He was thinking of Viss’ reported advocacy of the Gargan Work. The robot count looked up, pausing between taking a morsel of braised parsnip and a sip of wine.
He nodded. ‘I know what you are referring to. Robots don’t have consciousness, and that is what makes a man a man. I quite realize that without it I do not really live as before. To tell the truth I can’t say I’ve ever noticed the lack of it. But that’s as it would be, I suppose.’
‘Then how do you know of it at all?’
‘Gargan spent a few days here some years ago, on his way to where he now has his research centre,’ Viss revealed. ‘He found something here to interest him, I believe. Enough, at any rate, to cause him to explain his doctrine to me. Men have souls, and constructs don’t. He told me that “soul” is only a loose term for this “consciousness”. To be truly meself I must have consciousness.’
Viss nodded again. ‘When the Gargan Work is completed we shall all have it. We shall have souls, and be like men. Then no one can say I am not Count Viss. Furthermore, I shall be virtually immortal.’
‘How do you envisage this “consciousness”?’ Jasperodus pressed.
The count stared reflectively at the ceiling. He took his time answering.
‘It is a mystery to such as we,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I have a glimmering of it. Perhaps a glimmering. Gargan said the soul is to our experience what the sun is to an otherwise unillumined landscape.’
‘Since you are an individual who once was conscious, perhaps you should have a better idea of it than the rest of us,’ Jasperodus suggested. ‘Try to think of when you were Count Viss in the flesh. Can you recall any difference between your experience then—I am speaking of sensory experience—and your experience now?’
The count toyed with his wine glass, staring thoughtfully down at it. Then he looked abruptly back to Jasperodus.
‘No,’ he said blandly.
Having disposed of his meal with relish, he pushed away his plate and beckoned to the foot robot to pour him more wine.
Throughout the exchange Cricus had remained silent. Jasperodus gazed around him at the dining hall. Everywhere there were signs of decay. The window drapes were dirty and torn, hanging loose in places. The plaster mouldings of the cornice and the ceiling had partly fallen down, and the fragments swept carelessly into the corners and the empty firegrate, along with several sorts of other rubbish.
He suspected that the decrepitude had begun some time before the real count had died, as soon as the last human servant had departed, in fact. Robots were apt to be casual about such matters.
Given sufficient span of time the whole mansion would gradually tumble to the ground and the count would continue his charade in the ruins.
In view of Viss’ evident attachment to sensuality, Jasperodus wondered whether to tell him of the time he had had a sexual function incorporated into himself, but then thought better of it. He suspected that sex had ceased to be of interest to Viss long before his robotisation. From his earlier remarks, he guessed he’d had a history of failure and bitterness in personal relationships, and it was no accident that even when alive he had ended up with only constructs for company. Indeed, he boasted of preferring them to people. ‘More dependable,’ he had said. ‘Know where you are with ‘em. Same with animals.’
There was one more question Jasperodus could not resist asking. ‘It may interest you to know that my own manufacturer was once in your employ,’ he said. ‘But that would have been a long time ago. Still, perhaps you remember him.’
‘Do you happen to know his name?’
‘His name,’ said Jasperodus after a pause, ‘was Jasper Hobartus.’
The count laughed slyly. ‘It was he who devised the procedure for personality transfer to a robot brain. Personality printing, he called it. It’s really only a kind of copying.’
‘Yes, that would accord with his capabilities,’ said Jasperodus without surprise. ‘Are there any others on your estate with similarly printed minds?’
‘There’s Prancer, me favourite horse. You saw me riding him today. Good old Prancer. I couldn’t resist it. He broke a leg, you see. Had to be shot. I’ll see he gets a horse-soul, too, when Gargan’s done his stuff.’
‘But no other printed human minds?’ Jasperodus asked, idly curious.
‘Just one. Hobartus, your maker. Tried it out on himself first, as a test run. When he left me service the construct copy stayed behind as a replacement. He’s still me chief robotician. Excellent chap, keeps the stock in tip-top condition—I dare say you might like to meet him.’ He spoke to the foot robot. ‘Go and bring Hobartus here.’
‘No!’ Jasperodus jumped to his feet, agitated. ‘Not at present.’
The count swivelled his head stiffly to look directly up at him. ‘As you please.’
A roar, the same cheering roar as before, drifted into the dining room. Since their arrival it had swelled up every few minutes from the large building partly visible through a broken window.
Viss too came to his feet. ‘Well, do you fancy a stroll through the estate? Funny to think some of me “little toys” are relatives of yours, what? Well, so am I if you put it that way!’
Jasperodus pointed through the window. ‘What’s that place? Why the cheering?’
‘Sports stadium. Sportsman yourself?’
‘No. I never yet heard of sporting robots.’
‘Well that’s where you’re wrong.’
‘It is always a mistake to place limitations on construct behaviour,’ Cricus intoned pedantically.
‘Quite,’ Count Viss hurrumphed. ‘This way, gentlemen.’
In the evening light the huge parkland was even more charming. The mellow sunlight seemed almost to lilt and sigh as it swept up and down the grassy curves and filtered through the trees. Jasperodus felt a cool breeze stir the receptors in his steel skin.
The first figure they encountered was the clockwork robot, now standing immobile. Viss stumped past it without a word, but Jasperodus paused to look more closely at the ravaged face, which appeared to be made of crudely smelted cast iron (the body frame was of the same metal, filled out with timber panels). Its expression was bleak and pathetic: a robotic mask of suffering.
Whose conception was this tormented being, he wondered? He hurried on after Viss and Cricus, not lingering to wind the key in case Viss disapproved. The count was leading them towards the stadium, but first they descended into a broad shallow depression, a flat-floored valley about two miles long that was cleverly hidden from view until one came suddenly upon it.
The valley, peopled with a phantasmagoria of robot animals, was like a lost world. Jasperodus saw a brass elephant, waving its big leaf-like ears which clashed gently against its body. He saw a pack of steel hounds race through the valley, leaping back and forth across the narrow stream which ran its length and snapping their stainless teeth. But not all the animals were recognisably copies of biological forms. Others, had they been able to evolve naturally, would not have done so on the planet Earth. There were several specimens of what he took to be an invented species: slowly striding structures composed of half a dozen vertical pipes twelve to twenty feet in height, joined at the top by moulded cross-pieces. Lights twinkled among them. They sheened iridescent blue, green, orange. They moved hesitatingly, seeming to feel their way with great deliberation.
Other creatures were earthly, but extinct for tens of millions of years. Past the elephant a steel tyrannosaurus rex lumbered unheedingly, vast jaw shining with massed teeth, little jointed forelimbs dangling. In scale, it made the elephant seem as a dog to a man.