A Glimpse of Infinity. 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, “but 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