The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

by Barrington J. Bayley

  In fact this was one reason for the bitter hatred between the Alliance and the New Empire to the south. The Emperor’s advisers were of the view that the northern peoples perceived their countries to be on the verge of becoming virtually uninhabitable. The Emperor had continually been warned (and not without justification) that the Borgors planned to conquer the south and transfer their populations there.

  Just the same, when Jasperodus had suggested easing the north’s anxiety by no longer preventing Borgor from installing a new space mirror, the idea had been furiously rejected.

  For hour after hour the small aircraft streaked north, clinging to the landscape like a low-flying bird. If possible Jasperodus wanted to fly into Borgor itself. How he would then gain his ends, and escape being destroyed minutes after leaving the plane, he was not sure. His intention at present was simply to fly straight to the capital, Breshk, put down on the landing field, announce himself and try to persuade the Borgor military of the seriousness of his mission….

  He skirted the Geeb Sea so that he could approach from the south-west, reasoning that the Borgors probably experienced little trouble from that direction. It was certain that the Alliance was an in-depth hedgehog of radar tracking stations, but he doubted that they would pick him up: the plane’s radar-absorbing alloy was a Gargan Cult invention, and he did not think humans possessed it. At any rate it was unheard of when he left the New Empire. As for visual sightings, once in Alliance territory he could expect to pass without notice in the general air traffic.

  Night fell and the towns dotting the steppe grew more numerous. He became unsure of his surroundings, the control panel having no map and only a crude compass, but he thought he had overflown Rendare and crossed the border into Borgor.

  It was then that his sketchy plan fell to pieces. His radar picked up three blips, approaching fast. They veered, seeming to lose him, then to find him again, and came directly on.

  He switched on his radio, phasing rapidly through the frequencies until he heard the pilots talking in the guttural accents of Borgor, whose language was a particularly strangled dialect of the common speech of Old Tergov.

  Over the fading carrier wave came a young male voice. ‘What do you mean, you can’t see him? We can see him.’

  Presumably the speaker was talking to a radar station. His own tail glare, Jasperodus realized, was making him noticeable in the darkness. Although the reaction gases did not actually burn, they were hot enough to make the ventura glow after a while. Probably he had been spotted from the ground.

  Another, less distinct voice broke in. ‘Treat as hostile. Engage and destroy.’

  Did the Borgors treat every unidentified aircraft in this way? Jasperodus swung hard over, wondering if he could outrun his pursuers. His plane was armed, with missiles that could lock on a visual or radar image, but he did not want to commit a hostile act.

  Best would be to put down somewhere, preferably somewhere with cover. He switched to infra-red vision and began looking for one of the infrequent forested areas. The three interceptors fanned out, seeking to box him in. They were as fast as he was, and they evidently knew their business.

  A rocket arrowed after him, twisting and turning as he snaked in an effort to throw it off. A brief explosion flung up his tail. The missile, following the heat of his exhaust, hadn’t actually struck; it was on a proximity fuse.

  He brought the nose up just in time to avoid a forty-degree impact with the steppe. He had suffered damage; the rudder was not responding well.

  And above him, the Borgors were ready to pounce.

  Another missile hurtled past the canopy to vent its spite on the ground below. Then, ahead and to the left, Jasperodus saw a flickering infra-red glare on the horizon. It resolved itself as it approached into scattered lights, and on his returning to the normal spectrum there emerged a scene of industry: buildings, roads, heaps of refuse, and machine-like installations.

  It was a mine of some kind. A third missile exploded, tearing off a piece of wing. But Jasperodus had already found his chosen landing place: a long adit trench that descended at a shallow angle into the ground.

  Attempting to land vertically would only make him an easy target. Flaps down, he slanted into the trench, maintaining control despite the damaged wings. Its sides went past him in a blur, lined with chains and belts as he skimmed along it, and in seconds he was below ground where it became a square tunnel down which he plunged.

  Something—roof supports or the narrowing walls of the tunnel—ripped off the plane’s wings. He had not lowered the undercarriage and the aircraft’s belly screeched along a metal ramp, then seemed to encounter a muck-like surface. He was in darkness, lunging into the earth with the plane breaking up all around him.

  A human would have been killed instantly. Jasperodus was saved from damage by the mesh retainer that held him in his seat, keeping him as immobile as a piece of solid steel. But suddenly its moorings snapped. He shot forward headfirst, smashing into the canopy and lodging halfway through it.

  The wrecked plane had come to a stop. There was no visible light, and even with infra-red vision he could gain only a hazy idea of his surroundings. He struggled through the shattered canopy and scrambled down the buckled nose to the floor of the tunnel.

  It was wet, thick with slurry. He stumbled further down the slope, deciding to put some distance between himself and the scene of the crash-landing, and then he stopped as he saw a number of bobbing lights in the distance.

  A group of figures was approaching slowly. The figures were almost impossible to discern at first, since the lights they carried were forward-facing beams fastened to their heads. Three were humans in bulky clothing, the headlamps fixed to smudged white protective helmets. Two others were robots, one crudely constructed, built for brute strength—the sort of construct one would expect the Borgors to use. The other was slighter and more sophisticated-looking. He had, Jasperodus judged, been made by a robotician of skill.

  He noted with interest that the largest of the men also carried, swinging from his waist, what looked like an old-fashioned oil lamp enclosed in a wire mesh, but whose light was so feeble he could not understand what it was for.

  The group stopped, looking from Jasperodus to the torn fuselage that all but blocked the tunnel. Their headlamp beams weaved to and fro, cutting paths through the dust that thickened the air. Jasperodus’ surroundings became more clear by their light. Curved girders supported the roof. The tunnel walls were rough greyish earth, interspersed with chunks of rock.

  The smell of the place was dank and mineral-like: the smell of the earth’s bowels.

  Quite obviously the adit’s chief use was for transporting material out of the mine. On either side conveyor belts, stilled now, were piled with soft grey rock. Two more belts, empty, were stationed inward, while the tunnel’s centre was occupied by a metal chain-ramp, a travelator of some sort.

  In an expression of wearied disgust, the big man with the oil lamp lifted his eyebrows and puffed out his cheeks. He uttered a Borgor oath.

  ‘Just look at that krazzin’ mess!’

  One of his companions was muttering in amazement. ‘It’s a krazzin’ plane!’

  Slowly the three men trudged forward and jumped up to peer into the cockpit. Finding it empty, they glanced over the tunnel floor, even to the roof.

  Their leader returned to Jasperodus. ‘Did you see this happen?’

  After hesitation, Jasperodus nodded.

  ‘Where’s the krazzin’ pilot?’

  Jasperodus stared, thinking it safer not to reply.

  The others came up. ‘He must have ejected before he came down,’ one said. ‘Or else he’s gone deeper in.’

  ‘Nah, we would have seen him. He ejected but the canopy stayed on, the poor krazzin’ bastard. What a krazzin’ mess! It’ll take krazzin’ hours to clear this lot up. We’ll have to tip into the old workings.’

  It struck Jasperodus how imperturbably the miners viewed the event. The leader’s
complaining was no more than ritualistic grumbling. They were like ants: stolid, matter-of-fact manipulators of raw nature. In hours they would have dragged out the remains of the plane, repaired the belts and chain-ramp, and have everything functioning normally.

  ‘Where’s your lamp,’ the leader said suddenly, glaring at him.

  Jasperodus made no answer except to grope at his forehead as though surprised to find nothing there.

  ‘Oh, krazzin’ heck. What team are you supposed to be with? What are you doing here, anyway? Hey, you—’ the man beckoned impatiently to the smaller of the two constructs—‘take this toy soldier to Number Two rip, they’re short there. Come on, the rest of you, we’d better see about getting this krazzin’ lot sorted out.’

  He turned and trudged up the tunnel, followed by the others. The robot who was left with Jasperodus looked him over briefly.

  ‘Are you new here?’ he asked him mildly. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before.’

  ‘Very new,’ Jasperodus told him.

  ‘And not Borgor-made, either. Captured, like me, I presume? Well, don’t think of trying to get out of here. There’s nowhere to go. You shouldn’t have lost your lamp, by the way. You need it down here. Follow me.’

  With only the other’s lamp to see by, Jasperodus found that the going was not easy and he had to step carefully. His companion, he noticed, spoke with a southern accent. Neither did he look like a manual-labour robot. His visage was refined, his limbs slender.

  ‘What shall I call you?’

  ‘There’s no need for names here. My master used to call me Yoshibo.’

  ‘You weren’t a free construct, then?’

  ‘A wild robot, you mean? I should think not!’ Yoshibo sounded offended. ‘I belonged to the household of a senator chief of Mungold, a protectorate on the border of the New Empire—the border as it was then, I should say. I was tutor to the senator’s children.’ A note of pride entered Yoshibo’s voice, to be replaced by sadness. ‘But that was more than twenty years ago, as near as I can judge by counting shifts. I was taken during one of the sweeps south, and have been here ever since.’

  The slope of the passage was getting steeper. They went on for a considerable time, until Jasperodus judged they were about a quarter of a mile underground. Side tunnels began to appear, usually branching off at a narrow angle. Eventually Yoshibo took one of these.

  At its entrance some bogie-mounted metal tubs and a couple of flatbeds lay on railway tracks which disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. ‘A belt has not been installed here yet,’ Yoshibo murmured, as if by way of explanation. ‘That will have to wait until after the main supplies have been got through.’

  ‘What is mined here?’ Jasperodus asked suddenly.

  ‘You don’t even know that?’ Yoshibo stopped to stare at him. ‘We mine coal.’

  Coal. Jasperodus was intrigued, almost amused. He knew of the stuff, of course. It was a combustible soft black rock, though occasionally brown, which was the petrified remains of packed and decayed vegetation laid down millions of years ago. It was, in fact, the state of decay immediately preceding liquid oil. Burned in the manner of wood, it could be used as a fuel. ‘Cooked’ in a certain way, it could yield a variety of useful substances.

  As with oil, the irreplaceable natural deposits had been consumed voraciously in the earlier age. There was no coal in the south. But he had heard that a little of it still remained in the north, and that the Borgors used it to fire one or two power stations. The reason for this anachronism was that the mineral riches of northern Worldmass had been extracted at a relatively late date. Technology had learned to do without natural hydrocarbons before every last particle was gone.

  How grimed and caked Yoshibo was, Jasperodus noticed. And how strange it was to see men working in an environment as dangerous as mining undoubtedly was. If this mine had been in the New Empire it would have been very nearly all robot-operated.

  But then, the Borgors had a real fear of construct intelligence. In the south, a demand for—say—shoes resulted in androform robots, capable of thought and feeling, being put to work at last, alongside a human owner. In Borgor it resulted in a mechanised factory which was like a low-grade robot taken to bits: idiot servomechanisms with only vestiges of self-direction, lacking any higher functions.

  It was widely believed in the south that the Borgor Alliance refused to use robots at all. This, of course, was not true. But those few self-directed constructs produced in Borgor did tend to be travesties of the robotic art, unable, for instance, to engage in any but the most childish conversation. Curious anomalies could issue from this limitation: in robotic, as in organic intelligence, there was an inverse ratio between intelligence and functional accuracy. A very simple robot, like those made in Borgor, could have perfect motor skills, or perfect computational ability; could, for instance, be made unbeatable in the countless games of skill that fascinated humans: could poke balls about a table with a stick more superbly than any merely human poker of balls, as an example. But the more intelligent the robot, the more it was liable to err like a human.

  Jasperodus believed that the cause of Borgor’s anti-robot prejudice lay in its social order. Borgor and her allies were feudal. Each district was effectively the hereditary property of a ‘commissary’ who directed all labour within his domain and even presided over the personal lives of his social inferiors. A society so highly cohesive gave much satisfaction to those who wielded power in it, and the hierarchy of relationships was not to be weakened by admitting machines into the rank order. In the New Empire, on the other hand, free robots had become just one more social class, the lowest of all.

  ‘I suppose most of the robots here are captured from the south?’ he queried. ‘Borgor constructs wouldn’t be much use, on the whole.’

  ‘One cannot be stupid underground,’ Yoshibo agreed. ‘But the Borgors can make clever robots if they want to. Only a few of us are captured; the rest are Borgors, specially made for the job. They are activated in the mine and know of no other existence, though many are of nearly average intelligence. We shall have to crawl through here.’

  Ahead of them the tunnel had been almost flattened by the pressure of the earth lying above it, buckling the arc-shaped girders. The floor, too, seemed to have been forced upward to meet the roof, twisting the railway tracks. Only a narrow gap remained. Following Yoshibo’s example, Jasperodus got down on his hands and knees, dragging himself through the aperture until there was room enough to stand.

  ‘This section will have to be dinted before the face is opened,’ Yoshibo said, ‘I don’t know why it hasn’t been done already. We are having to route scurry all round the Bospho.’

  Jasperodus could only guess at the meaning of the miners’ argot, which Yoshibo spoke with a self-conscious sense of style, except that the Bospho was a mountain in Rendare. Unwilling prisoner or not, Yoshibo had entered into the spirit of his new life.

  A sudden loud bang from above made Jasperodus look up in alarm. Yoshibo laughed.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. It’s only a bit of weight coming on.’

  They continued for a further half hour through the network of tunnels, crossing one where a conveyor belt carried a stream of broken rock to an unknown destination, splashing through pools of blackened water, and scrambling through narrow defiles or over obstacles.

  They came to the ‘rip’. This turned out to be where a tunnel was being driven forward in search of a new seam of coal. Their arrival was prefaced by the sound of a muffled detonation, and the tunnel filled with billowing smoke and dust.

  Yoshibo waited for the smoke to disperse, then pressed forward. From out of side alcoves where they had apparently been taking cover emerged a work gang: several robots directed by a man, carrying at his waist the same type of faintly burning oil lamp Jasperodus had noticed before.

  The robots scurried to the end of the tunnel, their combined headlamps making it almost festive with light. Not all were androform: some w
ere scuttling scorpion-like machines which dashed forward and began gathering in the rubble from the explosion with their claw-like front limbs, raking it over their backs, up their outstretched tails and thence to the moving conveyor belt along one wall.

  Other robots seized pick-axes and began levering out loosened blocks of rock from the tunnel end, while yet others helped the scorpions, shovelling rubble onto the conveyor or picking up the larger chunks bodily, staggering with them to the belt and heaving them laboriously on. The supervisor, meanwhile, looked on broodingly.

  Yoshibo approached timidly. ‘Reporting to the rip, sir.’

  Slowly the human turned to him. His face was fat, red and bad-tempered. ‘Get yourself a shovel,’ he growled, then looked at Jasperodus. ‘You too—no, wait. You a southern robot, boy?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Jasperodus said.

  ‘You a smart machine?’

  ‘I think so, sir.’

  ‘Know how to handle explosives?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good. Let’s see if you can blow yourself apart like some of these mechanical krazzniks. Take this.’

  He stopped to pick up a heavy power drill, throwing it to Jasperodus with a beefy arm. ‘Drill fresh holes for charges. If you don’t know what to do ask that brass one there.’

  He nodded to a construct who was toiling at the rock face with a pick-axe. Though his body was as blackened as the others, Jasperodus could just about see, here and there, patches of dirty yellow showing through.

  Holding the drill gingerly, he stepped forward to his new occupation.

  For the next hundred hours Jasperodus worked almost without pause. Yard by yard the rip was pushed forward. Every eight hours the human foreman was replaced by another, and occasionally other humans would appear and talk to him. But the robots worked without rest, and needed none.

  On first being discovered near the plane Jasperodus had had to make a quick decision. The men running the mine would be unsophisticated, and annoyed that he had caused them such trouble. If he had revealed his origins, or even if they had suspected something strange about him, he feared they would consign him straight to a crushing machine, or whatever equivalent they had handy.