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

‘And that’s why,’ he finished briskly, ‘my younger self would never believe me if I went to him with such a wild tale.’

‘It’s logical,’ Aton commented. ‘The Historical Office would want to avoid paradoxes in anything as important as that. But you mentioned another assistant, Absol Humbart. Presumably he was put through this procedure too?’

‘Did I mention Absol Humbart? No, he wasn’t there,’ Rilke said vaguely. ‘Maybe he was in the earlier repetitions.’

The point didn’t seem worth pursuing. ‘So what do you propose to do?’ Aton asked.

The old man produced a heavy hand beamer from under his cloak. ‘Kill myself,’ he said simply. ‘It’s the only way. Kill the young Rilke before he makes that experiment in isolating pi-mesons, then none of this can happen. There’ll be no empire, no Chronotic wars. The world will be as it was before time-travel was invented.’

‘And how was that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody seems to know any more.’

‘Kill yourself,’ Aton said woodenly. ‘Are you really prepared to do that?’

‘Somebody has to do something. I can’t think of any other way, and besides I’m really responsible for what’s happening.’ His face creased. ‘It’s taken me six hours to reach this decision. Now I’ve taken it, I know what to do.’

‘Paradoxes,’ Aton murmured. ‘If you kill your earlier self, then you’ll no longer be alive to kill yourself.’

‘We’ll just have to let that sort itself out.’ Rilke jutted out his jaw ruminatively.

‘Why have you taken the trouble to tell me all this?’

‘Piloting the machine is a two-man job. One to navigate, one to steer. If anything happens to me you’ll still be able to get back, though. It’s programmed to retrace its course automatically.’

‘If you succeed,’ Aton mused, ‘there won’t be any question of coming back. There’ll be no time-travel. As a matter of fact, I probably won’t exist. Few people now living will.’

‘True. Well, what about it?’

Dwight Rilke’s self-sacrifice did not surprise Aton or occasion any particular admiration in him. The issues at stake were so awesome that the fate of any individual shrank to insignificance. Rilke was clearly not aware, however, of the other side of the coin; if the world returned to its original state, humanity would become extinct in a few hundred years.

But, in fact, Aton was certain that the reversion would not be anything like as complete as the aged scientist imagined; otherwise he would not for a moment have contemplated letting Rilke carry out the scheme. Rilke’s understanding of Chronotic mutations was evidently crude and simplistic. He did not realize that the original world had been so deeply erased that it could probably never reappear. Something else, resembling it in many features perhaps, would assemble itself out of the jumble the Chronotic Empire had made of time.

Which meant there was a good chance the annihilatory war that had made a desert of Earth would never take place. Mankind would survive even without time-travel.

‘All right, I’ll be your navigator,’ he told Rilke. ‘But it’s your show.’

He followed Rilke into the narrow cabin and examined the controls. They were antiquated, but he recognised them as the forerunners of the timeship controls he was used to.

Rilke closed the door and busied himself preparing for the journey. The drive unit started up with a whine, and Aton realised it was more powerful than he had first thought.

He studied the navigator screen. Rilke, mumbling to himself, phased them into the strat.

The Umbul of Node 6 was a place of slender towers whose smooth walls, straddled at the base, curved up to end in knife-edge peaks. It was a place of boulevards and curiously intricate passages that wound around the base legs of the soaring buildings. Inpriss Sorce ran through these passages in blind panic.

She had been in Umbul for a day and a half, during which she had not slept. She had found nowhere to live, nowhere to earn money. She had been too busy running.

On the chronliner she had searched desperately for the handsome young Time Service officer who had promised to help her. He was nowhere to be found and she could think of only one explanation: the Traumatics had already murdered him. Neither had she seen the man he had left the passenger lounge with.

But the officer’s warning was not lost on her. The Traumatics were playing cat-and-mouse with her. She could not escape them and they would kill her when they were ready.

When the chronliner docked she had fled into the city. She soon discovered there was nowhere she could go. As she stepped off the disembarkation ramp a man had emerged from the crowd and smiled at her.

It had been Rol Stryne!

She had run past him, but he hadn’t tried to stop her. Since then either he or the other man, Velen, had seemed to appear everywhere.

Now her nerve had finally cracked. She ran up to strangers in the street. ‘Help me, please help me!’ But they shouldered off her hysterical pleas. Once or twice she mentioned the Traumatics, but that only made the response even more hostile. The Traumatics were a secret power, here in Umbul as elsewhere, and there was scarcely a citizen who would knowingly cross them.

Inpriss collapsed on to a bench, sobbing.

A man sat down beside her.

‘You see, baby, it just isn’t any good to fight it. Go along with it, it’s better that way.’

She looked up open-mouthed into the lean, predatory face of Stryne.

‘You just have to co-operate,’ he told her soothingly. ‘Then the hunt will be over.’

Suddenly she was like a rabbit hypnotised by a stoat. Her eyes were glazed. ‘You want me to come with you willingly,’ she said in a flat, empty voice. ‘That’s why you let me go before. Because I wasn’t willing.’

‘That’s right, honey. You understand now.’ He flashed a knowing glance at Velen, who was standing nearby, and made a signal to the helpers, who had been keeping track of the woman for them and were hovering in the background, to disperse.

She had broken and would obey them. Stryne knew how to recognise the signs. In a way he was slightly regretful it was ending so soon. Many victims kept up the chase for years. He knew of one, a man, who had been pursued for two decades before submitting.

‘Hulmu is the only true reality, sweetheart. You’ll find that out soon. You’re going to him.’

She closed her eyes.

‘Come on, Inpriss. Let’s go.’

Meekly she rose and walked with the two men, clutching her satchel. She was in the grip of something she had never felt before: a resignation so strong it overpowered her. It wasn’t as if they had broken her will. It was as if her will had changed, so that she agreed with what they were going to do to her, simply because she couldn’t see any other future.

‘You see, honey, by the time we get to this stage we’re doing you a favour,’ Stryne told her as they walked. ‘Just imagine if we didn’t sacrifice you for some reason or another. Every time your life repeated you’d have to go through all this again. But this way your life won’t repeat. Your soul will go to Hulmu. You’ll never have to endure the pursuit again.’

‘Where are we going to do it?’ Velen asked eagerly. ‘Somewhere nice and quiet? We could hire a hotel room.’

‘We have to go to the main temple,’ Stryne informed him. ‘The Minion himself is taking an interest in this case. He’ll be watching.’

‘The Minion? Wow!’

‘Yes, he’s one, Your Highness. I was right.’

In Prince Vro’s suite in the discreet, extremely select Imperial Hotel a man was stretched out on the floor. The oblong plates of the field-effect device stood on either side of his head. Perlo Rolce fiddled with the device’s knobs, watching a small screen with a greenish tint across which dim shapes flickered, while one of his men knelt by the prisoner holding a pain-prong.