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

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.’ Narcis 1greeted him with a smile.

‘Good day to you, Your Highness.’ As they came close Mayar could hear the faint whine of the orthophase that Narcis 2wore 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.’

Narcis 1gazed 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—’