“What are you talking about?” asked Juomes, as if Caps were crazy.

  “You certainly trust in your memory,” said Beryl, “considering that it only works intermittently.”

  Only then did Caps realize that whatever the work of the human mushroom city might be, they weren’t going to tell him, at least not in front of Elyseo. And even if Elyseo were not there, they still might not trust Caps enough to tell him anything that really mattered. Caps couldn’t blame them. He didn’t even know himself well enough to know if he could be trusted.

  There are versions of the legend in which this noble party entered Transept City accompanied by a great windstorm that filled the city with sand and dust, or an earthquake that opened a gate for them, or a flood that made rivers of the streets.

  In reality they entered the city like awestruck tourists. The gates were not barred or even supervised. Nor had anyone accosted them as they approached, passing great stone shapes that seemed to be a mockery of the mushroom city, except that some of them still hung in the air, suspended by the gravity balancers of some ancient sculptor. They also passed the fallen heads of statues once built in memory of robots—though Juomes insisted that the robots had been gargoyles. “There’s no point building statues of machines. They all look alike.”

  Transept City had been carved out of a great pillar of stone. It was a city built for giants, but it stood so high above the surrounding terrain that the vast scale of it could not be seen. Robots entered and left the city by means of shafts and elevators.

  The five legendary heroes climbed up by means of one of the old construction ramps that wound around and around the shaft of the pillar. To Caps’s surprise, it was Juomes who called for a rest now and then. Though he claimed he was stopping out of concern for Beryl and Rend, neither of them ever seemed tired, and Juomes always did. But no one said anything about it. It occurred to Caps that, while Juomes had begun the journey full of vigor, seemingly inexhaustible, the rigors of the trip were taking a heavy toll on him. He seemed to require more effort to start moving, like an old man or a machine that needed oiling. Well, he might be old.

  Apart from the sheer effort of going endlessly uphill, though, the passage into the city was easy, with neither obstacle nor challenge. Juomes must have been thinking the same thing, because he said to Beryl, “Now that I see how easy it is, I’m a little less impressed that you were able to get inside.”

  “It was getting out that presented the main challenge,” she replied.

  Here’s how heroic they were: They followed Elyseo into the city, ignoring his protest that the Guardians would sense them immediately. He led them in and out of passageways and chambers, vast empty things. But they never moved as fast as he urged them to, because they could not help but gawk at the sheer size of everything around them. Even Juomes, large as he was, looked like a baby playing in his parents’ closet.

  “Now you know how I feel all the time,” said Rend.

  That was their last laugh inside Transept City, for as they rounded the next corner they found themselves facing a half dozen Guardians, huge white machines more than ten meters high, which strode on two legs and outran them in moments when they tried to flee.

  To Caps’s surprise, however, the Guardians did not kill them or even hurt them—their grasp was considerably gentler than the jodphurs’ had been.

  “They’re designed to catch, not to kill,” said Elyseo.

  “So what happens to us?”

  “They junk us,” said Elyseo. “We’re assumed to be defective robots.”

  The Guardians lowered them into a giant concrete container with smooth, polished sides that sloped slightly inward. The lid they placed on top was so heavy that it took two of the giant Guardians to set it in place. Fortunately, it was perforated so it let in air and light.

  By that light they discovered that only four of them had made it into the prison.

  “Where’s Beryl?” asked Juomes.

  “Always hanging back, that one,” said Rend. “They missed her.”

  “The Guardians don’t miss anyone,” said Elyseo. “She must have been caught by another team and put into another cell.”

  All around them were dead bodies—a few of them the skeletons of long-dead animals, mostly birds, but the vast majority were the broken, corroded corpses of robots.

  “If they can’t make any more robots, why would they program the Guardians to discard defectives instead of repairing them?” asked Caps.

  “Most of these were new when they went in here,” said Elyseo. “Freshly made robots that never became sentient. Discards.”

  “They threw away the whole robot because the brain unit didn’t work?”

  “They don’t know why the brain doesn’t work,” said Elyseo. “So they start over.”

  “So this is a city where they used to make new robots.”

  “They still do,” said Elyseo. “But not mass produced anymore. Handmade, one at a time, in the effort to build one with a mind that works.”

  Juomes chuckled. “So here’s the graveyard of Robota. This is where all the robots will end up, now that they can’t replicate themselves. Along with their dreams.”

  “But Elyseo,” said Caps, “you aren’t defective, and yet here you are.”

  “But I am defective,” said Elyseo. “I ignored the identify-or-avert signal.”

  “You were getting a signal?” demanded Juomes, suddenly suspicious. “And you didn’t tell us?”

  “Yes, from the time I came within range of the city down there on the ground below,” said Elyseo. “I assumed you knew that all cities send out a signal like that. If I had identified myself, Kaantur would have found out that I wasn’t dead.”

  “Why aren’t robots made so that identification is automatic?” asked Caps. “I mean, you’re machines, and you could be wired to identify yourself no matter what.”

  Elyseo seemed reluctant to answer. “Would you stand for it?” he asked. “Always having everyone know who you were without any ability to control it?”

  “No,” said Caps. “But . . .”

  “But you’re a human, not a machine,” said Juomes. “They’re all like Kaantur-Set. They all wish they were alive, instead of being big mechanical toys.”

  “There was a time,” said Elyseo, ignoring Juomes’s gibe, “when there were some robots that were sentient, but most were not. The nonsentient ones were . . . like slaves. And even though they had no mind and could not feel their slavery, we became ashamed of having slaves.”

  “Ashamed,” said Caps, “in front of the humans.”

  “Yes,” said Elyseo. “We wanted to be equals.”

  “That’ll be the day,” said Juomes.

  “Humans had given up slavery. Could we do less?” asked Elyseo. “And once we decided to make no more slaves, none of us were willing to have some automatic response that wasn’t under our own control. It’s part of being free, not having to tell what you don’t want to tell.”

  “Interesting thought,” said Caps. “That the essence of humanity is the ability to lie.”

  “Not lie,” said Elyseo. “Just . . . withhold.”

  “Who made you?” asked Caps.

  “Me?” asked Elyseo. “I could check my . . .” He paused a moment. “I was made in the manufactory at Bilellepad.”

  “I mean, in the first place,” said Caps. “Before robots ever came to Robota. Who made the first of your kind? Who was it who learned how to make you intelligent, instead of all being machines and . . . slaves?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elyseo. “We aren’t given that information.”

  “Some living creature, anyway,” said Juomes. “Life grows from life—machines don’t grow from machines.”

  “Your kind grew from a machine,” said Elyseo to Juomes.

  Juomes growled, but made no reply. Instead he looked up at the lid that held them in. “We could fit through those holes in the lid,” he said.

  “Probably,” said Elyseo. “If you can climb there.”

  But of course they couldn’t. The walls were too smooth, and the inward slope defeated their attempts to make a living (or mostly living) pyramid. They couldn’t get high enough for Rend to scramble up their bodies to reach the openings.

  And there the legend might have ended—indeed, had their story ended there, what legend would have grown around them?—except that a shadow passed over the perforations and a voice called out. “Are you down there?”

  It was Beryl.

  They called to her, and she lowered a rope.

  Caps looked at the rope, at Juomes, at Elyseo. “We’re supposed to climb this?” he called up to her.

  “I’m not hauling you up, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” she called down.

  Apparently robots were designed for this kind of work, because no sooner had she finished speaking than Elyseo passed the rope under his arm and through a slot in his side, and then hung limply from the rope as some wheeled mechanism whirred him swiftly upward.

  “Can you do that?” Caps asked Juomes.

  “I just put the rope in my mouth and swallow my way up,” said Juomes. “So you’d better go first.”

  Caps climbed, again surprised—though by now he should not have been—at how easily he could do it, how little it wearied him. Juomes, climbing afterward, was enormously strong—but also heavy enough that it was quite an exertion for him. He was panting when he reached the top. Caps had not been.

  Caps pushed these thoughts aside, however, for he had other, more pressing questions.

  “How did you evade the Guardians, when we couldn’t?” Caps asked Beryl.

  “More to the point,” Juomes asked her, “why aren’t they chasing us now?”

  It was Elyseo who answered. “Because the ones that caught us are stupid.”

  “Good thing we didn’t run into any smart ones, then,” said Juomes.

  Beryl explained. “They already caught you. They’re patrolling the perimeter again, looking for new intruders and malfunctioning robots. They don’t know or care that you got out.”

  “My question goes unanswered,” said Caps.

  Beryl sighed. “Juomes already knows my story. So, I imagine, does this robot.”

  “I don’t,” said Elyseo-Set. “Just because we have antennae to share data—when we choose to—doesn’t mean our leaders share all that they know with us.” He held up his one hand to calm Juomes. “My broadcast unit is switched off, for my own protection. I can’t imagine I’ll ever turn it back on. If you want my antennae as trophies, you can have them.”

  Juomes looked at him with contempt. “It’s not a trophy if you give them to me.”

  “I’ll turn my back and close my eyes,” said Elyseo.

  Juomes turned his back on Elyseo and waved for Beryl to go on.

  So Beryl told Caps her story. Briefly. Unemotionally. “I grew up in one of the last human communities to survive in one of the old cities. The hunter robots killed my parents, but when they found my sister and me, just babies then, they kept us as pets.” She pulled from her pocket a thin metal sheet that held a lifelike picture of her sister. “We amused them.”

  “They fed you and kept you alive?” asked Elyseo. “Why?”

  “Because some robots, in case you haven’t noticed, have a thing about humans.”

  “You mean the way Kaantur smokes, even though robots don’t breathe?” asked Caps.

  “Kaantur’s only the most pathetic in his imitation of life,” said Beryl. “Feeding us pleased them somehow. When you live around robots all through your childhood, you get a feel for what they can and can’t do. What they notice. How they program their machines.”

  “And that’s how you got away,” said Caps.

  “Eventually, yes,” said Beryl. “Now, Elyseo-Set. You know this city. Where would they take Caps’s teleporter once they got it here?”

  A harsh voice came from outside their circle. “Wherever I tell them.”

  Caps turned to see Kaantur-Set leaning against a wall, smoking his pipe.

  Juomes growled.

  “Ah, Juomes,” said Kaantur. “I look forward to adding your head to my trophy case. Your parents’ heads have fed too many mothworms, and I need a replacement.”

  Juomes charged at him, screaming.

  Hunter robots leapt from the ledge above Kaantur and had Juomes on the ground in moments. With escape impossible, Juomes stopped struggling.

  “Beg me,” said Kaantur. “Like your mother did.”

  Juomes said nothing, but Beryl gave a small groan.

  “Ah, yes, Beryl,” said Kaantur. “After all I did for you, this is how you reward me. Bringing strangers into my city, trying to steal things.”

  “You did nothing for me,” said Beryl.

  “I raised you from a pup,” said Kaantur. “Runaway pets are guilty of ingratitude.”

  “All we wanted,” said Rend, “was the jewel you stole from Juomes!”

  Kaantur laughed. “Just because a creature can talk doesn’t mean it’s intelligent.” He looked down at Juomes. “Look how easily he is defeated now. The mighty hunter, the keeper of a hundred antennae.”

  “Two hundred and forty,” said Juomes.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t count if you steal them out of a spare-parts box,” said Kaantur. He turned to Caps. “He’s nothing without his jewel. Haven’t you noticed? Hasn’t he been a little slower? A little weaker? Could we have taken you down so easily, Juomes, if you hadn’t been all these days without your jewel?”

  Now Caps understood why Juomes had been so tired on the way up into the city.

  Kaantur-Set turned to Elyseo. “Good work, Elyseo-Set. I didn’t think you could persuade them to follow you into the city, but I guess I underestimated you.”

  “That’s a lie!” shouted Elyseo.

  Kaantur laughed. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone native. You think these are your friends now?”

  “Kill us and have done with these games,” said Juomes.

  “Don’t rush me,” said Kaantur. “It pleases me to leave you alive a little longer.”

  The hunter robots bound them and carried them—not as gently as the Guardians had—to a platform suspended between large balloons. An air truck.

  “So getting out of the city isn’t going to be a problem this time,” said Juomes to Beryl.

  “Almost as easy as dying,” said Beryl bitterly.

  Soon the balloons lifted them into the air. Not so high that they lost sight of the ground, but high enough that if they tried to wriggle off the platform, they would surely die.

  Only Elyseo-Set remained unbound. He slumped silently near the back of the platform, out from under the canopy, so the sun beat down on him mercilessly.

  “I told you the robot would betray you,” said Beryl.

  “I don’t think he did,’ said Juomes.

  “Weren’t you listening?” said Rend.

  “To Kaantur-Set? A liar and murderer? Do you think he ever tells the truth?” Juomes turned to Caps. “What do you think?”

  “I think,” said Caps, “that Elyseo has had some kind of switch turned off, so he can’t move or speak.”

  Juomes chuckled. “Interesting. Yes, I think you’re right. He’s not just pouting. He’s as much a captive as we are.”

  “If he didn’t betray us, who did?” asked Rend.

  “Who says we were betrayed?” said Juomes. “The Guardians might have called Kaantur-Set when they locked us away. We weren’t far from the prison when Kaantur found us.”

  The balloons drifted out over the ocean, and passed near half-submerged skyscrapers from a ruined human city.

  Then they came to the edge of the world, where the ocean poured over into the abyss.

  Or so it seemed for one insane moment, and even when they realized the truth it made no more sense to them. There was a hole in the sea—no, several holes, several miles across, where the water flowed downward as if it were rushing over a waterfall, down until the water was lost in a fog of mist. What happened to it at the bottom, Caps could not guess. What force could keep the whole ocean from pouring in and filling this hole? What pumps could draw away the ocean as quickly as it flowed in? Near the edge of the first hole, they passed an abandoned Sentry City, floating in the sky.

  The balloons lifted them higher as they reached the edge of the largest hole in the sea, and soon they found themselves rising to meet yet another robot city. Again, there was a dome like the cap of a mushroom, and under it like a wasp’s nest hung a vertical slab of stone. Or was it the stone that hung in the air like an impossible island, supporting the city that bloomed mushroomlike atop it? The floating city hung over a hole in the sea, using it like a moat. Or perhaps the force that punched the hole in the sea was the same one that held the city in the air.

  Whatever the science, in practical terms it amounted to this: Their air truck tethered to the city, and they were carried from their platform to a prison deep in the stone—a dungeon in the middle of the air.

  Once their guards had left them alone, Caps went immediately to Elyseo’s inert body.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Beryl.

  “I’m going to see if I can wake him up.”

  “Oh, you think you press a button and that’s it?” she asked derisively.

  “They can’t have turned him off remotely. Like he said, he’s not a slave.”

  “I think we have pretty good evidence that he is one,” said Beryl.

  “He didn’t betray us,” said Caps.

  “I agree,” said Juomes. “Kaantur wants us to think he did, so it’s to our advantage to think not.” Juomes came over and elbowed Caps aside.

  Caps noticed that Juomes’s blow was weaker than the cuffs and shoves he had given Caps before. Perhaps Juomes was conserving his strength, but it seemed to Caps that the journey had not been kind to him.

  “I’ve been over the corpses of these things a few hundred times,” said Juomes. “I don’t know what all the external controls do, but I know where they all are.”

  He started pressing a series of touch-sensitive pads in various niches of Elyseo’s body. Nothing happened.