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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘It would be a great adventure.’

  ‘Only for a fool who no longer wishes to live.’

  ‘Perhaps. Give my greetings to the Kessene.’

  I moved away from him, walking slowly towards the hive.

  I had slept but a few minutes, and on waking found my mind buzzing with new energy.

  The dream. I was sure the dream was telling me what to do. I had taken the Bees too much for granted, not pondering enough as to their true nature. And yet all I had to do was to think about terrestrial bees.

  The gathering of nectar was not the end of the bees’ food-making process. That nectar was taken into the hive and made into honey. The same must be true, I reasoned, of the Bees of Handrea and their gathering of knowledge. That knowledge was further refined in the depths of the hive. But what was the honey that resulted from this refining?

  Men have sometimes entered the hive to taste the Bees’ honey.

  The Bees of knowledge; the honey of experience. The phrase came into my mind, I did not know from where.

  Of course! The answer came to me in a flash. It explained everything – why the Bees ignored me, why they pulled artifacts to pieces and abandoned them, apparently fashioning nothing similar themselves.

  Social insects, as individuals, are not complete. They live only to serve the hive, or colony. Usually they are biologically specialised to perform specific functions and are oblivious of any other. Workers do not know sex. Drones do not know anything else.

  The individual Bees I had encountered were not, by themselves, intelligent. What was intelligent was the Hive Mind, the collectivity of all the Bees, existing as some sort of separate entity. This Mind sent out its golden insects to bring back items of interest from the surrounding world. The Bees collected ideas and observations which were then mulled over by the mind to provide itself with experience. Because the Hive Mind itself had no direct perception; everything had to come through the Bees.

  Experience was the honey that was made from this dry, arid knowledge. It was the Hive Mind’s food.

  And it was the Hive Mind, not the individual Bees, that would understand my needs!

  Could it have been the Hive Mind and not Saint Hysastum, I wondered, that had been calling to me through my dreams? At any rate my course of action seemed clear. I must descend deep into the hive in search of the Mind, hoping that I could contact it somehow.

  The Fly was still fiddling with the number board when, for the last time, I left the dim vault of the junkheaps. How close I was to the truth – and yet how far! Armed as usual with my spear I set off, heading for the very centre of the hive where I imagined the Mind to manifest itself.

  The damage caused by dragging the alien ship into the interior had all been repaired. The ceaselessly busy and largely inconsequential-looking activity of the giant insects went on all around me. The Bees rushed to and fro, buzz-saw voices rising and falling and wings trembling on meeting, or performed their odd waggling dance before one another. Except for their size and some physical differences it could have been any beehive on Earth.

  I journeyed through the golden chambers I have already described. Beyond these lay a labyrinth of worm-like tunnels in which were interspersed empty egg-shaped chambers or nests. I discovered this to appertain to the hive’s reproductive arrangements, for eventually I entered a part of the labyrinth that was not empty. Here larvae crawled about the chambers, tended by worker Bees. Then I suddenly broke through the labyrinth and was confronted by an enormous honeycombed wall extending far overhead. Each cell of this honeycomb evidently contained an egg, for newly-hatched larvae were emerging here and there and crawling down the surface.

  Somewhere, conceivably, was a huge bloated queen, mother to the whole hive. Could this queen constitute the intelligence I sought? I rejected the idea. As among earthly insects, she would be totally overburdened with her egg-laying role and unfit for anything else.

  A longitudinal slit, about eight feet in height, separated the honeycomb from the ground. Since my destination lay in this direction I passed through it and walked, in semidarkness for a time, with the bulk of the honeycomb pressing down above me.

  Then the space seemed to open up abruptly and at the same time I was in the midst of a golden haze which intensified with each step I took, so that the limits of the place I was in were indistinct. Vague shapes loomed at me as if in a dream. Among them was the alien ship I had seen carried into the hive, sliding past me as if into a mist.

  My foot caught against something. The floor was littered with objects of all kinds so as to resemble the floor of the vault of the junkheaps, except that here they were bathed in the golden ambience covering everything. I went on, picking my way among them. Presently I heard a familiar buzzing sound. Ahead of me were a number of Bees that appeared to be in an ecstatic trance. Their legs were rigid, their wings were open and vibrating tremulously, their antennae quivered, while the droning they gave off had an almost hypnotic effect.

  During the course of my journey I had gradually become aware of an oppressive feeling in my head and an aching sensation at the bridge of my nose. These feelings became unbearably strong in the golden haze. I looked at the gathered Bees and understood that this was the place where their honey was processed, or perhaps where it was stored. With that thought the aching in my head became like a migraine and then suddenly vanished. Something pushed its way into my brain.

  I tasted the Bees’ honey. I experienced as the Bees experience.

  The dream had been a precursor. But it could not have prepared me for such total immersion. What is experience? It comes through the senses, is processed by the mind and presented to the consciousness. The Bees’ honey bypasses all these, except perhaps the last. It is raw experience, predigested, intensified, blotting out everything else.

  This honey has an actual physical basis: magnetism. Handrea’s magnetic field, as I have mentioned earlier, is unusually strong and intricate. The Bees have incorporated this magnetic intricacy into their evolution. By means of it they are able to perform a kind of telepathy on the creatures they borrow their knowledge from, using magnetic currents of great delicacy to read the memory banks of living minds. By tuning in to Handrea’s magnetic field they know a great deal about what is taking place across the planet, and by the same means they can extend their knowledge into space within the limits of the field. Thus they knew of the accident aboard the passenger liner, and perhaps had learned much of mankind, before I ever set foot on Handrea.

  Sometimes magnetic strains from this golden store sweep through the hive in wayward currents. Twice these currents had impinged on my mind to create dreams, giving me the information that had led me into this trap.

  I do not know how long my first trance lasted. When it ended I found myself lying on the floor and understood that I must have been overwhelmed by the rush of impressions and passed out. Clarity of the senses lasted only a few minutes, however. The magnetic furore swept through my brain again, and once more I was subjected to amazing experiences.

  One does not lose consciousness during these trances. It is rather that one’s normal perceptions are blotted out by a stronger force, as the light of a candle is annihilated by the light of the sun.

  And what are these stronger experiences?

  How am I to describe the contents of alien minds?

  At first my experience were almost wholly abstract, but possessing a baroque quality quite different from what one normally thinks of as abstract. When I try to recall them I am left with a sense of something golden and ornate, of sweetish-musk aromas and of depth within depth.

  Like my friend the Fly, the Bees are much interested in mathematics, but theirs is of a type that not even he would be able to understand (any more than I could, except intuitively when I was in the grip of the trance). What would he have made, with his obsession with numbers, of the Bees’ theorem that there is a highest positive integer! To human mathematicians this would make no sense. The Bees accomplish it by arr
anging all numbers radially on six spokes, centred about the number One. They then place on the spokes of this great wheel certain number series which are claimed to contain the essence of numbers and which go spiralling through it, diverging and converging in a winding dance. All these series meet at last in a single immense number. This, according to the theorem, is the opposite pole of the system of positive integers, of which One is the other pole and is referred to as Hyper-One. This is the end of numbers as we know them. Hyper-One then serves as One for a number system of a higher order. But, to show the hypothetical nature of the Bees’ deliberations there is a quite contrary doctrine which portrays all numbers as emanating from a number Plenum, so that every number is potentially zero.

  These are items, scraps, crumbs from the feast of the Bees’ honey. The raw material of this honey is the knowledge and ideas that the individual Bees forage from all over Handrea. In the safety of their hive the Bees get busy with this knowledge, converting it into direct experience. With the tirelessness of all insects they use it to create innumerable hypothetical worlds, testing them, as it were, with their prodigious intellects to see how they serve as vehicles for experience. I have lived in these worlds. When I am in them they are as real as my own. I have tasted intellectual abstractions of such a rarefied nature that it is useless for me to try to think about them.

  But as my brain began to accommodate itself to the honey my experiences became more concrete. Instead of finding myself in a realm of vast theoretical calculation I would find myself sailing the seas of Handrea in a big ship, walking cities that lay somewhere on the other side of the globe, or participating in historical events, many of which had taken place thousands of years previously. Yet even here the Bees’ intellectual preoccupations asserted themselves. Nearly always the adventures I met ended in the studies of philosophers and mathematicians, where lengthy debate took place, sometimes followed by translation into a world of pure ideas.

  There was a third stage. My experiences began to include material that could only have come from within my own brain. I was back in my home city on my home planet. I was with my friends and loved ones. I relived events from the past. None of this was actually as it happened, but restructured and mixed together, as happens in dreams, and always with mingled emotions of joy, regret and nostalgia. Among it all, I also lived fantastic scenes from fiction; even comic-strip caricatures came to life, as if the Bees did not know the difference between them and reality.

  My home world came, perhaps, to be my own private corner of the honey-store, though it is certainly only a minor item in the Bees’ vast hoard. Yet what a sense of desolation I always feel on coming out of it, in the periods when for some reason the magnetic currents no longer inflame my brain, and I realise it is only hallucination! I then find myself in this arid, lonely place, with Bees buzzing and trembling all around me, and as I crawl from the chamber for nearby food and water I know that I shall never, in reality, see home again.

  For the time is long, long past when a rescue beacon could do anything to help me. Not that there was ever, in fact, any chance of constructing one. Because the Bees are not intelligent.

  Incredibly, but truly, they are not intelligent. They have intellect merely, pure intellect, but not true intelligence, for this requires the exertion of both intellect and the feelings – and, most important, of the soul. The Bees have no feelings, any more than any other insect has, and – of this I am convinced – God has not endowed them with souls.

  They are merely insects. Their intellectual powers, their avid thirst for knowledge, are but instincts with them, no different from the instinct that prompts the ants, bees and termites of Earth to feats of engineering, and which has also misled men into thinking those to be intelligent. No rational mind, able to respond to and communicate with other rational minds, lies behind their voracious appetite.

  It seems fitting that if by some quirk or accident of nature intellectual brains should evolve in that class of creature roughly corresponding to our terrestrial arthropods (and Handrea offers the only case of this as far as I know, even though insect-like fauna are abundant throughout the universe), they should do so in this bizarre fashion. One does not expect insects to be intelligent, and indeed they are not, even when endowed with analytical powers greater than our own.

  But how long it took me to grasp this fact when I strove so desperately to convey messages to the Hive Mind! For there is a Hive Mind; but it has no qualities or intelligence that an individual Bee does not have. It is simply an insect collectivised, a single Bee writ large, and would not be worth mentioning were it not for one curious power it has, or that I think it has.

  It seems able, by some means I cannot explain, to congeal objects out of thought. Perhaps these objects are forms imprinted on matter by magnetism. At any rate several times I have found in the chamber small artifacts which earlier I had encountered in visions, and which I do not think could have been obtained on Handrea. Once, for instance, I found a copy of a newspaper including in its pages the adventures of the Amazing Human Spider.

  And recently I discovered a small bound book in which was written all the events I have outlined in this account.

  I no longer know whether I have copied my story from this book, or whether the book was copied by the Bees from my mind.

  What does it matter? I do not know for certain if the book, or indeed any of the other objects I have found in the chamber, really existed. The fact is that for all the abstract knowledge available to me, my grip on concrete reality has steadily deteriorated. I can no longer say with certainty which of the experiences given me by the honey really happened in my former life and which are alterations, interpolations or fantasies. For instance, was I really a companion of the Amazing Human Spider, a crime-fighter who leaps from skyscraper to skyscraper by means of his gravity-defying web?

  I have been here for many years. My hair and beard are long and shaggy now that I no longer trim them. Often at the beginning I tried to break away from this addiction to the Bees’ honey, but without it the reality of my position is simply too unbearable. Once I even dragged myself halfway back to the vault of the junkheaps, but I knew all the time that I would be forced to return, so great is the pull of those waking dreams.

  And so here I remain and must remain, more a parasite upon these monsters than I ever had imagined I could be. For monsters they are – monsters in the Satanic sense. How else can one describe creatures of such prodigious knowledge and such negligible understanding? And for my enjoyment I have this honey – this all-spanning knowledge. Mad knowledge, too great for human encompassing and fit only for these manic Bees and the work of their ceasless insect intellects. Knowledge that has no meaning, nothing to check or illuminate it, and which produces no practical end. And yet I know that even here, amid the unseeing Bees of Handrea, far from the temples and comforts of my religion, God is present.

  EXIT FROM CITY 5

  Kayin often wondered why the autumnal phase of the City’s weather-cycle brought with it such an atmosphere of untidiness and decay. He sat holding Polla’s hand in the park, watching as the light over the City dimmed with the approach of night. Here, the gentle breeze that blew continuously through City 5 collected by fitful gusts into a modest wind, skirling up a detritus of torn paper, scraps of fabric and dust.

  Rearing above the park’s fringe of trees the ranks of windows in the serried arrays of office buildings began to flick into life. The park was situated on a high level and well out towards the perimeter of the City, so that from this vantage point City 5, with its broken lines, blocks and levels, presented the appearance of a metal bowl finely machined into numerous rectilinear surfaces like an abstract sculpture. From the broken perimeter to the central pinnacle the City rose in a wide counter-curve to the curve of the crystal dome overhead, creating a deliberate but false impression of spaciousness. And indeed for a brief period in the late morning, when the light was brightest and the air filled with the sounds of industry, City 5 d
id manage to generate an atmosphere of liveliness, almost of excitement. But by mid-afternoon the illusion was gone. The crystal dome, glinting in the falling light, became oppressive, and when night arrived it grew over-reachingly, invisibly black, filling Kayin’s imagination with vacant images of outside.

  ‘Why don’t they leave the light on?’ he said irritably. ‘I don’t need any night-time.’

  Polla did not answer. The reason was known to them both. Of all the carefully-arranged principles by which the City lived, routine was the most vital. Instead she disengaged her hand and put her arm round his neck in a fond, artless gesture. ‘You are getting moody lately,’ she told him.

  He grunted. ‘I know. Can you blame me? This trouble with the Society. I’m out, you know. They don’t dare let me back after this. And the City Board will come down on my neck like a ton of steel.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll go easy, on you. What you did wasn’t really shocking by today’s standards. Anyway, something like that doesn’t usually bother you, Kayin.’

  Kayin sighed. ‘You’re right, it’s not the Society. They won’t achieve anything anyway. Poll, have you ever taken a walk through the City from end to end?’

  ‘Sure,’ she laughed, ‘lots of times.’

  So had he. Its diameter was a little short of five miles. Streets, offices, factories, houses, parks, level piled on level. Some parts of the City were laid out neatly, efficiently, others were warrens of twisting, turning passages. There was a fair amount of variety. But for some reason, on these walks of his, Kayin always seemed to find himself out at the perimeter, where the City proper met the crystal dome, piling up against it in irregular steps like a wave. It was not possible actually to touch the dome: the way was barred by a solid girdle of steel. For interest’s sake, Kayin would usually return through the basement of the City, where acre upon acre of apparatus managed the precise transformations of matter and energy that kept City 5 biologically viable, skirting round the vast sealed chambers that contained the old propulsion units that had brought them here centuries ago.