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

Two hours later he let her rest, her breath coming in quavering sobs. Quietly they lay together on a broad divan bed, and while she recovered from her relentless delirium, idly he reflected on the nature of sex, which was a world all of its own, inviting one to become submerged indefinitely in its dizzying depths.

Such a degree of obsession as Verita had was an unlikely outcome on his part, though his was indeed a supercharged kind of sex. In him it was a temporary madness, a sort of induced brain fever. He felt no sense of slavery to it – a consequence, perhaps, of its late addition to his faculties.

Beside him he felt Verita once again stirring. Whatever might have been the disappointments of the day, he reflected, this kind of thing gave him immense satisfaction. Barring the other matter, which he now vowed to forget, he was a complete man.

11

Do robots dream? Jasperodus did.

Even his powerful brain would at times weary of ceaseless activity and so, to gain a brief respite in oblivion, he would resort to suspending his higher brain functions for a spell, bringing on the robotic surrogate of sleep. Then, sometimes, the dream would come.

It was always the same. He lay on a moving belt, unable to move because his motor function had been cut out – permanently, and deliberately. The belt bore him inexorably towards the open intake door of a blast furnace.

Seen through that gaping mouth, the inside of the furnace was a terrible, pitiless, compressed haze of heat, like the interior of a star. Jasperodus became aware that besides himself the belt was carrying an endless succession of metal artifacts into the furnace: gun carriages, statues, sections of girder, engines, tools, heaps of domestic utensils, heavy machinery of all kinds – some of it evidently self-directed – and robots like himself lying inert and helpless. One of these for some reason had not been immobilised but was strapped down to a cradle-like rack; it stirred desultorily in its bonds as if unaware of its true situation, which was that it was due to fall together with everything else on the belt into the devouring heat, to lose all form and identity and coalesce into a common pool of liquid metal.

Jasperodus awoke howling.

He leaped off the padded couch where he had lain. For a while he stood stock-still, forcing the reassuring sight of his surroundings to wash away the recurring nightmare, but remaining in the grip of unaccountable moods and feelings.

The dream faded slowly. He sought some comforting distraction, and his eye lit on a covered gold receptacle, somewhat in the style of an amphora, that had been designed by him and delivered from the goldsmiths the previous day. He turned to inspect it anew.

It had been inspired in part by descriptions he had read of the interior of the ancient Temple of the Brotherhood of Man at Pekengu. Outwardly it presented a dome of gleaming yellow gold dusted with point-like diamonds, and resting on a decorated base of red gold. Moving certain of the pyramidal studs located round the base caused the dome to come free, and it was then shown to enclose what at first sight looked like a hazy polyhedron glowing with misty light, but which on closer examination proved to be a fine mesh composed of chainwork of white gold, so delicate as to have the texture of cloth, stretched over the projected apexes of a stellated polyhedron, or rather hemipolyhedron, made of the rare and gorgeous orange gold. The full splendour of the latter became evident when the mesh was removed (by sliding an encircling base ring of red gold left and right in a secret sequence) and it could in turn be lifted away, if one knew in which order to press the studs on its lower planes. It then disclosed an upright box of severe classical proportions, grooved and fluted, embossed with narrow vertical pilasters, made of green gold that was shaded and heavy in lustre, almost venomous. The association it brought to mind was of a stately prison, or perhaps a bank vault. By pressing its floor from beneath, the front could be made to spring open. Within was a perfume bottle like a vinaigrette, a slim feminine shape woven from threads of spun gold of every colour: yellow, red, white, green and orange.

He grunted, and put it all together again. He was pleased: it was perfect. He would have liked to have been able to make it with his own hands as well as having designed it, but with all his other activities he would not have found the time to acquire the skills involved.

The only thing still lacking was a really special perfume to put in the bottle. He would give thought to that later.

Glancing at the wall clock, he saw that the morning was fairly well advanced and made a phosphor-dot call to his office.

‘What awaits?’

The brass face of his secretary bent clerkishly on the screen. ‘No communications have been received by me this morning, sir.’

‘None at all? What of the report from the Expeditionary Force?’