“Can it be fixed?” the robot said.

“Fixed? You think it is still alive?”

“You fix things, do you not, before you sell them?” the robot said. “It makes the value greater and so on. So I understand.”

“I am just a dealer,” Mukhtar said. “And this is. . . . Are you willing to sell it?” He withdrew from the golden man and paced.

“It would not be appropriate,” Mukhtar said. “I do not deal in religious relics. It is not . . . proper.”

“This is a religious relic?” Mariam said. By now she was confused.

“It is a weapon,” the robot said. “But I do not think it is dangerous anymore. I do not know. It was made for an old war, and it is an old thing.”

“I did hear there was a disturbance in the desert the other night,” Mukhtar murmured. “A shurta patrol was attacked by wild machines.”

“They should have kept away,” the robot said. “It is not my fault.”

“You dug it out?”

“Yes. It disturbed the local . . . wildlife. The old soldier machines out in the desert still. They remember. I do not rightly know if they were drawn to it to kill it or if they were called there by it. It doesn’t seem alive to me. But some things are hard to kill.”

“Zoroaster lived thousands of years ago, yet his faith still lives in me and my line,” Mukhtar said. “The hardest thing to kill is truth.”

“Yet as a weapon it failed,” the robot said.

“I could make inquiries,” Mukhtar said, a little unwillingly, Mariam thought. “But no one has made new robots for centuries. And this. . . . Some would say it is an abomination.”

“It is just a machine,” the robot said. “I would like it fixed.”

“To sell?” Mukhtar said.

“No.”

Mariam watched them. Mukhtar genuinely troubled, though Mariam did not quite understand why. And the robot, softly spoken, inflexible—she thought she could detect a burning desperation in its core, the way it stood. As though it had come a long way just for this.

And she thought of the Damask rose she had given it, and that it had carried into the desert beyond the city.

“Then can you pay for it yourself?” Mukhtar said. “What you are asking of me, it is expensive.’

“I do not have much money,” the robot said.

“Then do you have anything else to sell?”

The robot considered the question.

“Would you value me?” it said.

“Value you?” Mukhtar said.

“Yes.”

Mukhtar rose. “Would you mind . . . ?” he said.

“Not at all.”

Mukhtar wasn’t noded. He put on headgear, lenses with which to study the robot instead. He muttered as he went.

“You weren’t kidding about the weaponry part,” he said. “If you ever go off you’d blow half this city. You were never decommissioned?”

“I never felt the need,” the robot said.

“You had the build upgraded on Titan,” Mukhtar said.

“Yes.”