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

He switched on the wall screen, tuning it to the external scanners. ‘Enjoy the show,’ he said, then left for the control cabin, locking the door behind him.

The controllers of the egress port were used to a constant stream of craft applying for exit; they asked no questions in his case. For the second time in his life he floated up above the dome, seeing the City spread out below him. But this time there were big, clumsy cylindrical objects floating in the vicinity of the City, some of them sporting wicked-looking equipment welded on in various places. The war was due to begin soon.

Kayin chose a direction at random and started up the nucleon engines at full power. In a second City 5 was gone. He and Polla were alone in the void; the eternal, infinite, vacant void.

On and on and on and on and on. The engines never stopped. Although they ran silently, Kayin checked their action constantly on the instruments in the control cabin.

Polla had wept and screamed, then sulked for weeks, and then gradually became friendly again. By now Kayin himself felt defensively sullen about what he had done. It was boorish and uncharacteristic of him. But he stubbornly refused to apologise, even to his own conscience.

At this distance it was impossible even with the most powerful magnification available on the rocket to gain as much as a photon’s worth of image from the City. Shortly after departure he had picked up brief flashes that came not from the City itself but from the spaceships that were fighting one another with nuclear weapons. Even if they had not been travelling at billions of times the speed of light, such minute flickers would not have been detectable by any means now.

So there was only the emptiness on all sides. Looking out into it, one could not even discern distance; there was only absolute lightlessness.

After they had been travelling for nearly two months Kayin took to spending long periods in the direct observation blister that, projecting from the hull of the rocket in a perfectly transparent bulge, formed a cavity of extrusion into space. Here was the only place in the rocket where the artificial gravity (derived from the same principle as the nucleon engine) did not operate. With the cavity light switched off, one might as well have been floating in free fall in the void itself. Kayin spent what seemed like hours staring out of the blister, into what to his eyes was simply blackness but which his mind knew to be infinity. His mind began working in new directions. Matter, he reasoned, had structure, but space was simply emptiness. Yet space, too, had structure of a kind. It had extension and direction. Was there, he wondered, a substratum to the void, a richer reality lying beneath it? After a while, for some dim sense of pleasure only vaguely known to himself, he took to coming into the cavity naked.

SENSORY DEPRIVATION

The human mind is not made to be without incoming sensory data for any but the briefest periods. The first consequence of sensory deprivation is that the subject loses, first the sense of his bodily outline, and then his sense of identity. Then, since the consciousness will not tolerate lack of perceptions, and being denied them from the external direction, it draws upon them from the inner direction, projecting on to the senses first hallucinations of a random, dream-like character, and then, if the process is continued, unlocking the archetypal symbols from the unconscious.

Kayin went through all these stages fairly quickly. Out in the void he saw vast wheeling mandalas, glimmering forms whose size was beyond the mind to compute. He saw the mystic triad, the mystic quaternity, exemplified in a thousand dazzling forms. He did not think or remark on what he saw, for he was not there. His personal identity was gone; his being consisted merely of an impersonalised consciousness of the symbols he saw.

Once he must have moved accidentally and bumped into the wall of the cavity. The bodily sensation brought him momentarily to himself. Flashing waves of excitement, of joy, swept through him. I’m seeing it, he thought. This is the reality underlying space, the structure of the world transcending it. Stay here long enough and it shows itself.

Then he was merged once again with the contents of the unconscious, a kind of paradisical, compelling, luring world. His next bodily sensation was a feeling of hotness. Vaguely he returned to himself, realising that genuine light was in his eyes. He turned slowly. The door of the cavity was open and Polls was drifting in, having turned on the illumination to a dim, soft glow.