Robota

by Doug Chiang

  Now, though, watching the robots at work, they said nothing.

  A plume of smoke announced that Kaantur-Set was emerging from the machine. Caps felt an irrational anger that this man-imitating robot had been inside his place — though in truth Caps had no idea if the place was really his. For all he knew, he had been put there by an enemy, who used the machine to wipe out his memories.

  But if that was so, what was the incomprehensible message about?

  And now that he thought about it, the facelike image that delivered the message resembled these hunter robots. For all Caps knew, the machine really did belong to them, and he was just a dumb animal who had stumbled into it and pulled the wrong lever.

  Kaantur-Set followed the smoke of his pipe out of the machine.

  Caps now had a chance to look at him without running away, and he saw something else. A preserved animal paw hung from around Kaantur-Set’s waist. A talisman?

  A trophy. Like the antennae that Juomes and that woman collected and wore around their waists.

  Juomes started breathing heavily and rushed away. Caps and Rend followed. As soon as they were far enough from the robots to dare to speak, Caps asked him what was wrong. Juomes didn’t explain, but said they had to get back to his hideout.

  The place was in a shambles. Someone had ransacked it. “I only have one thing worth stealing,” he said. “My jewel.”

  Sure enough, it was gone.

  “I thought you wore it,” said Caps.

  “Not when I was heading for your machine,” said Juomes. “I feared a trap. Better they should kill me than take the jewel.”

  “But they’ve taken it anyway,” said Rend.

  “Yes,” said Juomes bitterly, knocking boxes and papers aside in vain. “It was a trap, but a more subtle one than I expected.”

  “It suggests they knew you had this jewel,” said Caps, “and knew where you lived, and watched you and waited until you were out.”

  “They’ll be back,” said Rend.

  “Of course,” said Juomes. “But what do I care?”

  He pulled the battle glove from his left hand. Under it was a prosthetic hand.

  “Looks like you’re part robot,” said Rend.

  Juomes casually batted him across the room with the back of his right hand. Rend rolled away, cursing, unhurt.

  “That was your hand at Kaantur-Set’s belt, wasn’t it?” said Caps.

  “He took my hand trying to get me to give him my jewel,” said Juomes. “After he killed my family, he thought that taking my hand would make me confess?” Juomes laughed bitterly. “Now he has the jewel anyway.”

  “Why would he want it?” asked Caps.

  “These jewels with the symbol on them came from an ancient spaceship. They allowed the higher animals to ‘cube’ — to become intelligent, to speak. Like our monkey friend here.”

  “No jewel made me smart,” said Rend.

  “How did it work?” asked Caps.

  “I’m not a scientist,” said Juomes. “Are you?”

  “I just — did they eat the jewel or wear it to sleep or what?” asked Caps.

  “It hasn’t worked in years,” said Rend, “or Juomes wouldn’t be so stupid.”

  Juomes ignored him. “Once it changes an animal, it breeds true — all its offspring have speech as well. It brought a golden age to the world. It made the robots jealous, and the king of the robots, Font Prime, sent out Kaantur-Set and his hunters to destroy all the jewels. They think when the jewels are gone, we’ll all become dumb beasts again. Mine was the last.”

  “Font Prime,” said Caps.

  “Do you remember something?” asked Rend eagerly.

  “The message inside my machine. It mentioned Font Prime.”

  “I’m going to find Font Prime,” said Juomes. “I’m going to kill it. That will end the persecution of the animals.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Caps, “if you’ll have me.”

  “To help me?”

  “I don’t know if you need my help,” said Caps. “A man with no memory.”

  “Oh, you have a memory,” said Juomes. “You know how to speak. How to reason. You know many things. All that you’ve forgotten is yourself.”

  “He forgot me, too,” said Rend.

  “Everyone who knows you tries to forget you,” said Juomes.

  “But they all fail,” said Rend smugly.

  “Come with me, Caps,” said Juomes. “I’ll teach you to fight. Maybe your memories will come back to you. Maybe you know something, locked in your head, something that will lead me to my jewel, or if I can’t save it now, then to Font Prime.”

  3.1Desert Rocks

  3.2Seashore

  3.3Bilellepad Robot Factory

  3.4Desert Shore

  When the children of the hunter-beasts tell the story, Juomes is the hero — and who can blame them? In their tale, Caps was like a baby, and Juomes taught him everything.

  Juomes did teach him, talking to him as they journeyed by day. And when they stopped at night for sleep, and when they first arose in the morning, he tried to teach Caps to fight.

  Juomes discovered that Caps had strength and adroitness beyond any mere teaching, however. Juomes had only to show Caps how to do a maneuver with a weapon or with his bare hands, and Caps mastered it at once. And when they sparred, weapon on weapon, Caps could disarm the great hunter-beast by brute strength alone.

  “You don’t look it,” said Juomes, “but you were born to be the scourge of the robots.”

  Rend was not impressed. “Big animals fighting to see who’s strongest. Monkey goes where they can’t go, monkey sees what they can’t see.”

  “Monkey poops and throws it at big animals,” said Juomes.

  “I can also pee in their eyes,” said Rend. “Everybody does what he can do.”

  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.

  3.5Midday Rest and a Lesson

  3.6Robot Encampment

  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.

  3.7Ruins in the Trees

  3.8Elyseo’s Fate

  “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.”

  3.9Elyseo-Set

  “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.

  3.10Kaantur’s Stiltwalker

  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.

  3.11Surrounded

  4.1Jodphur Commander

  “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?”

  4.2The Hidden City of the Jodphurs

  4.3Keedim the Elder

  “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.”

  4.4Transept City Gate Keeper

  “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.”