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

  The Soul of the Robot

  Jasperodus, a robot, sets out to prove he is the equal of any human being. His futuristic adventures as warrior, tyrant, renegade, and statesman eventually lead him back home to the two human beings who created him. He returns with a question: Does he have a soul?

  The Knights of the Limits

  The best short fiction of Barrington Bayley from his New Worlds period. Nine brilliant stories of infinite space and alien consciousness, suffused with a sense of wonder …

  The Fall of Chronopolis

  The mighty ships of the Third Time Fleet relentlessly patrolled the Chronotic Empire’s thousand-year frontier, blotting out an error of history here or there before swooping back to challenge other time-travelling civilisations far into the future. Captain Mond Aton had been proud to serve in such a fleet. But now, falsely convicted of cowardice and dereliction of duty, he had been given the cruellest of sentences: to be sent unprotected into time as a lone messenger between the cruising timeships. After such an inconceivable experience in the endless voids there was only one option left to him. To be allowed to die.

  Barrington J. Bayley

  SF GATEWAY OMNIBUS

  THE SOUL OF THE ROBOT

  THE KNIGHTS OF THE LIMITS

  THE FALL OF CHRONOPOLIS

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Introduction from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

  The Soul of the Robot

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  The Knights of the Limits

  Acknowledgments

  The Exploration of Space

  The Bees of Knowledge

  Exit from City 5

  Me and My Antronoscope

  All the King’s Men

  An Overload

  Mutation Planet

  The Problem of Morley’s Emission

  The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor

  The Fall of Chronopolis

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Website

  Also by Barrington J. Bayley

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

  Barrington J. Bayley (1937–2008) was a UK writer active as a freelance under various names in the 1950s, often working as P. F. Woods and (with his editor and colleague Michael Moorcock) as Michael Barrington. During his prolific early years in particular, he wrote juvenile stories, comics, picture-strips and features as well as sf, which he began to publish with ‘Combat’s End’ for Vargo Science Fiction Magazine #4 in 1954. The best of his early work appears in The Seed of Evil (coll 1979), a retrospective assembled to honour his substantial career. All his sf novels were published under his own name, beginning with Star Virus (1970). This complex and somewhat gloomy space epic, along with some of its successors, had a strong though not broadly recognized influence on such UK sf writers as M. John Harrison. Perhaps because Bayley’s style is sometimes laboured and his lack of cheerful endings is alien to the expectations of readers of conventional Space Opera, he never received adequate recognition for the hard-edged control he exercised over plots, whose typically intricate dealings in Time Paradoxes, and their insistent highly focused metaphysical drive, make them some of the most formidable works of their type. Though Annihilation Factor (1972), Empire of Two Worlds (1972) and Collision Course (1973; vt Collision with Chronos 1977) – which utilizes the time theories of J. W. Dunne – are all variously successful, probably his most fully realized Time Paradox or Time Police space opera is The Fall of Chronopolis (1974) (see below).

  The Robot Jasperodus series – comprising The Soul of the Robot (1974; revised 1976) (see below) and its loose sequel The Rod of Light (1985) – marked a change of pace in its treatment of such Robot themes as the nature of self-consciousness; and The Garments of Caean (1976) utilizes some fairly sophisticated cultural Anthropology in a space-opera tale at whose heart lies a subversive device: a depiction of sentient clothing which (more or less literally) makes the man. But perhaps the most significant work Bayley produced in the 1970s was short fiction, most of it collected in The Knights of the Limits (1978) (see below); much of his last fiction (at least twenty further stories) appeared in Interzone and remains uncollected. Later space operas – The Grand Wheel (1977) (about Psi Powers), Star Winds (1978), The Pillars of Eternity (1982), The Zen Gun (1983), The Forest of Peldain (1985), The Sinners of Erspia (2002) and The Great Hydration (2005) – continued to conceive of the universe as a kind of polished machine. Bayley continues to be seriously underestimated, perhaps because most of his best work appeared as paperback originals, most of these being published in America, a land he never visited or showed any inclination to depict in his fiction. His UK following, though not large, remained intensely loyal until the end of his life. They were right to keep his name alive.

  The Fall of Chronopolis, which is the first tale assembled here, climaxes Bayley’s early career in its wide-ranging but impersonal exuberance, lacking any attempt to cosy up to the reader. Even at its most outrageous, the story reads like polished reportage: a characteristic that marked Bayley’s work throughout, a sense that the worlds he described were so absolutely real that he needed only to report the latest news from the front. I
n this novel, which is a pure Time Opera, the Chronotic Empire jousts through time and space against a terrifying adversary in doomed attempts to maintain a stable reality; at the crux of the book it becomes evident that the conflict is eternal, and that the same forces will oppose one another through time forever, in one Alternate World after another.

  Though it was published in the same year (1974), The Soul of the Robot, the second novel here presented, marks a new stage in Bayley’s career. Everything one might say about The Fall of Chronopolis applies here; what is added is a focus on characters – in this case robots – who own deep strangeness reflects the worlds they occupy. The effect is strangely moving and unsettling: as though we were eavesdropping on creatures far removed from us, but still intimate. The overall tale makes complex play, as before, with a number of philosophical Paradoxes, though Bayley’s touch here is relatively light and elliptical, approaching the surreal ‘lightness’ achieved by John T. Sladek in his own robot novels.

  The Knights of the Limits may contain stories that seem bleak, but in the end Bayley’s architectural ingenuities (and the human/machine interfaces he was now able to depict with such ease) are what we remember. We remember the dark glittering intricacy of his creations, which glow like orreries in the mind’s eye. Bayley was a cleansing writer, he cleared the eye, and sharpened the mind. We are very lucky to have him here.

  For a more detailed version of the above, see Barrington J. Bayley’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bayley_barrington_j

  Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

  THE SOUL OF THE ROBOT

  For Mike Moorcock – ‘the eternal champion’!

  1

  Out of pre-existence Jasperodus awoke to find himself in darkness.

  Seldom can a sentient being have known such presence of mind in the first few seconds of its life. Patiently Jasperodus remained standing in the pitch-blackness and reviewed his situation, drawing upon the information that had been placed in his partially-stocked memory before his birth.

  He became aware that he stood unaided inside a closed metal cabinet. The first intelligent action of his existence was to grope forward with his right hand until he found the knob on the inside of the cabinet’s door. He turned, and pushed. Then he stepped out to inspect the scene that met his eyes.

  A man and a woman, well worn in years and dressed in smudged work smocks, stared at him shyly. They stood close to one another, like a couple who had grown old in each other’s company. The room smelled faintly of pine, of which wood workbenches and other furniture were fashioned: chairs, cupboards, a table and an assembly rack. Cluttered on these, as well as on floor, benches and hooks, was a disorderly array of components and of the curious instruments betokening the trade of an electronics craftsman.

  Although the room was untidy and somewhat shabby, it had a warm, homely atmosphere. Its disorder was that of someone who had his own sense of method, and Jasperodus already knew how efficacious that method was.

  His glance went back to the elderly couple. They, in turn, looked at him with expressions that tried desperately to mask their anxiety. They were gentle and blameless people, and in Jasperodus’ eyes rather pathetic since their eager expectations were doomed to disappointment.

  ‘We are your parents,’ the wife said in a hesitant, hopeful voice. ‘We made you. You are our son.’

  She had no need to explain further, for Jasperodus knew the story: childless, and saddened by their childlessness, the couple had chosen this way of giving their lives issue. They looked to Jasperodus now to bring them as much joy and comfort as an organically born flesh-and-blood child might have done.

  But like many an ungrateful son, Jasperodus had already made his decision. He imagined better things for himself than to spend his life with them. Jasperodus, the hulking, bronze-black all-purpose robot they had created, laughed harshly and moved purposively across the room to the door. Opening it, he walked out of their lives.

  Looking after his retreating back, the man put his hand comfortingly on his wife’s shoulder. ‘We knew this could happen,’ he reminded her gently. It was true that they could have made their offspring with a built-in desire to cherish them; but that, they had both decided, would not be the right way. Whatever he did, it had to be of his own free will.

  Yet, after their long, patient labours, their parents’ anguish was real. Jasperodus had some theoretical knowledge of the world, but no experience of it. His future was as unpredictable as his past was blank.

  ‘What will become of him?’ the woman said tearfully. ‘What will become of him?’

  2

  The rambling cottage stood alone in extensive countryside. Jasperodus took a direction at random and simply kept on walking. He walked first across a tiny patch of land that supplied his parents’ meagre needs. Two robot agricultural machines were at work, one harvesting high-yield crops of grain and vegetables and the other tending a few animals. More of his father’s handiwork, Jasperodus did not doubt, but they were primitive machines only, built for specific work. They compared to himself as a primitive insect compared to a man.

  Five minutes brought him through the smallholding to rolling woods and wild meadows. Confident that if he kept going he would eventually meet with something more in keeping with his new-born sense of adventure, for the time being he contented himself with simply enjoying his first few hours in the world, admiring his body and all the faculties his parents had given him.

  Jasperodus’ form was that of a handsome humanoid in bronze-black metal. His exterior, comprising flat planes mollified by brief rounded surfaces, aspired to a frankly metallic effect. To alleviate the weightiness of this appearance he was decorated all over with artistic scroll-like engravings. Altogether, his body exuded strength and capability.

  His face he could not see and so had to postpone his inspection of it. His senses, however, he could explore freely. He switched his eyesight up and down the spectrum of radiation, well beyond the octave of light visible to human beings. His audible range was equally broad. His sense of smell, on the contrary, though adequate, was not as sharp as in many men and certainly did not approach the acuteness of some animals. As for his sense of touch, it was perfectly delicate where it concerned dynamics, but he was to learn later that it lacked the delicious touch-sensations that were available to organic beings; it meant nothing to him to be stroked.

  Touch-sensation was a field his father had not mastered, indeed it was the trickiest problem in the whole of robotics.

  His repertoire of sensory inputs was rounded off by a superb sense of balance and movement. Jasperodus would have made a skilful dancer, despite his weight of about a third of a ton.

  All in all he was probably one of the finest robots ever to be built. His father, a master robot-maker, was well-qualified for the task; he had learned his trade first of all in a robot factory in Tarka, later spending nearly a decade creating unusual robots on the estates of the eccentric Count Viss. Finally he had enrolled with the supreme robot designer of them all, Aristos Lyos, for a further three years of special study, before retiring to this remote, pleasant spot to create the masterpiece that would fulfil his life. Jasperodus could well imagine the old man’s devotion, as well as the inexhaustible patience of his wife, who had prepared the greater mass of repetitious micro-circuitry.

  Insofar as the machinery of his body went, all that Jasperodus had examined so far was of the finest workmanship, but not unique. More mysterious was the formation of his character … Here his father had shown his originality. It would have been an easy matter to endow him with any type of personality his parents had wished, but that would have defeated the object of the exercise, which was to give rise to a new, original person of unknown, unique potentialities. Therefore, at the moment of his activation, Jasperodus’ father had arranged for hi
s character to crystallise by chance out of an enormous number of random influences, thus simulating the chance combination of genes and the vagarious experiences of childhood.

  As a result Jasperodus came into the world as a fully formed adult, complete with a backlog of knowledge and with decided attitudes. Admittedly his knowledge was of a sparse and patchy kind, the sort that could be gained from reading books or watching vidtapes. But he knew how to converse and was skilled at handling many types of machinery.

  He knew, too, that the planet Earth was wide, varied and beautiful. Since the collapse of the Rule of Tergov (usually referred to now as the Old Empire) some eight hundred years previously there had been no integrated political order. In the intervening Dark Period of chaos even knowledge of the planet’s geography had become vague. The world was a scattered, motley patchwork of states large and small, of kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms and manors. And although a New Empire was arising in the south of Worldmass – the great continent comprising most of Earth’s dry surface – that saw itself as a successor to the old and destined to resurrect its glories, the machinations of the Great Emperor Charrane made slow progress. The rest of the world heeded him but little.

  On and on strode Jasperodus. Night fell. He switched to infrared vision, planning to walk on uninterrupted into the day.

  After some hours he saw a light shining in the distance. He switched back to normal vision, at which the light resolved itself into a fierce beam stabbing the darkness and moving slowly but steadily across the landscape, disappearing now and then behind hillocks or stretches of forest. Eager to investigate, he broke into a loping run, crashing through the undergrowth and leaping over the uneven ground.

  On topping a rise, he stopped. He found himself looking down on a track comprising parallel steel rails. The moving headlight rounded a curve and approached the culvert. Behind it followed a chain of smaller lights, glimmering from the windows of elongated, dulled-silver coaches with streamlined fluted exteriors.