A Vision of Hell. Brian Stableford

might be made. This exemplifies the confusion of the citizens of the Millennium. They were as helpless as newborn children. An infant society. Ignorant, yet not knowing of their ignorance; blind to the contexts of their existence, yet not knowing of their blindness.

      The society of Euchronia’s Millennium was vulnerable. Its vulnerability was exposed by Carl Magner, who rediscovered the Underworld in his nightmares. (How? There was no way of knowing.) Perhaps the rediscovery of the ruined Earth was the last thing the Euchronians needed. Perhaps, on the other hand, the rediscovery of the Hell which the Plan had left behind was the only way in which the people could come to terms with the Heaven it had built.

      Perhaps it would help them to rediscover themselves.

      CHAPTER 4

      Rafael Heres had to make a statement to the Euchronian Council. The pressure on him had grown, and he knew that the current of opinion which was flowing through the Council was set against him. But it had been so before, and he had survived. Usually he stirred up big enough waves to make countercurrents of his own to drown out the others. He had faith in himself now. He knew that the only significant opposition to him, in the past and the present, was Rypeck. He had always controlled Rypeck, and he was sure that he could hold him now.

      He opened his address by telling them that Carl Magner was dead. Some of them already knew, but to most it came as something of a shock. That a man should die was not uncommon, but that a man like Magner should die by assassination beside a public road was a strange and upsetting thing. That fact alone stilled the currents of hostility. It changed the game completely. Almost, if such a thing was conceivable in this day and age, it made it look as if the Magner affair might not be a game at all. (But even in games, pieces lose their lives.)

      Heres talked about Magner, who had somehow become so important that the Hegemon of the Euchronian Movement could deliver an obituary for him. Heres talked calmly about Magner’s background, and the tone of his voice not only expressed his own sympathy but went out into the multilink to grab sympathy from the listeners. He gave little attention to the tragedies which had marred Magner’s life, but simply by numbering them he made certain that everyone appreciated what a hard time the man had had.

      A less subtle man might have used the statement to build a case against Magner—to turn his public image into the effigy of a madman, preparatory to burying his memories and his ideas forever. But that was what many of them expected. That was what most of them already believed. Heres knew, as any leader knows, that it is dangerous to confirm what people already know. A leader should always be ahead, moving amid the ideas that people have not yet discovered. Magner’s death had changed the game, and Heres wanted to be the one to work out the new rules.

      It took Heres a little over an hour to make a martyr out of Magner. Instead of claiming that Magner’s experiences had made him mad, the Hegemon suggested that the pain and the anguish had lent Magner a keener insight into life than was possessed by the majority of the carefully cushioned citizens of Euchronia’s Millennium. He said, in fact, that Magner had become a visionary—a man who saw beyond the present and the legacies of the past to the realms of possibility and the legacies which ought to be put in hand for the future.

      “Before he was killed,” said Rafael Heres, “Carl Magner stood at the focus of a controversy which grew around him like a storm. Some of you may have seen the discussion which took place between Magner, Clea Aron and Yvon Emerich on the holographic network last night. The arguments there made only a beginning in searching out the implications of Magner’s theories, but they will have served to familiarize many of you with the fundamentals of the problem.

      “Carl Magner accused Euchronian society of a crime of omission in that the Movement has, at least since the Millennium, ignored and forgotten the world which still exists beneath us—the surface of the Earth from which our ancestors came. Magner wanted to remind us that the old world, from whose ashes the new one arose, was never totally consumed. He claimed that there are still men in the Underworld, living in the darkness because our world enjoys the sunlight that once was theirs. We know that the sunlight used to be ours too, and some of you would argue that we have merely preserved it while the men on the ground willfully forsook it. That may be, but as Carl Magner has tried to remind us, that was thousands of years ago. The men who live in the Underworld now are not responsible for the decisions of their forefathers.

      “I do not think that there can be any possible question about the actions of the Planners in the remote past. No one was denied the chance to make himself part of the Plan, from the moment that the Movement was founded to the moment when the last section of the platform cut off the last rays of sunlight from the last few acres of the derelict surface of the old world. No decision which we make today or in the future will reflect on the choices made in the past by the men of the past. But the situation today is different. Different circumstances call for new decisions—we cannot simply keep echoing the old ones. The Planners of the Euchronian Movement set out to build a world for us—their ultimate descendants. They did what they set out to do. We inherited that world, we have it now, and there can be no limit to our gratitude toward those who made it for us. We value this world very highly—it is our life and we guard it as we do our lives. We will continue to do so. We will continue to value and protect our own existence and the manner of that existence.

      “Carl Magner asked us to open the doors of our world to the people of the Underworld. This we cannot do. To open our world is to threaten it. But this does not mean that Carl Magner’s accusations were untrue.

      “We have forgotten the Underworld. The people who live in the Underworld today, if people there are, are not the people who refused to join the Plan, who made a free choice and chose to live their lives as they would.

      “We remember the men who stayed on the ground rather than work for a new world as cowards and traitors, and perhaps we have reason for this. But we must not judge too harshly. It was their right to choose, and it remained their right throughout the centuries when the two worlds were coexistent. How many of us are the descendants of late recruits, who joined the Movement a hundred, or a thousand years after the Plan was first put into operation? We do not know. It makes no difference. It does not matter whether our ancestors in the age of psychosis were committed Euchronians, or the grandfathers of converts. Why should it? How can it?

      “I believe that Carl Magner was right to remind us of the world we left behind. I believe he was right to ask us whether there are men on the ground today, and if so, whether we owe them something because we have taken away their sunlight. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which he suggested is not the right answer, but the question which Magner asked remains the right question.

      “The Euchronian ideal—the ideal which built the new world, and which gave us everything that we are and everything that we have—is the principle of working together for the benefit of others. The Planners worked for their children, many generations hence, but how many Planners died childless? How many of the men who worked for our world have no descendants living here? Again, we do not know. Again, what does it matter? For those men, the ideal remained. They still gave their lives to the Plan, if not for their own children, then for the children of their neighbors, and the children of men who lived and worked on the other side of the world.

      “The Euchronian Plan was declared complete two centuries ago. We live now in what we are pleased to call the Euchronian Millennium, the world which is our heritage. But can we really call ourselves Euchronians? We work, we live useful lives. But the people for whom we work, and to whom we offer our resources, are ourselves. If we are Euchronians, then perhaps we should look beyond ourselves. Perhaps we should look beyond our children and our children’s children, whose future, we hope, is secure because of the efforts of the Planners. Perhaps we should remember the Underworld, and ask ourselves whether we might devote something of our effort and endeavor toward doing what even the Planners themselves could not do and did not try. Perhaps, now that we have our world secure in the sky, we should begin to make another new world—another good and safe world, where men can live secure and free lives—out of the surface which languishes beneath our feet.

      “We cannot bring the people of the Underworld into our world. But we can help them to rebuild theirs. We can offer them knowledge and supply them with tools