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

Utter darkness. Blinding light. Which was it?

It was neither. It was whirlpools of the inconceivable. It was visions which the eye accepted but which the brain found unrecognisable: reality without the sanity that made reality real. The brain reacted to these visions with terror and dwindled in on itself to seek refuge in death or unconsciousness. Such sanctuary was denied Aton, however. The drugs that coursed in his blood pre-empted the closing down of the mind and condemned it to full alertness.

Yet alongside this jarring shock was a start of recognition. He remembered it now. This was what he had seen for a bare instant aboard the Smasher of Enemies.

Aton went reeling and spinning on a five-dimensional geodesic. There was no point of comparison to the space or time that he knew. The wind of the strat blew against his face like a cloying mist composed of ghostly pseudo-events, and whenever it ceased or lessened, his hands went instinctively to the control knobs at his waist.

But this phase, in which his mind still clung to its allegiance to passing time, lasted only seconds. Then the continuum of the strat seeped into his every cell and time ceased.

Eternity began, and Aton’s sanity disintegrated.

Luckily one did not need to be sane to accomplish one’s mission. One needed to know that there was an escape, that one could die. One needed to know that failure would mean to sink endlessly into the strat.

Therein lay the cunning of the courier system. Neither the senses nor the intellect could understand the environment in which they found themselves, but some primeval instinct enabled the mind to find a direction. The courier strove with all his being to reach the distant receiving station where he would be permitted to stop his heart.

Until that goal was attained, Aton lived in a world that was timeless. He could not measure the duration of his journey either in seconds or in centuries, because there was no duration. There could be no such thing as duration without a before and an after, and in this state nothing preceded and nothing followed. He skirled and spun. He went through titanic processes where five-dimensional objects menaced him as though they were living beings, but nothing began and nothing ended.

After a while his brain seemed to revive and to attempt to recover its old mode of perception. It was, he realised, beginning to come to terms with the five-dimensional strat and to abstract three-dimensional worlds from it.

Captain Mond Aton lived his life over again, beginning with conception and ending with his being sealed into the dispatch chamber at Chronopolis. After that, everything was just a vague shadow.

The illusion – could it be called an illusion? – was absolutely real. Every incident, every pleasure, every pain, and every effort exercised his soul anew. And not merely once. His life became like a film strip and was run through hundreds, thousands, millions of times over. The continued, reiterated experience became unbearable.

Interspersed with this continual re-enactment were other experiences that were more or less intelligible. At first he thought he had somehow been dumped back into orthogonal time in a different body and a different life. But soon he realised that the dreamlike episodes that so much resembled events in the real world were phantoms: mock-ups located in the strat. The strat was eternity. And eternity, as he had learned at training college, was the storehouse of potentialities. Somewhere in this vast insubstantial ocean were mock-ups of everything existing in orthogonal time, as well as of every fictitious variation of what existed. And also there were mock-ups of that which did not exist but which could be thrown up into the world like flotsam on a beach by some convulsion of the strat.

After enduring all this for millenniums, or microseconds, an odd feeling of strength came over Aton. The strat was no longer so strange to him. It was as if he himself was transforming into a five-dimensional being. He was able to look down on his life as an entirety and give his attention to any part of it.

Sequential time would seem, after this, flat and narrow. But his fingers still moved over the steering controls. His mind still strove to release itself in the only way possible.

His target, a fleet of timeships, loomed ahead of him. Protected by their own orthogonal time-fields they stood out clearly as glowing solid bodies surrounded by the swirling strat. Aton’s earphones were beeping as he came within range of the homing signal.