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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘Listen, I’ve been doing some hard thinking,’ he said. His eyes, though tired, were almost unnaturally bright. ‘San Hevatar isn’t really capable of responding to what you’ve been saying, you know. He’s too deep into his role … the whole weight of the empire is on him. I’m the one you should have been talking to, because I’m the one you’ve convinced.’

  Aton felt a stir of interest. ‘Just who are you?’

  ‘Me? I was Hevatar’s assistant, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘No, I’m not talking about this religious stuff. I was his assistant; his scientific assistant. We were on the project together.’

  ‘The project?’

  ‘Yes. Would you like to see it?’ Rilke rose. ‘Come on, I want to show it to you. You don’t mind, do you?’

  He waited while Aton quickly dressed. Then Aton followed him through the passages and courtyards of the still brightly lit manse. Cowled monks and comforters stood guard here and there, some wearing handguns strapped over their habits. Rilke ignored them all, however, and halted before a door apparently made of solid lead. He took a big iron key from beneath his cloak and inserted it in a keyhole. There was a loud click, and the door swung open.

  ‘Here you are, this is where it all began.’

  They entered what Aton, after, first taking in the profusion of heavy-duty equipment, realised was a high-energy physics research laboratory. This, he supposed with a feeling of awe, was the centrepoint of the whole empire.

  Carefully Rilke closed the door behind them.

  ‘So this is where San Hevatar discovered the secret of time-travel!’ Aton breathed reverently.

  ‘Him? He didn’t discover it,’ Rilke told him flatly. ‘I did.’

  Aton stared at him blankly. ‘You?’

  ‘Hevatar developed it, but I made the initial discovery.’ Rilke’s face softened, and he began to reminisce. ‘We were a team. Hevatar was the leader, Absol Humbart and myself were his chief assistants. There was a lot more equipment in here in those days. There were particle accelerators, high-energy plasma chambers, and so forth. But we weren’t even thinking of time-travel then. We never dreamed it was possible. We were investigating the nuclear binding force of baryons, that was all. One day I thought of a new way to isolate pi-mesons. When I set up the apparatus, by chance a surge gate malfunctioned and there was a sudden rush of power. Suddenly I found I had discovered a way to accelerate pi-mesons faster than light.’

  The old man looked around the laboratory as if remembering. ‘It was an accident, a million-to-one shot. From then on, Hevatar took over. Naturally he grabbed something like that with both hands, and he explored it from all angles. Before long he had discovered the most important consequence of the effect I had produced: that it could be used to move mass through time. From then on there was no stopping him. He takes all the credit for it now, of course, but none of it would have happened if I hadn’t carried out that one experiment.’

  ‘You must feel proud.’

  ‘Do I? For a long time I did. But lately it frightens me. We get all the news here; we’re privileged in that respect. History is being ripped apart. It’s like seeing the end of the universe, but no one seems to realise that time itself can collapse and no one wants to stop it. I opened a real Pandora’s box when I made that experiment. And when you came this afternoon I realised that everything had gone too far.’

  ‘What happened to this other man – Absol Humbart? Is he dead?’

  Rilke turned away and muttered something Aton could barely catch. ‘We’ve spoken of him already. Let’s not go into that.’

  Aton reflected bitterly that of the only two people to share his view of the situation, one was too obsessed with his insane love for a corpse to care and the other was this weary old man.

  ‘I’m glad that you at least agree with me,’ he told Rilke. ‘But there seems little we can do.’

  ‘Isn’t there? There’s something I can do. Something I can try to do, at least. I can go back in time, prevent any of it from happening.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  Rilke led him to a large dull-brown cabinet that at first Aton had taken to be a cupboard. ‘This is a functional time-machine. The very first, in fact.’ He opened the door. Inside Aton saw seats, a control panel.

  ‘You really think you stand a chance of influencing Hevatar’s – or your own – younger self?’

  Rilke’s smile was wintry. ‘Hevatar has never been influenced by anybody. As for myself, I was an eager young pup and I certainly wouldn’t have passed up the chance to make a crucial discovery, not for anyone. Besides, there’s something you need to understand. We didn’t know the empire existed in those days. It’s strange, isn’t it? Time has changed such a lot. Past, present and future have all changed. But there’s one thing the empire and Church are very careful to see doesn’t change. They are careful to preserve the vital event that led to the creation of the empire. San Hevatar and myself were brought up under special conditions and weren’t allowed to know that there already was time-travel. We worked for the same company, Monolith Industries, that presumably we had worked for before anything had altered. But not until we had unearthed that one secret of how the time-drive works was the truth gradually revealed to us.’ He smiled. ‘It was like coming out of a dream. In a way we’d known all along; there was plenty of evidence for it if we had cared to piece it together. But we never had. The answer is, of course, that we were psychologically constrained in some way.

  ‘And that’s why,’ he finished briskly, ‘my younger self would never believe me if I went to him with such a wild tale.’

  ‘It’s logical,’ Aton commented. ‘The Historical Office would want to avoid paradoxes in anything as important as that. But you mentioned another assistant, Absol Humbart. Presumably he was put through this procedure too?’

  ‘Did I mention Absol Humbart? No, he wasn’t there,’ Rilke said vaguely. ‘Maybe he was in the earlier repetitions.’

  The point didn’t seem worth pursuing. ‘So what do you propose to do?’ Aton asked.

  The old man produced a heavy hand beamer from under his cloak. ‘Kill myself,’ he said simply. ‘It’s the only way. Kill the young Rilke before he makes that experiment in isolating pi-mesons, then none of this can happen. There’ll be no empire, no Chronotic wars. The world will be as it was before time-travel was invented.’

  ‘And how was that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody seems to know any more.’

  ‘Kill yourself,’ Aton said woodenly. ‘Are you really prepared to do that?’

  ‘Somebody has to do something. I can’t think of any other way, and besides I’m really responsible for what’s happening.’ His face creased. ‘It’s taken me six hours to reach this decision. Now I’ve taken it, I know what to do.’

  ‘Paradoxes,’ Aton murmured. ‘If you kill your earlier self, then you’ll no longer be alive to kill yourself.’

  ‘We’ll just have to let that sort itself out.’ Rilke jutted out his jaw ruminatively.

  ‘Why have you taken the trouble to tell me all this?’

  ‘Piloting the machine is a two-man job. One to navigate, one to steer. If anything happens to me you’ll still be able to get back, though. It’s programmed to retrace its course automatically.’

  ‘If you succeed,’ Aton mused, ‘there won’t be any question of coming back. There’ll be no time-travel. As a matter of fact, I probably won’t exist. Few people now living will.’

  ‘True. Well, what about it?’

  Dwight Rilke’s self-sacrifice did not surprise Aton or occasion any particular admiration in him. The issues at stake were so awesome that the fate of any individual shrank to insignificance. Rilke was clearly not aware, however, of the other side of the coin; if the world returned to its original state, humanity would become extinct in a few hundred years.

  But, in fact, Aton was certain that the reversion would not be anything like as complete
as the aged scientist imagined; otherwise he would not for a moment have contemplated letting Rilke carry out the scheme. Rilke’s understanding of Chronotic mutations was evidently crude and simplistic. He did not realize that the original world had been so deeply erased that it could probably never reappear. Something else, resembling it in many features perhaps, would assemble itself out of the jumble the Chronotic Empire had made of time.

  Which meant there was a good chance the annihilatory war that had made a desert of Earth would never take place. Mankind would survive even without time-travel.

  ‘All right, I’ll be your navigator,’ he told Rilke. ‘But it’s your show.’

  He followed Rilke into the narrow cabin and examined the controls. They were antiquated, but he recognised them as the forerunners of the timeship controls he was used to.

  Rilke closed the door and busied himself preparing for the journey. The drive unit started up with a whine, and Aton realised it was more powerful than he had first thought.

  He studied the navigator screen. Rilke, mumbling to himself, phased them into the strat.

  The Umbul of Node 6 was a place of slender towers whose smooth walls, straddled at the base, curved up to end in knife-edge peaks. It was a place of boulevards and curiously intricate passages that wound around the base legs of the soaring buildings. Inpriss Sorce ran through these passages in blind panic.

  She had been in Umbul for a day and a half, during which she had not slept. She had found nowhere to live, nowhere to earn money. She had been too busy running.

  On the chronliner she had searched desperately for the handsome young Time Service officer who had promised to help her. He was nowhere to be found and she could think of only one explanation: the Traumatics had already murdered him. Neither had she seen the man he had left the passenger lounge with.

  But the officer’s warning was not lost on her. The Traumatics were playing cat-and-mouse with her. She could not escape them and they would kill her when they were ready.

  When the chronliner docked she had fled into the city. She soon discovered there was nowhere she could go. As she stepped off the disembarkation ramp a man had emerged from the crowd and smiled at her.

  It had been Rol Stryne!

  She had run past him, but he hadn’t tried to stop her. Since then either he or the other man, Velen, had seemed to appear everywhere.

  Now her nerve had finally cracked. She ran up to strangers in the street. ‘Help me, please help me!’ But they shouldered off her hysterical pleas. Once or twice she mentioned the Traumatics, but that only made the response even more hostile. The Traumatics were a secret power, here in Umbul as elsewhere, and there was scarcely a citizen who would knowingly cross them.

  Inpriss collapsed on to a bench, sobbing.

  A man sat down beside her.

  ‘You see, baby, it just isn’t any good to fight it. Go along with it, it’s better that way.’

  She looked up open-mouthed into the lean, predatory face of Stryne.

  ‘You just have to co-operate,’ he told her soothingly. ‘Then the hunt will be over.’

  Suddenly she was like a rabbit hypnotised by a stoat. Her eyes were glazed. ‘You want me to come with you willingly,’ she said in a flat, empty voice. ‘That’s why you let me go before. Because I wasn’t willing.’

  ‘That’s right, honey. You understand now.’ He flashed a knowing glance at Velen, who was standing nearby, and made a signal to the helpers, who had been keeping track of the woman for them and were hovering in the background, to disperse.

  She had broken and would obey them. Stryne knew how to recognise the signs. In a way he was slightly regretful it was ending so soon. Many victims kept up the chase for years. He knew of one, a man, who had been pursued for two decades before submitting.

  ‘Hulmu is the only true reality, sweetheart. You’ll find that out soon. You’re going to him.’

  She closed her eyes.

  ‘Come on, Inpriss. Let’s go.’

  Meekly she rose and walked with the two men, clutching her satchel. She was in the grip of something she had never felt before: a resignation so strong it overpowered her. It wasn’t as if they had broken her will. It was as if her will had changed, so that she agreed with what they were going to do to her, simply because she couldn’t see any other future.

  ‘You see, honey, by the time we get to this stage we’re doing you a favour,’ Stryne told her as they walked. ‘Just imagine if we didn’t sacrifice you for some reason or another. Every time your life repeated you’d have to go through all this again. But this way your life won’t repeat. Your soul will go to Hulmu. You’ll never have to endure the pursuit again.’

  ‘Where are we going to do it?’ Velen asked eagerly. ‘Somewhere nice and quiet? We could hire a hotel room.’

  ‘We have to go to the main temple,’ Stryne informed him. ‘The Minion himself is taking an interest in this case. He’ll be watching.’

  ‘The Minion? Wow!’

  ‘Yes, he’s one, Your Highness. I was right.’

  In Prince Vro’s suite in the discreet, extremely select Imperial Hotel a man was stretched out on the floor. The oblong plates of the field-effect device stood on either side of his head. Perlo Rolce fiddled with the device’s knobs, watching a small screen with a greenish tint across which dim shapes flickered, while one of his men knelt by the prisoner holding a pain-prong.

  Progress had been much quicker than even Vro had hoped. Rolce had started by visiting the street where Archivist Mayar believed the causal hiatus might have occurred. While using a map to help him look out the likely routes where the body might have been taken, he had noticed some activity an untrained person would not have observed. In his own words the place was ‘crawling with snoopers’. Rolce had taken a chance and his men had performed a routine but efficient street kidnapping.

  ‘Why should so many Traumatics be on the street?’ Vro asked with a frown, sipping a liqueur.

  ‘That’s easily answered, Your Highness. This man’s part of a pursuit operation. They are harrying some poor devil through the city till he drops.’

  He nodded to his assistant to apply the prong again, repeating his question to the prisoner. The Traumatic gave a long gurgling scream and squirmed on the thick pile of the carpet, and Rolce kept watch on the screen, stroking his chin.

  He had long found that a field-effect device coupled to long jolts of unbearable agony provided an almost foolproof method of interrogation. The subject might discipline his mind so as to prevent the answers the inquisitor sought from forming there, but pain broke down this discipline. While his attention was preoccupied with pain, images and information flooded into the body’s electrostatic field automatically, quite against his will.

  ‘He doesn’t know anything about Princess Veaa,’ Rolce declared at length. ‘But he knows the address of their chief temple here in Umbul.’

  ‘So what do you recommend now?’

  ‘The princess might be in the temple, or nearby. At any rate someone there should know what has been done with her.’ Rolce cogitated briefly. ‘Our best bet is to act quickly and decisively, before the Traumatics have time to suspect anything amiss; the disappearance of one of their members, for instance, might alert them to trouble. I suggest a raid on the temple, perhaps assisted by the police or by members of the Imperial Guard stationed here. Even if the princess is not on the premises we are very near the end of the trail.’

  Vro gestured floorwards. ‘And what of him?’

  ‘If the majordomo can be depended on to dispose of a corpse …’

  ‘Have no fear. The standards of service in this hotel know no limits.’

  ‘In that case …’ Rolce bent low, taking from his pocket a rubbery cylinder which he applied to the prisoner’s head. The struggling Traumatic went limp as the weapon turned his brain to jelly.

  ‘Now, Your Highness, I propose that we make our move with the least possible delay.’

  Inpriss Sorce was privileged to be
sacrificed with full ceremony upon the altar of Hulmu, in the Umbul Temple itself.

  She stared as if hypnotised at the representation of Hulmu’s Impossible Shape. Here it was not an abstract sculpture but a hologram mobile that writhed and twisted. Stryne noticed her fascination and seized her chin in his hand to forcibly avert her gaze. If one stared at it too long one’s eyes began to move independently of one another and sometimes did not right themselves for up to an hour.

  As the accredited pursuers, Stryne and Velen had the right to perform the ceremony with no other Traumatics present. A camera had been set up so that the Minion, founder and leader of the Traumatic sect, could watch from another part of the temple.

  ‘Do you believe in Hulmu now, honey?’ Stryne asked Inpriss.

  ‘Yes,’ she said weakly. And she did. Evil as powerful as theirs could not be founded only on imagination. Something real had to exist behind it.

  ‘He does exist, you know,’ Stryne assured her. ‘The God of the Church, he doesn’t exist. We are all Hulmu’s creatures. He projected us on to the screen of time, so he could watch us. Mmmmmm.’

  The two men moved about the room adjusting the various apparatuses it contained. ‘Strip off, Inpriss,’ Stryne said.

  Obediently she removed her clothes.

  ‘Fine. OK, lie down on the altar.’ His voice became caressing.

  They began the ceremonies, going through the Compounding of Villainies, the Plot and Counterplot, the Scriptwriter’s Diversion. To indulge themselves, though it was not obligatory, they both performed the Ritual of Mounting for the second time, offering up the orgasms to Hulmu as before. Sex and death always went well together.

  The devices around them hummed and clicked, many of them performing symbolic functions secret to the sect. Eventually, at their prompting, Inpriss began to speak the responses herself. This was most important. The victim’s co-operation had to be genuine.

  Stryne and Velen knew that Inpriss had reached a stage of resignation quite divorced from reality: a state that was almost euphoria. If they did their job properly this would be followed by a return to cold realism, a new appreciation of the horror of her position. That was what made the euphoria so useful: the subsequent mental agony was that much greater.