The Face of Heaven Read online

  Table of Contents

  Borgo Press Books by Brian Stableford

  Copyright Information

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Borgo Press Books by Brian Stableford

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations

  Asgard’s Conquerors (Asgard #2)

  Asgard’s Heart (Asgard #3)

  Asgard’s Secret (Asgard #1)

  Balance of Power (Daedalus Mission #5)

  The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

  Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

  Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales

  The City of the Sun (Daedalus Mission #4)

  Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories

  The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Critical Threshold (Daedalus Mission #2)

  The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy

  The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Dragon Man

  The Eleventh Hour

  The Face of Heaven (Realms of Tartarus #1)

  The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)

  Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future

  Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  The Florians (Daedalus Mission #1)

  The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions

  The Gates of Eden

  A Glimpse of Infinity (Realms of Tartarus #3)

  The Golden Fleece and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)

  The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions

  In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

  Journey to the Core of Creation: A Romance of Evolution

  Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story

  The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

  Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses

  The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania

  The Mind-Riders

  The Moment of Truth

  Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels

  The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)

  The Paradox of the Sets (Daedalus Mission #6)

  The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera

  Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

  Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)

  The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession

  The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas

  Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)

  Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies

  Streaking: A Novel of Probability

  Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6)

  The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism

  A Vision of Hell (Realms of Tartarus #2)

  War Games

  Wildeblood’s Empire (Daedalus Mission #3)

  The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below

  Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

  Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Year Zero

  Yesterday Never Dies: A Romance of Metempsychosis

  Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 1976, 2012 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  Acknowledgments

  I am greatly obliged to Heather Datta for her great kindness and consummate efficiency in scanning the text of the first edition of this novel, thus enabling me to get it back into print.

  Chapter 1

  The stars stood still in the sky, as they always had, as they always would. They shone with a steady pearl-white light. Each one was perfectly round. They were not evenly distributed in the sky. They clustered above the land that was called Shairn, and they grew hardly less dense towards the east, where the lands of the Men Without Souls stretched away from Cudal Canal farther than the eye could see from Amalek Height. To the north of Shairn was the Swithering Waste, and in those skies the stars were set farther apart, and farther still as one went west of north, skirting the great wall of iron. Ultimately, in the far west of north, were the blacklands, where no stars shone at all except for a single line which curved away into the darkness: a road of stars. No one followed the road of stars, not because no one was curious as to where it might lead and why, but because the blacklands sheltered creatures which preferred to stay away from the lightlands and from men of all kinds, and the men were afraid of them.

  To the west and southwest of Shairn the stars shone brightly enough, but those were bad hills, stained with poison and incurable disease. There were nomad paths—allegedly safe paths—across the hills, but only the Cuchumanates dared use them unless need forced fugitives to take the risk. To the south itself was more good land—the land called Dimoom by the Children of the Voice.

  Chemec was crouched on top of the hill called Clauster Ridge, sheltering beneath the umbrella of a sourcap from the light of the stars. Clauster Ridge was by no means the impressive peak that Amalek Height was, but it brought Chemec far too close to the stars for him to feel truly comfortable. He felt that, as he watched the Livider Marches which stood unused between the ridge and Cudal Canal, so the stars kept watch on him. But someone had to keep watch—someone always had to keep watch in these troubled times. Old Man Yami was getting old, and the young Ermold across the canal was aching for a fight and a chance to take a few skulls. For any reason, or for no reason at all.

  In fact, with the sourcaps all around him, Chemec c
ould hardly watch at all, but he took a liberal interpretation of his duty, and he had every faith in his nose. The fashion these days was to train eyes rather than noses, but Chemec could never really come round to the idea of counting the stars his friends in the great war of life. They were, at best, neutral. Whereas odors....

  He was also listening for movements in the fields of asci which carpeted the gentler slope of the ridge behind him. If anything edible went by, he might as well catch it, and he definitely did not want to be caught unawares by one of his own people. The wind—a gentle enough wind—blew direct from Walgo. It always had and it always would.

  When he caught the signal, it came sharp upon the wind, like a tiny stab in his sinuses. It was a cold smell, and a weird smell. A smell that was distinctly alien. It came to him with such a shock that he imagined a shadow rushing on him from the east, and he leapt to his feet, swinging his stone axe out of the cradle of his arms and into readiness for attack. But the shadow was nothing.

  He moved with a strange sideways shuffle, something like a crab. One of his legs was bent, the bone having been broken when he was very young. He had learned to live with the deformity. He had the reputation of being a lucky man. When he wanted to move quickly he scuttled like a spider, and one could never quite judge his direction while his head was bobbing and his shoulders weaving.

  The sharp smell was a liar. Nothing was close at hand. Whatever it was, it was out of sight. But it was coming, slowly. Chemec waited, wondering and worrying, ready to stay or run as the event might demand.

  Something new, to him, meant something terrible.

  Chapter 2

  The stars stood still in the sky. Pearl-white light. Every star perfectly round, no matter how close his imagination soared, no matter how far it crept, huddling into the mud and the foul earth. Always the same stars. Always still-standing, white-shining. Always.

  Carl Magner, sweating in his sleep, dreaming a dream which, for him, was filled with horror and mystery, had no possible idea of what those stars might signify, and why. He only knew that they seemed to be perpetually falling upon him, threatening him and taunting him with a cold, steely anger.

  Magner liked stars. Real stars. Stars which shone weakly, pin-point stars which wheeled their way slowly across the night sky and faded in the west when dawn came. He felt an attraction to those stars. They meant something to him—something real and safe and ultimately knowable if, for the time being, unknown.

  But while the stars wheeled Magner slept, and his sleep took him into the world of alien stars which acted as stars should not.

  They were the stars of Hell.

  Carl Magner had no real understanding of his nightmares. There was no one who could help him to understand. Nightmares no longer existed as signs and symptoms and real phenomena. No one—except Carl Magner—had nightmares. The word was a label that had become a lie. There were no nightmares, supposedly. Carl Magner was alone. There was no one to help him, no help to be offered.

  In fleeing the fall of the stars, Magner kept company with all manner of strange creatures—creatures whose names were also lie-labels, but whose being might once have been real, or at least hypothetical. He could name them—most of them—but he could not understand them. He had no preconceived attitude appropriate to them, nor any chain of logic which might help him decide.

  They were the creatures of Hell. True Hell. Real Hell.

  Not Dante’s Inferno, but Euchronia’s Tartarus. The Underworld. The world beneath the bowels of the Earth.

  Knowing as he did that Hell was real, and knowing that there was no conceivable doubt of that fact, Carl Magner had little alternative but to accept the revelations of his dreams as realities. Because dreams were extinct, the unreality of dreams was by no means axiomatic. It did not even seem probable to Carl Magner. He looked upon the experiences of his sleep as an extra sense—an ultra-sight. There was no other way he could think of them.

  Given that Hell was real, given that the nightmare experience was real, Carl Magner had no alternative but to think that the urgency of the dream, the madness of the dream, the fierceness of the dream, and the fearfulness of the dream were meaningful. The feelings of fear and compulsion were purposeful. Magner thought—and what else could he think?—that the dreams were not only trying to tell him something, but trying to make him act on it. He alone, of the millions of men who inhabited Euchronia’s Millennium, was prey to this compulsion, this fear, this need.

  There was something messianic in the very fact of his perennial nightmare.

  In Magner’s dreams, the Underworld was filled—positively filled, or it seemed so—with people. People living under the stars, trapped forever under the cold light of the alien stars. It was their terror which Magner felt, or so he thought. It was their compulsion.

  He hardly sensed the people as individuals at all. He was aware of them en masse, as a unit, as a gargantuan hive organism, perpetually growing, and dying by degrees. But it was essentially human. He sensed the people of the Underworld as a whole race, but it was definitely a human race. Magner could identify with those people—he was identified with them. In his sympathy, he identified his fear with their fear, his nightmare with their nightmare.

  Magner, in his sleep, was enmeshed in a gruesome, glue-some phantasmagoria of images which forced him to react. He could not exempt himself from the sensations of feet in sticky earth, lungs filling with dead, fetid air, gullets sucking up filthy water, any more than he could exempt himself from the terror. In his dreams, he was never clean, because excrement of all kinds was always close to him. He sweated constantly. It was hot, and worse than humid. It was glutinous.

  Often in his dreams he found himself running—from the falling, staring stars, from the fluttering, screaming (?), nightflying moths, from the multicolored, shinyskinned, click-clicking crabs. But the running was so slow, his limbs so gummed down, his environs so thick and turgid, that he never got anywhere at all. The creatures of the eternal night kept coming. Eternally.

  They never caught him, save by degrees.

  The worst thing of all—absolutely the worst—was the fact that he passed so easily from the Hell-world of his nightmare to the real world of his waking life. The one faded into the other with a casual smoothness like the changing of images in a holoreceiver. The world of his inner, secret life and the world in which he lived as one of the infinitely privileged of Euchronia’s Millennium were not merely close. They overlapped.

  At best, they touched. At worst, they were one and the same Earth.

  Carl Magner believed, deeply and sincerely—and what else could he believe?—that his nightmare was a message and a command. He believed that the people of the Underworld were asking...demanding...his help.

  Chapter 3

  Chemec followed the four aliens along the contour of the hill. Their incredible stink was still filling his nostrils, but he had already become used to it, and it was no longer painful or sickening. It was, in the final analysis, only slightly unpleasant. Its pervasive quality made him feel exposed. He felt that he would not be able to smell a harrowhound at close quarters. This scared him, though he must have known that the smell would send a harrowhound running.

  In consequence of his fear, Chemec walked with his ears pricked and his eyes—normally quiet and idle—flicking furiously from side to side. Sometimes he brought both eyes forward at once to focus and give him stereoscopic vision, but that was little enough use in the dim outdoors—he considered it a child’s trick, or a device for reading by lamplight.

  Superficially, the strangers resembled men. Men Without Souls, chiefly. But their clothing was not man-like, if it really was clothing. They were hairless—bald as eggs. They had bulky packs on their backs and they carried things—not axes, not spears, nor knives, but most definitely the produce of Heaven Above. But there was more to their presence here than a visitation from Heaven Above. They were more alien than that. They wore masks, but not painted man-masks after the fashion of the
Ahrima. Small masks, with eye- and nose-pieces. They moved like nothing on Earth, walking high and slow, with no semblance of care or caution.

  Their strangeness was frightening to Chemec. He stumbled once and disturbed a flight of ghosts. They fluttered madly up into the air and a big bat swooped out of nowhere to snap one of them into its mouth. The rest clicked softly as they spiralled back into the shelter of the silkenhairs, swaying in mid air as their huge papery wings jockeyed for position.

  The aliens saw neither the flight of the ghosts nor the swoop of the bat, although no real man could possibly have remained unaware. Chemec could even smell the incident, despite the scent of the aliens. The panic of the ghosts had oozed from their pores into the night air—a warning to all who lurked nearby. But not the strangers.

  A few moments later, the aliens did come to a halt—suddenly—and Chemec’s heart seemed to recoil as he thought that they might have known he was following all the time. But he was not that old—his heart did not stop, and his body froze into perfect stillness. He might have smelled of fear...just a little. But he was entitled to that, while he was dogging the footsteps of the unknown.

  But the strangers had not seen Chemec. Instead they had seen Stalhelm, for the first time, nestling in the valley beyond the hill. They had not realized it was there, despite the fact that the slopes on which they now walked bore the unmistakable signs of human usage. Chemec realized that the aliens were idiots. They were crippled in the senses—lame in the very being.

  While he was still, a crab walked from the shadow of a cranebow and crossed his path. It was only a few feet away, and he could have picked it up, ripped away its claws and cracked its shell between his teeth in a matter of seconds. But he let it go. He often did. He thought of himself as Chemec the crab. Bent-legged Chemec, who preferred other meat as a matter of distinction and self-pride.

  The strangers moved off again, walking straight toward Stalhelm. The villagers knew by now that an enemy—they had to be presumed enemies—was approaching, and they would also know that Chemec was following. They would be sure that he was doing his job, holding his stone axe ready for action. Twice, or maybe more, Orgond and Yewen had brought up the idea of his being made Star King, but he had always been ready to be tested, and he had always passed the test, bent leg notwithstanding. Even Old Man Yami was something of a friend to him, despite the fact that he was crippled. But there had to be limits on friendship for the Old Man. The only certain thing in life was the fact that the Old Man would one day be the Star King, and the Old Man was ever more ready to submit someone else to the test in his place. Nobody wanted to be starshine when his closest friend was sitting by the fire. Friendship had limits.