The realms of tartarus t.., p.31
The Realms of Tartarus, Trilogy, page 31
“Am I going to die?” he asked his Gray Soul.
The Soul was a shadow, a patch of darkness on the sun-spun sheen of his slithering thoughts. It was shaped like a dart or a moth at rest. It was steady, but it appeared to waver and ripple because of the pressure that was rippling his consciousness.
“No,” replied the Soul. “You won’t die.”
“Must I keep fighting?” asked Camlak.
“Yes.”
Camlak did as he was advised. He kept fighting. But he still felt that he was losing the fight. He still felt that he was being dissolved into the thin, shallow waves, diffusing into the liquid layers of the drug which reached for him from the well of his bloodstream.
He trusted the Soul. He could see the Soul, and while he knew the Soul was there he knew that there was a chance for him to reverse the process of disintegration that was extinguishing him.
But he did not quite know how.
He struggled alone, in the abyss, for an eternity, while the molecules shuddered like windblown flags, their structures tottering and their edges crumbling and shattering, undermining him and reshaping him. The clock on the wall was lost to his eyes. The passage of time was no longer a factor in the battle.
As the pressure upon him grew, so did his own desperation, so did his own reason, and so did his need for faith in himself and in the silhouette of his Soul.
“Help me,” said Camlak to the moth-shadow.
“Help yourself,” said the Soul, coaxing him, asking him for an effort.
“Heal me,” pleaded Camlak, who felt himself torn across.
“Heal yourself,” demanded the Soul.
Camlak’s mind made hands in nowhere, and extended them outwards from the thin film of glistering light which spread him over the surface of sucking death. The hands reached into the naked, cold sky beyond his brain. They were reaching into space—a space he had never found before and known only by implication. It was real space, with volume and containment, but it was enfolded inside him, inside his body and his being. He was wrapped around a whole cosmos.
Soul space.
He formed hands and his hands formed claws, and the claws formed clutches and they reached up and up, and every shattering, shimmering, thread-held fragment of him cried:
“Help me!”
And the Soul said: “Help yourself.”
The hands continued to ascend into the empty, wasted, derelict sky, feeling the cold and the needles of icelike fire beating into their palms, fraying and cracking the fingers and the claws.
Blood spilled.
But the hands did not matter.
The false flesh peeled off the unreal bones and the whited wreckage of the fingers still reached out into the sky, hauling at false arms and clutching with the rigor of death at the boundaries of the invaginated universe.
The thin strand of slime burst as the false shoulders erupted, and then, with a single convulsive movement, the realbeing grew, through the wall between the spaces, through the shattered puppet self, free from its existential womb.
Camlak opened his mouth to drag in air, gulping and swallowing and sucking. In the cage, the air flooded into the lungs. In the soul-space the ultimate coldness chilled the nascent self.
The head opened its eyes and felt them burn in the brightness, while the other felt pain and shock.
In the instant, Camlak was suspended, in transit, caught in the process of metamorphosis, turning himself outside-in like a snake swallowing its tail.
The mouth screamed: “Help me!”
And shadows clustered about the eyes, and claws reached out to grip his dead hands and his shoulders. Fingers twined in his hair and a million moth-shapes fluttered round and round his face in black cascades, casting a kaleidoscopic chaos of shadows on the darkening face of the carpet-mist which had been eating Camlak’s mind.
Camlak was free.
Reborn, by the power of his will and his need. He burst into nowhere and he screamed in exultation.
CHAPTER 35
As Joth reached out to unfasten the door to Camlak’s cage he saw the torpid rat’s eyes whip open. Inside the eyes he watched a sudden flare of light.
Then Camlak’s scream struck him down.
Iorga, behind him, suddenly lost control of his body and collapsed to the floor like a puppet with snapped strings.
Julea folded up without a sound.
Vicente Soron, who was coming through the door, pitched forward, the momentum of his movement throwing him against the banister of the cellar steps. The gun which he had found flew from his hand, released by limp fingers, and clattered on the tiled floor of the room.
Only Harkanter had been standing quite still at the instant of the scream. He, too, felt his mind suddenly disconnected from his body, imploded into utter blackness. But he was balanced, and he did not immediately fall. His body stood, held erect and still by muscles that were momentarily frozen.
Moments later, the muscles relaxed of their own accord, and Harkanter swayed, then rolled over with exaggerated slowness to meet the ground with a solid thump.
Joth’s eyes did not close immediately. He fell, but he could still see what happened while he fell. He was the only one staring full at the prisoner at the instant of the scream.
He alone saw the instant of Camlak’s disappearance.
The shape of the rat seemed to become completely fluid. The body flowed into a hole that opened a core of cold light somewhere within the space that the body had occupied. Very quickly, but in finite, measurable time, Camlak’s body was collected into that hold and delivered through it.
The release which Joth had brought came an instant too late.
CHAPTER 36
The velocity of the shock wave was rather less than the speed of light. No electromagnetic radiation or sonic vibration was involved. The most sensitive instrumentation in the cybernet recorded only secondary phenomena—secondary, that is, relative to the Earthly continuum. Relative to the other space the wave itself was only an echo.
But it was an echo that woke a response.
The intensity of the reaction obeyed the inverse square law. Everyone within a mile or so of the location of the scream was affected in much the same way as those actually in the cellar. The reaction to the wave was the decoupling of all motor responses in the body—the effective isolation of the brain. The mechanism which permits such decoupling is located in the body known as the pons situated beneath the hind brain, and it may be assumed that it was within this body that the signal was received. Many of those affected within this range blacked out completely, and thus experienced nothing in the aftermath of the response. In other cases, however, the brain continued to operate although notionally cut off from all sensory input. The people so affected “dreamed,” but the content of the dreams was only partly the issue of their own (subconscious) minds. A complex series of images transmitted by the modification of the shock wave itself were recorded, transcribed and reechoed within the program store of the subconscious mind. Engrammatic patterns were disturbed, destroyed and created. Almost all were to prove inviable, in the long term, and were broken up and erased by the mind’s own defensive systems and faculties of self-repair. But that process would take time. In the meantime, the whole process of subconscious activity within the brain was disturbed. In no case was the disturbance so great as to cause permanent insanity.
Outside the critical radius at which the decoupling reaction was triggered there was no less of consciousness. By the same token, however, there was no immunity to the inflow of images. The extent to which the induced “dreams” interfered with the normal processes of brain activity varied according to the sensitivity of the individual, the type of activity ongoing in the particular brain at that moment, and—of course—the intensity of the stimulus as defined by the inverse-square law. The experiential blackout which defended many minds within the critical zone operated in a very few cases outside that zone, the strength of the signal being insufficiently strong, in most cases, to activate such a response even where available. Even so, a rather large number of individuals remained unaware that their brains had, in fact, been affected by the wave. Until these people began, in the near future, to suffer from “bad dreams” there would be no manifestation of the consequences of the event available to the conscious memory. Outside a radius of approximately twelve hundred miles, virtually all affected people fell into this category.
CHAPTER 37
Clea Aron, who was preparing for sleep, lying still in the darkness, allowing her thoughts to wander, actually felt the invasion of her mind like the blow of a fist to the back of her head. As the blow rocked her the blaze of confused images flooded her senses, causing her to gasp with pain.
She sat up and clutched her head in both hands. Following the initial shock there was a period of recoil, and then the images flooded her senses for a second time, more slowly, expanding and fragmenting. The experience was still too fast, and too complex, for her to sort out the imprints which were being stamped on the molecules which programmed her being, but she felt a few moments of utter strangeness that were beyond understanding. During those few moments she lived as an alien being with a wholly new identity.
She burst into tears and cried out aloud for someone to help her. Her own self reasserted itself, quickly and strongly, but the effects of the shock were absorbed.
That night, and every other night for many months, she would dream, and the dreams would belong only partly to herself.
CHAPTER 38
Enzo Ulicon was sitting in a chair examining printout from the supply unit at his deck when the wave hit. He felt it as a stabbing sensation at the base of his skull. His hands shook, briefly but violently, and the thin paper of the printout crumpled and ripped.
His eyes closed, reflexively, isolating him with the pain, so that he could concentrate his control. A series of patterns blossomed on the closed eyelids, and rushed back into his mind. The patterns swirled into pictures and for several minutes he became delirious, hurtled through a sequence of visionary instants which flared and were gone. It was barely possible to extract any sense from the flickering confusion, but Ulicon was calm and undisturbed. He identified the sensation, initially, as an ordinary headache—it did not occur to him that it was anything unfamiliar. He saw, therefore—and knew that he saw—the burning town, the firelit masks, the long, straight, corpse-littered road through the dark wilderness. He saw the fire-illumined cat face, and the multimillion-colored cankers, sills, dendrites, drapes and frills that comprised the life-system of the Swithering Waste. There was no sense in the sequence—no causality, no logic. It was simply an imaginative mosaic.
But Ulicon knew that he had looked into Hell.
He felt very frightened for a few moments, afterwards. But it was gone, and—so far as he knew—finished. The fear drained away. His hands were still unsteady, but they trembled very slightly, and he found that he could make them still by an effort of will.
Later in the night, he attempted to recall some of the images, reaching back into his memory. They rushed at him from the caverns of his mind, and once again he became the focus of the display. It was then that he realized that it was not finished, and perhaps never would be. Hell had been revealed, and he could not unlearn the revelation.
He, of all people, should have been able to cope with this discovery. It was he that had insisted so strongly that Rafael Heres and the others should become aware that there were two worlds of Earth, and not one.
Nevertheless, he doubted his sanity and he was suddenly possessed with the curious feeling that the floor beneath his feet was not secure, that at any moment it might begin to fracture, and precipitate him down, into darkness….
CHAPTER 39
Eliot Rypeck was already asleep, already dreaming. He was quiescent, save for his eyes, which moved beneath closed lids while his mind ran through its sequence of programs, its patterns of life, rehearsing them subconsciously and modifying them slightly by correlation with lately gained experience.
When the wave came he felt neither shock nor pain, but the mechanical process which occupied his brain was completely disrupted. The dream which was playing through his gray cells was shattered, the cytoarchitectural limitation of the process was lost, the neuronal messages were scrambled. He was ripped back into wakefulness by a sensory hurricane.
Within his dream, Rypeck howled in anguish. There was a momentary sensation of flight which quickly became one of falling, falling into a black vortex while the whirling world closed in and reached out a multitude of claws. As consciousness returned to flush out the aborted program, wipe the circuits clean, sweat stood out on his face and he felt the compulsion to move. He sat up in bed, as if jerked erect by strings.
He rocked slowly back and forth as he felt the whole garbled mess ebbing from his mind. He felt his body coming back to him, his sense of being swelling like a balloon to occupy every inch of his living frame.
The realization came to him that he had had a nightmare. That realization was infinitely more frightful than the thing itself. The connective routes in his thought processes were already well established. Nightmare…i-minus…Carl Magner.
The moment had come.
For a few seconds, the images returned, dancing at the threshold of consciousness. They flew all around him like fluttering moths, striking at his eyes from within.
Ulicon was right, he said, silently, chasing away the fugitive ideas with cold, vocalized thought. They came from outside. They came from outside into his mind.
One word swelled to the forefront of his mind, and would not die, dragging itself out and finally yielding only to an endless chain of echoes.
…invasion….
He lay back, and tried to force sleep to return. He was struck by the silly illusion that his whole awakening had been a fake, that he had merely reentered the macabre theater of his nightmare, enfolding himself within. But if this was a nightmare, it was real. He knew full well as he fought against wakefulness that he was not asleep, not dreaming, not hallucinating.
He was covered with sweat, and the sheets felt unbearably, glutinously warm against his body. After a few minues, he sat up again and mopped his face. He sat still, staring out into the darkness, at the thin sliver of the night sky which filtered in through the screened window. While he waited, his heartbeat began to settle.
But he could not get rid of the obsessive word which still ran faint echoes tumbling round the inside of his skull.
It turned out to be a very long night….
CHAPTER 40
The Ahrima were encamped to the south and west of Sagum, though parties of warriors covered north and east as well. The people of Sagum, forewarned by runners from Lehr, had elected to defend their town rather than desert it. They had stripped what they could from the fields, and strengthened the wall wherever significant improvement could be made in the time available. Even while the Ahrima rested before the assault the Children of the Voice worked ceaselessly, determined to hold the Ahrima and divert the horde if it were possible.
So far as they knew, no army was gathering in Shairn. The men of the towns were looking to their own and placing their faith in chance or destiny. The people of Sagum knew, however, that if they held the Ahrima for any length of time, warriors would come to them, in small groups, to harry the invaders from without, killing one or two at a time, destroying their supplies and poisoning their animals. If Sagum could hold, the Ahriman strength would be whittled away. The heartland of Shairn would grow relatively stronger. Stalhelm and Lehr had already taken some toll of the enemy’s numbers.
On the other hand, if Sagum fell, the Ahrima would stay there, growing strong again on the produce of Shairan land, until they broke out to go whichever way they cared, with no town that would dare to stand against them. They would ravage the heartland and destroy the nation.
The fate of Sagum, therefore, seemed likely to determine the fate of Shairn.
Until the wave came.
The visions struck at the Ahrima, in sleep and in wakefulness. They saw what happened not as individual experience, but as collective experience. Every man knew that the visitation had come to all men, because not one warrior of the Ahrima was alone when the visions came.
There was not one among the Ahrima who could make sense of the “package” of images. To them, it was simply something that struck at the core of their being, something hostile and alien. It panicked them.
They turned away from Sagum, south to burned Lehr, and further south still, passing beyond the boundaries of Shairn into the lands of the Cuchumanate migration paths, and the isolated strongholds of the Men Without Souls.
Within the walls, however, the reaction was very different. The wave was no less a revelation to the Children of the Voice than to the Ahrima, but to them it was a revelation of an entirely different kind. They could see the images for what they were: the tangled memory web of one of their own kind. And more than that, they knew what had happened.
They knew it inside themselves, because they too had Gray Souls. When the impact of the wave turned their consciousness in upon itself, they did not find themselves isolated with confusion and fear. The Gray Souls were there. Even the Warriors and the little children achieved communion of a sort, without the aid of music or trance or the mind-smoothing juice of the weepweed. Those who knew how to use the communion, who already had the most effective rapport with the symbiotic Souls, discovered the whole truth. They learned that Camlak had broken the barrier, had everted himself into Soul space.
It was a miracle. Of course it was a miracle. Shairn was saved from the Ahrima, Camlak was free from a cage in Heaven, and a wave of force was traveling across and through the world and out into space announcing that Camlak and the Souls, together, had transcended the tyranny of space.
