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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  The bright, breezy manner simply left Kayin scowling. He turned away, but Herren followed him, speaking sympathetically. ‘Yes, I know, it’s an awful shame. But the game’s not lost, you know. Things really are moving. I thought you might be interested.’

  Kayin shrugged.

  ‘Well, all right, it is a bit open here. Listen. I happen to know where you’re staying. Surprised?’ He laughed. ‘News travels these days. Friends, you know. I’ll call on you tonight. Pity if you were left out of everything.’

  Kayin looked at him thoughtfully. It’s up to you.’ He felt oddly detached. Herren might be a Ramification agent, for all he knew, but he didn’t much care.

  In the event, Herren was playing it straight. He called just as Kayin and Polla were finishing their evening meal. The wall screen was showing an old drama from several years ago – the new-style dramas had been taken out of circulation – but they were paying it too little heed to be drawn into the semi-hypnagogic state in which it could have been fully appreciated.

  Herren entered the room and rudely switched the screen off. ‘Not interested in that old rubbish, are you?’ He looked around, then produced a small metal cylinder from his pocket and carefully placed it on the table. ‘This will fool any hidden scanners,’ he explained. ‘They’ll pick up nothing but an empty room.’

  Kayin stared at the gadget blankly. ‘Where did you get it?’

  The other winked. ‘There’s a certain amount of underground stuff being manufactured these days.’

  Despite his own misdemeanour, Kayin found the idea hard to grasp. ‘Do you mean insurrection? The City is fragmenting?’

  ‘They are talking of civil war.’

  ‘But that’s … crazy …’ Kayin wondered if Herren knew what he knew of City 5’s situation, of the facts concerning the sidereal universe.

  ‘I haven’t been getting much news lately,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Let me fill you in. Kord has already killed three members of the Temporary Board. Chippilare and Kuro escaped, thanks to the loyalty of sympathetic elements both in the Ramification and outside. They have organised an opposition and are holding out in the Western Segment, down near the Basement. It’s more or less an enclave. The State Police aren’t strong enough to go in and get them out.’

  ‘Has Kord given the police arms?’

  ‘They’re getting arms now. But the opposition is manufacturing arms, too. It’s a revolution! Because the opposition isn’t just in the enclave, it’s all over, gradually being organised. Youth is waking up!’

  Polla stared from one to the other of the young men in disbelief. ‘Kayin, can this be true? What’s happening?’

  ‘Kord is finding out that he can’t enslave the mind of humanity for ever,’ Herren said. ‘We are discovering freedom.’

  ‘It’s all over a difference of opinion,’ Kayin told her wearily. ‘Kord and his people think that the City can best be preserved by rigid control and a low level of aspiration. Our technology is sufficient, so there’s no need for further development in the arts or sciences. The others, like Herren here, believe that that approach leads to a slow but sure disaster and that the City must be kept bubbling to stay healthy, that life isn’t worth living any other way anyhow. They both feel strongly enough about it to go to war. They’re all in the minority, of course. The great majority of the population have the good sense to interest themselves in nothing much except the inertial stocktaking.’

  ‘But which side is right?’

  ‘Right?’ Kayin said with a grimace. ‘Neither! Both roads will lead to disaster … There isn’t any solution … The City exists in a place where it isn’t supposed to be …’

  Herren leaned forward and gripped his slumped shoulder comfortingly ‘Steady, old chap. I know how it must have been for you this afternoon, seeing your friends executed. Believe me, we’ve all been through it. But you’ll pull through. I know we’ll be able to depend on you when the time comes.’

  Kayin remembered the wry smile on red-headed Tamm’s face, just before they injected the poison.

  When Kuro finally answered Kord’s invitation, he found the centuries-old Master of City 5 looking drawn and strained. For his part, it had been a mortal blow to Kord’s confidence when he had failed to contain the situation. He suspected that for some years the briefings he had been given had been tampered with to play down the actual motion of events. Now, though he held the central premises of the Ramification, he effectively controlled only two-thirds of the City.

  ‘Very well,’ he said curtly, ‘you are strong enough to fight us.’

  ‘And we will.’

  Kord spoke in an exasperated tone. ‘Already there have been gun battles in the City! Yesterday fire broke out in the Northern Segment.’ Angrily he rapped his artificial leg. ‘Do you know how I got this? In a civil war pretty much like this one is becoming. Sheer lunacy! It’s suicidal to fight inside the City; we can’t allow it again.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘If we have to fight, it will have to be done outside the dome.’

  ‘My conclusion exactly,’ Kuro said sombrely, ‘as far as heavier weapons go, anyway. We can both construct space vessels of some sort. For the arrangement to be effective each side must be allowed to transfer sufficient forces outside, without interference.’

  ‘Agreed, then. We shall set up an independent commission to control the egress port.’

  He paused reflectively. ‘By the way, I got some news today. You know that there is an instrument in the Ramification set to record the moment when the material universe finally vanishes altogether. Just after eight last night, the event registered.’

  Kuro made no comment. After they had completed the formal arrangements he left, feeling only slight discomfort about what was going on.

  ‘It’s like a nightmare,’ Polla said.

  The City appeared to be huddling, expectant. In the north could be seen the fire-blackened region, and a faint smell of smoke still hung in the air, not quite eradicated by the circulatory system. The crystal dome sparkled; but beyond it vague shadowy forms were moving as the contending forces arrayed themselves.

  ‘Well, at least the City will be safe,’ Kayin replied. Herren had come to him and expected him to take part in the street fighting. When he had declined, he had again come to him and invited him to help man the weapons carried by the new spacecraft. Kayin could imagine what kind of a battle that would be: hastily built ships manoeuvring in an utterly empty void, carefully avoiding proximity with the City and offering perfect sitting ducks to one another. With luck, none of them would return and the City could live in peace.

  Kayin was fingering a key in his pocket. It was a special key, working by electronic impulses, and it gave its owner possession of the observatory’s nucleon rocket. Kayin had never handed it back after his mission with Tamm.

  ‘Poll,’ he said, ‘let’s go somewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out,’ he answered sardonically, ‘outward bound. The early expeditions failed because they always turned back when they reached the point of no return, when their engines wouldn’t have got them back if they’d gone further. We’ll keep on going. What does it matter?’

  She didn’t understand what he was talking about, but she followed him to the park where they used to meet. He headed for the observatory, but this time bypassed the dome and pressed the key into a small slot in the base of the tower.

  A door slid open. He stepped inside, taking Polla by the hand and tugging her through. There was a gap of about twelve feet between the hull of the rocket and the shell of the tower. The spacecraft loomed above them like a huge shaft.

  He pressed the same key into a slot in a large box inside the door. It clicked and hummed; automatically the rocket was being readied for use.

  ‘Kayin,’ Polla protested in sudden alarm. ‘What’s going on? I’m not going anywhere –’

  Without waiting for her fright to become hysteria, he closed in on her. For a few moments she was
gasping as they grappled, then he had her held securely over his shoulder. Still she struggled, bewildered, but there wasn’t far to go. He carried her to the embarkation platform; swiftly it took them up the side of the rocket to the port. Inside the rocket he stepped down a short passage and threw her down in the luxurious living apartment.

  ‘What are you doing?’ She sat up on the floor, her legs asplay.

  He switched on the wall screen, tuning it to the external scanners. ‘Enjoy the show,’ he said, then left for the control cabin, locking the door behind him.

  The controllers of the egress port were used to a constant stream of craft applying for exit; they asked no questions in his case. For the second time in his life he floated up above the dome, seeing the City spread out below him. But this time there were big, clumsy cylindrical objects floating in the vicinity of the City, some of them sporting wicked-looking equipment welded on in various places. The war was due to begin soon.

  Kayin chose a direction at random and started up the nucleon engines at full power. In a second City 5 was gone. He and Polla were alone in the void; the eternal, infinite, vacant void.

  On and on and on and on and on. The engines never stopped. Although they ran silently, Kayin checked their action constantly on the instruments in the control cabin.

  Polla had wept and screamed, then sulked for weeks, and then gradually became friendly again. By now Kayin himself felt defensively sullen about what he had done. It was boorish and uncharacteristic of him. But he stubbornly refused to apologise, even to his own conscience.

  At this distance it was impossible even with the most powerful magnification available on the rocket to gain as much as a photon’s worth of image from the City. Shortly after departure he had picked up brief flashes that came not from the City itself but from the spaceships that were fighting one another with nuclear weapons. Even if they had not been travelling at billions of times the speed of light, such minute flickers would not have been detectable by any means now.

  So there was only the emptiness on all sides. Looking out into it, one could not even discern distance; there was only absolute lightlessness.

  After they had been travelling for nearly two months Kayin took to spending long periods in the direct observation blister that, projecting from the hull of the rocket in a perfectly transparent bulge, formed a cavity of extrusion into space. Here was the only place in the rocket where the artificial gravity (derived from the same principle as the nucleon engine) did not operate. With the cavity light switched off, one might as well have been floating in free fall in the void itself. Kayin spent what seemed like hours staring out of the blister, into what to his eyes was simply blackness but which his mind knew to be infinity. His mind began working in new directions. Matter, he reasoned, had structure, but space was simply emptiness. Yet space, too, had structure of a kind. It had extension and direction. Was there, he wondered, a substratum to the void, a richer reality lying beneath it? After a while, for some dim sense of pleasure only vaguely known to himself, he took to coming into the cavity naked.

  SENSORY DEPRIVATION

  The human mind is not made to be without incoming sensory data for any but the briefest periods. The first consequence of sensory deprivation is that the subject loses, first the sense of his bodily outline, and then his sense of identity. Then, since the consciousness will not tolerate lack of perceptions, and being denied them from the external direction, it draws upon them from the inner direction, projecting on to the senses first hallucinations of a random, dream-like character, and then, if the process is continued, unlocking the archetypal symbols from the unconscious.

  Kayin went through all these stages fairly quickly. Out in the void he saw vast wheeling mandalas, glimmering forms whose size was beyond the mind to compute. He saw the mystic triad, the mystic quaternity, exemplified in a thousand dazzling forms. He did not think or remark on what he saw, for he was not there. His personal identity was gone; his being consisted merely of an impersonalised consciousness of the symbols he saw.

  Once he must have moved accidentally and bumped into the wall of the cavity. The bodily sensation brought him momentarily to himself. Flashing waves of excitement, of joy, swept through him. I’m seeing it, he thought. This is the reality underlying space, the structure of the world transcending it. Stay here long enough and it shows itself.

  Then he was merged once again with the contents of the unconscious, a kind of paradisical, compelling, luring world. His next bodily sensation was a feeling of hotness. Vaguely he returned to himself, realising that genuine light was in his eyes. He turned slowly. The door of the cavity was open and Polls was drifting in, having turned on the illumination to a dim, soft glow.

  She smiled at him distantly. They both rotated and twisted slowly round one another, hanging in the air. The hem of the short frock she wore was riding up, warping and twirling. To Kayin it was the most vivid thing he had ever seen, a vision thousands of miles across. Her face flashed with angelic light. The texture and colour of her skin radiated a soft, irresistible power.

  He undid the clasp at her neck and pulled off the loose frock. They continued to turn and bend soundlessly in the cavity, the frock drifting away from them. Her body was angled slightly away from him, slightly above him. Reaching up, he first fondled then drew off her soft undergarment. Hot waves of unconsciousness swept through him.

  The symbols and signs were still all around them, the very substance of their world. Kayin heard choking gasps, squeals and screams. He was submerged, spinning in endless glyphs of power and enjoying a withering, burning fire that ran in wide searing rivers and consumed the world.

  Briefly he came again to consciousness of himself. They were suspended in the centre of the cavity. He was gripping Polla by her upper arms, and she his. Their bodies, held away from each other while he thrust between her legs, and joined at the genitals, were arched violently and bucking like wild animals, savagely butting, fucking. Dizzily vision again faded from his consciousness. He and the world were one identity, consisting of a huge, powerful and stiff phallus moving forward with steady purpose. Then he was at the same time a large opened vulva against which the phallus mashed and poked, making them both throb.

  A murmur caught his ear. He was pressed up against Polla, his lips against hers and their bodies straining and heaving. Would they merge, blend, generating between them an androgyne with supernatural sexual powers?

  Then, with a groan, they fell slightly apart and began grappling with the whole length of their bodies, limbs twisting and tangling, biting, gripping and kicking. Finally, after a last lunge at her, Kayin, fully restored to himself now, pushed her away and they hung staring at one another avidly.

  END OF THE LINE

  Kayin and Polla lay weakly in the living apartment. For weeks they had been exhausting themselves in the outside cavity, pushing to the utmost every kind of sex that a male and a female can engineer between them.

  It was a discovery that Kayin would have liked to take back to City 5. There was nothing like it. Twenty minutes alone in the cavity, and sex became like it had never been before. It seemed that all unconscious power was released and flooded into action.

  ‘Would you like to go home, Poll?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she sighed quietly.

  In between their frequent bouts Kayin had also given himself time to think. At first he had thought the visions he saw in the void, even in the blister cavity itself, were real, a hopeful revelation of a positive reality beneath the nothingness through which they moved. More soberly, he had now recognised them for what they were: projections from his own mind, the exteriorisation of basic psychic patterns, which spilled into the open when the constraining effect of sensory impressions was removed. One interesting thing about them was that both he and Polla frequently experienced the same images at the same time during their love-making, further evidence that the unconscious was a collective one.

  ‘Then we’re going home,’ he said firmly.


  ‘You don’t want to find the other universe?’ she spoke timidly, like a child. Such powerful and abundant sex as they had been getting seemed to have made her regress to something like a childish state.

  ‘There isn’t any other universe. What’s more, I’m pretty certain by now that there isn’t any space. No empty void.’

  She didn’t understand what he meant, so he didn’t try to explain. The idea had formed itself slowly in his mind, and he felt sure that it was right. Space was a consequence of matter, not matter of space. Outside the sidereal universe, where there was no matter, there was no space either. When City 5 had escaped the metagalaxy, it had simply escaped into non-being.

  It would not appear that way to observers, of course. Since space was always associated with matter, City 5 extended its own island of space. Projectiles sent out from it always did the same, generating as they went a fictitious measuring system of distances and velocities by which they orientated themselves.

  The nucleon rocket was not going anywhere. It merely created its own ‘appearance’ of space as it ‘moved’ through an incomprehensible nullity. It was, in fact, hard to argue that it moved at all; such a statement was quite meaningless, as was its obverse that the rocket didn’t move.

  None of which made any difference as regards piloting it. The rocket acted according to the laws of its materiality, for in nullity there were no laws. Kayin turned the ship round and gave the computer the problem of finding City 5. The moment of their return being mathematically certain, he and Polla then waited patiently for the rocket to deliver them there, indulging often in the pastime of which they never grew tired.

  When the rocket signalled completion of the journey, they went to the now familiar outside cavity, eager for their first glimpse of their life-long home to be by line of sight.

  Polla fainted dead away. Kayin grabbed a stanchion to steady himself, and avoided the same only by a determined effort of will. The crude cylindrical ships, the litter from the war between the followers of Kord and the followers of Kuro, were scattered all over the space surrounding the City, gutted, gashed and broken, trailing bodies and equipment.