tiny vehicles. Like ants in a hill, they seemed integral parts of a great system, whose logic and strategy was too vast, too god-like, for the entities themselves even to suspect.

  The sim hovered near the spires of the western extreme of the complex, tinting them with red and casting dappled shadows in the furthest streets. The room in which Dayling stood was circular, its windows curved. It was easy to forget the direction of weight, provided only that he stood very still, and lost himself in the illusion that the world was tilting this way and that, the gleaming complex spinning like a great metal plate, with himself as its center, and his vantage its cockpit.

  Dayling was not afraid of falling. He was master of the illusion. He felt, in this particular moment, that he was master of the sky as of the city, and that the thin, languid clouds were his to command.

  This was a city—one of several cities on the face of the Earth—but it was a city where no one lived. Men worked here, in their thousands, each of them engaged in the basic task of instructing the machines, but the city was for and of machines. No one lived in cities—cities were held to be unfit for human habitation. Houses stood alone. The cities were the organs of the cybernet.

  This particular organ was the brain. It was the largest, the most complex, and the most vital. It was here, in Euchronia’s brain, that the personality of Euchronia was determined, that the thoughts of the human race happened, that the self-awareness of the human race was contained.

  Dayling looked out from the crown of Euchronia’s steel skull, and rejoiced in being, now—and perhaps for a long time to come—the idée fixe within that brain. The dominant idea...the delusion of grandeur.

  The mundane functions of the Euchronian organism went on as they had under Heres, and under the kingpins of a thousand other Euchronian councils. The hunger of the race was satiated, the thirst, the need to rest, to excrete, to receive occasional stimuli of excitation. Even the sense of identity which the brain of Euchronia possessed was very little affected. The body was the same, and the face. Its state of health was not changed.

  In a way, the alteration which had taken place was the most trivial possible. Only the very highest, most abstract functions of the brain and mind of Euchronia had been affected. What had taken place was a kind of religious conversion, a sudden reinvestment in a new set of ideas, a sudden rediscovery of purpose and ambition.

  But Dayling felt all the triumph, all the exultancy which such a conversion inevitably brings. He felt the power, and the pleasure. He felt the confidence of the newly faithful—the confidence that the great organism whose brain contained him was immortal, and ultimately meaningful.

  To him, these concepts went hand in hand, inseparable, just as they had to Heres, and to the first Euchronians. But Dayling, it will be remembered, was a mortal man. Like the patterns of electric discharge forever forming and decaying within his own brain, he was transient...a ghost in the machine.

  He was thinking, as he looked out over the glistening panorama of his power: “Now is the time to build, to clear away the sterile ideas of the Movement and build a real world...a world adapted to mankind...a perfect world. We have the instrument, if only we have the mind....”

  47.

  There was Festival in Cynabel, in the heartland of Shairn. More than twenty thousand people were in the town and the fields around: fields to which the blight had not yet come but which were stripped bare nevertheless. Even so, of twenty thousand people more than half were starving.

  Only a fraction of the vast assembly could gather before the long house for the Festival. Cynabel was a large town, by Shairan standards, but refugees from the north had swollen its numbers eightfold. Thousands more might be in the marshes and the bare hills, but they too would have to travel southward as the blight came.

  The crowd around the throne-stone had never been so vast nor so dense—and perhaps never so quiet. They waited anxiously, desperately, not so much for the confrontation with their Gray Souls, but because they were in dire need of guidance from the priests, from the wise men, from the strong men, and from the prophets. They had to be told what to do. Their lives—their whole way of life—was being eaten out from beneath them. In such a time, prophets are needed. They are more necessary than any other breed of men.

  The Shaira had confidence in their prophets, for they knew them to be more intimately in contact with the Gray Souls than other men, and they had implicit faith in their Souls.

  Chemec the crab stood close by the throne-stone, waiting. Of all men in Shairn he was, at this moment, the most important. His greatness had been thrust upon him by chance, by the Souls, and by the priests. He was a puppet to all these things, and he was the focal point of the des
tiny of Shairn.

  The drums beat with the slow, steady rhythm which all men knew. The beat was no louder, but it seemed, perhaps, a little larger. There was something massive in the way the sound swelled and spread about the town. The drummers were beside the long house, and in the shadow of the earthen wall. They were Cynabel’s drummers, but they were also Kerata’s and Myrmeleon’s, Asica’s and Fiera’s, and others from the north and the east. When the horns blew, they seemed to fill the air and the land with mournful crying—the wailing of Shairn.

  There was not one fire, but fifty, each confined within a ring of stone and huddled round with silent people. The embers burned red and spat sparks, and no flames danced in them. No smoke clouded the air.

  Only a fraction of the assembly possessed enough of the leaf-like fronds from which the pulp used in the festival derived. The small, lichenous plant had suffered from the blight as had everything else. For the rest—rather more than half—this would be a barren Festival in terms of spiritual comfort.

  The elders, the Chemec with them, stood with eyes closed, absorbing the rhythm of the drums and the strange cadence of the horns, reaching for the inner sight, as always, without the aid of the pulp. They would contact their Souls, because they had faith. The others, used to the crutch provided by the drug, would not.

  There was no clear space around the throne stone for the dance of the Star King. On this occasion, the ritual would be practiced in another fashion. There was to be no transfer of power, no death. This was to be a Festival without secular leaders. The robes which the priests wore had one sleeve black with sequins of silver, the other golden yellow. Each one, therefore, had taken into himself the roles of sun and stars.

  The pace of the drums grew slower and slower, and the metabolism of each of the listeners, attuned to the rhythm, began to slow down. The crying of the horns melted into the low beat, and became almost constant—the notes tortured, dragged into indefinite extension.

  When the moment finally came, Chemec was very calm inside himself. His senses were relaxed, and he was in a light trance. The power which took hold of his voice was not under his conscious control, but it was nevertheless his voice and not that of the Gray Soul within him. He knew what he had to say, and as long as it was said, it did not matter what power guided the words: his, or the Soul’s, or the elders’. The message was the same.

  He told the people that Shairn was dying. He told them that they must leave Shairn, and go west-of-south, into the lands where the Men Without Souls lived. They would not be welcome, and the journey would be hard, because the Men Without Souls were poor farmers, and lived mostly out of the wilds. The Children of the Voice, too, would have to live on the wild country, and they would have to fight, even to do that. The Ahriman horde which had passed through Shairn had also gone into that country, and it might be that the Shaira would have to face the Ahrima a second time.

  For the Children of the Voice, said Chemec, there would always be war, wherever they moved. But the Children of the Voice would win, because they would move together, in an army so vast as to be unconquerable. They would live like Ahrima, but they would not die so fast, because they had more to sustain them in life.

  He told them that this was not a matter of invasion. They could not and would not try to take the lands into which they moved in order to settle there. They would have to move on, and on, because the blight which killed Shairn would follow them wherever they went, and though they would stay ahead of its relentless march it would always be moving, always behind them.

  They must keep going, he said, while they died, and while their children died, and while their children’s children died. No one would see the end of the march, nor would their children.

  And then began the prophecy:

  Though Shairn died now, it would not die forever. Though all that lived was perishing of the blight, new life would spring up again. In time, the new life would spread throughout the land, and make it good again. So, too, would all the dead lands flower and flourish once again, in their turn.

  There would be a time, he promised, that the Children of the Voice would return to Shairn. They would not find their villages and their homes, but they would find new life throughout the land. Though no man living and listening would ever see his homeland again, the children of his children’s children’s children would return, and find it a new home, and make it once again the land called Shairn.

  Before then, there would be hardship. Though thousands would begin the journey, and tens of thousands, perhaps only hundreds would return. Some, no doubt, would be lost on the way, and might live on in other lands, as different people. But the true people of Shairn would be guided, not by Chemec, who must die, but by their Souls, and by the hero Camlak, killer of the Harrowhound, who had seen Heaven. The people of Shairn would be one people, and they would come home one people, in due time, no matter how many or how few lived, no matter how many or how few went their own way.

  Thus Chemec gave to the people of Shairn not only a purpose, a goal, and hope, but also an identity, and a unity. He was a prophet, and he gave them a saint: a dead hero, who lived nevertheless, who was both guardian and guide to the Shaira.

  Those who saw, during that Festival, their Gray Souls knew that what Chemec said was true. But even those who did not—those without the pulp or the inner strength—believed. When the great trek began, there was no one who stayed behind. A handful, perhaps, could have scraped a living out of what the blight left, might even have protected some tiny area from the blight, driving it out with fire as some of the northern villages had tried to do, with limited success. But no one chose to try. When the twenty thousand left Cynabel, and became thirty and forty thousand while they passed through the remaining villages and towns of Shairn, none stayed behind them. All followed, secure in the knowledge that one day, in some manner, the children of their children’s children’s children would bring the name of Shairn back to the reborn land.

  48.

  Having failed to make contact with Rafael Heres through the medium of the cybernet, Eliot Rypeck sat back in quiet contemplation. There was, he supposed, every reason why Heres should not be accepting calls, especially from himself.

  Rypeck knew full well that Heres would consider himself betrayed, and he was not at all sure that he did not agree. He had betrayed such trust as Heres had put in him. He had released not only the secret of the i-minus project, but also the news concerning the corrosion of the pillars. In so doing, Rypeck had dealt a death blow to the Euchronian Movement as a political monopoly. And in going further, committing himself to the new government under Dayling, he had—almost entirely by his own action—destroyed the Movement even as a political entity.

  And the pity of it all was that Eliot Rypeck still believed in Euchronianism. He still believed that there could be a Millennium, if only the right historical route could be discovered, and if only the right social evolution could take place. Rypeck still wanted everybody to win. But he had come to believe in Euchronia for all the people of Earth, not just Euchronia for the Euchronians. The strength of his faith had made him into a heretic, as strength of faith always tends to do.

  He could not help feeling a kind of relief at the fact that he had been unable to reach Heres. He had felt it his duty to try—to face the man he had deposed, and be accused—but he had not really known what he could say, or whether there was anything to be said at all. The gulf which had now opened up between himself and the ex-Hegemon was not something which could be healed, by words, by time, by any human action. Rypeck had smeared Heres’ image of the world, and nothing could cancel that.

  Rypeck felt sorry for Heres, and he also felt shame in himself. But he stood by what he had done. If, in time, it was proved to be a mistake, he would still stand by it. He did not lack trust in himself. For a moment, though, while he thought of Heres, he wished that all that had happened could be wiped out, cut away from the thread of history, and the clock turned back so that all the choices might b
e taken again, by wiser men.

  Then he put Heres out of his mind.

  Much later, he discovered that the reason he had failed to make contact was that Heres had hanged himself.

  49.

  When Warnet came back to see him a second time, Sisyr was feeling a great deal better in himself. The pain had been controlled, new growth was replacing the destroyed tissues.

  They had taken the bullets out of him, because they dared not leave them inside. The surgeons had been very much afraid, in performing the operation, that through ignorance they might kill the alien rather than helping him, but they had been even more afraid that the same result might accrue through inaction. Sisyr knew that what they had done was neither dangerous nor necessary, but he understood, in his mind, the conflict which must have taken place in their minds. He was grateful for their decision.

  He had been in pain for some considerable time, and he had slept deeply while much of the internal repair work had been carried out. But this was simply an incident that had to be lived through, and he had been content to live through it, allowing it to take the time it took without anxiety or any other kind of mental turmoil. Warnet had tried to talk to him before, and had found communication difficult. Now, however, all was well again...or becoming well again.

  “Burstone went into one of the Sanctuaries,” said Warnet. “If and when he decides to return, he will be isolated.”

  “It is not necessary,” replied the alien.

  “Why did he shoot you?”

  “I think,” said the alien, “that you might call it a lack of instinct. His mind was altered by changing circumstance, and it had no...capacity to steer. The action was a product of the distortion. It was futile, without meaning.”

  “He meant to kill you.”

  “Yes—but it does not matter.”

  Warnet stared for a while at the inhuman face, still finding it strange to his eyes, though he had looked into it so many times before.