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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘You must let me help you, sir. There may be only seconds –’

  ‘Surely you realise that I cannot leave the ship. Save yourself … and whomever else you can.’ Seeing Krish’s indecision, his tone hardened. ‘That’s an order, Lieutenant.’ He waved his pistol. ‘I have my own protection … against the strat.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Krish stiffened. He stepped back, clearly affected then snapped off a salute that Aton returned perfunctorily.

  Then he turned on his heel and strode away.

  Moments after he had gone the wavering ortho field deserted the stretch of corridor where Captain Aton was standing. The pistol, with which he had been meaning to shoot himself, dropped from his fingers. In a little over a second the field swayed back again, but in that second Aton saw it.

  The strat. The temporal substratum.

  The Gulf of Potential Time.

  It was only a glimpse, but even a glimpse is too much. Fortunately, or perhaps not so, the returning ortho field saved him – saved him, among other things, from remaining conscious, for exposure to the strat does not bring merciful oblivion. With the return of passing time the glimpse of eternity became a mental shock of pathological proportions. Aton instantly fell unconscious.

  At almost the same time two noncom chronmen, running desperately for the life raft, saw their captain lying there in the corridor. Without even thinking about it they each seized an arm and lugged him at speed towards Station 3.

  When a field of orthogonal time (that is, of time as it can be understood by the human intellect) breaks down, it does not collapse all at once. Bubbles and fragments of it cling, eddying and drifting, for anything up to ten minutes.

  One such bubble had attached itself to Station 3.

  The scene at Station 3 was one of turmoil. Discipline had broken down in the face of horror, and about thirty men were fighting to get aboard the raft – even though, with an orderly embarkation, room could have been found for them all. On his arrival Lieutenant Krish tried to impose a sense of command. He was cut down by Sergeant Quelle, who had found a pistol beamer and held it awkwardly in his brass suit’s mechanical claw.

  Quelle had good reason for shooting the lieutenant. He was anxious that no one who knew his guilty secret, apart from his fellow Traumatics, should board the raft with him. He ensured that the Traumatics went aboard first, then entered the raft himself preparatory to casting off.

  But among those who boarded in the final rush were the two noncoms carrying the unconscious form of Captain Aton. They themselves were not so lucky. They dropped Aton to the floor then bravely left the raft to assist some wounded men. Quelle indignantly clanked forward to rid himself of his potential accuser, but he was too late. In that moment others in the raft decided that they had lingered long enough and activated the escape sequence. The gates closed and the hum of the raft’s own emergency ortho field filled the dim interior.

  The last wisps of the ship field were now dissipating, and the shattered destroyer was wholly saturated by the strat. It ceased, in one sense, to have any material existence at all: matter cannot retain its properties without the vector of time to give it substance. As such, the life raft magically passed unimpeded through several walls and floated free.

  It was the only raft to leave the Smasher of Enemies. All the others either were too damaged or else failed to energise in time. The survivors switched on the small scope and saw, by the light of the raft’s feeble beta projector, the vague image of a tall Hegemonic warship looming over them. They cowered, fearing, but eventually the ship turned and receded beyond the scope’s range.

  Still wearing the protective suit, Sergeant Quelle fretted. He had felt it reasonably safe to kill in the confusion at Station 3, but here there would be witnesses who could not be silenced and bodies that could not be disposed of. He sweated inside the suit, glancing at Aton and hoping he would not recover.

  The raft was transmitting, as a beacon, a rotating beta beam. Otherwise there was nothing they could do. They settled down and waited, for life or a fate worse than death.

  TWO

  Node One: Chronopolis, mistress of the Chronotic Empire, seat of the Imperial Government of His Chronotic Majesty Philipium Ixian I, and the location of that repository of imperial wisdom, the Imperator.

  Chronopolis was complex and sprawling. In the morning light (the sun had risen to that angle which most accentuated the city’s panoply of splendour) her towers, arches, and minarets sparkled and flashed, casting long shadows that fell sharply across the various quarters housing her polyglot population – across the Hevenian quarter, with its characteristically arcaded architecture; across the more rigidly styled Barek quarter; and so on. For people of every nation and of every period in the mighty time-spanning empire flocked to Chronopolis.

  The incredibly massive, intricate palace that occupied the centre of the eternal city was well placed, for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Like a spider at the centre of a vast web, it cast out tentacles in all directions so that it was hard to say where it left off and the rest of the city began. This enmeshment was functional as well as descriptive: the palace merged gradually into the city in the form of government departments, military offices, and church institutions – the three pillars of any state. The residence of His Eminence the Arch-Cardinal Reamoir also lay within the palace grounds, so that all strands, spiritual as well as political, were drawn into the hands of His Chronotic Majesty. And visible from the upper reaches of the palace, from where one could overlook the entire city, were the massive shipyards beyond the outskirts of Chronopolis, busy now as never before.

  On this day of Imdara in the fifth month of year 204 (as measured from the pastward buffer known as the Stop Barrier – the zero point in imperial reckoning) the activities proceeding in the imperial palace were too numerous to list. The business of attending to the affairs of the thousand-year imperium went on – all under the gaze, if they so desired, of those members of the Ixian dynasty who were domiciled there – in the thousands of chambers, halls, lecture-rooms, salons, and chapels. As they did on every other day, except for the specified holy days of observance.

  Of these activities, not least in importance was the education of the next generation of rulers. In one of the domestic wings Brother Mundan, one of a dozen appointed tutors, wrestled with the problem of steeping a class of young Ixians – some of them quite closely related to the emperor – in the traditions of the dynasty.

  Even his brown cassock and curtailed cowl, even all the majesty of the Church that lay behind him (the Church, of course, accepting the responsibility for all serious education) was sometimes insufficient to curb the irreverence of these youngsters, who were apt to place themselves above normal values even in matters of religion. Luckily the Church placed great reliance on repetition as a method of teaching, and this generally enabled Mundan to bludgeon his charges into submission. Indeed, it would have been difficult to instil the present lesson, ‘The Foundation of Empire’, with its mixture of history, abstract physics and religious dogma, by any other means. Brother Mundan was repeating it to the present class for at least the twelfth time.

  ‘And to what,’ he intoned, ‘do we owe the existence of the empire?’

  After a pause Prince Kir, cousin to the emperor, rose. ‘To the intervention of God, Brother.’

  Munden nodded. ‘Correct, Your Highness. Once, time stretched unchanging from the interminable past to the interminable future, or at least it changed only slowly due to natural movements in the temporal substratum or to time-storms. There was no empire and no true religion. There was religion, of a sort, but it was superstition, such as some of the futureward heathens hold to. Then God acted so as to redeem mankind. At what is now called Node Six, in the city of Umbul, capital of the present province of Revere, He chose as His appointed messenger San Hevatar, a scientist working in the laboratories of the ruling Ixian family – of your family, Highnesses.’

  Mundan’s gaze settled on one who, instead
of attending closely, was more interested in exchanging whispers with a neighbour.

  ‘Princess Nulea, what are the three things that God revealed to San Hevatar?’

  The girl started and jumped up. With glazed eyes she chanted the answers she had long learned by rote.

  ‘One: the mutability of time, Brother Mandan. Two: the means of travelling through time. Three: the nature of the soul.’

  ‘Thank you, that is correct. Through His messenger San Hevatar, God has taught us that time is mutable. He has taught us how to travel through time. And He has taught us that the nature of the soul is to persist in eternity.’

  He rapped the lectern to pique their interest. ‘The first of these truths shows us the possibility of the Church’s mission. The second truth shows us how the mission may be accomplished. And the third truth shows us why it should be accomplished.’

  His voice became challenging. ‘And why should the Church work to accomplish its mission under the protection and banner of the Chronotic Empire?’ Brother Mundan’s dark eyes flashed. This point in the lesson touched the fires in his own breast.

  Once again Prince Kir proved the most apt of his pupils. ‘Because time does not die, Brother Mundan. Because the soul cannot leave the body.’

  ‘Yes, Highness, that is so,’ Mundan said with a slight frown. The answer was probably lost on the densest of those present. ‘The Church works to bring the true faith to all men, past, present, and future – to establish God’s kingdom on Earth. Even though we die we continue to exist in the past, because the past does not vanish. The Church seeks to transform our past lives and bring God into our souls.

  ‘Let us take in turn each of the three truths revealed by San Hevatar. First: that time is mutable. This means simply that even the past may be changed because in absolute terms there is no past, just as there is no unique present. Orthogonal time is but the surface of the bottomless ocean of potential time, or the temporal substratum: the hidden dimension of eternity in which all things co-exist without progression from past to future. Prior to the foundation of the empire the past could change without man’s knowledge or will, due to time-storms or natural mutations, just as the wind can change direction. Now, thanks to the grace of God, the past and the future can be controlled and altered by conscious intervention.’

  This intervention took the form, of course, of the Historical Office, which undertook to edit and restructure history by manipulation of key events, and of the imperial time-fleets, which in the last resort enforced the imperial writ. To Brother Mundan this seemed entirely proper and right.

  He proceeded to the second God-given truth, writing some equations on the blackboard.

  ‘These equations describe the operation of moving mass through time. You should already be familiar with them from your physics lessons, so here we will concern ourselves with the structure of orthogonal time, which is of great importance for the stability of the empire.

  ‘Time is composed of a wave structure. The nodes of the wave travel at intervals of approximately one hundred and seventy years and are of great interest to the time-traveller since they comprise “rest points” in the tensioning of the Chronotic energy field. This is of crucial importance in the business of time-travel, because matter can be transported from one node to another and will remain in place without any further expenditure of energy. On the other hand if matter is transported to a time between nodes, or conversely is taken from between nodes and is deposited somewhere else, it will not persist in its new location without a continuous expenditure of energy, usually accomplished by means of a device called an orthophase. This is the reason why nearly all Chronotic intercourse takes place from node to node. The seven nodes covered by the span of the empire form, as it were, the seven continents or provinces of the empire, while the intervening periods comprise a series of hinterlands, benevolently governed but rarely seeing a time-ship except in time of rebellion or by order of the Historical Office.

  ‘In ordinary life, of course, none of this is of any consequence, since the nodes are invisible to us.’

  ‘Why are there nodes, Brother Mundan?’ asked Prince Kir seriously.

  Mundan frowned again. ‘We may take it as part of God’s wisdom, Highness, though technically it is, as I say, the wave structure of time. The nodes give the empire an absolute standard of time-measurement – for the movement of the nodes is absolute, not relative. We are fortunate enough to live in Node One. Today, for instance, is Imdara of the fifth month, and tomorrow will be Juno of the fifth month. When tomorrow comes it would be possible for us to travel back in a time-machine to today, Imdara – but Node One will not be here. It will have moved on, to Juno. Thus nodal time, as apart from historical time, is the time the empire uses to conduct its business. The clocks of the time-fleets measure nodal time.

  ‘Imagine what chaos would reign if we tried to govern a time-travelling empire where time was uniform, not gathered into nodes. If it were a simple matter – say, for a man to travel into tomorrow and meet himself there – why, antinomies and paradoxes would abound in such confusion that no order could survive. Time itself, perhaps, would break down and the whole world would sink into the substratum. That is why God, in His great wisdom, has so arranged the universe that the natural period between nodes is greater than the span of a man’s life, so that he will not meet himself. And it is to prevent the harmful accumulation of paradoxes that it is forbidden to travel into internodal time, except in the emperor’s name.’

  Princess Nulea giggled. ‘Narcis doesn’t think so!’

  ‘Silence!’ Brother Mundan’s face became an angry red. He was well aware that certain members of the imperial household did not consider themselves bound by the laws that restrained the rest of society. But he would brook no mention of Prince Narcis’s unspeakable perversion here.

  Princess Nulea lowered her eyes. ‘Sorry, Brother Mundan,’ she murmured, smirking.

  ‘I have a question, Brother Mundan,’ another young prince interrupted. ‘What happens to a timeship if it phases into orthogonal time between nodes, but has a malfunctioning orthophase or runs out of power?’

  Mundan had been asked that question before by this very class. He was convinced the questioner was doing it because he knew it distressed him.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice calm, ‘the ship will remain in phase for a short time. Then it will out-phase automatically and sink into the substratum, together with every soul on board.’

  He turned, as much so as to hide his face as anything, and wrote on the blackboard the additional formulas which, together with the derivations from the mass-energy equation, described the nodal system associated with time’s forward momentum.

  Then, once he was sure he had recovered his composure, he faced the class again.

  ‘Now we come to the question of the soul,’ he said quietly. ‘The empire itself, if bereft of religion, could subsist on the first two truths alone, though it would not be the empire we know. Knowledge of the soul is the empire’s spiritual meaning, as expressed by Holy Church.’

  He paused to bring home the seriousness of the third truth, almost daring them to cheek him further. But they did not. They knew that on this subject he was fanatical. Any jeering concerning the existence of the soul would be reported straight to Arch-Cardinal Reamoir.

  ‘Prior to the revelations received by San Hevatar it was even possible for atheists to deny that the soul exists at all. Once time-travel had been demonstrated, however, the existence of the soul became indisputable.

  ‘Why? Because time-travel proved that the past does not vanish when our awareness leaves it; the past continues to exist. And that raises the following question: what of that awareness? Must that not also continue to exist in the past even though, paradoxically, we are not “aware” of it? And what happens to that consciousness of ours at death? It cannot be extinguished – for otherwise the past would vanish.

  ‘There is only one way to resolve the riddle, and
it is this: the soul experiences itself as a moving moment of time beginning with conception and ending with death. At death the soul travels back in time to the moment of conception to live its life through again exactly as before. This repetition continues eternally; thus is a man’s past kept alive.

  ‘From this proposition the existence of the soul is proved.

  ‘This means that we have sat here in this room, hearing this lecture at this moment of time, countless times before, and will do so countless times again.’

  With a sense of dignity Brother Mundan opened a book of Holy Scripture and began to read the words written by none other than San Hevatar.

  ‘“There is the body and there is the soul. The body belongs to orthogonal time. But the soul, being spiritual, is eternal; yet it does not persist beyond its appointed period in time. On meeting the end of that period it travels back to the beginning, and experiences its life anew. Thus the soul has the God-given power to travel through time.

  ‘“And why does the soul not remember the life it has already lived? It is because of death trauma, which wipes clean all the soul’s memories …”’

  It sometimes seemed to Chief Archivist Illus Ton Mayar that the Achronal Archives, which he administered, had taken on an existence all of their own and had begun to separate from the rest of the universe. Many of the staff no longer ventured into the outside world. Mayar understood their feelings: men whose working hours were spent in cataloguing time’s mutations were apt to feel that the world was insubstantial. Here, in this subterranean cluster of vaults and bunkers, could be found a refuge from Chronotic instability.

  The Achronal Archives were, in essence, a record of deleted time. Whenever an event was altered – whether by natural causes, or by order of the Historical Office, or by act of war – the consequences spread up and down historical time making the adjustment complete in all directions. Only the existence of the archives made such changes detectable. Protected by powerful time-buffers, the vaults were impenetrable to the powerful rectifying vibrations that echoed through the strat. Thus the records that were kept on every facet of the empire remained intact and could be compared with time as it currently stood.