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

Smiling together, the two wandered away.

Meantime in another part of the palace’s inner sanctum Narcis’s other brother, Prince Vro Ixian, was busy receiving the report of Perlo Rolce, owner of the Rolce Detective Agency.

Prince Vro’s apartments were gloomily lit and carelessly furnished. The cleaning staff was rarely allowed in and dust lay everywhere. To remind him of his great sorrow, one wall of the main room was taken up with a tridimensional hologram screen that gave a direct view into a mausoleum about a mile distant so that it seemed an extension of Vro’s dwelling. The sarcophagus occupying the centre of the burial chamber gaped open, empty.

The burly detective sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair facing the prince, who stood in a curious stance at the other end of the room, head cocked and one hand resting negligently on a table. Three or four years older than Narcis, he had the same cast of face, but his eyes were more penetrating.

Rolce was used to Ixian peculiarities. This was not the first time he had been engaged by a member of the imperial household. He spoke directly, without prevarication.

‘Your Highness, since our last meeting I have followed up the evidence suggesting that the Traumatic sect might have been involved in the affair. I can now confirm it categorically: it was the Traumatic sect who stole the body of Princess Veaa from its resting place.’

Vro looked pleadingly at the empty sarcophagus. ‘But for what purpose?’

Rolce coughed before continuing. ‘The motives for the crime are far from pleasant, Your Highness. The Traumatic sect, as you must know, is prone to bizarre practices. Rejecting the teachings of the Church, its members worship a god they call Hulmu and whom they deem to dwell in the uttermost depths of the strat. Hulmu, by their doctrines, feeds on the trauma that the soul experiences on separating from the body at death, but is usually robbed of his pleasure because the soul passes back in time and finds refuge in its body again. Therefore the sect practises certain rites, ending in human sacrifice, that they claim give the victim’s soul to Hulmu.’

‘What has this to do with my beloved Veaa?’ said Vro harshly. ‘She is dead already.’

‘Your sister died of a brain haemorrhage, and later was embalmed by the Murkesen process, which leaves all the vital tissues intact,’ the detective explained. ‘Someone in the Traumatic sect apparently believes that these two factors together have left her soul in a state of suspension, and that it has not departed into the past.’

‘You mean she is still alive?’ Prince Vro asked in a shocked tone.

‘No, Your Highness,’ Rolce replied hurriedly. ‘One should not pay heed to heretical theories.’ Then, seeing Prince Vro’s lips curl, he added, ‘Even according to the Traumatics your sister is deceased. It is merely that her soul is believed to be still accessible to Hulmu. They hoped, by means of rites or medical experiments, to release her soul from its latent state and offer it to Hulmu. A personage of such exalted rank was, of course, a great prize to them.’

A low moan escaped Prince Vro’s lips and his face expressed ashen horror. Then he turned away and began to give vent to strangled sobs, while Rolce sat impassively and stared at the nearby wall.

The private detective had come across many weird situations in the course of his work and the predicament of Prince Vro aroused no comment in his mind.

He knew that the prince had been desperately enamoured of his sister Princess Veaa. The emperor had even indicated that he would consent to a marriage between them. And then had come her sudden death. In an orgy of mourning Prince Vro had designed her mausoleum personally, placed her embalmed body in the sarcophagus with his own hands, and installed the direct-wire hologram to his private apartment so that he would never forget her.

Sadly, his misfortunes had increased still further. The embalmed body had been stolen from the mausoleum, for no explicable reason. Exhaustive police investigations had proved fruitless. Eventually Vro had called upon Rolce’s services.

Rolce had wondered why the prince had not followed the example of his brother Narcis and travelled back in time to when Veaa was still alive (though that might, he reflected, entail complications of a personal nature). But the speculation was sterile. Vro seemed as deeply in love with the corpse as he had been with the living woman.

With difficulty the prince recovered his composure. ‘And what has become of her now?’

Rolce frowned. ‘At this point the affair becomes perplexing. I gained most of my information so far by infiltrating one of my men into a secret Traumatic cell. Unfortunately his guise was eventually penetrated and the fellow was murdered. I then used more direct methods to track down the cor – to track down the princess, and ascertained that she had been removed from Node One on an internodal liner. However –’

‘They can do that?’