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

A worm’s place is at home – that is my opinion, and I strongly recommend that you repair hither post-haste. As for whether you should or should not communicate with ignorant savages, that is of absolutely no interest to me.

Your most displeased uncle,

I saw Sorn’s bier, an electrically driven train decorated like a fanfare, as it left the North Sea Bridge and passed over the green meadows of Yorkshire. Painted along its flank was the name HOLATH HOLAN SORN, and it motored swiftly with brave authority. From where we stood in the observation-room of the King’s Summer Palace, we could hear the hollow humming of its passage.

‘You will not find things easy without Holath Holan Sorn,’ I said, and turned. The King of All Britain was directing his mosaic eyes towards the train.

‘Things were never easy,’ he replied. But he knew as well as I that the loss of Sorn might mean the loss of a kingdom.

The King turned from the window, his purple cloak flowing about his seven-foot frame. I felt sorry for him: how would he rule an alien race, with its alien psychology, now that Sorn was dead? He had come to depend entirely upon that man who could translate one set of references into another as easily as he crossed the street. No doubt there were other men with perhaps half of Sorn’s abilities, but who else could gain the King’s trust? Among all humans, none but Sorn could be the delegate of the Invader King.

‘Smith,’ he said, addressing me, ‘tomorrow we consign twelve tooling factories to a new armaments project. I wish you to supervise.’

I acknowledged, wondering what this signified. No one could deny that the aliens’ reign had been peaceful, even prosperous, and he had rarely mentioned military matters, although I knew there was open enmity between him and the King of Brazil. Either this enmity was about to become active, I decided, or else the King forecast a civil uprising.

Which in itself was not unlikely.

Below us, the bier was held up by a junction hitch. Stationary, it supplemented its dignity by sounding its klaxon loudly and continuously. The King returned his gaze to it, and though I couldn’t read his unearthly face I suppose he watched it regretfully, if he can feel regret. Of the others in the room, probably the two aliens also watched with regret, but certainly no one else did. Of the four humans, three were probably glad he was dead, though they may have been a little unsure about it.

That left myself. I was more aware of events than any of them, but I just didn’t know what I felt. Sometimes I felt on the King’s side and sometimes on the other side. I just didn’t have any definite loyalties.

Having witnessed the arrival of the bier from the continent, where Sorn had met his death, we had achieved the purpose of the visit to the Summer Palace, and accordingly the King, with his entourage of six (two fellow beings, four humans including myself) left for London.

We arrived at Buckingham Palace shortly before sunset. Wordlessly the King dismissed us all, and with a lonely swirl of his cloak made his way to what was in a makeshift manner called the throne-room. Actually it did have a throne: but it also had several other kinds of strange equipment, things like pools, apparatus with what psychologists called threshold associations. The whole chamber was an aid to the incomprehensible, insectile mentality of the King, designed, I suspected, to help him in the almost impossible task of understanding a human society. While he had Sorn at his elbow there had been little need to worry, and the inadequacy of the chamber mattered so little that he seldom used it. Now, I thought, the King of All Britain would spend a large part of his time meditating in solitude on the enigmatic throne.

I had the rest of the evening to myself. But I hadn’t gone far from the palace when, as I might have guessed, Hotch placed his big bulk square across my path.

‘Not quite so fast,’ he said, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly.

I stopped – what else could I have done? – but I didn’t answer. ‘All right,’ Hotch said, ‘let’s have it straight. I want nobody on both sides.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know.

‘Sorn’s dead, right? And you’re likely to replace him. Right?’

‘Wrong,’ I told him wearily. ‘Nobody replaces Sorn. He was the one irreplaceable human being.’

His eyes dropped in pensive annoyance. He paused. ‘Maybe, but you’ll be the closest to the King’s rule. Is that so?’

I shrugged.

‘It has to be so,’ he decided. ‘So which way is it going to be, Smith? If you’re going to be another traitor like Sorn, let’s hear it from the start. Otherwise be a man and come in with us.’

It sounded strange to hear Sorn called a traitor. Technically, I suppose he was – but he was also a man of genius, the rarest of statesmen. And even now only the 0.5 per cent of the population roused by Hotch’s super-patriotism would think of him as anything else. Britain had lived in a plentiful sort of calm under the King. The fact of being governed by an alien conqueror was not resented, even though he had enthroned himself by force. With his three ships, his two thousand warriors, he had achieved a near-bloodless occupation, for he had won his victory by the sheer possession of superior weapons, without having to resort much to their usage. The same could be said of the simultaneous invasion of Brazil and South Africa: Brazil by fellow creatures of the King, South Africa by a different species. Subsequent troubles in these two areas had been greater, but then they lacked the phlegmatic British attitude, and more important, they lacked Holath Holan Sorn.

I sighed. ‘Honestly, I don’t know. Some human governments have been a lot worse.’

‘But they’ve been human. And we owed a lot to Sorn, though personally I loathed his guts. Now that he’s gone – what? The King will make a mess of things. How do we know he really cares?’

‘I think he does. Not the same way a man would care, but he does.’

‘Hah! Anyhow, this is our chance. While he doesn’t know what he’s doing. What about it? Britain hasn’t known another conqueror in a thousand years.’

I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t know. Eventually he stomped off in disgust.

I didn’t enjoy myself that evening. I thought too much about Sorn, about the King, and about what Hotch had said. How could I be sure the King cared for England? He was so grave and gently ponderous, but did that indicate anything? His appearance could simply be part of his foreignness and nothing at all to do with his feelings. In fact if the scientists were right about him, he had no feelings at all.

But what purpose had he?

I stopped by Trafalgar Square to see the Green Fountains.

The hand of the invader on Britain was present in light, subtle ways, such as the Green Fountains. For although Britain remained Britain, with the character of Britain, the King and his men had delicately placed their alien character upon it; not in law, or the drastic changes of a conqueror, but in such things as decoration.

The Green Fountains were foreign, unimaginable, and un-British. High curtains of thin fluid curled into fantastic designs, creating new concepts of space by sheer ingenuity of form. Thereby they achieved what centuries of Terran artists had only hinted at.

And yet they were British, too. If Britons had been prompted to conceive and construct such things, this was the way they would have done it. They carried the British stamp, although so alien.

When I considered the King’s rule, the same anomaly emerged. A strange rule, by a stranger, yet imposed so easily.

This was the mystery of the King’s government: the way he had adopted Britain, in essence, while having no comprehension of that essence.