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

Like my friend the Fly, the Bees are much interested in mathematics, but theirs is of a type that not even he would be able to understand (any more than I could, except intuitively when I was in the grip of the trance). What would he have made, with his obsession with numbers, of the Bees’ theorem that there is a highest positive integer! To human mathematicians this would make no sense. The Bees accomplish it by arranging all numbers radially on six spokes, centred about the number One. They then place on the spokes of this great wheel certain number series which are claimed to contain the essence of numbers and which go spiralling through it, diverging and converging in a winding dance. All these series meet at last in a single immense number. This, according to the theorem, is the opposite pole of the system of positive integers, of which One is the other pole and is referred to as Hyper-One. This is the end of numbers as we know them. Hyper-One then serves as One for a number system of a higher order. But, to show the hypothetical nature of the Bees’ deliberations there is a quite contrary doctrine which portrays all numbers as emanating from a number Plenum, so that every number is potentially zero.

These are items, scraps, crumbs from the feast of the Bees’ honey. The raw material of this honey is the knowledge and ideas that the individual Bees forage from all over Handrea. In the safety of their hive the Bees get busy with this knowledge, converting it into direct experience. With the tirelessness of all insects they use it to create innumerable hypothetical worlds, testing them, as it were, with their prodigious intellects to see how they serve as vehicles for experience. I have lived in these worlds. When I am in them they are as real as my own. I have tasted intellectual abstractions of such a rarefied nature that it is useless for me to try to think about them.

But as my brain began to accommodate itself to the honey my experiences became more concrete. Instead of finding myself in a realm of vast theoretical calculation I would find myself sailing the seas of Handrea in a big ship, walking cities that lay somewhere on the other side of the globe, or participating in historical events, many of which had taken place thousands of years previously. Yet even here the Bees’ intellectual preoccupations asserted themselves. Nearly always the adventures I met ended in the studies of philosophers and mathematicians, where lengthy debate took place, sometimes followed by translation into a world of pure ideas.

There was a third stage. My experiences began to include material that could only have come from within my own brain. I was back in my home city on my home planet. I was with my friends and loved ones. I relived events from the past. None of this was actually as it happened, but restructured and mixed together, as happens in dreams, and always with mingled emotions of joy, regret and nostalgia. Among it all, I also lived fantastic scenes from fiction; even comic-strip caricatures came to life, as if the Bees did not know the difference between them and reality.

My home world came, perhaps, to be my own private corner of the honey-store, though it is certainly only a minor item in the Bees’ vast hoard. Yet what a sense of desolation I always feel on coming out of it, in the periods when for some reason the magnetic currents no longer inflame my brain, and I realise it is only hallucination! I then find myself in this arid, lonely place, with Bees buzzing and trembling all around me, and as I crawl from the chamber for nearby food and water I know that I shall never, in reality, see home again.

For the time is long, long past when a rescue beacon could do anything to help me. Not that there was ever, in fact, any chance of constructing one. Because the Bees are not intelligent.

Incredibly, but truly, they are not intelligent. They have intellect merely, pure intellect, but not true intelligence, for this requires the exertion of both intellect and the feelings – and, most important, of the soul. The Bees have no feelings, any more than any other insect has, and – of this I am convinced – God has not endowed them with souls.

They are merely insects. Their intellectual powers, their avid thirst for knowledge, are but instincts with them, no different from the instinct that prompts the ants, bees and termites of Earth to feats of engineering, and which has also misled men into thinking those to be intelligent. No rational mind, able to respond to and communicate with other rational minds, lies behind their voracious appetite.