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

Sinatra was gazing at the head of the family, waiting. The middle-aged man rose nervously. He could have pressed the ‘no question’ button on the ipseity unit, but he now understood why almost no one ever did. It would have been an insult to so commanding a presence.

‘I have a question, sir. Why not let the new candidate, Karnak, use ipse holo if he wants to? It doesn’t mean we’re going to vote for him, but I can’t see any reason why he shouldn’t.’

Sinatra’s eyes clouded over ever so slightly. ‘There isn’t any reason why he shouldn’t use it,’ he said. ‘Who’s stopping him? But he’s not much of a candidate if he wants it handed to him on a plate. That’s not how I got my equipment, and I didn’t go around asking for anyone else’s either.’

The family head nodded. It made sense. A man ought to be able to stand on his own feet, especially if he was to help rule UnderMegapolis. But a half-frown remained on his face.

Mutely the darkly shining mahogany reflected six holo images in agitated altercation. Raft took the lead, arguing in clipped, deadpan statements, deriding his colleagues’ concern.

Sinatra, for once, seemed shaken, however. ‘I’ve changed my mind, something’s gotta be done. I was on ipse tonight. You know what ninety per cent of the questions I got were? Why don’t we put ipse holo at Karnak’s disposal?’

‘Nobody asked me that when I went on yesterday,’ Raft said.

Sinatra’s face twisted sardonically. ‘You don’t have a sympathetic manner.’

‘They’d have got a short answer if they had. The voters admire a guy who’s tough but straight.’

Cagney turned to look directly at Sinatra, his head tilted calculatingly. ‘What gives with this Karnak? What’s his secret?’

Sinatra raised two fingers placed together. ‘He’s got it . Ipseity. Charisma.’

‘Huh-huh. He’s got ipseity, huh? So how’s he going to put it over, huh?’ Cagney chuckled. ‘On ipse holo, maybe?’

‘Come together, you guys!’ Sinatra pleaded. ‘We can’t afford to let this kind of situation develop any further. You never know what it can do in future generations.’

Lancaster clenched his fists and raised his face, lips drawn back over strong white teeth. He spoke in a voice that was low and intense, little more than a muscular whisper. ‘I say when you are threatened, strike! We should kill, kill, kill! ’

‘ No! ’ Sinatra yelled. ‘We agreed before: no assassinations.’

‘Say,’ said Bogart suddenly, looking sideways at Schultz as if hit by a crafty inspiration. What if this Karnak guy did become a magister? Schultz is the one who’d get pushed out, that’s for sure. We can do without him. Karnak wouldn’t last long anyhow.’

‘No!’ Schultz protested hoarsely.

‘Leave Schultz alone!’ Sinatra ordered loudly. ‘He’s my buddy.’ But he, too, looked at Schultz speculatively.

A shiver ran through the room and the holo images flickered and seemed about to melt into something indefinable.

‘One sign of trouble and you’re all falling apart,’ Raft said disgustedly. ‘Sometimes I think I’m in crummy company. If you’re so steamed up about it, let Karnak put himself on ipse. What does it matter? Let him take the consequences.’

They all looked at one another, considering.

‘Fact Number One: UnderMegapolis is run on personal charisma,’ said Mettick. ‘It’s as real as the electricity in your holo set. And I’ll tell you something I’ve found out that shows just how seriously the syn leaders themselves take it. Every one of them has onput recognition gates on his com-lines, to stop the others from beaming their images into his conglomerates. They’re afraid someone will subvert their managers by sheer charge of personality.’

‘Isn’t that over-cautious?’

‘Not at all. One of their regular tactics is to call a nonsyn enterprise and start giving orders to the underlings. You’d be surprised how often those orders are obeyed.’

A disturbing picture formed in Obsier’s mind of distrust and conspiracy in the highest echelon. ‘Then how do they communicate with one another?’

‘Only privately, by direct face-to-face holo.’

‘You know, when I’m with Karnak I feel confidence in him,’ Obsier pondered slowly, ‘but when I see one of the syn bosses on holo I don’t feel so sure of him, and I almost feel like giving up. Do you really think he has enough personal charge?’

‘Only one person in millions has as much, but honestly I don’t know. I keep trying to imagine how he’d make out in a confrontation with Lancaster, say, or Raft. Those people have so much of it, it’s frightening – almost unnatural. Not to speak of their having a monopoly of it, in supercity terms, since only they can use ipseity apparatus.’

‘Not any more. Haven’t you heard? The syn has relented. Karnak is going on ipse holo tonight.’

Mettick’s quest for a believable human profile to the syn bosses had led him into labyrinths of the library that had been unpaced for decades. He walked through dusty low-vaulted galleries past rows of disused terminal units, each of which gave access to some obscure facet of the past. He knew the answer was here somewhere. The facts he had discovered so far were too puzzling, too extraordinary, not to have an answer.

There had been some fascinating sidelines, too, in his search into the past. Even as far back as the minus eighth century there seemed to have been some sort of premonition of more modern history. Mettick had found references to ‘the withering away of the state’ and ‘the abolition of central authority’ that was supposed to come about in the future. He wondered how the ancients’ could have guessed about the fate of the empty government levels that separated UnderMegapolis from SupraBurgh.

An age-old silence enveloped him. The nearest girl librarian was at least half a mile away, in the better-frequented upper floors. Mettick consulted some reference numbers on a list he carried and keyed on one of the terminal units. An ancient ‘cinema’ comedy began to unreel, fascinating him with its extraordinary grimaces and quite ugly songs. He abandoned the unit after a couple of minutes and wandered on.

He entered a side passage where the lighting, for some unknown reason, was dimmer. To his amazement the material of the walls gave way to stone and wood in archaic, rotting panels. And while he stood there one of those panels gave a little squeak and swung open.

Behind it was a flat glass screen with a picture on it. Mettick had difficulty in recognising the image at first: it was not in holo but flat. There was something else wrong with it, too: it was made up, unnaturally, of only two colours, white and greyish black in various tones.

The picture had a graininess that, peering closer, he saw resulted from its being composed of hundreds of parallel horizontal lines. But, when he finally recognized what it was, he jumped back in shock.

It was the face of Magister Dutch Schultz.

He began to tremble and then calmed himself as he realised that the picture carried no charismatic charge. The screen was some unbelievably primitive kind of television which could not possibly convey ipseity. God knew how old it was – it was a wonder it was still functioning.

‘Hello, citizen,’ Schultz said in a husky voice. ‘So you’re tryin’ to find out the truth? Okay, I’ll tell you the truth…’

Karnak strode into the transmitting studios feeling ten feet tall. This was to be his night. By the pressure of democracy – pure democracy, not the plutocratic variety – the magisters had been forced to concede an elementary right.

The studio producers were deferential. He waited in a cool blue chamber while the announcements were made. Then he was ushered into the transmitting cubicle. In front of him was the holo camera. Around him were the sensors that, with a faint hum, began to pick up his ipseity emanations at a frequency of 23 trillion trillion per second and feed them through the com-lines…