had had to deal with, and by virtue of that fact he had looked to have a good many years in him. But time seemed to move so quickly here. A man might pass from maturity to senility in a matter of weeks. The people of the Underworld seemed to live their lives inside a span of time which Burstone hardly noticed in passing. Burstone could remember the contact before Ermold as if it were yesterday. And the one before that. He would remember Ermold with crystal clarity when three more contacts had all fulfilled their purpose and rotted into the stinking, polluted dust from which they came. That was the way of things.
Burstone waited, unwillingly, glancing at his wristwatch every few moments, giving Ermold the time that was his due, but begrudging the filthy savage every second of it. Burstone did not like the stillness and the alienness and—more than anything—the cold, steady perpetual starlight. He sweated, and knew that he was slowly absorbing the stink and the foul taint of the Underworld. Once back on top he would have to slink home like a rat in the shadows, to bathe for an hour and plaster himself with the medicines which would save his skin from rotting away, and save his body from the vile diseases he inhaled with every breath. If only he could wear a mask—a proper mask rather than a wad of cotton wool and a piece of perforated plastic. But he had been warned against masks.
He was afraid, as well.
But the thrill of fear, and the rather less conscious thrill of pollution were almost life’s blood to him. He needed them. They gave something to him which he could not hope to find in any other way. The tainting of his body and the washing clean, the scouring of his body with the hormonal cocktail that was fear—these meant something to him. They were real to him in a way that the diversions of the Over-world were not. The ritual descent into Hell, followed by the ascent into Heaven—this was the purpose of life. It was the focal point of his existence. It was the reason that he was needed by the worlds. It was his duty, his honor, and his...joy?
Burstone was a completely sane man. His dreams never troubled him.
While he waited, he drifted on an ocean of feeling. An emotional castaway.
The creatures of the underworld would not come close. The smell of him, in their senses, was just as alien to them as theirs was to him. His sharp, chemical cleanliness was an affront to them. No predator would dare to come close, and the small creatures engaged in the business of survival detoured in order to pass him by. He saw the great ghost moths fluttering between the squabs some yards away, and heard their high-pitched screaming at the very limits of his audible range, but there was not enough light for him to see anything else. He was virtually blind down here. He had a horror of darkness, too. On this, too, his soul fed.
When the time was up, he simply picked up the suitcase and began the walk back to the cage with which he could hoist himself back to the platform. He walked with an easy, measured stride, unhurried. It took courage—genuine, completely pure courage. It took strength of mind and of character. 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.
