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

Most history books inferred that the Ixian family had already been the rulers of Umbul when San Hevatar placed the secret of time-travel at their disposal. Prince Vro told Aton, however, that he believed this to be a distortion of the truth. It was unlikely that the city of Umbul itself had existed in the beginning. As far as he could judge, the Ixians had not been kings or rulers, but the owners of a giant industrial and research conglomerate where San Hevatar had worked as a scientist. They had seized their chance to indulge their wildest ambitions, conquering past centuries, always moving pastward, where the technology was inferior to their own.

For his part San Hevatar had been a man with a vision. He had given a religious meaning to his discoveries and had found the past a fertile ground for his teachings. He had founded the Holy Church, thus giving the burgeoning Chronotic Empire a unifying culture.

Eventually the Ixians had realised that, once it was let loose on mankind, time-travel, which they had used so successfully, could also work against their interests. It would be particularly dangerous if time-travellers were to penetrate the empire’s rear, travelling into the past beyond the empire’s control and working changes there – changes which inevitably would influence the present in ways not planned by the Historical Office. They determined to fix a date in time beyond which time-travel could not be introduced. To this end the stupendous Stop Barrier had been built, consuming one-third of the imperial budget and rendering the past impenetrable to time-travellers. One day it would be moved back to bring yet more of history under the empire’s control, but for the moment it remained both the pastward limit on the empire’s expansion and its rearward protection.

Umbul, on the other hand, was much too close to the futureward frontier to be entirely safe from marauders from the future. A new imperial capital, Chronopolis, had been built close to the Stop Barrier, at what was designated Node 1 (although now another node, Node 0, lay between it and the barrier), protected by nearly the full extent of the empire.

So San Hevatar, prophet and God’s special servant, now lived a life of relative quietude away from the mainstream of events. But he continued, in each repetition of his life, to make the crucial discovery of how to move mass through time, paradoxically even while the evidence of that discovery was all around him before he had made it. It was as if his inner being performed this act as a sacred rite: the central, essential rite of the Church.

Captain Aton meditated on all this as Prince Vro’s yacht crossed Node 5. ‘Where in San Hevatar’s life cycle would you like to intervene?’ Prince Vro asked him politely.

It would be no use approaching the prophet when he was an eager young man, Aton thought. Someone on the verge of a momentous discovery would hardly be persuaded to abandon it. Aton needed to talk to a man who had had time to reflect, who would be old enough to make a sober judgment.

‘At about fifty years of age,’ Aton requested.

‘So late? That is a quarter of a century after the gift of time-travel. If your object is to annul the empire I would have thought, perhaps, a few decades earlier.’

‘That is not really my object,’ Aton said with a smile. ‘It would, after all, be asking too much. But if San Hevatar were, perhaps, to appear at Chronopolis and speak against the war, then I am sure his word would carry more weight than that of all the emperors put together.’

‘Maybe. If His Eminence Arch-Cardinal Reamoir does not declare him a heretic!’ Vro laughed caustically.

The cabin of Prince Vro’s yacht was not large (nearly all the vehicle’s mass being taken up by its powerful drive unit) and with six passengers, three of whom were Perlo Rolce’s assistants, Vro had been obliged to dispense with his crew and attend to both navigation and piloting himself. He typed some instructions into the yacht’s computer and made adjustments in accordance with the figures it gave.

Rolce and his men, trying not to appear inquisitive, kept glancing at Aton surreptitiously. They could hardly believe what was happening.

The yacht slowed down as it approached Aton’s target. Vro became fretful.

‘I am at a loss to know where to phase into ortho,’ he said. ‘To tell the truth I am reluctant to do so at all. As you know, civilian timeships are forbidden to materialise anywhere between nodes, and I am not keen to make myself conspicuous. I’m afraid I shall have to land you somewhere quiet, Captain, and that could put you many hundreds of miles from San Hevatar.’

A strange look came to Aton’s face. ‘There’s no need to phase in at all,’ he told Vro. ‘Just open the cabin door and let me out.’

Perlo Rolce surged to his feet, his hard face displaying most uncharacteristic shock.