Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Soon the revels entered a new phase. The bandits turned their attentions to the women, who up to now had been standing in a huddled group to one side. Their menfolk had all been slaughtered on the train, and they looked forlorn and apprehensive, remembering the recent horror and anticipating the mistreatment to come. Now they were dragged into the firelight and their ropes removed. They were forced to dance, to drink. Then their kidnappers, one by one, began to caress them, to throw them to the ground and strip them. The light of the flames flickered on gleaming naked bodies, and very quickly the scene turned into an orgy of rape.

Jasperodus watched all this blankly, listening to sobs and screams from the women, to growls of lust from the men. Carnal pleasure was foreign to him, and for the first time he felt sullen and disappointed: the experience of erotic sexual enjoyment was something his parents had not been able to give him.

True, the enjoyment the bandits found in forcing women against their will, in hearing their screams and cries of protestation, he could to some slight extent understand. After all, there was always satisfaction in forcing, in dominance. But the frantic sensual pleasure of desire gone mad, that he could not understand.

Again, it was not that he lacked aesthetic appreciation. He knew full well what beauty was, but unfortunately that did not help him in the sphere of eroticism. The aesthetic qualities of the naked female bodies now exposed to his view did not exceed, in his opinion, the aesthetic qualities of the naked male bodies. Clearly the sexual passions they aroused in the breasts of these ruffians was a peculiarly animal phenomenon that was closed to him.

It came to him, while he watched what the men were doing to the women, that he possessed no phallus or genitals of any kind. Yet his parents had definitely envisaged him as a son, not as a daughter or as neuter, and his outlook was a strictly masculine one. He glanced down at himself. So that the absence of male genitals should not invest him with an incongruously feminine appearance his father had placed at the groin a longish box-like bulge that gave a decidedly male effect, rather like a cod-piece. Unlike a cod-piece, however, it hid not phallus and testicles but a package of circuits concerned with balanced movement, corresponding to the spinal ganglia in humans.

Throughout the night the sleepless Jasperodus watched the frenzy in the firelight and brooded. Any stimulation he managed to gain from the spectacle of continued rape (and later, of resigned abandonment on the part of the women) was vicarious and abstract; the purely mental observation of a pleasure which, he was sure, he could never share.

3

At dawn, while the camp was still in a drunken sleep, Jasperodus roused himself. He made his way back along the route he had come until striking the railway track. Then, taking the direction followed by the crippled train, he set off, walking between the rails with his sub-machine-gun clanking lightly against his side.

The sun rose to its zenith and found him still walking. By the time it sank into mid-afternoon the wild countryside was giving way to cultivated plots. The people here were evidently not rich and lived sparsely. Although some of the fields were worked by rather tatty cybernetic machines, in others human labour guided powered ploughs and harvesters, or even scratched the earth with implements hauled by animals.

The further he went the more the forest thinned, until eventually the landscape consisted entirely of farmland. Draught animals had disappeared by now. The farms were larger and only machines were at work. The cottages of the outlying farms were here transformed into more expansive houses, and altogether the scene was a pleasant one of peaceful rural life.

Without pause Jasperodus walked on into the night and through to the next day. At mid-morning he was entering a town.

Judging by its appearance it was of some antiquity, and probably dated back to the Old Empire, for on the outskirts he saw a clump of ruins that he guessed to be at least a thousand years old. In its present form, however, the town had probably taken shape about five hundred years ago. Its streets were narrow, twisting and turning confusingly. The buildings, many of them built of wood, crowded close together and had a cramped appearance.

Jasperodus strode easily through the busy lanes, enjoying the bustle of commerce. The open-fronted shops were doing a brisk trade and the people cast scarcely a glance at the tall man of metal who passed in their midst.

But he was not ignored by everyone. As he approached the town centre a sharp, peremptory voice rang out.

‘You there – robot! Stop!’

He turned. Approaching him were four men, uniformly apparelled in sleek green tunics, corded breeks, and green shako hats surmounted by swaying feathered plumes. Their faces were hard, with cold eyes that were used to seeing others obey them.