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

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘That is quickly settled,’ Lyos answered easily. ‘If no one possessed consciousness then the concept could not arise. Since we are able to speak of it, someone must have it. Who else but man?’

  And so there Jasperodus stood, still trapped in a riddle.

  ‘Look upon yourself as man’s tool,’ Lyos advised gently. ‘There is much achievement in you, that is plain, and more to come. Man gave you your desires, and the energy to fulfil them. So serve man. That is what robots are for.’

  Lyos tilted his head and called out in a sharp voice. ‘Socrates!’

  From a pair of bay windows behind him there emerged a robot, a head smaller than Jasperodus, who stepped quietly on to the terrace. His form was rounded and smooth. The eyes were hooded, secretive, and the design of the face betokened a reticent but watchful demeanour. Instantly Jasperodus felt himself the subject of a probing intelligence that reached out from the robot like an impalpable force.

  ‘This here is Socrates, my masterpiece,’ announced Lyos. ‘His intelligence is vast, at times surpassing human understanding. But, like you, he has no consciousness, neither will he ever have any. If he did – there’s no knowing what he would be, what he might do.’

  Jasperodus scrutinised the newcomer. ‘Good day,’ he ventured hesitantly.

  ‘Good day,’ answered Socrates in a voice that was a distant murmur.

  ‘Socrates is intelligent enough to realise that I am conscious but that he is not,’ Lyos remarked. ‘It induces some strange thoughts in him. I keep him by me in my old age to amuse me with the fantastic products of his intellect.’ He twisted round to face Jasperodus again. ‘Concerning one point I am curious. You have gone to some trouble to track me down. Why did you not go directly to the man who made you and direct your questions to him?’

  Jasperodus took his time about framing a reply. ‘Shame, perhaps,’ he said eventually. ‘Shame at having deserted them. No, that’s not it. He has inflicted this enormous fraud on me. Why should I expect him to tell me the truth now?’

  Lyos nodded. ‘Yes, I see.’

  Jasperodus took a step back. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said respectfully. ‘You have not resolved my perplexity, but you have answered my question.’

  On leaving, he glanced back at the pair. Socrates had moved close to his master, and they both gazed out to sea. Then the robot bent and spoke some words into the old man’s ear.

  Back in Tansiann that evening Jasperodus hurried through the palace towards his apartments but was waylaid suddenly by an acquaintance who appeared from behind a pillar.

  ‘Jasperodus! I am so glad to have found you. Have you seen Caught in the Web yet? It is superb!’

  ‘No, I … haven’t found the time.’

  ‘Please do. The reviews do not mislead. Speeler really demonstrates the use of dynamism when it comes to dramatic content. And such a clever counterbalancing of themes … you’ll get a good laugh out of it, too.’

  Jasperodus’ interlocutor was a fellow robot, Gemin by name, one of several whose duties in the administration had led them to enter the social life of the court. He was a more suave version of certain wild robots Jasperodus had been conversant with: witty, elegant, proud of his sophistication. He and his set – which also included humans – looked upon themselves as the whizz-kids of the establishment. Inventive, bursting with enthusiasm for the modern world Charrane was building, amateur experts on the fashionable trends in drama, music and painting, they cultivated an outlook of irreverent cynicism, almost of foppishness.

  Gemin lounged against the pillar, one leg crossed over the other. His almost spherical face, with its disconcertingly bright orange eyes, gleamed. ‘I hear the planning staff is buzzing with something big, Marshal. Come on, now, what’s afoot? Don’t tell me you’ve adopted my plan to drop the Moon on Borgor!’ He chuckled.

  At any other time Jasperodus would have been glad to discuss Speeler’s new play Caught in the Web with him, or even to exchange banter about top secret decisions. All he wanted now was to depart. There loomed in his mind the knowledge of the emptiness that was within Gemin, and he knew it was a mirror of his own emptiness; the emptiness that by himself he could not see. He fancied he could hear mechanisms grinding, churning out the dead words.

  ‘Excuse me, I have business,’ he said curtly, and strode on.

  Alone in his apartments he wandered through the rooms, trying to quieten his agitation. He had received the answer he had expected, had he not? Then he should be suffering no disappointment.

  One of the rooms, the one with the north window, he used as a studio. He stepped to the half-finished canvas on the easel, took up the brush to add a few careful strokes, then desisted. The light was not good enough; he needed morning light, not that of electric bulbs, for this particular picture.

  He looked slowly around at the paintings littering the studio, as though wishing to assess his progress so far. He nodded; he knew that his work was good. He had made no attempt to pander to fashion; by many his pictures would be adjudged outdated. His purposes had been purely private, and he had settled upon that style of painting which seemed best suited to express the emotions that ran deep in him. The greater part of the canvases were landscapes or seascapes, depicting his feeling for the planet Earth (which had been heightened on that occasion, seemingly long ago now, when he had floated in space several hundred miles above it). They were largely naturalistic, but lit with flaming flashes of imagination. Thus a bulky boat sat sedately amid a universal fire that was concocted of sunset, sea and sky.

  Jasperodus’ other main effort to prove himself in the field of feeling lay in music. He had worked assiduously at the art of composition, begging at one time the help of Tansiann’s most distinguished composer. So far he had exerted himself in a number of chamber works and was beginning to get the measure of his talent. Already he was planning something more ambitious: a definitive work of lasting value. As a singer, too, he had discovered some merit – to the delight of his teacher, for his electronic voice was easier to train than a human one.

  Closing the door of the studio behind him he returned to the main lounge, where he sat down, took his head in his hands and uttered a deep sigh (a humanoid habit he had never quite lost).

  Then he gave a cry of exasperation. What was the use of brooding over this tormenting enigma? It could only end in total dejection, and possibly, eventual nonfunction.

  With a determined effort he forced the gloom from his mind. He could be content with what he had: he was accepted in the world of men, and by his outward works he was no less than they were.

  It had been a taxing day and he needed to indulge himself in a pleasurable diversion, and there was one particular diversion that he knew from experience was uniquely consoling.

  He made a phosphor-dot communicator call to the set of apartments adjoining his own, then repaired to a small room which was kept locked and which would open only to himself. When he emerged Verita had arrived and was waiting in the boudoir, already naked.

  And Jasperodus, his eyes glowing hotly, was now ready and equipped for the one human activity that had once been denied him: sexuality.

  This had always been an area of experience where, in common with all other robots, Jasperodus had been totally impotent. Stung by the occasional taunt – and irked by curiosity – he had eventually sought a way to repair his one great deficiency. The expense had been considerable – more than he himself would have cost to make – but inestimably worth it.

  The secret to sexual desire lay in the extraordinary range and speed of the impressions which the brain was forced to receive on the denoted subject – in the normal man’s case, on women – a speed which took the process beyond any voluntary control. The problems facing the robotician hired by Jasperodus had been several: first to elucidate this secret, then to translate it into robotic terms, and lastly – most difficult of all – to encompass the new processes in the small space that could be found within Jasperodus’ skull by rearranging the other s
ections of his brain. The task had carried the techniques of micro-circuitry to their limit; but after nearly a year the almost-impossible had been accomplished, and Jasperodus was financially poorer but also incomparably richer.

  Along with his new faculty went the apparatus to make it meaningful. The balance-and-movement ganglia that had occupied the bulge of his loins had been redeployed. In their place Jasperodus was able to bolt in position the artificial sex organ he was now wearing. Of flexible steel clad in a rubberoid musculature, and made in generous proportion to his magnificent body, it was much superior to the natural variety, being capable of endlessly subtle flexions and torsions at his command. When bolted in place it was fully integrated into his body, nerves and brain, all of which could be aroused to orgasm by stimulation of the sensitised layer in the rubberoid cladding. When it was not in use, he detached it only for the sake of appearances.

  Armed with his indefatigable steel phallus, Jasperodus had set himself to enjoying women of all types, to their immense delight, and he knew how to be uninhibited about it.

  For a long time he had known that he exuded an air of erotic masculinity. Females of more exotic tastes had confessed to him that he, uniquely among robots, aroused their interest, but until his conversion that kind of interest had naturally been a closed book to him. Now, however, sexual passion was a world he had fully explored, and those women who previously had only eyed him had found their expectations more than met. Once having submitted to him, a woman was never again content with a mere man.

  Jasperodus demonstrated that he was capable of tricks that flesh-and-blood men were not. Besides, his stamina was without limit. He had once performed non-stop for a whole week, using a relay of women, to see if his enjoyment would flag. It had not: the orgasms had only become more intense.

  His appetite was insatiable: he demanded women of every flavour. Women who smelled warm, secret and heady (like Verita). Women with a fresh odour like celery. Women with a bouquet like tangy wine. Women who were voluptuous (like Verita), Junoesque, slim and lissom, buxom, fat or thin. Women who were startlingly pretty and shyly innocent, attractive and sluttish (like Verita) or plain and salacious. Young girls, women in their prime, experienced matrons. The apartments adjoining his own comprised a harem where he maintained his more regular partners. Women like Verita, for instance, lived solely for sex with him. It was her meat and drink.

  Jasperodus could understand why sex held such a prime place in human affairs. Sometimes the mere sight of a woman filled him with a desire that was overwhelming.

  He stepped into the large boudoir and spoke in a low, thrilling voice.

  ‘Good evening, Verita,’ he greeted in a fruity voice.

  She stood naked at the further end, having entered by another way, and smiled invitingly.

  They moved slowly towards one another, eyeing each other hotly.

  Verita had an ample, agile body. Her breasts were generous but did not sag too much; wavy red hair framed her lively face with its wide red mouth and magnetic eyes. Her hips were well filled out, and moved in an enticing motion as she walked on long fleshy legs.

  They came close. He felt her breasts and her warm soft skin pressing and moving against him. The smell of her surrounded him. She was breathing heavily, her moist mouth half open and her eyes half closed.

  Sensations were flooding through Jasperodus, throbbing, burning, bursting. Excitement gripped them both, the excitement that was a kind of oblivion, and in which any other existence was forgotten.

  Two hours later he let her rest, her breath coming in quavering sobs. Quietly they lay together on a broad divan bed, and while she recovered from her relentless delirium, idly he reflected on the nature of sex, which was a world all of its own, inviting one to become submerged indefinitely in its dizzying depths.

  Such a degree of obsession as Verita had was an unlikely outcome on his part, though his was indeed a supercharged kind of sex. In him it was a temporary madness, a sort of induced brain fever. He felt no sense of slavery to it – a consequence, perhaps, of its late addition to his faculties.

  Beside him he felt Verita once again stirring. Whatever might have been the disappointments of the day, he reflected, this kind of thing gave him immense satisfaction. Barring the other matter, which he now vowed to forget, he was a complete man.

  11

  Do robots dream? Jasperodus did.

  Even his powerful brain would at times weary of ceaseless activity and so, to gain a brief respite in oblivion, he would resort to suspending his higher brain functions for a spell, bringing on the robotic surrogate of sleep. Then, sometimes, the dream would come.

  It was always the same. He lay on a moving belt, unable to move because his motor function had been cut out – permanently, and deliberately. The belt bore him inexorably towards the open intake door of a blast furnace.

  Seen through that gaping mouth, the inside of the furnace was a terrible, pitiless, compressed haze of heat, like the interior of a star. Jasperodus became aware that besides himself the belt was carrying an endless succession of metal artifacts into the furnace: gun carriages, statues, sections of girder, engines, tools, heaps of domestic utensils, heavy machinery of all kinds – some of it evidently self-directed – and robots like himself lying inert and helpless. One of these for some reason had not been immobilised but was strapped down to a cradle-like rack; it stirred desultorily in its bonds as if unaware of its true situation, which was that it was due to fall together with everything else on the belt into the devouring heat, to lose all form and identity and coalesce into a common pool of liquid metal.

  Jasperodus awoke howling.

  He leaped off the padded couch where he had lain. For a while he stood stock-still, forcing the reassuring sight of his surroundings to wash away the recurring nightmare, but remaining in the grip of unaccountable moods and feelings.

  The dream faded slowly. He sought some comforting distraction, and his eye lit on a covered gold receptacle, somewhat in the style of an amphora, that had been designed by him and delivered from the goldsmiths the previous day. He turned to inspect it anew.

  It had been inspired in part by descriptions he had read of the interior of the ancient Temple of the Brotherhood of Man at Pekengu. Outwardly it presented a dome of gleaming yellow gold dusted with point-like diamonds, and resting on a decorated base of red gold. Moving certain of the pyramidal studs located round the base caused the dome to come free, and it was then shown to enclose what at first sight looked like a hazy polyhedron glowing with misty light, but which on closer examination proved to be a fine mesh composed of chainwork of white gold, so delicate as to have the texture of cloth, stretched over the projected apexes of a stellated polyhedron, or rather hemipolyhedron, made of the rare and gorgeous orange gold. The full splendour of the latter became evident when the mesh was removed (by sliding an encircling base ring of red gold left and right in a secret sequence) and it could in turn be lifted away, if one knew in which order to press the studs on its lower planes. It then disclosed an upright box of severe classical proportions, grooved and fluted, embossed with narrow vertical pilasters, made of green gold that was shaded and heavy in lustre, almost venomous. The association it brought to mind was of a stately prison, or perhaps a bank vault. By pressing its floor from beneath, the front could be made to spring open. Within was a perfume bottle like a vinaigrette, a slim feminine shape woven from threads of spun gold of every colour: yellow, red, white, green and orange.

  He grunted, and put it all together again. He was pleased: it was perfect. He would have liked to have been able to make it with his own hands as well as having designed it, but with all his other activities he would not have found the time to acquire the skills involved.

  The only thing still lacking was a really special perfume to put in the bottle. He would give thought to that later.

  Glancing at the wall clock, he saw that the morning was fairly well advanced and made a phosphor-dot call to his office.

&
nbsp; ‘What awaits?’

  The brass face of his secretary bent clerkishly on the screen. ‘No communications have been received by me this morning, sir.’

  ‘None at all? What of the report from the Expeditionary Force?’

  ‘No copy has arrived here, and I presume it is still in the Decoding Room, or else has been delayed in Registry. I have made inquiries in both departments but so far have failed to elicit satisfactory answers. I gather copies have arrived in other offices, however.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Jasperodus said impatiently. ‘I will be with you shortly.’

  He examined himself in the full-length mirror to see if he required scrubbing, then reached for his cloak bearing his badges of office. Perhaps, he told himself, he should begin to exert more direct pressure around himself, lest he stood in danger of losing his influence.

  On the surface everything was going very well indeed. The new Mars Expeditionary Force – the three great invasion drums that had been Jasperodus’ brainwave – were nearing Mars. True, his rumoured promotion to Marshal-in-Chief had not materialised – Charrane had appointed Marshal Grixod instead – but in retrospect he was glad of it. The post had become largely a ceremonial one now that most decisions were taken by the planning staff, and Jasperodus had come to value his time.

  With the military situation seemingly secure, Jasperodus had found his interest attracted to other matters of far-reaching import for the future of the Empire. He had set in motion a number of projects. Among these was a research project to analyse in detail the causes of the fall of Tergov, with a view to laying the New Empire on a sounder foundation.

  The studies made by this team (under his guidance, admittedly) had already confirmed one notion he held: the decisive effect that systems of land-holding have on a society. It was instructive to see that in Tansiann the consequences of private land-ownership had been accelerating over the past five years. The disparities in individual wealth were now quite ludicrous. The proletarian class had swelled, while immense fortunes were being made at the other end of the scale – as Jasperodus well knew; he himself derived a huge income from speculation in land (through a holding company, since legally he was not entitled to own property).