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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘Not any more. Haven’t you heard? The syn has relented. Karnak is going on ipse holo tonight.’

  Mettick’s quest for a believable human profile to the syn bosses had led him into labyrinths of the library that had been unpaced for decades. He walked through dusty low-vaulted galleries past rows of disused terminal units, each of which gave access to some obscure facet of the past. He knew the answer was here somewhere. The facts he had discovered so far were too puzzling, too extraordinary, not to have an answer.

  There had been some fascinating sidelines, too, in his search into the past. Even as far back as the minus eighth century there seemed to have been some sort of premonition of more modern history. Mettick had found references to ‘the withering away of the state’ and ‘the abolition of central authority’ that was supposed to come about in the future. He wondered how the ancients’ could have guessed about the fate of the empty government levels that separated UnderMegapolis from SupraBurgh.

  An age-old silence enveloped him. The nearest girl librarian was at least half a mile away, in the better-frequented upper floors. Mettick consulted some reference numbers on a list he carried and keyed on one of the terminal units. An ancient ‘cinema’ comedy began to unreel, fascinating him with its extraordinary grimaces and quite ugly songs. He abandoned the unit after a couple of minutes and wandered on.

  He entered a side passage where the lighting, for some unknown reason, was dimmer. To his amazement the material of the walls gave way to stone and wood in archaic, rotting panels. And while he stood there one of those panels gave a little squeak and swung open.

  Behind it was a flat glass screen with a picture on it. Mettick had difficulty in recognising the image at first: it was not in holo but flat. There was something else wrong with it, too: it was made up, unnaturally, of only two colours, white and greyish black in various tones.

  The picture had a graininess that, peering closer, he saw resulted from its being composed of hundreds of parallel horizontal lines. But, when he finally recognized what it was, he jumped back in shock.

  It was the face of Magister Dutch Schultz.

  He began to tremble and then calmed himself as he realised that the picture carried no charismatic charge. The screen was some unbelievably primitive kind of television which could not possibly convey ipseity. God knew how old it was – it was a wonder it was still functioning.

  ‘Hello, citizen,’ Schultz said in a husky voice. ‘So you’re tryin’ to find out the truth? Okay, I’ll tell you the truth …’

  Karnak strode into the transmitting studios feeling ten feet tall. This was to be his night. By the pressure of democracy – pure democracy, not the plutocratic variety – the magisters had been forced to concede an elementary right.

  The studio producers were deferential. He waited in a cool blue chamber while the announcements were made. Then he was ushered into the transmitting cubicle. In front of him was the holo camera. Around him were the sensors that, with a faint hum, began to pick up his ipseity emanations at a frequency of 23 trillion trillion per second and feed them through the com-lines …

  The producer signalled to him through the side of the cubicle. He was on.

  ‘Fellow citizens,’ he began, ‘tonight …’

  And then the impressions began to hit him. It was merely like a tidal wave at first and he was able to ride with it. But in the next few seconds it became stronger. Millions upon millions of scenes, tens of millions of human consciousnesses, were forcing themselves into his consciousness, which like a balloon expanded, expanded, expanded

  And burst.

  Sinatra had cornered Schultz in a small, narrow room with drab brown walls. It had no furniture, no means of escape.

  ‘You goddam stool pigeon,’ Sinatra raged. ‘You ratted on us all.’

  ‘Whaddya want me to do, Frank?’ Schultz screamed in terror. ‘You were gonna bump me off. I could see it coming.’ He had run and run and fought for his life, but now there was nowhere left to go.

  ‘I put you on the council,’ Sinatra said, ‘and if I want it’s my right to take you off or do what the hell I like with you.’

  ‘No, Frank, no!’

  Sinatra leaped at Schultz. His fists smashed into him again and again, throwing him cowering to the floor. Then he attacked him with a crowbar that appeared in his hand, bringing the weapon down in three savage strokes. Soon there was blood everywhere.

  Mettick burst into campaign headquarters looking desperate. ‘Get hold of Karnak,’ he demanded. ‘Don’t let him go on ipse.’

  Obsier looked up tiredly. ‘Why?’ he said mildly. ‘Actually you’re too late. Karnak was taken ill at the start of the programme. We’re waiting for news now.’

  Mettick sank down on to a chair. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Should he be?’ Obsier stared at him perplexed. ‘I hear he’s in a coma. We’re waiting for the doctor’s report.’

  ‘He’ll be dead,’ Mettick said in despair.

  Suddenly Obsier became alert, matter-of-fact. ‘Tell me what you found out,’ he said rapidly.

  ‘Two things, chiefly.’ Mettick fished in his pocket and came out with a sheaf of pictures. ‘Take a look at these. They’re portraits of world-famous actors living about a thousand years ago. They were known colloquially as “Hollywood stars”. Notice the resemblance?’

  Obsier leafed through them. He saw the familiar, compelling faces of the Magisters of UnderMegapolis, captioned with their names. Burt Lancaster, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and so on. Some were wearing characteristic expressions; others were in strange, surprising poses. Lancaster had his head tilted, favouring the viewer with a most uncharacteristic glossy smile.

  ‘Absolutely incredible!’ he exclaimed. ‘What is it? Some fantastic coincidence of genetic reconstitution? Or –’ His voice sank. Unwelcome, irrepressible thoughts were going through his brain. ‘Or …’

  ‘You’ve guessed it.’ Metick pushed away the pictures and slumped down in his chair. ‘The change must have come fairly recently, certainly within the last hundred years. The cybration of big business reached a point where human beings were eliminated at the top. The cybration system became the actual, effective owner of the capital.’

  ‘Without anyone knowing?’

  ‘Why not? It was so complicated, data processing gives such opportunities for mystery … Besides, it only happened with the five biggest conglomerates – no, six, counting Reagan. Remember him? Each of these conglomerates became the property of a single mass of automatic data processing. Much cleverer, much more efficient than a human being.’

  ‘Yes, but why …?’

  ‘Don’t you see it? There was still the problem of the interface, to use a piece of cybration jargon. The cybrators needed personae so as to be able to deal with human beings and to help them find their bearings in a human world. So they went back through history looking for the most charismatic personalities they could find, the ones with greatest mass appeal. There must have been other considerations, too. I mean, the cybrators must have had some kind of affinity – anyway, they found them among the cinema stars of the minus eighth century. And they reconstructed those personalities in their data banks. Totally. You couldn’t call those personae puppets by now. The identification must be complete.’

  ‘So we’re ruled by ghosts,’ Obsier said woodenly.

  ‘Yes. Or eighth-century Hollywood film stars. Whichever you prefer.’

  ‘But on ipse holo they come over … they’re real.’

  ‘So what? They generate the ipseity just as they build up a persona. That’s why they have so much of it. More, probably, than the original film stars had.

  ‘Schultz told me. He got in touch with me in the library. He’s the odd one out, by the way – he never was a film star but a genuine gangster, the type that the actors were supposed to portray. That’s why there are no good pictures of him.’ He touched a blurred photo of a round, indistinct face. ‘He wasn’t in the original set. Sinatra created hi
m for convenience, to look after some subsidiaries and give him added weight on the council. That’s why he chose a real gangster, I guess: it amused him somehow. But something went wrong. Schultz has developed in his own direction, has become separated from Sinatra and wants to break away from him. He tried to do a deal with me; said he’d help me break open the syn. And he told me –’ Mettick slammed his fist on the desk. ‘But too late!’

  ‘Told you what?’ Obsier pressed anxiously, leaning forward.

  ‘About ipse holo! The real reason why it’s never used, except by the syn. It’s a killer!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Obsier stared at him.

  ‘Ipseity transmission is a reciprocal process. It can’t work one way. The sender becomes aware of the receiver, too. When you’re broadcasting to millions of people they not only become aware of your presence, but you at the same time receive the presence of all those millions. The consciousness can’t take it. It overloads.’

  Noting the other’s expression, Mettick continued:

  ‘That datum has been removed from the library. Everybody thinks it’s just too expensive, not too dangerous.’

  ‘But the syn bosses. They don’t –’

  ‘They’re not alive!’ cut in Mettick savagely. ‘They’re what you said, ghosts animated by electricity. You know that “question time” technique they use on ipse holo? I learned today they handle thousands of questions at the same time, calculated on a scatter pattern so nobody even suspects anything.’

  They sat silently for a while. Finally Obsier forced his brain into motion again.

  ‘Maybe this is the beginning of something new after all,’ he said uneasily. ‘If Schultz really is going to help break the syn, it will all have been worth it.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any hope there. Schultz can’t be too bright, or he wouldn’t have left it so late to warn me. And remember, he’s really part of Sinatra. He’ll never be able to hide what he’s done. I imagine the Schultz persona has been washed right down the drain by now.’

  ‘And where does that leave us? We’re the ones who know.’

  ‘We’re in a spot. It’s no good thinking anybody can fight the syndicate. They’ve got the means to power nobody else can use: ipseic holocom. We could go into hiding but they’d always be able to find us. We might be able to flee to SupraBurgh but –’ He shuddered.

  ‘I can’t face SupraBurgh,’ said Obsier definitely, thinking of the obscene sight of a starship riding up into the endless blue.

  ‘No, me neither. And that’s something else we have to thank them for –’

  The desk holo chimed behind Obsier. He turned, spoke quietly to it, then swung back to Mettick.

  ‘Karnak’s dead.’

  ‘The syndicate murdered him by his own hand.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again they were silent, until Obsier said sombrely, ‘What were you saying about SupraBurgh?’

  ‘There’s one thing that obsesses the syn. The stars. They have a psychotic resentment about them. Remember Reagan? They wiped him out, too. He was the last one to make a bid for the stars, which was what he was doing when he tried to extend into SupraBurgh. But he couldn’t make it and they know they can never make it, either. They’re machines, imprisoned down here and keyed into this subterranean supercity. So they hate the stars and the open sky. And that’s why, over the generations, they’ve conditioned us to hate them too.’

  MUTATION PLANET

  Filled with ominous mutterings, troubled by ground-trembling rumblings, the vast and brooding landscape stretched all around in endless darkness and gloom. Across this landscape the mountainous form of Dominus moved at speed, a massed, heavy shadow darker than the gloom itself, sullenly majestic, possessing total power. Above him the opaque sky, lurid and oppressively close, intermittently flared and discharged sheets of lightning that were engulfed in the distant hills. In the instant before some creature fed on the electric glare the dimness would be relieved momentarily, outlining uneven expanses of near-barren soil. Dominus, however, took no sensory advantage of these flashes; his inputs covered a wider, more reliable range of impressions.

  As he sped through his domain he scattered genetic materials to either side of him to dampen down evolutionary activity, so ensuring that no life-form would arise that could inconvenience him or interfere with the roadway over which he moved. This roadway, built by himself as one of the main instruments of his control over his environment, spanned the whole eight thousand miles of the planet’s single continent, and was a uniform quarter of a mile wide; at irregular intervals side roads diverged into the larger peninsulas. Since the substance of the roadbed was quasi-organic, having been extruded by organs he possessed for that purpose, Dominus could, moreover, sense instantly any attack, damage, or unacceptable occurrence taking place on any part of it.

  After leaving the interminable plain the road undulated over a series of hills, clinging always to the profile of the land, and swept down into a gigantic bowl-like valley. Here the gloom took on the darkness of a pit, but life-forms were more copious. By the light of the flickering lightning flashes, or by that of the more diffuse radiations employed by Dominus, they could be seen skulking out there in the valley, a scattering of unique shapes. They were absolutely motionless, since none dared to move while Dominus passed by. Leagues further afield lights winked and radio pulses beamed out as the more powerful entities living up the slopes of the valley signalled their submission.

  Dominus dosed the valley heavily with genetic mist, then surged up the opposite wall. As he swept over on to a tableland a highly-charged lightning bolt came sizzling down, very close; he caught it in one of his conductors and stored the charge in his accumulators. It was then, while he raced away from the valley, that his radar sense spotted an unidentifiable object descending through the cloud blanket. Puzzled, Dominus slowed down to scarcely a hundred miles per hour. This was the first unusual event for several millennia. He could not, at first, account for it.

  The strangeness lay in the fact that the object was so large: not very much smaller than Dominus himself. (Its shape, thought new to him, was of no account – even at the low, controlled level of mutation he permitted thousands of different life-forms continued to evolve.) Also, it was moving through the air without the visible benefit of wings of any kind. Come to that, a creature of such bulk could not be lifted by wings at all.

  Where had it evolved? In the sky? Most unlikely. The plethora of flying forms that had once spent their lives winging through the black, static-drenched cloud layer had almost – thanks to Dominus – died out. Over the ages his mutation-damping mist, rising on the winds, had accumulated there, and without a steady mutation rate the flying forms had been unable to survive the ravages of their environment and each other.

  Then from where? Some part of the continent receiving only scant surveillance from Dominus? He was inclined to doubt this also. The entity he observed could not have developed without many generations of mutation, which would have come to his notice before now.

  Neither was the ocean any more likely a source. True, Dominus carried out no surveillance there. But a great deal of genetic experience was required to survive on the land surface. Emergent amphibia lacked that experience and were unable to gain a foothold. For that reason oceanic evolution seemed to have resigned itself to a purely submarine existence.

  One other possibility remained: the emptiness beyond the atmospheric covering. For Dominus this possibility was theoretical only, carrying no emotional ambience. Up to now this world had absorbed his psychic energies: this was life and existence.

  Due to this ambiguity Dominus did not act immediately but kept in check the strong instinctive urges that were triggered off. Interrupting his pan-continental patrol for the first time in millennia, he followed the object to its landing place. Then he settled down patiently to await developments.

  Eliot Harst knew exactly where to find Balbain. He climbed the curving ramp to the upper part
of the dome-shaped spaceship and opened a door. The alien was standing at the big observation window, looking out on to Five’s (whatever system they were in, they always named the planets in order from their primary) blustering semi-night.

  The clouds glowed patchily as though bombs were being let off among them; the lightning boomed and crashed. The tall, thin alien ignored all this, however. His attention was fixed on the gigantic organism they had already named Dominus, which was slumped scarcely more than a mile away. Eliot had known him to gaze at it, unmoving, for hours.

  ‘The experiment has worked out after all,’ he said. ‘Do you want to take a look?’

  Balbain tore his gaze from the window and looked at Eliot. He came from a star which, to Eliot, was only a number in Solsystem’s catalogues. His face was partly obscured by the light breathing mask he wore to supplement ship atmosphere. (The aliens all seemed to think that human beings were more sensitive to discomfort than themselves: everything on the ship was biased towards the convenience of Eliot and his assistant Alanie). But over the mask Balbain’s bright bird-like eyes were visible, darting from his bony, fragile and quite unhuman skull.

  ‘The result is positive?’ he intoned in an oddly hollow, resonant voice.

  ‘It would seem so.’

  ‘It is as we already knew. I do not wish to see the offspring at present, but thank you for informing me.’

  With that he returned to the window and seemed to become abruptly unaware of Eliot’s presence.

  Sighing, the Earthman left the chamber. A few yards further along the gallery he stopped at a second door. Jingling a bell to announce his presence, he entered a small bare cell and gave the same message as before to its occupant.