The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

‘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.