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

After they had been travelling for nearly two months Kayin took to spending long periods in the direct observation blister that, projecting from the hull of the rocket in a perfectly transparent bulge, formed a cavity of extrusion into space. Here was the only place in the rocket where the artificial gravity (derived from the same principle as the nucleon engine) did not operate. With the cavity light switched off, one might as well have been floating in free fall in the void itself. Kayin spent what seemed like hours staring out of the blister, into what to his eyes was simply blackness but which his mind knew to be infinity. His mind began working in new directions. Matter, he reasoned, had structure, but space was simply emptiness. Yet space, too, had structure of a kind. It had extension and direction. Was there, he wondered, a substratum to the void, a richer reality lying beneath it? After a while, for some dim sense of pleasure only vaguely known to himself, he took to coming into the cavity naked.

The human mind is not made to be without incoming sensory data for any but the briefest periods. The first consequence of sensory deprivation is that the subject loses, first the sense of his bodily outline, and then his sense of identity. Then, since the consciousness will not tolerate lack of perceptions, and being denied them from the external direction, it draws upon them from the inner direction, projecting on to the senses first hallucinations of a random, dream-like character, and then, if the process is continued, unlocking the archetypal symbols from the unconscious.

Kayin went through all these stages fairly quickly. Out in the void he saw vast wheeling mandalas, glimmering forms whose size was beyond the mind to compute. He saw the mystic triad, the mystic quaternity, exemplified in a thousand dazzling forms. He did not think or remark on what he saw, for he was not there . His personal identity was gone; his being consisted merely of an impersonalised consciousness of the symbols he saw.

Once he must have moved accidentally and bumped into the wall of the cavity. The bodily sensation brought him momentarily to himself. Flashing waves of excitement, of joy, swept through him. I’m seeing it , he thought. This is the reality underlying space, the structure of the world transcending it. Stay here long enough and it shows itself .

Then he was merged once again with the contents of the unconscious, a kind of paradisical, compelling, luring world. His next bodily sensation was a feeling of hotness. Vaguely he returned to himself, realising that genuine light was in his eyes. He turned slowly. The door of the cavity was open and Polls was drifting in, having turned on the illumination to a dim, soft glow.

She smiled at him distantly. They both rotated and twisted slowly round one another, hanging in the air. The hem of the short frock she wore was riding up, warping and twirling. To Kayin it was the most vivid thing he had ever seen, a vision thousands of miles across. Her face flashed with angelic light. The texture and colour of her skin radiated a soft, irresistible power.

He undid the clasp at her neck and pulled off the loose frock. They continued to turn and bend soundlessly in the cavity, the frock drifting away from them. Her body was angled slightly away from him, slightly above him. Reaching up, he first fondled then drew off her soft undergarment. Hot waves of unconsciousness swept through him.

The symbols and signs were still all around them, the very substance of their world. Kayin heard choking gasps, squeals and screams. He was submerged, spinning in endless glyphs of power and enjoying a withering, burning fire that ran in wide searing rivers and consumed the world.

Briefly he came again to consciousness of himself. They were suspended in the centre of the cavity. He was gripping Polla by her upper arms, and she his. Their bodies, held away from each other while he thrust between her legs, and joined at the genitals, were arched violently and bucking like wild animals, savagely butting, fucking. Dizzily vision again faded from his consciousness. He and the world were one identity, consisting of a huge, powerful and stiff phallus moving forward with steady purpose. Then he was at the same time a large opened vulva against which the phallus mashed and poked, making them both throb.

A murmur caught his ear. He was pressed up against Polla, his lips against hers and their bodies straining and heaving. Would they merge, blend, generating between them an androgyne with supernatural sexual powers?

Then, with a groan, they fell slightly apart and began grappling with the whole length of their bodies, limbs twisting and tangling, biting, gripping and kicking. Finally, after a last lunge at her, Kayin, fully restored to himself now, pushed her away and they hung staring at one another avidly.

Kayin and Polla lay weakly in the living apartment. For weeks they had been exhausting themselves in the outside cavity, pushing to the utmost every kind of sex that a male and a female can engineer between them.

It was a discovery that Kayin would have liked to take back to City 5. There was nothing like it. Twenty minutes alone in the cavity, and sex became like it had never been before. It seemed that all unconscious power was released and flooded into action.

‘Would you like to go home, Poll?’

‘I don’t care,’ she sighed quietly.

In between their frequent bouts Kayin had also given himself time to think. At first he had thought the visions he saw in the void, even in the blister cavity itself, were real, a hopeful revelation of a positive reality beneath the nothingness through which they moved. More soberly, he had now recognised them for what they were: projections from his own mind, the exteriorisation of basic psychic patterns, which spilled into the open when the constraining effect of sensory impressions was removed. One interesting thing about them was that both he and Polla frequently experienced the same images at the same time during their love-making, further evidence that the unconscious was a collective one.

‘Then we’re going home,’ he said firmly.

‘You don’t want to find the other universe?’ she spoke timidly, like a child. Such powerful and abundant sex as they had been getting seemed to have made her regress to something like a childish state.

‘There isn’t any other universe. What’s more, I’m pretty certain by now that there isn’t any space. No empty void .’

She didn’t understand what he meant, so he didn’t try to explain. The idea had formed itself slowly in his mind, and he felt sure that it was right. Space was a consequence of matter, not matter of space. Outside the sidereal universe, where there was no matter, there was no space either. When City 5 had escaped the metagalaxy, it had simply escaped into non-being .

It would not appear that way to observers, of course. Since space was always associated with matter, City 5 extended its own island of space. Projectiles sent out from it always did the same, generating as they went a fictitious measuring system of distances and velocities by which they orientated themselves.

The nucleon rocket was not going anywhere. It merely created its own ‘appearance’ of space as it ‘moved’ through an incomprehensible nullity. It was, in fact, hard to argue that it moved at all; such a statement was quite meaningless, as was its obverse that the rocket didn’t move.

None of which made any difference as regards piloting it. The rocket acted according to the laws of its materiality, for in nullity there were no laws. Kayin turned the ship round and gave the computer the problem of finding City 5. The moment of their return being mathematically certain, he and Polla then waited patiently for the rocket to deliver them there, indulging often in the pastime of which they never grew tired.