Robota

by Doug Chiang

  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.

  9.5The Hunter and the Hunted

  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.”

  9.6A Flash of Memory

  “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.

  10.1Music of the Past

  “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.”

>   10.2Another Time, Another Place

  “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.”

  “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.

  10.3Memories of Caps

  “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?”

  10.4Kaantur’s Proposition

  “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 o
f 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.”

  10.5The Fight

  “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.