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

Kord permitted himself a direct glance into Kiang’s mobile face. They’re afraid of us, he thought. They feel young in our presence; they’re aware that we were old and wise, sitting on this board, before they were babies. But they’ll fight us if they have to.

The members of the Permanent Board lived for only one day a year. Thus one year of ageing for them spanned three hundred and sixty-five years of City 5 history. Without this device of a permanent guiding hand, Kord believed, the City would never have maintained its historical stability thus far – and in this small, unique, precious island of life stability was all-important. If social tendencies slowed down enough to require less readjustment, the dormant period could be extended to ten years, perhaps even to a hundred years.

At the moment those long, restful sleeps seemed a long way off. Inwardly Kord sighed. He was the last of a line of leaders, including men like Chairman Mao and Gebr Hermesis, who had tried to reform the mind of humanity and fix it with an eternal pattern. Always the problem was one of training the new generation to think in every way like the old. Humanity had survived their failures, but Kord was convinced that it would not survive his.

Angrily he flung the file he had studied at Kiang. ‘A hundred years ago you would have been executed for the contents of that file. I spare you now only on the assumption that rectification of the situation will immediately be taken in hand.’

‘…We do not necessarily agree, Chairman, that rectification is necessary.’

‘How many times do I have to spell it out to you, gentlemen?’ Kord said, his voice becoming gravelly with displeasure. ‘We are concerned with preserving the City, not for a thousand years, not for a million, but for ever , for eternity . Due to the nature of the human psyche this is only possible if life is regularized in every detail. There must be no new directions, no individuality, no innovations or originality of thought. The City is small. It must be protected from itself.’ Kord felt himself sweating. Only a few years ago the consciousness of what was required for survival was infused in the Ramification, in the mind of the City itself. Yet over and over again, through the centuries, he had gone through exactly such arguments as this. It seemed that the tendency to deviate, to forget, was ever-present and in time entered even the Temporary Board itself. Even so, Kord was shocked to find that the position had deteriorated so quickly in the past year, his perpetual nightmare was that one day he would awake to find that his authority was no longer valid.

‘You have made the severest mistake,’ he continued, ‘committed the greatest crime, in giving youth its head. The absolute pre-condition for a permanent social pattern is the complete subordination and conditioning of the younger generation. But what do I find? Led on by your own foolish ambitions, you have permitted youth to set in train what threatens to be a virtual renaissance in the arts and sciences.’

‘We have been giving the matter considerable thought for some time, Chairman,’ Chippilare put in. ‘As we see it, you fear initiative because it will upset the balance; but we fear stasis because it produces a movement in the other direction, towards decay. The City can die through a progressive depletion of psychic energy, as well as through an explosion of it.’

‘There has been a noticeable air of apathy and drabness about the City of recent years,’ Kuro said. ‘Perhaps you, in suspended animation, have missed it. It was to counteract this decline in tone that we decided to liven things up a bit.’

‘In fact,’ added Freen, ‘we now question whether a society can be kept in good health without innovation and change.’

‘It can,’ answered Kord firmly, aware by now that he had a full-scale rebellion on his hands. ‘There were many such societies on Earth, usually of a primitive nature, which were eventually destroyed only by change and innovation introduced from outside. In particular, the aborigines of the prehistoric period on the continent of Australia maintained a fully developed culture for thousands of years, believing their origins to be in an immensely distant “dream time”. We have to create a “dream time” for our people.’

‘That’s right,’ said Elbern, looking at Freen with a certain amount of hostility. ‘The reason for the long-term stability of the aborigines was that, living in a sparse, poorly-endowed land, all their energies were taken up in the considerable skills needed to survive. We are perhaps unfortunate in that with our level of technology we can take care of our basic needs fairly easily – that is why we have tried to, replace preoccupation with short-term needs with preoccupation with long-term needs, in the maintenance of the basic machinery, in the continual drawing up of new plans for the redesign of the City, and above all in the inertial stocktaking, which takes up an enormous amount of the population’s labour-time and is concerned with accounting for every atom of the City’s mass. I do not need to remind you how important that activity is if we are to conserve all our mass and energy over billions and billions of years.’

The Temporary Board looked embarrassed and cast covert glances at one another. At length Kiang ventured: ‘Our recent philosophical studies have cast doubt on the very basis of the City’s plan for existence. We have been studying the very fact of matter itself. It has been known ever since the early formulation of dialectical materialism that motion and tendency, opposing forces and so on, are the very basis of matter whether it takes physical, mental or social forms. If the principle of opposition, as for instance in a class struggle of some sort, is fundamental then how can you be sure that a static or self-perpetuating state is even possible? You cannot name any Earth society that remained stable for all time.’

Kiang was voicing Kord’s private fears, but he said nothing, only stared stonily.

‘Furthermore,’ Kiang continued, ‘we have to take note of the fact that materiality is an extraordinary and temporary occurrence in the space-time frame. More and more we have become convinced that the materiality of the sidereal universe consisted of an accidental polar opposition with no inherent tendency towards stability. It had to move some way, and in so doing the transient balance was lost; hence the shrinkage of matter and its final disappearance. But where does that leave us? The materiality of City 5 is even more isolated and vulnerable. At any moment in time it may suddenly collapse and disappear. So there is not much point in our planning for eternity.’

Throughout this argument the Permanent Board had listened in silence. When Kiang had finished Bnec, Kord’s specialist in physics, let out an expression of disgust.

‘A very pretty speech! You palpitating fool, is your brain so addled that you have forgotten your special access beyond the Mandatory Cut-Off? Or do you believe yourself to be too progressive to learn anything from the superhuman efforts of your ancestors? Can you seriously imagine that these questions were not thrashed out, researched and resolved millennia ago?’

Kord held up his hand to quell the brewing quarrel. ‘Have no fear, the material of the City is sound as far as science can tell. Also, we shall not run out of energy provided we lose no appreciable mass: it has been found that we are in a privileged position here, in that there is a conservation of mass-energy. The material polarity, as you correctly call it, is self-conserving. When atomic energy, say, is released from matter to perform useful work, it is not dissipated but we absorb it elsewhere in the City. Thus as long as the total mass remains constant the same energy can be released again and again in a cyclic action. Apart from that we have proved that we can keep the genetic material of the population stable. So our problem concerns only the conscious, active life of the City, without which none of these principles can be maintained.’