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

‘Does the girl know about you too?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’d better stay out of her way. We can’t let this get to the captain.’

Aton made a lunge for freedom, kicking with his feet, butting and shoving with his body. Before he could gain the door they had restrained him and held him in a corner where he panted in quiet fury.

Quelle swaggered in front of him. ‘It’s not only the Imperial Time Service that’s host to the Cult of Hulmu, Captain. We Traumatics make much use of the internodal facilities.’

‘What shall we do with him, Quelle?’ the security officer asked.

‘Maybe we could use him,’ one of the guards said in a caressing voice, looking Aton over in a way that was incongruous coming from this burly, blue-jowled strong-arm man.

‘Don’t be a fool, he hasn’t been pointed.’

‘He’s no problem,’ Quelle said gleefully. ‘He may have been my captain once, but the truth is that now he’s a condemned convict who’s escaped from the Courier Service. We can get rid of him without anybody asking questions.’

‘Good. We’ll put him through the garbage chute.’

Quelle cackled, eyeing Aton with undisguised hatred. ‘I’m sorry about this, Captain, speaking as one chronman to another. But you see how it is – dog eat dog.’ He darted a look at the security officer. ‘I hate to do this to my own superior officer, you understand.’

‘You traitor,’ breathed Aton. ‘You’re worse than scum.’

‘Don’t you go saying that, now.’ Quelle seemed genuinely hurt. ‘I’m a good chronman. Religion is one thing, the Time Service is another. Why, as soon as my leave is finished I’ll be riding out with His Chronotic Majesty’s armada!’

One of the guards checked the corridor outside to ensure it was empty. The officer gave Aton another dose of the numb-prong so that he could give as little trouble as possible. Then they were dragging him along the passageway.

After a few yards they opened a grey-painted door and proceeded through narrow service passages, safe from the eyes of either passengers or crew. Aton knew that for the moment attempts at resistance were useless, and bided his time. Presently, close against the outer wall of the ship, they came to an area littered with cardboard boxes and tubs of rubbish.

The mouth of a big cylindrical chute, with a covering lid clamped shut, projected from one wall and was accompanied by several large steel levers. The two guards gripped Aton’s arms tight.

‘You tried to put me in the strat once, Captain,’ Quelle murmured. ‘It’s my turn now, I reckon.’

Aton struggled weakly. The security officer pulled on one lever; the chute’s lid swung open. Aton was swung off his feet and inserted into the smelly cylinder, upon which the lid closed up over him to leave him for a moment in darkness, his feet pressing upon some further obstruction down in the chute.

Then this too, a second valve, slid open. He heard a clicking, grating noise and then the chute’s hydraulic rams swept down on him, clearing the chute. He was pushed at speed through the ship’s wall, through the limit of the containing orthogonal field, back into the strat.

Supernal fire burned all around him. Looking back, Aton saw the chronliner receding into the futureward – the plus-ward, in chronman’s jargon – direction.

The fate of anyone else thrown into the strat would have been clear. They would sink deeper and deeper into mere potentiality, into the Gulf of Lost Souls. If, as a time-courier, he had failed to reach his target that would have been his fate too, once he lost momentum.

But now he had nothing to fear from such a horrendous ending – if ending it could be called. He could move through the strat at will, by the mere wish.

His intention was to return to the chronliner where he would continue his efforts to help the Traumatics’ frightened quarry, the unfortunate Inpriss Sorce. When he willed himself to follow the timeship, however, another, deeper urge in him took over and instead he moved with accelerating speed minuswards – into the past and towards Chronopolis. His sojourn aboard the chronliner had, it seemed, been but an accidental interruption of his journey.

For it was slowly becoming clear to Aton that his subconscious mind, not his waking thoughts, was controlling his destiny. His subconscious mind had discovered, under duress, the secret of time-travel. And now it was sending him, at near-courier speed, on a mission to save the empire !

To one side the shimmering leaden wall of the ortho-world flashed by. He knew that he could phase himself into that world anywhere he liked, choosing any of the millions of locations and scenes that the endless screen presented.

But he passed them all by. Prompted by his inner urgings, he had a definite destination in mind.

Chronopolis. Node 1. The Imperial Palace.

After what seemed like a long time the majestic vision of the empire’s administrative centre swung up before him. He sped closer, seeing it expand as upon a holo cinema screen. Then he phased himself into actual, orthogonal time.

Archivist Illus Ton Mayar, a slender wispy figure standing alongside the stocky detective Perlo Rolce, exhibited some awkwardness as he delivered his final report to Prince Vro Ixian.

When informed that the investigation he had ordered was complete, Vro had answered peevishly: ‘It has taken you long enough!’ and had turned his back on them to gaze into the holocast of the empty mausoleum.

‘An undertaking of this kind does take time , Your Highness,’ Mayar told him apologetically. ‘It was with the greatest difficulty that I was able to include it in our work programme. The tragic events befalling the empire have practically overloaded the capacity of the archives.’

‘Yes, all right. What have you to tell me?’

‘Perlo Rolce’s suspicion has been vindicated. The body of Princess Veaa has disappeared in a causal hiatus.’

‘And what is that, exactly?’

‘Put simply, a dislocation in time. A failure of cause and effect to match up. In practical terms, Princess Veaa was transported to Node Six and, presumably, hidden there. Later a crack in time appeared; all events leading up to a certain point – in the city of Umbul – were wiped away. Normally this would lead to the body still being back in Chronopolis, never having been removed. Instead the effect of the now-nonexistent cause remains: the body remains where it was hidden.’

‘But with the trail leading to it eradicated,’ Rolce put in.

Prince Vro nodded his understanding. ‘All this would have seemed incredible only a short while ago. Now it seems commonplace.’

Mayar murmured in agreement. The attacks from the Hegemony had intensified. Not only were whole continents undergoing existential deformation but the empire now seemed riddled with cause-and-effect cracks, some of them large enough to present enormous administrative difficulties. Sometimes it seemed to Mayar, from his unique standpoint, that the structure of time was about to come crashing down like a shattered vase.

‘It’s like magic,’ Vro said wonderingly. ‘She’s been spirited away with no one doing it.’

‘That’s what it amounts to, Your Highness,’ Rolce said stiffly.

‘Well.’ Vro’s voice became brisker. ‘What can you do to find her?’

‘The temporal discontinuity has been mapped, Your Highness.’ Mayar produced a thick scroll and opened it, laying it on the table. It was so large that it covered the whole surface.

Vro stared perplexed at the chart, written in the esoteric Chronotic symbolism used by the Achronal Archives. Mayar explained that the vertical grid bars referred to time-units, though whether to minutes, days or months he did not say. He pointed out the jagged, wandering line that staggered through the neat layout like an earthquake crack.