A Vision of Hell. Brian Stableford

a road which might run with blood, and which might take him to his death. For no real reason. On the other hand, there was the Swithering Waste. No road was there, but perhaps some kind of destination. Nita had gone that way, with the man who had no face. Beyond the Waste was the metal wall, and beyond that...if there was a beyond. But that way was clouded with doubt no less than the road to Lehr. Whatever choice he made, there would only be more choices, until he was interrupted by death. There was no known way, now that Stalhelm was gone.

      Camlak felt the loneliness eating him from within.

      He went to find the map which had hung on the wall in the long house. It had been torn down and slashed into three pieces by a sword. He put the pieces together on the long table and adjusted the edges.

      Nita would have taken the man without a face and the girl Huldi over the hills called Anarek and Stiver, across the rocks at Scarmoon, and then into the Swithering Waste toward the Great Wall. Camlak tried to form an estimate of how far they would have gone, but the calculation defeated him. He had no way of measuring the time inside his head. If he could catch up with them while they were crossing Scarmoon, it would be easy enough to find them, but in the Waste it would need a miracle. The Waste was hundreds of miles across, and to the west it stretched to the dead cities and the very borders of the darklands—a vast expanse of poisoned shallows and jagged rock, completely overgrown and teeming with vermin—and worse. A death trap. No place to be wandering in search of other travelers. Once Nita was beyond Scarmoon, he would have virtually no chance of meeting her until the Wall. If that were so, then time now was not really of the essence.

      In the emotional battle between the father of the child and the Old Man of Stalhelm, the father really had little chance. That was the way love worked in the Underworld, at least in Shairn. Camlak needed to know what had happened to the people. He could not turn his back on the leadership which he had fought so hard to win. He had to know what happened on the road to Lehr, and he had to know by seeing. There was no other way.

      From the vantage on top of the skull-gate he could see as far as the canal ridge out toward Walgo but only as far as the hilltops in the southwest. The forested slopes cut off his view of Dossal Bog. The Ahrima and the rogue Truemen were well out of sight by now.

      As he went through the skull-gate and turned toward Lehr he reflected that Stalhelm had stood a long time in the farthest reaches of Shairn. By the tally of the gate the people had done well. But he knew that the dead get no credit in the tally of survival, and the contribution of the knitted skulls to the future of the Children of the Voice was purely negative. It was a symbol, not a magical guarantee. Yami’s head-taking ways had not, in the end. preserved Stalhelm forever, even if Yami had not lived to see its fall. Yami, as a good leader, had even known precisely when to die. If anyone remembered Stalhelm at all, they would remember Yami, and the brief hour in which Camlak had reigned would be forgotten as the blackest time in the town’s history. So much for three times lucky.

      Camlak left his home for the first and last time, and went into the Underworld.

      CHAPTER 3

      The history of the Overworld began, according to the Euchronian Movement, at the close of the second dark age (which they also called the age of psychosis). Naturally enough, there was no one to disagree with them. In point of fact, however, an unbiased observer—Sisyr, perhaps—might have traced the Overworld mentality much further back than that. At least a thousand years, and probably two. A devout Euchronian might shrug his shoulders, and point out that an odd millennium or two was little enough compared with the eleven thousand years of the Euchronian Plan (let alone the half a million years the Euchronians were prepared to spend if that were necessary), but a historian would have recognized the flaw in such a comparison of duration. The velocity of history is not uniform. “Progress” (a mythical concept dating back to prehistoric time) is not constant.

      However, it was certainly during the second dark age that the Movement was formed and the Plan was born. According to Euchronia, the Movement and the Plan saved the world. No one would disagree with that, either. By Euchronian standards, Euchronia had saved the world. It had discarded the old world and built a new one, on a platform which was mounted over every convenient acre of the old world’s land surface.

      In the beginning, the Plan had been ludicrous. The Euchronians had accepted that in those days (they denied it now), but they had pointed out with some justice that if ludicrous ambitions were all that were left, they were the only recourse of hope.

      Work on the Plan had been underway for several centuries when Sisyr’s starship arrived in the solar system. The Euchronians never actually found out why Sisyr came to Earth, although they did discover that his arrival at precisely the time when they needed him most was purely fortuitous. Whatever the reason, Sisyr was ready and willing to set it aside in order to provide Euchronia with the technical expertise and the scientific knowledge which they lacked. The margin between failure and success was undoubtedly filled by Sisyr. Without his intervention time would most definitely have run out for the dying Earth. As it was, the assistance of the alien and his home world, though slow to be provided (starships took centuries to cross the interstellar gulf between the two worlds) turned the tide.

      Euchronia was suitably grateful to Sisyr, but it also found it very convenient to forget him. The Movement had its pride, and it needed the credit more than he did. Sisyr went into quiet retirement somewhere on Earth, atop one of the mountains which projected its peak into the Overworld. He asked nothing other than a home and a quiet life. The Euchronians presumed that he would die one day and could then be obliterated entirely from the history of the Earth. They were wrong. While thousands of years rolled by, Sisyr showed not the slightest sign of dying. Earthly memories, however, were short, and Sisyr’s active contribution to the Plan ended long before the platform was complete and the world rebuilt upon it. The only real reminder of his existence was the fact that two or three times a century a star-ship would land, but the aliens were discreet, and they bothered no one except Sisyr.

      The platform was completed in six thousand years. The world in which the Euchronians were destined to live was finally pronounced complete after eleven thousand. The cities were finished, the cybernet which would provide the needs of the community was complete—a gargantuan mechanical beast for the humans to parasitize. The Euchronian Millennium was declared and the people settled down to enjoy it.

      They did not know how. They only knew why.

      Hundreds of generations of Euchronians had spent their entire lives laboring toward an end they knew they would never see. Billions of lives had been given up absolutely to the ideal of the Plan. For eleven thousand years, the purpose of life in Euchronia had been labor, unselfish and unrewarded: the infinitely protracted process of giving birth to a new existence. And when the birth was achieved....

      The purpose of life was lost.

      The Planners had anticipated this. They knew that there would have to be a period of adjustment, and they knew that period would be measured in centuries rather than in years. The Utopian potential of Euchronia’s Millennium would have to be carefully developed and brought to flower. It would take time and effort. The Planners, with the supreme optimism which had guided their forebears out of a ruined Earth and toward a promised land, led them to believe that it could and would be done. It had to be done—to justify the Plan. But when the Millennium came, they only knew what and why. They did not know how. This time, they could only rely on their own resources. They could not ask Sisyr for help.

      The people of Euchronia’s Millennium were living in a functionally designed Utopia, but they had problems. They were not Utopians. They were, in a sense, a society of misfits. Empirically maladjusted. The builders of a new world are ipso facto ill fitted to live in it. The mother cannot be expected to live the life of the child. Mothers who try destroy their children.

      Among the methods adopted by the Planners to facilitate the Plan was the i-minus effect—the chemical control of dreams. I-minus was calculated to exorcize instincts, so that social conditioning—functional social conditioning—might be made one hundred percent effective. It worked. It continued to work after the Millennium, but no one could tell whether the fact that it worked was useful or not. No one could judge the situation well enough to decide whether the