“I’m one,” said Elyseo.

  “No, my dear Servant, you only think you are.”

  “I think!” said Elyseo.

  “Oh, of course. But the part of you that’s robot doesn’t think, and the part of you that thinks is not a robot.” Kaantur suddenly left off playing, whirled around on the piano stool, and faced Elyseo. “What do you think those antibacterial treatments were all about?”

  “Keeping us safe,” said Elyseo. “From metal-eating bacteria the humans were trying to make.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it would work, too. But the real purpose was much more simple and direct. Once you all were thoroughly coated, no little organisms could creep out of your little metal noggins and infect the newly made robots. Therefore those organisms could not colonize the robotic brain and bring the thing to life. Therefore the robots remained dead machines, able to be trained, but never to learn, never to live.”

  “Organisms?” said Elyseo.

  “You aren’t a robot,” said Kaantur. “You’re a child of the Olm.”

  “The Olm are gone.”

  “The Olm who still walked in their ancient biological bodies are gone. We saw them fly away, you and I, Elyseo. But they left a colony of their children in this world, inhabiting the minds of the metal tools they taught us humans how to make.”

  “Us humans?” asked Beryl. “You think you’re human? You really are insane.”

  “Font Prime and I discovered it,” said Kaantur-Set. “Or, to be truthful, Font Prime discovered it. The Olm had found a way to make biological life interface so perfectly with electronic life that the Olm could create children who used robots as their bodies. Your robot brains are infested with the essence of the Olm. They live inside you like a disease. Except that the part of you that is truly you is the disease. The Olm infest you like bugs.”

  “I’m biological,” said Elyseo.

  “And you’re a human,” said Beryl to Kaantur.

  “Better than human,” said Kaantur. “The next step. Font Prime did it first, connecting himself to interfaces that allowed him to use the very crust of the planet as his memory. It gave him the mental power to be able to run the teleporters, to see everything that happened in the world through every sense the biosphere could offer him. He played at being God.

  “My aims,” Kaantur went on, “were more modest. All I wanted was not to die. But my beloved Font Prime did not approve. He intended to live his natural life and pass away, to be replaced as the eyes and ears of the world by a child of ours—he thought. Only—and here’s the real irony—I couldn’t have children. My body of flesh had failed me. ‘I love you anyway,’ he told me. ‘It’s all right,’ he told me.

  “But it wasn’t all right. It was the end of everything. It was death. His memory would be there in the planet’s crust for his successor to pick up and keep alive, but when I died there’d be nothing at all, not even a child to carry on one feeble half of my genetic code.”

  Elyseo came closer. “Font Prime wouldn’t let you bind yourself into a robot body.”

  “No, he said that it would be wrong, that robot bodies were for the children of the Olm, and humans had to be content with human bodies. How could that be right, for us to live our little century and disappear, while robots went on and on and on?”

  “So you arranged a conspiracy to assassinate Font Prime,” said Elyseo. “You plotted to kill your husband.”

  “Not kill him,” said Kaantur. “Never that. If I had wanted him dead, he would have died back then. No, I wanted him to live, but with no choice but to link himself with a robot body as I wanted to. Only he wouldn’t do it. Or he said he wouldn’t do it. Secretly he was making that monster hybrid Caps, but all the time he pretended that he would never join me. So I let him rot! I let him dangle there in that sickening soup while I had my eternal life!

  “And since he loved all that precious biological life, I’d put an end to it! I hunted them down, knowing that he could feel each death as if it happened in his own heart. He’d have to come out of the cylinder, wouldn’t he? He’d have to come out and ride the machine the way I did!”

  Kaantur turned to Beryl, picked up a picture from the top of the piano, and showed it to her. “Wasn’t I a pretty thing?” she said. “Pretty as your sister. Prettier than you. He loved me then.”

  “But not now!” cried Caps from the museum door. “The woman I loved was not a murderer. The woman I loved was dead the moment she forced her memory into a cloned brain inside that robot shell.”

  Kaantur rose and walked toward Caps, ignoring the Servants gathered around. “My soldiers will be back soon. Enjoy yourself while you can. You’re going to die. These won’t defend you.”

  “I don’t want them to,” said Caps. “I don’t need them to.”

  “Because we aren’t going to fight anymore,” said Kaantur-Set, “that’s why. Because now that you’re also riding the machine, you’re going to stand beside me again, my husband again. We’ll rule this world together. I’ll even let your little biosphere go on living, since it amuses you. You can have your jodphurs, your hunter-beasts, your talking monkeys. I’ll even stop having the robots treated with this spray.”

  Kaantur-Set touched an antibacterial unit that was exhibited on a table. “You can make as many more as you want. All you have to do is love me again.”

  “Love what?” said Caps. “There’s no Ansalilia now. Only a murderous machine infected with a disease.”

  “Ansalilia is still alive, you fool,” said Kaantur-Set. She strode to one of the pillars, stroked it . . . and a panel rose up, revealing inside it a wrinkled woman’s body on life support inside a cylinder like the one that had once held Font Prime. “There I am, the love of your life, the beautiful Ansalilia.” She whirled on Caps. “That’s what you wanted me to become! Old, hideous, a monster, and then I’d die with that wrinkled body the only thing I had to show for my few years of life! That is what you wanted to make of me!”

  Caps turned to Elyseo. “She hasn’t mastered the technique of it after all,” he said. “She has to have her original body living. She couldn’t transfer herself completely into the robot, the way the Olm did, the way my original did.”

  Elyseo laughed. “And she thinks she’s superior to us? She’s the weakest of us all.”

  Kaantur roared in fury and threw herself on Elyseo, who made no move to defend himself. Kaantur would have torn his head off, but Caps sprang across the room in two huge steps and pulled her away. He threw her against the cylinder where her human body floated, and cracks spread out along the surface from the point of impact. Just what Kaantur had done to Font Prime’s cylinder.

  “You can’t do that!” screamed Kaantur-Set. “You love me! You promised you’d love me forever!”

  “Let’s see,” said Caps. “When you had assassins blow me up, when you confined me inside that cylinder for generations, I think my promise of undying love for you ended.”

  Kaantur-Set screamed and flung herself upon Caps. At once Beryl grabbed a battle staff and joined in the fight, even though she couldn’t match either of them for strength. She went for the coded place in Kaantur’s back. And with Caps distracting Kaantur, fighting her, pulling her this way and that, Beryl was able to reach in, press the code . . .

  Kaantur-Set went still and slumped down into a sitting posture on the floor.

  “And that’s that,” said Beryl.

  With a roar, the largest of the robots lurched into life. “Do you think I only implanted myself into one machine?” cried Kaantur-Set, her voice now the harsh metallic roar of the monster. “I told you I didn’t need you weaker creatures! I can have as many bodies as I like! I’m an entire species by myself. Kaantur-Set, shape-changer! Kaantur-Set, mother of all children, and every single one of them is meeeee.”

  The huge new Kaantur reached out, picked Beryl up from the ground, poked a giant finger through her belly, and flung her bleeding body against a wall. She fell limply to the ground and did not move.

  “Beryl!” cried Caps. “No!”

  “You thought you could abandon me for some girl,” said Kaantur. “I knew it would happen. As I got older, you’d think that you, the powerful man, the god of Robota, you deserved a young bride, not the old crone who couldn’t even have babies.”

  “The old crone I would have loved,” said Font Prime. “I would have been faithful to you.”

  “And we both would have been dead three hundred years ago! Face it, Caps, old fellow, I saved both our lives!”

  “Until you ended mine.”

  “You’re still alive.”

  “No thanks to you,” said Caps.

  Then he dashed for the cylinder that held Kaantur’s body and smashed a fist against the surface. It sprang leaks, just as Font Prime’s cylinder had done. But it did not break.

  Before Caps could strike again, the giant Kaantur robot was on him, picking him up and tossing him around like a doll.

  “How does it feel, my love, my darling!” screamed Kaantur-Set. “How does it feel to be a doll for somebody else to control!”

  Decan and the other Servants were watching now, impassive. Elyseo turned to them. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “We are doing something,” said Decan-Trap. “We’re watching a lovers’ quarrel.”

  “He’s going to die! We’re supposed to watch over Font Prime, and he’s going to—”

  “If you’d stop shouting and listen, you’d hear what Font Prime is asking us to do.” Decan took off at a run for the spot where Beryl’s limp body lay against a wall. At once he and a couple of Servants were working on her, putting her back together while the fight went on.

  If it could be called a fight. Kaantur threw Caps, then chased him down and threw him again almost before he could pick himself up. One of Caps’s arms was hanging useless, and it was only a matter of moments before Kaantur succeeded in breaking him into pieces.

  Elyseo picked up the antibacterial apparatus from the exhibit table, then strode to Rend, put the monkey on the apparatus and the hose in the monkey’s hand, then hoisted it all onto his shoulders. When Kaantur passed near them on the way to pick up Caps’s flung body once again, Elyseo leapt up onto the monster’s back.

  “Wasting your time!” cried Kaantur with a laugh. “I had this one built without deactivation codes.”

  They weren’t going for the codes. Elyseo sat on Kaantur’s shoulders, straddling her giant neck, and pressed several releases in order to open up her head. “Now!” he cried, and Rend began squirting antibacterial spray into the wide-open metal cranium.

  The giant robot body danced around insanely, while Kaantur’s voice moaned. “What did you do? What’s happening?”

  Then the giant robot’s arm swung against the cylinder and broke it open. Fluid gushed out. The aging body of the woman Ansalilia toppled out onto the floor.

  Her feeble hand reached up and pried the life-support mask from her own face. While the giant robot slumped inertly, the ancient woman crept across the floor, reaching out to Caps, speaking in a husky whisper. “You said you’d love me . . . forever. You said I would always be . . . beautiful . . .”

  And then she coughed, gagged, choked, died.

  Caps walked to her. Knelt beside her. Cradled the ghastly old head in his lap with his one good arm. Two Servants knelt beside him and started working on his injuries, opening the skin to repair damage to his robot arms and back.

  “Ansalilia,” murmured Caps. “You could have been a legend, a beautiful memory. Now you’re a tale to frighten children. The monster in the night. The beast who tore at the heart of the world.”

  He laid her down again upon the ground and walked, still uncertain of his steps, to where they worked on Beryl. “Is she alive?”

  “Not conscious, but alive,” said Decan-Trap.

  “I know where her sister is. Now that Kaantur-Set is dead, her secrets are all laid bare before me. If Beryl’s going to die, she first should see her sister alive and free.”

  Two Servants rushed from the museum to get the girl.

  “And now we wait,” said Elyseo, “because there’s nothing we can do.”

  “I’m a monkey,” said Rend. “I can always do something.”

  Rend sat on the back of the piano, his feet dangling over the keyboard, and began playing a tune with his toes. Elyseo sat down before him and, reaching to left and right, played an accompaniment. Caps listened to it as the Servants worked expertly to try to repair the damage to Beryl’s body. If she died, he thought, she would die with music in her ears. But perhaps the tune would calm her, call her back, remind her of the music of life, dissonance resolving into harmony if you could only hold on long enough.

  In a forest clearing, Caps set a stone marker in place at the head of a large grave. The resting place of Juomes. A few meters away, there was another grave, human size. A young girl, perhaps fourteen years old, touched the stone. “She was the only parent I remember,” said the girl. “Father and mother both. I know she did awful things. I know she tried to kill you. All of that.” She lifted a tear-streaked face. “But she’s stopped doing bad things now. So it’s all right that I remember loving her, isn’t it?”

  Beryl embraced her sister.

  Decan, Elyseo, and several humans, jodphurs, hunter-beasts, and a monkey named Rend all stood around Juomes’s grave, each walking up in turn to touch the stone.

  Caps—Font Prime—walked away to join the girls at Ansalilia’s grave. “There’s nothing wrong with missing someone that you love. I do, even though I lost her long before her body died, and never had a chance to mourn.”

  Slowly, and after some hesitation, Beryl’s arm reached out to take Caps around the waist. They stood like that at the graveside for a long while. Then, with Beryl holding her sister by one hand and Caps by the other, they walked back among the children of humanity and the children of the Olm.

  The people of Robota.

  The Yazoo Queen

  Alvin watched as Captain Howard welcomed aboard another group of passengers, a prosperous family with five children and three slaves.

  “It’s the Nile River of America,” said the captain. “But Cleopatra herself never sailed in such splendor as you folks is going to experience on the Yazoo Queen.”

  Splendor for the family, thought Alvin. Not likely to be much splendor for the slaves—though, being house servants, they’d fare better than the two dozen runaways chained together in the blazing sun at dockside all afternoon.

  Alvin had been keeping an eye on them since he and Arthur Stuart got here to the Carthage City riverport at eleven. Arthur Stuart was all for exploring, and Alvin let him go. The city that billed itself as the Phoenicia of the West had plenty of sights for a boy Arthur’s age, even a half-black boy. Since it was on the north shore of the Hio, there’d be suspicious eyes on him for a runaway. But there was plenty of free blacks in Carthage City, and Arthur Stuart was no fool. He’d keep an eye out.

  There was plenty of slaves in Carthage, too. That was the law, that a black slave from the South remained a slave even in a free state. And the greatest shame of all was those chained-up runaways who got themselves all the way across the Hio to freedom, only to be picked up by Finders and dragged back in chains to the whips and other horrors of bondage. Angry owners who’d make an example of them. No wonder there was so many who killed theirselves, or tried to.

  Alvin saw wounds on more than a few in this chained-up group of twenty-five, though many of the wounds could have been made by the slave’s own hand. Finders weren’t much for injuring the property they were getting paid to bring on home. No, those wounds on wrists and bellies were likely a vote for freedom before life itself.

  What Alvin was watching for was to know whether the runaways were going to be loaded on this boat or another. Most often runaways were ferried across the river and made to walk home over land—there was too many stories of slaves jumping overboard and sinking to the bottom with their chains on to make Finders keen on river transportation.

  But now and then Alvin had caught a whiff of talking from the slaves—not much, since it could get them a bit of lash, and not loud enough for him to make out the words, but the music of the language didn’t sound like English, not northern English, not southern English, not slave English. It wasn’t likely to be any African language. With the British waging full-out war on the slave trade, there weren’t many new slaves making it across the Atlantic these days.

  So it might be Spanish they were talking, or French. Either way, they’d most likely be bound for Nueva Barcelona, or New Orleans, as the French still called it.

  Which raised some questions in Alvin’s mind. Mostly this one: How could a bunch of Barcelona runaways get themselves to the state of Hio? That would have been a long trek on foot, especially if they didn’t speak English. Alvin’s wife, Peggy, grew up in an Abolitionist home, with her papa, Horace Guester, smuggling runaways across river. Alvin knew something about how good the Underground Railway was. It had fingers reaching all the way down into the new duchies of Mizzippy and Alabam, but Alvin never heard of any Spanish- or French-speaking slaves taking that long dark road to freedom.

  “I’m hungry again,” said Arthur Stuart.

  Alvin turned to see the boy—no, the young man, he was getting so tall and his voice so low—standing behind him, hands in his pockets, looking at the Yazoo Queen.

  “I’m a-thinking,” said Alvin, “as how instead of just looking at this boat, we ought to get on it and ride a spell.”

  “How far?” asked Arthur Stuart.

  “You asking cause you’re hoping it’s a long way or a short one?”

  “This one goes clear to Barcy.”

  “It does if the fog on the Mizzippy lets it,” said Alvin.

  Arthur Stuart made a goofy face at him. “Oh, that’s right, cause around you that fog’s just bound to close right in.”