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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘I feel I know every foot of this place,’ Kayin said. ‘I feel I know everybody in it. That’s ridiculous, of course – you can’t know two million people. But you understand … I’ll admit I’ve had some good times here. It’s all right if you like living in what is essentially an extended, highly technical village. But there’s something a bit dead about City 5. Nothing ever comes in from outside. Anything that happens has to be generated right here.’

  Polla’s expression was both worried and uncomprehending. ‘What are you talking about? What could come in from outside?’

  He ignored her question. ‘I’ll tell you something, Poll,’ he said, ‘the City Board ought to have tighter control. I don’t like the kind of symbolisations and plays they’ve been putting on lately. They really shouldn’t allow these independent art groups and independent scientific groups like the Society. Ambition is a curse, it’s frustration.’

  ‘I never expected to hear you say that! You were always going to be the teenage rebel.’

  Kayin shook his head. ‘I still can’t feel happy at having to spend the rest of my life in City 5. I know that’s a queer thing to say. I have my job in the Inertial Stocktaking Department, I spend my time in the same way everybody else spends theirs, and I wish I could be content with that. But instead I feel restless, dissatisfied. I just wish I could go somewhere.’

  With an impatient shake of her head Polla stood up. ‘All right. Let’s go home and have a session. I feel randy.’

  ‘Okay.’ Automatically he rose and followed. But before leaving the park he headed for its most obtrusive feature, the now defunct observatory. The building, a tall, ribbed dome, bulked large against the background of trees and shrubbery. Beside it a squat tower loomed, housing the exploratory nucleon rocket that had once been part of the observatory’s ancillary equipment. He beckoned Polla and, crossing a stretch of sward, led her through a small door in the base of the building.

  Although abandoned, the observatory was still kept in good order and any citizen had the right to visit and use it. Few people ever bothered, but Kayin, along with his ex-colleagues in the Astronomical Society, had spent a fair amount of time there lately.

  Not that there was anything to see. The experience was a purely negative one, and subsequent visits could do nothing but repeat it. A soft light, faintly tinged with green, filled the vaulted chamber. Kayin switched on the observatory and saw the glow of life come into the control panels, heard the waiting hum from the machinery that moved the main telescope.

  The instrument was the best of its type ever designed, fitted with the complete range of auxiliary apparatus – radio, X-ray, laser and maser detectors, image amplification and the rest. When built, its makers had boasted that it could detect emitting matter anywhere in the sidereal universe. Kayin set the big cylinder in motion and brought it to rest pointing directly to zenith. The wall display screens remained dark and opaque. As if performing a ritual Kayin moved the telescope again, directing it towards City-perimeter-west. On the screens, again nothing. North: nothing. East: nothing. South: nothing. Kayin and Polla stood stock-still in the capacious, echoing dome, staring at the black screens like children recalling an often-repeated lesson.

  City 5 was an oasis of light in an immense darkness. A few minutes ago Kayin had said he wished he could go somewhere. He realised now that that wasn’t quite right. What he meant was: he wished there was somewhere to go.

  He thought of the nearby nucleon rocket. Recently he actually had gone somewhere – almost.

  Near the centre of the City, in the upper echelons of the Administrative Ramification, Kord awoke after his customary year of suspended animation.

  Strange … the freeze process stopped everything, body and brain. Logically he should come out of it with the feeling that only a second or two had passed since he lost consciousness. Inexplicably, it was not like that. Each time he felt as if he had been gone a long, long time, and privately he suspected that he aged a year mentally despite the biological stop.

  He thrust the thought from his mind. If his task was ever completed, perhaps then he could give his attention to philosophical diversions. Until then there was only one thing to occupy his whole being.

  Having lifted him out of the casket and given him a thorough check, the doctors helped him down from the inspection slab, one of them assisting Kord to fit on his prosthetic leg, the legacy of a brief period of civil strife early in the history of the City. At length he stood up, feeling fit and alive, and paced the room experimentally, limping slightly on the artificial limb. Other men entered with clothes and attentively helped him to dress.

  Not until they had finished did he speak. ‘Are the others awake?’

  ‘Yes, Chairman. Will you proceed to briefing?’

  He nodded, and left the room by a side door to find himself in a small, discreetly lighted chamber containing only a table and a chair. A man wearing the uniform of the Social Dynamic Movements Department entered briefly to hand him a file.

  Kord sat down, opened the file and began to read. It was written in the special language of sociodynamic symbology, legible only to specially trained persons, From it Kord could gain a complete picture of social tendencies over the past year, every nuance, every incipient crystallisation and fragmentation, every vibration between the poles of conservation and change. If the symbolic analysis was not enough, Kord had implanted under the skin of his neck a set of filaments connected directly to the memory area of his brain. A lead from the City Archives Monitor Desk, taped to his neck, would induce in them currents carrying audio-visual recordings, of conversations, happenings, a million cameos of life easily gathered and recorded by the watchful electronics of a closed system like City 5. By drawing on the memories he would suddenly find in his mind, Kord’s knowledge of the past year would be experiential, not merely symbolic.

  In adjoining cells the other four members of the Permanent Board were reading similar files. As he progressed through his, Kord knew that he would be calling on the Monitor Desk. He had been aware of dangerous tendencies present in the society of City 5, but he had not anticipated this sudden alarming acceleration of events. Grimly he realised that when the twenty-four-hour period was up he would not, as was the custom, be returning to deep freeze.

  That night Kayin did not, as he would normally have done, attend the meeting of the Astronomical Society, but spent it instead alone with Polla. Ham-Ra, President of the Society, had already put his decision to him and in fairness Kayin had agreed with his judgement. He was out.

  The Society gathered in a comfortable, otherwise unused room in one of the rambling parts of the City. A video recorder in one corner contained the edited minutes of their previous meetings and what little information or few resolutions they had been able to formulate.

  The object of the Society was to re-establish the sciences of astronomy and space exploration. It numbered fifteen members, without Kayin, between the ages of seventy and twenty-three. In most societies like this one youth was the order of the day.

  ‘We have a lot to present this session,’ Ham-Ra said by way of introduction. ‘For the first time we’re really getting somewhere. However, you’ll all have noticed that Kayin isn’t here. A few of you know why. For the rest, it will become plain later just why he can’t attend.

  ‘Now then, friends, when we last convened over a month ago we were getting depressed and ready to give up. But what Tamm has to show us today is really going to knock you out. Take over, Tamm.’

  The freckled red-head rose, grinning shyly, and stood by the table, on which stood a video unit. ‘As you know, public knowledge concerning the origin of City 5, the whereabouts of Earth and so on, has fluctuated considerably over the years by reason of the Mandatory Cut-Off of information, as the Administrative Ramification vacillated between the theory that total ignorance is best and the theory that full knowledge is best. Over the past ten years Mandatory Cut-Off has been relaxed considerably – otherwise our Society couldn’t exist
– and along with the upsurge of interest in scientific matters we have been able to gain access to some information that wasn’t available before.

  ‘Nevertheless our astronomical knowledge has been slight, particularly where it affects our relations with Earth. We know that the City came from Earth some hundreds of years ago, that we can never go back, and that essentially we must remain here for all time. I think we can take it that the pendulum of policy is swinging towards freedom because, by sedulously bending the ears of a few sympathetic parties in the Administrative Ramification, Ham-Ra and myself gained official permission to make use of the City’s last remaining nucleon rocket in order to undertake an expedition to the sidereal universe, or as close to it as we could safely get.’

  ‘That’s fantastic!’ said a voice into the ensuing silence.

  Tamm nodded. ‘The condition we had to agree to is that the results of the expedition, and the information we gained from it, remain the property of the Ramification and should not be divulged outside the Society. Furthermore only two members were permitted to go on the trip. For various reasons Ham-Ra stood down in favour of Kayin, who together with myself made up the crew. It would have been nice if you could all have seen what we saw, but we made complete video recordings throughout, so to that extent you can share the experience with us.

  ‘You will see that the expedition was not only one of exploration; it was also a concession on the Ramification’s part on divulging historical knowledge in the form of an instruction tape on the rocket itself. What you learn will probably not surprise any of us much, but it will still give us a great deal to think about.’

  He pressed a stud on the video unit. A large wall screen lit up. Tamm and Kayin were in the nucleon rocket’s main cabin in bucket seats before a curved control panel. Kayin’s keen, intelligent face turned towards the pick-up.

  ‘We are going out through the egress sphincter now. In a few moments we should be the first people of our generation to see the City from outside.’

  With a flicker, because of rather hasty editing, the picture changed to show a view through one of the ports. Everyone in the room held his breath. At first they only saw what appeared to be a vast curving wall, just visible as a dull metallic sheen due to an unseen source of illumination. Then, as the rocket drifted away, they got a full view of the City seen side-on: a huge disc-shaped slab surmounted by a graceful glittering dome in which could be discerned a low profile of shadowy shapes.

  The rocket mounted above the City and hovered over it, somewhat to one side. They were looking down on the dome now and the City was suspended in space at an odd angle, blazing with light in an otherwise unbroken, impenetrable blackness.

  They could have stared at it for ever; but suddenly they were back in the cabin again and this time Tamm was speaking to them while Kayin piloted the rocket. ‘Athough we can see nothing out here even with the ship’s telescope – apart from the City, that is – we have been given a guidance tape that should take us to the sidereal universe or the material universe as it is alternatively called. The distance is about three light-years, so we should be there very quickly.’

  The picture flickered wildly again; Tamm had cut out half an hour of uneventful tape. When they came back it was in the middle of a word. Tamm was shouting wildly.

  ‘– look at that! Just look at that!’

  The pick-up was once more pointing outside. The sight that met their eyes was more spectacular even than the panorama of the City. The first impression was of a blaze, of scattered light, of fire. Nearby, a few huge misty spirals hung in the void; further away, on either side, above and below, and far off into the depths, masses of similar spirals and glowing clouds and streamers receded into the distance, while a sort of diamond dust seemed to be infused among them all.

  The scene was hypnotic, and the pick-up camera lingered on it for a considerable time. After the first impact, the impression was gained that the phenomenon, though big, was limited in size: the larger-looking spirals, though majestic, were some distance away and on the straggling edge of the cloud, whose limits seemed to define a slight but perceptible curve.

  At that moment they became aware that the rocket’s instruction tape had clicked into action, delivering a neat lecture in the quiet, calm voice of an electronic vodor. So unobtrusive was the voice at first that they failed to hear it in the general excitement:

  ‘… we have now passed the first threshold beyond which the material universe becomes visible, and are approaching the second threshold. You are warned severely against attempting to cross the second threshold; such a manoeuvre is generally agreed to be almost impossible or at any rate prohibitively difficult, and if by chance you should succeed and actually enter the material universe, you will not be able to leave again and will suffer the fate of all the matter it contains. Proceed with care: your visual instincts will probably tell you that the edge of the material universe, the metagalaxy as it is sometimes called, is light-years away or at least many millions of miles away. It is, in fact, very close. The galaxies you are now seeing are only a few miles in diameter, many of them less than a mile in diameter, and the entire conglomeration of galactic and stellar systems is still shrinking steadily.

  ‘The cause of the shrinkage of matter has not been ascertained with any certainty. It was first detected in AD 5085, Old Reckoning, when specific anomalies relating to the velocity and wave-length of light revealed that all phenomena having the properties of mass-energy were shrinking relative to the unit of space. Extrapolation of the equations led to the conclusion that a point would be reached, and that fairly soon, when the fundamental particles would be too small to maintain their identity in the space-time frame and that therefore all matter everywhere would vanish from existence.

  ‘Since the shrinkage related to the metagalaxy as a whole, it was theorised that if an entity or system could escape beyond the by then known boundaries of the sidereal universe then it might also escape the field of the shrinking process and survive. Luckily the centuries-old Problem of Velocity had recently been solved, and already ships had been built capable of traversing the whole diameter of the metagalaxy in a fairly short period of time. The first attempts to pass into the space beyond the metagalaxy, however, met difficulty. Either the shrinkage field or the metagalaxy itself set up an interface with the rest of space that constituted a barrier to the passage of matter. Penetration of the barrier was, however, theoretically possible, and was attempted over a considerable period of time by ships equipped with specially powerful drive units. Eventually one such ship succeeded, to return with the report that the void beyond the metagalaxy, though it appeared to contain no matter itself, would accept the existence of matter placed in it and maintain it in a stable, non-shrinking state.

  ‘As the universe shrank, the barrier grew more impenetrable. If anything was to be preserved, it was essential to act quickly. Twenty self-contained cities were constructed and equipped with the most powerful drive units. As they headed at top speed for the perimeter of the material realm they were able to observe a large number of ships, cities and similar constructs doing the same from various points in the universe. None of these alien launchings met with success and mankind’s effort did only marginally better. As they encountered the barrier and strove to make their exit, all but one of the Earth cities either blew up or otherwise failed to break through. It can now be said with certainty that City 5 is the sole fragment of matter to have escaped the shrinking metagalaxy, where the current state of materiality is such that biological life is believed to be no longer possible.

  ‘In recent years an acceleration in the rate of shrinking has been observed, leading to the belief that the moment is now very close for the extinction of this island of materiality unique in the spatial frame. For a long time it has been effectively invisible from City 5, or indeed from anywhere outside the interface region, for the reason that the enveloping barrier has an outer and an inner surface known as the first and second thresholds. The
inner threshold is permeable to radiant energy but offers a strong resistance to the passage of solid masses. The outer threshold may be crossed quite easily by slow-moving masses, but is opaque to light and other radiation passing to it from the inner threshold. In order to view the sidereal universe it is therefore necessary to position oneself between the two.

  ‘City 5 was designed to be self-subsisting in perpetuity. Physicists on Earth nevertheless entertained the expectation, or rather the hope, that other areas of materiality where humanity could again proliferate would be located in the void, even though they might be immensely remote from the home universe. For a long time long-range spaceships were built and despatched from City 5 in efforts to discover even one atom or electron of matter. Any one of these missions covered a distance equal to many billion times the diameter of the old metagalaxy at its original full size, a feat that has added poignancy when we reflect that by pre-shrinkage standards of measurement City 5 itself is slightly over half an inch in diameter. All such projects have long since been abandoned as useless and the exploratory rockets dismantled. It is now accepted that materiality is not a normal feature of the space frame and that it does not exist anywhere apart from the sidereal universe already known to us. All future endeavours on the part of humanity must perforce make do with such material as was transported in City 5 at the time of the migration, and the City has therefore had to face the problems of perpetuating the life of mankind in complete isolation. The technical aspects, though prodigious, do not present any insoluble difficulties; the chief problems lie in the social and psychological fields.’

  The screen went suddenly blank. ‘I think we might as well end the tape there,’ Tamm said matter-of-factly. ‘That’s the valid part of the mission.’