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

There was a third stage. My experiences began to include material that could only have come from within my own brain. I was back in my home city on my home planet. I was with my friends and loved ones. I relived events from the past. None of this was actually as it happened, but restructured and mixed together, as happens in dreams, and always with mingled emotions of joy, regret and nostalgia. Among it all, I also lived fantastic scenes from fiction; even comic-strip caricatures came to life, as if the Bees did not know the difference between them and reality.

My home world came, perhaps, to be my own private corner of the honey-store, though it is certainly only a minor item in the Bees’ vast hoard. Yet what a sense of desolation I always feel on coming out of it, in the periods when for some reason the magnetic currents no longer inflame my brain, and I realise it is only hallucination! I then find myself in this arid, lonely place, with Bees buzzing and trembling all around me, and as I crawl from the chamber for nearby food and water I know that I shall never, in reality, see home again.

For the time is long, long past when a rescue beacon could do anything to help me. Not that there was ever, in fact, any chance of constructing one. Because the Bees are not intelligent.

Incredibly, but truly, they are not intelligent. They have intellect merely, pure intellect, but not true intelligence, for this requires the exertion of both intellect and the feelings – and, most important, of the soul. The Bees have no feelings, any more than any other insect has, and – of this I am convinced – God has not endowed them with souls.

They are merely insects. Their intellectual powers, their avid thirst for knowledge, are but instincts with them, no different from the instinct that prompts the ants, bees and termites of Earth to feats of engineering, and which has also misled men into thinking those to be intelligent. No rational mind, able to respond to and communicate with other rational minds, lies behind their voracious appetite.

It seems fitting that if by some quirk or accident of nature intellectual brains should evolve in that class of creature roughly corresponding to our terrestrial arthropods (and Handrea offers the only case of this as far as I know, even though insect-like fauna are abundant throughout the universe), they should do so in this bizarre fashion. One does not expect insects to be intelligent, and indeed they are not, even when endowed with analytical powers greater than our own.

But how long it took me to grasp this fact when I strove so desperately to convey messages to the Hive Mind! For there is a Hive Mind; but it has no qualities or intelligence that an individual Bee does not have. It is simply an insect collectivised, a single Bee writ large, and would not be worth mentioning were it not for one curious power it has, or that I think it has.

It seems able, by some means I cannot explain, to congeal objects out of thought. Perhaps these objects are forms imprinted on matter by magnetism. At any rate several times I have found in the chamber small artifacts which earlier I had encountered in visions, and which I do not think could have been obtained on Handrea. Once, for instance, I found a copy of a newspaper including in its pages the adventures of the Amazing Human Spider.

And recently I discovered a small bound book in which was written all the events I have outlined in this account.

I no longer know whether I have copied my story from this book, or whether the book was copied by the Bees from my mind.

What does it matter? I do not know for certain if the book, or indeed any of the other objects I have found in the chamber, really existed. The fact is that for all the abstract knowledge available to me, my grip on concrete reality has steadily deteriorated. I can no longer say with certainty which of the experiences given me by the honey really happened in my former life and which are alterations, interpolations or fantasies. For instance, was I really a companion of the Amazing Human Spider, a crime-fighter who leaps from skyscraper to skyscraper by means of his gravity-defying web?

I have been here for many years. My hair and beard are long and shaggy now that I no longer trim them. Often at the beginning I tried to break away from this addiction to the Bees’ honey, but without it the reality of my position is simply too unbearable. Once I even dragged myself halfway back to the vault of the junkheaps, but I knew all the time that I would be forced to return, so great is the pull of those waking dreams.

And so here I remain and must remain, more a parasite upon these monsters than I ever had imagined I could be. For monsters they are – monsters in the Satanic sense. How else can one describe creatures of such prodigious knowledge and such negligible understanding? And for my enjoyment I have this honey – this all-spanning knowledge. Mad knowledge, too great for human encompassing and fit only for these manic Bees and the work of their ceasless insect intellects. Knowledge that has no meaning, nothing to check or illuminate it, and which produces no practical end. And yet I know that even here, amid the unseeing Bees of Handrea, far from the temples and comforts of my religion, God is present.

Kayin often wondered why the autumnal phase of the City’s weather-cycle brought with it such an atmosphere of untidiness and decay. He sat holding Polla’s hand in the park, watching as the light over the City dimmed with the approach of night. Here, the gentle breeze that blew continuously through City 5 collected by fitful gusts into a modest wind, skirling up a detritus of torn paper, scraps of fabric and dust.

Rearing above the park’s fringe of trees the ranks of windows in the serried arrays of office buildings began to flick into life. The park was situated on a high level and well out towards the perimeter of the City, so that from this vantage point City 5, with its broken lines, blocks and levels, presented the appearance of a metal bowl finely machined into numerous rectilinear surfaces like an abstract sculpture. From the broken perimeter to the central pinnacle the City rose in a wide counter-curve to the curve of the crystal dome overhead, creating a deliberate but false impression of spaciousness. And indeed for a brief period in the late morning, when the light was brightest and the air filled with the sounds of industry, City 5 did manage to generate an atmosphere of liveliness, almost of excitement. But by mid-afternoon the illusion was gone. The crystal dome, glinting in the falling light, became oppressive, and when night arrived it grew over-reachingly, invisibly black, filling Kayin’s imagination with vacant images of outside .

‘Why don’t they leave the light on?’ he said irritably. ‘I don’t need any night-time.’

Polla did not answer. The reason was known to them both. Of all the carefully-arranged principles by which the City lived, routine was the most vital. Instead she disengaged her hand and put her arm round his neck in a fond, artless gesture. ‘You are getting moody lately,’ she told him.

He grunted. ‘I know. Can you blame me? This trouble with the Society. I’m out, you know. They don’t dare let me back after this. And the City Board will come down on my neck like a ton of steel.’

‘Oh, they’ll go easy, on you. What you did wasn’t really shocking by today’s standards. Anyway, something like that doesn’t usually bother you , Kayin.’

Kayin sighed. ‘You’re right, it’s not the Society. They won’t achieve anything anyway. Poll, have you ever taken a walk through the City from end to end?’

‘Sure,’ she laughed, ‘lots of times.’

So had he. Its diameter was a little short of five miles. Streets, offices, factories, houses, parks, level piled on level. Some parts of the City were laid out neatly, efficiently, others were warrens of twisting, turning passages. There was a fair amount of variety. But for some reason, on these walks of his, Kayin always seemed to find himself out at the perimeter, where the City proper met the crystal dome, piling up against it in irregular steps like a wave. It was not possible actually to touch the dome: the way was barred by a solid girdle of steel. For interest’s sake, Kayin would usually return through the basement of the City, where acre upon acre of apparatus managed the precise transformations of matter and energy that kept City 5 biologically viable, skirting round the vast sealed chambers that contained the old propulsion units that had brought them here centuries ago.