A curious feature of the hill was the natural earth ringwall that surrounded it, looking like nothing so much as the wall of a lunar crater. Outside this rampart there sprawled for miles in every direction a sheet metal shanty town, rambling and disordered. The carrier slanted down over sheds and shacks, the scream of its barrel-shaped thrusters falling to a purling moan as it alighted on a stretch of wasteground, the jar of its landing dislodging numbers of robots from their perches and tumbling them to the cindery surface. They staggered to their feet flexing their limbs, whose lubrication had been made stiff by the coldness of the journey.
Jasperodus, on the other hand, dropped lithely from the girderwork and approached the disembarking Glyco.
‘Unload all the findings and store them,’ he ordered. ‘I will examine them later.’ Glyco nodded, his blue-sheened skull glinting in the sunlight.
Jasperodus strode off towards his private dwelling about two miles away, entering what to a human would have looked like a disorganised slum. To some extent the ramshackle appearance of the shanty city was misleading: robots did not invest their energy in architecture. For them, buildings were an afterthought, erected as a precaution against rust or rain, to prevent their possessions from being blown away, or merely in imitation of their onetime human masters. Otherwise, a bare encampment might have served as well.
The first district Jasperodus had to traverse was the quarter of the indolents. Robots had the same tendency as humans to congregate like with like. Lounging in the doorways of dull sheds of zinc and iron were constructs marked by an habitual lassitude, a few of whom offered languid greeting as a traveller went by. They felt no boredom, and would remain inactive for months at a time unless nudged into motion by some outside stimulus.
Their passivity was not, however, typical of robotkind. More telling was the industriousness visible on the central hill that loomed through the dust and heat haze, its rough surface running with glowing rivulets of metal that were being smelted directly out of the mass and guided to foundries and workshops inside the ringwall.
The hill, a huge lump of iron, nickel and other metals in lesser amounts, including rare earths, was the source of all the building material in the robot city, and had also supplied the bodies of many of its inhabitants. It was, in fact, an impacted asteroid shard, one of hundreds scattered about the world. Jasperodus had pieced together the story of their arrival on Earth, and they were testimony to the most risk-ridden period in all history.
The bombardment dated from the last days of the Rule of Tergov. Earth’s minerals were long since exhausted: for centuries she had imported all her raw materials from elsewhere in the solar system. Evidently there had been someone in those last desperate days—someone who still commanded resources and had the power to act—who knew that organised society was irretrievably lost and that the Dark Period, as it became known, lay ahead. That same someone had also realized that, without metals, Earth could never again give rise to a technological culture.
The solution was a ruthless programme to reprovision the planet before it was too late. A number of ferrous asteroids had been deflected from their transmartian orbits and placed in near-Earth orbit, where they were broken into smaller pieces and directed into the atmosphere.
The horrific side-effects of an act of this kind were almost beyond imagining. Although the terminal velocities of the asteroid chunks were low by astronomical standards—or else they would have devastated the whole Earth—the loss of life must have been appalling (even if only adding to the slaughter produced by civil strife). About half the shards had been aimed into sparsely inhabited regions; but the rest had been placed close to the predicted sites of future emergent cultures—close to river valleys, natural harbours, salt deposits and so on—which by the same token were already densely populated. Neither had the targeting, which it could be presumed tried to minimise damage wherever possible, always been accurate. In one case an asteroid had fallen squarely on a major city.
Who had decided upon the scheme? Who had implemented it? Civil authority had by then vanished. What technical resources remained were mostly in the hands of the warring factions, who would scarcely have interested themselves in long-term considerations… Jasperodus’ theory was that robots had been responsible for the project. No human would have had the nerve for it—it was too horrendous. A human would have hesitated, delayed, hoped for another solution… until finally there was no longer the capability for taking action.
It must have been robots. Robots, servants of Tergov with an unbending sense of duty, had decided upon the necessity for the scheme, had planned it, had contrived to commandeer the equipment needed for it, and had carried it out. Alone, they had saved mankind from a perpetual stone age.
Or had they? It was not possible to be sure. More skills than they had anticipated, perhaps, had survived the Dark Period—the art of robotics itself, for instance. And there was still scrap metal lying about in the wrecked cities of old Tergov, though mostly converted to rust. Perhaps this would have sustained mankind through to the early redevelopment of space travel, making the mineral resources of the solar system once more available.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. In either case a world poor in metals would have had few robots. As it was, the present upsurge in robotic activity was entirely due to the presence of the asteroid deposits. They were what enabled robots to manufacture robots with a fervour not too different from a reproductive urge. They provided the physical resource for a construct civilisation that was developing its own customs, its own obsessions, and which was destined to mutate considerably away from its human origins, if it was not destroyed first by the human nations around it.
Jasperodus left the indolents’ quarter behind him. From all around him came the noises of the township’s activity—noises of metal, a susurration of clinking, clanking and clanging, of banging and gonging, of dragging of sheet on sheet, mingled with an occasional shout, cry or bellow, the purr or thump of an engine. He walked through a market area where citizens bartered products made in their personal workshops: toys, scientific instruments, curiosities or wholly novel devices (robots, not needing to earn their livings beyond the occasional replacement isotope battery, had much time for projects of an experimental or desultory nature), small doll-robots which took the place of pets in construct society, paltry in intelligence but endowed with endearing mannerisms. Heavier industry was concentrated closer to the iron-nickel mountain. There were to be found spacious workshops belonging to organised companies of robots, and from which there would typically emerge huge machines based on abstruse philosophical concepts which, more often than not, proved fallacious in practice. It did not seem to matter to the originators of these follies how often their ideas failed; they never counted the cost, either in time or effort, of anything they undertook. Wedged up against the ringwall that had been thrown up crater-fashion by the impact of the asteroid was also a ghetto district inhabited by non-androforms—wheeled, box-type, multiped, segmented and assorted robots, self-directed special-labour types scarcely classifiable as sentient (the earthmover abandoned at the archaeological site was one such) and a number of immobiles. Androforms largely disdained this social minority, for robot-makers, like nature, had discovered the humanoid shape to be the most convenient and versatile, and it had come to be associated with normality. The ghetto dwellers bore no grudge over their inferior status. They had no species feeling, and did not reproduce.
Jasperodus’ route, however, took him not towards the ringwall but through a quarter where the production of new citizens was concentrated. The singed smell of hot metal was in the air, the smell of smoke and tempering steam. From long slant-roofed sheds rose the chimneys for the furnaces and rolling mills where sheet metal was made and body parts stamped out. Scattered around them were the homes and assembly shops of the robot-makers themselves, as well as the studies of those who specialised in design.