The Rod of Light

7

When first agreeing to accompany Cricus, Jasperodus had been prompted by a feeling of curiosity concerning Gargan and his project. It was, he had reasoned, an interesting precursor to those possible trends in future construct society that were doomed to failure. He had even derived a certain amount of amusement from the thought. But, after a further fifteen days of travel, he began to be oppressed by a more serious, even ominous feeling. The landscape had grown bare and wild. The region was subject to frequent magnetic storms, and a brooding, electric sensation seemed constantly in the air.

Cricus stopped and linked an arm to his. ‘Inspect the terrain ahead carefully. Do you notice anything amiss?’

There stretched before them level ground strewn with boulders and scrub. Jasperodus shook his head.

‘Then listen. What do you hear?’

Intently Jasperodus tuned up his hearing. ‘Yes, there is a muffled noise,’ he reported. ‘A sonic muffler is in operation.’ He looked around. ‘Where is it? Underground?’

‘Not quite. We are about to descend into a rift valley in the plain. The terrain ahead of us is an illusion, created to make the Gargan Work invisible from the air. Follow me, and be careful how you place your feet.’

After a few yards Jasperodus noticed that Cricus was seemingly sinking into the ground inch by inch with each step he took. Gingerly he followed, and watched his own feet disappear likewise. The visible ground was insubstantial; they were treading an unseen surface below it.

Cricus glanced back. ‘The slope becomes steeper here,’ he warned. ‘Do not lose your footing.’

Except that there was no resistance, it was like wading through water. The false surface rose to Jasperodus’ waist, to his chest, then to his neck to give him a worm’s-eye view.

Then it closed over his head completely. Instead of the flat plain, he saw a broad, dry canyon spread out below. The bank they were descending was a collapsed section of cliff. Towards the horizon, an opposite cliff reared. The disguise was more than camouflage: it was a trap. Anyone not knowing the proper route but coming on the canyon by accident would likely tumble to his death as solid ground became empty air.

From below, the fake landscape disappeared altogether. The sun shone through the same cloudy sky as before.

And there, some distance away on the floor of the canyon, was the site of the Gargan project. Like most robot habitations it was unimpressive to look at. There were sheds of zinc and iron, and a few vehicles, including aircraft. Evidence of small-scale industrial working came from smoke rising from what might have been a foundry, from the thump of engines, more audible now that he was beneath the sonic muffler’s umbrella, and from what he took to be a huge junkheap.

There were also some surprising touches. Planted neatly among the sprawling sheds were three interconnected buildings of almost human elegance. Moreover these villas were built of stone, a material usually scorned by robots. Secondly, the place seemed almost deserted, in contrast to the aimless outdoor sociability of construct townships generally.

Eager to show off the dramatic change in the scenery, Cricus had stopped to allow Jasperodus to inspect the view. ‘How does this illusion work?’ Jasperodus asked. ‘I have not met its like before.’

It is some kind of projected image,’ Cricus told him vaguely. ‘An invention well within the scope of the minds serving the Gargan Work. It has hid this location from Borgor eyes for a number of years.’

They resumed the descent. On gaining the canyon floor, Cricus set off for the clustered buildings.

They had not gone far when a rapid-fire sound, such as that made by a machine gun, came to their ears. The source of the sound proved to be two strange figures approaching in the shadow of the cliff wall from further down the canyon: black robots, riding astride hurtling machines with two wheels apiece mounted in tandem.

The noise was produced by small engines that powered the bizarre contraptions, which the robots rode in a posture that was peculiarly tense and aggressive-seeming. The main controls were steering bars which they reached forwards to grip in both hands, forcing them to crouch low. They were heading straight for the travellers and reached them in moments, circling as if to herd them before braking to a sudden stop in their path, throwing up spurts of dust.

Both riders and machines were larger than had appeared from a distance. The broad wheels were rimmed with thick layers of wire mesh, fitting them for travel over rough ground. One foot on the ground to prevent their machines from toppling over, the robots leaned back in their saddles, regarding the newcomers.

They had a wild and reckless look, their eyes swivelling silver slits, the lower parts of their faces jutting out like the muzzles of steel beasts. One spoke in a rasping voice. ‘You have arrived none too soon! For days we have searched for constructs, but all have fled the region and the village is long since deserted.’

Turning in the saddle, he pointed to the junkheap that towered in the distance. ‘Come, you are destined for the pile.’

‘Let us pass,’ Cricus said nervously. ‘I am Cricus, and I bring Gargan a new recruit for his team.’

The first robot turned to his companion. The latter murmured gruffly: ‘We shall be food for the pile ourselves, if we find none.’

‘True.’

He turned back to Cricus. ‘So you come to serve the Work? Then be grateful, for you shall! Gargan has ordered more brains to be added to the pile. Yours are as good as any other.’

Jasperodus became convinced of danger too late to flee. A net shot out from between the handles of the wheel machine to drape itself over him, so that he found himself struggling in a mesh of reticulated tungsten steel that tightened with his every movement. A tug from his captor toppled him to the ground. Rope he could have torn to shreds, but this net was made specifically to catch robots. He threshed about, before realizing he was only enmeshing himself further, then became still.

A second net had trapped Cricus. The riders now dismounted, propped up their machines on short extensible rods, and reached behind their saddles to open large square boxes that were placed there. From these they took out objects which unfolded to form fairly large wheeled carts.

Without another word they lifted Jasperodus and Cricus one by one into the carts, which they then attached to the rear of their vehicles. With the same machine-gun noise as before, the machines set off, towing the carts behind them.

Over the racket, Jasperodus bellowed to Cricus. ‘What will be done with us, Cricus?’

His friend’s frightened voice drifted to him. ‘I don’t know… some experiment or other.…’ Then: ‘At least we shall be of use to the Work.…’

Raising his head over the shallow rim of the truck, Jasperodus saw that they were approaching the junkheap. It was now visible as a sprawling pile, twenty to thirty feet high, of immobilised robots. Arms, legs, heads, torsos, all were tangled and tossed together. He had seen such sights before. It was common to see junked constructs piled high in scrapyards, in the yards of iron foundries, in the streets of Tansiann, and on the outskirts of robot townships. The difference was that the robots on such heaps were generally dismantled, emptied of useful parts, while here they seemed mainly complete. Only the obvious fact that their motors controls had been disconnected, he guessed, prevented them from being fully functional.

Standing by the pile, however, were three hulking constructs of a type to strike fear into any robot who had ever known slavery to humans. They were wreckers, machines whose enormous strength enabled them to subdue those superannuated constructs who objected to their own destruction. Jasperodus, who had fallen into the clutches of such creatures once before, felt a flash of anger at what Cricus had led him into, and he began to reckon what his chances of escape might be in the instants after the steel net was removed.

The truck bounced to a stop. Briefly he took the time to notice a thick cable that emerged from the foot of the pile to snake across the ground and into one of the big sheds. Then he got ready to spring to his feet, to run, as he was lifted out of the truck and lowered to the ground.

In the event he was not even given the opportunity. A wrecker placed a giant foot on his back, holding him down. The net was drawn back, but only far enough to expose his head. A steel hand forced his face into the dusty earth, from which barely a blade of grass grew. The inspection plate at the back of his cranium clicked open. They were switching off his motor functions.

Only then, with nothing connecting his mind to his limbs, a steel puppet whose strings had been cut, was he tumbled out of the net like a fish onto land.

The wreckers picked him up, one by his arms and another by his legs, and flung him high in the air. Up he arced, to fall with a crash and a clatter near the top of the heap, where he lay gazing helplessly at the sky.

Seconds later he heard a second crash, not quite as loud. It was the more lightly built Cricus, landing in his turn on the pile.

Jasperodus was disposed over perhaps a dozen living metal corpses. His head, for instance, rested on some luckless constructs face. Did all the occupants of the pile remain mentally active, as he did, he wondered? He presumed so. But from their silence it was to be deduced that not only their power of movement but also their voices had been switched off.

Experimentally he tried to speak, and found that he was dumb.

Why had he been placed here? To await the attentions of Gargan and his cohorts—put in store, so to speak? Three or four minutes passed while he deliberated this question, and he could find no other explanation. That his inspection plate had been left open did not, during that time, occur to him as significant; but now he first heard, then felt, a stealthy slithering movement in the pile below him. The face of the robot on which he lay was pushed aside an inch or two, causing his own head to loll; and something, a flexible metal tentacle by its feel, began to touch and tap at his cranium.

He heard a humming sound. The tentacle had entered his open inspection window! It was drilling into his brain!

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the humming stopped. Instead, Jasperodus heard something else: a confused chattering noise, made up of hundreds of muttering voices, all of whom seemed to be trying to address him.

It was a short while before he realized what the voices consisted of. He heard them not with his ears but in his head. They were the subvocalised thoughts of the robots in the pile around him, and they were not trying to talk to him at all.

Every one of them was muttering away to itself.

The chattering separated and floated away, like scum and tangle collecting on the surface of a pond into whose depths Jasperodus now found himself sinking.

And then, in those depths, the visions began.

At first they were fragmentary: glimpses of landscapes, of sunsets, of faces, buildings and countless artifacts, interspersed with brief sequences that were more abstract in character. He recognised them as graph curves, winding and dancing in as many as forty dimensions.

At first, too, the visions imposed themselves on his imagination only. His eyes continued to see the broody sky. Eventually, however, after how long he did not know, the new neural input completely coopted his sensorium and the external world vanished from his sight and hearing. He began to hear voices again—not the superficial chatter he had heard earlier, but operational machine talk—a number-crunching logic language.

Slowly Jasperodus became aware of what was happening to him. He was descending into the construct brain’s equivalent of the subconscious. Nor was it merely his subconscious; the tentacle that had drilled into his skull was a neural cable. It connected together the brains of all the robots in the pile, pressing them into the service of one huge, ramshackle—and probably arbitrary—link-up. This subconscious was a collective one.

In this inferior region practical functions lived side by side with archetypal images and stubborn fears. In that respect, it paralleled the human subconscious exactly. There were horrendous dreams of being torn apart by wreckers. There were irresistible voices demanding submission (stemming from the compulsive obedience to humans generally built into robots). There were also looming figures undeniably reminiscent of the robot cult gods. In the fading shapes Jasperodus was fascinated to discern, albeit in disguised form, gigantic Mekkan, dazzling Alumnabrax, Infinite Logic (another construct god)….

Yet apart from these archetypes, no robot personalities confronted him. He was a lone individual here in the turgid waters of the collective mind. Why was that? Why, for other robots, did individuality persist only on the level of attention, the superficial level of self-image…?

The answer was not hard to guess at. Of all the robots in the pile, only he possessed consciousness. His attention was real, not fictive; and due to that, the neural cable had inadvertently directed it from the external world to the inferior mind.

Also due to that, the monstrous octopus that connected together the separate brains was giving him what few humans had ever known: experience of the mind’s functional substructures.

And at the same time he learned the reason why waking consciousness normally was prevented from visiting its own supporting depths. Try as he might, he was unable to regain access to his external senses.

He was trapped. And he began to fear it would be for the rest of his existence….

Time flowed… and then flowed no longer….

…Until, after a measureless interval, the waters of the unconscious receded, leaving the heap of silent, motionless robots high and dry. Disconnected by the neural cable, Jasperodus found himself staring skyward once more.

Judging by the position of the sun and the quality of the light the time was mid-morning. There came a noise of trampling and clashing; someone was climbing the heap, using metal bodies as stepping stones, and by the sound of it dislodging several and sending them slithering down the pile.

Shortly the brute face of one of his captors loomed over him. The robot reached down, and with uncharacteristic gentleness eased the neural cable from the back of his head. Then, seizing him under his arms with large hands, it lugged him awkwardly down the heap, nearly losing its footing more than once.

At the bottom Jasperodus was dragged to where another construct waited, then was dropped. The second robot knelt to finger the back of his skull.

He heard his inspection plate click shut. The two constructs stepped back, and Jasperodus realised that the power of movement had been returned to him.

Tentatively he stirred, feeling unsteady at first although no deterioration had taken place in his motor system. Cautiously he lifted himself on one knee, and after a moment, to his feet.

The two confronting him were probably the same robots that had captured him, though it was not possible to be sure. After a pause, one spoke.

‘We are instructed to apologise for placing you forcibly upon the pile. Gargan was expecting you. He will see you now.’

Jasperodus glanced up the metal slope. ‘How long was I there?’

Twenty days? Thirty? Am I a timekeeper?’

‘Also remove from that heap the construct who conducted me here,’ Jasperodus ordered.

‘No instruction was issued with regard to your guide,’ the robot told him brusquely, and made an impatient gesture. ‘Come. You are to meet Gargan.’

He turned and walked towards the nearest zinc shed, taking the path of the thick trunk-line that snaked thither from the foot of the pile.

With a heightened sense of curiosity and expectation now that his delayed journey was at an end, Jasperodus followed.