They followed the robots through grassland, desert, along the shores of the sea. The trail of the machine was unmistakable, for it was either dragged through narrow places or slung between four heavy-footed beasts in open country.

  Here is the most important thing Juomes told Caps as they traveled:

  “The robots are afraid. Each one we kill is irreplaceable, because they’ve lost the ability to reproduce themselves.”

  Caps was confused. “How can a machine not make another machine? They should have great factories that churn them out, thousands in a day.”

  Juomes looked at him oddly. “You see what I mean? You remember another world, another time—it’s only this day and age that you have forgotten. No, they make the robots all right, but they’re only empty shells. Machines that do nothing but what they’re commanded to do. That’s the other reason they want the cubing jewels. But they won’t work. The jewels turn living things sentient. Those robots are dead from the start.”

  “How could they forget how to make new robots? Was there some secret that they’ve forgotten?”

  “Am I a robot?” asked Juomes. “I know that much and no more. And if I knew more I wouldn’t tell. The robots don’t replace their dead? Good. Let that continue till the last one is dead. Then, if any sentient animals survive, the world is ours. Never to be called ‘Robota’ again.”

  It made Caps uneasy to hear such talk, though he didn’t know why, not then.

  They overtook Kaantur-Set’s robots near the rusting hulk of an old drilling machine. The robots seemed not to notice that they were being followed, and for their part, Juomes and Caps and Rend could not see any plausible way to get the jewel from them. Robots did not sleep; they only camped because the beasts pulling the machine had to rest. They would be alert all night. “In the forest we might take one or two in the darkness,” whispered Juomes. “Here is their element—a bare place without life. We’ll watch. We’ll follow.”

  The robots led them to the ruins of a city. The buildings were huge, but still dwarfed by thousand-foot trees that had grown in the years since the city was abandoned. Robot guards were stationed at the gate. Juomes led Caps and Rend by another way. It involved a lot of climbing, but they were strong and it was exhilarating to take possession of such a place.

  “It was built by humans?” asked Caps.

  “Robots don’t need cities. They don’t need rooms like these. They don’t need beauty. When you’re done with robots you can stack them up like stones. Only animals like us need dens. Only cubed animals need their dens to be beautiful.”

  An avalanche had thrown huge boulders into one edge of the city, and it was among these giant stones that Rend discovered a robot’s head. He brought the others to see it.

  “Help,” said the head.

  “Where are your friends?” said Juomes sarcastically.

  “They took me apart to rust when the rains come,” said the head. “Because I refused to hunt.”

  “Hunt what?”

  “You,” said the head. “Kaantur-Set ordered me to go back and kill you.”

  “Back away,” said Juomes to the others. “He’s been wired as a bomb.”

  “I was,” said the head, “but I recircuited myself. I’m harmless now. Look, the explosives are tucked into my skull at the base. They were set to go off when you kicked me or rolled me.”

  “It’s a trap,” said Juomes.

  Caps walked over and picked up the head. Nothing exploded.

  “Thanks for trusting me,” said the head.

  “You’re insane,” said Juomes.

  “I know this one,” said Caps. “He tried to save me.”

  “Everybody tries to save you,” said Juomes, “and still you go on trying to get killed.”

  “Where is the rest of your body?” Caps asked the robot.

  Juomes asked in disbelief. “You’re not going to put him back together, are you?”

  “I’ll understand if you refuse to let me travel with you,” said Caps. “But this robot is not like the others. He doesn’t kill animals. So he doesn’t deserve to die.”

  “They all kill animals,” said Juomes.

  “A robot that Kaantur-Set wanted to kill,” said Caps, “is a tool we might have a use for.”

  “He knew we’d find him,” said Juomes.

  “But he didn’t know we’d put it back together,” said Caps.

  “Do you two mind if I set off these explosives?” said Rend. “They’ll be expecting to hear a big boom, and we shouldn’t disappoint them.” He sounded eager.

  “The monkey likes bombs,” said Juomes.

  “Not till I find all the parts,” said Caps.

  Rend helped, though Juomes didn’t, and finally they had everything except one arm. With the head directing him, Caps put the robot back together until the robot was able to reassemble the rest of himself without help.

  “Every robot life is precious these days,” said the one-armed robot. “My name is Elyseo-Set.”

  Juomes snorted. “A talking machine doesn’t need a name.”

  “I’m Caps,” said Caps.

  There was a loud explosion not very far away. It momentarily deafened Caps, and by the time he could hear again Rend came scampering back.

  “It was a big one!” he screeched. Then he looked around, as if trying to find the sound of his own voice. “I sound far away, but here I am!”

  By a waterfall, Kaantur-Set heard the explosion. “They took the bait,” he said to his hunters.

  He threw Elyseo’s arm into the water.

  “You’re the man who was in the teleporter, aren’t you?” said Elyseo to Caps. “General Kaantur-Set, the great and wise—and he almost kills you out of habit.”

  “Teleporter?” said Caps.

  “No such thing,” said Juomes. “An old legend. If they could teleport, why would they need to make such a long journey of it?”

  Rend, who was apparently reading lips, jumped up and down and said, “Can they put a teleporter inside itself?”

  “The teleporters worked for humans,” said Elyseo. “When the humans left the cities and turned wild, we robots could not make the machines teleport for us.”

  “You mean when the robots expelled us!” said Juomes.

  Elyseo looked at Juomes. “You were never expelled,” he said. “Your kind didn’t exist then. That’s how long ago it was.”

  The hunter-beasts had come into existence after the humans left these great cities? Caps could make no sense of it. How did the cubing jewels fit into this version of the past? Yet robot memories did not forget as animals did, substituting false information for true. What memories robots lost simply disappeared. So either Elyseo was lying or he never knew the truth, or the cubing jewels had come to the animals after humans and robots had separated.

  Why do I want so badly to learn the truth of this? wondered Caps. What can it possibly matter to me?

  They emerged from the other side of the city into thick viny forest. Desert on one side of the city, jungle on the other. The city was huge, but the climate difference had to do with the great mountains behind the city, which forced the rain to fall almost exclusively on the leeward side.

  In late afternoon they began to make camp in a fairly open grove of trees. They were arguing about whether it was safe to sleep with Elyseo among them when some of the trees began to move.

  It was jodphurs, their faces covered with battlepaint, that broke from the trees, and the party was surrounded.

  “They’re tame,” said Caps.

  “How can you call them tame?” said Elyseo. “They’ve taken us captive.”

  “They aren’t eating us,” said Caps.

  “I know them,” said Juomes. “They wouldn’t have taken us, except we have that machine with us.”

  “Who are they, then?” said Caps.

  “They aren’t tame,” said Juomes. “They’ve cubed.”

  “Jodphurs?” said Elyseo. “Impossible.”

  “Look at their heads. At what’s attached at their ears. Translators. You don’t do that with tame animals. You only do that with creatures that can speak.”

  “So they can understand us?” asked Caps.

  The jodphur carrying him roared. Immediately afterward, a tinny voice from its translator said, “Yes, you fool.”

  “From a roar, the translator got that?” said Caps.

  “From the roar, the translator got ‘you fool.’ The ‘yes’ came directly from its brain,” said Juomes.

  “That sounds suspiciously like robotics,” said Elyseo.

  “When there’s a living mind telling the machine what to do, it’s not a robot,” said Juomes. “Where there’s life, then the machine remains a tool.”

  “So a fungus with a stick is better than Font Prime?” asked Elyseo.

  “Probably not better at mathematics,” said Caps. No one was amused.

  The jodphurs took them to a city—the kind that humans lived in now. In a forest of immense mushrooms, human workers had carved hundreds of rooms into the stalks and caps.

  “How do mushrooms grow so big?” asked Caps.

  “Because humans wanted them to,” said Juomes.

  “Have the mushrooms cubed?” asked Elyseo.

  “When you’re disassembled again,” said Juomes, “and your parts are melted down to slag, remember that even jodphurs can cube, but you can’t.”

  For Caps, though, the real question remained. “Why haven’t the robots found this place?”

  “There are many mushrooms,” said Juomes, “and only one of them, at any particular time, is a city.”

  The jodphurs deposited them at last before a group of elders of the human city. Caps was relieved to see other people built to the same scale he was. There were also elders of the jodphurs with them.

  “Except that you had a robot with you, you would have been brought here as guests instead of prisoners,” said Eyth, an old woman who was most senior of the human elders.

  The leader of the jodphurs, Keedim, sniffed Caps’s face like an enormous dog. “You have been seen before,” said the mechanical voice from his headset. “You have killed no living creature.”

  “I’ve eaten fruits whenever I could find them,” said Caps. “I can’t vouch for the origin of what Juomes has fed us.”

  Keedim laughed—a terrifying thing, when a jodphur laughs. “My old friend Juomes. What are you doing with a whole robot, instead of just taking his antennae?”

  “It was this human’s idea,” said Juomes.

  Caps explained, then, how Elyseo had warned them his head was booby-trapped. “And earlier,” said Caps, “he tried to warn me that Kaantur-Set was coming. He has no use for Kaantur’s campaign against the living.”

  “A robot that doesn’t serve Font Prime?” asked Eyth.

  “Font Prime has not been seen in centuries,” said Elyseo. “All we see is Kaantur. For all I know, Kaantur has destroyed Font Prime. Or cut him off from all its machinery, so he can’t talk to any of us but him.”

  “That’s what they want us to believe,” said a younger voice.

  She stepped out from among the elders—the young woman Caps had seen back in the forest.

  “You,” he said. “You saw how Elyseo tried to save me.”

  “I saw a robot waving his arms,” said the young woman. “What he meant to do, and whether he was this robot, I can’t say.”

  “Juomes, you’re an honest man,” said Caps. “Tell them—”

  Caps was interrupted by the laughter of the elders, for Juomes was acting comically offended by having been called a man.

  “I am a hunter-beast,” he said.

  “An honest one,” Caps persisted. “Once he was reassembled, Elyseo could have betrayed us at any time.”

  “How do we know he didn’t?” said Juomes. “How do we know he hasn’t used these”—and he tweaked Elyseo’s antennae—“to tell Kaantur-Set where we are?”

  “I think the more important question,” said the young woman to Caps, “is who you are, and why we should trust you.”

  “Are you one of the elders?” asked Caps. “You seem young.”

  The woman looked at him with cool disdain, as if to say, I may seem young, but I know more than you do.

  “Beryl is the one who brought us news of you,” said Eyth.

  “She is the one who kept us from killing you when we saw you,” said Keedim.

  “The machine you’ve been following,” said Beryl. “The one that apparently spawned you—Kaantur and his hunters took it to Transept City.”

  “Then you’ll never get it back,” said Elyseo. “The Guardians of Transept City are far fiercer than the hunter robots. They aren’t sentient, but they’re relentless and irresistibly powerful. Not even a jodphur could stand against them.”

  “Silence that thing,” said Keedim.

  Two jodphurs lifted Elyseo by his legs and dangled him high above them, ready to smash him to the ground and grind him underfoot, if given the word.

  “There was a monkey with them,” said Beryl.

  “Jodphurs can’t catch monkeys,” said Juomes. “Except in the sense that dogs catch fleas.”

  That was all it took to bring Rend out of hiding. He had clung to the nearly nerveless spine of the last of the jodphurs through the journey. Now he came out scolding Juomes, even though his own method of arrival seemed to illustrate just what Juomes had said.

  Everyone laughed at this, but in the end, their questioning turned serious again. Where did you come by the name Caps? I don’t know, Rend told me that was my name and I knew of no other. How did you come to be inside a teleporter—if that’s what it is? I don’t know. Rend said that every time I tried to use it, I came out with no memory. Then how do you know language, and all the other things you seem to know? I told you, I don’t remember, I have no idea. I am what you see before you.

  “I can’t find out who I am without finding out how that machine brought me here, and where I came from. So if you let me go, I’ll make my way to Transept City and try to learn what I can.”

  “Then you’ll be killed,” said Keedim. “Your pet robot is right in saying that no humans—or jodphurs, or hunter-beasts—have come out of there alive.”

  “I’m going with him,” said Juomes. “They have my jewel now. I want it back.”

  “That’s not all you want,” said Beryl, challenging him.

  “All right then,” Juomes answered. “I’m tired of this game. The robots will die out eventually, since they can make no more. But it’s taking too long.”

  Keedim smiled grimly. “You seem to have no faith in the work we’re doing.”

  “Maybe you’ll succeed, maybe you won’t,” said Juomes. “Meanwhile, I’ll find Font Prime, if I can, and when I do, I’ll destroy it.”

  “And you trust this stranger, this ‘Caps,’ on such a dangerous mission?” said Keedim.

  “We have already trusted each other,” said Juomes. “There’s more to him than meets the eye.”

  “Go, then,” said Eyth. “We won’t keep you. But the robot stays, to be tried for his crimes.”

  Caps laughed. “Tried? For his crimes? When your only conceivable witness claims she can’t tell one robot from another? And how can a machine commit a crime? All you’d be doing is trying him for the crimes of other robots.”

  They looked at him in silence. “A citizen of our city could be expelled for saying such things,” said Eyth.

  “Then you’re no better than Kaantur-Set,” said Caps. “He also sentenced Elyseo to die because of things he said.”

  “You test our patience,” said Keedim. “I need no trial. I will throw this robot to the ground and grind it under my feet.”

  “Do that and you will have sentenced Juomes and me to death,” said Caps, “because Elyseo is our only hope of accomplishing our mission in Transept City.”

  “What?” said Juomes. “I would never trust a machine!”

  “You have no choice,” said Caps. “It’s a robot city. Do you know where anything is? Do you think they post directories of the city in convenient places for visitors to read? We have no hope without a guide, and we have no guide but Elyseo.”

  It took another half hour, but the jodphurs set Elyseo down—none too gently—and Eyth and Keedim agreed that he could go with Caps and Juomes.

  “Then I’m going, too,” announced Beryl.

  “Why?” asked Caps.

  “Because I have also been in Transept City,” said Beryl. “Not far, but far enough to know about the Guardians. And to have evaded them and escaped. Up to a point, I’ll know if the robot leads us true.”

  “If ‘Beryl the Eyes of the Forest’ wants to be the eyes of the city as well,” said Juomes, “I’m glad to have her with us.”

  Thus it was that, in the morning, it was a party of five that set off for Transept City: Caps, Juomes, Beryl, Rend, and Elyseo. Through the forest of mushrooms Beryl led the way.

  “How did humans make such mushrooms grow?” asked Caps.

  “We have given up the science of tools—we can never defeat the robots using machines,” said Beryl. “But the science of life, we excel at that. Let us say that we taught a mushroom to do what no mushroom had ever done, and when its spores sprouted, the new-sprung mushrooms remembered the lessons better than their parents.”

  “So was it your science of life that brought intelligence to the jodphurs?” asked Caps.

  “It was my jewel,” said Juomes. “It belonged to my grandmother, and she lent it to the people of the city. Wasn’t it?”

  Beryl only smiled. “What kind of fool would try to bring intelligence to the most dangerous predator in the world?”

  “I’d say Kaantur-Set’s hunters are the most dangerous,” said Caps.

  “They aren’t predators,” said Beryl. “They’re a disease.”

  “And maybe,” said Juomes, “we’re the cure.”

  Caps remembered something Keedim had said. “What is the work they’re doing—your people, I mean, Beryl?”

  “We stay alive,” she said. “We find ways to farm that won’t be obvious, so we can feed our people. We try to protect our children from the robots, so there’ll be a next generation.”

  “But when Keedim said Juomes had no faith in the work your people were doing, they were talking about the decline of the robots, and how long it was taking.”