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

It seems fitting that if by some quirk or accident of nature intellectual brains should evolve in that class of creature roughly corresponding to our terrestrial arthropods (and Handrea offers the only case of this as far as I know, even though insect-like fauna are abundant throughout the universe), they should do so in this bizarre fashion. One does not expect insects to be intelligent, and indeed they are not, even when endowed with analytical powers greater than our own.

But how long it took me to grasp this fact when I strove so desperately to convey messages to the Hive Mind! For there is a Hive Mind; but it has no qualities or intelligence that an individual Bee does not have. It is simply an insect collectivised, a single Bee writ large, and would not be worth mentioning were it not for one curious power it has, or that I think it has.

It seems able, by some means I cannot explain, to congeal objects out of thought. Perhaps these objects are forms imprinted on matter by magnetism. At any rate several times I have found in the chamber small artifacts which earlier I had encountered in visions, and which I do not think could have been obtained on Handrea. Once, for instance, I found a copy of a newspaper including in its pages the adventures of the Amazing Human Spider.

And recently I discovered a small bound book in which was written all the events I have outlined in this account.

I no longer know whether I have copied my story from this book, or whether the book was copied by the Bees from my mind.

What does it matter? I do not know for certain if the book, or indeed any of the other objects I have found in the chamber, really existed. The fact is that for all the abstract knowledge available to me, my grip on concrete reality has steadily deteriorated. I can no longer say with certainty which of the experiences given me by the honey really happened in my former life and which are alterations, interpolations or fantasies. For instance, was I really a companion of the Amazing Human Spider, a crime-fighter who leaps from skyscraper to skyscraper by means of his gravity-defying web?

I have been here for many years. My hair and beard are long and shaggy now that I no longer trim them. Often at the beginning I tried to break away from this addiction to the Bees’ honey, but without it the reality of my position is simply too unbearable. Once I even dragged myself halfway back to the vault of the junkheaps, but I knew all the time that I would be forced to return, so great is the pull of those waking dreams.

And so here I remain and must remain, more a parasite upon these monsters than I ever had imagined I could be. For monsters they are – monsters in the Satanic sense. How else can one describe creatures of such prodigious knowledge and such negligible understanding? And for my enjoyment I have this honey – this all-spanning knowledge. Mad knowledge, too great for human encompassing and fit only for these manic Bees and the work of their ceasless insect intellects. Knowledge that has no meaning, nothing to check or illuminate it, and which produces no practical end. And yet I know that even here, amid the unseeing Bees of Handrea, far from the temples and comforts of my religion, God is present.

EXIT FROM CITY 5

Kayin often wondered why the autumnal phase of the City’s weather-cycle brought with it such an atmosphere of untidiness and decay. He sat holding Polla’s hand in the park, watching as the light over the City dimmed with the approach of night. Here, the gentle breeze that blew continuously through City 5 collected by fitful gusts into a modest wind, skirling up a detritus of torn paper, scraps of fabric and dust.

Rearing above the park’s fringe of trees the ranks of windows in the serried arrays of office buildings began to flick into life. The park was situated on a high level and well out towards the perimeter of the City, so that from this vantage point City 5, with its broken lines, blocks and levels, presented the appearance of a metal bowl finely machined into numerous rectilinear surfaces like an abstract sculpture. From the broken perimeter to the central pinnacle the City rose in a wide counter-curve to the curve of the crystal dome overhead, creating a deliberate but false impression of spaciousness. And indeed for a brief period in the late morning, when the light was brightest and the air filled with the sounds of industry, City 5 did manage to generate an atmosphere of liveliness, almost of excitement. But by mid-afternoon the illusion was gone. The crystal dome, glinting in the falling light, became oppressive, and when night arrived it grew over-reachingly, invisibly black, filling Kayin’s imagination with vacant images of outside.

‘Why don’t they leave the light on?’ he said irritably. ‘I don’t need any night-time.’