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

‘Have you so little faith?’ he said quietly. ‘The Church, the empire cannot – must not – be destroyed. It is eternal. The armada is God’s plan. The Evil One must be fought. Mankind must be saved.’

As he uttered the last words San Hevatar seemed to find speech increasingly difficult. To Aton’s amazement he passed his hand over his eyes and seemed to be in distress, rocking to and fro.

‘Fight the enemy of mankind, Captain Aton!’ he gasped as though in a trance. ‘Conquer his minion! All is not as it seems!’

Aton was fascinated to hear the prophet coming out with words almost identical to those of the Imperator . Then San Hevatar seemed to recover himself and become once more self-composed. He stood up.

‘Your concern, though bordering on the heretical, is commendable,’ he said smoothly, as though unaware of his words of a moment before. ‘It deserves a reward. It would be possible for me to have your sentence of death commuted. We have a certain monastery where by means of special techniques your dangerous gift can be unlearned and your nervous system returned to normal. Of course, it would be necessary for you to pass the rest of your life in seclusion, as a monk. You know too much to be returned to public life.’ He nodded. ‘Spend the night here and think it over. Rilke will look after you.’

Suddenly Aton said, ‘What do you know about a man with jewels for eyes?’

He did not know why the image had come to his mind so abruptly, but the prophet’s mouth opened and his face went ashen.

‘You have met him? Already?’

‘Yes.’

San Hevatar’s expression closed up. He reminded Aton of an insulted woman as he swept from the chamber, his long cope rustling.

The old man regarded Aton for long moments with tired eyes. ‘My name’s Dwight Rilke,’ he said, standing and offering his hand. ‘Come along with me, I’ll find you a room.’

Aton had slept for a number of hours when he was awakened by the sound of the door opening. He sat up. At the same time, the light came on.

Dwight Rilke entered the room, looking stooped, defeated and very tired. ‘Sorry if I’m disturbing you, Captain, but I want to talk to you,’ he said. He found a chair and sat down close to Aton, then licked his lips before speaking again in a dry, ancient voice.

‘Listen, I’ve been doing some hard thinking,’ he said. His eyes, though tired, were almost unnaturally bright. ‘San Hevatar isn’t really capable of responding to what you’ve been saying, you know. He’s too deep into his role… the whole weight of the empire is on him. I’m the one you should have been talking to, because I’m the one you’ve convinced.’

Aton felt a stir of interest. ‘Just who are you?’

‘Me? I was Hevatar’s assistant, you know.’

‘Yes, I can see that.’

‘No, I’m not talking about this religious stuff. I was his assistant; his scientific assistant. We were on the project together.’

‘ The project?’

‘Yes. Would you like to see it?’ Rilke rose. ‘Come on, I want to show it to you. You don’t mind, do you?’

He waited while Aton quickly dressed. Then Aton followed him through the passages and courtyards of the still brightly lit manse. Cowled monks and comforters stood guard here and there, some wearing handguns strapped over their habits. Rilke ignored them all, however, and halted before a door apparently made of solid lead. He took a big iron key from beneath his cloak and inserted it in a keyhole. There was a loud click, and the door swung open.

‘Here you are, this is where it all began.’

They entered what Aton, after, first taking in the profusion of heavy-duty equipment, realised was a high-energy physics research laboratory. This, he supposed with a feeling of awe, was the centrepoint of the whole empire.

Carefully Rilke closed the door behind them.

‘So this is where San Hevatar discovered the secret of time-travel!’ Aton breathed reverently.

‘Him? He didn’t discover it,’ Rilke told him flatly. ‘I did.’

Aton stared at him blankly. ‘You?’

‘Hevatar developed it, but I made the initial discovery.’ Rilke’s face softened, and he began to reminisce. ‘We were a team. Hevatar was the leader, Absol Humbart and myself were his chief assistants. There was a lot more equipment in here in those days. There were particle accelerators, high-energy plasma chambers, and so forth. But we weren’t even thinking of time-travel then. We never dreamed it was possible. We were investigating the nuclear binding force of baryons, that was all. One day I thought of a new way to isolate pi-mesons. When I set up the apparatus, by chance a surge gate malfunctioned and there was a sudden rush of power. Suddenly I found I had discovered a way to accelerate pi-mesons faster than light.’

The old man looked around the laboratory as if remembering. ‘It was an accident, a million-to-one shot. From then on, Hevatar took over. Naturally he grabbed something like that with both hands, and he explored it from all angles. Before long he had discovered the most important consequence of the effect I had produced: that it could be used to move mass through time. From then on there was no stopping him. He takes all the credit for it now, of course, but none of it would have happened if I hadn’t carried out that one experiment.’

‘You must feel proud.’

‘Do I? For a long time I did. But lately it frightens me. We get all the news here; we’re privileged in that respect. History is being ripped apart. It’s like seeing the end of the universe, but no one seems to realise that time itself can collapse and no one wants to stop it. I opened a real Pandora’s box when I made that experiment. And when you came this afternoon I realised that everything had gone too far.’

‘What happened to this other man – Absol Humbart? Is he dead?’

Rilke turned away and muttered something Aton could barely catch. ‘We’ve spoken of him already. Let’s not go into that.’

Aton reflected bitterly that of the only two people to share his view of the situation, one was too obsessed with his insane love for a corpse to care and the other was this weary old man.

‘I’m glad that you at least agree with me,’ he told Rilke. ‘But there seems little we can do.’

‘Isn’t there? There’s something I can do. Something I can try to do, at least. I can go back in time, prevent any of it from happening.’

‘You can do that?’

Rilke led him to a large dull-brown cabinet that at first Aton had taken to be a cupboard. ‘This is a functional time-machine. The very first, in fact.’ He opened the door. Inside Aton saw seats, a control panel.

‘You really think you stand a chance of influencing Hevatar’s – or your own – younger self?’

Rilke’s smile was wintry. ‘Hevatar has never been influenced by anybody. As for myself, I was an eager young pup and I certainly wouldn’t have passed up the chance to make a crucial discovery, not for anyone. Besides, there’s something you need to understand. We didn’t know the empire existed in those days. It’s strange, isn’t it? Time has changed such a lot. Past, present and future have all changed. But there’s one thing the empire and Church are very careful to see doesn’t change. They are careful to preserve the vital event that led to the creation of the empire. San Hevatar and myself were brought up under special conditions and weren’t allowed to know that there already was time-travel. We worked for the same company, Monolith Industries, that presumably we had worked for before anything had altered. But not until we had unearthed that one secret of how the time-drive works was the truth gradually revealed to us.’ He smiled. ‘It was like coming out of a dream. In a way we’d known all along; there was plenty of evidence for it if we had cared to piece it together. But we never had. The answer is, of course, that we were psychologically constrained in some way.