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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  There could be no mistake. From all parts of the huge armada the message was the same. The instruments revealed that the concept of order and religion which everyone on board was sworn to serve was irrevocably gone.

  To the commanders surrounding Prince Philipium the news brought varied emotions. Sick anger, sinking fear, stony grimness, defiant hatred.

  ‘We are ghosts!’ uttered Prince Philipium in a voice hollow with grief. ‘What can we do? The empire is vanquished!’

  ‘Ghosts we may be, but we shall still live for a while,’ growled Commander Haight. He tried to calculate how long it would be before the armada faded away and lost all vestige of materiality, now that it had no existential support. It could be hours or days.

  ‘One thing is still left to us,’ he urged. ‘Revenge! Let us ensure that of the Hegemony, too, nothing remains!’

  Exultant shouts greeted his words. Prince Philipium, his eyes staring but devoid of life, gave the orders.

  The ghost armada moved forward only to find that its quest was needless. The Hegemony had gone down along with the empire. The ships that it had put into the strat, however, persisted like those of the armada itself. The two forces locked on to each other and began to battle. There was no question of phasing into ortho to fire their weapons – there was no orthogonal time any longer – and the strat torpedoes were too ineffective to satisfy their blood lust. Instead the ships sought to destroy each other by collision. The conflict raged on, fed by despair and hatred.

  Aton found he could strike little cheer from the Chief Archivist and his assistants. They seemed unable to recognise that the existence they knew had, in fact, vanished and that they would shortly die. In what Aton found a morbid manner they preferred to go about their duties and spent as much time as possible lovingly going over recorded scenes of bygone days and endless lists of names, places, and events.

  Neither was he able to answer any of their questions. But two hours later those scanning the surrounding strat reported that an object was again approaching.

  For the second time the Imperator materialised into the loading bay.

  ‘Aton, my servant!’ it boomed.

  Aton stood before it stiffly. ‘I am here, Imperator.’ Then he added, ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Into the far future. My mind is clear now.’

  The Imperator seemed larger, more powerful, more majestic than it ever had before. ‘The time for your greatest service to the empire has arrived, Captain Aton.’

  ‘I do not understand, Imperator. There is no empire.’

  ‘What has been will be. If you are victorious.’ The machine-emperor paused. ‘The Minion thinks he has won. He has recovered the time-distorter from his Hegemonic tools and now plans to use it again for another purpose.’

  ‘Imperator! What is there to talk about?’ Mayar interrupted brokenly. ‘All is gone!’

  Impatiently Aton cautioned Mayar to keep silence. The Imperator hummed loudly. ‘At present potential time, alike to primordial chaos, has drowned the world of real time,’ it resumed. ‘The Chronotic storm, however, is abating; soon orthogonal time will form again on the gulf’s surface, like a skin forming on a liquid. If allowed to congeal without interference, it is impossible to say what that new world will be like. That is where the Minion intends to come in. He will use the time-distorter to project a world agreeable to Hulmu, his master. That must not be. You must fight him, Aton. You must take the distorter away from him.’

  ‘But I don’t think I can, Imperator,’ Aton said. ‘I have already learned to my cost that the Minion is strong.’

  ‘With the help of religion, you can defeat him.’

  Without warning a wide-angled beam of light shot out from the Imperator and bathed Aton. Immediately an extraordinary flood of thoughts and feelings flooded his mind, all connected with the religion in which he had been brought up. Prayers, catechisms and hymns such as he had been taught as a child seemed to sing in his brain.

  The emotion engendered by this experience made him feel humble. Objectively, he recognised the use of a thought ray similar in principle to a field-effect device, except that it worked in reverse. The Imperator was reminding him of his religious training. But why?

  ‘The Minion approaches. Come.’

  Once more the door to the inner chamber in the machine’s metal side opened. Aton hesitated.

  Then he entered. The Imperator phased into the strat and went speeding down, seeming to know where to go. After what felt like a long wait, Aton became aware that it had killed its velocity and was idling. The door opened, and through it he could see the strat, spreading and convoluting before his tortured eyes.

  The message was clear. He ventured into the strat.

  He saw the Minion almost immediately, soaring up from the deep, carrying the big tube-like device Aton had seen once before. As Aton came closer he saw the jewel eyes flash and glint through the supernal fire that surrounded them both. The Minion’s mouth was agape and raucous laughter issued from it.

  ‘Ha ha ha! You want my little toy! Oh, no! This time Hulmu will have you!’

  Aton moved in to the attack.

  The Minion pointed the tube. Vapours gushed forth and Aton felt himself being wafted away, his four-dimensional form deformed and eroded. With difficulty he evaded the vapours, and then he closed with the Minion and wrestled bodily with him.

  The Minion had more than one shape! Limbs and extruberances shot out from him in all the directions of the five-dimensional space in which they fought. Aton found himself encaged in a living organism of roots, limbs, and branches.

  He himself was not without resource. With a supreme effort he caused every cell of his body to discharge the transcendent energy it had gained by immersion in the strat. There was a sort of explosion, an uncoiling of the immaterial continuum, and he was free.

  But he was weakened. And then, before he could take stock of himself, he was imprisoned once more.

  This time he seemed to be transfixed or encaged in brilliantly coloured glass or crystal. There was a sudden shift, and then he knew he had been transferred to a similar, but second prison.

  He was inside the Minion’s eyes, being flashed alternately from one to the other!

  Laughingly the Minion ejected him and hovered jeering. His ability to alter him in size gave Aton a real appreciation of the greater power of his enemy. He began to despair.

  ‘Hee hee hee! First I will reform the world, and then I will take you down again to Hulmu, poor little captain!’

  Tenaciously Aton circled, and then moved in again.

  Through his brain was running a prayer, one he had known since he was a child. Something within him was urging him to say this prayer aloud, and when he came near the Minion again, he sent the vibrations of the words spearing into the strat.

  ‘Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time.’

  That was all, but surprisingly the Minion recoiled as if in horror. Aton pursued him, speaking the prayer over and over again.

  ‘Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time. Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time.’

  The Minion shrieked with pain. He flashed out and writhed in a million illusory shapes, running the full gamut of his evil energies in an uncontrolled spasm. The prayer seemed to reduce him to a condition akin to the effect of nerve gas on a normal nervous system. Aton dived in and seized the time-distorter. The Minion struggled briefly to retrieve it, then fell back.

  Then the Minion suddenly fell headlong into the gulf at extraordinary speed. ‘Hulmu! I have failed you again! Ohhhhhh …’

  And Aton had carried out the orders of the Imperator.

  The God’s Imposer was junked.

  The huge ship had run head-on into countless enemy vessels. Smaller craft it had swatted like flies. But finally the total of those collisions had proved crippling. The twisted and shattered hulls of upwards of a dozen Hegemonic vessels were embedded in the
God’s Imposer, and the giant drive units now were silent.

  ‘The ortho field won’t last long, sir!’ gasped an ensign. ‘It’s down in parts of the ship already.’

  ‘Then kill yourself, you little fool, like the others are doing,’ growled Commander Haight. ‘Me, I’m not hanging around like a trapped rat.’

  And in fact the bridge was littered with suicides, including Prince Philipium. No one had bothered to use the ship’s many life rafts or strat suits. But Commander Haight was not on the bridge. He was down in the guts of the ship, just within its outer wall. And the ensign was stationed at one of the ports that, had the armada succeeded, would have been pouring troops on to the ground.

  ‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to experience,’ Haight grated out, ‘and now I’m going to. Open the port, Ensign.’

  ‘But, sir!’

  ‘You heard me, you young squirt. It’s an order. Get that port open!’

  Trembling, the ensign turned his back to the port and operated a series of switches. The port whined slowly open, dilating iris-fashion. The safety cover went up.

  Pressing his forearm against his eyes so that he would not be struck unconscious and fall to the deck, Commander Haight flung himself at a run into the strat.

  ‘To understand what has happened,’ said the Imperator to Aton, Inpriss Sorce, and the assembled archivists, ‘it is necessary to understand the nature of time and the origin of Church and empire.

  ‘Orthogonal time is reality. But reality cannot continue to subsist by itself. Like every structure in the universe it requires a certain kind of feedback on itself to remain steady. It requires something against which to rest itself, to react upon, otherwise, if it simply existed in a void, it would soon collapse into nothing.

  ‘This something is the temporal substratum. The strat is, if you like, aberrated reality; it provides the feedback that keeps real time stable, or relatively so. As such, it is potential, not actual, and less than real.

  ‘The deeper one goes, the less like reality the strat is. In the uttermost depths are forms of quasi-existence inconceivable for us! And they are only there at all because somewhere – in orthogonal time – is the authentic existence from which they are degraded.

  ‘The quasi-beings in these depths have a terrible hunger for authentic existence. But they are unable to emerge into it because they are too far removed from its nature. Some of them, however, are immensely powerful in their own realm; such a one is Hulmu.

  ‘He is the enemy of mankind.’

  ‘I had thought Hulmu was just a superstition on the part of the Traumatic sect,’ Mayar said hesitantly. ‘I hadn’t even believed the Church when it identified him with the Evil One.’

  ‘He is genuine and we have been fighting him for countless aeons. The empire is much older, in terms of eternity, than you think.’

  The Imperator hummed meditatively. ‘Until the discovery of time-travel the existential world was safe from such monsters. There was no possibility of their touching orthogonal time. Then, in some unique accident of history, a man called Dwight Rilke hit on a flaw in the structure of the world. He discovered that there was a way whereby matter could be moved through time.

  ‘From that instant the universe of actuality was in danger. And that danger manifested almost immediately. During the early experiments there was an unfortunate accident whereby one of the assistants fell headlong into the temporal substratum. This man was Absol Humbart, later the Minion. He was caught by Hulmu, who realised that the weakening of orthogonal time offered him an opportunity to claw his way up and become real. But still it was not easy. In order to gain a foothold Hulmu needed first to acquire sufficient reality, in order to transfer himself to the surface.

  ‘For this Absol Humbart promised souls! If Hulmu could devour enough souls that had lived in orthogonal time, then he could erupt into our world and establish himself there, satisfying his enormous hunger to become real!

  ‘But the driblets he has been given are not nearly enough. His strategy has only one object – to be able to absorb the death trauma of mankind, past, present, and future! Only by devouring every man, woman, and child who ever lived, or will live, can Hulmu gain the wherewithal to climb out of his pit, claim the Earth and eventually, perhaps, the galaxy. To this end he and the Minion scheme, trying to create a situation that will bring about the death of humanity in special circumstances. If the Minion could have employed the time-distorter just as orthogonal time was reforming, he might have achieved this. The distorter is an instrument no man could have conceived of; its construction requires the powers of a god.’

  The Imperator paused to allow them to digest its words.

  ‘You say we have fought this beast for aeons,’ called a brave archivist, ‘but the empire itself has not existed that long.’

  Something resembling a laugh issued from the machine. ‘The empire has risen, fallen, and risen again, countless times. All that will be has been, again and again and again. Always, at this point, we have managed to foil Hulmu; always we have managed to resurrect the empire by the same means that he destroyed it. The process has, I estimate, gone through the cycle one billion times.

  ‘But I have not completed my tale. How did the empire arise? It was no accident. Of those involved in so rashly presenting mankind with time-travel one, San Hevatar, saw the danger. He knew that the evil Traumatic sect had to be countered. He founded the Church to fight Hulmu. He designed the rituals of the Church as a weapon and a bastion against Hulmu. That is why, Aton, your prayer was so effective against the Minion; it is especially constructed to contain vibrations he cannot endure. If it were not for the Church, all might have fallen victims to Hulmu by now.’

  ‘You say this,’ pointed out Aton seriously, ‘but the San Hevatar I have met did not strike me as being aware of it.’

  ‘He was not. Perhaps the first time around he was. But now, after so many changes and resurrections, we move through our parts as if in a dream. Did you know that you must fight the Minion? Even I did not know, I only remembered flashes, like San Hevatar. Most of the time I am completely insane, as your friend Prince Vro tells you. I am insane, and know only these lucid periods when the empire has vanished. Then I travel into the far future to visit the civilisations there, and everything becomes clear.’

  ‘The future people,’ Inpriss objected, ‘why don’t they help us to fight Hulmu?’

  ‘They cannot, and in any case they do not believe in Hulmu. They know only that the secret of time-travel is the most dangerous secret in the universe, that if it is not controlled it can destroy time. That is why they want the empire continually to rise and fall in its war with the Hegemony; it is history’s warning to mankind. There are no Chronotic empires in future ages; men are too afraid. But if the example of the empire were not before them then they might forget and begin to tamper with time.’

  ‘And you,’ said Aton. ‘Who are you? What are you?’

  ‘I am the oldest part of the empire. I began life as an administrative computer in the physics laboratories of Monolith Industries. I took part in the original discoveries concerning pi-mesons. When the struggle with the Minion began I played a leading part in it. Gradually I was extended and increased my intelligence. Now I and the Minion are the main actors in the drama. He has an advantage because he is coached by Hulmu. With every cycle he grows stronger. We, too, must grow stronger, Aton! I could not tell you how often you have fought the Minion!’

  ‘One billion times,’ Aton said dryly.

  ‘No, not so. No one could be expected to endure that for so long. Every so often fate changes the champion who challenges him. Once it was Commander Haight; now he has been relieved of the duty and knows nothing of it. Next time it may be you, or it may be another. I cannot tell. But someone always arises with sufficient power to struggle against him. And always I am here to see that he does so. Eventually, perhaps, I will have evolved sufficiently to play the role myself.’

  The Imperator’s h
um grew louder. ‘You must understand that of the world as it was before the empire arose nothing remains. Even the calendar is different. Dwight Rilke’s discovery was made in the twenty-fourth century of their era; and the Stop Barrier was eventually placed in what was their fifteenth century, before a technological society had even developed.’

  ‘You speak of resurrecting the empire,’ said Mayar, still puzzled, ‘but how can that be? How can it possibly be accomplished?’

  ‘In the same way that the Minion hoped to accomplish a world fit for Hulmu to live in. We have Hulmu’s time-distorter. Hulmu misled the Minion when he represented himself as the creator and projector of the images on the screen of time; he is not that, merely an impotent spectator. Nevertheless his time-distorter can, to an extent, achieve creation.’

  The Imperator rolled forward and stood over those present in an almost menacing fashion. ‘The strat, just before the film of orthogonal time forms, is like a supersaturated solution waiting to be seeded. The time-distorter is designed to feed vibrations into that solution, and from those vibrations a world will grow. Here we have all the components to recreate the empire. We have the Achronal Archives with their detailed knowledge of the empire. The rituals of the Church themselves are the basis whereby the essence of the empire can be restored; San Hevatar intended them that way. We have the time-distorter to project all this on to the newly forming orthogonal world, and we have myself, Imperator, to operate it!’

  With a small sharp explosion a section of the Imperator fell away to reveal a neat concavity. ‘Long ago I equipped myself for this task. Fit the distorter into this space. Jack into me the output leads from your archival computers. Quickly, there is little time! I will re-create all the original conditions, the starting point from which the empire will burgeon! All will be foreordained! The war with Humlu must continue eternally!’

  Inpriss Sorce gave a little cry. ‘Must I go through it all again?’ she quavered.

  ‘There may be variations,’ the resonant voice said in a near-whisper. ‘Perhaps next time you will live in peace. Perhaps, too, some other officer of the Time Service, not Captain Mond Aton, will become familiar with the strat and be called upon to fight the Minion. Only one thing is certain; if the empire falls and cannot be reformed, then mankind falls to Hulmu, and monsters crawl out of the deeps of potential time to claim the Earth.’