‘Let her talk!’ roared Vro. He leaned close. ‘You know of Princess Veaa. Was her body brought here?’
‘Ye-e-e-s.’ The woman’s lips twisted lasciviously. ‘An imperial princess! The Minion thought her soul might be retrievable. That it was suspended in the strat.’
‘And was it?’
‘No! She was good and dead. Properly dead. Her soul had gone back to the beginning, like everyone else’s.’ Her face registered disgust.
‘So what did you do … with the body?’
‘Kept it. For a trophy.’
‘Is it here in the temple?’
‘No.’
‘Then where?’
‘Don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘In the city somewhere.’
Rolce ascertained that she was telling the truth. And as more interrogatees were put under the device, Vro grew more and more fretful. Many of them knew of Princess Veaa. But no one seemed to know where she had been taken.
‘Don’t despair, Your Highness,’ Rolce comforted him. ‘She’s been here, that’s certain. It’s a routine matter to trace her from here on.’
Aton decided to explore the temple and left them to it. It was fairly quiet now, but the Imperial Guard would have their work cut out to winkle out everyone in a building so large. There were probably a hundred hiding places. Aton made his way upstairs towards the area where he had found Inpriss. Perhaps, he thought vaguely, he could find what Prince Vro was looking for.
He opened all doors he came to as he went. He saw altar rooms, storerooms filled with enigmatic equipment, rooms for mysterious purposes. In some of the rooms people huddled in corners and stared at him fearfully. He did not envy them; the Church was not kind to heretics.
Venturing down a deserted corridor he heard a strange mewing sound from behind a door. Aton hesitated, then opened the door slowly and slid inside.
Standing with its back to him was a fat, shabby, slope-shouldered figure holding in pudgy hands a mirror-like object whose surface crawled and shimmered with unrecognisable shapes. The mewing seemed to be an expression of pleasure or amusement as the man gazed into the roiling surface.
At Aton’s entrance he put down the mirror and turned to face him. Aton confronted a being straight out of a nightmare, a nightmare he had endured only recently.
The man with jewels for eyes!
The crystal-filled sockets flashed and glittered in a multitude of colours. The face was pudgy and covered with a film of sweat. The slobbery mouth was agape with mirth.
‘Come in, Captain Aton, and close the door!’ welcomed the creature, its voice giggly and cheerful. ‘I have been waiting for you!’
Aton felt an urge to retreat, to get away. ‘Who – what – are you?’
‘I? Do you not know? I am Hulmu’s Minion, chief of all his worshippers!’
‘But you are not human.’
‘Not human? Indeed I am! A little extended, perhaps, but that is because I am Hulmu’s pet, his little favourite. Like you, I am familiar with the strat. I have been all the way down to Hulmu, to let him sport with me. From time to time he gives me little presents and gadgets. He gave me these eyes, all the better to see in the strat with.’
‘Hulmu is real?’ Aton became aware of a peculiar offensive odour the Minion gave off.
‘Oh, indeed! Do not doubt it. He gave me the time-distorter, all the better to wreak havoc with.’
‘The distorter? It comes from you?’
‘Correct. Surprised?’ The Minion lolled his head disclaimingly. ‘I don’t use it much myself,’ he drawled. ‘I have an arrangement with the Hegemonics – purely out of the goodness of my heart, of course. When they want to raid the empire, I lend it to them. Afterwards I take it back for safekeeping. They tried to keep it for themselves once. They still don’t know how I got it back!’ He chortled.
‘There is only one?’
‘Only one. It’s enough.’
‘Why don’t they try to make another?’
‘Can’t. They might have tried to analyse it, I dare say. No human being will ever make a gadget like my time-distorter. Only Hulmu is clever enough for that.’
‘But why? Why should you want to destroy the empire?’
‘Why not? It’s all part of Hulmu’s plot and counterplot. He is the scriptwriter, is he not? He projects us, does he not?’ The Minion’s giggles became hysterical. ‘How does it feel to have an audience?’
Aton felt dirtied by this creature’s presence. Surely, he thought, the Traumatics’ creed cannot be literally true. When he compared this giggling monster with the sedateness and calm reason of the Church …
The Minion seemed to read his mind. ‘Oh, the cult of Hulmu is very old. A little bit older than the Church, even. I should know, I started it! Before I became Hulmu’s Minion I was Absol Humbart! But those other fools, San Hevatar and Dwight Rilke, rejected Hulmu, the genuine creator. They founded their silly church.’
Grinning, the Minion came towards him with tiny mincing steps. Aton determined to destroy the loathsome creature if he could. He ejected energy from his body, sending rays and waves against the shambling figure. The Minion laughed. His own body began to pulse, shedding sparkling rainbows all around. He seemed to regard it as a game. Their contest filled the room with fantastic forms of light, but neither was hurt in any way.
‘I was wiser. I gave myself to Hulmu. He gives me my little toys, and I help him to get what he needs – souls in death trauma!’
They both left off wasting energy in firework displays. Suddenly the sound of booted feet came from further along the corridor. The Imperial Guard were on their way.
‘Come, friend Aton,’ the Minion hissed. ‘Come to Hulmu!’
With surprising agility he bounded forward and seized Aton in his arms. Fetid breath wafted across Aton’s face, but before he could react, the Minion had phased into the strat, taking Aton with him.
The Minion was amazingly strong. Aton could not break loose from his embrace. Down they sank, spiralling and plummeting, down, down, down. The four-dimensional screen of orthogonal time was left behind. Left behind, too, were the upper reaches of the strat where what was potential already bore some resemblance to what was actual. They went down, down, into the deeps where potentiality had less and less prospect of becoming actuality – that is, of materialising on to the orthogonal world – and had less and less in common with its forms. The pressure was frightful. They sank into gloomy six-dimensional regions where nameless things lurked and waited in the murk. Aton felt brooding hatred as they passed by; the potential quasi-beings sensed that he and the Minion came from the upper world and experienced a writhing envy.
The descent was timeless and Aton seemed temporarily to lose the will to free himself. Then he began to feel the presence of a vast overpowering intelligence.
Hulmu!
Hulmu was something impossible. A six-dimensional, nonexistent shape that lashed and danced in all directions in frantic convolutions. He was lord of this region; all bowed to him.
A voice he could almost smell spoke in Aton’s mind.
‘Know me and surrender your being.’
In that instant it came home to Aton with a certainty and conviction he could not analyse who the enemy was that had been spoken of by the Imperator and San Hevatar.
The enemy of the empire was not the Hegemony. It was not even the Traumatic sect, or the Minion.
It was Hulmu.
He could not define the ultimate evil that was Hulmu. He only saw, as if in a vision, that the struggle was relentless and would continue until victory was gained by one side or the other.
With newly regained strength Aton lashed out. The Minion sought to restrain him, but he broke free and soared upwards like a bubble, out of the reach of Hulmu’s lashing tentacles. Other powers snatched at him but he knew he was safe.
Up, up, up.
TEN
Aton was semi-conscious for the latter part of his ascent to the realm of materiality. He did not fully recover until
he had already phased into ortho.
His subconscious mind had brought him to familiar territory. He was standing in the deserted court chamber of the Imperial Palace’s inner sanctum, Node 1. It was night and the chamber was only dimly lit.
Silence prevailed everywhere.
After some moments he saw a lone figure seated on a couch and stepped closer.
It was Inpriss Sorce.
‘Inpriss?’
She looked up. ‘You’re back!’
‘How did you get here?’
‘Prince Vro’s men brought me. They said I’d be safe here in the palace. I’m under imperial protection.’ A note of pride entered her voice as she said the last. She smiled. ‘It’s certainly a different type of life from what I’m used to.’
‘But it can only have been minutes ago that I last saw you.’
A slightly wary look crossed her face. ‘It’s been nearly three days.’
Three days. Had he been that long in the gulf?
Shaken, he glanced at a wall clock and frowned.
‘Where is everybody? Surely they don’t retire this early?’
‘They’re all in the churches and chapels, praying. The armada has set out.’
So matters were coming to a climax. And his mission had failed.
Disconsolately he paced the great hall. He tried to imagine the pace of events beyond the bounds of the palace in the eternal city and throughout the mighty time-spanning empire. Did he fancy he heard the structure of time creaking like the timbers of a crippled ship?
Unexpectedly there came the whirring of motors. The Imperator rolled out from its hidden compartment and towered over the man and the woman.
‘My servant, Captain Aton,’ the resonant voice murmured.
‘Imperator.’
‘It was a stirring sight, Captain. Powerful timeships, seemingly without number, coming one by one up the procession ramp to be presented to the people and blessed by the Arch-Cardinal Reamoir, before phasing into the strat. Now the three main wings are joining formation from the nodes where they were built. Very soon the Hegemony should feel their presence. If it does at all …’
‘May God go with them, Imperator,’ Aton replied dully.
‘If it does at all,’ repeated the Imperator fatalistically. ‘The Hegemony is also gathering all its forces. It knows the last card has been called. For the past few days it has been using the time-distorter at full aperture.’
‘Imperator,’ Aton said eagerly, though it now seemed rather late for this information, ‘the time-distorter belongs to the Traumatic sect and was given to them by the being they call Hulmu.’
The machine-emperor’s continuous hum undulated thoughtfully. ‘Orthogonal time is breaking up, Captain. If you were to journey through the empire now you would not recognise it. For the past two days it has been impossible to phase into Nodes Three and Four.’
Aton was aghast. ‘What?’
‘Nothing intelligible exists there. Orthogonal time has become totally deranged in the area. The strat is like an ocean in many respects, Captain Aton. The features we call the nodes are the regularly spaced ripples on the surface that hold the orthogonal world together. But there can be deeper waves that can overthrow everything. Tidal waves that tear the world of reality apart.’
Aton noted that the Imperator spoke more lucidly than on an earlier occasion. But if it had recovered its sanity it had done so belatedly. The picture it drew was frightening.
‘What will happen?’
‘What has happened will happen.’
Back to cryptic utterances, Aton thought in disgust.
Inpriss had crept forward to join them. She looked up overawed at the Imperator, which she could only have known as a semi-legendary ultimate authority. Her hand touched Aton’s sleeve as if seeking comfort.
Aton happened to glance to his right and with bulging eyes saw the east wall curve inward as though it were a wall of water. In seconds the heaving structure righted itself and stood rigid, but he knew the signs of spatio-temporal deformation.
‘Are we under attack?’ he asked sharply.
‘The whole empire is under attack. Time is under attack.’
Those were the last words the Imperator spoke before the great darkness descended on them all and expunged them from reality.
They returned still carrying the memory of their previous existence. ‘What happened?’ said Aton.
‘The empire was annihilated,’ said the Imperator, ‘and then put back.’
The entirety of the strain being put upon orthogonal time had been steadily building up into a wide-scale wave motion originating deep in the substratum. Eventually it had climaxed in a sort of tidal wave. The Chronotic Empire, and everything associated with it, was swept away.
But the giant time-storm was by no means over. On the contrary, the oscillations were building up and becoming more violent. As the wave entered the second half of its cycle the empire reappeared, almost exactly as when the wave had overtaken it.
But not quite.
There were innumerable small changes. And the difference between these and normal Chronotic mutations was that the inhabitants of the empire were aware of them.
Prince Vro Ixian had at last achieved his heart’s desire. Following leads found in the Traumatics’ temple in Umbul, the detective Perlo Rolce had traced the body of Princess Veaa to a rundown house in the outskirts of the city. Prince Vro, arming himself and taking only Rolce with him, entered the house and found it uninhabited.
Methodically he went through the dwelling room by room. In the second floor back he discovered a chamber draped in white silk. An open coffin of pinewood lay on a dais, and in the coffin, as beautiful as a pale rose, was the embalmed corpse of the young princess.
‘My dearest, my beloved Veaa!’ Vro swept towards the coffin.
And in that moment the tidal wave of potential time overcame the material world and swept everything away. The world came back in what, to the actors in it, could have been only an instant. But Vro was aware of the hiatus and understood what it implied.
In the coffin Princess Veaa opened her eyes, moved her head, and slowly sat up.
Vro gave a wild cry. ‘Veaa!’ he shrieked.
‘Vro!’ Her shriek was no less mortified.
The two stared at each other in utter horror.
In the court chamber everything was more or less as before. Inpriss Sorce clung tightly to Aton.
‘Will it happen again?’ Aton asked.
‘The wave has but receded for a moment. The turbulence is still building up. When it returns there will be no reprieve. All will dissolve … permanently.’
The Imperator clicked and hummed. Suddenly there was a muted whine, and a part of its matted surface opened. Aton saw a tiny room within, illuminated, its walls padded.
‘Get inside, quickly,’ the Imperator ordered.
The command’s urgent tone brooked no inquiry. Hastily Aton and Inpriss crowded into the small space. The door closed up behind them.
The rolling geodesics of the substratum, summoned up from the deeps, had hit a resonance that nothing could withstand. As the mighty preponderance of Chronotic potentiality smashed against the empire for the second time, the edifice that had been built up with such care was not temporarily annulled merely, but torn apart, and the materiality of the fragments dissipated beyond recovery. The screen of orthogonal time was, itself, ripped to shreds.
Seconds before this happened the Imperator had phased into the strat. Aton, reading the move on a small instrument panel with which the tiny cabin was provided, was only mildly surprised to learn that the machine-emperor possessed this ability. He heard the strained drone of the modest drive unit as it battled against the dangerous turbulences.
Where was the Imperator taking them?
So it had happened. The one thing uniquely feared by achronal archivists had finally come to pass.
Phased permanently into the strat, the Achronal Archives were the one department o
f Chronopolis’s administration to survive. The archivists now saw the fullest justification of their cult of isolationism. The emotionally shattered men and women prowled around the vaults, touching one another for comfort, caressing the humming casings that contained the computer store of all that had taken place in the vanished Chronotic Empire.
All around them lay nothing but the strat. There was no orthogonal time. The time-storm, of unprecedented proportions, had eliminated it, and potentiality reigned supreme. There was no actuality, except for this one little isolated bubble.
The in-turned atmosphere of the sepulchral establishment, always noticeable, now intensified by the minute. Chief Archivist Illus Ton Mayar knew that in short order it would develop into group insanity. But he did not think that any of them would live to see that happen. Very soon the archives would melt into the strat like sugar in water. Their existential support – the whole material background from which they had sprung – had been taken away. They persisted now only by virtue of strat time, which did not match one-for-one with orthogonal time.
Mayar was sitting alone in his private room when there was a hammering on the door and an excited shout from one of the senior archivists.
‘There’s something approaching through the strat.’
Mayar hurried to investigate. He arrived at the loading bay just in time to see the imposing bulk of the Imperator materialise there.
All present fell to their knees. A door in the side of the Imperator clicked open and a man and a woman, the man dressed as a captain of the Time Service, stepped out.
Mayar watched the apparition with astonishment. ‘God be praised!’ he managed to say. But he still did not dare to hope.
The man and the woman stepped towards him, but before he could speak again the Imperator had once more vanished.
And in the Invincible Armada, swaying its way through the disturbed and roiling strat, there also dawned the realisation of the empire’s destruction.
Prince Philipium, Grand Admiral of the Armada, enthroned in the majestic bridge in the titanic flagship God’s Imposer, froze as though paralysed. His face was almost green with shock.
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 66
