A Vision of Hell. Brian Stableford

He never looked around. The thought of finding a new point of entry, of setting up a new contact, and the inevitable risks that would be involved in so doing, did not disturb him. He accepted that part of his role.

      Up on top, clean and healthy, he would still feel good, even though he had not fulfilled his mission on this occasion. He would feel the satisfaction of knowing that his part was played.

      He was only an ordinary man.

      CHAPTER 7

      The Hell beneath Euchronia’s Millennium had not been cut from the cloth of existence in a single piece, or in a single moment. It grew as a patchwork, very slowly. The several evolutions which took place beneath the slowly expanding sections of the Overworld platform had every chance to discover new ways of coping with the conditions of life. The adaptation of surface life to Tartarean circumstances took place according to several different patterns. Each pattern was a collaboration between chance and choice. When the platform was complete and the Underworld was sealed—several thousand years after the process was begun—the patterns came together, and a new collaboration begun. (Collaboration in the Underworld did not take the same form as collaboration among the Euchronians. It took more familiar forms, like war—the war of nature: natural selection.)

      There was no section of the Underworld under which the ecosystem of the old world failed to adapt to new circumstances. The adaptation was costly—the mortality of species was over ninety percent, and the mortality of individuals within species that survived was often on the same sort of scale. Some surviving species, on the other hand, proliferated vastly and enjoyed altogether unprecedented success. All the surviving species were unstable, and remained so. By the time of the Euchronian Millennium, some kind of stability was just beginning to assert itself within many communities of organisms, but on the previous evolutionary scale several eons of progress toward balance had been lost. Curiously, almost half the loss had taken place before the Plan got under way.

      Homo sapiens was the species which adapted most easily to the new regime, and by his active interference he encouraged and assisted many other species to do likewise. (He also discouraged and prevented one or two, but his positive success was much greater than the negative corollary.) The Euchronians had very unkind things to say about the men who stayed on the ground, but it was not the fact that they resented the work and the dedication involved in commitment that made most of them do so. In point of fact, the weak and the degenerate almost invariably joined the Euchronians, fearing the darkness and the wild world more than they hated the work and the regimentation. The Euchronians at least provided food and shelter for their people. On the surface, there were no guarantees. The people who stayed on the ground at the end—who actually went into the Underworld rather than join the Plan (as distinct from those who simply retreated from the encroaching platform)—did so because they preferred their own idea of freedom to that of the Euchronians. They wanted freedom from the Plan, and they were prepared to accept Hell instead of the promise of Heaven for their children’s children, in defense of that idea of freedom.

      There was, of course, a great deal of fighting between the Euchronians and the men on the ground while the platform was growing. The supplies which kept the Plan going came from the ground—from the land of the men who could still make the land provide. In return, that land was eaten up as was the derelict land. When the landowners would not supply the Euchronians, the Euchronians took what they needed. When they cooperated, the only gratitude they received was the offer to join the Plan when their land, in its turn, came to be covered over. The Euchronians won every fight. They had the numbers and they had the organization. There was no way the men on the ground could defend their world. They had to take one of the new environments which was offered to them—the proto-Heaven or the neo-Hell. From the Euchronian point of view, that was no choice at all. Not everyone saw it the Euchronian way.

      Hell was not kind to the men who chose it. The old world had been past redemption in terms of the human civilization which had grown up in it. From the point of view of society in the second dark age the world was ended, doom had come. But a derelict world is not a dead world. Life continues, somehow. Always. The old order was finished, and chaos was come, but life went on. Even the imprisonment of the old world—its condemnation to perpetual darkness—could not make life extinct within it. The old species had to die by the thousand, and those which survived did so at tremendous cost, but the cost of evolution in terms of necessary death is always less than the cost of not evolving. The genetic heritage of the survivor species was ruthlessly stripped and rebuilt, with selection operating at very high levels and evolution being forced at a tremendous rate, but they could take it. Just. Adapt, or perish, was the only law. It applied to Homo sapiens no less than to all the other species. The cost of human survival was a complete genetic overhaul of the species. The men who went to Hell wanted freedom. Freedom from Euchronia they won, but freedom from evolution they could not have.

      Evolution in the Underworld was necessarily rapid. A characteristic tachytelic pattern developed: divergent evolution of forms, rapid speciation, a high rate of extinction and specific genesis. An evolutionary explosion. It had happened before, on the Earth before man, but the evolutionary change of gear which took place when the Underworld came into existence saw the greatest-ever increase in the rate of evolution—the biggest explosion of them all. It echoed through the ages which followed, and would echo for many more. The impact was only just beginning to die when the Euchronians, in the Heaven which they had built up above, completed their Plan.

      Man—omnivorous, intelligent, at the very highest level of the biotic hierarchy—changed least of all the species in the Underworld. Even man became not one species, but several.

      The greatest evolutionary boost was evident in the semi-sentient species which had cohabited with man in the concrete jungles of the age of psychosis. They had the capacity to adapt if they could make the leap to full sentience and change their physical form in order to cope with a complete reorientation of their survival strategies. Some of them made that leap. Some became extinct because their gene pools drained dry in the attempt.

      At the lowest strata there was complete reorganization. Millions of years of plant evolution went to waste, and progress began again with the lowest forms—the algae and the fungi. The stratum of the primary consumers in the animal kingdom was likewise completely refurbished, but here there were already patterns of life and forms of being which were useful. The crabs of Tartarus were not the crabs of pre-historic ages, nor the moths, nor the cockroaches, nor even the multitudinous worms, but the names did as well for the new versions. There are only so many ways to design an animal, and most of the models had been ready in the prehistoric world.

      The microbiotica, of course, were reorganized on the same scale as the plants and lower animals, but from the macrobiotic point of view the revision was quite invisible. There are even fewer ways to design a bacterium or a protozoan than there are to design an animal. Form and function survived despite the fact that genetic complements had to be given a complete overhaul. The bacteria had the least difficulty adapting. Bacteria always exist in extreme circumstances.

      From the microbiotic point of view, the division of the world into Heaven and Hell was virtually immaterial. A trivial incident on the path of existence. As if an immortal were stung by a bee....

      CHAPTER 8

      Camlak did not hurry along the road to Lehr. He walked steadily, at a pace which he could sustain for many miles. He was forced to import a rather mechanical quality into both his thoughts and his actions. It was necessary to the situation. He already knew, in his heart, what he was going to see when he finally looked out over Dossal Bog, but he advanced toward that moment nevertheless. He would have to meet it.

      Once he was past the hill called Stiver he left the road proper, and bore slightly southwest, taking higher ground so that he could command a good view of what was ahead of him. He did not climb to the ridges but merely moved as a hunter might, close to the road but not too close, stalking its length, tracking its curves. The stars were less dense in the roof of the world over these dried-up, coarse lands, and the light they shed was not bright, but Camlak had good eyes, and there was light enough for him to see what he needed to see.

      And eventually, his assumed mechanism brought him to the climactic vision. From the slopes of the hill called Solum