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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘Remove it.’

  Servants struggled to drag away the dead hulk, aided by one or two other robots. Inch by inch it was hauled towards the big doors; meantime the tables were replaced, and fresh platters of food and more flagons of drink appeared.

  Zhorm tossed a grape into his mouth. ‘Well, robot, I hope you perform your other work as well as you disposed of Gogra. You look as if you need cleaning up – my girls will see to it.’ He beckoned to a servant.

  Jasperodus looked down at himself. He was, it was true, somewhat dirty. His travels had left him caked with mud and dust – added to, now, by plaster and brick-dust.

  Some of the banqueters nearest the King giggled and ogled him as he was led away. ‘Lovely naked girls,’ leered one. ‘Nice soft hands – enjoy yourself!’

  Fools! Jasperodus thought. As if their touch could mean anything to me.

  He followed the servant through the wide doors from which Gogra had emerged, along a short passage and into a perfumed chamber. Three naked girls rose smiling to meet him.

  ‘Come, honoured guest. Let us bath you.’

  In the centre of the circular room was a bath filled with scented water. Soap and various implements lay on a low table. For Jasperodus’ benefit, so that he would not have to enter the bath, there was also a couch on which he was invited to lie.

  The girls got to work, cooing and chuckling as they washed his metal body with caressing movements. He was surprised to see that they appeared to enjoy their task and to gain some perverse kind of pleasure from his strange but man-like form. One in particular – a pretty red-head – stroked him specially languorously, lingering around the box-like bulge at his groin and on the insides of his thighs. Once or twice he noticed her eyes become hot and her breath come in short little gasps. He wondered if it was the strong air of masculinity he imagined he possessed that gave them stimulation. He himself, however, felt nothing.

  When they had finished drying him they showed him into an adjoining room furnished as a bedchamber and left him alone. Evidently the King’s instructions had been loosely worded but the girls were taking them literally and treating him as a human guest. There was a soft bed on which, he presumed, he could if he wished rest; but as he could remain without fatigue on his legs he stood stock-still at the window overlooking the garden around which the King’s residence was built. He was deeply troubled, and was trying to sort out the truth of what had been said to him earlier.

  After some time the door opened and in came a man in his late forties with wavy grey hair and a thin face with high, prominent cheekbones. His expression was distracted, slightly effeminate. He wore a loose robe and carried a large box studded with knobs and dials.

  ‘I am Padua,’ he announced, ‘robotician to the King, I have instructions to examine you, so if you would please lie face down on the floor …’

  ‘You believe I have a sickness,’ Jasperodus interrupted.

  ‘Not a sickness exactly …’ The robotician sounded apologetic.

  ‘An aberrant self-image, then.’

  ‘Just so.’ Padua laid down his box. ‘Now …’

  ‘Wait a moment.’ Jasperodus spoke with such a tone of command that Padua raised his eyebrows and blinked.

  ‘I have need to talk to you. You are an expert on creatures such as I. Is it true what they tell me – that it is impossible for me to be self-aware?’

  ‘Yes, that is so.’ Padua looked at him with a waiting, blank expression.

  ‘Then explain how it is that I am self-aware.’

  ‘The answer is simple: you are not.’

  ‘But do I not show all the signs of awareness? I have emotions – do they not mean awareness?’

  ‘Oh, no, emotions may quite easily be simulated machine-wise. Nothing lies behind them, of course. The robot has no soul.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Jasperodus became agitated. ‘I have a soul. I experience, I know that I am a conscious self. Could I know such things, could I say them even, if they were not true?’

  ‘An interesting question.’ To Jasperodus’ exasperation Padua seemed to receive his anguished pronouncements as a diverting conundrum rather than in the deadly earnest in which they were intended. ‘But once again the answer is that nothing you can say can make any difference. It is technically possible for a self-directed machine to form the conclusion, the opinion as it were, that it has such awareness, having heard that the phenomenon exists in human beings which seem to be so similar to it. But such an opinion is a false one, for the machine does not really understand what awareness is and therefore forms mistaken notions about its nature. The machine-mind is an unconscious mind. Not alive.’

  ‘And yet you are standing here, arguing and talking with me!’

  ‘Oh, one may debate with a robot quite fruitfully. Many have sharper wits than most men. In fact a robot can be a very acceptable companion. But it is my experience that after some lengthy time in its company one comes to notice a certain lack of living vitality in it, and to realise that it is after all dead.’

  ‘So this that I have, and call consciousness, is not consciousness?’

  ‘No. This, in fact, is precisely what I am here to investigate …’

  Padua’s words struck Jasperodus like blow after blow and inflicted more injury on him than Gogra’s hammer ever could have done. ‘You are very sure of yourself, Padua,’ he snarled in surly disappointment.

  ‘Facts are facts. When the science of robotics was first born, back in the civilisation of the Ancient World, the hope of producing artificial consciousness was entertained. It soon became evident that it was impossible, however. There are theorems which prove the matter conclusively.’

  Jasperodus immediately expressed a desire to hear these theorems. Without demur Padua obliged; but they were couched in such technical terms that Jasperodus, who had no deep knowledge of robotics, could not understand them.

  ‘Enough, enough!’ he boomed. ‘Why should I listen to you? You are nothing but a second-rate practitioner in a broken-down, out-of-the-way kingdom. You probably don’t know what you’re talking about.’ This thought, as a matter of fact, was the last straw at which Jasperodus was now clutching.

  Padua drew himself up to his full height. ‘If I may correct you, I am a robotician of the first rank. I have a First-Class Certificate with Honours from the College of Aristos Lyos – and there can be no better qualification than that.’ He shrugged with a hint of weariness. ‘It is not altogether by choice that I practise my profession here in Gordona. But these are troubled times. I came here for the sake of a quiet, peaceful life, to escape the turmoil that is overtaking more sophisticated parts of the world.’

  Jasperodus glowered sadly at his unwitting tormentor, his spirits dwindling to nothing. He had been cheated, after all, of the thing he had been most sure of. Just what was this self-awareness possessed by human beings and of which he could have no inkling? Doubtless the robotician was secretly laughing at him for believing his mechanical self-reference to be that godly state of consciousness reserved only for biological beings. Yet even now it seemed incredible to him that this feeling of self-existence he imagined he had was only a fake, a phantom, an illusion, that it didn’t exist. Still, how could he deny Padua’s expert judgment?

  The more he thought about it the more his brain whirled until he could bear it no longer. He flung himself full-length on the floor.

  ‘Get on with your work, Padua,’ he invited, his voice muffled by the floor tiles. ‘I do not wish to believe I exist when in truth I do not. Rectify my brain and release me from this agony.’

  After a long pause the robotician knelt beside him. Then there was a slight feeling of pressure and a click as he applied special tools that alone could open Jasperodus’ inspection plate.

  For a time Padua employed the extensible monitors on his inspection box, inserting them into the hundreds of checkpoints beneath the plates in Jasperodus’ head and neck. He turned knobs delicately and carefully watched the dials.
Jasperodus could scarcely hear him breathe. Eventually he replaced the plates and stood up.

  ‘A sublime example of robotmanship,’ he said in a tone of reverence. ‘Worthy of the great Lyos himself. I suppose you weren’t …?’

  ‘No,’ Jasperodus replied shortly. Hastily he scrambled to his feet. ‘You did nothing!’ he exclaimed angrily. ‘Why did you make no adjustment?’

  Padua raised his hands in a gesture of resignation. ‘I would not presume to interfere in a work of such superb craftsmanship. Anything I could do to amend your integration state – to use a technical term – would be meddlesome and crude …’ He placed his finger on his lips thoughtfully. ‘I have just thought of something. Your fictitious self-image could be deliberate. It may have been a deliberate device on the part of your designer. At that, it is quite ingenious. Hmm.’ Padua nodded, musing. ‘A means of raising a machine’s status in its own eyes and so lifting its self-reliance to a new level. Very ingenious. Possibly I should have played along with your delusion.’

  ‘Too late for that now,’ replied Jasperodus dully. If what Padua said was true, then the cruelty of what his parents had done to him was almost unbelievable. Surely their intention had been quite the reverse.

  ‘Indeed, yes.’ Padua packed up his gear. ‘Well, time for you to be moving.’

  ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘You are now a member of the King’s household. I have orders to send you down to the stables, where the machines and animals are quartered. So if you will step this way …’

  Jasperodus stepped to the door, then paused and turned to Padua. ‘But you have condemned me to Hell,’ he accused. ‘To a living death. Yet how can I be condemned? I am not a conscious soul, I only appear to myself to be. I do not exist, I only believe that I do. I am nothing, a figment, a thought in the void without a thinker.’ He shook his head in deepest despair. ‘It is a riddle. I cannot understand it.’

  Padua gazed at him with something touchingly close to sympathy. ‘If this self-image is pre-programmed, you are indeed faced with a paradox that to a machine-mind is insuperable,’ he admitted. He touched Jasperodus on the arm. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again. I hope so.’ He pointed down the corridor. ‘Please follow the passage to the right. The stable hands will be ready to receive you.’

  So Jasperodus, his morale broken, believing his effective worth to be zero, obeyed the robotician and plodded towards the palace stables to begin his servitude.

  4

  From the animal stables down near the courtyard that opened on to the concourse, came the sound of stamping feet, of snorting horses and the occasional bark of a dog as the kennels stirred in the pre-dawn gloom. Hearing these sounds, Jasperodus envied the animals their common warmth and sensitive restlessness. It would have been better to be stabled among them, he thought, rather than here in the unrelieved tedium of the construct section.

  A dreary, creaking voice suddenly came to life in the stall next to his own. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six. All here. Four plates of patterned silver. Five gold goblets engraved with the Royal Coat of Arms. A trencher of platinum, design depicting a rustic scene. Now the earthenware. Fifty plates of assorted glaze. Count them slowly. Handle them carefully, you rotten rusted hulk. Oh dear. Two plates broken. Oh dear, I am a rotten rusted hulk.’

  A pause; then the maddening monologue began again. The voice came from an aged, deteriorating robot who worked in the palace kitchens. Every night his moronic brain sorted through the day’s experiences which, with small variations, were always the same: endless abuse from the kitchen staff and an inevitable succession of accidents and mistakes. Night after night Jasperodus was forced to eavesdrop on a stream of babble, a machine version of troubled dreams, a recurring nightmare whose theme was incompetence.

  He stood in a wooden stall to which he was fastened by a heavy chain. The precaution was futile as well as unnecessary: with a little exertion he could have torn out the chain by the pins that fastened it to the timber and made his escape. But neither escape, nor defiance, nor disobedience were anywhere in his mind. Jasperodus had entered the stables, from the very first moment, utterly resigned to his future of machine drudgery. He knew himself to be nothing: he carried out his work dutifully and without omission, but mulishly, so that Horsu Greb, the robot overseer, had been forced to admit scant value on his talents.

  For the first few weeks of his slavery he had continued to wrestle with the existential riddle posed him by his conversation with Padua.

  It had been a tormenting time, for all his efforts had only persuaded him that Padua – and all the others – must be right. He had striven to enter into his own mind to find his basic identity, to locate the ‘I’ that, if he were conscious, must lie behind all his thoughts and perceptions. But however hard he tried all he could find were more thoughts, feelings and perceptions. The inference was plain: if the ‘I’ could not be grasped then it was reasonable to suppose that it did not exist at all.

  And so he was a figment, as Padua had said. The ‘consciousness’ he had presumed in himself was fictitious only. It would not be difficult for a clever robot-maker to arrange: probably it consisted of one thought mechanically assessing another. But dead, all dead.

  Jasperodus did not know whether to curse those who had made him or to pity them.

  Since he had reached his conclusions and left off his mentations the despair they had brought him had worn down to a kind of everyday weariness. Weariness and boredom were now his constant companions – he had no others, for apart from himself the robots of the stable were cretinous in the extreme. He could, for short periods, escape this weariness (as well as Kitchen Help’s desperate maunderings) by switching off his higher brain functions, upon which he simply vanished from existence as far as his own cognisance went. Unfortunately some automatic mechanism limited this haven of ‘sleep’ to four hours out of twenty-four, since from a physiological standpoint it was not necessary to him at all. Otherwise he might have preferred to switch himself off permanently, since according to Padua non-being was more appropriate to his proper condition.

  With regard to the boredom that was eating into him: he had noticed that he alone of all the working robots was afflicted with it. He theorised two explanations: (I) his erroneous self-image was responsible and (2) the other robots were too stupid ever to feel bored.

  Either explanation was sufficient on its own, he felt, but notably the latter. The constructs he had been thrown among were a haphazard collection, their intelligence ranging from the subhuman right down to the negligible. Some were so primitive that they scarcely deserved to be called ‘self-directed’ at all. Jasperodus ignored all of them, including the resurrected Gogra, whom he had occasionally seen skulking about. On their first sighting one another he had wondered if the big fighting robot would take him to task for the humiliation he had suffered, but either Gogra’s reconstituted brain contained no memory of his defeat or else he was too dim-witted to feel resentment.

  The same could not be said for Horsu Greb, robot overseer, dim-witted though he undoubtedly was. The bad feeling he harboured towards Jasperodus stemmed, apparently, from a casual jest on Padua’s part. When advising Horsu of the new robot’s capabilities, as was his duty, he had jokingly remarked that Jasperodus could be a candidate for Horsu’s own job. Never a man of enormous humour, Horsu had taken the threat seriously and ever after looked with ill-veiled hostility toward his handsome chargehand. Even he sensed something unusual about Jasperodus, despite the latter’s modest demeanour, and that was the reason why he kept him in chains at night.

  Dawn broke, chinks of light filtering into the stable, glancing off metal, shining on wood. Dogs barked more vigorously in the animal section, from which wafted a warm, raw odour Jasperodus was well used to.

  A timber gate squeaked open. Horsu Greb lurched into view, red-rimmed eyes staring out over a bulbous nose flawed with warts. Rubbing sleep from his eyes and hitching up his baggy trousers with a length of leather cord, he paced th
e gangway, bellowing hoarsely.

  ‘Stir yourselves, you useless lumps! The sun is in the sky! No more lazing!’

  He turned aside to urinate against the flank of an unprotesting earthmover. The stalls resounded to a general clanking and thumping; Jasperodus rattled his chains, marvelling anew at the way Horsu bolstered his self-esteem by projecting organic qualities on to the robots – by imagining that they, not he, preferred to sleep into the day.

  The unkempt overseer stopped by Jasperodus’ stall and glared at him. ‘I want a good day’s work out of you!’ he roared. ‘No slacking! There’s a lot of carrying to be done!’

  Jasperodus remained impassive while Horsu unlocked his chain. He moved into the gangway, receiving as he did so a jocular kick from Horsu’s steel-toed boot.

  The constructs trailed out of the stable in a ragged procession. Not all were humanoid: there were quadrupeds built for hauling after the manner of horses or oxen; wheeled robots; and the self-directed earthmover bearing before it a great splayed blade. In front of Jasperodus Kitchen Help trudged along. Horsu had interrupted his litany, which he hurriedly resumed now with a list of resolutions, adjuring himself to break no plates, spill no soup, and tread on no more pot-boys’ toes.

  Out in the courtyard the robots milled around aimlessly until Horsu, with much self-important yelling and many superfluous blasts upon a whistle, directed them to various destinations: some to the palace where they carried out domestic duties, some to the animal stable where they served as grooms, and the rest, Jasperodus included, out of the courtyard and along the palace wall to a building site.

  The sunlight still barely slanted across the ground as they began work. The earthmover continued digging out the foundations it had started the day before. Jasperodus and two other humanoids unloaded bricks and masonry blocks from some lorries, piling them conveniently for the work to be undertaken. The building gangers had not arrived yet but Horsu, though not himself of that trade, presumed to stand in for them, placing himself on a pile of rubble and looking around him with judicious nods.