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

Casting his eye over the strewn booty, Jasperodus spied an object of immediate interest to him: a hand mirror, included among the valuables because of the gems that adorned its frame. Quickly he seized it and settled by the fire; now at last he would be able to see his face.

He had feared that his father might have given him the grotesque mouthless and noseless face seen on many robots, or even worse, that he would have committed a much greater travesty by sculpting a human face. The countenance that stared out of the mirror reassured him. It was a sternly functional visage – and, of course, it was immobile – but it was more than just a mask. Following the general conception of his body, it consisted mainly of machined flat surfaces and projections that gave it a solid but intriguingly machicolated appearance. A square-bridged nose ended in simple flanges perfectly adapted to its function as an olfactory device. A straight, immobile mouth, from which Jasperodus’ booming, well-timbred voice was thrown by a hidden speaker, was so well placed amid the angled planes of the jaw that it fitted naturally and without artifice; as did the flat, square ears, which contained an arrangement of small flanges serving the same purpose as those of the human ear: the abstraction of direction and stereo from the sound they received.

Eyes glowed softly by their own red light. Finally, the whole face was lightly engraved with the same intricate scrolls that decorated the rest of the body.

Jasperodus was well pleased. His was a non-human, robot face, but somehow it seemed to express his inner essence: it looked the way he felt.

Craish arrived and found him gazing into the mirror. Laughing, he tipped up a bottle and poured liquor over Jasperodus’ torso. ‘Admiring yourself, metal-man? A pity you can’t drink.’

Jasperodus laid down the mirror, but did not speak.

Unabashed, Craish sat beside him and swigged from the bottle. ‘We can certainly use you,’ he continued. ‘You’re strong, and bullets don’t bother you a bit. You look like you’re worth a lot, too – your owner must be plenty sore to lose you. You’ll stay with us from now on, understand?’

He spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone in which he had ordered the robot to work at the train. Jasperodus ignored him. Nearby, one of Craish’s men had laid down his sub-machine-gun and he picked it up to examine it. It was simply-constructed, but its design was good: merely a barrel, a repeater mechanism, a short stock and a handgrip. On one of his father’s lathes Jasperodus could have turned one out in less than an hour. The magazine was spherical, slotting over the handgrip, and contained hundreds of rounds.

‘An effective device,’ he commented, slinging the gun over his shoulder by its strap. ‘I will keep this.’

‘Hey, gimme my gun, you damned robot,’ objected its owner explosively. ‘Who do you think you are?’

Jasperodus stared at him. ‘You wish to do something about it?’

Craish intervened in a sharp tone. ‘Wait a minute! If I want you to carry a gun I’ll tell you, metal-man. So put the gun down. Just sit there and wait for your orders.’

‘You are very good at giving orders,’ Jasperodus said slowly, turning his massive head.

‘And you’re good at taking them. You’re a robot, aren’t you?’ Craish frowned uneasily. ‘A machine.’ He was perplexed; robots, in fact any cybernetic system, had a natural propensity for obeying orders that were firmly given, but this one showed an unnerving individuality. Advanced machines, of course, would tend to be more self-reliant and therefore more subject to individual quirks, but not, he would have thought, to this degree.

‘Say,’ whined the deprived bandit, ‘this hulk doesn’t take any notice of us at all. It just sits there defying us. It must have a command language, Craish.’

Craish snapped his fingers. ‘That’s it. Of course.’ He turned to Jasperodus. ‘What’s your command language? How does your master speak to you?’

Jasperodus had only a vague idea what he was talking about. ‘I have no master,’ he replied. ‘I am not a machine. I am an original being, like you. I am a self.’

Craish laughed until tears started from his eyes. ‘That’s a good one. Whoever manufactured you must have been a kookie to write that in your brain. Where are you from, by the way? How long have you been loose?’

‘I was activated this morning.’

‘Yeah?’ Craish’s merriment trailed off. ‘Well, like I said, give the man back his gun.’

‘Do you think you can take it from me?’ Jasperodus asked him acidly.

Craish paused. ‘Not if you object,’ he said slowly. He deliberated. ‘Were you thinking of staying with us?’

‘I shall keep my own counsel.’

‘Okay.’ Craish motioned to the plaintiff in the case. They both got up and left. Jasperodus remained sitting there, staring into the fire.

Soon the revels entered a new phase. The bandits turned their attentions to the women, who up to now had been standing in a huddled group to one side. Their menfolk had all been slaughtered on the train, and they looked forlorn and apprehensive, remembering the recent horror and anticipating the mistreatment to come. Now they were dragged into the firelight and their ropes removed. They were forced to dance, to drink. Then their kidnappers, one by one, began to caress them, to throw them to the ground and strip them. The light of the flames flickered on gleaming naked bodies, and very quickly the scene turned into an orgy of rape.

Jasperodus watched all this blankly, listening to sobs and screams from the women, to growls of lust from the men. Carnal pleasure was foreign to him, and for the first time he felt sullen and disappointed: the experience of erotic sexual enjoyment was something his parents had not been able to give him.

True, the enjoyment the bandits found in forcing women against their will, in hearing their screams and cries of protestation, he could to some slight extent understand. After all, there was always satisfaction in forcing, in dominance. But the frantic sensual pleasure of desire gone mad, that he could not understand.

Again, it was not that he lacked aesthetic appreciation. He knew full well what beauty was, but unfortunately that did not help him in the sphere of eroticism. The aesthetic qualities of the naked female bodies now exposed to his view did not exceed, in his opinion, the aesthetic qualities of the naked male bodies. Clearly the sexual passions they aroused in the breasts of these ruffians was a peculiarly animal phenomenon that was closed to him.

It came to him, while he watched what the men were doing to the women, that he possessed no phallus or genitals of any kind. Yet his parents had definitely envisaged him as a son, not as a daughter or as neuter, and his outlook was a strictly masculine one. He glanced down at himself. So that the absence of male genitals should not invest him with an incongruously feminine appearance his father had placed at the groin a longish box-like bulge that gave a decidedly male effect, rather like a cod-piece. Unlike a cod-piece, however, it hid not phallus and testicles but a package of circuits concerned with balanced movement, corresponding to the spinal ganglia in humans.

Throughout the night the sleepless Jasperodus watched the frenzy in the firelight and brooded. Any stimulation he managed to gain from the spectacle of continued rape (and later, of resigned abandonment on the part of the women) was vicarious and abstract; the purely mental observation of a pleasure which, he was sure, he could never share.

At dawn, while the camp was still in a drunken sleep, Jasperodus roused himself. He made his way back along the route he had come until striking the railway track. Then, taking the direction followed by the crippled train, he set off, walking between the rails with his sub-machine-gun clanking lightly against his side.