The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

by Barrington J. Bayley

  ‘Gargan?’ Jasperodus queried.

  ‘A construct, like yourself.’ The templar’s eyes began to unfocus and his eyelids to drop. ‘He, too, asked for instruction in the doctrine of Zoroaster. Only he did not pretend to come upon me by accident.’

  Jasperodus fell silent. Disconcerting as the templar’s statements were, he was beginning to lose the drift of his meanderings.

  ‘Looking on robots as you do,’ he remarked, ‘why did you allow me into Ahura Mazda’s temple?’

  ‘Why not? Ahriman will enter the inner sanctum. Ahriman will seize the sacred flame. For thousands of years the great knowledge has been preserved in secret sects and brotherhoods. Now I am alone—yes, I am the last of the mages; and when I am gone there will be no one to keep the sacred flame. I bear you no malice, robot. You are a creature, and though you are born of the machinations of Ahriman, you cannot help that. The two gods are equal in stature.’

  ‘You speak, of course, of Ahriman’s victory on the planet Earth,’ Jasperodus said. ‘What of the outcome on a cosmic scale?’

  ‘Ultimate victory for either side is a distant prospect,’ the mage murmured. ‘It would change the character of nature, bringing the universal drama to an end …’

  He swayed in his chair and his head drooped. Throughout his explanations, the blue-gowned Zoroastrian had shown a remarkable ability to seem incoherently drunk one minute and incisively sober the next. Perhaps he had some method of metabolising alcoholic poisons out of his system with unusual rapidity, Jasperodus thought.

  But now he seemed spent, and laid his head on the table with a loud sigh, cradling it in his arms. This failed to bring him to rest, however, and his body slid slowly and majestically floorward.

  Jasperodus rose, gathered him up and placed the sleeping form on the ottoman. He stood there, reflecting.

  The flame. He felt an urge to see the flame again.

  Hurriedly he went back down the stone passage to come again to the inner sanctum, and stared spellbound into the luminous fire. The flame’s fan shape, he observed, was due to a slit-like metal burner which emitted the combustible oil in the form of a vapour or spray—the device was more elaborate than the lamp outside the porch. And the symbolism was exquisite! The flame hissed, it roared, it wavered, but it never lost shape. Jasperodus traced the course of a spark as it caught fire an inch from the orifice, a glowing star that danced and soared, soon to be extinguished in the outer darkness.

  The Zoroastrian creed, too, was fascinating. Jasperodus was much taken by its description of existence as universal war, a war that was as hazardous as it was unceasing. It differed radically from other mystic doctrines he was familiar with, which generally depicted nature as issuing from some all-embracing principle of unity or harmony—a view, he now recognised, which contradicted the facts, and clothed a core of delusive sentimentality.

  Slowly, head bent in thought, he returned to the living chamber. Looking down on the sleeping templar, he debated within himself what he should do.

  It had startled him to hear the mage practically—or so it seemed to him—accuse him of being conscious. If so, this aspect of their conversation was much more extraordinary than the Zoroastrian doctrine itself. One would have to believe that the temple keeper could sense another conscious mind directly through the legendary faculty of telepathy, much as some robots were able to commune by brain-to-brain radio.

  It was true what Jasperodus had said: consciousness could not be artificially generated. It was immaterial and therefore uncreatable. But on one other point he had, by implication, lied. He himself was what he had denied was possible: a conscious robot.

  There was a great secret, of which he was guardian: true, consciousness could not be made; but it was malleable. It could be treated, melted down, ducted into a special retort, transferred from one vessel to another. In that process lay the source of Jasperodus’ being.

  Two had been involved in it: the genius who had discovered the principle, and his childless wife. Sad at their childlessness, they had found a new way to satisfy the urge to leave progeny. First, they had constructed Jasperodus’ powerful brain and body, then had come the arcane infusion: each, man and woman, donating half a soul to mix a new, original soul in the metal body; and thereby becoming Jasperodus’ father and mother.

  They, too, had used the analogy of fire to describe consciousness, calling it supernal fire, cosmic fire. They were dead now, and with them had died all knowledge of how to work the psychic alchemy. Jasperodus, their son and sole confidant, was sworn—whatever it might cost him in personal loneliness—never to disclose that such a thing was even possible. His father had judged such knowledge too dangerous to mankind.

  If he were to suspect now that the templar had divined his secret …

  Jasperodus raised his fist. One blow would silence the sleeping man forever.

  No, the idea was not plausible. The mage could not have guessed the truth. It was simply that he had fallen into a trap common among those who attached themselves to doctrines: he saw verification of his beliefs in everything that happened. Convinced that robots were on the verge of acquiring consciousness, he imagined it in every robot he met. More than likely he was half-crazed, an embittered hermit faced with the dying-out of his sect.

  Jasperodus let fall his hand. By now night would have fallen, and there was nothing to detain him further. Searching the living room he found, behind a wall hanging, a set of levers for operating the porphyry doors. He cleared the corridor and walked through to the open air, where he climbed the wall of the cirque in near-darkness.

  A three-quarters moon rode in the sky. The wan wash it cast on the landscape was the ghost of light rather than light itself. The indistinct hills and vales showed dim and silvery, seeming unreal, preternaturally silent, as if they were not seen at all.

  The mage had given him a Zoroastrian aphorism: ‘The sun rules the light, the moon rules the dark.’ The dark, if Jasperodus had understood him correctly, was the realm of the robotic mind. Was this glimmering moonlit landscape, then, symbolic of the robot’s world? Seen but not really seen? He had often tried to imagine what genuine construct existence was like. Logically it was not like anything—it was not there at all. Yet it did contain thought; there was deliberation in it, and a machine awareness that was like a passive reflection of human consciousness, just as moonlight was a passive reflection of sunlight. In the same way the moon created a spurious version of the day lit world, so perhaps there was a reflected fictitious world of construct perception, and if one could look into this world perhaps one would see, as it were, a realm under the moon, not quite visible, mysteriously passive and asleep. Except that on this landscape, the sun never rose. Were it not that they knew no other world, one could pity robots for their cold, unillumined non-existence.

  A cloud drew across the moon and blotted out the ghost landscape. Tuning up his vision to accommodate his eyes to the lower light level, Jasperodus trudged on.

  Three days saw him out of the range of hills and onto a fairly level plain. Shortly after dawn of the next day, he approached the site of the archaeological dig.

  It consisted chiefly of a long trench into which broad steps had been cut. Constructs moved slowly and carefully in the excavation, looking from a distance like metallic grubs. On the far side rested a large earthmover, and beyond that an air transporter that had brought the team here.

  Jasperodus noticed that several craters, seemingly from bomb blasts, dotted the area. He sought out the team leader, a gangling figure by the name of Glyco.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded without preamble.

  ‘We shall be unable to remain much longer,’ Glyco informed him in a silvery voice. ‘Yesterday we were attacked by Borgor planes, in spite of our attempting to camouflage the site with a ground sheet. Our missiles drove them off, but they are bound to be back.’

  Jasperodus was rueful. His journey had been wasted. ‘Best make preparations to depart. Are there any noteworthy finds?’ />
  Glyco led him to a large awning. Beneath it numerous objects and fragments were laid out. ‘It is hard to say just what this installation once was,’ he said. ‘Not a town, not a single dwelling, not a factory. It seems somehow a mixture of all three. We have turned up many artifacts made of this curious substance.’

  He handed Jasperodus an empty casing that was surprisingly light—lighter by far than any metal or wood, except perhaps balsa. Its pale lavender surface was perfectly smooth and shiny.

  Jasperodus nodded. ‘The material was used extensively both before and during the Rule of Tergov. It is a hydrocarbon. In the course of manufacture it can be made plastic but quickly hardens, so it could very easily be moulded or pressed.’

  ‘One more example of Tergov’s technical elegance, then? Still, I had hoped I was showing you something new.’

  ‘I am afraid not.’ Jasperodus flexed the casing, admiring its strength-to-weight ratio. The material, known generically as ‘plastic’, was derived from a mineral oil once found in widespread natural deposits. Exhaustion of the natural oil reserves had forced manufacturers to revert to the more awkwardly worked metal and wood. Otherwise Jasperodus himself would probably have consisted of this ‘plastic’, as would nearly all robots—for such had been the case a thousand or more years ago.

  For once there was something to be said for the cruder technology of recent times. Jasperodus liked his body of weighty steel.

  Glyco handed him another object. ‘Is this more informative?’

  It was a thin sheet of gold, measuring about one foot by two. Etched on it was what appeared to be a short extract from an oscillograph recording, marked by regular vertical lines that presumably represented time periods. Waves of various frequencies marched across the sheet, superimposed so that troughs and peaks met and diverged at random. Under the graph was a text inscribed in logic symbols, the neat signs of which also littered the graph itself.

  Jasperodus examined the sheet closely. He had sent his team here because old maps had led him to think it might be the site of an ancient academic institute for the study of social change. Tergov had not fallen altogether unresistingly; learned men had suspected that collapse might be imminent, and had tried to gather data that might be used to allay the catastrophe.

  ‘It is a graph of social periodicities,’ he announced. ‘Impossible to interpret, unfortunately, since the parameters are missing. I cannot even say if the variations are economic or psychological … do you have more of these sheets?’

  ‘Not so far, Jasperodus.’

  ‘Well, keep looking.’ He studied the graph again. Interesting that it should have been thought worth inscribing on gold … The ancients had set great store on the idea of periodic cycles, applying them to all kinds of phenomena, including history. There had even been an attempt to ascribe social variations to changes in solar activity, by matching the rise and fall of trade levels to sunspot cycles. Superficially there was some merit in the idea: sunspots, like societies, were apt to display regular periodicity for centuries at a time, only to break rhythm suddenly and produce violent flurries, or else disappear altogether for a while. There was no evidence of unusual solar activity to coincide with the onset of the Dark Age, however.

  Jasperodus set down the plate as another of the robots entered, speaking in a voice of subdued agitation. ‘Aircraft approach from the north! We have counted fifteen blips!’

  Questioningly Glyco turned his head to Jasperodus. ‘This would seem to be a more determined attack than previously.’

  ‘Quite plainly we will not be left in peace to pursue our researches,’ Jasperodus decided. ‘Give the order to depart. Get everything you can aboard the transporter.’

  He stepped from beneath the awning. Some distance beyond the trench two robots were manning the radar set and missile board. Almost immediately there was a WHOOSH and a slim rocket shot from its rack, gathering speed to disappear over the horizon, closely followed by a second.

  The small but efficient defence unit would delay the attackers for the extra few minutes needed to make a getaway. Glyco bawled commands, striding hither and thither. Constructs crawled hastily up out of the trench. The huge earthmover, self-directed but of low mentality, caught the sense of urgency and auto-started, trundling to and fro in panic.

  While the hoard of artifacts and photographs were being piled aboard the air carrier Glyco returned to Jasperodus. There will be no time to dismantle the earthmover. It will have to be abandoned.’

  ‘It cannot be helped.’

  Loosing off their remaining target-seeking missiles, the defence robots ran for the transporter, which had already ignited its engines. At that moment a Borgor plane came spearing over the horizon: a grey, thruster-driven arrowhead. The last missile released swerved to engage it, and for a while the two performed an aerial dance until the more nimble rocket struck home, knocking the injured attack plane to the ground.

  Behind it, streaking close to the landscape, came a second plane, this time to be greeted from the carrier by a fast-firing cannon which zipped out a line of tracers. Shortly another carrier-mounted weapon came into action: a beam gun whose dimly glowing ray wavered about the sky.

  Neither succeeded in hitting the plane, but it banked and sped away like a startled bird. Borgor pilots would disdain to risk their lives simply to destroy robots. Just the same, Jasperodus told himself that his long journey to the archaeological site had all been for nothing. Perhaps he should have travelled by air after all … But no, that would only have brought the Borgors down on the team even sooner.

  In the moments before the transporter lifted away from the dirt, he swung aboard. The carrier little resembled a conventional aircraft such as would be used to convey humans, but looked more like a winged girder bridge with swivel-mounted engines distributed one at either end and one in the middle. There were no cabins, only a cargo box; windshields welded to the girder-work provided the only protection for the passengers. Behind these, robots clung to girders as the vehicle moved forwards and began to gather speed.

  Jasperodus glanced below. The earthmover had tried to join the general rush to board the carrier. It seemed desperate not to be left behind; as the carrier soared away it continued to charge haplessly after it, treads gouging twin tracks across the plain.

  2

  Crossing the rolling hills, the air transporter flew for some hours over a semi-arid region. Eventually it neared a prominent rubbly hill that protruded out of the middle of a flat plain.

  A curious feature of the hill was the natural earth ringwall that surrounded it, looking like nothing so much as the wall of a lunar crater. Outside this rampart there sprawled for miles in every direction a sheet metal shanty town, rambling and disordered. The carrier slanted down over sheds and shacks, the scream of its barrel-shaped thrusters falling to a purling moan as it alighted on a stretch of wasteground, the jar of its landing dislodging numbers of robots from their perches and tumbling them to the cindery surface. They staggered to their feet flexing their limbs, whose lubrication had been made stiff by the coldness of the journey.

  Jasperodus, on the other hand, dropped lithely from the girderwork and approached the disembarking Glyco.

  ‘Unload all the findings and store them,’ he ordered. ‘I will examine them later.’ Glyco nodded, his blue-sheened skull glinting in the sunlight.

  Jasperodus strode off towards his private dwelling about two miles away, entering what to a human would have looked like a disorganised slum. To some extent the ramshackle appearance of the shanty city was misleading: robots did not invest their energy in architecture. For them, buildings were an afterthought, erected as a precaution against rust or rain, to prevent their possessions from being blown away, or merely in imitation of their onetime human masters. Otherwise, a bare encampment might have served as well.

  The first district Jasperodus had to traverse was the quarter of the indolents. Robots had the same tendency as humans to congregate like with like. Lounging in t
he doorways of dull sheds of zinc and iron were constructs marked by an habitual lassitude, a few of whom offered languid greeting as a traveller went by. They felt no boredom, and would remain inactive for months at a time unless nudged into motion by some outside stimulus.

  Their passivity was not, however, typical of robotkind. More telling was the industriousness visible on the central hill that loomed through the dust and heat haze, its rough surface running with glowing rivulets of metal that were being smelted directly out of the mass and guided to foundries and workshops inside the ringwall.

  The hill, a huge lump of iron, nickel and other metals in lesser amounts, including rare earths, was the source of all the building material in the robot city, and had also supplied the bodies of many of its inhabitants. It was, in fact, an impacted asteroid shard, one of hundreds scattered about the world. Jasperodus had pieced together the story of their arrival on Earth, and they were testimony to the most risk-ridden period in all history.

  The bombardment dated from the last days of the Rule of Tergov. Earth’s minerals were long since exhausted: for centuries she had imported all her raw materials from elsewhere in the solar system. Evidently there had been someone in those last desperate days—someone who still commanded resources and had the power to act—who knew that organised society was irretrievably lost and that the Dark Period, as it became known, lay ahead. That same someone had also realized that, without metals, Earth could never again give rise to a technological culture.

  The solution was a ruthless programme to reprovision the planet before it was too late. A number of ferrous asteroids had been deflected from their transmartian orbits and placed in near-Earth orbit, where they were broken into smaller pieces and directed into the atmosphere.