my back and the wound wouldn’t heal. I got worse. Then we met the hellkin. He joined us. His name was...is...Iorga.”
Joth paused, expecting some reaction.
“This is the...man...who killed Harkanter?” asked Ulicon, filling the pause.
“He had to,” said Joth.
“Let’s not leap forward now,” said Rypeck, with a hint of impatience in his voice. “We’ll leave the matter of judgment until the proper time. Tell us what happened.”
“Iorga had seen Camlak, with another man from the village. We went back toward the wall. We found the other, but not Camlak. Camlak had been shot, by the man called Soron. He had come out into the open because Harkanter was trapped in a mud hole. He wanted to help. The other—Chemec—had been more cautious, and had stayed hidden. But Camlak didn’t think there was anything to be afraid of. That was my fault. It was because of me that Camlak wasn’t afraid. But they shot him.”
“Harkanter claimed that he was attacked—that the rat had a knife.” This interjection came from Ulicon.
Joth shook his head.
“There was a misunderstanding,” said Rypeck.
“I had to get him back,” said Joth, ignoring the remark. “It was up to me. He kept me alive in the village. But for him I’d be dead. If not for me, he wouldn’t have been at the wall. He wouldn’t have tried to help Harkanter. I came up to the Overworld to bring him back. I brought Iorga with me to help.”
“Why come back in secret?” demanded Rypeck. “Why come to steal the rat? Why break into Harkanter’s house with guns?”
“Do you honestly think,” said Joth, “that anyone would have listened to me? Was there any other way? The one thing I wanted to do, at that time, was free Camlak. I had no other purpose. I set about doing it in the only way it could be done—by stealth. We didn’t intend to kill anyone—we just wanted to take Camlak off Harkanter and back to the Underworld. When that was done, I intended to come back for the explanations. I had myself patched up by a doctor, and then Julea got Harkanter to open his door to us. It would have gone according to plan. We went down into the cellars. Camlak was in a cage. I saw him there. And then there was an explosion inside my head.”
There was a brief silence. This was the climactic point. They all knew that this was the fulcrum of the whole matter, but none of them knew how to approach it.
Eventually, it was Ulicon who spoke.
“I was sitting in an armchair,” he said. “I was reading some printouts. It was as if I’d been stabbed in the back of my neck, the blade traveling upwards into my brain. I couldn’t hold the pages—I just lost control of my hands and they shook like leaves in a high wind. My eyes were closed, but I was seeing. The light—or the illusion of light—was almost unbearably bright. Images flashed in an incoherent sequence. It was all too bright and too fast for me to make sense of it, but some of the images I could almost focus, and recall. What I saw was a confused conglomerate of visual memories. I looked—through someone or something else’s eyes—into the Underworld. I saw what your father saw. It took time, but I came to realize that what had happened to me—and hundreds of thousands of others—was no more than what had already happened to your father. With him, it took years; with us, less than a second. He, perhaps, saw through many pairs of eyes, had access to millions of memories. We saw through one pair of eyes one set of visual images.
“For a while, when I found that these alien memories were imprinted in my mind, I feared that I would go mad. Perhaps, by the standards which were mine a few days ago, I am no longer sane. If so, that is true of fully half the members of our society. Our minds have been invaded. We have memories that are not our own. When we wake, we are constantly aware, but at least we are in control. When we sleep....
“The citizens of Euchronia have no nightmares. That is the way it was intended to be. Euchronia was intended to be the answer to intellectual unrest. But that is no longer true. We now know that our minds are open. Perhaps we have opened them ourselves—we do not know. But in any case, our inner being can no longer be entirely our own. Our inner space is no longer delimited by the confines of our physical being. We wonder, now, if any one of us can speak of my self, my mind.
“We now understand The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and why your father wrote it. We think that we understand how the alien ideas coming into his mind comingled and integrated with his own. We now have nightmares, as he did. Some of us—I don’t know how many—now catch, as he did, the leakage of other minds while we sleep. The mindblast has ripped away the shielding around our selves, and we are no longer secure.
“We know that the focus of the blast was Harkanter’s house. We know that the being in the cage disappeared, and we can only believe that its disappearance was the cause of the blast. We live in desperate fear of this incessant pollution of ourselves which is coming from the Underworld. Our reflex action is to destroy—to obliterate the minds which are invading our personal space. What Eliot and I fear is that the destruction of the Underworld is not a real solution to the problem. We fear that the clock cannot be turned back, and that our minds are permanently altered. What we fear is that in destroying the Underworld we may destroy our chance to find a real answer. There are only two people in the world who might help us find such an answer. You are one. You must tell me everything that you know or suspect about what happened in Harkanter’s cellar.”
“I thought that he’d destroyed himself,” said Joth, slowly. “I saw him—my eyes were actually upon him in the moment he disappeared. But Nita believes that he is alive. Elsewhere. She spoke about her soul—the festival I saw in the village was called the Communion of Souls. She said that during such a communion she had looked into other worlds, and that her father had gone into one. But the festival was just a ritual—it was a mime. Nothing happened that I was aware of. There must have been so much more—so much that I couldn’t begin to know.
“Camlak’s memories came into their minds too, but they just accepted it. They weren’t even surprised. Perhaps it happens all the time, to them. But I don’t think so. I think there’s something about the way they live and think that we can never understand—something that is utterly different from us. And yet there’s so much that is the same....
“I don’t know what happened. What you’ve said may all be true. It seems reasonable. But all I know is what you know—that Camlak’s memories have been blasted into my mind and your mind and many other minds. It could happen again. It probably will. Everything that you and the whole Movement fears could come true. Our minds might be dissolved inside our heads. But there’s one thing that you must consider. Nita and Chemec weren’t surprised. They knew what had happened. And if they, and the Children of the Voice as a whole, really know and understand what happened, then they can do it again. If you try to exterminate the Children of the Voice, then they may react as Camlak reacted when Harkanter put him in a cage. If you start a war with the people of the Underworld, you might lose. They can destroy you.”
5.
Abram Ravelvent was tired. Since he had become tangled in this affair through acquaintance with Carl Magner, it had taken years off his life. His initial interest had been mere curiosity—a typical fascination for the unusual. He had once found intellectual puzzles a source of delight. Now he was lost inside one. What had been a game had become a prison. Once, he had been able to choose where he would stand in the argument. He had committed his belief on the instruction of a whim. Now, he was completely bound up. He no longer dared to believe, or even to guess. But still people came to him with questions and arguments. He was still an “expert” to be consulted. People still looked to him for confirmation and
