The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

It was widely believed in the south that the Borgor Alliance refused to use robots at all. This, of course, was not true. But those few self-directed constructs produced in Borgor did tend to be travesties of the robotic art, unable, for instance, to engage in any but the most childish conversation. Curious anomalies could issue from this limitation: in robotic, as in organic intelligence, there was an inverse ratio between intelligence and functional accuracy. A very simple robot, like those made in Borgor, could have perfect motor skills, or perfect computational ability; could, for instance, be made unbeatable in the countless games of skill that fascinated humans: could poke balls about a table with a stick more superbly than any merely human poker of balls, as an example. But the more intelligent the robot, the more it was liable to err like a human.

Jasperodus believed that the cause of Borgor’s anti-robot prejudice lay in its social order. Borgor and her allies were feudal. Each district was effectively the hereditary property of a ‘commissary’ who directed all labour within his domain and even presided over the personal lives of his social inferiors. A society so highly cohesive gave much satisfaction to those who wielded power in it, and the hierarchy of relationships was not to be weakened by admitting machines into the rank order. In the New Empire, on the other hand, free robots had become just one more social class, the lowest of all.

‘I suppose most of the robots here are captured from the south?’ he queried. ‘Borgor constructs wouldn’t be much use, on the whole.’

‘One cannot be stupid underground,’ Yoshibo agreed. ‘But the Borgors can make clever robots if they want to. Only a few of us are captured; the rest are Borgors, specially made for the job. They are activated in the mine and know of no other existence, though many are of nearly average intelligence. We shall have to crawl through here.’

Ahead of them the tunnel had been almost flattened by the pressure of the earth lying above it, buckling the arc-shaped girders. The floor, too, seemed to have been forced upward to meet the roof, twisting the railway tracks. Only a narrow gap remained. Following Yoshibo’s example, Jasperodus got down on his hands and knees, dragging himself through the aperture until there was room enough to stand.

‘This section will have to be dinted before the face is opened,’ Yoshibo said, ‘I don’t know why it hasn’t been done already. We are having to route scurry all round the Bospho.’

Jasperodus could only guess at the meaning of the miners’ argot, which Yoshibo spoke with a self-conscious sense of style, except that the Bospho was a mountain in Rendare. Unwilling prisoner or not, Yoshibo had entered into the spirit of his new life.

A sudden loud bang from above made Jasperodus look up in alarm. Yoshibo laughed.

‘Don’t worry about that. It’s only a bit of weight coming on.’

They continued for a further half hour through the network of tunnels, crossing one where a conveyor belt carried a stream of broken rock to an unknown destination, splashing through pools of blackened water, and scrambling through narrow defiles or over obstacles.

They came to the ‘rip’. This turned out to be where a tunnel was being driven forward in search of a new seam of coal. Their arrival was prefaced by the sound of a muffled detonation, and the tunnel filled with billowing smoke and dust.

Yoshibo waited for the smoke to disperse, then pressed forward. From out of side alcoves where they had apparently been taking cover emerged a work gang: several robots directed by a man, carrying at his waist the same type of faintly burning oil lamp Jasperodus had noticed before.

The robots scurried to the end of the tunnel, their combined headlamps making it almost festive with light. Not all were androform: some were scuttling scorpion-like machines which dashed forward and began gathering in the rubble from the explosion with their claw-like front limbs, raking it over their backs, up their outstretched tails and thence to the moving conveyor belt along one wall.

Other robots seized pick-axes and began levering out loosened blocks of rock from the tunnel end, while yet others helped the scorpions, shovelling rubble onto the conveyor or picking up the larger chunks bodily, staggering with them to the belt and heaving them laboriously on. The supervisor, meanwhile, looked on broodingly.

Yoshibo approached timidly. ‘Reporting to the rip, sir.’

Slowly the human turned to him. His face was fat, red and bad-tempered. ‘Get yourself a shovel,’ he growled, then looked at Jasperodus. ‘You too—no, wait. You a southern robot, boy?’

‘Yes sir,’ Jasperodus said.

‘You a smart machine?’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘Know how to handle explosives?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Good. Let’s see if you can blow yourself apart like some of these mechanical krazzniks. Take this.’