‘My orders are perfectly explicit, Colonel,’ Haight told him. ‘We are to stay until the distorter is found, whatever that might mean.’
‘Even if it means losing the Lamp of Faith?’ Anamander seemed to find the notion incredible.
But Haight merely shrugged sardonically. ‘Yes … so what if we do? We are all expendable.’ His gaze flicked around him, as though he were able to look through walls and see his command in all its entirety. ‘What of the Lamp of Faith – do you imagine the empire cannot manage without it? The Invincible Armada will include a thousand ships as good as this one.’
The ship lifted off again and drifted beyond Base Ogop’s boundary to attack a concentration of projectors that was building up there. But it was forced to retreat. So many of its own beams were out of action that it was being outgunned, and while it left its central position, Hegemonic troops poured into the base to fight it out with the chron commandos.
The officer in charge of the technical teams spoke to Haight over a vidcom. His face was haggard with desperation.
‘There’s no distorter on the base, sir. We’ve been through everything.’
Haight cursed. ‘There has to be one!’ he snarled.
‘Sir –’
The Lamp of Faith lurched. One corner of the ship hit the concrete with a huge crunching sound. Moments later the whole mass slammed down as the lifting engines cut out and the great vessel rocked from side to side.
‘Should we phase out, sir?’ questioned Colonel Anamander in a low voice.
‘What did I just tell you, Colonel?’ Haight growled. ‘We don’t leave until we are successful, and that comes from the emperor himself.’
Captain Mond Aton had been largely unaware of events taking place outside the small bedroom where he lay. But he felt the sudden lurch followed by the impact, and knew that the ship was losing power.
The knowledge provoked only slight interest in him. The batman had brought him a passably fitting uniform. He had donned it and inspected himself in a full length mirror.
For a moment it had made him think he was back aboard the Smasher of Enemies. Things had started clicking into place in his mind.
The room shifted in perspective and suddenly acquired depth. It glowed with new colour. He was no longer in an insubstantial two-dimensional world. He could understand his surroundings again.
Now he lay quietly, considering the remarkable situation he was in.
After a while other distant noises began to intrude into his consciousness. The hissing of energy beams biting deeper into the ship. The spit of beam pistols closer by.
He rose and went into the main lounge. As he did so, Commander Haight burst in and slammed the door behind him, a gun in his hand.
‘What’s happened?’ Aton asked calmly.
Servants hurried into the room. Haight waved them away. He stepped to the large mahogany table and opened a panel in its top, turning a dial-like device this way and that.
Then he sat down at the table, his pistol pointing at the door, his free hand near the device, toying with a switch.
‘We couldn’t find a distorter,’ he rumbled. ‘Now the Hegemonics are all around us. The power has failed and our beams are gone. There’s fighting inside the ship.’
‘Is that a destruct device?’ Aton asked, eyeing the switch.
Haight nodded. ‘The one on the bridge doesn’t work. A long time ago I had an additional one installed here.’
‘Then what are you waiting for?’ Aton inquired pointedly.
The commander grunted. ‘The Hegemonics have offered a truce! It seems they want to talk to us, so I’ve agreed. Might as well hear what they have to say.’
‘They are coming here?’
‘Where else?’
Aton took a seat at the other end of the room. For some minutes they waited in silence.
At length there was the sound of footsteps and the door opened. Colonel Anamander entered. He surveyed the room and raised his eyebrows at Haight, who nodded.
Into the room came two tall slim men. They wore brocaded garments of yellow cloth that accentuated their slimness and gave them a formal elegance. The most striking feature of their apparel was their headgear: cylindrical hats over a foot high, surmounted by curved lips that projected forward for several inches.
Commander Haight kept his gun trained on them. ‘Forgive me if I do not rise to make a proper greeting,’ he said in a gravelly tone. ‘Announce yourselves.’
One of the two stepped forward. He looked at Haight with none of the rancour that was evident in Haight’s own expression.
‘I am Minister Ortok Cray, and I am a member of the Ruling Council of Saleem, which is, as you know, the faction which has hegemony in the federation you know as the Hegemony. And this –’ he gestured to his companion ‘– is Minister Wirith Freeling, of the same council.’
Haight did not show his considerable surprise. ‘I am privileged indeed,’ he murmured. ‘I am Commander Haight, a loyal servant of His Chronotic Majesty Philipium the First.’
Minister Ortok Cray glanced at Aton as if expecting to be introduced to him also. ‘I can assure you that there is no need to threaten us with your weapons,’ he told Haight. ‘It is not our intention to trick you or even to capture your ship. It is our wish that, after making the necessary repairs for which we shall offer every assistance, you should return to Chronopolis and convey our sentiments to your master.’
The Hegemonic spoke with a drawling accent. Haight, however, used to the variegated dialects and languages of the empire, scarcely noticed its strangeness.
‘Sentiments?’
Minister Wirith Freeling made an expansive gesture. ‘I don’t know if you are aware of how difficult communication between our two civilisations is made by religious differences. To a large extent our cultures are ignorant of each other – by far the greater ignorance, however, is on your side.’
Commander Haight was proud of, rather than insulted by, this ignorance. ‘It is no part of our habits to pander to heathens.’
Ortok Cray sighed. ‘But in the present circumstances, surely some intercourse would be advisable? As it is, the empire appears not even to know the elementary facts of the Hegemony’s history.’
Commander Haight’s opinion was that, once the Invincible Armada was launched, any conversation between the two would be extremely one-sided. It was true, of course, that no real study of Hegemonic culture had been undertaken, and such cultural contact as there had been had consisted of proselytising Church missionaries. He could not see that it was in the least important. But he laid down his gun.
‘Come to the point.’
‘We wish to end the war and come to an understanding based on co-existence.’
‘Hah! You fear the armada.’
‘Indeed. But do you not also have much to fear?’ The mildness disappeared from Ortok Cray’s face and Haight found himself confronting two men of steely determination.
‘We have shown that we are ready to risk all to defend ourselves,’ the Hegemonic leader continued. ‘You know what the time-distorter can do. It is a weapon so terrible that, if it is employed without restraint, then the user stands in as much danger as the victim. That, no doubt, is why you have not made use of it against us. But our situation is so desperate that we will stop at nothing.’
Aton spoke up from the other side of the room. ‘You had expected us to use the distorter?’
Haight glared at him in displeasure for the interruption. Ortok Cray turned to regard the young captain.
‘It is, after all, an invention of the Chronotic Empire,’ he said. ‘Our acquisition of it is quite recent.’
‘And just how did you acquire the distorter?’ Haight grated. He and Anamander exchanged puzzled glances.
‘That, naturally, I cannot tell you. The important thing is that we have it and will continue to use it. Furthermore, so far we have used it only at low power and with small aperture. If driven to it we will pull out all the stops. In no circumstances will we
surrender. But we would prefer to live in peace. Surely you can see that this struggle is going to be a calamity for us both?’
‘And you, of course, try to place the blame for the conflict squarely on us. That, I’m afraid, won’t do. Long before the armada was thought of the empire was suffering from your armed incursions, your attempts to interfere with imperial chron integrity –’
‘And we were suffering from the impudence of your missionaries,’ retorted Wirith Freeling hotly. ‘You evidently do not appreciate what your religious aggressiveness means to us. And apart from that, there was always your patent desire to see us as a part of your territories.’
Haight shrugged gloomily. ‘Your intransigent attitude towards the true faith renders it a duty to bring you the light of the Church.’
‘We have our own religion, the religion of the Risen Christos! We want none of your – of your –’ Freeling was sputtering with indignant rage.
Ortok Cray raised a hand. ‘Patience,’ he murmured to his colleague. ‘This is not the time for quarrels and recriminations. This is the time for explanation.’
He turned to face Haight once more. ‘You complain of our earlier attempts to interfere with Chronotic history. But I wonder if you realise the reason behind those attempts? Our endeavours to make our case plain to your government at Chronopolis have always been thwarted, since your Church refuses to accept our representatives there.’
‘Well, now I am your prisoner and you can say what you like.’
‘Precisely. The point at issue concerns the Century of Waste. Our cultures are separated by a period of a hundred years when the Earth is uninhabitable. The origin of this is presumably known to you.’
‘Some war in the hinterland of Node Seven,’ said Haight reflectively. ‘Node Seven is the empire’s frontier. We have not yet consolidated ourselves in the stretch of time succeeding it. Indeed, it may be left for that to be accomplished by the natural advance of the node.’
‘That’s right: a war which left the Earth desolate. In point of fact this was established in orthogonal time well before time-travel was introduced at what you call, I believe, Node Six. But do you not see what this means? During that war mankind was wiped out. History came to an end at that point until, by some random movement in the strat, there was a historical mutation that led to the invention of time-travel. The future Earth was then colonised by migrants from the past. Thus it transpires that time-travel is the instrument of mankind’s survival.’
‘So? All this is recognised. Time-travel came as a gift from God, to redeem mankind from its own destruction. That is the entire basis of the true faith and the justification for the Chronotic Empire. You have told me nothing new.’
‘Except that we do not regard the invention of time-travel as an act of God, but never mind about that. Do you not see the implications? The annihilation of mankind took place before the Chronotic Empire had begun to establish itself throughout time. The course of history was quite different then. The migration to the future took place when the empire began to expand – and more particularly when the Church of San Hevatar established itself as the one true church. Do you now see what I am getting at?’
Haight merely frowned, but the truth struck Aton forcibly. ‘You are refugees!’
Ortok Cray nodded. ‘We, or rather our ancestors, were religious dissidents who were driven out of the empire in the early days. We established ourselves here, beyond the empire’s reach – at that time. Hence our proud independence and our dislike of your Church.’
‘None of this explains your impudent forays into our territory,’ complained Haight broodingly. ‘If you wished to be left alone, why did you draw our attention to you?’
‘Because the empire’s hold on the structure of history is increasing,’ Ortok Cray reminded him. ‘We have every reason to fear the Historical Office. If nothing is done now, then in about fifty years’ time the Hegemony will disappear from history.’
‘How do you know that?’ Aton said, puzzled, and ignoring his lack of entitlement to join in the discussion.
‘Time is not static,’ pointed out the Hegemonic minister. ‘The nodes proceed forward at a steady rate, overtaking events that are already established in the future. If the node contains some Chronotic mutation or has been altered in some way, then events ahead of it will also change as it approaches. And this means that the Chronotic Empire, even while maintaining its fixed rear at the Stop Barrier, will continue to grow into the future – quite apart from further conquests by timeships. At the moment the events leading to the disastrous war that wiped out mankind are still intact. But Node Seven is already encroaching on them and eventually will overtake them. The Historical Office, naturally, will want to delete this war. There will be no general destruction, no Century of Waste.’
‘A change we should all applaud, surely,’ Aton commented. ‘To annul such a terrible happening does not seem at all bad.’
‘We want the war to be fixed in time for ever.’
They were all taken aback by the ferocity of the minister’s words.
‘If there is no war,’ Ortok Cray continued quietly, ‘if the Earth is not depopulated, then the disciples of the Risen Christos can have found nowhere to settle themselves on fleeing the persecutions of your Church – or, at best, can only have been absorbed into a more friendly population, whatever that population might be. The future will have a new, completely different history. The Hegemony will never have come into existence at all.’
Commander Haight came to his feet and paced the lounge, frowning. ‘Once time-travel becomes an established fact of life such temporal upheavals become inevitable,’ he commented. ‘Only the continued existence of the empire is absolutely guaranteed. Yes, I can see that you have good cause to fear us.’
‘We do not agree that the continued existence of the empire is a certainty,’ Wirith Freeling snapped. ‘The empire is contingent, like all other things existing in time. That time-travel cannot vanish, once having been invented, is true, no doubt, but not the empire. Time-travel came before the empire.’
‘The two are indissolubly linked.’
‘Let us not argue theology,’ Ortok Cray put in. ‘You have your religion, we have ours. We believe we can destroy your empire, even though we destroy ourselves in doing so. These are our demands: the Chronotic Empire must limit itself in time and must not intrude into the period containing the annihilatory war. You have a thousand years, be content with that. Let Node Seven continue without you, do not extend your authority beyond its current generation.’
Haight stopped short and looked at the two Hegemonics with controlled fury. ‘Do you expect His Chronotic Majesty to agree to terms like that?’
‘We wish him to examine the situation and to recognise the delicacy of our own position. Also, that the present course will destroy us both.’
‘Then I will not answer you, since the answer belongs to His Majesty.’
Minister Ortok Cray acknowledged this with an inclining of his head.
‘We would welcome a meeting between our respective representatives,’ he said. ‘Some arrangement tolerable to us both would be better than total war. If your side is willing to take part in talks, send a timeship broadcasting an appropriate message.’
‘I will convey your requirements.’ Haight’s tone was sardonic, almost sarcastic.
‘Then we thank you. Please let us know if you need anything to make your ship timeworthy. I think we can expect you to be on your way in, let us say, ten hours?’
Haight nodded. Ministers Ortok Cray and Wirith Freeling made some parting gesture that was strange to him, and swept sedately from the room.
When they had gone, Commander Haight stroked his chin for a few moments, then looked thoughtfully at Aton.
‘I can see allowing you to wear the emperor’s uniform has done the trick,’ he said slowly. ‘You are a veritable model of rationality.’
As Aton made no reply, Haight turned to Anamander. ‘Well, our enterprise has
come to a surprising conclusion, eh, Colonel?’
Seating himself at the table, he carefully deactivated the Lamp of Faith’s emergency self-destruct.
SEVEN
‘It’s hard to say what it is, or what it’s like,’ Aton muttered. ‘There are really no words to describe it. All the words of our language refer to three-dimensional, orthogonal time.’
‘Are the experiences still in your memory? Are they vivid?’
‘Yes, but they tend to fade, to become … recast so as to resemble ordinary experiences. Such as what you might see on a strat screen.’
Commander Haight sighed deeply. ‘That figures. A strat screen interprets the substratum in terms of sensory criteria. One might well expect the brain’s memory banks to do the same.’
They were heading back towards Chronopolis, Node 1, accompanied by the Song of Might, and were already deep inside the empire’s historical territory. Haight had been kept busy, first attending to repairs to the Lamp of Faith and then negotiating a homeward course, the journey to the frontier being under escort by a squadron of Hegemonic Tower-class ships. But the moment he had been able to take a rest from his duties he had hurried to his quarters to question Aton closely on the nature of the strat.
‘Nothing has a single nature,’ Aton said. ‘Everything merges into everything else; there are a billion aspects to everything. Nothing exists as an object; all is flux and motion.’
‘Hmmm.’ Haight listened carefully to the words, fixing his gaze on Aton’s face. It was as if he was trying to find in Aton’s steady eyes some glimpse of what those eyes had seen.
He was somewhat disappointed by the results of his experiment. Aton’s descriptions had been fairly lucid but resembled technical descriptions such as one might find in textbooks. They did not convey the essence of the experience.
Aton’s return to normalcy was also something of a disappointment to him. He turned, stretched his weary limbs, then stepped to the cocktail bar and poured himself a stiff slug of gin. After brief hesitation he poured one for Aton too and pushed it across to him.
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 59