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

Of these activities, not least in importance was the education of the next generation of rulers. In one of the domestic wings Brother Mundan, one of a dozen appointed tutors, wrestled with the problem of steeping a class of young Ixians – some of them quite closely related to the emperor – in the traditions of the dynasty.

Even his brown cassock and curtailed cowl, even all the majesty of the Church that lay behind him (the Church, of course, accepting the responsibility for all serious education) was sometimes insufficient to curb the irreverence of these youngsters, who were apt to place themselves above normal values even in matters of religion. Luckily the Church placed great reliance on repetition as a method of teaching, and this generally enabled Mundan to bludgeon his charges into submission. Indeed, it would have been difficult to instil the present lesson, ‘The Foundation of Empire’, with its mixture of history, abstract physics and religious dogma, by any other means. Brother Mundan was repeating it to the present class for at least the twelfth time.

‘And to what,’ he intoned, ‘do we owe the existence of the empire?’

After a pause Prince Kir, cousin to the emperor, rose. ‘To the intervention of God, Brother.’

Munden nodded. ‘Correct, Your Highness. Once, time stretched unchanging from the interminable past to the interminable future, or at least it changed only slowly due to natural movements in the temporal substratum or to time-storms. There was no empire and no true religion. There was religion, of a sort, but it was superstition, such as some of the futureward heathens hold to. Then God acted so as to redeem mankind. At what is now called Node Six, in the city of Umbul, capital of the present province of Revere, He chose as His appointed messenger San Hevatar, a scientist working in the laboratories of the ruling Ixian family – of your family, Highnesses.’

Mundan’s gaze settled on one who, instead of attending closely, was more interested in exchanging whispers with a neighbour.

‘Princess Nulea, what are the three things that God revealed to San Hevatar?’

The girl started and jumped up. With glazed eyes she chanted the answers she had long learned by rote.

‘One: the mutability of time, Brother Mandan. Two: the means of travelling through time. Three: the nature of the soul.’

‘Thank you, that is correct. Through His messenger San Hevatar, God has taught us that time is mutable. He has taught us how to travel through time. And He has taught us that the nature of the soul is to persist in eternity.’

He rapped the lectern to pique their interest. ‘The first of these truths shows us the possibility of the Church’s mission. The second truth shows us how the mission may be accomplished. And the third truth shows us why it should be accomplished.’

His voice became challenging. ‘And why should the Church work to accomplish its mission under the protection and banner of the Chronotic Empire?’ Brother Mundan’s dark eyes flashed. This point in the lesson touched the fires in his own breast.

Once again Prince Kir proved the most apt of his pupils. ‘Because time does not die, Brother Mundan. Because the soul cannot leave the body.’

‘Yes, Highness, that is so,’ Mundan said with a slight frown. The answer was probably lost on the densest of those present. ‘The Church works to bring the true faith to all men, past, present, and future – to establish God’s kingdom on Earth. Even though we die we continue to exist in the past, because the past does not vanish. The Church seeks to transform our past lives and bring God into our souls.

‘Let us take in turn each of the three truths revealed by San Hevatar. First: that time is mutable. This means simply that even the past may be changed because in absolute terms there is no past, just as there is no unique present. Orthogonal time is but the surface of the bottomless ocean of potential time, or the temporal substratum: the hidden dimension of eternity in which all things co-exist without progression from past to future. Prior to the foundation of the empire the past could change without man’s knowledge or will, due to time-storms or natural mutations, just as the wind can change direction. Now, thanks to the grace of God, the past and the future can be controlled and altered by conscious intervention.’

This intervention took the form, of course, of the Historical Office, which undertook to edit and restructure history by manipulation of key events, and of the imperial time-fleets, which in the last resort enforced the imperial writ. To Brother Mundan this seemed entirely proper and right.

He proceeded to the second God-given truth, writing some equations on the blackboard.

‘These equations describe the operation of moving mass through time. You should already be familiar with them from your physics lessons, so here we will concern ourselves with the structure of orthogonal time, which is of great importance for the stability of the empire.