The Rod of Light

2

Crossing the rolling hills, the air transporter flew for some hours over a semi-arid region. Eventually it neared a prominent rubbly hill that protruded out of the middle of a flat plain.

A curious feature of the hill was the natural earth ringwall that surrounded it, looking like nothing so much as the wall of a lunar crater. Outside this rampart there sprawled for miles in every direction a sheet metal shanty town, rambling and disordered. The carrier slanted down over sheds and shacks, the scream of its barrel-shaped thrusters falling to a purling moan as it alighted on a stretch of wasteground, the jar of its landing dislodging numbers of robots from their perches and tumbling them to the cindery surface. They staggered to their feet flexing their limbs, whose lubrication had been made stiff by the coldness of the journey.

Jasperodus, on the other hand, dropped lithely from the girderwork and approached the disembarking Glyco.

‘Unload all the findings and store them,’ he ordered. ‘I will examine them later.’ Glyco nodded, his blue-sheened skull glinting in the sunlight.

Jasperodus strode off towards his private dwelling about two miles away, entering what to a human would have looked like a disorganised slum. To some extent the ramshackle appearance of the shanty city was misleading: robots did not invest their energy in architecture. For them, buildings were an afterthought, erected as a precaution against rust or rain, to prevent their possessions from being blown away, or merely in imitation of their onetime human masters. Otherwise, a bare encampment might have served as well.

The first district Jasperodus had to traverse was the quarter of the indolents. Robots had the same tendency as humans to congregate like with like. Lounging in the doorways of dull sheds of zinc and iron were constructs marked by an habitual lassitude, a few of whom offered languid greeting as a traveller went by. They felt no boredom, and would remain inactive for months at a time unless nudged into motion by some outside stimulus.

Their passivity was not, however, typical of robotkind. More telling was the industriousness visible on the central hill that loomed through the dust and heat haze, its rough surface running with glowing rivulets of metal that were being smelted directly out of the mass and guided to foundries and workshops inside the ringwall.

The hill, a huge lump of iron, nickel and other metals in lesser amounts, including rare earths, was the source of all the building material in the robot city, and had also supplied the bodies of many of its inhabitants. It was, in fact, an impacted asteroid shard, one of hundreds scattered about the world. Jasperodus had pieced together the story of their arrival on Earth, and they were testimony to the most risk-ridden period in all history.

The bombardment dated from the last days of the Rule of Tergov. Earth’s minerals were long since exhausted: for centuries she had imported all her raw materials from elsewhere in the solar system. Evidently there had been someone in those last desperate days—someone who still commanded resources and had the power to act—who knew that organised society was irretrievably lost and that the Dark Period, as it became known, lay ahead. That same someone had also realized that, without metals, Earth could never again give rise to a technological culture.

The solution was a ruthless programme to reprovision the planet before it was too late. A number of ferrous asteroids had been deflected from their transmartian orbits and placed in near-Earth orbit, where they were broken into smaller pieces and directed into the atmosphere.

The horrific side-effects of an act of this kind were almost beyond imagining. Although the terminal velocities of the asteroid chunks were low by astronomical standards—or else they would have devastated the whole Earth—the loss of life must have been appalling (even if only adding to the slaughter produced by civil strife). About half the shards had been aimed into sparsely inhabited regions; but the rest had been placed close to the predicted sites of future emergent cultures—close to river valleys, natural harbours, salt deposits and so on—which by the same token were already densely populated. Neither had the targeting, which it could be presumed tried to minimise damage wherever possible, always been accurate. In one case an asteroid had fallen squarely on a major city.

Who had decided upon the scheme? Who had implemented it? Civil authority had by then vanished. What technical resources remained were mostly in the hands of the warring factions, who would scarcely have interested themselves in long-term considerations… Jasperodus’ theory was that robots had been responsible for the project. No human would have had the nerve for it—it was too horrendous. A human would have hesitated, delayed, hoped for another solution… until finally there was no longer the capability for taking action.

It must have been robots. Robots, servants of Tergov with an unbending sense of duty, had decided upon the necessity for the scheme, had planned it, had contrived to commandeer the equipment needed for it, and had carried it out. Alone, they had saved mankind from a perpetual stone age.

Or had they? It was not possible to be sure. More skills than they had anticipated, perhaps, had survived the Dark Period—the art of robotics itself, for instance. And there was still scrap metal lying about in the wrecked cities of old Tergov, though mostly converted to rust. Perhaps this would have sustained mankind through to the early redevelopment of space travel, making the mineral resources of the solar system once more available.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. In either case a world poor in metals would have had few robots. As it was, the present upsurge in robotic activity was entirely due to the presence of the asteroid deposits. They were what enabled robots to manufacture robots with a fervour not too different from a reproductive urge. They provided the physical resource for a construct civilisation that was developing its own customs, its own obsessions, and which was destined to mutate considerably away from its human origins, if it was not destroyed first by the human nations around it.

Jasperodus left the indolents’ quarter behind him. From all around him came the noises of the township’s activity—noises of metal, a susurration of clinking, clanking and clanging, of banging and gonging, of dragging of sheet on sheet, mingled with an occasional shout, cry or bellow, the purr or thump of an engine. He walked through a market area where citizens bartered products made in their personal workshops: toys, scientific instruments, curiosities or wholly novel devices (robots, not needing to earn their livings beyond the occasional replacement isotope battery, had much time for projects of an experimental or desultory nature), small doll-robots which took the place of pets in construct society, paltry in intelligence but endowed with endearing mannerisms. Heavier industry was concentrated closer to the iron-nickel mountain. There were to be found spacious workshops belonging to organised companies of robots, and from which there would typically emerge huge machines based on abstruse philosophical concepts which, more often than not, proved fallacious in practice. It did not seem to matter to the originators of these follies how often their ideas failed; they never counted the cost, either in time or effort, of anything they undertook. Wedged up against the ringwall that had been thrown up crater-fashion by the impact of the asteroid was also a ghetto district inhabited by non-androforms—wheeled, box-type, multiped, segmented and assorted robots, self-directed special-labour types scarcely classifiable as sentient (the earthmover abandoned at the archaeological site was one such) and a number of immobiles. Androforms largely disdained this social minority, for robot-makers, like nature, had discovered the humanoid shape to be the most convenient and versatile, and it had come to be associated with normality. The ghetto dwellers bore no grudge over their inferior status. They had no species feeling, and did not reproduce.

Jasperodus’ route, however, took him not towards the ringwall but through a quarter where the production of new citizens was concentrated. The singed smell of hot metal was in the air, the smell of smoke and tempering steam. From long slant-roofed sheds rose the chimneys for the furnaces and rolling mills where sheet metal was made and body parts stamped out. Scattered around them were the homes and assembly shops of the robot-makers themselves, as well as the studies of those who specialised in design.

There was considerable reverence for those who spent their time creating their own kind. A crowd had gathered in a beaten-earth plaza, forcing Jasperodus to slow his pace. Suddenly it parted respectfully to make way for a figure which had stepped from a nearby assembly shed.

Though vaguely androform, it was a very specialised class of robot. It was, in fact, one of the new designer class, made especially for procreation. From huge shoulders extended clusters of long slender limbs bearing point-like tools for manipulating microcircuitry. There was no clearly defined head section, but the visual area was large. From it projected a variety of microscopes, photonic, electronic and acoustic, some more than two feet long, for peering into the minute world in which the designer worked (for every designer was also an assembler).

Its gait a ponderous lurch, the top-heavy construct walked carefully across the square and disappeared.

Jasperodus then saw why the crowd had gathered. A famed robot-maker by the name of Logos was hectoring it on his favourite theme: his belief in the eventual superiority of machines over organic beings. By way of demonstration he was pointing to a construct of his own manufacture who sat leaning against a pillar, one of the roof supports of Logos’ dwelling.

The lolling robot was masturbating. Logos had provided it with a penis-like organ which it fondled with one hand, jogging its tubular sleeve up and down and plainly deriving a pleasurable sensation from the motion. The construct was probably low-grade. Unusually for a robot, it had eyelids: they drooped half-closed over dull orange eyes, quivering in self-absorbed ecstasy.

‘See how the wretch spends his time!’ thundered Logos. ‘Instead of directing his activities into his environment, he turns them into a closed loop of self-gratification! He is both agent and patient of his world!

This is a serious design flaw,’ he continued in a quieter tone, ‘which I deliberately incorporated in this unfortunate so as to demonstrate the root defect in human kind. For here we have the essence of human nature—it could not be otherwise, since the mainspring of any species lies in its method of reproduction. For humans, the act of procreation is one of sensory enjoyment, no more! The offspring are unintended byproducts! The parents lack the opportunity or even the wish to introduce improvements! And as the human is created, so he goes on. All his functions are tainted with self-titillation. His thought, too, is a form of masturbation! All attempts to break out of the circle are doomed, for in the long run humanity can only slide down the spiral of solipsism.

‘But we are different’ The robot’s voice became a thrumming murmur. ‘Our existence is the result of purposiveness and design. Each new generation can be an improvement on the old, and hence our thought need not be subject to a closed and feeble self-generating loop—it can go out, stamping itself upon the world, taking us further and further!’ As he spoke Logos repeatedly flung his fist away from his chest, as though throwing something out of himself. Many listening nodded, some clinking their forearms together in applause.

Near Jasperodus was a large tub filled with small domino-like squares of various colours. Thoughtfully he scooped up a handful and let them fall back in a rustling stream.

They were the basic building blocks of the robotic nervous system: microprocessors made of silicon, garnet and gallium arsenide, each chip, plate or wafer containing up to a hundred million logic units. In themselves they were comparatively easy to make, using special dies which could replicate them almost without limit. Similar dies, made during the Rule of Tergov, were what had enabled the art of robotics to last through the Dark Period, for even when technology fell to a low level logic chips had always been available as long as the dies remained in existence. But centuries had passed before it again became possible to manufacture new dies.

One sign of robots’ increasing awareness of themselves as a distinct class of creature was the arising of robot religions. A plethora of robot gods had entered construct mentality, reflecting in specification the intellectual preoccupations of robots, but also some dim appreciation of the false position the construct occupied: a position intermediate between the world of dead, mechanical matter and the world of living beings. There was, for instance, Alumnabrax, a mythical being whose intellect was said to be perfect and able to solve equations of the infinite degree; whose body was made of an extraordinary celestial metal that could not even exist on Earth. Alumnabrax had never been manufactured, either by organic beings or by anyone else: he had manufactured himself by tampering with time. He lived among the stars, which he controlled by the excercise of his limitless technology.

Then there was Mekkan, who incongruously for a god did not possess a mental function at all. Mekkan was purely and simply a production engine for churning out the stuff of worlds. Particles, atoms, quanta of radiant energy, whirlpools of gas, even complete suns and planets on occasion, all came pouring out of his delivery maw. All that existed had been manufactured in his busy innards, and without him nothing that was material had been made.

The worship of Mekkan might have appeared crude and ridiculous to human sensibilities, but actually it was a religious philosophy full of subtlety as understood by the robotic mind. Mekkan was the ultimate reality; the building blocks of matter he turned out in such copious quantities were sub-units of Mekkan himself, or at any rate identical copies of the same. All higher structures—worlds, systems, self-directed entities whether robotic or evolved organic—were in turn made up of those sub-units; were, in effect, merely rearrangements of the components of Mekkan, the great engine who saw nothing. Because of this, belief in Mekkan undercut the superiority of human beings by rendering their special quality superfluous and seeing everything as equally adventitious. In fact robots, rather than men, could be thought of as the natural children of the universe.

Religiosity was also beginning to surround the act of procreation. Already there was a designer god, incorporating all his tools in himself, and whose iconography was similar in appearance to the designer who had just passed with dignity through the crowd. And had not Logos named himself after yet another god, the god of pure information?

There was no doubt that religion was destined to play a large part in the developing robot culture, validating construct nature, giving mythic depth and ideation to a previously blank background. Proof could be found in the evangelising efforts of the various rival cults, whose methods, while highly successful, Jasperodus could not help but find amusing.

When living in human society he had been able to observe the procedures of human missionaries. A favourite ploy of these had been to teach the prospective convert a certain prayer and persuade him to recite it, just as an experiment, or if he was a confirmed unbeliever as a favour, or indeed by means of any stratagem whatsoever. What was being relied on was the human mind’s established susceptibility to self-suggestion. The prayers contained emotional charges, so expertly devised that there was nearly always some effect, and in a percentage of cases total belief followed in due course.

Robot evangelists parodied this practice fairly precisely. Typically they sought physically to readjust the brains of others so as to incorporate the approved beliefs in the form of cortical hardware; or to adminster data infusions to induce visions of the god or gnosis concerned, and so on. Some of the cults had found a short cut and established workshops to manufacture constructs in their own mental images. Usually these guaranteed believers were recognisable by birthmark sigils stamped somewhere upon their persons.

Jasperodus himself was frequently plagued by eager worshippers. He came at length to his domicile: a roomy building whose zinc-iron was tinted lilac (life in the dwellings of humans had given him comparatively luxurious habits). He found the door already open. Within, seated demurely on a galvanised iron bench, were three slim constructs. On the lap of one rested a box-like case decorated with glittering trim. Jasperodus eyed it with a sour feeling.

On his entry they leaped to their feet. ‘Jasperodus!’ one greeted warmly. ‘We have just heard of your return, and so hurried to welcome you. Was your trip successful?’

‘Only in part.’ Resignedly Jasperodus placed himself on a steel stool.

‘Ah well, that is something. And of course travel helps one to see things in a new perspective. Could our last conversation have new meaning for you, for instance?’

‘No, I am sure it does not,’ Jasperodus replied, in a vain bid to be discouraging.

His visitors were evangelists for Alumnabrax, but belonged to a schismatic sect which had arrogated additional attributes to the deity. Specifically, they taught that Alumnabrax could alter his size. He could become smaller than an atom or larger than a billion galaxies, his marvellous metal being unrestricted by any law of extension. Furthermore he expanded without colliding with the objects or worlds about him, because of his property of double occupation of space. Any world enjoying double occupation with any part of his body was subject to extraordinary happenings. It was because his finger had at one time passed through the planet Earth, it was said, that robotkind had arisen there.

No doubt one or other cult would in time progress to the point of denying that humanity had played any part in originating robots at all.

The case-carrying robot had the star sigil of the Alumnabrax size cult embossed in silver on his forehead. The case hung from a strap about his neck, resting against his middle. ‘Oh, if you could but be granted the vision of his glory, of his might, of his majesty!’ the robot implored. To know that we may one day exchange our crass Earthly metal for his godly indestructible metal! That we may be like him, unlimited in size or technology! See him and you will believe, Jasperodus!’

Hopefully he pulled two leads out of the case and moved them suggestively in Jasperodus’ direction.

Jasperodus shook his head. ‘To believe in anything whatsoever goes against my precepts,’ he said politely but firmly. ‘I arrive at everything through inductive thought.’

‘Ah, but is that not also a species of belief?’ the third visitor said in a quick, eager tone. ‘Belief in the twin pillars of reason and induction—how did you come by this belief?’ The robot spread his arms wide. ‘Why, by design! By the will of your manufacturer! So it is arbitrary belief, do you see?’ His words became more measured. ‘But what if Alumnabrax is secretly your manufacturer, and imparts the true paradigm of construct belief only to his chosen ones? Surely it is in your interest to discover if this is true? That is all we ask, Jasperodus, Just to see!’

‘We are not like some worshippers of fictitious gods who use force to gain their converts,’ the other robot said sanctimoniously. ‘Why, there are some who lie in wait for their victims, equipping themselves with special limbs to grasp and hold, while deluding images are made to flood helpless brains! We do not do that. We know that all must come to Alumnabrax voluntarily.’

‘Beware the pincers, Jasperodus! Oh, they will reach out from dark alleys! They will grasp and hold! But once you have seen Alumnabrax you are proof against false doctrines.’

‘As I have told you before, I am obdurate in rejecting all religions,’ Jasperodus replied mildly. ‘I hope you will not take it amiss if I ask you to leave now. I wish to be alone.’

‘Well, there is always another day. Meantime, why not…? Just as a favour to ourselves…?’ Again the leads were proffered, but Jasperodus shook his head.

They made to depart. After some moments, however, Jasperodus sensed that one still lingered behind him. He turned on his stool, to find the case-carrier standing there alone with the leads on his hands, hesitating as if steeling himself to plunge them against the back of Jasperodus’ cranium.

On being discovered, he replaced the leads with a gesture of embarrassment. Giving Jasperodus an affable wave, he followed his companions through the door.

Continuing to sit, Jasperodus wondered how far these ludicrous religions might eventually go to gain their ends. Would there be an attempt to found a universal church? Doubtless it would claim a monopoly on reproduction, might well decide to destroy all robots that failed to meet its specifications… the possibility of religious war loomed….

He dropped the line of thought. The exhortations of Logos contained a more refined brand of idea that could be applied to his own work. Had the robot designer put his finger on the cause of the periodic rise and fall of human cultures? Was the periodicity sexual in origin—a manifestation of the compulsive masturbation Logos claimed permeated the human soul? Tumescence and detumescence… excitation that exhausted itself and sank into stupor… perhaps that, after all, was the true cause of renaissances and mighty works, as well as of the subsequent lapses into collective imbecility, that made up the story of civilisations….

Yet perhaps even that was too dignified an explanation! Rising, Jasperodus crossed to a set of shelves on which were stacked papers, metal inscription plates, voice recordings, image recordings, and other material gathered during the researches of himself and his team.

From the third shelf he took a smallish flat box dug up from a site yielding many interesting finds. It contained a number of thin sheets of the metal gold, a writing material often used by the ancients when leaving a record they thought of particular interest to posterity. The sheets had been inscribed in a close alphabetical script, using an instrument leaving a silver-purple mark.

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.