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

I remember the time they came to him and demanded a national working week of twenty-five hours. This was just after the King’s men had innocently tried to institute a sixty-hour working week, and had necessarily been restrained.

The petitioners knew how impossible it was; they were just trying to make trouble.

The King received them amid the sparse trappings of his Court. A few of his aides were about, and a few human advisers. Then he lifted his head and asked for help.

‘Advise me,’ he said to everyone present.

But the hostile influences in the hall were so great that all those who might have helped him shrugged their shoulders. That was the way things were. I said nothing.

‘If the proposal is carried out,’ the King told the ministers, ‘current programmes will not go through.’

He tried to reject the idea, but they amazingly refused to let it be rejected. They threatened and intimidated, and one gentleman began to talk hypocritically about the will and welfare of the people. Naturally there was no response: the King was not equipped. He surveyed the hall again. ‘He who can solve this problem, come forward.’

There was a lethargic, apathetic suspension. The aliens were immobile, like hard brilliant statues, observing these dangerous events as if with the asceticism of stone. Then there was more shrugging of shoulders.

It speaks for the leniency of the extraterrestrials that this could happen at all. Among human royalty, such insolence would bring immediate repercussions. But the mood was contagious, because I didn’t volunteer either. Hotch’s machinations had a potential, unspoken element of terrorism.

Whether the King realised that advice was being deliberately withheld, I don’t know. He called my name and strode to the back of the hall.

I followed his authoritatively gyrating cloak, reluctantly, like a dreading schoolboy. When I reached him, he said: ‘Smith, it is knowledge common to us both that my thinkings and human thinking are processes apart. Not even Sorn could have both kinds; but he could translate.’ He paused for a moment, and then continued with a couple of sentences of the mixed-up talk he had used on Sorn, together with some of the accompanying queer honks and noises. I couldn’t follow it. He seemed to realise his mistake, though, for he soon emerged into fairly sensible speech again, like this: ‘ Honk . Environs matrix wordy. Int apara; is trying like light to; apara see blind, from total outside is not even potential… if you were king, Smith, what would you do?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘people have been angered by the impositions made on them recently, and now they’re trying to swing the pendulum the other way. Maybe I would compromise and cut the week by about ten hours.’

The King drew a sheaf of documents from a voluminous sash pocket and spread them out. One of them had a chart on it, and lists of figures. Producing a small machine with complex surfaces, he made what appeared to be a computation.

I wished I could find some meaning in those cold jewel eyes. ‘That would interfere with my armament programme,’ he said. ‘We must become strong, or the King of Brazil will lay Britain waste.’

‘But surely it’s important not to foster a discontented populace?’

‘Important! So often I have heard that word, and cannot understand it. Sometimes it appears to me, Smith, that human psychology is hilly country, while mine is a plain. My throne-room contains hints that some things you see as high, and others as low and flat, and the high is more powerful. But for me to travel this country is impossible.’

Smart. And it made some sense to me, too, because the King’s character often seemed to be composed of absences. He had no sense of crisis, for example. I realised how great his effort must have been to work this out.

‘And “importance”,’ he continued. ‘Some mountain top?’

He almost had it. ‘A big mountain,’ I said.

For a few seconds I began to get excited and thought that perhaps he was on his way to a semantic break-through. Then I saw where I was wrong. Knowing intellectually that a situation is difficult, and why it is difficult, is not much use when it comes to operating in that situation. If the King had fifty million minds laid out in diagram, with all their interconnections (and this is perfectly possible) he would still be no better able to operate. It is far too complex to grasp all at once with the intellect; to be competent in an environment, one must live in it, must be homogeneous with it. The King does not in the proper sense do the former, and is not the latter.

He spent a little while in the throne-room, peering through thresholds, no doubt, gazing at pools and wondering about the mountainous. Then he returned and offered the petitioners a concession of ten minutes off the working week. This was the greatest check he thought he could allow on his big industrial drive.

They argued angrily about it, until things grew out of hand and the King ordered me to dismiss them. I had to have it done forcibly. Any one of the alien courtiers could have managed it single-handed by mere show of the weapons on his person, but instead I called in a twenty-man human bodyguard, thinking that to be ejected by their own countrymen might reduce their sense of solidarity.

All the humans of the court exuded uneasiness. But they needn’t have worried. To judge by the King and his men, nothing might have happened. They held their positions with that same crystalline intelligence which they had carried through ten years of occupation. I was beginning to learn that this static appearance did not wholly result from unintelligibility, but that they actually maintained a constant internal state irrespective of external conditions. Because of this, they were unaware that the scene that had just been enacted comprised a minor climax. Living in a planar mentality the very idea of climax was not apparent to them.

After the petitioners had gone, the King took me to his private chambers behind the courtroom. ‘Now is the time for consolidation,’ he said. ‘Without Sorn, the governing factions become separated, and the country disintegrates. I must find contact with the indigenous British. Therefore I will strike a closer liaison with you, Smith, my servant. You will follow me around.’

He meant that I was to replace Sorn, as well as I could. Making it an official appointment was probably his way of appealing for help.

He had hardly picked the right man for the job, but that was typical of the casual way he operated. Of course, it made my personal position much worse, since I began to feel bad about letting him down. I was caught at the nexus of two opposing forces: even my inaction meant that somebody would profit. Altogether, not a convenient post for a neutral passenger.

Anyway, since the situation had arisen, I decided to be brash and ask some real questions.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but for whose sake is this war being fought – Britain’s or yours?’

As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt a little frightened. In the phantasmal human-alien relationship, such earthy examinations were out of place. But the King accepted it.

‘I am British,’ he answered, ‘and Britain is mine. Ever since I came, our actions are inseparable.’

Some factions of the British public would have disagreed with this, but I supposed he meant it in a different way. Perhaps in a way connected with the enigmatically compelling characters and aphorisms that had been erected about the country, like mathematics developed in words instead of numbers. I often suspected that the King had sought to gain power through semantics alone.

Because I was emotionally adrift, I was reckless enough to argue the case. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘without you there would be no war. The Brazilians would never fight without compulsion from their own King, either. I’m not trying to secede from your authority, but resolve my opinion that you and the King of Brazil are using human nations as instruments… in a private quarrel.’