The Face of Heaven

by Brian Stableford

  They have stripped the old world to its bones, and now they are fighting desperately to consume as large a share as possible of the wastes of ours.

  “These are the children betrayed by their millions of ancestors. We are the children who were not betrayed, and who must not betray our own children. Our ancestors accepted responsibility for building a world, and we must accept the responsibility along with the world. It would be the most terrible of crimes to open our world to the forces of greed and destruction that destroyed the old.”

  Emerich knew that she had gone on too long, but he had allowed her to do so because she was obviously in good form. She had begun to repeat herself in the end, but she had rounded out her argument quickly enough. If she had run over her time she had only taken time he had already won from Magner. The stage was set now, the arguments were arrayed. The issues were assembled—sins of the fathers...Euchronian responsibilities and principles...justice and humanity....

  All Emerich had to do was keep the wheel spinning.

  “Clea,” he said, as the camera hesitated between the combatants, “used the term ‘betrayal.’ Don’t you think, Carl, that your plan to open the way between the worlds is such a betrayal? Isn’t it a betrayal, not only of everything your ancestors worked for, but of your own world, your own life, your own children?”

  Magner was tempted to say “no” and leave it at that. It was as simple as that, to him. But he knew that he could not afford it. He was backed up to the wall now, he had to hit back.

  “Clea spoke of men betraying their children and men betraying their ancestors,” he said. “I think that such arguments are themselves betrayals. They are traitors to reason and to humanity. Perhaps the men who did not choose to participate in the Euchronian Plan were selfish. But you cannot simply declare a man ‘selfish’ and write him out of the human race. There is more to a man than his lack of Euchronian belief. These men had a choice, and they took it, and we must recognize that it was not an easy choice, that their motives were probably complex, and that the fact they chose to stay with the old world rather than with the new does not make them villains, let alone subhumans of ‘an entirely different species.’

  “We must recognize that our knowledge of the early years of the Plan is imperfect, and that our understanding is even more imperfect. We live now in entirely different circumstances. We do not have the means by which we might judge these men, and it is wrong that we should attempt to do so. We have a new world now, and a new way of life. We have a responsibility to the men who worked to give us this new life—but we must not make this responsibility into idolatry. We have a responsibility to use the gifts which they have given us, to adapt our thinking to our new life. We are failing our ancestors if we accept our new world but stick with fanatical rigidity to old prejudices, and ways of thought developed in old contexts. We are new men now—the human race has made a second beginning. Then let us find a new and proper humanity—let us aspire to the justice that our ancestors lacked as well as to the sanity and the hope for the future which they possessed.

  “I say that we have no right whatsoever to condemn the men of the Underworld for the decisions made by their forefathers. But even if we had, would it not be just and reasonable to refuse to exercise that right? In the new world today we do not hate the men of the Underworld. Why do we ignore them? Why have we forgotten their world and their very existence? Is this not an attitude of guilt? You want me to speak about betrayal...well, then, I offer you this betrayal: the betrayal of the men on the ground by the men in the sky. The betrayal of our kindred, of our own humanity. Do we owe our loyalty to a cruel principle, or do we owe it to people?”

  “We owe our loyalty to one another,” said Clea, without waiting for Emerich. “Not to a principle of any kind, nor to an idea which is, in the final analysis, only a label. You say that we owe our loyalty to people, but what is ‘people’? Who are ‘people’? We cannot define a man by calling him a man. We must have an idea of humanity which is not simply a matter of shape or the ability to cross-breed. You yourself have talked of things which are ‘truly human.’ We all have some idea of the qualities which go to make up what we call ‘humanity.’ We cannot determine our loyalties as simply as you seem to think. You say that we condemn the people of the Underworld—I say that they stand condemned, and not through any of our doing. We can owe them nothing that we do not owe in greater measure to ourselves, and to our ancestors and descendants as far as the imagination can stretch. We must make a decision as to whom we might mean when we speak of ‘people.’ And we must also decide what we include in our concept of humanity.

  “I owe my loyalty to the men and women of the Euchronian Millennium—to the men and women who made it possible and to the men and women who will enjoy its fruits. I owe my loyalty to the whole human world fashioned by those same men and women and provided for them. I will do my utmost to protect that world from those who attack or oppose it—whether from without or from within. The fact that those assailants may be ‘people’ does not exempt them from all judgment of their actions. Sometimes, in matters of loyalty, one must choose between people. I have made my choice and I have made it rationally and justly. The new world must be protected by and on behalf of Euchronia’s citizens. The men in the Underworld, whether it is Hell or Heaven, must stay there. It is their world, to use as they will.”

  “And the sunlight?” said Magner. “Is the sunlight ours and ours alone? Do we own the Face of Heaven itself?”

  “We do,” said Clea Aron. “We have built a world upon which the Face of Heaven may smile. It is ours. The men of the Underworld chose the Face of their own Heaven. They chose darkness. It is theirs.”

  Magner drew breath. The camera was on him. Emerich made no move to intervene.

  “All that I say,” said Magner, “is that they should have that choice. They should be able to choose darkness, if they so wish. But they should also be able to choose light. As you have said, it was not one generation of men who were offered a choice by the Planners, but many. I say that we should still offer that choice to the men on the ground. Now, and to all future generations.”

  “But isn’t the choice you want to offer a different choice altogether?” This time it was Emerich who took up the point. “The choice which was offered by the Planners was the choice between building a world and parasitizing a world. No one offered them Heaven, but only the opportunity of working towards a Heaven for their children. You want to offer them the reward without the labor. That’s not the same choice at all, is it?”

  “It’s the choice that we face,” said Magner. “There are men in Heaven and men in Hell. We have the choice of delivering the men of the Underworld from their life of torment, or of condemning them to suffer it for eternity. They have no choice unless we choose to give it to them. It is true that their choice is not the choice that was offered to their ancestors, but neither is ours.”

  “In that case,” Emerich pointed out, “you can hardly argue that we should give the men on the ground the choice because the Planners did.”

  Magner shrugged. “I accept that entirely. We shouldn’t be arguing on the basis of what the Planners did or didn’t do. But it was by reference to the Planners that Clea was trying to justify her entire argument. My argument is based on the fact that in the Underworld there are men like ourselves, and that we should share what we have with them.”

  “There may be men,” said Clea, “but there are certainly no men like ourselves. I have already said that you cannot simply call the inhabitants of the old world ‘men’ and leave it at that. What kind of men are they that live in the ruins of a murdered world, subsisting on the waste of another? If men live like rats in a sewer, are they not more rats than men?”

  “You have a somewhat prettified concept of humanity,” snapped Magner, his voice sounding slightly unsteady for the first time. “If the new world fell apart tomorrow and pitched us all into this Hell the Euchronian Plan has created do you imagine that none of us cou
ld survive? Don’t you think that we would willingly take to dirt and decay and waste and the bare bones of a ruined world, if that were the price of survival? Don’t you think that in a matter of days the environment of the Underworld could have transformed you, or I, or Rafael Heres, or even Yvon Emerich into a scavenger, living like ‘a rat in a sewer?’ Man is an adaptable animal, Clea. What is necessary, he will do. Whatever is necessary.”

  “Perhaps,” said Clea, whose voice accepted the edge of hostility and magnified it in turning it back on Magner. “No doubt some of us might do perfectly well as citizens of the Underworld. You see the capacity for degeneration in all of us, and perhaps it is there, in all of us, to some degree. All the more reason, I would think, that we should not take these monster-men into our world. If the seeds of degeneracy are in us all, then the third dark age is not so distant from us as we might think. We must guard against it all the more watchfully.”

  “You say that man is an adaptable animal,” said Emerich, taking up the thread artfully and concentrating the assault on Magner, “and we must remember that the Underworld has been closed for a very long time. The men of the Underworld, therefore, are presumably adapted to it. You call the Underworld Hell—but do they? Why is the Underworld a Hell if man is so adaptable? If the men of the Underworld have adapted to darkness, wouldn’t it be cruelty to let the light shine into their dark world? Might not the sun be said to represent, from their viewpoint, the fires of Hell? In short, Carl, isn’t it true that the men of the Underworld no more want a doorway into our world than we want a doorway into theirs?”

  Emerich hammered out the questions in quick succession, with heavy emphasis on each one, and then just stopped, leaving Magner suspended in stiff silence. Magner, caught following the drift of Clea Aron’s argument, was suddenly stranded by confrontation with Emerich’s. The camera zoomed in on him and trapped him, caged his face in the well of sudden silence, closed in on his hesitation.

  All of a sudden, his uneasiness flared into fear. His head, blown up to three times natural size, was cut off at the shoulders and held in a million holoviewers all over the world. He could feel the tightness of the frame, the claustrophobia.

  “I said that man was adaptable,” said Magner, arranging his thoughts while he spoke, and speaking slowly to steal time from the insistent cameras. “No doubt the men of the Underworld are adapted to their way of life. But they are adapted for survival. They survive, and of course they have adapted to the demands of survival under such circumstances.... But that does not make the Underworld any less of a Hell. There is nothing in the Underworld except survival. They have life, but nothing more. We have so much more, so much more to offer, if we only would. We can offer them the opportunities of happiness, of creativity, of self-fulfillment—everything that was given to us by the endeavors of others.”

  “We can offer these things,” said Clea, levelly. “But they could not take them. They could not even want them.”

  Magner wanted to shout. He wanted to shout: “You cannot possibly know what they want.” But that was the one thing he dared not say. It was the one thing he had to avoid at all costs. Because it was true. Clea could not know, and nor could Emerich. And all they had to say was “Nor can you.” They had deliberately stayed clear of that point. They had waited for him, waited until he would have to stray on to it himself, or concede them the battle. There was no way out.

  Emerich came smoothly into the gap, once the point was established as theirs.

  “Isn’t it true,” said Emerich, “that we can’t offer these things? We live as we do because we are a stable society. Our needs are supplied because they are carefully balanced to match the supply. How could we conceive of absorbing millions of people into Euchronian society? There is no way. The population of the world stands only in the hundreds of millions. Less than half a billion. How many men are there in the world below? Ten million? Fifty? We could not absorb even five million, could we? Wouldn’t opening the Underworld destroy the society designed by the Euchronian Plan?”

  Magner went down before the sudden torrent, which was not so much question as accusation. There was no answer he could find. A simple “no” could not stand up against the odds. It would not even be true.

  “We have no right,” said Magner, “to deny the people of the Underworld the sight of the Face of Heaven.”

  “We must,” said Clea Aron.

  “You say that they are the descendants of a selfish and greedy people,” said Magner, trying to salvage something of the debate, though the moment was already past. “But we are a selfish and greedy people. We are a people who will not see, who are willfully blind to the world which still exists beneath our feet. We are the guilty, not they.”

  “Must we give away the world,” asked Emerich, “because you feel guilty?”

  “They survive down there without a world,” said Magner. “They would not destroy ours.”

  “Neither should we,” said Emerich.

  To that, Magner could say nothing. He had virtually nothing left to say. He could go back to the beginning, and try to plot a better course for the whole argument, but there was not the time for that. They had trapped him. They had beaten him.

  He had known, of course—since the very beginning—that the Overworld never would be opened, that they never would permit the men of the Underworld to accept a place in Heaven. He had tried to remind them that the wrecked world was still beneath their feet, that they could never leave it behind them, that it would always be with them, and that the people in torment would always return, one way or another, to haunt them.

  But he was not sure that he had done even that.

  Chapter 57

  During the early years of the Euchronian Millennium there were six species extant in the Underworld which may be said to have been sentient and intelligent to some degree. Three of these races were descended from pre-Euchronian Homo sapiens, three were not. How many of these races might be called “human” is, however, a matter of definition. Also dependent on definition is the matter of which races might be called “human.”

  The so-called True Men (otherwise known as the “Men Without Souls”) remained most similar to the parent stock, both genetically and culturally speaking. Physically, the True Men of the Underworld were not dissimilar to the men of the Overworld. It may be that interbreeding would still have been possible, and thus it could be argued that they remained the same species.

  The True Men had, of course, abandoned all pretensions to the type of civilization characteristic of the age of psychosis. They had not begun to develop any kind of civilization based on an alternative pattern. They lived in walled towns, and though intercourse between towns was fairly well-developed there was virtually no political organization above that of the towns. The True Men were basically hunters and gatherers, with little agriculture or mining, but they retained the bare bones of a commercial system designed for a rather different way of life. The True Men tended to dominate those lands in which there existed substantial relics of the prehistoric second dark age, and the scavenging activities which they organized contrived to draw a certain amount of useful material from these areas even at this late date. This method of “production” served to keep the primitive activities of trade alive, but the source of supply was dwindling continuously.

  The True Men retained literacy with the aid of material supplied by the Overworld, but the art fell under the complete control of a specialist sect, who thus became something of a power elite after the manner of priests or wizards.

  Because of their relatively slow generation time the species was in slow decline under the prevailing environmental pressure. As a species, they were in no danger of extinction, but their way of life was being forced to undergo steady change, and ultimately they would have to look for an alternative.

  A second species—or at least a subspecies—descended from prehistoric Homo sapiens was the Ahrima. Unlike the True Men the Ahrima had deliberately elected to remake their socia
l organization and their way of life. The Ahrima may be regarded as an “artificial” species to some extent, because their genetic isolation from the True Men was a matter of rigid social ordinance. There is little doubt that fertile offspring would still have resulted from a cross, had such a cross been possible. However, the willful isolation of the Ahriman gene pool made it inevitable that they should diverge at a faster rate from the genetic heritage of the parent stock.

  The Ahrima chose to become the predators par excellence of the Underworld. The founders of the species embraced a philosophy which declared that the only way to survive in such an ultimately rigorous environment was to give total loyalty to one well-defined group and none whatsoever to any other. The True Men and all other species of the Underworld thus became prey species for exploitation. The Ahrima were fighters, men and women alike, and they placed a very high priority on physical prowess, endurance, and the sheer power to survive. They did not practice specific rites of passage—such rituals were held to be false and ineffectual—but built into their whole way of life a rigor which ensured that the weak could not possibly survive. The total load on this species was socially increased, but it was also socially channeled to dispose of its random component. Owing to this socially promoted tachytely the Ahrima were slowly increasing fecundity and decreasing generation time. Simultaneously, however, they were putting such an intolerable pressure on the other major species of the Underworld that only two ultimate destinies were possible: either the remaining species would combine forces to obliterate the Ahrima entirely, or the Ahrima would wipe out their principal prey populations and have to reorder their own social organization.