The Flight to Lucifer Read online

  “What is it?” Perscors asked impatiently. “There’s nothing on this level, is there?”

  Before Valentinus could make any reply, Perscors was startled by a whisper which did not seem to come from any particular direction, A male voice, with a kind of bitter or ironic sympathy, said to him: “Try to understand that Olam lied. There is no return from this flight, not by the living. And Olam and Valentinus are not among the living …”

  The voice trailed off, even as Valentinus muttered: “There is a presence here,” but nonetheless, he started up the stone stairs. Perscors followed, to find another bare room; this one was brightly illuminated—how he could not tell—from its walls.

  “This room is empty also, Valentinus. Will the whole tower be empty?”

  “No, not so very empty,” Valentinus answered, in a soft, dry tone, as he stared at the walls. Projections had come upon all the walls at once, as though cast upon screens. But the images came and went so quickly that Perscors, turning from wall to wall, could hardly follow what might have been a sequence or story. As figure merged into figure, actions seemed followed not by their effects but by their causes. In the midst of this phantasmagoria he began to make out certain elements. A Primal Man—naked, calm, majestic, godlike—appeared walking upon a rocky shore, against the background of an ocean without waves, a sky without color, blue sea against white horizon. The man’s face moved Perscors, first to wonder, then to reverence, but finally to apprehension concerning the man himself, for it came to seem that there was a bewilderment, not in the man’s countenance, but in the random patterns of his walking.

  This bewilderment was linked to another image. In heights more suggested than seen, the man reclined amid vistas hinting at an abyss of perfection, a formlessness more orderly than any form could be. As Perscors watched, the man’s face grew in size until it was one with the serene abyss. Across this double vision of the wandering and resting man a shadow fell, but a shadow that seemed itself to be a grace. Suddenly the light grew too brilliant upon that wall, and Perscors spun about to the wall behind him. There the shadow fell large, and confronting it, Perscors was overcome by desire, for the shadow’s grace was now a woman, whose dark, full face expressed a great silence, a silence Perscors yearned to enter. But this phantasmal gleam vanished also, and now all the walls were blank with a fierce, numbing light.

  Valentinus climbed to the tower’s third level, which was roughly furnished and lit in a more subdued way by a single lantern upon each wall. Perscors, clambering up after, asked no questions but looked about him with curiosity at an oaken table, some chairs, a few cupboards, and one low couch set against a wall.

  “Is this Olam’s den?” he asked, but asked more of himself than as expecting any reply.

  “We can’t get farther up by ourselves,” Valentinus muttered, “so we must wait here for him, anyway. It is almost five hours until departure, and he comes neither early nor late. I am going to sleep.”

  Disdaining the couch, Valentinus curled up on the floor and was asleep in a moment. Perscors felt anger rising, and headed for the stairs to the fourth level. The first touch of his foot on the first stair stunned him almost into unconsciousness. Only the terrible strength of his will kept him upright, for a force had flung him across the tower and against a wall. Though nearly overcome, he staggered toward the stairs again, furiously determined to mount them. His advance carried him up against a series of shocks, each sickening but none the equal of the original in impact. Confronting what seemed crystal walls on all sides, open translucently to the night sky, he stared in disbelief at radiances more burning than ever he had beheld, and then rested his eyes by looking about the room. There was one object only, a moving model of the cosmos, half as high as a man and occupying the room’s center. Intricately carved, its metallic design gave off a loathsome aura, as though the artificer had done his work in overt horror of what he had so superbly imitated. The model seemed to be proclaiming the evil of what was represented, a proclamation conveyed by the sinister light, green-blue, in which the structure whirled about.

  Perscors, fascinated and repelled, glanced down at the stone floor between him and the cosmic model. A single word glowed in the stone, in large irregular red letters, spelling out: heimarmene. He did not know the word. Repeating it to himself, softly, he felt intensely ambivalent. He sensed that the word involved his destiny, and at once he welcomed it and rebelled against it. A voice, this time off to his right, spoke in the deep, full whisper of a woman: “Climb the stairs to the top, Perscors, and then leave your companions. Realize that this journey is intended against the star world, and against your heimarmene …”

  The voice reverberated in his ear with a sensation itself passionate. Impatiently he shook it from him, but turned to mount the stairs to the fifth level, convinced that such had been his intention anyway. This time the stairs offered no resistance. He bounded up to an almost dark room, illumined fitfully as if by flares, yet with no sign of such agency. In the room’s center was a single lectern, six feet high, with a slim parchment manuscript upon it. The vellum outer wrapper was stamped in gold: the gospel of truth. Perscors, turbulent with wonder, took up the manuscript and opened it, to find that most of its pages had been obliterated, torn or burned away, or else ruined by long exposure to watery air. But on the third page he could make out: “This Ignorance concerning the Father produced Anguish and Terror. And the Anguish became dense like a fog so that no one could see …” Some pages further on he was able to read: “It was a great marvel that they were in the Father without knowing Him …” Near the close, after many ruined pages, he found one consecutive passage:

  “As a person’s ignorance, at the moment when he comes to know, disintegrates of its own will; as darkness disintegrates when light appears; so also Deficiency dissolves with the advent of the Fullness. Surely thenceforward Shape is no longer apparent but will be extinguished in fusion with Unity, at the moment when Unity shall perfect the Aeons. So also shall each one of us receive himself back. Through knowledge he shall purge himself, by consuming the matter within himself like darkness to a dying flame …”

  As he read this passage, Perscors heard a call to arms he felt he had heard before, where and when he could not recall. Despite his reverence for the words he had read, he knew that he understood them only in small part. If the flight to Lucifer, or anywhere else, could purge him to understanding, then he felt more than ready to depart; in this spirit he prepared himself to ascend to the tower’s total darkness, and he was not surprised when his kerosene torch failed him as he mounted the stairs. He continued to climb up, but found himself almost breathless as he reached the final step. He dragged himself into the sixth room, and then he fainted. After a few moments, he recovered consciousness to find himself lying in darkness upon the icy-cold stone floor. Summoning all his powerful will, he rose to his knees. At once fire flamed about him. It seemed as if the tower’s seventh and topmost floor had been burned away. An unbearable wave of heat flowed toward him. As Perscors lost consciousness again, his mind was noting that this agony of flame could not consume him, or even daunt him, but he fell into a heavy sleep even as he tasted his own pride.

  Heimarmene

  “He is a heavy sleeper, your giant,” Olam grinningly remarked to Valentinus, who stared gloomily at the just-awakened Perscors, more than four hours later. Perscors was still lying on the stone floor of the sixth room, but now without sensations of heat or cold. The room was lit brightly from or through the walls, and the trapdoor to the tower’s roof was open, at the top of a final circle of stairs. Lying on his back, Perscors looked up through the aperture into a starry sky,

  “You have woken from your slumber,” Olam said to Perscors, and added roughly: “But will you stay awake? You hear all sorts of calls, but will you ever tell one from another? Will your pleasure voyage turn into something more?” With his stranger’s face yellow and jeering under a broad-brimmed hat, Olam seeme
d ugly and formidable to Perscors. Angry at this provocation, Perscors felt his strength returning rapidly and rose to his feet.

  “You are an odd host, Olam. Mythological films, two kinds of voices, models of the star world, ruined scriptures, fire and cold. Something to eat before departure, and a few explanations from you and Valentinus, would be more useful.”

  Valentinus maintained his usual silence, but Olam roared in amusement.

  “You’re in the great line, giant! You’ll keep blundering on and perhaps break even your head on a truth before you end! Food’s no problem. You’ll eat now before we leave. But you won’t understand, not at the point you’ve reached. Fire questers almost never come to know.”

  “Why take me along, then?” Perscors questioned. “If Valentinus knows, even if he can’t remember much, what shall I be good for?”

  “You come together,” Olam said more quietly. “The quest needs you both, your soul and his spark. Where we are going, the combat is simpler than here, but just as bloody and twice as vital.”

  “Combat with whom or what, Olam?”

  “You know the text,” Olam answered, “though St. Paul got it backward, just exactly backward. Our strife really will be not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present Darkness, and against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. But we don’t know yet, nor do you, whether your soul isn’t part of those spiritual hosts.”

  Olam’s full statement had been puzzling. Perscors stood in doubt, looking from this alien presence to Vaientinus, waiting for his friend to speak. After a hesitation, Valentinus spoke harshly, addressing himself to Olam: “As we have got to go together, all of us, it is not a time to taunt each other with mysteries. There we will at least have a chance of knowing who and where we are.”

  “But idiom are we going against?” Perscors burst out.

  “Against the star world,” Olam answered, “and in your case, perhaps against yourself. But we aren’t the first, nor will we be the last, to set ourselves against the cosmos.”

  “You speak as though you were no part of the cosmos, Olam. What are you, anyway?”

  But for once Valentinus started to speak of his own will, interrupting the others: “There isn’t a way of explaining these things here, not on our world. So many times I’ve had to learn that. Risk everything, as I know you to be capable of doing, and then both of us will see more clearly.”

  After this appeal, Perscors was content. Olam led them back to the tower’s third level, where they shared a meal of bread and brandy. They ate silently, as midnight came near. When they finished, Perscors turned to Olam: “Just one last question, anyway. What does heimamene signify?”

  “It means fate, oppressive cosmic fate. It pretends to be the law of the universe. The Babylonians invented it, and astrologists have played with it ever since. But the Greeks, and the best of them at that, made it a philosophic religion. Pythagoras called it a harmony, and he invented the psyche, your precious soul, as an effluence from it, so that part of your mind would be an overflow from the stars. But you have a spirit also, your pneuma, a kind of spark, that isn’t your soul and that is older and better than the stars. We are going so as to give you a chance to purge yourself of your soul, and to let that spark blaze up again into the light beyond the stars.”

  For some moments, all three sat in silence. Perscors had more to absorb than the abundance that already had flooded him. Resolving to brood upon all this later, he confined himself to one pragmatic question: “I am ready to leave, with a whole heart. What is the ship?”

  Olam proudly replied: “I cross the cosmos through black holes. Even if a craft came close to the speed of light, it would not be fast enough, for these light-years are beyond your span. The escape from heimarmene is through the black holes. In their density, their gravity is so strong that everything is pulled into them. All of light comes in, including every spark of spirit.”

  “But how do we enter a black hole so as to come out of it again? Where do you find your gateway or window?”

  “That is part of the knowing” was all that Olam would answer.

  “What, then, is the spacecraft?”

  Olam laughed with the weariness of too many questions.

  “An illegal borrowing, from your space shuttle perhaps. We will say no more about that. Instead, we will depart, now! No space suits or helmets required, either for how we go or where we go. You’ll breathe an ordinary sea-level atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen, on the flight and on Lucifer.”

  He stood and led the way up the tower, Valentinus following him, and Perscors, heart pounding, coming after. This time the fourth level offered no obstacles. On the tower’s flat roof, the spacecraft waited, and they entered.

  “I am the pilot,” Olam said as Perscors glanced about him. “We will be a while on this crossing, and by the nature of it you will have to sleep. But it will be a good sleep, a dreamless sleep, almost like a good death.”

  Perscors did not bother to react. His heart was set on Lucifer, and his weariness with Olam seemed now as intense as his weariness with the earth he was leaving. He turned and, as though sleepwalking, went to the nearest bunk and sank into it. In a moment he was in profound sleep.

  Valentinus walked over to the bunk and studied the features of his sleeping friend. “Will I see him again, Olam?”

  “How can I say, Valentinus? I only know what we must do when we get there. What will happen, I cannot know. But this one seems subtler than the others, as well as stronger. There may be enough of the spark in him. He will have his chance.”

  Valentinus turned away, to his own meditations. Olam went to the controls, and within moments the flight to Lucifer had begun.

  The Mandaeans

  When he awoke, Perscors found himself lying by the bank of a wide river in a green valley. Years before, he had been in Iraq and had walked along the lower Euphrates. As he began to walk by this river, he wondered if he were back at the Euphrates, so reminiscent was the landscape. Then he stopped and looked about him. Olam, Valentinus, and the spacecraft were gone, and he was alone on a planet far away from earth, on the other side of the cosmos. He felt neither terror nor wonder.

  Looking to his right, away from the river, he saw that he was not alone. A tall, gaunt man, but not so tall as himself, walked toward him across a meadow. The man, dressed in what seemed an aristocratic version of a shepherd’s smock, carried a large shepherd’s crook, which to Perscors seemed as much a weapon as a badge of office. Perscors silently waited to be welcomed.

  “In the name of the great first alien Life from the worlds of light, the sublime that stands above all works, I greet you.” The man announced himself as Enosh, leader of the Mandaeans, and demanded knowledge of Perscors’s identity, origins, and purposes.

  “Perscors. I come from afar, across the black holes of space, and I believe I seek no enemy.”

  Enosh studied him closely, and then smiled.

  “You have come to the wrong world, then, for here you must choose a side.”

  “Is there no peace on a world named the light-bearer?”

  “We are surrounded by the Sethians” was the unsmiling reply. “And they have enemies to both sides of them, and so it goes, on to their enemies’ enemies, and ever so on to the end of this world. We are all exiled from Light and Life together, but some have the knowledge of the exile, while most do not. And those who do not know war incessantly against the Knowers.”

  “I have no clear understanding of what I know or do not know. I came here with a stranger, named Olam, and with my friend Valentinus, but they would seem to have flown off again without me.”

  Enosh thought for a few moments. “If Olam brought you, it must have been for some good purpose. Of Valentinus I have no acquaintance. Where do you mean to go, once you have breakfasted among our tents?”
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br />   Perscors turned around and pointed to the river.

  “An impulse tells me that I am to cross this river and go westward.”

  “We can land you on the other bank,” said Enosh reluctantly, “but no one will go with you. And whether the Sethians will harm you, I cannot say. But come now, and eat with us.”

  He led Perscors across the meadow, into some low hills, until they entered the armed camp of the Mandaeans. Perscors, looking around him at the many curious but not friendly faces, saw a shepherds’ community of some seven hundred, a spare, gaunt, rugged-looking people. The men were armed with lances, swords, bows, and the formidable pastoral crooks. The Mandaeans ate at long communal tables, gathered together as families, except for Enosh and Perscors, who sat together to eat under a tree. An armed retainer served them goat’s milk, cheese, and bread. They ate in silence, as Perscors studied a pale-blue sky, lit by a sun that seemed smaller and less luminous than the sun he had known on earth.

  “What is the quarrel between you and the Sethians? Is it actually a religious matter?”

  Enosh hesitated for a long interval, and then spoke with great bitterness: “At root, it is religious, but on the surface it is the common quarrel about possession of land. If you cross west over the river, somewhat farther down from here, you come to haunted ground. Ages ago, it was holy, for we and the Sethians agree that the Pleroma was there. Now it is only a legacy, useful for grazing, and for dreaming. But we claim it, they dispute our claim, and we and they raid one another’s flocks there.”

  “How far down the river is it?” Perscors asked.

  “About an hour’s march. Do you mean to go there first?”