A dreary, creaking voice suddenly came to life in the stall next to his own. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six. All here. Four plates of patterned silver. Five gold goblets engraved with the Royal Coat of Arms. A trencher of platinum, design depicting a rustic scene. Now the earthenware. Fifty plates of assorted glaze. Count them slowly. Handle them carefully, you rotten rusted hulk. Oh dear. Two plates broken. Oh dear, I am a rotten rusted hulk.’
A pause; then the maddening monologue began again. The voice came from an aged, deteriorating robot who worked in the palace kitchens. Every night his moronic brain sorted through the day’s experiences which, with small variations, were always the same: endless abuse from the kitchen staff and an inevitable succession of accidents and mistakes. Night after night Jasperodus was forced to eavesdrop on a stream of babble, a machine version of troubled dreams, a recurring nightmare whose theme was incompetence.
He stood in a wooden stall to which he was fastened by a heavy chain. The precaution was futile as well as unnecessary: with a little exertion he could have torn out the chain by the pins that fastened it to the timber and made his escape. But neither escape, nor defiance, nor disobedience were anywhere in his mind. Jasperodus had entered the stables, from the very first moment, utterly resigned to his future of machine drudgery. He knew himself to be nothing: he carried out his work dutifully and without omission, but mulishly, so that Horsu Greb, the robot overseer, had been forced to admit scant value on his talents.
For the first few weeks of his slavery he had continued to wrestle with the existential riddle posed him by his conversation with Padua.
It had been a tormenting time, for all his efforts had only persuaded him that Padua – and all the others – must be right. He had striven to enter into his own mind to find his basic identity, to locate the ‘I’ that, if he were conscious, must lie behind all his thoughts and perceptions. But however hard he tried all he could find were more thoughts, feelings and perceptions. The inference was plain: if the ‘I’ could not be grasped then it was reasonable to suppose that it did not exist at all.
And so he was a figment, as Padua had said. The ‘consciousness’ he had presumed in himself was fictitious only. It would not be difficult for a clever robot-maker to arrange: probably it consisted of one thought mechanically assessing another. But dead, all dead.
Jasperodus did not know whether to curse those who had made him or to pity them.
Since he had reached his conclusions and left off his mentations the despair they had brought him had worn down to a kind of everyday weariness. Weariness and boredom were now his constant companions – he had no others, for apart from himself the robots of the stable were cretinous in the extreme. He could, for short periods, escape this weariness (as well as Kitchen Help’s desperate maunderings) by switching off his higher brain functions, upon which he simply vanished from existence as far as his own cognisance went. Unfortunately some automatic mechanism limited this haven of ‘sleep’ to four hours out of twenty-four, since from a physiological standpoint it was not necessary to him at all. Otherwise he might have preferred to switch himself off permanently, since according to Padua non-being was more appropriate to his proper condition.
With regard to the boredom that was eating into him: he had noticed that he alone of all the working robots was afflicted with it. He theorised two explanations: (I) his erroneous self-image was responsible and (2) the other robots were too stupid ever to feel bored.
Either explanation was sufficient on its own, he felt, but notably the latter. The constructs he had been thrown among were a haphazard collection, their intelligence ranging from the subhuman right down to the negligible. Some were so primitive that they scarcely deserved to be called ‘self-directed’ at all. Jasperodus ignored all of them, including the resurrected Gogra, whom he had occasionally seen skulking about. On their first sighting one another he had wondered if the big fighting robot would take him to task for the humiliation he had suffered, but either Gogra’s reconstituted brain contained no memory of his defeat or else he was too dim-witted to feel resentment.
The same could not be said for Horsu Greb, robot overseer, dim-witted though he undoubtedly was. The bad feeling he harboured towards Jasperodus stemmed, apparently, from a casual jest on Padua’s part. When advising Horsu of the new robot’s capabilities, as was his duty, he had jokingly remarked that Jasperodus could be a candidate for Horsu’s own job. Never a man of enormous humour, Horsu had taken the threat seriously and ever after looked with ill-veiled hostility toward his handsome chargehand. Even he sensed something unusual about Jasperodus, despite the latter’s modest demeanour, and that was the reason why he kept him in chains at night.
Dawn broke, chinks of light filtering into the stable, glancing off metal, shining on wood. Dogs barked more vigorously in the animal section, from which wafted a warm, raw odour Jasperodus was well used to.
A timber gate squeaked open. Horsu Greb lurched into view, red-rimmed eyes staring out over a bulbous nose flawed with warts. Rubbing sleep from his eyes and hitching up his baggy trousers with a length of leather cord, he paced the gangway, bellowing hoarsely.
‘Stir yourselves, you useless lumps! The sun is in the sky! No more lazing!’
He turned aside to urinate against the flank of an unprotesting earthmover. The stalls resounded to a general clanking and thumping; Jasperodus rattled his chains, marvelling anew at the way Horsu bolstered his self-esteem by projecting organic qualities on to the robots – by imagining that they, not he, preferred to sleep into the day.
The unkempt overseer stopped by Jasperodus’ stall and glared at him. ‘I want a good day’s work out of you!’ he roared. ‘No slacking! There’s a lot of carrying to be done!’
Jasperodus remained impassive while Horsu unlocked his chain. He moved into the gangway, receiving as he did so a jocular kick from Horsu’s steel-toed boot.
The constructs trailed out of the stable in a ragged procession. Not all were humanoid: there were quadrupeds built for hauling after the manner of horses or oxen; wheeled robots; and the self-directed earthmover bearing before it a great splayed blade. In front of Jasperodus Kitchen Help trudged along. Horsu had interrupted his litany, which he hurriedly resumed now with a list of resolutions, adjuring himself to break no plates, spill no soup, and tread on no more pot-boys’ toes.
Out in the courtyard the robots milled around aimlessly until Horsu, with much self-important yelling and many superfluous blasts upon a whistle, directed them to various destinations: some to the palace where they carried out domestic duties, some to the animal stable where they served as grooms, and the rest, Jasperodus included, out of the courtyard and along the palace wall to a building site.
The sunlight still barely slanted across the ground as they began work. The earthmover continued digging out the foundations it had started the day before. Jasperodus and two other humanoids unloaded bricks and masonry blocks from some lorries, piling them conveniently for the work to be undertaken. The building gangers had not arrived yet but Horsu, though not himself of that trade, presumed to stand in for them, placing himself on a pile of rubble and looking around him with judicious nods.
The work was tedious and heavy. Hours passed and the sun rose in the sky; Jasperodus’ body hummed almost audibly as he humped the blocks of stone which were quarried, he believed, from ancient ruins lying somewhere in the region.
Occasionally he paused to take note of anything interesting that might be happening nearby. They were working to build fuel bunkers for a powerhouse that lay beneath the palace, and every now and then a number of large baffle-plates set in the palace wall opened slightly to give forth a wave of heat. As the day progressed the exhalations grew more intense until they finally stopped altogether. Jasperodus, who was familiar with the layout of the powerhouse through having worked there as a stoker, suspected that something was amiss.