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

The play’s dramatic effect was heightened by the fact that the key characters were all acted live, and occasionally emerged from the scene, while the minor ones were images only. Jasperodus found it totally absorbing. It was written, he guessed, by some author of antiquity, and unfolded in dazzling language a story of dukes and princes, of ill-fated lovers from hostile houses. Inwardly he congratulated the inventor of this type of drama, as well as of the device itself. But then such marvels were probably common out in the East; this thought reminded him of how recently he had been born. For all he had done, he had not yet penetrated very far into the world.

The drama ended. The substantial-seeming scenes vanished, leaving behind a handful of actors standing on bare boards. They bowed low to Jasperodus.

‘Excellent!’ Jasperodus commended. ‘A fine performance!’ He would have been content to mull over the play for a while, but an oldster with a bushy white beard slid into view.

‘And now, Your Majesty, permit us to present views of the distant past. These images have been preserved from the Age of Tergov!’

He attended to the laser device. In the space recently occupied by the drama another scene sprang into being. This time it was a still, showing an aerial view of part of a city so vast and magnificent that all present gasped.

‘These pictures are a little smudged because the holograms lay for centuries in the soil before being unearthed,’ the spry old man explained. ‘Here is Pekengu, one of the Four Capital Cities of the Rule of Tergov. When this hologram was taken Tansiann was but an unimportant town of moderate size. Pekengu itself is now little more than a sad shell of ruins, though still inhabited.’ The projector clicked; a second scene appeared. ‘Here we see another of the Four Capitals: Pacifica, the floating city on the Great East Sea. Pacifica was fifty miles across, and its population was two hundred million. The great central shaft you see extended half a mile below the surface of the ocean and two miles into the air.’ The expositor continued to give more facts about the ancient capital, now lying wrecked on the bed of the ocean, and then switched to perhaps the best of his pictures. ‘Here is a view of one of the most consummate architectural triumphs of all time: the Temple of the Brotherhood of Man at Pekengu. Parts of this magnificent edifice still remain, notably the north wall. This picture is believed to have been taken about a hundred years after the temple was built.’

Jasperodus gazed enthralled at the gigantic building. He had never imagined anything even remotely like it. Its central feature was a massive dome about whose middle floated a girdle of clouds, so immense was it. The lower parts of the dome seemed to cascade away into mounds, waves, traceries and runs that spilled and tumbled out over the ground, all seeming to hang from the floating upper mass rather than to support it.

‘Can you show us the inside of this building also?’ he demanded excitedly.

‘Alas, no. Pictures of the interior do exist, so I have heard, but I have none in my collection.’

The expositor exhibited his remaining pictures: the impressively developed territories on Mars; the vast sea barrage that, in those days, altered continental climates by controlling oceanic currents; a stupendous space community that swept through the solar system on an elongated elliptical path so as regularly to cross the orbits of all the planets; a view of Saturn seen over the towers of a town on Tethys, one of its inner satellites.

‘These,’ the expositor told them, ‘are examples of the bygone glory that the Emperor Charrane seeks to revive.’

The sights left Jasperodus stirred and agitated. Here indeed were accomplishments of a high order! He began to feel an immense admiration for the Old Empire and regretted that he could not have lived in the former time.

The picture show ended with a shorter second series showing weird, almost impossible animals. Creatures with ludicrously long necks or with twenty-foot wing spans, cats the size of elephants and horses the size of cats. Some of the animals bore no resemblance to any beast Jasperodus knew of and defied description.

‘None of these animals occur in nature but were created during the classical civilisation by a science now lost,’ the expositor explained. ‘This science could also culture bizarre types of man, but these and all other like species are extinct today, not having survived the wild state that attended the Dark Age.’