The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

He swayed in his chair and his head drooped. Throughout his explanations, the blue-gowned Zoroastrian had shown a remarkable ability to seem incoherently drunk one minute and incisively sober the next. Perhaps he had some method of metabolising alcoholic poisons out of his system with unusual rapidity, Jasperodus thought.

But now he seemed spent, and laid his head on the table with a loud sigh, cradling it in his arms. This failed to bring him to rest, however, and his body slid slowly and majestically floorward.

Jasperodus rose, gathered him up and placed the sleeping form on the ottoman. He stood there, reflecting.

The flame. He felt an urge to see the flame again.

Hurriedly he went back down the stone passage to come again to the inner sanctum, and stared spellbound into the luminous fire. The flame’s fan shape, he observed, was due to a slit-like metal burner which emitted the combustible oil in the form of a vapour or spray—the device was more elaborate than the lamp outside the porch. And the symbolism was exquisite! The flame hissed, it roared, it wavered, but it never lost shape. Jasperodus traced the course of a spark as it caught fire an inch from the orifice, a glowing star that danced and soared, soon to be extinguished in the outer darkness.

The Zoroastrian creed, too, was fascinating. Jasperodus was much taken by its description of existence as universal war, a war that was as hazardous as it was unceasing. It differed radically from other mystic doctrines he was familiar with, which generally depicted nature as issuing from some all-embracing principle of unity or harmony—a view, he now recognised, which contradicted the facts, and clothed a core of delusive sentimentality.

Slowly, head bent in thought, he returned to the living chamber. Looking down on the sleeping templar, he debated within himself what he should do.

It had startled him to hear the mage practically—or so it seemed to him—accuse him of being conscious. If so, this aspect of their conversation was much more extraordinary than the Zoroastrian doctrine itself. One would have to believe that the temple keeper could sense another conscious mind directly through the legendary faculty of telepathy, much as some robots were able to commune by brain-to-brain radio.

It was true what Jasperodus had said: consciousness could not be artificially generated. It was immaterial and therefore uncreatable. But on one other point he had, by implication, lied. He himself was what he had denied was possible: a conscious robot.

There was a great secret, of which he was guardian: true, consciousness could not be made; but it was malleable. It could be treated, melted down, ducted into a special retort, transferred from one vessel to another. In that process lay the source of Jasperodus’ being.

Two had been involved in it: the genius who had discovered the principle, and his childless wife. Sad at their childlessness, they had found a new way to satisfy the urge to leave progeny. First, they had constructed Jasperodus’ powerful brain and body, then had come the arcane infusion: each, man and woman, donating half a soul to mix a new, original soul in the metal body; and thereby becoming Jasperodus’ father and mother.

They, too, had used the analogy of fire to describe consciousness, calling it supernal fire, cosmic fire. They were dead now, and with them had died all knowledge of how to work the psychic alchemy. Jasperodus, their son and sole confidant, was sworn—whatever it might cost him in personal loneliness—never to disclose that such a thing was even possible. His father had judged such knowledge too dangerous to mankind.

If he were to suspect now that the templar had divined his secret …

Jasperodus raised his fist. One blow would silence the sleeping man forever.

No, the idea was not plausible. The mage could not have guessed the truth. It was simply that he had fallen into a trap common among those who attached themselves to doctrines: he saw verification of his beliefs in everything that happened. Convinced that robots were on the verge of acquiring consciousness, he imagined it in every robot he met. More than likely he was half-crazed, an embittered hermit faced with the dying-out of his sect.

Jasperodus let fall his hand. By now night would have fallen, and there was nothing to detain him further. Searching the living room he found, behind a wall hanging, a set of levers for operating the porphyry doors. He cleared the corridor and walked through to the open air, where he climbed the wall of the cirque in near-darkness.

A three-quarters moon rode in the sky. The wan wash it cast on the landscape was the ghost of light rather than light itself. The indistinct hills and vales showed dim and silvery, seeming unreal, preternaturally silent, as if they were not seen at all.