Cyclops in the Sky

by Lionel Roberts, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera; Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Astra City was a technological 40th century masterpiece. It represented the challenge of society to the raw untamed planet where it raised its gleaming towers in a far-flung corner of the galaxy. Beyond the force field encircling Astra City lay mystery and terror in the form of the weird primeval Greek beasts.
There were other mysteries surrounding Astra City. Mysteries like those the one-eyed Twen discovered in the labyrinth below the modern city. A labyrinth whose age would only be calculated in centuries... but which was believed to have been erected by the distant Masters themselves. Hidden in its depths Twen discovers a forbidden document of the millennial age, which involves her with a secret society who know the dreadful truth about the colonists. They are Androids... and their dawning intelligence leads them into head-on conflict with the rapidly decaying human race.

Release date: January 30, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE assistant librarian was bored. As bored as it is possible to be in a palatial edifice of beryllium and glass lined with something like half-a-million volumes and microfilms. However, it is possible, even in such circumstances to find that the sheer urbane business of every-day librarian life becomes a decided, crushing, and unmitigated, bore.

Twen sat by her filing cabinet, twirling her dainty fingers restlessly over rows and rows of names without number.

Some of the names, she reflected, meant something to her, others didn’t, but then, no mind however perfect, would be capable of assimilating the entire contents of that library. If a mind couldn’t be developed to that pitch, then there would be no point whatever in printing the volumes and taking the micro-films. She closed the drawer with a metallic clang—a clang that reflected something of her own boredom and anger. With a pronouncedly feminine flounce, she swung on her dainty heel and walked briskly across to the door labelled ‘archives’.

She had found from previous experience that there was nothing quite so interesting, or quite so certain to remove the jaded feeling or irksome boredom, than a browse among the archives. One had to be bored to want to bother with the archives. They were very old, very dusty. Volumes that were never read. Dossiers in their mouldering tapes, that were never consulted. Archives had merely an historical interest. They were kept in the same way that one keeps an old shoe—not having the heart to throw it away because of a faintly remembered superstition about it bringing good luck. Kept in the same way that old nuts and bolts from some long disused machine are kept in an old tobacco tin, and on the corner of an engineer’s work bench. Not because they have any purpose, but because he feels that one day they may come in handy. A reluctant collector’s instinct in humanity, makes him hang on avidly to rubbish that would be far better disposed of. Such were most of the volumes in the archives. At least, so Twen thought.

Twen had been raised in the atmosphere of new thought.

New thought, she decided, that was very clear, very simple, and very direct. It saved a tremendous amount of time and labour and endeavour, and if it did nothing else, it had justified its existence.

New thought was a semi-philosophical religion; a concept; a way of life; a system of existence. New thought stated simply, frankly and bluntly that providing a thing is useful, its existence is justified. If it has any real and valid purpose, if it is confined to a utilitarian niche in the wall of the great Edifice of Life, then it may rest there undisturbed. If however, it could have no valid or immediate purpose, then it was designated as rubbish, and dealt with accordingly.

The whole thing seemed very simple, and just and logical.

On the other hand, there were one or two border-line cases. For even the new leaders, the scientific men, were not entirely convinced that certain articles and certain prehistoric ideas were such a complete and utter waste of time. True they might be, but there was just a hint, a soupçon, a sneaking, lurking suspicion in the most materialistic mind, that there might after all, be something here that perhaps. …

And it was to the archives that such things were relegated.

One day, thought the scientists subconsciously, one day, some new trait of metaphysical thought, some new experiment may dawn upon us, and show us new light, so that we shall be able to find what it was that the ancients treasured so much about these particular works.

Twen, of course, was not a scientist, but in her rather simple way, she shared that attitude to the archives. But perhaps because of some faint feminine intuition, deep down in that part of her mind, which she herself was only vaguely conscious of, there lurked the feeling that somehow, somewhere, someone would make a great discovery in the archives. It was to her a kind of Golden Treasury; an Aladdin’s cave; a door to which as yet she had found no key. Perhaps the key was there?

Once in the archives, she seemed to become a different person. Her training and upbringing, her logical, methodical preciseness her neat, concise approach, drifted away from her to be replaced by a whimsical, almost melancholy sentimentality, as she flitted haphazardly from one shelf of locker to another; from one store box to another; from one vault to another. Turning over fragile dust-begrimed pages here; flicking a reel of meaningless there; like a butterfly trying various flowers, and finding that none of them had the nectar she sought. Questing for something perhaps yet not knowing what. …

She always felt that there was something different about the archives themselves; something strange and old as though the ghosts of the ancients lingered among the dusty volumes. There was no dust in the city, there was no dust in the library, there was no dust in any of the houses. The auto cleaners saw to that. The air-purifying systems fought a perpetual and winning battle against dust, grime, dirt and disorder. Everything in the city was slick, new, ultra-modern. It gleamed and shone from fresh polish and fresh polishing.

But in the archives no cleaning system had been installed. There was an atmosphere that seemed to go back for centuries. She wondered what the ancients were like. She wondered about their thoughts; about their hopes and their fears; about their doubts. They had believed in something which was referred to as the ‘soul myth’. This in itself was strange. It was almost something beyond Twen’s grasp. But as far as she could make out from what she had heard from odd, abstruse sources, and casual half-references, most of them joking, the ancients had believed that there was something other than the physical. Something they called a soul. A non-physical being which had gone on after ‘the end’.

Nowadays, of course, new thought and the New Thinkers, knew differently. There was nothing except those chemico-physical elements which could be weighed, measured, tested, handled and radiocally diagnosed. The universe was quite a complicated and complex structure. But there was no need for anyone to assume that it was more mysterious than it was. “Surely” argued the scientists, and “Surely” agreed their devoted followers. It was only the ignorance of the ancients about the more advanced laws of mind, matter, energy and mass, that had led them to this rather weird, supposition. The Time theorem had not been fully understood in those days, and now every school child knew it. Yesterday’s mystery was to-day’s common sense. Yet as Twen began her browsing among the ancient volumes that feeling began to leave her. Her mind lost its habitual orderliness, as it always did when she ventured through that thick green baize door, and descended the dusty staircase. She was a Cinderella about to meet the Fairy Godmother; she was Child Roland approaching the dark tower; she was Aladdin entering the cave of Abanazer; she was a fairy emerging from the world of fairyland, which she understood, and entering the strange realm of the world above, in this case the world below.

The cobwebs and the dust seemed to beckon to her like old friends. There was a feeling of melancholy sentimentality, which increased as she looked around in the dim old-fashioned electric lights. Strange, how it always had this effect on her, she thought. With a feeling almost of guilt she realised it was some months since she had last been in the archives. She tried to remember in which room she had last done any exploring. There was such a vast, labyrinthine network of catacomb-like passages beneath the great city library, that it was almost impossible for her to know exactly where she was, let alone where she had been a few months before.

Room after room looked almost identical, with its cobwebs, its dust, and its frightening grave-like stillness. She moved on through the first two rooms, down a long, low passage and taking a left-hand bend, she threaded her way through a vast network of chambers. Dark and still and echoing chambers. Dimly lit, like the sewers of some ancient human metropolis long-dead, and long-forgotten.

She might have been re-discovering the ruins of Pompeii, as she made her way further into the heart of the labyrinthine archives, than she had ever done before. Almost as though some deep, half-understood memory, or sense of purpose beyond her full comprehension lured her on and on towards … what ultimate fate, heaven alone knew. And as Twen did not believe in heaven, the concept was a difficult one for her to grasp.

At last she was pulled up short by an old, iron-studded oak door that she was quite certain she had never seen before. Yet, something about the door was vaguely familiar. Something about it seemed to ring a bell so faint and far away it sounded like the ghastly knell which Ralph the Rover had heard as he sank off the Inchcape Rock after doing his dastardly deed.

A chord of memory, mysterious, musical, and utterly remote, trembling away into silence, as she realised that she had never been this way into the archives so far, she had never encountered this door before. Taking the duster from her overall pocket she wiped the door carefully in search of some identification plate beneath the grime. Dust came up in little clouds and made her cough, she paused to light a cigarette, and waited for it to clear. When the atmosphere had become a little less fetid, she advanced towards the door again, and tried to decipher the worn faded name plate. She was not sure that all the characters had withstood the long, long ages that must have passed since they were painted. But from what she could make out the words seemed to be ‘Forbidden Documents’. The printing was archaic. It had never been a common script in the city in living memory. The lettering was crude and uneven as though it had been put on by hand, instead of one of the auto-scribe devices which were now universally employed. She opened the door with some difficulty and the creak of the protesting hinges was like the last sounds of a soul in torment.

Twen took a long pull on the cigarette to steady her quaking nerves and moved forward into the damp, dank, fusty, musty interior of the Forbidden Document room.

She wondered what possible reason anybody could have had for ‘forbidding’ a document; for banning it from public sight. Whatever might be wrong with the new thought approach to life it was genuinely concerned with truth. Nothing was ever forbidden. No books were ever burned. If they didn’t make sense they were simply disregarded. It was as simple and as logical as that. Nothing was ever forbidden. Any more than dust bins or garbage heaps are ‘forbidden’ or sewers are ‘forbidden’. It was simply that no one had any inclination to play in a sewer or sit on a garbage heap. …

It was one of the things that just weren’t done because it was unpleasant. There were so many important things to do in the life of the city, that no one had time. No one, that is, except a bored assistant librarian … to bother with the stuff that found its way into the archives.

Whoever had done the forbidding must have done it a long, long time ago.

She thought back over the history of the city. She had read a volume of it recently.

It was built on the site of a much older edifice, that had, as far as could be ascertained, been erected by a party of masters themselves. Not citizens. If that was the case, reflected Twen, when those masters had gone some of their buildings must have been left undisturbed behind them, before they had sent out the present citizens to repopulate this planet. If these books and micro-films had been forbidden, then they had been forbidden among those original masters who had come out and built the first settlement, upon which the modern city now lay. The thought struck her as odd. Why should the masters want to forbid anyone or anything to see something? A tingling excitement stirred, as she crossed rapidly to the nearest of the shelves. The room was as closely packed with books as the others; possibly because of the hermetic sealing of the door, most of them were in far better preservation than those outside. She began glancing swiftly at the cover of the book near her finger tips, then the next, and the next … none of the titles were in the least familiar. She had not even known that such books existed. They were cheap, very poorly produced reprints, which looked as if they had been run off on some private illicit Press.

They looked as though they had been produced in secret and as carefully locked away. All sorts of wild, romantic fanciful thoughts went spinning through her head as she glanced over the covers. …

She imagined, white-faced, strained printers behind shuttered windows and locked doors, oiling their presses to silence, and working with all possible speeds, lest those who had forbidden them to work, descended upon them in fury and destruction. She imagined them completing their work and quietly circulating it, and then, she visualised the descent of the secret police, the capture of the books the destruction of the printers. The slow solemn procession to the forbidden room, the hiding of the books, the lettering and locking of the door. Why, she wondered, was the door unlocked now? No one but the chief librarian and herself could have access to the keys. If this was a forbidden room, the door would obviously be locked … if the door was locked it could only be opened with a key. A key which would only be in her hands or the hands of the chief librarian. The chief librarian Thur—it didn’t seem likely that he would have been down here, and yet, as she further looked round, some tell-tale sign of disturbance should have been visible, but there was the thick dust on the door … that seemed to cut out this possibility all together.

Carefully and quietly she retraced her steps to the outside and began examining the door from w. . .