The Face of Heaven. Brian Stableford

required to raise the platform, nor could they imagine where they were going to get the necessary power. But they began work anyhow.

      Even as a gesture, the project was a worthwhile endeavor, and even as a failure it would be quite some gesture. There was no shortage of manpower placed at the disposal of the Planners. The operation began at a thousand points all over the globe. The Movement gobbled up governments and nations, and took over a dispirited world by bloodless revolution. The whole human race, insofar as it was organized, became Euchronia. The rebels were neither expelled nor hated, but merely ignored, as though they had forfeited their humanity.

      Work went on, calmly, implacably. Progress was made. And the end remained quite patently impossible. It was not so much that the project was beyond all human ambition and ability, merely that time was so completely set against them. They had not the time to learn because they had not the time to live. The world could not support their effort. The exhausted world simply could not meet its deadlines.

      Sisyr’s starship arrived on Earth during the first century of the Plan. It was pure coincidence. Reason (cold equations) said that a technology which could build starships could also build a new world, and so Euchronia asked Sisyr for help. He considered the problem in all its aspects and finally declared that the job could be done and that he would take the responsibility on a contractual basis.

      He sent a message back to his own people asking for supplies and for technical assistance. The message took decades to cross the interstellar gulf, the supplies and assistance took centuries. In the meantime, Sisyr and several generations of Euchronians collaborated in revising the Plan, educating the labor force and discovering new potentials in the wasted lands of Earth. There might, at this point, have been a hypothetical choice between building the new world and reclaiming the old. If so, the commitment of the human race to Euchronia was such that no choice ever became obvious.

      Sisyr and a small army of helpers of his own kind supervised the construction of the platform over the next few thousand years. By the time it had grown to cover the Earth’s land surface, most of the aliens had gone back to the distant stars.

      Sisyr remained to coordinate the rebuilding of a viable civilization on that surface. He assisted in the modeling of the Earth’s new surface, he collaborated on the scheme of land management, and he provided designs for the entire pattern of the maintenance of life. The social system itself was designed by the Movement, but it was designed to fit the world and the environment which had been built largely to Sisyr’s specifications.

      In return for his services, Sisyr was allowed to make his home on the remade Earth. He remained isolated from the Euchronian community, but pledged to keep its laws. He built himself a palace and retired. Some eight or nine hundred years before the Euchronian Plan, in its final form, came to fruition Sisyr had ceased to take any active part in it. Starships called at Earth three or four times each century, but they called on Sisyr, not the people of Earth. The people of Earth had nothing at all to do with starships once all the necessary aid from the star-worlds had been delivered.

      Sisyr’s contribution to the Plan resulted in its successful completion in a little over eleven thousand years—a short time, comparatively speaking. The Euchronians, of course, claimed the triumph as their own—as, indeed, it was. Theirs had been the vision, theirs the labor, theirs the will. Sisyr had only lent them time which they needed badly.

      Sisyr, like the Underworld the Euchronians had left behind, remained known to every citizen. But only as a fact, and an irrelevant fact at that. He had no part in the mythology of the New World.

      The Euchronian Millennium was finally declared, and the people became free of their total obligation to the Plan. They were released, to enjoy its fruits, to make what they would of their new life. The Movement did not claim that the society it had designed was Utopian, but it did claim that it had Utopian potential. All that was needed to make perfection was the will of the people. The society was designed to be stable, but not sterile. Euchronia’s stability was dynamic stability. Neither perfect happiness nor perfect freedom was immediately on tap, but Euchronia did what it could, and waited—with casual optimism—for the reheated equations of life and death to work themselves out.

      The completion of the Plan had demanded—indeed, the whole philosophy of Euchronia had demanded—that while the Plan was incomplete the people should remain single-minded, working together to the same end. The Movement had helped single-mindedness along somewhat, by devious means which seemed to have excellent results. When the Millennium began, the hegemony of the Movement retained those same devious means in order to assist society in its first, difficult years of freedom and readjustment.

      The single most remarkable fact about Euchronia’s Millennium, about Euchronia itself and its leaders in particular, was the apparent blindness—willful blindness—exhibited with respect to the wider contexts of existence. They lived in a thin stratum, paying no heed whatsoever to the realms of Tartarus below, nor to the infinite universe above. But they lived in the early years of the Millennium in the heritage of eleven thousand years of narrow-mindedness, in which the only fragment of existence which mattered was that thin stratum. It took time for them even to begin to realize that such tight boundaries could not contain them.

      Chapter 6

      The strangers tried to communicate with the Old Man, but he was not interested in communication. He was not interested in their questions or in their reasons. He was interested primarily in showmanship. The aliens were merely the means to his end.

      He exposed himself to them, and they did not kill him. He laughed at them, and they were patently hurt by his laughter. Then he made silence fall, and he began to put his patience on show, knowing that the silent waiting would ultimately hurt the invaders as much as the laughter.

      Chemec knew that when the silence had stretched far enough, Yami would have the aliens killed. There was no possible question about that. Chemec saw no other way. Nor did the warriors at the wall. There were some inside who did see things another way, who might have wished that the demands upon Yami were not as they were. The readers, undoubtedly, saw the advantages implicit in making friends with the men from Heaven. They would have wished to do just that. But they knew as well as Yami did that life was simply not like that. There were ways of doing things which had been well tried.

      Outside the gate the boy Camlak probably had more sympathy with the readers’ point of view than he had with his father’s. He was studying statecraft carefully, but he was still at the stage when he thought that the Old Man was obeyed because it was simply right that others should obey him. He had no conception of the delicate matters of deciding fitness to rule and make decisions. Decisions came hard to Camlak because his judgment was always crowded with motives and reasons and possibilities. His head would have to be clear of all that before he was allowed to take Yami’s place.

      The silence which Yami had made grew old, and finally died.

      “I am Yami,” said the Old Man. They were the only words he spoke. He knew the value of words and the majesty of simplicity.

      The strangers had grown visibly uneasy once their initial attempts to kill the silence had faded away into muttering confusion and final bewilderment. When Yami spoke, they relaxed as if some wonderful thing had happened. They smiled beneath their macabre masks. One of them reached forward, his hand open as though he wished to take hold of Yami. The Old Man remained still, and stared the hand away as though he were outfacing a snake.

      The alien withdrew his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.

      The great gate opened again behind the sitting men. Evidently Yami had been playing a prepared part. The end had been decided before he had stepped out of the gate. The strangers sat, quietly and comfortably, seemingly content, while the young woman Myddal fetched bowls of warm liquid, one by one, and placed one in front of each of the aliens. Eventually, she gave the last bowl to Yami. It obviously contained something different because it was not steaming. The strangers saw this, and even though their minds were crippled they evidently suspected something. But the one who had called himself Ryan Magner sipped from his own bowl and signaled with his hand. The others did the same.

      Yami drained his bowl, and watched while his victims did