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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  His audience was silent, thoughtful, perhaps a little stunned. Finally Ham-Ra said: ‘Well, that fills in some gaps in our knowledge. Any comments?’

  ‘It shouldn’t come as any great shock,’ someone said after a moment, ‘but somehow it does. We have always known we were isolated and alone, that we can’t return to Earth. But I always presumed that Earth and the rest of the universe still existed somewhere and would always continue to exist. It makes a difference.’

  ‘That’s a fact,’ said another. ‘It means we have to re-think our aims and objectives. Which brings me to the point that it still hasn’t been explained why Kayin is absent.’

  Tamm cleared his throat and glanced at Ham-Ra, who nodded for him to go ahead. ‘When Kayin and myself returned to City 5 we still had very little technical data of a useful kind. While beyond the first threshold we did of course take a whole library of image and spectral recordings which we can all study at our leisure. But a great deal of the other instrumentation we took along proved useless. More specifically, the nucleon rocket’s instruction tape had whetted our appetite to know more about the early efforts to explore the empty void, as this seemed to be the direction in which the Society’s interest would lie. Unfortunately the requisite documents lie well behind the Mandatory Cut-Off, and no one we could reach in the Administrative Ramification had authorisation to give us access. So we devised a scheme to tap the archives illegally.’

  The audience was torn between fright at this manoeuvre and admiration for its audacity. The brighter of them had already anticipated the outcome of the story. A skinny, scowling youngster with a sharp face snorted. ‘The tap was detected, of course?’

  ‘Yes, but only Kayin’s part in the matter is known to the Ramification. It was his training that made the attempt possible. Now, although both Ham-Ra and myself, and to that extent the whole Society, were involved, the only chance to save the Society from dissolution is to disavow responsibility. We all agreed that Kayin should be expelled and his actions condemned.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little unfair?’

  ‘Kayin doesn’t seem to think so.’

  ‘What will happen to him?’

  ‘Nothing much, not the way the wind’s blowing at present. You could say our loss is just as great as his – we’ve lost one of our only two members to have seen the sidereal universe with their own eyes.’

  The news seemed to have agitated, energised the Society. They began speaking all at once, shouting each other down.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We ought to force the Ramification to act!’

  ‘We ought to steal the nucleon rocket –’

  Ham-Ra held up his hands for silence. The hatchet-faced, damp-haired young man who had spoken before rose to his feet. Ham-Ra nodded.

  ‘Obviously the Ramification expected us to accept what we’ve learned and to give up quietly, maybe even to dissolve ourselves voluntarily,’ said the youth, whose name was Barsh. ‘Their message to us is: there is no science of astronomy, there is no exploration of space. I don’t think we should take it lying down. Instead, I think we should revive the whole question of whether there is matter in the empty void and of launching new missions going even further than they did before.’

  ‘That’s right! Last time they gave up too easily.’

  Curtly Ham-Ra once again stopped the rising hubbub. Tamm was smiling wryly. ‘I don’t imagine they gave up easily. I think they tried as hard as it’s possible to try. These days the Ramification has trouble of a different kind.’

  He flicked a switch, reeling back a few inches of tape. The screen glowed with its incredible picture, accompanied by the instruction tape’s closing remark:

  ‘… the chief problems lie in the social and psychological fields.’

  The others heard the words, but the blank looks in their eyes betrayed their lack of interest. ‘What are we going to do about outfitting an expedition into deep space?’ Barsh said.

  To Kiang, Chairman of the Temporary Board, the meeting with Kord was slightly frightening, slightly thrilling. The man was large – tall, broad, and bulky; his face, which gave one the impression that it had never smiled, was also large, and lined with the impress of years of wilfully directed thought. Its colour was grey, not the grey of illness but the grey of granite, of obdurate strength. When Kord spoke, everybody listened. He was that rare man, the great leader who in times past would have directed the affairs of continents, of planets. There was something heartbreaking in seeing that powerful personality applied with full force to the promotion of stasis and conservation on this pathetic scrap of a vanished universe.

  The boardroom was divided down the centre by a long, polished table. On one side sat the Temporary Board, headed by Kiang and backed by Haren, Kuro, Chippilare and Freen. Facing them sat the Permanent Board: Kord flanked by Bnec, specialist in physics, the science of materiality; Engrach, specialist in technology; Ferad and Elbern, specialists in sociodynamics. Elbern was one of Kord’s strokes of strategy, for he was a converted member of the old opposition of centuries ago. Kord knew that the errors promulgated by the vanquished party would occur again and again in the history of City 5, though he hoped with steadily diminishing force, and he realised the advantage of having a man who understood the kind of mentality that fostered them.

  Kord permitted himself a direct glance into Kiang’s mobile face. They’re afraid of us, he thought. They feel young in our presence; they’re aware that we were old and wise, sitting on this board, before they were babies. But they’ll fight us if they have to.

  The members of the Permanent Board lived for only one day a year. Thus one year of ageing for them spanned three hundred and sixty-five years of City 5 history. Without this device of a permanent guiding hand, Kord believed, the City would never have maintained its historical stability thus far – and in this small, unique, precious island of life stability was all-important. If social tendencies slowed down enough to require less readjustment, the dormant period could be extended to ten years, perhaps even to a hundred years.

  At the moment those long, restful sleeps seemed a long way off. Inwardly Kord sighed. He was the last of a line of leaders, including men like Chairman Mao and Gebr Hermesis, who had tried to reform the mind of humanity and fix it with an eternal pattern. Always the problem was one of training the new generation to think in every way like the old. Humanity had survived their failures, but Kord was convinced that it would not survive his.

  Angrily he flung the file he had studied at Kiang. ‘A hundred years ago you would have been executed for the contents of that file. I spare you now only on the assumption that rectification of the situation will immediately be taken in hand.’

  ‘… We do not necessarily agree, Chairman, that rectification is necessary.’

  ‘How many times do I have to spell it out to you, gentlemen?’ Kord said, his voice becoming gravelly with displeasure. ‘We are concerned with preserving the City, not for a thousand years, not for a million, but for ever, for eternity. Due to the nature of the human psyche this is only possible if life is regularized in every detail. There must be no new directions, no individuality, no innovations or originality of thought. The City is small. It must be protected from itself.’ Kord felt himself sweating. Only a few years ago the consciousness of what was required for survival was infused in the Ramification, in the mind of the City itself. Yet over and over again, through the centuries, he had gone through exactly such arguments as this. It seemed that the tendency to deviate, to forget, was ever-present and in time entered even the Temporary Board itself. Even so, Kord was shocked to find that the position had deteriorated so quickly in the past year, his perpetual nightmare was that one day he would awake to find that his authority was no longer valid.

  ‘You have made the severest mistake,’ he continued, ‘committed the greatest crime, in giving youth its head. The absolute pre-condition for a permanent social pattern is the complete subordination and conditioning of the younger gen
eration. But what do I find? Led on by your own foolish ambitions, you have permitted youth to set in train what threatens to be a virtual renaissance in the arts and sciences.’

  ‘We have been giving the matter considerable thought for some time, Chairman,’ Chippilare put in. ‘As we see it, you fear initiative because it will upset the balance; but we fear stasis because it produces a movement in the other direction, towards decay. The City can die through a progressive depletion of psychic energy, as well as through an explosion of it.’

  ‘There has been a noticeable air of apathy and drabness about the City of recent years,’ Kuro said. ‘Perhaps you, in suspended animation, have missed it. It was to counteract this decline in tone that we decided to liven things up a bit.’

  ‘In fact,’ added Freen, ‘we now question whether a society can be kept in good health without innovation and change.’

  ‘It can,’ answered Kord firmly, aware by now that he had a full-scale rebellion on his hands. ‘There were many such societies on Earth, usually of a primitive nature, which were eventually destroyed only by change and innovation introduced from outside. In particular, the aborigines of the prehistoric period on the continent of Australia maintained a fully developed culture for thousands of years, believing their origins to be in an immensely distant “dream time”. We have to create a “dream time” for our people.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Elbern, looking at Freen with a certain amount of hostility. ‘The reason for the long-term stability of the aborigines was that, living in a sparse, poorly-endowed land, all their energies were taken up in the considerable skills needed to survive. We are perhaps unfortunate in that with our level of technology we can take care of our basic needs fairly easily – that is why we have tried to, replace preoccupation with short-term needs with preoccupation with long-term needs, in the maintenance of the basic machinery, in the continual drawing up of new plans for the redesign of the City, and above all in the inertial stocktaking, which takes up an enormous amount of the population’s labour-time and is concerned with accounting for every atom of the City’s mass. I do not need to remind you how important that activity is if we are to conserve all our mass and energy over billions and billions of years.’

  The Temporary Board looked embarrassed and cast covert glances at one another. At length Kiang ventured: ‘Our recent philosophical studies have cast doubt on the very basis of the City’s plan for existence. We have been studying the very fact of matter itself. It has been known ever since the early formulation of dialectical materialism that motion and tendency, opposing forces and so on, are the very basis of matter whether it takes physical, mental or social forms. If the principle of opposition, as for instance in a class struggle of some sort, is fundamental then how can you be sure that a static or self-perpetuating state is even possible? You cannot name any Earth society that remained stable for all time.’

  Kiang was voicing Kord’s private fears, but he said nothing, only stared stonily.

  ‘Furthermore,’ Kiang continued, ‘we have to take note of the fact that materiality is an extraordinary and temporary occurrence in the space-time frame. More and more we have become convinced that the materiality of the sidereal universe consisted of an accidental polar opposition with no inherent tendency towards stability. It had to move some way, and in so doing the transient balance was lost; hence the shrinkage of matter and its final disappearance. But where does that leave us? The materiality of City 5 is even more isolated and vulnerable. At any moment in time it may suddenly collapse and disappear. So there is not much point in our planning for eternity.’

  Throughout this argument the Permanent Board had listened in silence. When Kiang had finished Bnec, Kord’s specialist in physics, let out an expression of disgust.

  ‘A very pretty speech! You palpitating fool, is your brain so addled that you have forgotten your special access beyond the Mandatory Cut-Off? Or do you believe yourself to be too progressive to learn anything from the superhuman efforts of your ancestors? Can you seriously imagine that these questions were not thrashed out, researched and resolved millennia ago?’

  Kord held up his hand to quell the brewing quarrel. ‘Have no fear, the material of the City is sound as far as science can tell. Also, we shall not run out of energy provided we lose no appreciable mass: it has been found that we are in a privileged position here, in that there is a conservation of mass-energy. The material polarity, as you correctly call it, is self-conserving. When atomic energy, say, is released from matter to perform useful work, it is not dissipated but we absorb it elsewhere in the City. Thus as long as the total mass remains constant the same energy can be released again and again in a cyclic action. Apart from that we have proved that we can keep the genetic material of the population stable. So our problem concerns only the conscious, active life of the City, without which none of these principles can be maintained.’

  He clenched his fist. ‘Get this! Everything that happens, happens beneath the crystal dome. There is no external world. There is no longer any universe, any creation … so any uncontrolled process beneath the dome is a danger to the City. The element in the human psyche that reaches out, explores and discovers must be eradicated. It means destruction to us. The outward, aspirational life must be replaced by an inward life of symbolism and extremely close personal relationships.

  ‘None of this can happen at once, of course. In a sense we are still in our first stages of arrival in the empty void. We have still to make the adjustment, which we are doing by degrees, progressing two steps forward and one step back. Thus at the moment the dome is transparent and lets out a blaze of light. This means a loss of energy but for us it is a symbol, an announcement of our presence. At some date in the future the dome will be made totally impervious and no quantum of mass-energy will ever be allowed to leave the City. Then again, we still call the City by its original name, City 5, bringing with it the awareness that there were other cities and other places. Eventually it will be known simply as the City.’

  ‘And is ignorance also part of the prescription for survival?’ Haren’s tone was mildly contemptuous.

  ‘A careful balance is needed.’ The long arguing was making Kord tired, but he refused to let his energy flag. ‘Full consciousness of our situation would be too much for the collective mind; it would cause mental disorders and ultimately destroy us. Likewise, complete ignorance would destroy us for different reasons. We must steer a middle course until the day when the non-deviating republic has been established and we can safely permit the whole city to live with the full knowledge and consciousness of where we are.’

  Kord stood up, his bulk looming over them. ‘I trust I have made things clear. We will recess for a short while and meet in the Executive Complex in three hours’ time. It will be necessary to make some arrangements.’

  With opaque faces the Temporary Board rose and left the room. The others remained behind, looking pensively at the table top.

  ‘A fairly bad business,’ Elbern said.

  ‘We can handle it. But I think the Board we leave behind when we freeze again will have some different names in it.’ Kord picked up the file he had thrown at Kiang and leafed through it moodily. The section on the Archetypal Dramas had been the first give-away. Kord had always known that the symbols and archetypes that would emerge from the collective unconscious would decide the fate of City 5 in the long run. That was why he had encouraged the development of art forms for which practically the whole City was an audience, films, plays and archetypal dramas delivered in a semi-hypnagogic state, in which these entities could find expression, symbols, characters and stories merging into a dream-like, hypnotic blend. The section on the dramas was always the first thing he turned to when given the briefing. If the symbols were rounded, square, on the Jungian mandala or quaternity patterns, then he was pleased. The image he looked for was the cave, the female, the square table, the square room, the circle. Today there was an altogether unacceptable number of thrusting, probi
ng images, the tower on the plain, the pointed lance, the long journey, the magician, the supreme effort. These images were all culled from the generalised social unconscious of the time. Aware of the part played by the sexual polarity in the structure of the social psyche, Kord had long since realised that it was necessary to create a womb-centred, vulva-centred civilisation, instead of a phallus-centred one.

  Brooding, he closed the file. He had faced many difficulties in the past. It was disappointing to find that they might not, after all, be diminishing.

  When they again met the Temporary Board three hours later, they found that the spirit of disagreement was still present. Further, the rebels had used the time to reconsolidate their position among some complexes of the Ramification. Kord was obliged to resort to strong measures. Within twenty-four hours he had set in motion an efficient and informed state police. Two days later, the general purge began. Within a week public executions were being held daily in the main park.

  Kayin was in hiding, having taken Polla with him, in a part of the City that had not been rebuilt for a few hundred years and where he had friends. To his surprise he remained hidden, whereas others failed to evade the combination of delation and electronic scanning by which the Ramification discovered everyone’s whereabouts. The reason, as he at last surmised, was simple: his expulsion from the Society had saved him. He was no longer associated with a subversive movement, and his other crime was not, in the context of present events, viewed with the same gravity.

  Accordingly he began to venture out. In the main park he watched as the unrepentant Ham-Ra, Tamm and Barsh received the customary lethal injections in the neck As he wandered away, feeling bitter and sick, he heard someone call his name.

  It was Herren, an acquaintance he had not seen for a couple of years. About the same age as himself, Herren appraised him speculatively.

  ‘How are you, old chap? Everything all right?’