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

Badly shaken, Jasperodus rose to his feet. Behind him he heard the heavy tread of the wreckers as they entered the hall.

During the conversation Ax Oleander had been unconsciously moving closer to the Emperor, until he had almost adopted the mouth-to-ear whispering position so familiar to Jasperodus. For the first time since Jasperodus had known him Oleander was wearing a smile of genuine pleasure, and it was clear now where many of Charrane’s just-stated thoughts had originated.

‘Mouth to ear!’ Jasperodus cried. ‘He feeds you his poison and you swallow it!’

The wreckers gripped his arms.

Jasperodus began to howl.

‘DEATH, DEATH, DEATH – you fools, do you not see? You are as dead as I! Death – all the world is nothing but death!’

They dragged him out still howling – not into the city, as he would have expected, but to a cellar under the palace. He passingly understood the reason for it: it would not be seemly to drag a marshal of the Imperial Forces through the streets. Here waited robotic technicians, around them strewn the tools of their trade with which to disassemble him. Broken up into small parts, he would be delivered to the masher.

They laid him down on a board table. But Jasperodus broke free and retreated to a corner of the cell-like room. The technicians fell back, disconcerted by this ferocious, glaring robot who fought for his life.

‘What can it matter what thoughts and feelings inhabit this empty vessel?’ Jasperodus babbled. ‘When my voice echoes out of this vacant iron drum, where does it come from? From nowhere, from emptiness – the voice of no one – a voice in the void without a speaker. And what of you? Does any entity form your words?’

Uncomprehendingly the technicians stared at him. The wreckers seized him again, and again Jasperodus began to howl.

‘DEATH! ALL IS DEATH!’

He was still howling when they switched off his brain.

The return of awareness was slow and fragmentary. It began with a solitary thought that flickered for a bare instant against an overwhelming darkness and then vanished.

Intervals of time cannot be measured in oblivion; but on occasion the thought recurred, then was joined by others. Piece by piece a vestigial, primitive creature was built up and became persistent. The period between the birth of this creature and the moment when it began to call itself Jasperodus seemed immense. It ended when Jasperodus recovered sufficient of his memories to recognise himself as a single entity. He was then puzzled to find that he could not locate himself in space; he seemed to be in many places at once.

Still he could not think clearly, neither did he know for certain who he was, where he came from or how he had got into his present condition. There followed a lengthy phase he thought of as ‘groping’. He seemed able to reach out and search the darkness in some vague or undefined manner, finding pieces of himself and adding them to him. As he did so he gained not only memories and extra mental clarity, but also inexplicable scenes that he seemed able to watch, each from a fixed vantage point.

This phase ended when his history and personality were again in his possession. Along with his anger at how he had been treated, Jasperodus was forced to appreciate certain facts.

He had no body.

He had no single spatial location.

There existed within himself, just below the level of his volition in a sort of subconscious stream, a continuous activity of monitoring, computing, comparing, collating and responding to countless small stimuli.

As far as he was able to ascertain he was located within and throughout the walls of Charrane’s palace in the form of a network.

A full understanding of his situation came after a little deductive thinking. Presumably the roboticians had not delivered his parts to the masher after all. Perhaps reluctant to waste such fine workmanship, they had preserved the sub-assemblies and later used them in a low-integration cybernetic system of the standard type that apparently had been installed in the palace and the surrounding ministries.

Just what confluence of interrelations had caused to be reconnected sufficient of his one-time components to restore self-directed integration would remain a mystery. The dim urge that had caused this skeleton brain to seek out the rest of its sub-assemblies was also hard to explain in conventional robotic terms. However, he now found himself fully alert and sound of mind, but embedded in an extensive network of electronic administration.

He wondered what the roboticians had done with his body. That, possibly, had gone to the masher.

His new mode of existence gave him an unexampled opportunity for surveillance. Apart from his having access to stored information of all kinds, there was a good number of hidden sound and image perceptors scattered about, mostly for the use, as it happened, of Charrane himself, who had become suspicious of what went on around him. It was ironic that they put Jasperodus in a much more intimate position to watch him .

With some curiosity Jasperodus took stock of the situation at court. A number of years had passed since his deactivation. Mars was under firm control, but the Borgor Alliance was once more flexing its muscles. He received little direct news from the outside world, but what he did learn caused him to think that the internal state of the Empire was ominous. Charrane, with some reluctance, had been persuaded by Oleander to agree to the onset of large-scale factory production in an attempt to counterbalance the Borgor threat. There were occasional stories of disturbances in the city, at least one being within earshot of the palace. A proposal was afoot to provide free rations and entertainment so as to keep discontented elements among the masses quiet.

Among the services his circuits controlled were various domestic functions, as well as office and administrative terminals used by the Emperor Charrane. Jasperodus found that this made him able to vent his spite if he so wished. For a while he amused himself by subjecting the great Emperor to a number of petty inconveniences – withholding water when he took a shower, or suddenly delivering it scalding hot or icy cold; transmitting to him the wrong reports through his terminals, or even better, writing up totally fictitious reports on the subject called for; putting through a call to Mars when Charrane had asked to speak to someone a hundred yards away; switching the lights on and off when he retired to bed; interrupting his act of love with wife or concubine by activating all the appliances in the room, and so on. But he desisted after a while lest Charrane should order a total overhaul of the palace’s cybernetisation. He could have interfered in the life of the administration more seriously if he so wished – he comprised, for instance, the data retrieval service for the planning staff – but he abandoned any such futilities.

Instead, he began to think of escape.

One day he made a scan of his demesne, looking through each sound-and-vision perceptor in turn, glancing at the inflow and outflow of each terminal. Suddenly he stopped short.

His face older and more lined than when he had last seen him, his old friend Cree Inwing sat in a tiny, stuffy office in an out-of-the-way part of the palace used by the Department of Military Supply. The brisk moustache was still there, as was the military bearing. He wore the epaulettes of a major, and was talking through the all-purpose terminal (Jasperodus had to admit that the new installation had achieved a much simplified method of communication) to the Logistics Section, sorting out details concerning the transportation of a batch of spare parts.

That finished, he rose and replaced the file holder on the shelf behind him. Watching through the same vision perceptor Cree had just been using, Jasperodus saw that he now walked with a pronounced limp.