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

‘Everything you’ve told me passes for psychosis back in Solsystem,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know… maybe this is really a travelling lunatic asylum. You could all be insane, even by the standards of your own people. Balbain had this kinky desire to be a slave. Abrak wanted to be killed bizarrely, and you want never to have been born at all. What kind of a set-up is that? If you ask me, the normal, healthy, human mentality is a lot closer to reality than all that.’

‘Every creature says that of itself. It is hard for you to accept that your outlook is not a norm, that it is an aberration, an exception. Let me tell you how it arose. Because of the incredibly luxurious conditions on the planet Earth there was able to develop a quite unique biological class: the mammalia . The specific ethological feature of the mammalia is protectiveness , which began within the family, then extended to the tribe, and finally, with your own species, has become so over-developed as to embrace the whole of the mammalian class. Every mammal is protected, by your various organisations, whether human or not. Now, the point is that within this shield of protectiveness qualities are able to evolve which actually are quite redundant, since they bear no relation to the hard facts of survival. One of these, becoming intense among monkeys, apes and hominids, is playful curiosity, or meddlesome inquisitiveness. This developed into the love of knowledge which became the overriding factor in the history of your own species.’

‘That doesn’t sound at all bad to me,’ Eliot said defensively. ‘We’ve done all right so far.’

‘But not for long, I fear. Your species is in more trouble than you think. There is no future in this mammalian over-protectiveness. The dinosaurs thought themselves safe by reason of their excessive size, did they not? And yet that giantism was exactly what doomed them. Already you ran into serious trouble when your compulsive care for the unfit led to a deterioration of the genetic stock. You saved yourselves that time because you learned to eliminate defective genes artificially. But perhaps other consequences of this nature of yours will arise which you cannot deal with. I do not anticipate that your species will last long.’

‘While you – death-lovers – will still be here, I suppose?’

Zeed’s golden eyes seemed to dim and tarnish. ‘We all inhabit a vast dark,’ he repeated, ‘in which there is neither rhyme nor reason.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Eliot’s fists were clenched now. ‘Here’s another “ethological feature,” as you call it – revenge! Do you understand that, Zeed? I’m going to take my revenge for the death of my mate! I’m going out there to destroy the animal that killed Alanie!’

Zeed did not answer but continued to stare at him and, so it seemed to Eliot’s crazed imagination, lost any semblance to a living creature at all. Eliot ran to the lower galleries of the ship and armed himself with one of the few weapons the vessel carried: a high-powered energy beamer. As he stepped down from the ship and on to the booming, crashing surface of Five some of Zeed’s words came back to him. An image came to his mind of the endlessness of space in which galaxies seemed to be descending and tumbling, and the words: an unfathomable darkness without any common ground . Then he pressed forward to challenge Dominus .

Dominus believed he had at last solved a perplexing riddle.

Following his initial seizure of one of the organisms, two others had emerged at short intervals so he had taken those also. A little later, he had moved in on the construct itself and taken a fourth organism from it. Of the fifth, there was no trace.

His analyses came up with the same result every time. The specimens were incomplete organisms: they were sterile. More accurately, they could only reproduce identical copies of themselves, like a plant. Together with this, their tissues suffered from an inbuilt deficiency which caused them to decay with age.

Plainly these facts were not consistent with their being motile, autonomous entities. Dominus now believed that the specimens he had were only expendable doll-organisms, created by some genuine entity as one might make a machine to carry out certain tasks, and dispatched here, in the metal construct, for a purpose.

And that entity, the owner of the construct and of the doll-organisms, having intruded on his domain once, would be back again.

With that realisation an urge beyond all power to resist came upon Dominus: the compulsion to evolve . He meditated in the depths of his being, and the entity to which he ultimately gave birth, amid great explosions, agonies and devastations, was as far above him in ability as he had been above his immediate inferior.

The new Dominus immediately set about the defence of his planet. The whole of the single continent became a springboard for this defence, and was criss-crossed with artifacts which meshed integrally with the space-borne artifacts he sent ranging several light-years beyond the atmosphere. To crew this extensive system Dominus copied the methods of the invader and created armies of slave doll-organisms modelled on the enemy’s own doll-organisms. And Dominus waited for the enemy to arrive. And waited. And waited. And waited.

To: Director, Orbit University.

From: Dean, Sociohistoric Faculty.

Date: 19 July AD 3065.

Dear Mansim: As you are aware, a month ago the Officiating World Steering Committee asked us to submit a bystander’s report on the events surrounding the activities of the well-known philosopher Isaac Morley, giving our interpretation of their possible significance. Frankly, some of us are alarmed at the direction in which our conclusions are taking us. Below is a précis of the report which tentatively is shaping up and which should go to the Committee in a few days’ time (most of it is rather elementary, as politicians, naturally, are ignorant of the subject of social energy fields). Are you happy to see it go through as it stands? Arthur.

CONFIDENTIAL

SPECIFICS: the building of the Antarctic Structure; the passage of the Extra-Solar Object; the economic deformations noted to have occurred in the period from March to December AD 3064.

1. The facts surrounding the edifice named the Antarctic Structure are simple, if not altogether explicable. The Structure is an immense pyramid, or ziggurat, five miles on the side, its faces worked into an intricate, baroque labyrinth. Five thousand people laboured on its construction for a year and a half, without payment and without any clear idea as to its purpose, having been inspired to assemble by the leadership of its architect the self-styled philosopher Isaac Morley, who had created a philosophical cult solely in order to complete his project.

Only later did it emerge that the Structure is actually a powerful, if somewhat over-elaborate, UHF transmitter, able to transmit a tight beam in a fixed direction spacewards at an angle of 5 degrees from the direction of the south polar axis, at longitude 93 degrees west. Its function as an ideological monument is probably secondary.

2. There seems no way in which Morley and his followers could have known beforehand of the passage of the mysterious object known simply as the Extra-Solar Object. Despite that, the beam from the Structure, after its one and only discharge on I April 3064, intercepted the Object exactly, at the point where it passed beneath the south pole, half a light year below the plane of the ecliptic.

The Object has an estimated rest-mass of a billion tons, and an estimated average diameter of three hundred and forty miles. It remained within detectable range for only one month. Apart from its high velocity, there is nothing to suggest that it is not of natural origin.