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 effect ought to be continued or not, or even how such a decision 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
