The three robots drew abreast as they approached the structure, metal feet rattling on stone. It was such an odd shape, its walls rounded, not straight like that of normal robot construction. They curved up and over to form the roof, giving the building an organic shape. There were strange symbols carved in a line around it, just higher than a robot could reach. Kavan stared up at them, trying to make sense of them.
‘They look so familiar,’ said Eleanor, but Kavan didn’t think so. They just looked like a tangled mess to him.
They walked around the building, searching for an entrance. They found it on the far side, facing the north. A metal door, three symbols above it, engraved in the stone of the building. These symbols were larger than the others. Kavan stared at them for some time, trying to understand them. He couldn’t hold them in his mind.
‘What are they?’ he heard Karel wonder out loud.
Eleanor laughed. ‘You mean you don’t know?’ she said, disbelievingly. ‘You really don’t know?’
‘No,’ said Kavan. ‘I have never seen them before. Have you?’
‘No, I’ve never seen them before either, but I know what they are.’
‘How could you?’ demanded Karel.
‘Any woman would know,’ said Eleanor. ‘That one is the pattern that you twist to make a girl, and this is the pattern you twist to make a boy.’
Kavan gazed at the patterns.
‘What about the one in the middle?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. That one doesn’t make sense. A mind twisted that way wouldn’t think properly. It would have no sense of itself.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘The other carvings, the ones around the side of the building, they all make sense now. Or rather they don’t. They are all minds, after a fashion, but they wouldn’t work.’
They gazed at the symbols for a while longer, to the sound of the waves crashing below.
Eleanor had lost interest. ‘What sort of metal is this?’ she asked, touching the door. Kavan placed his hand on it. He could feel a little iron there, a little gold, a little tungsten. But there was something additional in the alloy, something that he had never felt before.
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed, looking at Karel, the Turing City robot who had grown up surrounded by a richness of metal.
‘You. Come and feel this. Do you recognize it?’
The other robot touched the door.
‘It feels like…’ he said. ‘No, I don’t know. But it’s like something I half remember…’
The waves crashed around the island. A shaft of watery sunlight fell down upon them. The wind had turned east; it curdled the clouds, breaking them up.
Kavan pushed at the door with all of his strength. It didn’t move.
‘It feels different here,’ said Karel.
Kavan waved his own hand over where the other had indicated, near the door jamb. He felt iron underneath.
‘Could be the latch?’ he wondered aloud. He concentrated hard, sent his lifeforce down into the metal of his hand, felt at the iron there, felt it click into place.
‘Got it,’ he said. He pushed at the door, and it swung open easily.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Eleanor, you keep watch out here.’
‘I want to go in.’
‘Later.’
‘What about the symbols? Can you be sure you will understand what you see?’
‘Later,’ repeated Kavan.
There was a crowd of people standing in the depths of the building, frozen in a dim half-light that filtered down from the roof to part-fill the single room. Kavan closed the door and turned up his eyes, waited for them to adjust.
The roof was sea-green and translucent: a thick old plastic faded by the elements. Not the original roof, reckoned Kavan, but something added much later by… who? It now looked so worn and weathered. A muted light filtered through it, illuminating the crowd that waited in patient silence below.
So many robots, arranged in rows, all facing the door, sightless eyes gazing into eternity. All of them dead, the lifeforce long drained from their minds, the current long gone from their electromuscle.
Slowly, carefully, Kavan moved up to the nearest, his own eyes adjusting to the gloom.
The robot body that stood immediately before him was old. It wore iron panelling, red rust bubbling up among the faded remnants of what little paint had not flaked away from its body. It was a little shorter than Kavan, the curve of the arms and the legs not as graceful as his own. Everything about the body was a little straighter, a little squarer, a little less elegant.
He moved past this robot to the next one in the line. It looked older still. Shorter again, the panelling that covered its body was punctured by holes where the rust had eaten it away.
Kavan continued down the line. What was the purpose of this display? Had someone come to this land and collected specimens of local life to be exhibited here? Had the robots at the top of the world come to Shull, explored the land, made this exhibit, and then left? Why?
Down the line, past the robots, walking backwards through time. The bodies on display became smaller and more primitive the further he went. Realization dawned: This was a depiction of evolution on Shull laid out before him.
He moved even further back along the line, pleased by his deduction. Now the robots looked less like robots and more like animals. He passed four-legged crabs in thick iron shells. Something a little like a six-legged spider. Now the bodies had no legs: he saw a fish and something like a tiny whale, its metal body snub and rounded. And then there was nothing but the shells of organic life. He came to the end of the line and looked back along the exhibit.
Now he understood what he was looking at.
This building was testament, proof and warning all in one. There was no Book of Robots, there never had been. There was nothing but the evolution of robots.
But Kavan understood this: that if he wanted to rule the world, then the Book of Robots would be a useful tool. Particularly if he had a say in what went in the book. Just look at how the North Kingdom robots had fought, all because they had believed…
So who had erected this display, and why? So close to the northern coast of Shull…
He looked up to the faded green plastic of the roof. It was old, of course, but plastic did not last that long. That roof had been constructed in the last hundred years or so. The building would be older than that. Much older…
He looked closer at the walls further up by the roof. He saw slots there, spaces for beams and supports to be plugged in. This building wasn’t originally a museum, he decided. Had the robot display come later?
He turned around, scanning the walls for more clues, and then he noticed the patterns carved into the wall, opposite the door by which he had entered. They had been there all along, but he had been too taken by the display of robots to notice it. Now he moved back to take in the huge diagram that filled one whole interior wall of the building.
He gazed up at it, trying to make sense of what he saw. Circles, lines, dots, all in a half swirl, engraved into the smooth metal. For a moment, he considered going outside and summoning Eleanor for help, wondered if she might understand, just as she had with the patterns engraved on the building’s exterior, but then, just like that, it all made sense. The pattern revealed itself.
It was an astronomical map. Here, at the side, was the Sun, then the first planet, Siecle, and then Penrose with its two moons, Zuse and Neel. And further out, Bohm with its single ring. All drawn to a larger scale, their position in the galactic map clearly marked. And over here, almost at the centre of the map, another system was marked. This system sat at the centre of a large circle. The Penrose system lay on the circumference of that circle.
Other systems were also marked. Some well within the circle, some beyond. Kavan gazed at them, not recognizing any of them.