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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘So now you hope to settle in Revere?’

  ‘Yes. In Umbul, probably.’

  ‘Ah. The holy city.’

  ‘I thought that perhaps – perhaps –’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ Her hopes were plain. She thought that perhaps the Traumatic sect stayed clear of Umbul, birthplace of San Hevatar, of the Church, and in fact of the whole Chronotic Empire.

  He looked down sombrely at his hands folded neatly on his lap. ‘Citizeness Sorce, I am sorry to have to tell you this but you have been doing everything the Traumatics want you to do. This is their play, part of their ritual. The sacrificial victim must not be killed outright but must be captured and allowed to escape in the nick of time – by luck or his own efforts, so he thinks. Then captured again, allowed to escape again, on and on. The purpose is to make the victim aware of his, or her, situation and of the fact that he is being hunted, so as to produce a particular psychological state. This continues until his will is entirely broken and he actually co-operates in the final ceremony.’

  Inpriss Sorce’s brown eyes widened pleadingly. ‘Then I haven’t shaken them off?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Her hands flew about agitatedly. Aton thought she might be near a breakdown. In that case the Traumatics would not be far behind her.

  ‘Help me!’ she cried. ‘Somebody must help me!’

  ‘I’ll help you. Calm yourself.’

  She gazed at Aton, studying his face. ‘You will?’

  ‘I hate these people as much as you do.’

  ‘Is that why you’re going to help me?’

  ‘I’d help you anyway.’ Aton’s eyes narrowed as he saw a man enter the lounge and walk to the bar with a swaggering gait. His jaw clenched.

  The man was Sergeant Quelle!

  ‘Stay here and don’t move,’ he told Inpriss. ‘I’ll be back shortly.’

  The gunnery noncom uttered a grunt of startlement, his sharp face becoming a grotesque mask of disbelief, when Aton joined him at the bar.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here? I thought –’

  ‘You thought I was safely dead,’ Aton supplied. ‘More to the point, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Me? Why –’ Quelle gave a weak, hysterical laugh. He was, Aton noticed, wearing civilian clothes. ‘Just taking a spot of leave, Captain. Well-deserved leave. I’m on a cruise. I’ve got a medal now, you know. All of us have who got off the Smasher of Enemies. Except you, of course,’ he added thoughtfully. He gulped down the drink he had just bought, nearly choking on it. ‘Did you get a reprieve, Captain?’ he asked quaveringly. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Suffice it to say that I am here and that I can now remember all that took place on the Smasher of Enemies.’ Aton watched the look of agony that appeared on Quelle’s face. ‘How many of your friends are with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Eh? I’ve no friends here, sir.’

  ‘You’re lying. I happen to know who it is you are pursuing.’

  Quelle’s glance flicked involuntarily to Inpriss Sorce, who sat watching anxiously from across the lounge. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Perhaps Quelle was alone after all, Aton thought. Perhaps he was merely shadowing Inpriss Sorce and others would take over when the ship reached Umbul. But the gunnery sergeant’s shiftiness and deceit was so plain that nothing could be taken as certain.

  ‘Are you going to turn me in, sir?’ Quelle asked mildly, inspecting the bottles stacked against the bar.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you done it before?’ Quelle turned to him, smirking. ‘You know what I think, Captain? I think you’re an escaped prisoner. I don’t know how you did it, but the fact you’re here shows you did. There’s a courier dispatch chamber waiting for you in Chronopolis, isn’t there? Maybe I should turn you in. Because whatever you say it’s still your word against the testimony of eight witnesses.’

  Aton stepped closer to the man. His hand darted inside Quelle’s jacket. As he had expected he found a tiny beamer, small enough to fit into the palm of a hand.

  No one around them had noticed his sudden movement. ‘Let’s go and see the security officer, Quelle.’

  Quelle stood his ground for a moment. Then, at an insistent nudge from Aton he reluctantly preceded him towards the exit.

  Although unfamiliar with the layout of the civilian time-ship, Aton found the security office without difficulty. Quelle made no attempt to escape or to move against him, and Aton reflected that the Traumatic had made a good point. Back in Chronopolis his own story would carry little weight. But that did not matter; somehow or other he would rescue Inpriss Sorce from the Traumatic sect’s attentions.

  In the security office was a middle-aged, long-jawed man in the blue uniform of the Buick line. Aton pushed Quelle in ahead of him.

  ‘Officer, I am Captain Aton of the Third Time Fleet,’ he announced. ‘This is one of my men, Sergeant Quelle, whom I must ask you to place under close arrest. He is a criminal, a perjurer and a heretic, a member of the Traumatic sect, and he is currently engaged in hounding one of your passengers with intent to murder her.’

  The officer looked from one man to the other, his face impassive. But behind that impassivity Aton caught feelings that were unsettling – recognition of Quelle, dismay at the whole proceeding.

  ‘Serious charges,’ said the officer. ‘One moment, I’ll call my men.’

  He pressed a button. Almost immediately two security guards appeared at the door. Uneasy now, Aton turned to face them.

  ‘He has my beamer,’ Quelle said quickly.

  A numbing, stinging shock struck Aton in the neck and spread down to his shoulders and arms. The beamer slipped from his nerveless grasp; his arms hung uselessly. He swung around clumsily and saw the security officer holding the numb-prong with which he had half-paralysed him.

  The door slammed shut. All four men crowded around Aton, pushing him back. ‘What on Earth happened?’ the officer snarled at Quelle.

  ‘He knows about me,’ Quelle said in a surly tone. ‘He’s supposed to be dead; we thought we’d fixed him in Chronopolis. Hulmu help me, I nearly dropped when I saw him in the passenger lounge just now.’

  ‘Does the girl know about you too?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’d better stay out of her way. We can’t let this get to the captain.’

  Aton made a lunge for freedom, kicking with his feet, butting and shoving with his body. Before he could gain the door they had restrained him and held him in a corner where he panted in quiet fury.

  Quelle swaggered in front of him. ‘It’s not only the Imperial Time Service that’s host to the Cult of Hulmu, Captain. We Traumatics make much use of the internodal facilities.’

  ‘What shall we do with him, Quelle?’ the security officer asked.

  ‘Maybe we could use him,’ one of the guards said in a caressing voice, looking Aton over in a way that was incongruous coming from this burly, blue-jowled strong-arm man.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, he hasn’t been pointed.’

  ‘He’s no problem,’ Quelle said gleefully. ‘He may have been my captain once, but the truth is that now he’s a condemned convict who’s escaped from the Courier Service. We can get rid of him without anybody asking questions.’

  ‘Good. We’ll put him through the garbage chute.’

  Quelle cackled, eyeing Aton with undisguised hatred. ‘I’m sorry about this, Captain, speaking as one chronman to another. But you see how it is – dog eat dog.’ He darted a look at the security officer. ‘I hate to do this to my own superior officer, you understand.’

  ‘You traitor,’ breathed Aton. ‘You’re worse than scum.’

  ‘Don’t you go saying that, now.’ Quelle seemed genuinely hurt. ‘I’m a good chronman. Religion is one thing, the Time Service is another. Why, as soon as my leave is finished I’ll be riding out with His Chronotic Majesty’s armada!’

  One of the guards checked the
corridor outside to ensure it was empty. The officer gave Aton another dose of the numb-prong so that he could give as little trouble as possible. Then they were dragging him along the passageway.

  After a few yards they opened a grey-painted door and proceeded through narrow service passages, safe from the eyes of either passengers or crew. Aton knew that for the moment attempts at resistance were useless, and bided his time. Presently, close against the outer wall of the ship, they came to an area littered with cardboard boxes and tubs of rubbish.

  The mouth of a big cylindrical chute, with a covering lid clamped shut, projected from one wall and was accompanied by several large steel levers. The two guards gripped Aton’s arms tight.

  ‘You tried to put me in the strat once, Captain,’ Quelle murmured. ‘It’s my turn now, I reckon.’

  Aton struggled weakly. The security officer pulled on one lever; the chute’s lid swung open. Aton was swung off his feet and inserted into the smelly cylinder, upon which the lid closed up over him to leave him for a moment in darkness, his feet pressing upon some further obstruction down in the chute.

  Then this too, a second valve, slid open. He heard a clicking, grating noise and then the chute’s hydraulic rams swept down on him, clearing the chute. He was pushed at speed through the ship’s wall, through the limit of the containing orthogonal field, back into the strat.

  Supernal fire burned all around him. Looking back, Aton saw the chronliner receding into the futureward – the plus-ward, in chronman’s jargon – direction.

  The fate of anyone else thrown into the strat would have been clear. They would sink deeper and deeper into mere potentiality, into the Gulf of Lost Souls. If, as a time-courier, he had failed to reach his target that would have been his fate too, once he lost momentum.

  But now he had nothing to fear from such a horrendous ending – if ending it could be called. He could move through the strat at will, by the mere wish.

  His intention was to return to the chronliner where he would continue his efforts to help the Traumatics’ frightened quarry, the unfortunate Inpriss Sorce. When he willed himself to follow the timeship, however, another, deeper urge in him took over and instead he moved with accelerating speed minuswards – into the past and towards Chronopolis. His sojourn aboard the chronliner had, it seemed, been but an accidental interruption of his journey.

  For it was slowly becoming clear to Aton that his subconscious mind, not his waking thoughts, was controlling his destiny. His subconscious mind had discovered, under duress, the secret of time-travel. And now it was sending him, at near-courier speed, on a mission to save the empire!

  To one side the shimmering leaden wall of the ortho-world flashed by. He knew that he could phase himself into that world anywhere he liked, choosing any of the millions of locations and scenes that the endless screen presented.

  But he passed them all by. Prompted by his inner urgings, he had a definite destination in mind.

  Chronopolis. Node 1. The Imperial Palace.

  After what seemed like a long time the majestic vision of the empire’s administrative centre swung up before him. He sped closer, seeing it expand as upon a holo cinema screen. Then he phased himself into actual, orthogonal time.

  EIGHT

  Archivist Illus Ton Mayar, a slender wispy figure standing alongside the stocky detective Perlo Rolce, exhibited some awkwardness as he delivered his final report to Prince Vro Ixian.

  When informed that the investigation he had ordered was complete, Vro had answered peevishly: ‘It has taken you long enough!’ and had turned his back on them to gaze into the holocast of the empty mausoleum.

  ‘An undertaking of this kind does take time, Your Highness,’ Mayar told him apologetically. ‘It was with the greatest difficulty that I was able to include it in our work programme. The tragic events befalling the empire have practically overloaded the capacity of the archives.’

  ‘Yes, all right. What have you to tell me?’

  ‘Perlo Rolce’s suspicion has been vindicated. The body of Princess Veaa has disappeared in a causal hiatus.’

  ‘And what is that, exactly?’

  ‘Put simply, a dislocation in time. A failure of cause and effect to match up. In practical terms, Princess Veaa was transported to Node Six and, presumably, hidden there. Later a crack in time appeared; all events leading up to a certain point – in the city of Umbul – were wiped away. Normally this would lead to the body still being back in Chronopolis, never having been removed. Instead the effect of the now-nonexistent cause remains: the body remains where it was hidden.’

  ‘But with the trail leading to it eradicated,’ Rolce put in.

  Prince Vro nodded his understanding. ‘All this would have seemed incredible only a short while ago. Now it seems commonplace.’

  Mayar murmured in agreement. The attacks from the Hegemony had intensified. Not only were whole continents undergoing existential deformation but the empire now seemed riddled with cause-and-effect cracks, some of them large enough to present enormous administrative difficulties. Sometimes it seemed to Mayar, from his unique standpoint, that the structure of time was about to come crashing down like a shattered vase.

  ‘It’s like magic,’ Vro said wonderingly. ‘She’s been spirited away with no one doing it.’

  ‘That’s what it amounts to, Your Highness,’ Rolce said stiffly.

  ‘Well.’ Vro’s voice became brisker. ‘What can you do to find her?’

  ‘The temporal discontinuity has been mapped, Your Highness.’ Mayar produced a thick scroll and opened it, laying it on the table. It was so large that it covered the whole surface.

  Vro stared perplexed at the chart, written in the esoteric Chronotic symbolism used by the Achronal Archives. Mayar explained that the vertical grid bars referred to time-units, though whether to minutes, days or months he did not say. He pointed out the jagged, wandering line that staggered through the neat layout like an earthquake crack.

  ‘Here is the path taken by the discontinuity. Now, the issue revolves around Rolce’s information that the body was secretly taken aboard the chronliner Queen of Time. Later this gilt-edged information was contradicted by the direct observation – and this has been verified by agents equipped with orthophases – that the body was not taken aboard. This anomaly suggests that time had mutated in a nonuniform way, leaving traces in the environment of both versions of history. Typical of a causal hiatus. The body is neither in Chronopolis, nor was it removed from Chronopolis. The perfect dilemma.

  ‘Now what became of the princess during the first version? There are six stops where the Queen of Time could have off-loaded the body, presuming it was not discharged into the strat in transit. We reason that the body must have been taken off the ship before the hiatus occurred, otherwise it would still be here in Chronopolis and indeed might still be resting in the mausoleum; there would be no anomaly. On the other hand, it had probably been offboard for only a short time when the hiatus occurred. Transition from one resting place to another would seem to offer the most likely circumstance for the dislocation of the cause-and-effect relationship.’

  Mayar paused to catch his breath. This argument had been worked out between himself and Rolce, and it had cost them considerable mental effort.

  ‘Now look again at this discontinuity line,’ he resumed. ‘We find that it answers our deductions in every respect. It comes very close to intersecting the point in space and time when the chronliner was due to arrive at Umbul, Node Six. To be precise, it intersects Node Six just five hours after the Queen of Time docked.’

  ‘Umbul,’ breathed Vro. ‘The Holy City.’

  ‘We conclude that Umbul is where the princess was taken, and probably is where she still lies.’

  ‘Archivist Mayar has even pinpointed the streets and buildings through which the discontinuity passed,’ Rolce informed in a dry voice. ‘It sounds incredible. Nothing, an investigator’s void, and then, suddenly, clues begin again. The trail starts out of thin air.’<
br />
  The prince rounded on him. ‘You believe you can take up the trail again – in Umbul? You can find my beloved Veaa using your normal methods?’

  ‘If our conclusions are correct, Your Highness, I feel every confidence.’

  ‘Then you and I will both depart for Node Six, Rolce. I will order my private yacht to be readied tonight. Go, prepare yourself. Your instruments, your gadgets, whatever you will need. Can you manage it alone? Or do you need your agents?’

  The detective shifted his feet. ‘One or two men, perhaps.’

  ‘Whatever you need. Go, now. Return as soon as you can.’

  With a bow the detective departed. Prince Vro flung himself into a chair and lounged there, relaxed. For the first time in many months his manner was almost cheerful.

  ‘Well, Archivist, I hear your establishment has been moved into the strat. A wise measure, perhaps.’

  ‘It was deemed so, Your Highness.’

  ‘And so how does it feel to visit the world of we mortals?’

  Prince Vro’s tone was amicably sardonic; in point of fact Mayar found the necessity for the visit far from pleasant and he longed to return to the safety of his vaults. His department’s deployment into the strat had increased the sense of separation and isolation pervading the archives, and he had had to conquer a very considerable fear in order to make the trip to the Imperial Palace. Nothing but a command from a member of the imperial family was enough to persuade him to venture forth these days.

  ‘It feels unsettling, Your Highness. The world is in a far from happy state. It has lost stability. Who can tell what will happen?’

  ‘So you still feel it is all a dream, eh? Perhaps you feel you only wake from this dream when back in your archives.’

  ‘Something like that.’ Mayar licked his lips. ‘Your Highness, since you are going to accompany Perlo Rolce in the search for Princess Veaa, let me entreat you to take care. The Traumatics are highly dangerous people. They are afraid of no one.’

  Vro laughed. ‘Why, I had thought you were well on the way to becoming one yourself!’