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

‘ Are you calling me a liar, you –? ’ Sinatra lunged towards Lancaster, an incredulous, outraged look on his face. He gesticulated at the wall holo. ‘ This is how you put those figures together, and this is what it means in a year’s time.’ And while he spoke he shot an even faster display at the holo stage.

Cagney spoke up lazily. ‘Frank is always talking about bringing out-of-syn business into syn. What for? I notice most of these properties seem to wind up in his own stable. What are you gonna do, Frank? Bring the whole of UnderMegapolis into syn?’

‘Sure!’ bellowed Sinatra. ‘I’d like it that way!’

Bogart lit a cigar, blowing aromatic smoke that appeared to drift out of the holo and into the room. ‘Great,’ he observed. ‘So whenever anything goes wrong the voters have nobody to blame but us.’

‘Yeah, that would be great all right, wouldn’t it?’ Lancaster echoed.

There was a moment’s silence. Sinatra calmed himself, glancing around him at the hexagon of power that made up the syndicate: himself, Bogart, Lancaster, Raft, Cagney, and on Sinatra’s left, Schultz, a furtive, dour figure who spoke but seldom.

‘Nothing ever does go wrong in the outfits I run,’ he declared.

‘Nothing except the credibility of your own accounts,’ Lancaster answered tightly. ‘Let’s put your figures to the test, Frank. How about if we analyse them this way?’

The argument raged back and forth. The graph displays flickered so fast as to be on the edge of visibility, merging into a rainbow blur.

As the vert-tube dropped for mile after mile the golden glitter of SupraBurgh vanished. There was a brief, limbo-like transit through the abandoned area of Central Authority; then Obsier was plunged deep into the planet and entered UnderMegapolis.

Forms, hues and vistas slid into one another as the level-within-level mightiness of Obsier’s home supercity swung past. This was the kind of immensity, the kind of power, he was familiar with: ancient yet eternally modern, below reach of the sun, a deep thrusting place of hegemonies. It impressed him anew to return to it in this fashion, falling like a bullet in the v-tube.

Obsier had to admit that SupraBurgh, perched above it, using it as a foundation, was stunning – but in a way that was alien and frightening, spreading up and out like a great tree to glory in the sunlight that struck, unnaturally to Obsier’s mind, out of a naked sky. Equally unnatural were the interstellar ships that occasionally arrived to settle like birds in that tree, or, again lake birds, winged up to depart from it. The spectacle of those vanishing craft was most unnerving; Obsier found it a tremendous relief to escape from that oppressive feeling of vast expanses, of air and sunlight.

It was even a relief, despite the failure of his mission, to know that he had seen SupraBurgh’s horrors for the last time. Thankfully blotting out the repellent images from his mind, Obsier thought it almost incredible to reflect that at their founding the two conurbations had been governed as a single city: Megapolis; and that only gradually had the functions of Central Authority withered away as disparate physical environments (one underground, one up in the air) inevitably gave rise to divergent social and economic forms: divergent traditions, divergent languages, and finally divergent governments.

Just how long ago that had been could be judged from the fact that the deserted section where Central Authority had functioned (even now its empty corridors were left tactfully undisturbed by both sides) had originally been at ground level and now was half a mile into the Earth. Megapolis, a huge plug drilled into the planet’s skin, had sunk by its own weight. Its floor was now so close to the mohorivic discontinuity that UnderMegapolis was able to tap heat from the basaltic mantle beneath.

The v-tube decelerated fiercely, and shortly came to a halt. Ahead, the greenish radiance of serried strip-lights stretched away into the distance. Clutching a sheaf of documents, Obsier made his way towards a nearby Schultz In-Town Transit Services station.

‘So they wouldn’t wear it?’ Mettick asked.

‘No,’ Obsier told him. ‘And I guess that will be my last trip to SupraBurgh. In a way I’m glad of it. I don’t like it up there.’

‘Did you get any offers out of them?’

‘Not one. They’re not interested.’

‘Is it because they don’t use ipse holo up there?’

‘That’s true, they don’t, but I don’t think that’s it. They must have all the technical data available. We could get it built ourselves, perhaps, if they’d fund it. They’re just not interested. They don’t want to know us down here.’

‘It’s hard to understand. If an offer like that was made to any of the syn bosses they’d grab it like an alligator grabbing meat.’

‘Their system is different from ours. They’re not democratic, and not oligarchic. They have some sort of elitist social structure. They act as though we don’t exist…’

Mettick shrugged. ‘ We act as though they don’t exist… You know why I think they won’t play? They’re afraid of the syn. Do you think that’s right?’

Obsier placed his papers in a desk drawer. ‘Maybe. It’s more likely that they have an agreement with them: no interference in each other’s pitch. But it’s more than that, too. There’s a difference in mentality we could never cross. It was a mistake to think we could.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Mettick was reflective for a moment. ‘Well, we’d better tell Karnak.’

They went through a door into an inner office where the campaign team was working. Girls with tabulators were feeding in data for the prediction polls. If Karnak could gain this second ward in the imminent local election he would be riding high.

Mettick paused by the supervisor’s desk. ‘Is the Man in?’

She nodded. Mettick knocked on a door and they entered. Karnak was surrounded by his aides, hard at it as usual.

Karnak was the epitome of the tireless, hard-working politician. When he wasn’t actively campaigning he was busy on some side project, as now: trying to analyse the syn – the vast business syndicate whose bosses ruled UnderMegapolis by reason of holding all the seats on the Magisterial Council. To gain such a seat for himself – to be a magister – and break the syn’s monopoly was his life’s ambition.

A small holo screen was reeling off a list of the properties owned by one of the syn tycoons, Sinatra. Momentarily Obsier let his eye run through the exotic language of present-day business: Intricative Products; Non-Linear Machinations Composited; Stylic Access Services; Up-SupraBurgh Road Mercantile; Andromatic Enterprises; Andromatic On-Return Hook-Up… and on and on.

Karnak killed the holo and turned to face the newcomers. Straight away Obsier could feel the man’s charisma. The force of it struck him anew every time he came into Karnak’s presence, like an enveloping field of magnetism. That magnetism was a necessary prerequisite: all the magisters had it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Obsier said immediately. ‘SupraBurgh won’t finance an ipse holo set-up.’

Karnak took the news as a great man should. He paced the room, his long-jawed, handsome features briefly turned inward in concentration. ‘Okay, so that avenue is closed,’ he said firmly. ‘We shall just have to find another way.’

He stopped in front of the campaign charts that covered one wall. ‘I’m confident we’re going to win this ward. That will give me the right to contest the supercity general election in a month’s time.’

He swung round to face them again. ‘But let’s not kid ourselves: ipse holo is the key to success on a supercity scale. We can do quite a lot with ordinary holo in a ward election, because it can be backed up with personal appearances. But in a population of a hundred million, where holocom is of the essence—’ He made a gesture. ‘Just imagine me coming over like a shadow and Sinatra or Lancaster sitting right there in the room, with all the spiel they’re able to put over.’