She had no need to explain further, for Jasperodus knew the story: childless, and saddened by their childlessness, the couple had chosen this way of giving their lives issue. They looked to Jasperodus now to bring them as much joy and comfort as an organically born flesh-and-blood child might have done.
But like many an ungrateful son, Jasperodus had already made his decision. He imagined better things for himself than to spend his life with them. Jasperodus, the hulking, bronze-black all-purpose robot they had created, laughed harshly and moved purposively across the room to the door. Opening it, he walked out of their lives.
Looking after his retreating back, the man put his hand comfortingly on his wife’s shoulder. ‘We knew this could happen,’ he reminded her gently. It was true that they could have made their offspring with a built-in desire to cherish them; but that, they had both decided, would not be the right way. Whatever he did, it had to be of his own free will.
Yet, after their long, patient labours, their parents’ anguish was real. Jasperodus had some theoretical knowledge of the world, but no experience of it. His future was as unpredictable as his past was blank.
‘What will become of him?’ the woman said tearfully. ‘What will become of him?’
2
The rambling cottage stood alone in extensive countryside. Jasperodus took a direction at random and simply kept on walking. He walked first across a tiny patch of land that supplied his parents’ meagre needs. Two robot agricultural machines were at work, one harvesting high-yield crops of grain and vegetables and the other tending a few animals. More of his father’s handiwork, Jasperodus did not doubt, but they were primitive machines only, built for specific work. They compared to himself as a primitive insect compared to a man.
Five minutes brought him through the smallholding to rolling woods and wild meadows. Confident that if he kept going he would eventually meet with something more in keeping with his new-born sense of adventure, for the time being he contented himself with simply enjoying his first few hours in the world, admiring his body and all the faculties his parents had given him.
Jasperodus’ form was that of a handsome humanoid in bronze-black metal. His exterior, comprising flat planes mollified by brief rounded surfaces, aspired to a frankly metallic effect. To alleviate the weightiness of this appearance he was decorated all over with artistic scroll-like engravings. Altogether, his body exuded strength and capability.
His face he could not see and so had to postpone his inspection of it. His senses, however, he could explore freely. He switched his eyesight up and down the spectrum of radiation, well beyond the octave of light visible to human beings. His audible range was equally broad. His sense of smell, on the contrary, though adequate, was not as sharp as in many men and certainly did not approach the acuteness of some animals. As for his sense of touch, it was perfectly delicate where it concerned dynamics, but he was to learn later that it lacked the delicious touch-sensations that were available to organic beings; it meant nothing to him to be stroked.
Touch-sensation was a field his father had not mastered, indeed it was the trickiest problem in the whole of robotics.
His repertoire of sensory inputs was rounded off by a superb sense of balance and movement. Jasperodus would have made a skilful dancer, despite his weight of about a third of a ton.
All in all he was probably one of the finest robots ever to be built. His father, a master robot-maker, was well-qualified for the task; he had learned his trade first of all in a robot factory in Tarka, later spending nearly a decade creating unusual robots on the estates of the eccentric Count Viss. Finally he had enrolled with the supreme robot designer of them all, Aristos Lyos, for a further three years of special study, before retiring to this remote, pleasant spot to create the masterpiece that would fulfil his life. Jasperodus could well imagine the old man’s devotion, as well as the inexhaustible patience of his wife, who had prepared the greater mass of repetitious micro-circuitry.
Insofar as the machinery of his body went, all that Jasperodus had examined so far was of the finest workmanship, but not unique. More mysterious was the formation of his character… Here his father had shown his originality. It would have been an easy matter to endow him with any type of personality his parents had wished, but that would have defeated the object of the exercise, which was to give rise to a new, original person of unknown, unique potentialities. Therefore, at the moment of his activation, Jasperodus’ father had arranged for his character to crystallise by chance out of an enormous number of random influences, thus simulating the chance combination of genes and the vagarious experiences of childhood.
As a result Jasperodus came into the world as a fully formed adult, complete with a backlog of knowledge and with decided attitudes. Admittedly his knowledge was of a sparse and patchy kind, the sort that could be gained from reading books or watching vidtapes. But he knew how to converse and was skilled at handling many types of machinery.
He knew, too, that the planet Earth was wide, varied and beautiful. Since the collapse of the Rule of Tergov (usually referred to now as the Old Empire) some eight hundred years previously there had been no integrated political order. In the intervening Dark Period of chaos even knowledge of the planet’s geography had become vague. The world was a scattered, motley patchwork of states large and small, of kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms and manors. And although a New Empire was arising in the south of Worldmass – the great continent comprising most of Earth’s dry surface – that saw itself as a successor to the old and destined to resurrect its glories, the machinations of the Great Emperor Charrane made slow progress. The rest of the world heeded him but little.
On and on strode Jasperodus. Night fell. He switched to infrared vision, planning to walk on uninterrupted into the day.
After some hours he saw a light shining in the distance. He switched back to normal vision, at which the light resolved itself into a fierce beam stabbing the darkness and moving slowly but steadily across the landscape, disappearing now and then behind hillocks or stretches of forest. Eager to investigate, he broke into a loping run, crashing through the undergrowth and leaping over the uneven ground.
On topping a rise, he stopped. He found himself looking down on a track comprising parallel steel rails. The moving headlight rounded a curve and approached the culvert. Behind it followed a chain of smaller lights, glimmering from the windows of elongated, dulled-silver coaches with streamlined fluted exteriors.
He instantly recognised the apparition as a train. But its speed, he imagined, was unnaturally slow for such a machine – barely twenty miles per hour. Suddenly he heard a staccato chattering noise coming from the train, first in a long burst, then intermittently. The engine? No…
Machine-gun fire.
Jasperodus slithered down the embankment. The windowless leading coach swept majestically abreast of him, wheels hissing on the rails; locating a handhold he swung himself easily on to the running-board that ran the length of the outer casing.
He edged along the brief ledge, pressing himself against the curved metal skin of the vehicle and looking for a way in. Up near the roof he found a square sliding panel that made an opening large enough to admit him. Gracefully he levered himself to a level with it and dropped feet first into the brightness within.
He landed in a narrow tunnel with a rounded roof. At once the machine-gun started up again, making a violent, deafening cacophony in the confined space, and he staggered as bullets rattled off his body. Then there was a pause.