A Glimpse of Infinity. Brian Stableford
on with the account of what happened to you,” suggested Rypeck. “We can return to these points later.”
Joth shrugged. “I don’t know how long I was ill,” he said, “or how long I stayed in the village afterwards. Without night and day, time became meaningless. The Underworld runs on subjective time—there are no clocks. From seconds to seasons, all intervals of time are the same to them. The only duration which means anything to them is the time it takes to get tired, or the time it takes to get hungry. Even the length of a man’s life is unimportant, because no one dies of old age—there’s no such thing as a lifespan. Everybody dies, when the time comes, by disease or violence.
“We—that is, the girl Huldi and I—watched one of their religious festivals—a communion of souls. I can’t pretend to understand it. I wish I did. At the time, I thought I had a certain insight. Now, I’m not sure.
“There was a ritual, in which Camlak played the part of the sun, while his father—who had been the leader of his people—personified night. Camlak killed his father—executed him according to ritual—and so became the king. But the strange thing is that the ritual mimicked a different world. In their world, there is no sun, and no night. They were acting out a mystery, something which had meaning only within another world—a world which, for them, fulfills all the functions of the supernatural.
“To the Children of the Voice, the Overworld is both Heaven and Hell. It is the universe outside their own, within which their lives are sealed, and whose forces give structure and purpose and meaning to their own lives. This is completely beyond the scope of my father’s book and its message. If my father, in his dreams, found some way of seeing into the Underworld, perhaps even into the minds of the people who live there, then he could not make use of what he saw. He could not understand. This makes nonsense of his ideas. We could not bring the people of the Underworld out into the light, because everything they are is identified with the darkness—it is not only their bodies which have adapted, but also their minds.
“You must realize that the inhabitants of the Underworld are not like us. They are alien. And yet they are men. In the Overworld we tend to have a very narrow view of humanity, and of life. We have learned to hate the men on the ground—the men who stayed on the ground in the distant past—because they did not think like Euchronians. Our history makes us hate, despite the hypocritical voice of our reason. But our history is out of date. Our attitudes are out of date. There is another world beneath our feet—and it is not the one we think it is. It is not the one my father wanted to save, and it is not the one Heres wants to destroy.”
Ulicon and Rypeck exchanged glances. Each suspected that Joth Magner was deranged—that his mind had been somehow twisted by his experiences. But each man was afraid of his own suspicion. Of the ten or twelve men close enough to Heres to influence the Hegemon’s thinking, only these two wanted to believe that the present course of action was wrong. Joth Magner was their one hope of finding a reason which could turn Euchronia aside.
The plain fact was that from top to bottom, the entire Euchronian Movement—the authentic voice of Euchronian society—was frightened. From the moment when rediscovery of the Underworld had been forced upon them by the publicity given to Carl Magner’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, fear had been building up in virtually every citizen of the new world. At first, the fear had been a source of stimulation, excitement in a world which lacked excitation. Magner’s absurd proposal to open the Overworld in order to allow the inhabitants of the surface to emerge into the daylight had been a fashionable distraction. But once revealed, the Underworld could not be forgotten. Magner had died for what he believed, and his death had underlined effectively the fact that something real was at stake—that the issue, once raised, could not be put away again. The rediscovery of the Underworld put all the old arguments into a new context.
Rafael Heres, with his position as Hegemon of the Movement under threat, had tried to make political capital out of Magner by making the Underworld a matter of Euchronian concern. Events had turned against him. He had tried to quell the fear by drawing its source into a second Euchronian plan, but the fear had run wild, and could not be contained. Deliberately fed by certain dissatisfied and delinquent elements in the Overworld, the Underworld had become such a bugbear that Heres had been forced to meet it head-on. Instead of recruiting it, he was committed to destroying it. To soothe the troubled mind of Euchronian society, he had undertaken to destroy a world. And Euchronia would accept nothing less. The people of the Overworld knew no way to live with uncertainty—ten thousand years of Euchronian history had made certain of that. If Heres and the Movement had no final answer, then the Movement was finished—and so, perhaps, was the Overworld. Euchronia had always claimed to be the ultimate answer. Now it had to defend its claim. Heres and the vast majority of his followers saw one answer and one only: the Underworld must be destroyed.
Rypeck and Ulicon, however, believed that there was no such simple answer. But if they were to find an alternative—or even a reason why the obvious answer was no answer at all—they had to know more about the world below the platform. Only Joth Magner could tell them. If anyone could.
3.
The convoy came to a halt at midnight. Midnight meant nothing on the road of stars, but Germont, inevitably, had carried the habits and the circadian rhythms of the Overworld with him into the realms of Tartarus.
He spoke into the microphone which connected him to the other vehicles. “We rest here for the night,” he said. “No one goes outside, for any reason. Alpha-three, Beta-seven and Delta-five will maintain all-night watch using searchlights. Note anything moving, report anything dangerous, keep the lights circling. Do not open fire without orders. That’s all.”
The driver of the vehicle turned to look down over his shoulder at the commander of the expeditionary force. “Shall I switch off the headlights?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Germont. “And douse the interior lighting as well. I’m coming up to take a look around with the searchlight.” He left the communications network and hauled himself up into the cockpit of the armored car, to take the seat beside the driver.
High above—he could not estimate how high—the single line of electric stars ran back and forth across the solid sky, becoming a yellow blur in the distance as it faded toward the horizon.
“It really was a road,” said the driver, quietly. “Ten thousand years ago. A long, straight highway running hundreds of miles. It’s covered now, but it hasn’t been wholly obliterated. It’s an easy ride—the wheels go through this stuff like a knife. We’re so heavy we must be running on the old surface itself.”
“It was a road,” confirmed Germont. “It’s a road in the Overworld, too. When the platform was Planned, certain basic patterns were retained. This was an important road. That must be why the Planners left it lighted—after a fashion. It must have been a major access right up to the sealing of the platform.”
They watched the white beam of the searchlight in the third vehicle back as it played across the terrain to the righthand side of the column. The Underworld had not reclaimed the road, but it had reclaimed the city. Even the flat, impermeable apron of the highway had been overgrown, but it had offered little enough encouragement to the fungoid life-forms which predominated here. It had been carpeted, and nothing more. But the old buildings had offered support and framework to an ecosystem which was not replete with self-supporting structures. The new life of the Underworld had found a use for cities, and it had taken over despite the poisons which often built up there. In time, even the atomic and chemical waste would be co-opted, somehow, into the cycles of life which were adapting to the corpses of civilization. The process was going on, even now. Poison is a temporary thing. It kills, but out of the death it causes there comes new life, ultimately.
This city had become a forest, its concrete bones substituting for the xylem skeletons which had been lost when the old world was condemned to darkness. All the trees were gone, but the forests simply moved into the cities. Life is never defeated—evolution simply changes gear, and the process of adaptation begins, and continues forever.
“It’s all so still,” said the driver. “Nothing moves at all.”
“There’s