Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘And when it does dissipate?’

  ‘The cosmic furnace, into which all souls are thrown at death. From the common pool new individuals are moulded.’

  ‘So as well as making a conscious construct, you have also solved the mystery of what happens at death,’ Jasperodus remarked in a tone at once flippant and sombre. He cogitated, trying to understand the issue in all its aspects. The old man was clearly taxed by so much talk, but he could not resist asking the questions that came to mind.

  ‘If I have consciousness, how is it that I cannot locate my “I”? When I enter into my mind I find only thoughts and percepts.’

  ‘So it is with everyone. The self always remains hidden. You cannot see the seer, the mind cannot grasp the thinker of the thought. That seer, that thinker, is “I”, the soul.’

  The senile robotician made an effort to lift his head, but sank back with a defeated, sighing moan.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Jasperodus said, ‘I have been inconsiderate with so much inquisitiveness. What may I do for you? If it comes to that, may we not reverse the operation that gave me life? I could easily spare some vitality, which might restore your health.’

  ‘Too late; my condition is irreversible. In any case I would not countenance it. There is only one service you can perform for me, and that is to bury my body in a grave alongside that of your mother.’

  ‘You may live for some time yet. At least I can stay here to take care of you.’

  ‘No need for that either.’ With an effort the old man fumbled under his pillow and brought out a little white pill. ‘Well, Jasperodus, you chose to go your own way, but I see you have turned into a person of quality. I would stay to hear how you have fared, but I fear it might make parting too difficult. So farewell – and may the rest of life prove to your satisfaction.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’ Jasperodus asked, his eyes on the white pill.

  ‘I prepared this to spare myself an existence without the use of my mind during my last hours – which would not be long now in any case. I have delayed taking it so far – perhaps subconsciously I sensed you would come. Now that I have seen you I feel a sense of completeness. Nothing need delay me further.’

  With difficulty he guided the pill to his lips. Jasperodus reached out to snatch it away, then stayed his hand.

  His father died peacefully within seconds. Jasperodus drew back the curtains, admitting sunlight into the dusty room. He looked carefully around him, consigning every detail to his memory and recalling that occasion long ago when he had walked out of here, little realising the sacrifice that had been made on his behalf.

  Then he went through the cottage, looking for notebooks, instruments, anything appertaining to robotics, though whether he would have studied or destroyed any material or artifacts relating to his father’s great discovery he was not sure. However, he found nothing: everything had been meticulously removed.

  Going to the tool shed he sought out a spade, then dug a neat grave beside that of his mother. He wrapped his father’s body in a sheet, laid him in the excavation, filled it in and erected a plain wooden namepost.

  The work took slightly over half an hour. For a short while afterwards Jasperodus stood before the little cottage, taking in the landscape that lay before him, with its moistly wooded rolling hills, the cloud-bedecked sky that stretched and expanded everywhere over it, beaming down great shafts of sunlight into the air space beneath, and beyond that the framing immensity of the void and the wheeling masses of remote stars which for the moment he couldn’t see, and he speculated on the nature of the cosmic furnace his father had described, where all beings were melted, formed and re-formed.

  It was a marvel to him what a change new knowledge had wrought in him. All inner conflict, the result of his ignorance, was gone. He felt intelligent, strong, aware of himself, and at peace.

  On his return to the aircraft Arcturus found him in a private mood. ‘Well, what now?’ the rebel slum-dweller said acidly. ‘Do we proceed to the place of your ritual suicide, wherever that is to be?’

  ‘I hope you will not think me unreliable if I have changed my mind,’ Jasperodus informed him. ‘I shall live after all. We return to Tansiann.’

  ‘So we are to fight Charrane and Borgor after all?’

  ‘The best hope lies in a reconciliation with Charrane – though whether I can ever be reinstated with him I do not know.’ Automatically his mind began inventing various stratagems – unmasking the perfidy of Ax Oleander, petitioning for the return of the Emperor, and so on. ‘No matter; events must fall out as they will. Even if I am forced to quit public life there is much that I can do.’

  Arcturus grunted, eyeing him derisively but with curiosity. ‘As you wish, but what has brought about this change in policy?’

  ‘I owe you, I suppose, apologies and explanations,’ Jasperodus said, ‘though they would be tediously long. For me it has been a circuitous route, to discovering the sacrifice that was necessary for the creation of my being. That sacrifice should not be heedlessly abnegated. It should bear fruit. To create, to enrich life for mankind, to raise consciousness to new levels of aspiration, that is what should be done …’

  The ramp closed shut. Graceful as a gull the nuclear ramjet soared up from the field and went whining away to the East.

  THE KNIGHTS OF THE LIMITS

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Mutation Planet’ first appeared in Tomorrow’s Alternatives, edited by Roger Elwood. ‘The Problem of Morley’s Emission’ was written for An Index of Possibilities and is included in this collection by permission of Clanose Publishers Ltd. All other stories first appeared in New Worlds.

  The six-based number spiral and the concept of Hyper-One described in ‘The Bees of Knowledge’ are borrowed, with thanks, from the mathematical efforts of W. G. Davies.

  In an unwritten occult teaching

  various ascending orders of spacetime

  are defined in terms of ‘the Knights of the Limits’

  THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

  The physical space in which we and the worlds move and have our being may easily be presumed to be a necessary and absolute condition of existence, the only form of the universe that is possible or even conceivable. Mathematicians may invent fictitious spaces of higher dimensions than our own but these, our intuition tells us, are no more than idealistic inventions which could nowhere be translated into reality and do not therefore properly deserve the designation ‘space’. The space we know, having the qualities of symmetry and continuity, is intimately and automatically the concomitant of any universe containing things and events, and therefore is inevitable; without space as we know it there could be no existence. The commonplace mind accepts this notion without question; thoughtful philosophers have spoken of the symmetrical, continuous space of three dimensions as an a priori world principle whose contradiction would remain a contradiction even in the mind of God. Yet not only has this belief no axiomatic justification but, as I shall attempt to show presently, it is untrue.

  I had just smoked my second pipe of opium and was settling into a pleasant reverie. The opium smell, a sweet, cloying and quite unique odour, still hung in the air of my study, mingling with the aroma of the polished mahogany bookcases and the scent of flowers from the garden. Through the open window I could see that garden, with its pretty shrubs and crazy pathways, and beyond, the real ball of the far-off sun sinking through strata of pink and blue clouds.

  My attention, however, was on the chessboard before me. Perhaps I should say a few words about myself. I believe that my brief participation in ‘orthodox’ experimental research may permit me to call myself a man of science, although these days my studies are more mathematical and deductive. It will surprise some that my main interest throughout my life has been alchemy. I have myself practised the Hermetic Art with some assiduity, if only to feel for myself the same numinousness experienced by my alchemistic forebears in manipulating the chemical constituents of the world. Hence I have known what
it is to search for the prima materia (which others call the Philosopher’s stone, being the root of transformation); and I have pondered long and deeply on that profoundly basic manual, the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus.

  Unlike most contemporary men I am not inclined to the belief that alchemy has been rendered obsolete by modern science, but rather that its inadequate techniques and theories have been temporarily outstripped, while the essence of the Art remains unapproached. In the not too distant future the reverent search for prima materia may once again be conducted with the full charisma of symbology, but employing the best of particle accelerators. If the outlook I am displaying seems to run counter to the spirit of inductive science, let me admit that my thoughts do sometimes wander, for good or ill, outside the pale wherein dwell the more active members of the scientific community. There is value, I believe, in looking back over the history of science as well as forward to future expectations. I am not, for instance, hypnotised by the success of atomic theory, as are practically all of my colleagues. If I may be permitted to say so, the objections to the atomic view of nature listed by Aristotle have never been answered. These objections are still valid, and eventually they will have to be answered – or vindicated – on the level of subnuclear physics.

  Opium has the happy conjunction of both inducing a feeling of relaxation and well-being and of opening the inner doors of the mind to a realm of colourful creativity. By opium, it is conjectured, Coleridge glimpsed the poem Kubla Khan, only fragments of which he managed to remember. By opium I met my new, though sadly soon-departed, friend, the Chessboard Knight.

  A chessboard, to recapitulate the obvious, consists of 8×8 locations, or ‘squares’ arranged in a rectilinear grid. To us, the chessboard represents a peculiarly restricted world. The entities, or ‘pieces’ of this world are distinguished from one another only by their power of movement: a pawn can only move forward, one square at a time; a castle can move longitudinally for up to eight squares, a bishop likewise diagonally, and a knight can move to the opposite corner of a 2×3 rectangle. For all pieces movement is always directly from square to square, with no locations existing between the squares: none of them possesses the power of continuous, non-discrete movement we enjoy in our own world. On the other hand none of us possesses the power of simultaneous transition from location to location enjoyed by chessmen, particularly by the knight, who is unimpeded by intervening obstacles.

  A rapid succession of similar thoughts was passing through my head as I gazed at the chessboard, though ostensibly to study the game laid out thereon, which I was playing by letter with a distant correspondent. As sometimes happens when smoking opium, time suddenly slowed down and thoughts seemed to come with incredible speed and clarity. Normally, I mused, one would unhesitatingly suppose our real physical world to be the superior of the chessboard world, because no limitation is placed upon the number of locations we may occupy. No arbitrary laws restrict me from moving in any way I please about my study, my garden, or the countryside beyond. But is that so important? The significance of chess lies not in its very simplified space-time environment but in the relation the pieces hold to one another. By this latter criterion our own degree of freedom undergoes a drastic reduction: the number of stances I can hold in relation to my wife, to my friends or to my employer (though being retired, I have no employer) is by no means greater; insignificant, in fact, when compared to the infinite number of relationships that would obtain by mathematically permutating all possible locations in our continuum of physical space. Is it an unfounded presumption, then, that our own work of continuous consecutive motions is logically any more basic to nature, or any richer in content, than one based on the principle of the chessboard, comprising discrete transitions between non-continuous locations?

  I had reached thus far in my speeding express-train of thought when before my dazed eyes the chess pieces, like a machine that had suddenly been switched on, began flicking themselves around the board, switching from square to square with all the abruptness of the winking patterns of lights on a computer console. After this brief, flurried display they arranged themselves in a formation which left the centre of the board empty and were still – except for the White King’s Knight, who went flickering among them in his corner-turning manner, executing a dizzying but gracefully arabesque circuit of the board before finishing up in the centre, where he turned to me, bowed slightly, and lifted his head to speak to me in a distant, somewhat braying tone.

  In my drugged state this happening did not induce in me the same surfeit of bewilderment and incredulity that would normally, I believe, have been my reaction. Astonished I certainly was. It is not every day that one’s chess set shows a life of its own, or that the pieces remain so true to their formal nature as laid down by the rules that they move from one position to another without bothering to traverse the spaces between. Not, let me add for the sake of the record, that the pieces showed any carelessness or laziness, or that they took short cuts. In order to move, say, from Qkt4 to Kr4, a castle was required to manifest himself in all the intervening squares so as to show that he came by a definite route and that the way was unimpeded – only the Knight flashed to his opposite corner unperturbed by whatever might surround him. These manifestations were, however, fleeting in the extreme, and nothing was ever seen of the castle in between adjacent squares – because, naturally, in a game of chess there is no ‘between adjacent squares’.

  But I jump ahead of myself. My astonishment was so great that I missed the Knight’s first words and he was obliged to repeat himself. What he said was:

  ‘We enter your haven with gratitude.’

  His voice, as I have said, was distant, with a resinous, braying quality. Yet not cold or unpleasant; on the contrary it was cordial and civilised. I replied:

  ‘I was not aware that you were in need of haven; but that being the case, you are welcome.’ In retrospect my words might appear to have received weighty consideration, but in fact they were flippant and extemporary, the only response my brain could form to an impossible situation. And so began my conversation with the Chessboard Knight, the strangest and most informative conversation I have ever held.

  So total was my bemusement that I accepted with an unnatural calmness the Knight’s announcement that he was a space explorer. My sense of excitement returned, however, when he went on to explain that he was not a space explorer such as our imagination might conjure by the phrase, but that he was an explorer of alternative types of spatial framework of which, he assured me, there were a good number in the universe. What we are pleased to call the sidereal universe, that is, the whole system of space-time observable by us on Earth, is merely one among a vast range of various systems. Even more astounding, in the circumstances, was the revelation that the Knight hailed from a system of space identical to that which I had a moment before been contemplating! One analogous to a game of chess, where space, instead of being continuous and homogeneous as we know it, was made up of discrete locations, infinite or at any rate indefinite in number, and to which entities can address themselves instantaneously and in any order. There is no extended spatial framework in which these locations are ordered or arrayed and all locations are equally available from any starting point (provided they are not already occupied). An entity may, however, occupy only one location at a time and therein lies the principle of order in this well-nigh incomprehensible world. Structures, systems and events consist of convoluted arabesque patterns of successive occupations, and of the game-like relationships these manoeuvres hold to one another. The chess-people’s analogy of a long distance takes the form of a particularly difficult sequence of locations; alternatively the sequence could correspond to a particularly clever construct or device – the chess-people make little distinction between these two interpretations.

  As do the occupants of a chessboard, the entities of this space (which I shall term locational-transitional space) vary in the range and ingenuity of their movements. Primitive organism
s can do no more than transfer themselves slowly from one location to another, without pattern or direction, like pawns, while the most evolved intelligent species, like my friend the Knight, had advanced to dizzying achievements as laid down by the possibilities of such a realm. Their most staggering achievement was that of travel to other spaces; this was accomplished by a hazardous, almost infinitely long series of locations executed at colossal speed and comprising a pattern of such subtlety and complexity that my mind could not hope to comprehend it. Indeed, few even in the Knight’s spatial realm comprehended it and for their science it constituted a triumph comparable to our release of atomic energy from matter.

  The discerning reader who has followed me this far might justly wonder at the coincidence which brought these bizarre travellers to my presence at the very moment when I had been theoretically contemplating something resembling their home space. This question was uppermost in my mind, also, but there was, the Knight told me, no coincidence involved at all. On entering our continuum (which the Knight and the companions under his command did indirectly, via other realms less weird to them) the space explorers had become confused and lost their bearings, seeming to wander in a sea of primeval chaos where no laws they could hypothesise, not even those garnered in their wide experience of spatial systems, seemed to obtain. Then, like a faint beacon of light in the uncognisable limbo, they had sighted a tiny oasis of ordered space, and with great expertise and luck had managed to steer their ship towards it.

  That oasis was my chessboard. Not the board alone, of course – tens of thousands of chess games in progress at the same moment failed to catch their attention – but the fact that it had been illumined and made real by the thoughts I had entertained while gazing upon it, imbuing it with conceptions that approached, however haltingly, the conditions of their home world. Hence I owed the visitation to a lesser, more credible coincidence: chess and opium. At any rate, having landed their ship upon the board and thus bringing it under the influence of that vessel’s internally maintained alien laws, they had carried out simple manipulations of the pieces in order to signal their presence and establish communication – the real ship and its occupants not being visible or even conceivable to me, since they did not have contiguous spatial extension.