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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  The work was tedious and heavy. Hours passed and the sun rose in the sky; Jasperodus’ body hummed almost audibly as he humped the blocks of stone which were quarried, he believed, from ancient ruins lying somewhere in the region.

  Occasionally he paused to take note of anything interesting that might be happening nearby. They were working to build fuel bunkers for a powerhouse that lay beneath the palace, and every now and then a number of large baffle-plates set in the palace wall opened slightly to give forth a wave of heat. As the day progressed the exhalations grew more intense until they finally stopped altogether. Jasperodus, who was familiar with the layout of the powerhouse through having worked there as a stoker, suspected that something was amiss.

  He was proved correct, for shortly a stocky, red-faced man emerged from the access tunnel and hurried to Horsu, with whom he engaged in agitated discussion. On seeing Horsu shake his head in a gesture of indignant refusal Jasperodus heightened the sensitivity of his hearing so as to eavesdrop on their conversation.

  ‘Do you imagine my fine robots are so many lumps of wood to be burned up just like that? Away with you!’ Horsu was saying.

  ‘But imagine if there is an explosion – right underneath the palace!’ the other implored with anguish. ‘Would you have the King rebuke you for malfeasance?’

  Horsu parried the threat. ‘To me is entrusted only the care of the household robots. The powerhouse is not within my province and is in no way my responsibility.’

  And the other riposted: ‘Indeed it is, for your robots are even now engaged in building an extension to it.’

  However else Horsu might have answered remained unknown, for the Major Domo himself arrived, bearing himself imperiously and trailing behind him Kitchen Help.

  The Major Domo curtly overruled Horsu’s objections. ‘This robot here will be no loss,’ he declared. ‘The kitchen staff tell me he is completely useless and more of a nuisance than an asset. So let him expend himself on one last useful act.’

  With an aggrieved sigh the stablemaster looked this way and that, scratching his chin. He next looked Kitchen Help up and down and then glanced at Jasperodus; a crafty look came over his face.

  ‘Very well!’ he agreed. ‘Take Kitchen Help. The crisis evidently demands a sacrifice.’

  The aged construct nodded his head as it was explained to him what was required. His weakly glowing eyes blinked in his effort to understand. ‘Yes, I obey. Reach the opposite wall of the furnace; inspect to ascertain why the conduits will not open nor the rakes work; clear the mechanism and make sure it is working aright; if possible, quit the furnace and return.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent!’ The party moved to the mouth of the access tunnel and disappeared from view.

  Jasperodus continued with his work, but presently Horsu and the others emerged into the open again, minus the robot. The Major Domo pointed to a humanoid who worked alongside Jasperodus.

  ‘How about that one there? He seems sturdy enough.’

  But Horsu beckoned to Jasperodus himself. ‘I can do even better. It’s futile to send machine after machine into the furnace if they are simply destroyed without doing the job. This one, now, is in perfect condition; if he can’t do it none of them can.’ He adopted an expression of regret tempered with duty. ‘It distresses me, of course, that I shall probably lose this prime property, but after all they’re all expendable.’

  ‘What is the nature of the problem?’ Jasperodus asked on coming near.

  The powerhouse minder turned to him. ‘The furnace controls are jammed and all attempts to clear them from the outside have failed. In a word, it’s out of control: the furnace is overheating, the boilers are building up pressure, and if this goes on I don’t like to think about the consequences.’

  ‘Clearly a poor piece of design,’ Jasperodus remarked.

  The powerhouse minder shot him a look of reproof and then continued. ‘Someone has to go right into the furnace to see what the trouble is. We’ve already sent the kitchen robot, but apparently the temperature was too much for him.’ He went on to issue the same instructions he had given Kitchen Help.

  ‘I am acquainted with this furnace, and I am not likely to survive either,’ Jasperodus volunteered. ‘Perhaps if I were equipped with a cooling agent, such as frozen carbon dioxide supplied through a hose …’

  ‘Enough!’ roared Horsu. ‘There’s no time for niceties. This is an emergency – get on with it.’ And Jasperodus understood that Horsu was using the situation to get rid of him for good and all.

  If I were a living being it would be an injustice, he thought, but I am not a living being, so there is no injustice …

  He followed the humans to the access tunnel, automatically going over the layout of the powerhouse in his mind. Its design was so crude as to lose even the advantages of simplicity. Theoretically it used nuclear energy, consuming a specially processed type of ‘safe’ compound isotope that produced no residual radioactivity when it decayed, but generated enough heat to raise steam through a primitive heat exchanger. The isotope was shovelled into the furnace as slag and triggered into decay by a powerful jolt of microwaves, after which it decomposed into liquid waste and could be drained off through conduits.

  But in practice the isotope fuel was permanently in short supply and so was combined with an oddly disparate method of producing energy. The furnace was fitted with a system of flues to draw oxygen, and into it went anything that would burn – timber, coke, plastic, sometimes rubbish from the palace. The combination of combustion and nuclear power was not a happy one, as could be seen from the present situation. It would be a small disaster for King Zhorm if the powerhouse was destroyed, for apart from the damage it would cause to the palace itself, it would cut off the electricity supply to part of the town of Okrum – a form of royal largesse from which Zhorm drew popularity.

  The tunnel was lined with concrete and angled sharply underground. The light here was dim, being provided by feeble yellow lamps set in the ceiling. Halfway down the tunnel turned a right angle, and here Horsu and the others paused.

  ‘Right,’ Horsu said with unveiled satisfaction. ‘You know what you have to do – get on with it.’

  Wordlessly Jasperodus proceeded on his own. A few yards further down brought him to the furnace room.

  The space between wall and furnace was narrow. Facing Jasperodus were the furnace doors, fabricated of mica-carbon laminate and glowing faintly. Behind them the fire of the furnace seemed to roar and beat like a living heart.

  Two crouching robots turned towards him in the baking gloom. Jasperodus knew them well: they were stokers, their feeble mentalities adapted only to that one task. They were incapable of any other, such as the mission he had been sent on.

  Here I go, then. As I am nothing, so I shall be nothing. A thought in the void without a thinker …

  He dismissed any thought of death. Death could not exist for one who had never been born … It seemed to him that what was about to happen to him was a logical conclusion of the tragedy that surrounded him. Every day of his life he had been living a lie, the lie of his own being. That lie had brought him first to despair, then to the knowledge of his own imprisonment, and now … Everything had been leading to this fiery execution chamber.

  Understanding what was expected, the stokers applied themselves to levers, one on either side of the doors, and forced them slowly open. A brilliant white glare flooded into the narrow space.

  As the glaring fire was revealed, a curious image rose in Jasperodus’ mind, so vividly as to paralyse him for a moment. He saw a blast furnace in which iron and steel were smelted. Into it trundled an endless stream of scrap metal: objects large and small, weapons, cars, broken-up aircraft and locomotives, canisters, ornaments, statues and statuettes, table-ware, hooks and buttons, brackets, rods, girders, fences, gates, trays, myriad machines and defunct robots, every one disappeared into the ravening heat to lose all form and identity. And all the metal thereby gained was used again to mak
e a new generation of artifacts. Unaccountably this thought left Jasperodus feeling stunned – he himself could be melted down in such a furnace (as he had once been drawn from one) and used to make, perhaps, the chassis for a motorised carriage, or even a new, totally different robot who would live a happily humdrum existence unafflicted by the curse of a fictitious self-image.

  Where had this vision come from? Presumably from the stock of gratuitous memories bestowed on him by his father – somehow he still thought of the old man as his father. But it was over in a second or so. He moved forward, switching his vision to ultraviolet in an attempt to see through the flames, and clambered into the furnace. Fire licked at him; the doors edged shut behind him.

  He stood alone in a raging haze of incandescence.

  The air was thick with energy. It was like being under water.

  This must be what it’s like inside a star.

  Then it was hard for him to think anything for everything went fuzzy; the heat was disrupting his processes. He took a step, and stumbled over the body of Kitchen Help, which was at white heat and looked on the point of beginning to melt. His own skin was already glowing. Vaguely he was aware of his lower brain functions responding to the damage with a stream of urgent reports, analyses and prognostications; their import was that he should remove himself from here on the instant.

  The possibility presented itself that he might not even reach the far wall of the furnace, though it was not very far away. But something else rose to the surface in him, sweeping aside both defeatism and the machine analogue of panic. He determined that he would accomplish this one last thing, at whatever degree of difficulty; he would not end his functioning on a note of failure.

  His eyes were only of minimal use to him by now. He went forward, reeled, recovered himself and so gained the far end of the furnace where the trouble was. Groping with his hands, he verified what he had already guessed to be the cause of failure: vitrified ash from the burning of a combustible fuel had sealed both the lids of the waste pipes and the clumsy mica-laminate rakes that were supposed to shovel the ash away. Both ash and decomposed isotope was supposed to form a slurry to flow away to the waste pits below; instead they had stayed in the furnace, building up more and more heat.

  Though barely operational, Jasperodus kicked desperately at the glassy mass, and eventually succeeded in cracking and shattering it. Then he threw himself at the rakes, tearing free the fused fragments with his hands.

  His body was at white heat. His senses were going out, leaving him hanging in a vacant void.

  Collapse was imminent.

  If I really tried, he thought, perhaps I could reach the door. But he made no move to do so, and shortly he felt a tearing sensation as vital systems were taken out. Then he knew no more.

  There was light, gentle and caressing. There was the rustle of fabric, and the sigh of a breeze.

  And Jasperodus retracted his eyelids, gazing astonished at a baroque ceiling.

  Above him hovered the thin, intent face of Padua the robotician. He smiled faintly to see that Jasperodus was ‘awake’.

  ‘Do not be surprised,’ he murmured. ‘You have survived.’

  Nevertheless Jasperodus was surprised. Experimentally he levered himself to a sitting position, and observed that he had been lying on a low table covered with a yellow cloth. He appeared to be in one of the gracious little bowers that fringed the palace gardens; through the window casements he could see small, delicate trees, flowered bushes and orange-coloured blossoms.

  He looked down at his body: bronze-black, decorated all over with engravings, but otherwise unmarked. He swung his legs to the floor and stood with feet apart, trying to detect some persisting damage in himself.

  ‘I thought I had sustained more harm than this!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘You did – you were very badly damaged indeed,’ Padua told him mildly. ‘You have been out for six months.’

  ‘Six months …’ Jasperodus echoed wonderingly. He flexed his fingers, examining his hands.

  ‘You were in the condition known as scrap when they brought you out of the furnace,’ Padua said. ‘But for all the damage the basic design elements were intact – the brain was particularly well protected. I undertook to put you back in order and rescued you from the junkyard – just in time, as you were about to be pounded under the steam hammer.’

  ‘Six months is a long time to spend on a repair job. A labour of love, almost.’ Jasperodus’ tone was sardonic.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Padua smiled faintly again. ‘I was loath to see such fine work as you represent go to waste. There is little to give my talents full rein here in Gordona – that is the price one pays for living in such an out-of-the-way place. I regarded it as a pleasurable test of my skill, and no thanks are due my way.’

  Jasperodus, who had not intended to thank him, nevertheless noticed that Padua was looking at him with a strangely expectant expression on his face. He paced the room.

  ‘My faculties are fully restored?’

  ‘Yes, though it cost much effort.’

  ‘This hardly looks like your workshop.’ Jasperodus indicated the harmonious décor.

  ‘I decided to let you be reactivated in pleasant surroundings, rather than amid a clutter of tools and instruments.’ Again the expectant look.

  ‘What of radioactivity?’ Jasperodus asked suddenly, remembering the furnace. ‘Am I not dangerous to be near? The way things were, the isotope fuel might well have become unstable.’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about on that score. There was a little radioactivity, but I purged your substance of it by a means of accelerating atomic decay that is known to me.’

  ‘You are indeed wasted in Gordona,’ Jasperodus grunted grudgingly. He paced again, trying to place what it was that was new and puzzling in his environment.

  ‘There’s a change,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  At this Padua laughed and clapped his hands in delight. ‘I thought you’d never notice. Try again – can you guess what it is?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be asking if I could,’ Jasperodus replied with an irritable gesture.

  ‘Well, you see, the making of robots is as much of an art as a science. Even the masters of highest attainment are invariably stronger on some features, weaker on others – except, of course, for an acme of perfection like Aristos Lyos. Now your own maker was unexcelled in the area of intellectual functions, but rather weak when it came to a certain type of fine nerve structure needed for the senses of smell and touch. Now it so happens that that area is my own speciality! So I undertook to remedy his deficiencies. In the field of touch-sensation and of smell you now have the same range and sensitivity as any man or woman!’

  With much curiosity Jasperodus drew one hand across the other. It was as Padua had said: the dynamic sense of solid bodies was there, as before, but in addition there was an entirely new feeling; a stroking, tingling feeling.

  Fascinated, he laid the flat of one hand on the cloth of the table he had just vacated, moving the palm gently across the felt. An entirely novel rough-smooth feel coursed through him. A whole area of his brain seemed to come alive for the first time.

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I had hoped it would afford you some diversion,’ Padua replied affably.

  Jasperodus, however, would not be jollied along. ‘No doubt it will enable me to appreciate the qualities of the stable all the better,’ he grunted. ‘One thing you have not amended. I still have this irrational belief that I possess consciousness!’ And he rounded on Padua accusingly.

  Padua looked a little embarrassed. ‘There was nothing I could do about that,’ he said defensively. ‘It’s in the basic design: if I tried to remove it you would be reduced to a hulk, good for nothing.’

  Jasperodus emitted a sigh, a gesture he had learned from Horsu Greb. ‘Then to be frank I could have preferred that you had left me for scrap.’

  His words provoked such a look of unhappiness on the robotician�
��s face that he instantly regretted them – he had spoiled Padua’s pleasure. But he impatiently cancelled the feeling. Padua had enjoyed his work and he, Jasperodus, had to pay the price for his enjoyment.

  ‘Would it be any use if I advised you not to brood too much on this enigma?’ Padua suggested cautiously. ‘It is part of your integration state, and it does appear to work, as a device for raising your degree of function to a greater independence than is normally found in a robot. You are, almost, a perfect simulation of a man.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jasperodus said with scathing irony. ‘It helps not at all, especially as I must now return to the tender ministrations of Horsu Greb.’

  ‘I have been considering that,’ Padua replied. ‘Horsu could be accused of not making full use of your potentialities – it grieves me to see you wasted on manual labour. Perhaps I can persuade the Major Domo to assign you to more challenging duties where you will not be under his direction, though that would be a break with our usual practice. After all, Greb has effectively discarded you.’

  An idea came to Jasperodus. ‘Though my knowledge of engineering is far from extensive, I could undertake to design a better powerhouse than you have at present. It gives one a poor view of Gordona’s engineers.’

  ‘They are better described as optimistic amateurs,’ Padua agreed. ‘Possibly it could be arranged. Failing that, how would you like to become my assistant? But we must discuss this later – I have duties elsewhere, and perhaps you would like to be alone to collect your thoughts. I’ll be back in about an hour.’

  Padua departed, leaving Jasperodus to his own devices. Attracted to the garden, and wishing to test his new faculties, he unfastened the catch on a glass door and stepped outside. Some yards along a stone path, through a trellised arbour, brought him to a lawn whose further end descended into a series of cultivated terraces. All around were flowering trees, blossoms and shrubs, and beyond these could be glimpsed the circle of low buildings that comprised the palace: mixed timber and stone surmounted by curved, pointed roofs.