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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  There was no need to explain further. Every room in the palace, as well as every department of government, was wired for sound for the Imperator’s benefit. No one felt embarrassed by this state of affairs, since the machine had never been known to repeat anything it had heard.

  The humming faded almost to inaudibility before the Imperator spoke again.

  ‘What has been will be.’

  The machine rolled back on its castors, disappearing into its private chamber. The gold panel slid down into place.

  Mayar had expected nothing better from the interview. The Imperator undertook no executive function. While it was consulted occasionally, the cryptic nature of its pronouncements rendered it more in the style of an oracle. More than one emperor had spent days trying to puzzle out the meaning of its statements, only to have to ignore them in the end.

  ‘What has been will be,’ Philipium muttered feverishly. ‘How do you interpret those words, Reamoir?’

  ‘The Imperator understands the mysteries of time,’ the arch-cardinal replied smoothly. ‘It intimates that the victory of our invincible armada is foreordained.’

  The emperor gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘The enterprise against the Hegemony must go ahead … all must be prepared to the utmost.’ He lifted a shaking hand to his attendant. ‘To my quarters. I must rest. Later I will receive Commander Haight.’

  He moved off. Commander Trevurm bade Mayar good day and went about his business. The arch-cardinal, disdaining civilities, also drifted off.

  Mayar allowed his gaze to wander over the court chamber. He was feeling dismal. He was about to make his way back to the archives when Princess Mayora rushed up to him.

  ‘Chief Archivist, it is so long since we saw you here.’

  Mayar smiled politely. ‘Regretfully my stay must be short, Your Highness. I must return to the vaults.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense. You can easily spare an hour or so. Come over here.’ She seized him by the arm and led him towards a couch.

  Disarmed by the young woman’s charm, Mayar obeyed. Once seated, she turned and faced him directly.

  ‘So what have you been talking to Father about?’ she said breezily.

  Mayar was embarrassed. ‘With all respect, Your Highness –’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know,’ she interrupted with an impatient wave of her hand. ‘State confidence. Still, I know what it was all about. Daddy’s enterprise against the heathen.’ She leaned closer, her eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘Will there be great battles in the substratum? Awful mutations in time?’

  ‘I fear there will, Your Highness,’ Mayar said heavily.

  She drew back in an expostulation of surprise. ‘Well, don’t sound so gloomy about it. Look over there – there’s Captain Vrin.’ She pointed out a tall chron officer in full dress uniform – resplendent tunic, plumed hat, and waist-high boots belled at the top – who was talking animatedly, surrounded by spellbound young women. ‘He’s in the Third Fleet. He’s just come back from a battle at Node Five. Isn’t it exciting?’

  Mayar turned his head away, feeling that if he tried to speak his voice would choke him.

  Noticing his reaction, Princess Mayora pouted in disappointment. ‘Well, if you’re going to be so serious about it you might as well go and talk to my brother Philipium,’ she said. ‘There he is over there.’

  Mayar followed her gaze and located Philipium, the eldest of the emperor’s sizeable brood. Aged about forty, he had already begun to resemble his father and sported the same type of beard. He was destined to become Emperor Philipium II, although the date of his coronation was not permitted to be made known to anyone in Node 1, particularly not to the present emperor. Gazing upon him, Mayar allowed his thoughts to dwell for a few moments on the perplexing intricacies of time such a situation presented. Futurewards of Node 1 – in the internodal hinterland – was a Philipium the Younger who was not emperor but who remained until his dying day merely the son of the emperor. Yet eventually Node 1 would travel onwards, past the death of Philipium I, and Philipium II would become emperor. The soul of Philipium the Elder would travel back in time to be reborn; but in that cycle of his eternally recurring life, the cycle succeeding the current one, he would not be emperor but merely the father of Emperor Philipium II.

  Likewise Mayar, in the next cycle of his recurrent life, would find himself living in the internodal hinterland that Node 1 had left behind. He would be removed from the centre of the empire and so, he hoped, would find life a good deal more peaceful.

  The eternally repeated rebirth of the soul into the same life was one of the few dogmas of the Church that had been scientifically proved. That, together with the nodal structure of time, provided the empire with a form of passing time that, so to speak, transcended ordinary sequential time. At the same time the system of nodes was extremely convenient for the average mind, such as that of Princess Mayora, who sat with him now. She was happily able to ignore the enigmas and paradoxes that time-travel entailed, leaving such troublesome matters to the theoreticians of the Historical Office, of the Church’s Order of Chronotic Casuistry, and of Mayar’s own Achronal Archives.

  Did these people surrounding Mayar have any idea what the mutability of time meant? It was quite obvious that Princess Mayora did not. Like nearly everyone else, she regarded the gorgeous palace in which she lived as permanent, secure, and unalterable. The Chronotic wars were centuries away. Mayar glanced despairingly at the ingeniously vaulted and domed ceiling. If only they could realise, he thought, that all this could be magicked away, could never have been.

  Princess Mayora giggled. ‘Oh, look! Here’s Narcis!’

  Into the chamber strolled two identical youths, their arms fondly about each other’s necks. Looking closely at them, one could see them for Ixians. One could see in them, perhaps, what their father the emperor might have been in his youth: the oval face, the straight poetical nose. Here, however, their, lithe upright bearing, their unblemished skin turned Philipium’s tottering figure into a travesty.

  On looking even closer, one might discern that one of these apparently identical twins was in fact a few years older than the other. Their story needed no explication to Mayar. Narcis, youngest son of the emperor, a strange, wayward homosexual, had in defiance of all the laws of the empire travelled a few years into the future where he had met and fallen in love with himself. He had, moreover, persuaded his future self to return to Node 1 with him. The two now spent their time mooning about the palace together, flaunting their forbidden love for all to see.

  Arch-Cardinal Reamoir, whenever he chanced to come upon them, would give them the sign of the curse, whereupon the two young Narcises would laugh with glee. But in the atmosphere of the Ixian dynasty their love affair was not nearly as shocking as it would have sounded outside. Ixians married only Ixians, to keep the imperial line pure. At first this had meant marriages that spanned centuries, a man marrying, perhaps, his great-great-great-grandniece. But gradually all distinctions became blurred. Marriages between brother and sister, parent and child, were no longer frowned on. The blood was what mattered.

  And as for the crime of ‘going double’ – of consorting with one’s future self – in a world where it was forbidden even to tell a man what lay in his future, well, young Ixians did not feel that Chronotic laws were made to be obeyed.

  Princess Mayora waved to her double-brother. The Princes Narcis came towards them.

  ‘Good day, Chief Archivist.’ Narcis1 greeted him with a smile.

  ‘Good day to you, Your Highness.’ As they came close Mayar could hear the faint whine of the orthophase that Narcis2 wore on a belt at his waist to enable him to live outside his own time.

  ‘Come and talk to the archivist,’ Princess Mayora demanded. ‘He appears to need cheering up.’

  Narcis1 gazed at Mayar with dreamy eyes while fondling the back of his double’s neck. ‘He is too old,’ he said bluntly. ‘Old people talk only of dreary things, of war and politics and religion. We live for love,
do we not, Narcis?’

  ‘Yes, Narcis.’

  Smiling together, the two wandered away.

  Meantime in another part of the palace’s inner sanctum Narcis’s other brother, Prince Vro Ixian, was busy receiving the report of Perlo Rolce, owner of the Rolce Detective Agency.

  Prince Vro’s apartments were gloomily lit and carelessly furnished. The cleaning staff was rarely allowed in and dust lay everywhere. To remind him of his great sorrow, one wall of the main room was taken up with a tridimensional hologram screen that gave a direct view into a mausoleum about a mile distant so that it seemed an extension of Vro’s dwelling. The sarcophagus occupying the centre of the burial chamber gaped open, empty.

  The burly detective sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair facing the prince, who stood in a curious stance at the other end of the room, head cocked and one hand resting negligently on a table. Three or four years older than Narcis, he had the same cast of face, but his eyes were more penetrating.

  Rolce was used to Ixian peculiarities. This was not the first time he had been engaged by a member of the imperial household. He spoke directly, without prevarication.

  ‘Your Highness, since our last meeting I have followed up the evidence suggesting that the Traumatic sect might have been involved in the affair. I can now confirm it categorically: it was the Traumatic sect who stole the body of Princess Veaa from its resting place.’

  Vro looked pleadingly at the empty sarcophagus. ‘But for what purpose?’

  Rolce coughed before continuing. ‘The motives for the crime are far from pleasant, Your Highness. The Traumatic sect, as you must know, is prone to bizarre practices. Rejecting the teachings of the Church, its members worship a god they call Hulmu and whom they deem to dwell in the uttermost depths of the strat. Hulmu, by their doctrines, feeds on the trauma that the soul experiences on separating from the body at death, but is usually robbed of his pleasure because the soul passes back in time and finds refuge in its body again. Therefore the sect practises certain rites, ending in human sacrifice, that they claim give the victim’s soul to Hulmu.’

  ‘What has this to do with my beloved Veaa?’ said Vro harshly. ‘She is dead already.’

  ‘Your sister died of a brain haemorrhage, and later was embalmed by the Murkesen process, which leaves all the vital tissues intact,’ the detective explained. ‘Someone in the Traumatic sect apparently believes that these two factors together have left her soul in a state of suspension, and that it has not departed into the past.’

  ‘You mean she is still alive?’ Prince Vro asked in a shocked tone.

  ‘No, Your Highness,’ Rolce replied hurriedly. ‘One should not pay heed to heretical theories.’ Then, seeing Prince Vro’s lips curl, he added, ‘Even according to the Traumatics your sister is deceased. It is merely that her soul is believed to be still accessible to Hulmu. They hoped, by means of rites or medical experiments, to release her soul from its latent state and offer it to Hulmu. A personage of such exalted rank was, of course, a great prize to them.’

  A low moan escaped Prince Vro’s lips and his face expressed ashen horror. Then he turned away and began to give vent to strangled sobs, while Rolce sat impassively and stared at the nearby wall.

  The private detective had come across many weird situations in the course of his work and the predicament of Prince Vro aroused no comment in his mind.

  He knew that the prince had been desperately enamoured of his sister Princess Veaa. The emperor had even indicated that he would consent to a marriage between them. And then had come her sudden death. In an orgy of mourning Prince Vro had designed her mausoleum personally, placed her embalmed body in the sarcophagus with his own hands, and installed the direct-wire hologram to his private apartment so that he would never forget her.

  Sadly, his misfortunes had increased still further. The embalmed body had been stolen from the mausoleum, for no explicable reason. Exhaustive police investigations had proved fruitless. Eventually Vro had called upon Rolce’s services.

  Rolce had wondered why the prince had not followed the example of his brother Narcis and travelled back in time to when Veaa was still alive (though that might, he reflected, entail complications of a personal nature). But the speculation was sterile. Vro seemed as deeply in love with the corpse as he had been with the living woman.

  With difficulty the prince recovered his composure. ‘And what has become of her now?’

  Rolce frowned. ‘At this point the affair becomes perplexing. I gained most of my information so far by infiltrating one of my men into a secret Traumatic cell. Unfortunately his guise was eventually penetrated and the fellow was murdered. I then used more direct methods to track down the cor – to track down the princess, and ascertained that she had been removed from Node One on an internodal liner. However –’

  ‘They can do that?’

  The detective nodded. ‘The sect is very resourceful. It has good contacts in the internodal travel services.’

  ‘I see,’ muttered Vro. ‘And how soon before my beloved Veaa is found?’

  The other gave a worried sigh. ‘The trail has petered out, Your Highness. Quite frankly I do not understand it. I have never come up against such a blank wall before. Even if the body had been disposed of in some way – and I seriously doubt that it has – the methods I have used should have given me some information about it. Everything that happens leaves a trace that the trained investigator can pick up.’

  ‘What are you babbling about, Rolce?’ Vro swung around and confronted the older man, hands on his hips. ‘You are not doing your job! Is your fee not inducement enough?’

  ‘It is not that, Your Highness!’ the investigator protested. ‘My entire agency – which is an organisation to be reckoned with – is engaged solely upon this one assignment. We have never failed yet. But something odd seems to have happened.’

  For the first time Perlo Rolce displayed a degree of discomfiture. He shifted uneasily in his chair.

  ‘At my headquarters we have the man who shipped out the body of Princess Veaa,’ he said. ‘We are certain we have not mistaken his identity. Earlier we picked up his thoughts on the subject with a field-effect device.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He does not know anything about it any longer. He does not remember leaving Chronopolis on the requisite date.’

  ‘His mind has been tampered with.’

  ‘That might be the explanation if we relied on physical persuasion alone. He knows nothing of Princess Veaa, except vaguely as a one-time member of the imperial family. Yet we know for a fact that he had custody of the body for a considerable period of time.’

  ‘Just what are you suggesting?’

  The investigator looked, briefly, straight into Vro’s eyes, something he had never done before. ‘I do not know, Your Highness. I am a detective, not a Chronotician. But I am beginning to get the feeling that something outside my control has closed off the investigation.’

  He hesitated before going on. ‘The phenomenon is not unknown to me. Of late, there have been a number of such cases. Odd details that do not mesh together – a cause not producing the usual effect, or an effect not preceded by the usual cause. Only someone like myself, trained to notice details, would pick them up. In my belief the war with the Hegemony is beginning to touch us, even here at Node One. Time is under strain.’

  The prince brooded on his words. ‘It almost sounds as though you were looking for excuses,’ he said in a surly tone.

  ‘Your Highness, I assure you of my sincerity.’

  ‘Well, are you implying you wish to leave off the assignment?’

  ‘The Rolce Agency does not abandon assignments,’ Rolce told him. ‘There is one move still left to us. We have procured an orthophase and I am negotiating for the clandestine use of a time-travel unit.’

  ‘I could have arranged that for you,’ Vro interrupted in a mutter.

  Rolce shrugged. ‘One of my agents will phase himself into the past and carry out a survei
llance of our prisoner at the time he hid and transported the body of Princess Veaa. If we find that he did not commit these acts – as we know he did – then it will demonstrate that time has mutated in some peculiar way, leaving loose ends.’

  ‘In a very peculiar way,’ Prince Vro agreed huffily. ‘Are you not aware that a time-mutation leaves no loose ends and is generally undetectable after the event?’

  ‘I am aware of it, Your Highness, but I must deal in facts.’ He rose and handed the prince an envelope. ‘Here is my written report of all information to date.’

  ‘Thank you, my good fellow. Come and see me again soon.’

  After the detective had gone the young prince stood for a long time with the envelope unopened in his hand, staring into space.

  Defeat is never a pleasant thing to have to recount to one’s master. Commander Haight’s large, rugged face was stonily impassive as he answered the emperor’s probing questions concerning the attempt to save Gerread.

  At length Philipium I uttered a deep trembling sigh. ‘No blame,’ he said, to Haight’s relief. ‘The action was gallantly fought. Tonight the Military Council meets. We shall be discussing what action to take between now and the launching of the armada. There will be some, no doubt, who wish to abandon the enterprise and make peace overtures with the Hegemony.’ He looked closely at the commander. ‘How do you read the situation?’

  ‘The armada must be launched as soon as possible, Your Majesty – much sooner than was originally planned. The time-distorter is a terrible weapon. I cannot guarantee the ability of the defensive forces to ward off every attack that might be made.’

  ‘Can we not set up time-blocks?’

  ‘Time-blocks cannot be kept in continuous operation without years of preparation, Your Majesty. And I am advised that the rearward Stop Barrier already consumes one-third of the imperial budget. Our only safeguard is to overwhelm the Hegemony without delay. Otherwise I can foresee disaster.’

  The emperor grunted contemptuously. ‘Don’t tell me you’re another who thinks the empire can fall.’