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

The freckled red-head rose, grinning shyly, and stood by the table, on which stood a video unit. ‘As you know, public knowledge concerning the origin of City 5, the whereabouts of Earth and so on, has fluctuated considerably over the years by reason of the Mandatory Cut-Off of information, as the Administrative Ramification vacillated between the theory that total ignorance is best and the theory that full knowledge is best. Over the past ten years Mandatory Cut-Off has been relaxed considerably – otherwise our Society couldn’t exist – and along with the upsurge of interest in scientific matters we have been able to gain access to some information that wasn’t available before.

‘Nevertheless our astronomical knowledge has been slight, particularly where it affects our relations with Earth. We know that the City came from Earth some hundreds of years ago, that we can never go back, and that essentially we must remain here for all time. I think we can take it that the pendulum of policy is swinging towards freedom because, by sedulously bending the ears of a few sympathetic parties in the Administrative Ramification, Ham-Ra and myself gained official permission to make use of the City’s last remaining nucleon rocket in order to undertake an expedition to the sidereal universe, or as close to it as we could safely get.’

‘That’s fantastic!’ said a voice into the ensuing silence.

Tamm nodded. ‘The condition we had to agree to is that the results of the expedition, and the information we gained from it, remain the property of the Ramification and should not be divulged outside the Society. Furthermore only two members were permitted to go on the trip. For various reasons Ham-Ra stood down in favour of Kayin, who together with myself made up the crew. It would have been nice if you could all have seen what we saw, but we made complete video recordings throughout, so to that extent you can share the experience with us.

‘You will see that the expedition was not only one of exploration; it was also a concession on the Ramification’s part on divulging historical knowledge in the form of an instruction tape on the rocket itself. What you learn will probably not surprise any of us much, but it will still give us a great deal to think about.’

He pressed a stud on the video unit. A large wall screen lit up. Tamm and Kayin were in the nucleon rocket’s main cabin in bucket seats before a curved control panel. Kayin’s keen, intelligent face turned towards the pick-up.

‘We are going out through the egress sphincter now. In a few moments we should be the first people of our generation to see the City from outside.’

With a flicker, because of rather hasty editing, the picture changed to show a view through one of the ports. Everyone in the room held his breath. At first they only saw what appeared to be a vast curving wall, just visible as a dull metallic sheen due to an unseen source of illumination. Then, as the rocket drifted away, they got a full view of the City seen side-on: a huge disc-shaped slab surmounted by a graceful glittering dome in which could be discerned a low profile of shadowy shapes.

The rocket mounted above the City and hovered over it, somewhat to one side. They were looking down on the dome now and the City was suspended in space at an odd angle, blazing with light in an otherwise unbroken, impenetrable blackness.

They could have stared at it for ever; but suddenly they were back in the cabin again and this time Tamm was speaking to them while Kayin piloted the rocket. ‘Athough we can see nothing out here even with the ship’s telescope – apart from the City, that is – we have been given a guidance tape that should take us to the sidereal universe or the material universe as it is alternatively called. The distance is about three light-years, so we should be there very quickly.’

The picture flickered wildly again; Tamm had cut out half an hour of uneventful tape. When they came back it was in the middle of a word. Tamm was shouting wildly.

‘—look at that! Just look at that!’

The pick-up was once more pointing outside. The sight that met their eyes was more spectacular even than the panorama of the City. The first impression was of a blaze, of scattered light, of fire. Nearby, a few huge misty spirals hung in the void; further away, on either side, above and below, and far off into the depths, masses of similar spirals and glowing clouds and streamers receded into the distance, while a sort of diamond dust seemed to be infused among them all.

The scene was hypnotic, and the pick-up camera lingered on it for a considerable time. After the first impact, the impression was gained that the phenomenon, though big, was limited in size: the larger-looking spirals, though majestic, were some distance away and on the straggling edge of the cloud, whose limits seemed to define a slight but perceptible curve.

At that moment they became aware that the rocket’s instruction tape had clicked into action, delivering a neat lecture in the quiet, calm voice of an electronic vodor. So unobtrusive was the voice at first that they failed to hear it in the general excitement:

‘…we have now passed the first threshold beyond which the material universe becomes visible, and are approaching the second threshold. You are warned severely against attempting to cross the second threshold; such a manoeuvre is generally agreed to be almost impossible or at any rate prohibitively difficult, and if by chance you should succeed and actually enter the material universe, you will not be able to leave again and will suffer the fate of all the matter it contains. Proceed with care: your visual instincts will probably tell you that the edge of the material universe, the metagalaxy as it is sometimes called, is light-years away or at least many millions of miles away. It is, in fact, very close. The galaxies you are now seeing are only a few miles in diameter, many of them less than a mile in diameter, and the entire conglomeration of galactic and stellar systems is still shrinking steadily.

‘The cause of the shrinkage of matter has not been ascertained with any certainty. It was first detected in AD 5085, Old Reckoning, when specific anomalies relating to the velocity and wave-length of light revealed that all phenomena having the properties of mass-energy were shrinking relative to the unit of space. Extrapolation of the equations led to the conclusion that a point would be reached, and that fairly soon, when the fundamental particles would be too small to maintain their identity in the space-time frame and that therefore all matter everywhere would vanish from existence.

‘Since the shrinkage related to the metagalaxy as a whole, it was theorised that if an entity or system could escape beyond the by then known boundaries of the sidereal universe then it might also escape the field of the shrinking process and survive. Luckily the centuries-old Problem of Velocity had recently been solved, and already ships had been built capable of traversing the whole diameter of the metagalaxy in a fairly short period of time. The first attempts to pass into the space beyond the metagalaxy, however, met difficulty. Either the shrinkage field or the metagalaxy itself set up an interface with the rest of space that constituted a barrier to the passage of matter. Penetration of the barrier was, however, theoretically possible, and was attempted over a considerable period of time by ships equipped with specially powerful drive units. Eventually one such ship succeeded, to return with the report that the void beyond the metagalaxy, though it appeared to contain no matter itself, would accept the existence of matter placed in it and maintain it in a stable, non-shrinking state.

‘As the universe shrank, the barrier grew more impenetrable. If anything was to be preserved, it was essential to act quickly. Twenty self-contained cities were constructed and equipped with the most powerful drive units. As they headed at top speed for the perimeter of the material realm they were able to observe a large number of ships, cities and similar constructs doing the same from various points in the universe. None of these alien launchings met with success and mankind’s effort did only marginally better. As they encountered the barrier and strove to make their exit, all but one of the Earth cities either blew up or otherwise failed to break through. It can now be said with certainty that City 5 is the sole fragment of matter to have escaped the shrinking metagalaxy, where the current state of materiality is such that biological life is believed to be no longer possible.