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

Mayar followed her gaze and located Philipium, the eldest of the emperor’s sizeable brood. Aged about forty, he had already begun to resemble his father and sported the same type of beard. He was destined to become Emperor Philipium II, although the date of his coronation was not permitted to be made known to anyone in Node 1, particularly not to the present emperor. Gazing upon him, Mayar allowed his thoughts to dwell for a few moments on the perplexing intricacies of time such a situation presented. Futurewards of Node 1 – in the internodal hinterland – was a Philipium the Younger who was not emperor but who remained until his dying day merely the son of the emperor. Yet eventually Node 1 would travel onwards, past the death of Philipium I, and Philipium II would become emperor. The soul of Philipium the Elder would travel back in time to be reborn; but in that cycle of his eternally recurring life, the cycle succeeding the current one, he would not be emperor but merely the father of Emperor Philipium II.

Likewise Mayar, in the next cycle of his recurrent life, would find himself living in the internodal hinterland that Node 1 had left behind. He would be removed from the centre of the empire and so, he hoped, would find life a good deal more peaceful.

The eternally repeated rebirth of the soul into the same life was one of the few dogmas of the Church that had been scientifically proved. That, together with the nodal structure of time, provided the empire with a form of passing time that, so to speak, transcended ordinary sequential time. At the same time the system of nodes was extremely convenient for the average mind, such as that of Princess Mayora, who sat with him now. She was happily able to ignore the enigmas and paradoxes that time-travel entailed, leaving such troublesome matters to the theoreticians of the Historical Office, of the Church’s Order of Chronotic Casuistry, and of Mayar’s own Achronal Archives.

Did these people surrounding Mayar have any idea what the mutability of time meant? It was quite obvious that Princess Mayora did not. Like nearly everyone else, she regarded the gorgeous palace in which she lived as permanent, secure, and unalterable. The Chronotic wars were centuries away. Mayar glanced despairingly at the ingeniously vaulted and domed ceiling. If only they could realise, he thought, that all this could be magicked away, could never have been.

Princess Mayora giggled. ‘Oh, look! Here’s Narcis!’

Into the chamber strolled two identical youths, their arms fondly about each other’s necks. Looking closely at them, one could see them for Ixians. One could see in them, perhaps, what their father the emperor might have been in his youth: the oval face, the straight poetical nose. Here, however, their, lithe upright bearing, their unblemished skin turned Philipium’s tottering figure into a travesty.

On looking even closer, one might discern that one of these apparently identical twins was in fact a few years older than the other. Their story needed no explication to Mayar. Narcis, youngest son of the emperor, a strange, wayward homosexual, had in defiance of all the laws of the empire travelled a few years into the future where he had met and fallen in love with himself. He had, moreover, persuaded his future self to return to Node 1 with him. The two now spent their time mooning about the palace together, flaunting their forbidden love for all to see.

Arch-Cardinal Reamoir, whenever he chanced to come upon them, would give them the sign of the curse, whereupon the two young Narcises would laugh with glee. But in the atmosphere of the Ixian dynasty their love affair was not nearly as shocking as it would have sounded outside. Ixians married only Ixians, to keep the imperial line pure. At first this had meant marriages that spanned centuries, a man marrying, perhaps, his great-great-great-grandniece. But gradually all distinctions became blurred. Marriages between brother and sister, parent and child, were no longer frowned on. The blood was what mattered.

And as for the crime of ‘going double’ – of consorting with one’s future self – in a world where it was forbidden even to tell a man what lay in his future, well, young Ixians did not feel that Chronotic laws were made to be obeyed.

Princess Mayora waved to her double-brother. The Princes Narcis came towards them.

‘Good day, Chief Archivist.’ Narcis₁ greeted him with a smile.

‘Good day to you, Your Highness.’ As they came close Mayar could hear the faint whine of the orthophase that Narcis₂ wore on a belt at his waist to enable him to live outside his own time.

‘Come and talk to the archivist,’ Princess Mayora demanded. ‘He appears to need cheering up.’

Narcis₁ gazed at Mayar with dreamy eyes while fondling the back of his double’s neck. ‘He is too old,’ he said bluntly. ‘Old people talk only of dreary things, of war and politics and religion. We live for love, do we not, Narcis?’

‘Yes, Narcis.’