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

‘ When do I go through? ’

‘Oh—’ the technician glanced at his watch – ‘in about an hour.’

Aton steeled his nerves to face the coming ordeal. He had been languishing for nearly a week since his trial, waiting for his name to be called. Despite that the department dispatched a daily stream of messages to the distant time-fleets it never seemed to run short of couriers.

He reminded himself that he had been in the strat before – millions of times, in fact. Everybody had. Only nobody remembered it. When the body died, the soul, robbed of the body’s existential support, found itself in the strat. That was what caused death trauma – the bedazzlement of the soul when faced by potential time. But because it had nowhere to exist apart from the body, and even though shock reduced it to a state midway between unconsciousness and a dreamlike trance, it hurried back along its time-track, experiencing its life in reverse at a tremendously speeded-up rate like a video-tape on rewind, until it reached the moment of conception. At which point it began to live again.

Thus Aton’s imminent punishment would be something like the experience of death, except that not simply his soul but his body too was to be catapulted into the strat, and except that he would be pumped full of dugs to keep him conscious even under the impact of unspeakable trauma. An unconscious courier would be no good; he would not be able to guide himself towards his destination.

While the technician continued marking his papers, Aton began to speak in a low, haunted voice.

‘Scientists have debated whether the strat really exists as an independent continuum,’ he murmured, ‘or whether it is only an apparency our own machines have created; merely the result of that crucial act of accelerating pi-mesons faster than light. In the Time Service we are accustomed to thinking of the strat as an ocean, with orthogonal time as its surface… but perhaps the strat is only the world itself, scrambled and twisted because one no longer obeys its laws.’

The other man looked up, fascinated to hear this talk from one of the couriers. It was an unusual reaction; commonly three men or more were needed to hold them down.

‘The Church has an answer to that, at any rate,’ he pointed out to Aton. ‘The strat is real, but not as real as the world of actual time.’

‘Yes… the Church has an answer for everything,’ Aton replied, only slightly cynically. ‘The strat is the Holy Ghost, connecting God with the world. In the Time Service one inclines to take a more pragmatic view. Now that I am to be exposed unprotected to what chronmen fear most, it’s not surprising if my mind dwells on what its true nature might be.’

‘Your collected state of mind is, if I may say so, admirable,’ the technician admitted. ‘In your place, however, I would not be disposed to take the teachings of the Church so lightly. A comforter will be at hand at your dispatch to offer final consolation. Need I point out that the view you have just put forward – that the strat does not exist apart from the visible world – denies the Holy Ghost and is tantamount to materialistic atheism?’

A mocking smile played around the technician’s mouth and Aton realised the man was toying with him. He remained silent.

‘In any case,’ the technician continued after a pause, ‘the strat would appear to be what you called it just now: an ocean of potential time. For one thing, it has depth. It’s some years since the Church forbade any further deep-diving expeditions, but no doubt you know what happened to the earlier ones. The pressure of potential time gets stronger the deeper you go. Some of the ships had their ortho fields crushed.’

Aton shuddered slightly.

‘Do you resent what’s happening to you?’ the technician asked.

Aton shook his head, shrugging. ‘They say that I am a coward and a murderer. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But if it is, then this is just… for an officer.’ If he truly thought that he had committed those crimes, then he would almost have welcomed the punishment as a chance to redeem himself.

The technician rose. ‘Over here, please.’

A high-backed chair with dangling straps stood on the other side of the room. The two guards pinned Aton’s arms to his sides and forced him into it. The straps passed across his chest and over his thighs and forearms.

‘When your mission is accomplished you are instructed to die,’ the technician said softly. ‘The method will be the simple and direct one of vagal inhibition. To that end we will now implant a trigger word with which, at the appropriate time, you can excite your own vagus nerve and stop your heart.’

A needle pricked Aton’s arm. A coloured disc began to rotate in front of his eyes, attracting his gaze and holding it even against his will. A voice murmured soothingly in his ear.

Presently Aton fell asleep.

VOM.

When he awoke the word lay somewhere in his mind like a dead weight. He was vaguely aware of it, but he was unable to speak it, either aloud or mentally. That would not be possible until a certain phrase, spoken by a voice he would recognise when he heard it, released the word from its confinement.

The coloured disc wheeled away. In its place was put a more elaborate piece of apparatus that included, on the end of a flexible cable, what looked like the helmet of a diving-suit without a face-plate.

The technician glanced at his watch again and became more animated. ‘Time presses on. The dispatches you are to carry have already arrived. Now then. There are two reasons why we have to use live couriers to communicate with the time-fleets, and why those couriers have to be expendable. In the early days we tried other means – fast launches and one-man boats. But the time-drive is too bulky and expensive for such an application, especially if it is to have sufficient speed. So we evolved the method that will propel you. A massive generator will build up tremendous potential; that energy will be used to catapult you through the strat at high speed – much faster even than a battleship can move – and will give you sufficient momentum to reach your destination.

‘At first this method was tried out on unmanned missiles and even men in strat suits, but they would not do. The missiles got lost without a hand to guide them through the strat’s turbulence. A strat suit falls down on several counts: it’s bulky and so raises the energy requirement, its batteries would be able to maintain an ortho field only over short journeys anyway, and in any case using a strat suit defeats the whole object of the exercise because a courier needs to see the strat with his own eyes. It might work if we could include a scan screen such as a timeship has, but the weight of that would be prohibitive.

‘You will have some equipment with you, which will help you steer yourself towards your target. But what all this means is that for a while you’re going not just to see but to live in nonsequential strat time: in four-dimensional and five-dimensional time. No one can tell you what that will be like. Nevertheless we have to train you as well as we can so you’ll be able to carry out your task.’

The diving-helmet was lifted over Aton’s head to rest on his shoulders on a harness of foam rubber. He was in darkness. The technician’s voice came to him again, tinnily through the tiny earphones.

‘The purpose of this apparatus is to familiarise you, however inadequately, with what you will see immediately on entering the strat. It’s a mock-up, of course, since we cannot reproduce the real thing. The important thing for you to learn is how to keep your direction. Remember that reaching your destination is the only way you can ever leave the strat, and therefore the only way you can ever die . This, I assure you, will become your most vital concern.’