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

His father gave a deep shuddering sigh, as though seeking the last of his strength. ‘Did that really happen to you?’ he whispered. ‘It is not impossible. The soul, being non-material, does not always behave like a substance subject to the laws of space. Within limits one could be dismantled into subassemblies, and provided some degree of biological or robotic integration remained, the soul might well not dissipate.’

‘And when it does dissipate?’

‘The cosmic furnace, into which all souls are thrown at death. From the common pool new individuals are moulded.’

‘So as well as making a conscious construct, you have also solved the mystery of what happens at death,’ Jasperodus remarked in a tone at once flippant and sombre. He cogitated, trying to understand the issue in all its aspects. The old man was clearly taxed by so much talk, but he could not resist asking the questions that came to mind.

‘If I have consciousness, how is it that I cannot locate my “I”? When I enter into my mind I find only thoughts and percepts.’

‘So it is with everyone. The self always remains hidden. You cannot see the seer, the mind cannot grasp the thinker of the thought. That seer, that thinker, is “I”, the soul.’

The senile robotician made an effort to lift his head, but sank back with a defeated, sighing moan.

‘I am sorry,’ Jasperodus said, ‘I have been inconsiderate with so much inquisitiveness. What may I do for you? If it comes to that, may we not reverse the operation that gave me life? I could easily spare some vitality, which might restore your health.’

‘Too late; my condition is irreversible. In any case I would not countenance it. There is only one service you can perform for me, and that is to bury my body in a grave alongside that of your mother.’

‘You may live for some time yet. At least I can stay here to take care of you.’

‘No need for that either.’ With an effort the old man fumbled under his pillow and brought out a little white pill. ‘Well, Jasperodus, you chose to go your own way, but I see you have turned into a person of quality. I would stay to hear how you have fared, but I fear it might make parting too difficult. So farewell – and may the rest of life prove to your satisfaction.’

‘Is that necessary?’ Jasperodus asked, his eyes on the white pill.

‘I prepared this to spare myself an existence without the use of my mind during my last hours – which would not be long now in any case. I have delayed taking it so far – perhaps subconsciously I sensed you would come. Now that I have seen you I feel a sense of completeness. Nothing need delay me further.’

With difficulty he guided the pill to his lips. Jasperodus reached out to snatch it away, then stayed his hand.

His father died peacefully within seconds. Jasperodus drew back the curtains, admitting sunlight into the dusty room. He looked carefully around him, consigning every detail to his memory and recalling that occasion long ago when he had walked out of here, little realising the sacrifice that had been made on his behalf.

Then he went through the cottage, looking for notebooks, instruments, anything appertaining to robotics, though whether he would have studied or destroyed any material or artifacts relating to his father’s great discovery he was not sure. However, he found nothing: everything had been meticulously removed.

Going to the tool shed he sought out a spade, then dug a neat grave beside that of his mother. He wrapped his father’s body in a sheet, laid him in the excavation, filled it in and erected a plain wooden namepost.

The work took slightly over half an hour. For a short while afterwards Jasperodus stood before the little cottage, taking in the landscape that lay before him, with its moistly wooded rolling hills, the cloud-bedecked sky that stretched and expanded everywhere over it, beaming down great shafts of sunlight into the air space beneath, and beyond that the framing immensity of the void and the wheeling masses of remote stars which for the moment he couldn’t see, and he speculated on the nature of the cosmic furnace his father had described, where all beings were melted, formed and re-formed.

It was a marvel to him what a change new knowledge had wrought in him. All inner conflict, the result of his ignorance, was gone. He felt intelligent, strong, aware of himself, and at peace.

On his return to the aircraft Arcturus found him in a private mood. ‘Well, what now?’ the rebel slum-dweller said acidly. ‘Do we proceed to the place of your ritual suicide, wherever that is to be?’

‘I hope you will not think me unreliable if I have changed my mind,’ Jasperodus informed him. ‘I shall live after all. We return to Tansiann.’

‘So we are to fight Charrane and Borgor after all?’

‘The best hope lies in a reconciliation with Charrane – though whether I can ever be reinstated with him I do not know.’ Automatically his mind began inventing various stratagems – unmasking the perfidy of Ax Oleander, petitioning for the return of the Emperor, and so on. ‘No matter; events must fall out as they will. Even if I am forced to quit public life there is much that I can do.’

Arcturus grunted, eyeing him derisively but with curiosity. ‘As you wish, but what has brought about this change in policy?’

‘I owe you, I suppose, apologies and explanations,’ Jasperodus said, ‘though they would be tediously long. For me it has been a circuitous route, to discovering the sacrifice that was necessary for the creation of my being. That sacrifice should not be heedlessly abnegated. It should bear fruit. To create, to enrich life for mankind, to raise consciousness to new levels of aspiration, that is what should be done…’

The ramp closed shut. Graceful as a gull the nuclear ramjet soared up from the field and went whining away to the East.

‘Mutation Planet’ first appeared in Tomorrow’s Alternatives , edited by Roger Elwood. ‘The Problem of Morley’s Emission’ was written for An Index of Possibilities and is included in this collection by permission of Clanose Publishers Ltd. All other stories first appeared in New Worlds .

The six-based number spiral and the concept of Hyper-One described in ‘The Bees of Knowledge’ are borrowed, with thanks, from the mathematical efforts of W. G. Davies.

The physical space in which we and the worlds move and have our being may easily be presumed to be a necessary and absolute condition of existence, the only form of the universe that is possible or even conceivable. Mathematicians may invent fictitious spaces of higher dimensions than our own but these, our intuition tells us, are no more than idealistic inventions which could nowhere be translated into reality and do not therefore properly deserve the designation ‘space’. The space we know, having the qualities of symmetry and continuity, is intimately and automatically the concomitant of any universe containing things and events, and therefore is inevitable; without space as we know it there could be no existence. The commonplace mind accepts this notion without question; thoughtful philosophers have spoken of the symmetrical, continuous space of three dimensions as an a priori world principle whose contradiction would remain a contradiction even in the mind of God. Yet not only has this belief no axiomatic justification but, as I shall attempt to show presently, it is untrue.