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

He dismissed any thought of death. Death could not exist for one who had never been born … It seemed to him that what was about to happen to him was a logical conclusion of the tragedy that surrounded him. Every day of his life he had been living a lie, the lie of his own being. That lie had brought him first to despair, then to the knowledge of his own imprisonment, and now … Everything had been leading to this fiery execution chamber.

Understanding what was expected, the stokers applied themselves to levers, one on either side of the doors, and forced them slowly open. A brilliant white glare flooded into the narrow space.

As the glaring fire was revealed, a curious image rose in Jasperodus’ mind, so vividly as to paralyse him for a moment. He saw a blast furnace in which iron and steel were smelted. Into it trundled an endless stream of scrap metal: objects large and small, weapons, cars, broken-up aircraft and locomotives, canisters, ornaments, statues and statuettes, table-ware, hooks and buttons, brackets, rods, girders, fences, gates, trays, myriad machines and defunct robots, every one disappeared into the ravening heat to lose all form and identity. And all the metal thereby gained was used again to make a new generation of artifacts. Unaccountably this thought left Jasperodus feeling stunned – he himself could be melted down in such a furnace (as he had once been drawn from one) and used to make, perhaps, the chassis for a motorised carriage, or even a new, totally different robot who would live a happily humdrum existence unafflicted by the curse of a fictitious self-image.

Where had this vision come from? Presumably from the stock of gratuitous memories bestowed on him by his father – somehow he still thought of the old man as his father. But it was over in a second or so. He moved forward, switching his vision to ultraviolet in an attempt to see through the flames, and clambered into the furnace. Fire licked at him; the doors edged shut behind him.

He stood alone in a raging haze of incandescence.

The air was thick with energy. It was like being under water.

This must be what it’s like inside a star.

Then it was hard for him to think anything for everything went fuzzy; the heat was disrupting his processes. He took a step, and stumbled over the body of Kitchen Help, which was at white heat and looked on the point of beginning to melt. His own skin was already glowing. Vaguely he was aware of his lower brain functions responding to the damage with a stream of urgent reports, analyses and prognostications; their import was that he should remove himself from here on the instant.

The possibility presented itself that he might not even reach the far wall of the furnace, though it was not very far away. But something else rose to the surface in him, sweeping aside both defeatism and the machine analogue of panic. He determined that he would accomplish this one last thing, at whatever degree of difficulty; he would not end his functioning on a note of failure.

His eyes were only of minimal use to him by now. He went forward, reeled, recovered himself and so gained the far end of the furnace where the trouble was. Groping with his hands, he verified what he had already guessed to be the cause of failure: vitrified ash from the burning of a combustible fuel had sealed both the lids of the waste pipes and the clumsy mica-laminate rakes that were supposed to shovel the ash away. Both ash and decomposed isotope was supposed to form a slurry to flow away to the waste pits below; instead they had stayed in the furnace, building up more and more heat.

Though barely operational, Jasperodus kicked desperately at the glassy mass, and eventually succeeded in cracking and shattering it. Then he threw himself at the rakes, tearing free the fused fragments with his hands.

His body was at white heat. His senses were going out, leaving him hanging in a vacant void.

Collapse was imminent.

If I really tried, he thought, perhaps I could reach the door. But he made no move to do so, and shortly he felt a tearing sensation as vital systems were taken out. Then he knew no more.

There was light, gentle and caressing. There was the rustle of fabric, and the sigh of a breeze.

And Jasperodus retracted his eyelids, gazing astonished at a baroque ceiling.

Above him hovered the thin, intent face of Padua the robotician. He smiled faintly to see that Jasperodus was ‘awake’.

‘Do not be surprised,’ he murmured. ‘You have survived.’

Nevertheless Jasperodus was surprised. Experimentally he levered himself to a sitting position, and observed that he had been lying on a low table covered with a yellow cloth. He appeared to be in one of the gracious little bowers that fringed the palace gardens; through the window casements he could see small, delicate trees, flowered bushes and orange-coloured blossoms.