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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘And you,’ Eliot demanded. ‘What do you seek?’

  ‘We,’ answered Zeed with an icy lack of hesitation, ‘seek NULLITY. Not merely to die, like Abrak’s species, but to wipe out the past, never to have been.’

  Eliot shook his head, aghast. ‘How can any living creature have an ambition like that?’

  ‘You must understand that on your planet conditions have been remarkably gentle and favourable for the arising of life. Such is not the general rule. Elsewhere there is hardship and struggle, often of a severity you could not imagine. The universe rarely smiles on the formation of life. On my planet …’ Zeed seemed to hesitate, ‘we regard it as an act of compassion to kill our offspring at birth. The unlucky ones are spared to answer nature’s call to perpetuate the species. If you knew my planet, you would not think that life could evolve there at all. We believe that ever since the first nervous system developed, the subconscious feeling has been present that it has all been a mistake. To you, of course, this looks weird and perverted.’

  ‘Yes … it does indeed,’ Eliot said slowly. ‘In any case, isn’t it impossible? I presume you are travelling the galaxy in search of some race that has time travel, so that you can wipe out your own past. But look at it this way: even if you succeeded in that, there would still have to be a “different past” – the old past, a ghost past – in which you still existed.’

  ‘Once again you display your mental agility,’ Zeed said. ‘Your reasoning is sound: it may be that our craving can be satisfied only if the universe in its entirety is nullified.’

  Springing to his feet, Eliot went to the viewscreen and peered out on to turbulent, lightning-struck Five. He thought of Alanie and himself slaving in the laboratory, and felt tricked and insignificant. Zeed seemed to think of their work as no more than the collecting instinct of a jackdaw or an octopus.

  ‘Everything you’ve told me passes for psychosis back in Solsystem,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know … maybe this is really a travelling lunatic asylum. You could all be insane, even by the standards of your own people. Balbain had this kinky desire to be a slave. Abrak wanted to be killed bizarrely, and you want never to have been born at all. What kind of a set-up is that? If you ask me, the normal, healthy, human mentality is a lot closer to reality than all that.’

  ‘Every creature says that of itself. It is hard for you to accept that your outlook is not a norm, that it is an aberration, an exception. Let me tell you how it arose. Because of the incredibly luxurious conditions on the planet Earth there was able to develop a quite unique biological class: the mammalia. The specific ethological feature of the mammalia is protectiveness, which began within the family, then extended to the tribe, and finally, with your own species, has become so over-developed as to embrace the whole of the mammalian class. Every mammal is protected, by your various organisations, whether human or not. Now, the point is that within this shield of protectiveness qualities are able to evolve which actually are quite redundant, since they bear no relation to the hard facts of survival. One of these, becoming intense among monkeys, apes and hominids, is playful curiosity, or meddlesome inquisitiveness. This developed into the love of knowledge which became the overriding factor in the history of your own species.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound at all bad to me,’ Eliot said defensively. ‘We’ve done all right so far.’

  ‘But not for long, I fear. Your species is in more trouble than you think. There is no future in this mammalian over-protectiveness. The dinosaurs thought themselves safe by reason of their excessive size, did they not? And yet that giantism was exactly what doomed them. Already you ran into serious trouble when your compulsive care for the unfit led to a deterioration of the genetic stock. You saved yourselves that time because you learned to eliminate defective genes artificially. But perhaps other consequences of this nature of yours will arise which you cannot deal with. I do not anticipate that your species will last long.’

  ‘While you – death-lovers – will still be here, I suppose?’

  Zeed’s golden eyes seemed to dim and tarnish. ‘We all inhabit a vast dark,’ he repeated, ‘in which there is neither rhyme nor reason.’

  ‘Perhaps so.’ Eliot’s fists were clenched now. ‘Here’s another “ethological feature,” as you call it – revenge! Do you understand that, Zeed? I’m going to take my revenge for the death of my mate! I’m going out there to destroy the animal that killed Alanie!’

  Zeed did not answer but continued to stare at him and, so it seemed to Eliot’s crazed imagination, lost any semblance to a living creature at all. Eliot ran to the lower galleries of the ship and armed himself with one of the few weapons the vessel carried: a high-powered energy beamer. As he stepped down from the ship and on to the booming, crashing surface of Five some of Zeed’s words came back to him. An image came to his mind of the endlessness of space in which galaxies seemed to be descending and tumbling, and the words: an unfathomable darkness without any common ground. Then he pressed forward to challenge Dominus.

  Dominus believed he had at last solved a perplexing riddle.

  Following his initial seizure of one of the organisms, two others had emerged at short intervals so he had taken those also. A little later, he had moved in on the construct itself and taken a fourth organism from it. Of the fifth, there was no trace.

  His analyses came up with the same result every time. The specimens were incomplete organisms: they were sterile. More accurately, they could only reproduce identical copies of themselves, like a plant. Together with this, their tissues suffered from an inbuilt deficiency which caused them to decay with age.

  Plainly these facts were not consistent with their being motile, autonomous entities. Dominus now believed that the specimens he had were only expendable doll-organisms, created by some genuine entity as one might make a machine to carry out certain tasks, and dispatched here, in the metal construct, for a purpose.

  And that entity, the owner of the construct and of the doll-organisms, having intruded on his domain once, would be back again.

  With that realisation an urge beyond all power to resist came upon Dominus: the compulsion to evolve. He meditated in the depths of his being, and the entity to which he ultimately gave birth, amid great explosions, agonies and devastations, was as far above him in ability as he had been above his immediate inferior.

  The new Dominus immediately set about the defence of his planet. The whole of the single continent became a springboard for this defence, and was criss-crossed with artifacts which meshed integrally with the space-borne artifacts he sent ranging several light-years beyond the atmosphere. To crew this extensive system Dominus copied the methods of the invader and created armies of slave doll-organisms modelled on the enemy’s own doll-organisms. And Dominus waited for the enemy to arrive. And waited. And waited. And waited.

  THE PROBLEM OF MORLEY’S EMISSION

  MEMO

  To: Director, Orbit University.

  From: Dean, Sociohistoric Faculty.

  Date: 19 July AD 3065.

  Dear Mansim: As you are aware, a month ago the Officiating World Steering Committee asked us to submit a bystander’s report on the events surrounding the activities of the well-known philosopher Isaac Morley, giving our interpretation of their possible significance. Frankly, some of us are alarmed at the direction in which our conclusions are taking us. Below is a précis of the report which tentatively is shaping up and which should go to the Committee in a few days’ time (most of it is rather elementary, as politicians, naturally, are ignorant of the subject of social energy fields). Are you happy to see it go through as it stands? Arthur.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  SPECIFICS: the building of the Antarctic Structure; the passage of the Extra-Solar Object; the economic deformations noted to have occurred in the period from March to December AD 3064.

  1. The facts surrounding the edifice named the Antarctic Structure are simple, if not altogether explicable. The Structure is an immense pyramid, or
ziggurat, five miles on the side, its faces worked into an intricate, baroque labyrinth. Five thousand people laboured on its construction for a year and a half, without payment and without any clear idea as to its purpose, having been inspired to assemble by the leadership of its architect the self-styled philosopher Isaac Morley, who had created a philosophical cult solely in order to complete his project.

  Only later did it emerge that the Structure is actually a powerful, if somewhat over-elaborate, UHF transmitter, able to transmit a tight beam in a fixed direction spacewards at an angle of 5 degrees from the direction of the south polar axis, at longitude 93 degrees west. Its function as an ideological monument is probably secondary.

  2. There seems no way in which Morley and his followers could have known beforehand of the passage of the mysterious object known simply as the Extra-Solar Object. Despite that, the beam from the Structure, after its one and only discharge on I April 3064, intercepted the Object exactly, at the point where it passed beneath the south pole, half a light year below the plane of the ecliptic.

  The Object has an estimated rest-mass of a billion tons, and an estimated average diameter of three hundred and forty miles. It remained within detectable range for only one month. Apart from its high velocity, there is nothing to suggest that it is not of natural origin.

  3. Economic deformations: all economic networks report an upsurge in new and unaccustomed directions from March to December of last year. Intermittent surges and subsidences in economic activity are by no means unusual, but several features of this one are perplexing. The networks unanimously claim that their new production initiatives were in response to demand arising from innovations in fashion; but it has proved impossible to trace any originating source for this demand. Even more puzzling, the new fashions seem suddenly to have dissipated before the production period was properly completed, and the networks are now left with vast stocks of useless articles.

  One or two of the new commodities, such as the models of the Antarctic Structure which emit random buzzing noises, are clearly related to the influence of the Morleyites; but others, such as the holovid set able to screen nothing except the process of its own production, fulfil no obvious purpose.

  4. To the layman it might seem that the above events, while concurrent in time, could not have very much bearing on one another. To explain how they possibly could, it will be necessary briefly to review the theory of social energy fields.

  Early social science was separated, broadly speaking, into two camps. One view held that the individual human being is the only social reality, and that society itself has no substantive existence, but is only an arrangement, or ‘contract’, between autonomous, self-conscious individuals. The opposing camp, however, denied that consciousness is an attribute of the individual mind at all. According to this doctrine, consciousness is an aggregate social function; the ‘self’ has no independent existence and is a product, or reflection, of social forces. During the 20th and 21st centuries a series of wars was fought over this divergence in ideologies, as contending parties attempted either to destroy all forms of collective (or ‘state’) control, or else to establish a world of collective harmony in which only group aims were admitted.

  As with many diametrically opposed concepts, both were right and both were wrong. The individualist concept was erroneous because the social conditioning of individual consciousness is an observable fact, and in most cases is practically absolute. The collective concept is untenable on more theoretical grounds. If it were true, the collective cultural pool would be its own single source of influences and ideas, there being nowhere else from which to replenish them. Like any system denied an energy input, it would suffer a continuous downgrading of vitality. Since growth and novelty are more characteristic of cultures than is decline this doctrine also fails to answer the facts, and the regular injections into the common pool of fresh initiatives can only be attributed to individual qualities.

  Gradually it came to be realised that society, with its properties of gregariousness and organisation, can be adequately expressed only as a polar structure in which the individual comprises one pole and the collective or ‘aggregrate’ entity the other pole, the two taken together having the properties of opposition, complementarity and inseparability.

  It could be argued that the social polarity is a fictional concept since the ‘aggregate’ pole is scattered over the surface of the Earth. However, the dimensions selected are not those of physical space but of ‘social space’. Mathematically the ‘cultural polarity’, as it is sometimes called, belongs to the same class of structures as does a magnetic field, with which it shares many characteristics.

  The Psychological Aspect: Not only does the social polarity extend worldwide, it is also present in every individual brain. Human consciousness is clearly acted on by forces coming from two opposite directions: a man is both himself, and he is society. This ambiguity, an existential double-take, is absolutely ineradicable; neither pole can be omitted. The individual has innate qualities, urges and desires, but these cannot develop without appropriate stimuli; if bereft of society – if raised by animals, perhaps – he could not develop into a human person. Likewise, without individuals there could obviously be no society. Neither can persist without the other, and indeed until they coalesce within the brain no human being exists.

  The Organisational Aspect: The substance of the psychological polarity is the substance out of which all forms of social organisation are constructed.

  The polar binding force stretches from individual to total aggregate through a wide range of intermediate forms. The first manifestation of the binding force is known technically as coherence, in analogy to laser light which is of uniform wave-length and whose waves all move in step. Coherence refers to the principle of conformity in human affairs: the force of fashion, of national and cultural identity, of religious belief, and so on. Coherence involves no conscious organisation. The masses of individuals keep in step apparently of their own volition, but in reality because of the mimicking nature of this force.

  Like magnetic fields, the SEF (social energy field) is fairly static in its ground state. A magnetic field can, however, be made to give rise to an electric current which flows at right angles to the field; the social polarity has a similar property in that it may give rise to a flow of organised directiveness, this being a general term implying the intentionality of a system, and covering anything having the nature of a project. Invariably it involves a movement from a past condition to a future altered condition; usually (but not necessarily) it involves the deployment of material forces.

  Organised directiveness could therefore be said to be an SEF potential. When the flow actually occurs, however, it adds an extra dimension to the field, transforming it into a quadropolar energy structure requiring, for a complete description, not two, but four terms: individual and aggregate poles, positive and negative flow terminals.

  Cohesiveness is the term used to describe the condition of an SEF which is giving rise to a flow of organised directiveness. The economic system is its most obvious manifestation.

  The Principle of Conformation: The chemical term conformation describes the ability of some molecules to adopt various configurations, a different energy state being associated with each. The SEF is similarly capable of a range of conformations, in which the individual and aggregate poles are variously emphasised.

  The most extreme aggregate-favoured conformation is the mass crowd, or mob, probably the closest the aggregate pole ever gets to leading an independent existence. The characteristics of a crowd, both physically and psychologically, differ so radically from those of a healthy individual that it has been held to constitute a separate form of life, or rather, to constitute an entity intermediate between animate creatures and inanimate forces. An invariable feature of crowds is that the faculty of self-determination, which to some degree is present in every individual, is totally lacking in them. A crowd exhibits the characteristics of raw energy or a
body of water. It does not respond to instructions or appeals but only to physical barriers and conduits, provided they are strong enough. Any individual trapped in a crowd is, therefore, robbed of any control over his own movements, and should crowd control measures fail then internal pressures within the crowd can very quickly reach lethal proportions.

  The crowd’s power to submerge the individual is no less psychological than physical. Individuals who least expect it of themselves may find their judgement abdicated to crowd emotion, their feelings funnelled in a single direction like a torrent at full flood – a syndrome which has been a source of elation to those leaders who have learned to arouse it.

  Crowds of gigantic magnitude have mostly been associated with religious occasions. The earliest historical mention of a giant crowd is for the year 1966, when five million people assembled for the Hindu festival of Kumbh-Mela. A Kumbh-Mela crowd of over twenty million is recorded for eighty years later. The largest recorded crowd ever was an estimated two hundred and ten million people who assembled for the event of the Joyous Declaration of the World God Uhuru movement on the Central African Plain in AD 2381, this number being compressed into a remarkably small area thanks to the ingenious open-plan multi-storey stadia erected for the occasion. When control measures failed fifty million people died as a result of internal crowd pressure. At several loci within the crowd the aggregated pressure rose to such a degree that several millions at a time were fused into a single bloody mass in which no individual bodies or parts of bodies were distinguishable. Gigantic crowds continued to be a feature of World God Uhuru despite attempts by civil authorities to have the gatherings banned.