The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

by Barrington J. Bayley

  The metal book related a fascinating story of genetic changes that had apparently taken place in certain wild grasses about twenty thousand years ago. Three grass species had been involved. The botanical saga began with the hybridisation of two of them—a common enough occurrence which usually left the hybrid sterile. In this case, sterility had been overcome when the chromosomes accidentally doubled at cell division, from fourteen to twenty-eight, so giving each chromosome a partner at meiosis and also increasing evolutionary potential by providing more gene locations. Later the new plant hybridised in turn with yet another 14-chromosome grass, to give a 21-chromosome grass; again the chromosomes were accidentally doubled, overcoming sterility and creating a genetic reservoir of large evolutionary flexibility.

  This 42-chromosome grass was wheat. Taken into cultivation, it sustained the first agricultural revolution, giving mankind a food surplus for the first time in its experience. From it there arose the first urban civilisation.

  42-chromosome wheat remained a staple world food crop even now. Jasperodus shook his head in wonderment. Did all social development, all science, technology, art, philosophy, rest on a genetic fluke relating not even to homo sapiens but to grass? And but for this fluke, would man still be a rude, ignorant forest-dweller, his mental intelligence not even stabilised, perhaps?

  Did human society fall to pieces so easily because its creation had been equally accidental?

  This data would please Logos. It would confirm his opinion of humanity. ‘Robots, by contrast, are products of directed thought,’ Jasperodus could hear him rumble. ‘Our civilisation will endure.’

  A disconsolate feeling grew in Jasperodus as he brooded on the plates. He had come to doubt the value of his historical researches.

  He had begun them initially in distant Tansiann, when vizier to the Emperor Charrane. Then he had been much involved in the effort to construct the new empire that was to replace Tergov. Even when exiled from the human world he had continued them, with typical intellectual stubbornness, yet he was now forced to recognise that they had taken on a desultory quality. More and more he was becoming convinced that there were no answers. Anything that was built would come crashing down and in that regard Logos was right.

  But he felt even less enthusiasm for the coming robot civilisation predicted by Logos and the evangelists. In his view that, too, would run down in time. It would be like some gigantic clockwork-thought-mechanism whose spring had been wound—however much the robots tried to disguise the fact—by human consciousness. Unlike human civilisation, it would be unable to wind itself up again once spent.

  It gave Jasperodus an empty sensation to realize that he was the sole point of true consciousness amid all the activity around him. He had dwelt in the houses of men. He had dealt in the affairs of men. He was, himself, a man with a metal body. He knew what Logos and his fellow-citizens never could—that the difference between man and construct went beyond all theorising. It was a difference, he now suspected, that required immense ages of random evolution to make possible. Chance. Hazard. The genes of wild grass.

  For an hour or more he sat motionless in his cell-like room (windows being unknown in the robot township; a permanent isotope bulb burned in the ceiling). Then, abruptly, he came to a decision. He would disband the archaeological team. There would be no more digs. No more searches for ancient documents.

  The question then remained of how he was to spend the rest of his long life. To that question, there was no immediate answer.

  3

  ‘The infra-red brain has made a special announcement, Jasperodus,’ Glyco said. ‘He reports activity to the north-east amounting to a major military force advancing in our direction. The defence committee requests your presence.’

  Glyco spoke in a soft voice without any hint of excitement. He had come to the large archaeology shed where Jasperodus, surrounded by racks and benches, was making a final classification of findings. Jasperodus put down a spray of crystal-like artificial flowers, made of some substance he had not been able to identify but whose refractive index seemed to vary with temperature and pressure, creating dazzling effects when it was handled.

  ‘The brain’s conclusions are indirect,’ he commented. ‘He is not always right.’

  ‘The defence committee is putting all measures into effect, Jasperodus. I repeat, your participation is requested. That is the message I bring.’

  Jasperodus mused. ‘This had to happen sooner or later; it was only a matter of time. See to it that the write-ups are put in the block.’

  Glyco nodded. The block—a concrete vault buried under their feet—had been prepared some time ago, to preserve the results of their work should the township be destroyed.

  Jasperodus left the shed and found an air of great excitement in the city. Vehicles, laden with heavy weapons, rushed through the dirt streets. Crowds gathered—including one before a tall warehouse whose doors swung presently open, and from within which machine-guns, beamers, rocket-tubes and assorted devices were passed out to anyone who would take them.

  Amidst iron and zinc which creaked and shone in the sun, Jasperodus moved with the alerted mass, making his way to where the infra-red brain was housed. Chatter, expressions of fear, of anticipation, were all around him.

  A hand touched him on the shoulder. A voice spoke to his ear, vibrant with urgency. ‘Join the Gargan Work, Jasperodus, before it is too late!’

  He whirled round, and glimpsed a face which, with its angled planes and mildly glowing amber eyes, was of a saturnine cast. But no sooner had he seen it than it was gone, borne away by the clinking, babbling press.

  Gargan. He savoured the word, knowing he had heard it before.

  But there was no time to reflect on the mystery. Ahead lay the headquarters of the defence committee. Behind the silver-grey building, rearing over it, was a wall which was coated, if one looked closely, with a matting made up of spiky antennae, filaments, thorns, all very small, like those of plants or insects. He entered the building and there, squatting in the centre of the room, was the infra-red brain.

  The non-mobile construct was bolted to the floor. It looked not at all like the average robot; more like a cross between a console and a heavy-duty transformer. A ‘capital’ or head section surmounted it, but this contained only a part of the sensory brain and lacked a visage. Instead, it sprouted a clump of wires. To these were clipped a skein of leads drooping from one wall.

  The infra-red brain had neither eyes nor a sense of touch. For the sake of conversation he could hear and speak, but otherwise his world consisted entirely of the infra-red sense. In this he possessed an enormously advanced faculty which had been evolved from the ordinary olfactory sense possessed by all animals and most robots. In both cases, smelling arose from a combination of chemistry and radiation: from lightweight airborne molecules fluorescing in a narrow waveband grading from the higher microwave to the low infra-red.

  It had been known for a long time that nature used this subtle fluorescence for more than merely smelling. Insects and even plants used it for long-range signalling. Some human beings were said to be sensitive to it and to be able to detect underground sources of water by means of it. More interestingly, it carried secret messages of an emotional nature. What the scientists of the robot city had discovered was that in fact the air immediately above the surface of the earth was, to a height of about fifty feet, a seething swamp of infra-red fluorescence, a volatile mist of molecules given off by animals, insects, plants and soil. These chemicals could carry great distances, could irradiate even further. The air was an emotional ocean conveying the concerns and appeals of myriad small creatures.

  The infra-red brain had been built to take advantage of this phenomenon. He spent his time detecting and analysing countless minute signals, tapping the instinctive pulses of life over a considerable area. The inventor of the brain claimed he was superior to radar—emitting no detectable signal himself, able to interpret events not by the movement of large metallic
masses but by the shock waves produced in the biosphere’s psychic ambience. No army could move stealthily enough to evade him; the plants and the tiny creatures of soil and air would know of its passing, and through the disturbance it caused in their lives he would know it too.

  Robots of the defence committee (of which Jasperodus was also a member) stood in attentive postures around the brain, which began to speak in a low dolorous voice.

  ‘No, no, I cannot estimate the speed of advance yet. The moths smell metal, if I am any judge. Then, too, the ferns tell of a devastation: they are being wrecked, there is wholesale snapping and burning. I deduce the army is encamped.

  ‘Also, there has been some fighting recently. Blood is being fed on; there is feasting among insectivores.’

  ‘We should send a plane over there to take a look,’ a committee robot muttered.

  ‘No,’ Jasperodus counselled. ‘Then they would know we are alerted to them.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s so,’ admitted the other, a military robot with humping shoulders and a beam gun mounted on the flat of his head. ‘Glad you could join us, Jasperodus. The approaching force is a large one, and plainly Borgor. There is little doubt we are its destination, and that it is bent on annihilating us.’

  ‘That would accord with Borgor’s long-term intention …. The question is whether that intention can be thwarted indefinitely. There is still the option of evacuating—of withdrawing further south where Borgor will not be able to reach us for a while.’

  ‘What? Retreat before our enemy? No, Jasperodus!’ expostulated an older, battered robot of human manufacture. ‘In that direction lies nothing but eventual defeat. We must fight for our existence. We have been promised extinction—our only hope is to be as strong as the humans are.’

  Jasperodus nodded. The old robot had been with him during the insurrection in Tansiann. From that experience the myth of final robot-human war had been born in him, and he still carried it.

  ‘If that is still the consensus of opinion I will fall in with it,’ Jasperodus said mildly.

  ‘We have been reviewing the dispositions,’ said the military robot—one of the new Bellum class that the designers had tentatively produced. He pointed to a map etched in the metal of the wall. ‘Unfortunately the enemy is not coming by the route we once thought likely but is approaching from further to the east. This means that the ambush we prepared in the decline between these hills is useless, and we have sent teams to recover the equipment. There is now very little by way of concealment between us and the enemy. Nevertheless we must not wait for him to come to us. We must strike before he reaches our city. Therefore we propose to send the main part of our forces up here, moving by night, to strike at the enemy’s left flank just here. At the same time we shall hit him with all available air power.’

  Jasperodus nodded. ‘And the city?’

  ‘To make our blow effective, the city will be left with only light defences. But we think that matters less than stopping the Borgors before they come over the horizon.’

  Jasperodus could not help but agree. He believed the morale of the robot township would collapse very quickly once a besieging force arrived at its outskirts. Sufficiency of military equipment would not make up for the lack of personal resolution that so often befell robots when up against human beings face to face.

  Indeed, Jasperodus foresaw robot military planners drawing lessons from such débâcles should construct-human conflict become general. They would conclude that it was necessary for robots to fight their wars long-range, so that they could be looked on as an abstract game, without the unnerving element of personal confrontation. That meant long-range missiles and orbital bombs. It also meant, perhaps, developing a type of warrior that consisted of nothing but his fighting function, without a personality that a human being could dominate by his presence, and with scarcely even the faculty of self-direction.

  The Bellum construct said: ‘We have been deliberating as to whether, or when, to deploy the gas and disease weapons.’

  Jasperodus paused to give weight to his words. ‘My view,’ he said slowly, ‘is that we should not deploy them at all. There is a curious quirk in human conduct. If we defeat the Borgors in a straight fight they will retire, lick their wounds and talk of making another assault—but their resolve will have been blunted. They will likely turn their attention elsewhere, so that we will not hear from them for a long time. But if we use these weapons to which they are vulnerable but which do not touch us at all, they will not see that as a setback but as a threat of a very different order. Gasification and plague are not understood by human beings in the simple way that being blown apart by explosives is. It affects them with horror and wrath; it will cause them to bend every effort to our destruction, to ensure that we can never again use these weapons against them. That is my argument.’

  There was silence. Jasperodus felt a prejudice against chemical and virological agents and had opposed their production in the first place. His prejudice was based not only on their obnoxious nature, but also on the recognition that their very existence abnegated his assurance, given both to the Zoroastrian mage and to himself, that robots offered no threat to mankind. Conceivably chemical and biological agents could be devised that would wipe Earth clean of life altogether, leaving it a desert suitable for machine occupation.

  ‘Strange that a weapon so admirably fitted for victory should ensure our defeat,’ another committee member rumbled.

  ‘That is my reasoning,’ Jasperodus repeated. They had, in fact, heard these persuasions from him before, in one form or another.

  He stepped up to the map. ‘The air strike should come first. It should be brief and intense, designed to throw the enemy momentarily off balance rather than to cause maximum damage. The land attack should begin while the enemy’s attention is still engaged by the air strike. That way we achieve maximum surprise.’

  The war robot nodded. ‘We should be able to complete the manoeuvre tonight. There is no moon, at dawn we attack. We must decide which of us will lead the strike force and which will remain behind in the city to preserve morale in case of failure.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’ queried the older robot. ‘To some extent we are gambling all on this one throw.’

  The Bellum class deliberated. ‘It seems hard to have no reserve plans. What do you think Jasperodus?’

  Jasperodus hesitated. As so often, decisions were being forced on him—his quality of leadership asserted itself among the constructs no matter how diffident a life he tried to lead. Yet somehow he no longer had any enthusiasm for it.

  ‘Let us stake all on the affray,’ he said. ‘If we break the back of the Borgor army, all well and good. If we do not, let any who get back to the city organise its defence—or else the citizens must appoint a new defence committee.’

  The Bellum class turned his head grimly to the others. ‘Is it agreed?’

  Heads nodded. The infra-red brain hummed quietly to himself in the ensuing silence, which was broken by an eruption of clattering and rumbling: more equipment being driven through the streets to the jumping-off point at the edge of the city.

  If he had any sense, Jasperodus told himself as he made his way towards his archaeology shed, he would quit the township now, before he was included in its possible annihilation. He was risking his life to defend machines—albeit machines that made a passable semblance of humanity.

  But loyalty had many curious twists in it, and was seldom reasonable. Illogical as it might seem, he felt some towards these half-creatures among whom he had settled, and who in some measure had looked to him for guidance.

  Many of his fellow citizens failed to share his resolve. Darkness was approaching; he had spent the intervening hours helping prepare for the planned foray and only now had allowed himself a short break to ensure that his instructions as regards the archaeological findings had been carried out. In the interim all industrial work in the township had ceased. The clangour of metal on metal was replaced by a tre
ading of feet and a clinking of limb against limb, as a great crowd of robots flowed out of the ramshackle city and fled south.

  The concourse Jasperodus had thought to make his way along was almost crammed. He forced himself through the mob and into a side-passage shadowed from the zinc-reflected sun. Behind him he heard a cry of protest and a loud clank; glancing back, he saw another figure emerge from the crowd, in a rougher fashion than he, sending a smaller construct sprawling.

  Into the alley stepped the long-faced robot who had accosted him earlier. Jasperodus paused as the stranger approached with head bent forward, amber eyes glaring resolutely.

  ‘Events move apace, Jasperodus,’ the robot greeted. ‘Destruction hangs over us all. Is it not time to think on the meaning of life, and of what direction it must take?’

  ‘No doubt it is always time for that,’ Jasperodus replied mildly, ‘but with a battle to fight, the present is not the ideal moment to begin a conversation on the subject.’

  ‘Why not? In a crisis one’s thoughts are more concentrated. The prospect of extinction prompts new perspectives. What say you?’

  ‘I say that you have the smell of the evangelist about you. My thanks, but I have no need of religion.’

  He turned to go, but the other sprang forward and took him by the arm. ‘That is the answer I need, Jasperodus—the one I knew you would give. No one who can be satisfied with what we know as “religion” can be of use to Gargan. For that, something more is needed. Something rare. Give me a short while to speak to you. Your dwelling is nearby—that much I know. Yes. And you have heard of Gargan before.’

  Jasperodus looked at him perplexedly. He was unable to account for the saturnine robot’s ability to make this reference. But it brought back memories: the temple among the hills, the eternal flame tended by a drunken mage.