She had betrayed Juomes and Caps and Rend to save her sister, leading them straight into Kaantur’s trap. Yet that was exactly where they had wanted to go. How else would they have made their way into this heavily guarded chamber? And hadn’t her betrayal allowed Juomes’s goal to be achieved—the death of Font Prime? All she had done was save her sister, get Juomes and Caps where they wanted to be, and terminate the ruler of the robots.

  Except that none of those things meant what she had thought they would mean. Before Juomes died, he had realized that it was Kaantur all along, not Font Prime, who was his enemy. Juomes had died trying to help Caps save Font Prime from Kaantur-Set. And now Kaantur was gloating about something—more than the death of Juomes.

  I have been trapped by loving other people—yet my sister will be safe.

  He’s going to kill everyone else I love, she thought. He’s going to attack my city. The sentient jodphurs. The scientists who are so close to finding an airborne metal-eater. The people who trusted me. The people I betrayed.

  I’m going to live. My sister is going to live. And both of us are going to hate me for it.

  A door opened on the other side of the room.

  “Elyseo,” she said. She could not bear to show him the despair she felt, so she spoke in a light ironic tone. “You wouldn’t mind doing me a favor, would you?”

  “If I can,” he said.

  “Kill me now and save me the trouble later.” She managed a wry chuckle, but the tears coursing down her cheeks belied the jest.

  “No,” said Elyseo.

  Elyseo was right. Death would be too kind an outcome for her now. And besides, she had one job left that might be worth trying. “All right, I have a better idea anyway. Help me kill Kaantur-Set.”

  “I can’t,” said Elyseo. “I’m a Servant.”

  That took her aback. “You don’t wear the robe.”

  “That’s how we kept it a secret.”

  “You hunted with Kaantur.”

  “I never harmed any living soul.”

  “I wish I could say that.” Suddenly, she burst out sobbing.

  The robot came to her, touched her. The metal made her shudder. She turned away, then flung herself onto the body of Juomes.

  “I know,” said Elyseo. “I know that it’s no comfort, but I too have lost a loyal friend.”

  She looked up to see him cradling the corpse of Font Prime in his arms.

  “But you didn’t kill your friend.”

  “Nor did you kill yours,” said Elyseo. “But now I think we have important things to do.”

  “Like what?” she said. “Kaantur’s going to kill the last pocket of human resistance in the world.”

  “Maybe not,” said Elyseo.

  “Who’s going to stop him?”

  “Font Prime,” said Elyseo.

  “Font Prime is dead,” said Beryl.

  “Font Prime has been transported.”

  “Font Prime has been copied onto a machine.”

  Elyseo shook his head. “Font Prime has created for himself a body that has been robotically enhanced. But his heart, his brain, his skin, all his emotions, his will, his hopes, his loyalties—he is human to the core. He is human wearing armor under his skin.”

  Beryl buried her face again in Juomes’s fur. “It doesn’t matter. Kaantur has won.”

  “The struggle between Font Prime and Kaantur-Set has gone on for nearly three hundred years,” said Elyseo. “In all that time, despite his best efforts, Kaantur has never succeeded in taking control away from Font Prime. He thinks that because he killed this poor thing”—Elyseo looked down again at the body in his arms—“he now rules the robots as he has wanted to for so long.”

  “But he doesn’t?”

  “They obey him for now,” said Elyseo, “but they obey only his words. He doesn’t speak to their minds.”

  “And Font Prime does?”

  “Did,” said Elyseo. “And will again.”

  “How?” asked Beryl.

  “When Caps is able to access all his hidden memories, he will again be able to reach out to the minds of the robots.”

  “And control them?”

  “And persuade them,” said Elyseo. “Why can’t humans ever see us as we are? The living robots are not just empty machines. As surely as a hunter-beast, as a talking jodphur, as a nattering monkey, we are sentient beings with minds of our own. We follow Font Prime because we trust him. And when we have to choose between him and Kaantur—it won’t be hard. Kaantur has his human-hating followers, but the followers of Font Prime are far more numerous.”

  “But less violent.”

  “Less violent, but not necessarily less powerful. Not all power comes from a willingness to kill.”

  “No,” said Beryl. “Sometimes it comes from a willingness to die.”

  The invasion fleet rose up out of the water on giant spider legs, walking ashore and depositing a robot army as if they were turtles coming ashore to spawn. Along with the robots, they unloaded pairs of giant grasshopper legs, which the robots mounted like horses so they could walk at a pace unmatchable by any beast. From this battle the jodphurs would find no escape. Those who did not fight and die would flee and die—but die they would.

  The jodphurs and humans had set sentinels along the shore, and they now lit their signal fires. Kilometers inland, their counterparts saw the flames and lit new ones, spreading the word inward. The robot invasion had come. Out of their mushroom towers the humans and jodphurs descended, moving swiftly to the fortifications and ambuscades that would neither slow nor deceive the coming robots. They knew, in their despair, that this would be the last stand of the last remnant of the intelligent beasts. All they could hope to accomplish was to kill as many of the irreplaceable robots as came under the power of their hands.

  Who else could see the end of the human race on Robota? Deep in the bowels of the world, under a hole in the sea, within the vent of a once-submerged volcano, Caps—Font Prime—could see everything.

  Through the eyes of squirrels he saw it, through the fingers of grass he touched it, through the ears of rabbits he heard, and he could taste the throb of the robots’ thunderous steps in the quivering sap rising in the trees.

  For all of these were tied together, no individual aware of it, but all of them intertwined, their perceptions flashing and floating and streaming downward into the soil, into the very stone of the earth, where they were gathered by crystals that had grown upward toward the surface from the deepest underlying rock. Thin ribbons of rockbound metal became the highways of knowledge, carrying imperceptible data to the one who could perceive them.

  Caps embraced the stone pillar of the navel of the earth, obsidian pressing against the front of his body, the pure perfect crystal bonding to him as if it could bend to fit him, or as if his flesh had grown over it and made it part of him. Out of the warm stone, trembling in the magnetic potential of the crystal, there flowed all that Caps could bear to see of Kaantur’s invasion.

  “Can I stop this?” he asked softly. “Can I call these robots back?”

  “Call, Font Prime,” said Decan. “See what they do.”

  “Look at me,” Caps whispered.

  “I can hear you,” said Decan. “But who else?”

  It was not with his voice that he would have to call.

  Instead, he had to think of the robots of the world as a part of himself. The way a man might will his hand to flex, his knees to bend, so Caps had to find that impulse, that muscle, that joint, that part of himself that was a window into the minds of the robots.

  It was not with words he spoke, but in his mind it seemed like words.

  “Wait,” he said through the impulse of this unfamiliar new limb, this voice that spoke into the minds of his people. And then, because all he controlled was the ability to make them feel his will, not to make them obey it, he added, “Please, my friends.”

  He could hear Kaantur screaming through the antennae that quivered from every robot’s head: “He is not Font Prime! Don’t listen to him!”

  “You know me,” Caps said to them. “You know that I am one of you, but I am also one of them. Robot, and human. Once it was human assassins who tried to kill me; now I beg you, my friends, to let it be robots who give life back to the living. Slay no man or beast today. Kill no forest. Break no chain binding life to life and mind to tool.”

  He could feel-see-hear-taste them on the hard-packed earth of the plains, in their airboats over the forests, on their grasshopper legs bounding over desert sands and plunging through high grasslands. Most of them heard his voice in their minds with a sigh of recognition, with the ease of ancient friendship. “You’re back,” they said. “Where were you? Why has all this death been done in your name?”

  “Turn away from the slaughter,” said Font Prime. Said Caps, “Come home to see me walk among you once again.”

  “He’s a fraud!” cried Kaantur-Set. “The real Font Prime is dead! He died today!”

  In reply, Caps remembered the scene with all the clarity of his mind—how it felt to be plucked into the air, caught by the feet, swung like a bludgeon against the cylinder. The memory of the shards spraying around him, the viscous fluid flowing, and that helpless body dangling from its life support.

  Then, Kaantur’s hands tearing the machinery from the ruined man. Kaantur’s arm striking the ribs, smashing the heart, bringing the life that lingered there to a shuddering halt.

  “Yet I am not dead,” said Caps. “I transported myself out of the prison Kaantur made for me. I made myself anew, returned my memories into my mind, and I speak to you now more clearly than I ever could before. Come home and see me, my friends.”

  “Go forth and slay the last of the biological life!” cried Kaantur-Set. “Then come back and help me deal with this impostor, wherever he’s hiding! You know that I am the strong one. You know that life belongs to the one who has in him the power to survive.”

  There were some who listened to Kaantur, and wanted to go on.

  But in airboat after airboat, his followers shouted orders that the other robots would not obey. On land, the marching army turned back, leaving only a few still bent on destruction.

  Too few. Despite their armaments, the followers of Kaantur-Set could easily see that they would be overwhelmed by the jodphurs and the humans fighting to defend their lives and homes, their children, their species.

  Kaantur recognized it, too. The invasion would fail. He would expend the lives of his few supporters for nothing.

  He also recognized something else. That while his numbers were few, the robots who followed him were the ones with the thirst for power, the ones unafraid to kill without qualm, his own kind.

  All he had to do was find Caps and kill him, and the world would still belong to him. There would be plenty of time to cleanse Robota of biological life, when Font Prime was finally, fully dead.

  So his followers turned back, too, and mingled with the returning armies. On the tree-killer airboats, they pretended to change, and thanked the crews that had resisted them. Many robots were fooled.

  But Caps was not fooled. The invasion of the jodphur city had been stopped, but the war was not over yet, and soon Font Prime’s enemies would be gathered in the city that floated in the air above this place.

  Caps pulled himself away from the obsidian, but now he could feel the way it still clung to the memory of every cell of his skin. He was connected to the buried memory hidden in the skin of the world, skin to skin, and he could call upon it now without having to touch it, as Font Prime had called upon it and added to it from his prison in the cylinder that floated directly above this place.

  Caps turned to look at the Servants who surrounded him. “Take me home,” he said.

  They returned to the airboat and it rose upward, reaching its docking station at the base of the dangling stone before any of the other airships could return. As it rose, as it docked, Caps spoke to Decan-Trap.

  “I remember everything,” he said. “I remember the messages I received every time I awoke. I know what they meant. I know who I am.” Decan almost spoke then, but Caps held up a hand to stop him. “I know whom to kill,” he said.

  “I hoped you would,” said Decan. “Because you had forgotten more than I knew.”

  “I remember even the things I didn’t know I knew,” said Caps. “Even the things my original, my fatherself, could not bring himself to face.”

  “The worst had already happened to him,” said Decan. “And yet there were still things he dreaded.”

  “I once loved a woman,” said Caps, “a wise and powerful woman, who stood at my side and loved me in return. We dreamed of what we could make of this world, with our robot friends, with the gifts of the Olm that had been bequeathed to us, some of which we had only just begun to understand.”

  “The woman you loved,” said Decan softly.

  “I was the teacher of the robots, and she the governor of the humans. But she resented the coming of her death, and was tempted by the power that we had only just discovered—to bond a living human mind to a robot, to become the robot. As I have linked my mind to the great memory deposits of the metals and crystals of Robota’s crust, she linked her mind to a robot and rode it out boldly into the world even as her body was preserved in a cylinder of fluid.”

  “The name of the woman?” prompted Decan.

  “Ansalilia,” whispered Caps. “But what strode out of her chamber that day was nothing like the woman that I loved and trusted. She was a robot now, clinging to humanity only by such trivial means as smoking a pipe and playing the piano. She even denied her womanhood, calling herself Kaantur-Set.”

  “Do you still love her?” asked Decan-Trap. “Even now, will your love for her stay your hand?”

  “Ansalilia is in my memory. Her body is in another cylinder, older than the one my original lived in. But the robot Kaantur-Set is not the woman I loved. Kaantur-Set is the murderer of my people.”

  The door opened. Two of Kaantur’s hunter robots stood outside and fired their weapons point-blank at Caps’s chest.

  Ignoring the bloody wounds as if they were mosquito bites, Caps approached them, seized them by the throats, and dragged them down onto the floor. A Servant knelt over each one, reached into the cavity of its back, pressed the codes, and switched him off.

  Then the Servant once again sprayed the wounds from which Caps bled profusely. The bleeding stopped. The wound was taped over. Caps went on.

  Beryl followed the sounds of the frantic piano, played by inhumanly fast fingers dancing over the keys. Beside her, a little behind, walked Elyseo. “What can you hope to do like this?” said Elyseo. “Alone like this, against Kaantur-Set?”

  “I don’t care what happens to me,” said Beryl “That makes me dangerous.”

  “Only to yourself,” said Elyseo.

  “That will be a nice change, to have the power to betray no one but myself.”

  “Beryl,” said Elyseo, “can’t you hear it? The voice of Font Prime, calling home the armies. Can’t you hear?”

  “I’m a human,” said Beryl. “Human and nothing else. Bones of calcium, driven by muscle alone. Why should I be alive, when so many better souls are dead?”

  “Because they’re dead, and you’re alive, and there’s no benefit to them if you add yourself to their number.”

  Beryl ignored him and continued trying to find her way among the corridors to where the piano was being played.

  In a vast chamber, a museum scattered with a thousand artifacts, Kaantur sat at a piano and played. But Kaantur-Set was not alone. A monkey paced the room, touching everything, the walls, the pillars, the hulks of inactive robots that slumped here and there. Little robots, huge ones, designs that Rend had seen nowhere else.

  “Why all these toys?” asked Rend.

  Kaantur-Set ignored him, went on playing.

  Rend touched the knee of a giant robot that sat like a rag doll against a wall. “What are you for? New design, yet none of the new-built robots has a mind. So are you a mere machine, like the Guardians?”

  There was no answer.

  Into the museum strode Beryl, Elyseo just behind her.

  “Kaantur!” she cried. “Come and show me how you can fight!”

  The piano music hesitated only for a moment.

  The slumping robot next to Rend suddenly shuddered. Rend leapt back. But the huge machine returned to dormancy, and Rend scampered away to see what Beryl was going to do.

  “Give me my sister!” cried Beryl. “I paid the price, now give her to me!”

  Over the sound of the piano, Kaantur said, “You didn’t pay it, Beryl, darling. Juomes did.”

  “Where is she!”

  “Where you’ll never find her till I want you to,” said Kaantur.

  “Fight me!” cried Beryl.

  “I don’t intend to kill you,” said Kaantur. “In fact, my plan is to let you and your precious sister live on after all the other biological life on earth is dead. I’ll keep one garden so I can feed you, and then I can have the pleasure of watching you age and wither up and die, while I go on living, I and my kind.”

  “You have no kind,” said Beryl. “Robots are dying out as well.”

  “Yes, they are, aren’t they, the dear little toys.”

  That stopped Beryl only a couple of meters away from Kaantur’s piano. “Toys? They’re no more toys than you are.”

  “Toys,” said Kaantur. “I’m tired of them. That’s why I decided to put them all away.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Beryl.

  “They were still useful to me in destroying all the life of Robota,” said Kaantur. “Until Font Prime found his voice again. Now I’m tired of them. Their usefulness is over. I’ll outlive them, too, the way I’ll outlive human life.”

  “How do you think you’ll kill all the robots?” asked Beryl.

  “As easily as I stopped new ones from being built.”

  Elyseo circled behind Kaantur. “You stopped the making of new robots?”

  “Who else but me and Font Prime understood what the Olm had done? Trickery and fraud. Thinking machines! What a laugh! No machine has ever had a thought in all the history of Robota. There has never been a sentient robot.”