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

‘But how can you ignore them at a time this?’

‘I care only for my beloved Veaa,’ Vro said, gazing pitifully into the mausoleum. ‘Let the world perish, it’s nothing to me.’

Aton sighed deeply.

‘As for my father the emperor and his enterprise against the Hegemony,’ Vro went on, ‘that old lunatic could never be moved by anything I say to him anyway. I have not spoken to him for three years, yet he still expects me to command a wing of the armada! He will be disappointed. I shall not be here. I shall be away, into the future, to rescue my beloved and make her mine again!’

Without warning a change came over Vro’s face. He leaped to his feet and appeared to be listening intently.

‘What is it?’ asked Aton in alarm.

‘Can you not sense it?’

Aton became quiet and indeed did seem to sense something. A swelling that was inside him and outside him, in the air, in everything. Then he momentarily blacked out. When he came to, he was aware of a loss of consciousness lasting a split second.

Prince Vro went rushing about the room examining everything, peering into the mausoleum, studying his face in a mirror.

‘What happened?’ Aton asked in a subdued voice.

‘That’s the third time they’ve got through. Nothing’s changed here anyway. But then, I wouldn’t remember… not unless the change was discontinuous, perhaps not even then.’

‘The Hegemonics? They can strike even here?’

Vro nodded. ‘Usually they are beaten off, occasionally they manage to focus their projector for a second or two. Chronopolis has undergone a few minor changes, so the Achronal Archives tell us. I wonder what it is this time.’ His lips twisted wryly. ‘It could be for the best. Maybe my father has had some sense mutated into him.’

This revelation of how hard the Hegemonics were attacking was the most depressing thing Aton had met with so far. He laid his chin on his hands, thinking deeply. At length he decided upon something which had been brewing in his mind, but which he had not dared to think about up until now.

‘You can see why my father is so keen to get the armada under way,’ Vro remarked. ‘Much more of this and there won’t be any empire left.’

‘But once the armada is launched everything will get worse!’ Aton protested. ‘Both sides will let loose with everything they’ve got. The Hegemonics will use the time-distorter at full aperture!’

Vro did not seem interested. ‘What are you going to do now, Captain? You ought to give it some thought. It’s dangerous for you here. Once someone realises who you are they’ll make short work of you.’

‘I haven’t stopped trying yet. The emperor won’t listen to me. The Imperator won’t. There’s still someone left.’

‘Who?’

‘San Hevatar!’

Vro grunted. ‘Him! What do you expect him to do?’

‘I don’t know. The whole empire springs from him. Perhaps he can change everything. Perhaps he could even suppress the invention of time-travel.’

‘And wipe out the empire from the beginning?’ Vro’s voice was soft with awe.

There was a tight pain in Aton’s chest. When he spoke, his tone was leaden. ‘It sounds strange, doesn’t it? I, a committed servant of the empire, talking of annulling the empire. The ultimate in treachery. But I can see no other way. It is not just the empire that’s at stake now, it’s mankind, perhaps time itself. Mad the Imperator may be, but one thing it said is true: the enemy of the empire is the enemy of mankind. Perhaps madmen – or mad machines – can see clearly what saner men cannot.’

‘Your vision is certainly grandiose.’

‘With no communication through time each node would live separately, undisturbed. There would be no Chronotic Empire, but neither would there be any time-distorter, any Chronotic war, any strain on the fabric of time. Who can say what will remain when it finally rents open?’

‘And no Holy Church,’ Vro reminded him. ‘I wonder what San Hevatar will have to say to that.’

Aton turned to him. ‘You tell me you are heading for Node Six in the morning, Highness. Have you room for me aboard your yacht? Can you drop me off in the hinterland?’

‘I thought you could travel through time at will.’

‘Not quite at will. I have already tried. It seems my nervous system only asserts the ability during an emergency, or under certain kinds of duress.’

‘Well, it seems the least I can do,’ Prince Vro murmured, ‘to aid in the annihilation of the empire.’

The origin of the Chronotic Empire was, to some extent, obscured in the haze of recurrent time. It had taken place at a point in time that now lay between Node 5 and Node 6 – between Barek and Revere – about fifty years into the hinterland of Node 5. But two nodes had swept over the spot since the earth-shaking discovery attributed to San Hevatar. The empire had had three hundred years or more of nodal time, as apart from static historical or orthogonal time, in which to establish itself.

And during that nodal time the soul of San Hevatar had, of course, traversed his life several times, as had that of everyone around him. The world in which he lived had changed much in the course of those repetitions. The original San Hevatar would not have recognised it. Largely because of his own efforts, he was now born into a world where time-travel and the empire were already facts.

Most history books inferred that the Ixian family had already been the rulers of Umbul when San Hevatar placed the secret of time-travel at their disposal. Prince Vro told Aton, however, that he believed this to be a distortion of the truth. It was unlikely that the city of Umbul itself had existed in the beginning. As far as he could judge, the Ixians had not been kings or rulers, but the owners of a giant industrial and research conglomerate where San Hevatar had worked as a scientist. They had seized their chance to indulge their wildest ambitions, conquering past centuries, always moving pastward, where the technology was inferior to their own.

For his part San Hevatar had been a man with a vision. He had given a religious meaning to his discoveries and had found the past a fertile ground for his teachings. He had founded the Holy Church, thus giving the burgeoning Chronotic Empire a unifying culture.

Eventually the Ixians had realised that, once it was let loose on mankind, time-travel, which they had used so successfully, could also work against their interests. It would be particularly dangerous if time-travellers were to penetrate the empire’s rear, travelling into the past beyond the empire’s control and working changes there – changes which inevitably would influence the present in ways not planned by the Historical Office. They determined to fix a date in time beyond which time-travel could not be introduced. To this end the stupendous Stop Barrier had been built, consuming one-third of the imperial budget and rendering the past impenetrable to time-travellers. One day it would be moved back to bring yet more of history under the empire’s control, but for the moment it remained both the pastward limit on the empire’s expansion and its rearward protection.

Umbul, on the other hand, was much too close to the futureward frontier to be entirely safe from marauders from the future. A new imperial capital, Chronopolis, had been built close to the Stop Barrier, at what was designated Node 1 (although now another node, Node 0, lay between it and the barrier), protected by nearly the full extent of the empire.

So San Hevatar, prophet and God’s special servant, now lived a life of relative quietude away from the mainstream of events. But he continued, in each repetition of his life, to make the crucial discovery of how to move mass through time, paradoxically even while the evidence of that discovery was all around him before he had made it . It was as if his inner being performed this act as a sacred rite: the central, essential rite of the Church.