with the microphone still in his hand, climbed up to a position from which he could look out of the cockpit. The light of the many searchlights showed that the forest was banked unnaturally high on either side of them. The road ran through a long, shallow canyon. The obstruction in front was steep, but it did not seem impassable.
“We can climb that,” said Germont. “We don’t need a road. This thing is built to hold a slope.”
Somewhere back along the line, a machine gun came to life. Almost immediately, searchlight beams converged, and Germont looked back to where tiny white figures were moving on the ridge, while the bullets tore fungal tissue to pieces all around them. The soft, pulpy flesh splashed as the bullets hit, and sections of leathery algal frondescence fluttered in the air and writhed as they slid down the slope, robbed of their support. One of the figures was hurled back, and another. Dead and alive alike, they disappeared as great clouds of spore dust poured from the afflicted area.
There was a series of dull thuds as rocks hit the plating of Germont’s vehicle. He looked up, trying to locate the throwers, while the searchlight veered back and forth.
“Stop firing!” he commanded. “They can’t hurt us!”
Then the land somewhere in the rear began to slide. It was the spot where the firing had been concentrated—the bullets had weakened the ancient structure which supported the forest, and it was tumbling, sliding down into the road.
Realizing the danger, the trucks which were in the path of the slide came forward in a hurry. The first two or three managed to get far enough. One or two didn’t, and the loose rock, moving with fluid smoothness, washed into them, turned them, shoved them and began to bury them. One was turned over on its side.
When the slide was over, six vehicles were trapped. Two were breached, and all had some degree of internal damage.
Angrily, Germont ordered men out of the other trucks to begin digging out the trapped men and freeing the vehicles. They came out in closed-environment suits, and for every two or three men to dig, there had to be one with a rifle. The searchlights continued to scan the slopes for signs of the attackers.
Germont went out himself, to look at the corpse which lay in the roadway between his vehicle and the second in line. He waited while one of the doctors inspected the body.
“Is it human?” he asked, when the examination was over.
“Near enough,” said the doctor.
“He must have been crazy,” said Germont. “Coming at the truck like that.”
“It’s not a he,” said the doctor. “It’s a she.” Then the arrow hit him. It went through the plastic suit like paper, between his ribs and deep into his chest. He died instantly.
8.
Elsewhere in the Underworld, the men from Euchronia were building a city: a city of hemispherical domes and cylindrical tunnels. The encampment beneath the plexus which had been established by Randal Harkanter and the party which he had led into the Underworld had been packed up and removed to the surface, only to be replaced by a much larger and much better equipped invasion force, whose purpose was to begin seeding the Swithering Waste with the Overworld’s various biological agents of destruction, and to observe the effects thereof. It was one of several such stations—Germont’s convoy was intended to establish three more—set up in a number of rather different habitats.
The seeding was done from the air, the viruses being laid out along long lines radiating like spokes from the circular metal wall which was the base of the plexus. The “electronic bats” which dispersed the viruses also carried cameras to assist in observation, but small ground-cars were also made available to the observers. This group was headed by Gregor Zuvara, who had become an expert on the Underworld by virtue of having spent a few more days there than most of those called in to assist him.
As the miniature city grew, Zuvara was forced to make ever-more-plaintive complaints about the inadequacy of his labor force. As soon as the news concerning the attack on Germont’s force and the several deaths among his personnel was made public, the number of volunteers for work in the Underworld fell rapidly.
Within a matter of days it became obvious both above and below that some form of conscription would have to become effective. The subjugation of the individuals in the society of the Euchronian Millennium to necessity, as defined by the Hegemony of the Movement, became absolute. The clock had been turned right back. For the second time, the Euchronian Movement demanded total loyalty in order that the world might be saved, not for the present generation, but for generations to come.
Almost everyone expected this mobilization of Euchronia’s manpower to go quite smoothly. This, after all, was the principle on which the world had been made. It had worked once—it had to work again. But Zuvara found his recruits resentful and discontent. The Euchronian spirit—the determination and selflessness that had built a world on the roof of a ruined Earth—was lacking.
Slowly, Zuvara realized that everything had changed. The Euchronian ideal was not enough. Not this time. Something within society had shattered.
While he watched the blight he had brought spreading throughout the world, stripping the vast marshland of everything living, reducing all plant tissue to a sort of protoplasmic tar, Zuvara could not help thinking: “We are destroying the world. The whole world. We are doing this to ourselves. Everything will die. There will be nothing left.”
He told himself over and over that this was merely a nightmare, but he could not rid himself of it.
9.
Chemec the cripple had left Shairn with Camlak because the way his mind worked left him little option but to follow his leader. Camlak had been Old Man of Stalhelm—virtually all that was left of Stalhelm. He had been all that was left of Chemec’s life.
Now Camlak was gone, and there was virtually nothing left of Chemec’s existence. Nothing but his cunning and his failing strength, and his meager identity: Chemec the crab, Chemec the bent-leg. But Chemec hardly felt a sense of loss. Certainly he did not grieve for Camlak. Chemec took life as it came, and accepted events as they happened. He lived neither in his memories nor in his hopes, but stayed always within the moment of the ephemeral present, carried along by the current of life. It was the way of his kind, and Chemec was very much one of his kind. More so than Camlak or Nita, or even Old Man Yami.
It was because of what he was rather than in spite of it that Chemec became a prophet. He had never been a man at odds with his soul. He coexisted with the Gray Soul inside his mind, in the simplest possible way. It was there, he let it be. He had never tried to be a psychic parasite with regard to his Gray Soul, nor had he attempted any kind of exchange. At Communion, he merely looked his Soul in the face. Nothing more. It was perfect commensalism—Chemec and the Soul shared the body and the mind, and neither troubled the other.
And because of this, when the Soul began placing motives in his mind, Chemec did not realize what was happening. He accepted the motives as his own, and he obeyed their commands as if they came from his own self.
He needed the motives. With Camlak gone, he had nothing left to him but to drift back into Shairn, to find a new community or to live alone, existing until he died. The motives made something of him. They repaired the aspect of function in his life. They made him a man again, whereas he might otherwise have contented himself as a rat.
From the Swithering Waste he went southwest, and came to the townships of northern Shairn: to Isthomi
