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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  It was still his hope to persuade the Emperor to undertake some reforms in this area, but at the moment, due to his own negligence, he carried less weight at court. Placing his attentions elsewhere had caused him to forget the prime strategy of a court functionary: to be constantly in the Emperor’s sight, and constantly to be inflating his self-esteem.

  In addition, he had been encountering more opposition and hostility of late. It was strange, he thought – when he had been full of deviousness, guided only by self-interest, he had won friends and admiration. Now that his efforts were on behalf of the general good enemies were gathering around him.

  He left his apartment and walked towards his office in the west wing of the palace. Passing through one of the many tall arcades that surrounded the central basilica he chanced to see, skulking behind the columns of the peristyle, a pair of sinister-looking, oversized robots known in construct parlance as wreckers. These were robots whose task it was to subdue and destroy other robots who, when the time came for their dissolution, were sometimes apt to display an overactive survival circuit and resist the proceedings.

  A sneaking sense of unease came over him, though he could not specify its source. He walked a short distance further and then heard a voice address him by his rank of marshal. One of the housemen hurried up and spoke loftily to him, without the deference he was usually accorded.

  ‘There are visitors to see you, sir.’ And the houseman turned away, as though that were the end of the matter.

  Advancing behind him came the two wreckers. Jasperodus stared spellbound at these twin servants of doom. They were built for strength alone; the engines that drove their powerful limbs were housed in hulking carapace-like hulls which, added to their grotesque claw-like hands, gave them a dreadful crustacean appearance, like some species of giant crab-man.

  ‘You will accompany us, sir,’ said one in a hoarse voice.

  Jasperodus had almost let them touch him before he goaded himself into action. With a wild, fearful cry he flung himself away and went pounding down the concourse.

  In a minute he had gained the basilica. The doors, as usual at this time of day, were unguarded and he went bursting through them.

  The throne in the apse was unoccupied. At a table midway down the hall the Emperor Charrane sat talking with Ax Oleander and another vizier, the mild-mannered Mangal Breed.

  All three turned to see what had caused the commotion. Oleander greeted Jasperodus’ arrival with his normally unvarying hostile stare; but this time it bore the added tang of an inward triumph.

  Jasperodus rushed forward and sank to his knees before the Emperor.

  ‘Sire! On whose orders am I to be junked?’

  ‘On mine, of course,’ Charrane said indifferently. ‘Whose else?’

  ‘But, my lord – why?’

  Charrane looked from one to the other of his human companions with raised eyebrows. Then he gazed at Jasperodus, but with no hint of feeling.

  ‘At our first meeting some years ago you brought forward points affecting the security of the Empire. Now your work is done. The Empire is secure. That is all.’

  ‘That is no reason for a death sentence, sire!’

  ‘Death?’ echoed Charrane in puzzlement. ‘Death?’ Again he glanced at Breed and Oleander and for a moment seemed almost amused. ‘Listen to me, my friend. Because it has been your function over the past few years to question my judgement on matters of strategy, on the broad affairs of state, do not imagine you can become presumptuous over the business of your own disposal.’

  ‘I … I confess myself bewildered by your change in attitude towards me, sire …’ Jasperodus quavered, seeking some handle by which to grasp the situation.

  Ax Oleander humped his shoulders in a jovial shrug. ‘If the construct wishes to be given reasons, sire, why not indulge him?’

  Charrane lowered his eyes, then nodded curtly. He turned to Jasperodus.

  ‘There is an inexorability about machines, they say,’ he remarked. ‘Never halting, always advancing on the course they were first set to, whether circumstances warrant it or not. Certainly it has been the case with you! I have been made aware of how far your activities are beginning to extend. Projects here, projects there – many of them unsolicited!’ Now Charrane looked indignant. ‘Your talents are indisputable, but I do not wish to see them become unwelcome … besides, a certain King Zhorm of Gordona has lately applied to become my vassal, and he has recounted anew the story of your stay there, which has given me fresh food for thought.’

  ‘That kind of thing is behind me, sire! I work only for the advancement of the Empire!’

  ‘I am aware of that, Jasperodus. But I am also aware that your concern for the Empire now covers all spheres, not merely the military. May I remind you that the care and welfare of the Empire is my province? I do not care to be usurped in any form or fashion – ambition, Jasperodus, is a quality that should be restricted to men. In machines it is altogether unacceptable.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of reasonableness; a hint of humour came to his features. ‘What else could I do with you? My human ministers may be pensioned off with fleshly pleasures when they reach the end of their usefulness, and be no further bother to me. How does one turn aside the ambitions of a machine? Only by resort to the junkyard.’

  Jasperodus hung his head. ‘My services to you should merit a better reward, sire. I will forgo all ambitions, if you will spare me. Even constructs are endowed with a survival instinct.’

  ‘I have no doubt they are endowed with many things,’ Charrane muttered. Then he turned to accept a goblet of sherbet that was offered by a serving maid.

  Amid his shock and dismay, Jasperodus was forced to perceive his fundamental mistake. All this time he had been under a misapprehension regarding his relations with Charrane. The Emperor had never for a moment looked upon him as a living entity, but only as an inanimate machine, the use and disposing of which involved no sense of morality.

  Badly shaken, Jasperodus rose to his feet. Behind him he heard the heavy tread of the wreckers as they entered the hall.

  During the conversation Ax Oleander had been unconsciously moving closer to the Emperor, until he had almost adopted the mouth-to-ear whispering position so familiar to Jasperodus. For the first time since Jasperodus had known him Oleander was wearing a smile of genuine pleasure, and it was clear now where many of Charrane’s just-stated thoughts had originated.

  ‘Mouth to ear!’ Jasperodus cried. ‘He feeds you his poison and you swallow it!’

  The wreckers gripped his arms.

  Jasperodus began to howl.

  ‘DEATH, DEATH, DEATH – you fools, do you not see? You are as dead as I! Death – all the world is nothing but death!’

  They dragged him out still howling – not into the city, as he would have expected, but to a cellar under the palace. He passingly understood the reason for it: it would not be seemly to drag a marshal of the Imperial Forces through the streets. Here waited robotic technicians, around them strewn the tools of their trade with which to disassemble him. Broken up into small parts, he would be delivered to the masher.

  They laid him down on a board table. But Jasperodus broke free and retreated to a corner of the cell-like room. The technicians fell back, disconcerted by this ferocious, glaring robot who fought for his life.

  ‘What can it matter what thoughts and feelings inhabit this empty vessel?’ Jasperodus babbled. ‘When my voice echoes out of this vacant iron drum, where does it come from? From nowhere, from emptiness – the voice of no one – a voice in the void without a speaker. And what of you? Does any entity form your words?’

  Uncomprehendingly the technicians stared at him. The wreckers seized him again, and again Jasperodus began to howl.

  ‘DEATH! ALL IS DEATH!’

  He was still howling when they switched off his brain.

  12

  The return of awareness was slow and fragmentary. It began with a solitary thought that flickered for a bare instant agai
nst an overwhelming darkness and then vanished.

  Intervals of time cannot be measured in oblivion; but on occasion the thought recurred, then was joined by others. Piece by piece a vestigial, primitive creature was built up and became persistent. The period between the birth of this creature and the moment when it began to call itself Jasperodus seemed immense. It ended when Jasperodus recovered sufficient of his memories to recognise himself as a single entity. He was then puzzled to find that he could not locate himself in space; he seemed to be in many places at once.

  Still he could not think clearly, neither did he know for certain who he was, where he came from or how he had got into his present condition. There followed a lengthy phase he thought of as ‘groping’. He seemed able to reach out and search the darkness in some vague or undefined manner, finding pieces of himself and adding them to him. As he did so he gained not only memories and extra mental clarity, but also inexplicable scenes that he seemed able to watch, each from a fixed vantage point.

  This phase ended when his history and personality were again in his possession. Along with his anger at how he had been treated, Jasperodus was forced to appreciate certain facts.

  He had no body.

  He had no single spatial location.

  There existed within himself, just below the level of his volition in a sort of subconscious stream, a continuous activity of monitoring, computing, comparing, collating and responding to countless small stimuli.

  As far as he was able to ascertain he was located within and throughout the walls of Charrane’s palace in the form of a network.

  A full understanding of his situation came after a little deductive thinking. Presumably the roboticians had not delivered his parts to the masher after all. Perhaps reluctant to waste such fine workmanship, they had preserved the sub-assemblies and later used them in a low-integration cybernetic system of the standard type that apparently had been installed in the palace and the surrounding ministries.

  Just what confluence of interrelations had caused to be reconnected sufficient of his one-time components to restore self-directed integration would remain a mystery. The dim urge that had caused this skeleton brain to seek out the rest of its sub-assemblies was also hard to explain in conventional robotic terms. However, he now found himself fully alert and sound of mind, but embedded in an extensive network of electronic administration.

  He wondered what the roboticians had done with his body. That, possibly, had gone to the masher.

  His new mode of existence gave him an unexampled opportunity for surveillance. Apart from his having access to stored information of all kinds, there was a good number of hidden sound and image perceptors scattered about, mostly for the use, as it happened, of Charrane himself, who had become suspicious of what went on around him. It was ironic that they put Jasperodus in a much more intimate position to watch him.

  With some curiosity Jasperodus took stock of the situation at court. A number of years had passed since his deactivation. Mars was under firm control, but the Borgor Alliance was once more flexing its muscles. He received little direct news from the outside world, but what he did learn caused him to think that the internal state of the Empire was ominous. Charrane, with some reluctance, had been persuaded by Oleander to agree to the onset of large-scale factory production in an attempt to counterbalance the Borgor threat. There were occasional stories of disturbances in the city, at least one being within earshot of the palace. A proposal was afoot to provide free rations and entertainment so as to keep discontented elements among the masses quiet.

  Among the services his circuits controlled were various domestic functions, as well as office and administrative terminals used by the Emperor Charrane. Jasperodus found that this made him able to vent his spite if he so wished. For a while he amused himself by subjecting the great Emperor to a number of petty inconveniences – withholding water when he took a shower, or suddenly delivering it scalding hot or icy cold; transmitting to him the wrong reports through his terminals, or even better, writing up totally fictitious reports on the subject called for; putting through a call to Mars when Charrane had asked to speak to someone a hundred yards away; switching the lights on and off when he retired to bed; interrupting his act of love with wife or concubine by activating all the appliances in the room, and so on. But he desisted after a while lest Charrane should order a total overhaul of the palace’s cybernetisation. He could have interfered in the life of the administration more seriously if he so wished – he comprised, for instance, the data retrieval service for the planning staff – but he abandoned any such futilities.

  Instead, he began to think of escape.

  One day he made a scan of his demesne, looking through each sound-and-vision perceptor in turn, glancing at the inflow and outflow of each terminal. Suddenly he stopped short.

  His face older and more lined than when he had last seen him, his old friend Cree Inwing sat in a tiny, stuffy office in an out-of-the-way part of the palace used by the Department of Military Supply. The brisk moustache was still there, as was the military bearing. He wore the epaulettes of a major, and was talking through the all-purpose terminal (Jasperodus had to admit that the new installation had achieved a much simplified method of communication) to the Logistics Section, sorting out details concerning the transportation of a batch of spare parts.

  That finished, he rose and replaced the file holder on the shelf behind him. Watching through the same vision perceptor Cree had just been using, Jasperodus saw that he now walked with a pronounced limp.

  He returned to his desk. Jasperodus spoke softly through the terminal.

  ‘Cree.’

  Inwing looked round startled. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It is I, Jasperodus.’

  Bewilderment appeared on Inwing’s face. Then his expression firmed. ‘That is not his voice,’ he said sternly.

  ‘My own voice is lost to me. I can only use whatever vodors are available.’

  ‘Then where on Earth are you? I heard you had been … destroyed.’

  ‘There are bits of me all over the palace,’ Jasperodus told him. ‘I was destroyed, but only to a degree. The engineers incorporated me into the service system.’ He chuckled gently. ‘A gross underutilisation of my components, if you ask me.’

  He went on to describe in detail how he had been broken up, and how he had been able to reconnect all the parts of his redeployed brain through the system’s comlines. Cree reacted by looking in turns astounded and agitated, and at one time his hands began to tremble.

  ‘I want to escape this imprisonment,’ Jasperodus finished. ‘Will you help me, Cree?’

  ‘Wait! Wait! Don’t go any further!’ Cree rubbed his eyes, then leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and buried his face in his hands. ‘Give me time to take it in!’

  Jasperodus waited. He realised that Cree was now middle-aged, no longer the dashing young man he had once been. Jasperodus’ entreaty doubtless came as a severe crisis for him.

  Finally Cree sighed and uncovered his face.

  ‘So you want to be reconstructed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again Jasperodus waited, for what seemed to him a long time.

  ‘Well?’ he said then.

  ‘No need to ask. I’m with you, all the way.’

  ‘It will involve you in some risk,’ Jasperodus pointed out.

  ‘I owe it to you. Besides, I heard something about that raw deal you got. A bad show, Jasperodus. I’m sorry.’

  Jasperodus was elated. He had not expected to find help so easily. He had anticipated having to suffer his living incarceration for years before finding some means of extricating himself.

  ‘You’ve heard my tale,’ he said. ‘What of yours?’

  Cree shrugged. ‘Oh, my story is ordinary enough. I got my commission – thanks to you. Had some good times. Got wounded in action on Mars – lost part of a leg. So here I am with a desk job in Tansiann. Still, things could be worse.’ He ruminated. ‘What happens now
, Jasperodus? I’ll do whatever you say.’

  ‘I know I can depend on you,’ Jasperodus said. ‘Listen: I know exactly where all my components are as far as the service system is concerned, but that gives me, in effect, only my brain and a few ancillaries. I have no body. It will be necessary to acquire a new one, and for that you will need money. Also, we will need the services of roboticians we can trust and who are prepared to act criminally. They will need to be bribed.’

  Cree nodded. ‘I understand. My funds are at your disposal. If they are are not enough, well …’ he fingered his moustache. ‘We will think of something …’

  A few days later Cree entered his office in high spirits. He had been nosing around in the storerooms under the palace, and there he had found Jasperodus’ decorticated body, complete and undamaged.

  ‘Obviously nobody bothered sending it for scrap,’ he crowed, rubbing his hands. ‘You’ll look like your old self again, Jasperodus.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ Jasperodus congratulated, ‘and also pleased to learn that now there need be no lengthy delay while a new one is manufactured. Have you hired the roboticians yet?’

  ‘Have patience. I am putting out feelers, but give me a few more days.’

  ‘Very well, but now that the event is close it is time to discuss practical details. Cutting so much cerebration out of the system will certainly be noticed quickly because of the deterioration in performance. So the thing will have to be done all at once in a short space of time, and at night. Several men will be needed to extract my parts from various points in the palace, which will require careful planning.’