Robot Adept

This might be an irrelevant detail, but Mach wanted to know, as it could affect his attitude and therefore his play. He didn’t want to ask openly, which he realized was foolish; he was adapting increasingly to living ways, as he spent more time in this living body. Living creatures had awareness of pain, both physical and mental, and tended to be much more careful about things they did not quite understand than machines were. Mach was now far more sensitive than he had ever been in Proton, and he liked to believe that was an asset. So he wanted to know whether a hornet’s nest was inhabited without getting stung during the investigation, and to know the exact nature of the appearance of his opponent without suffering any embarrassment about his naïveté in asking. So he practiced another aspect of personality that came more readily to the living than to the machine: innocuous deception.

He went to Fleta for one more embrace. “Is that a golem?” he whispered to her ear.

Her ear twitched. She did retain some unicorn mannerisms in her human form! “Nay, it has no smell,” she replied. “It be a wraith.”

“Thank you.” So the whole thing, ball and player, was merely an image, a projection from the information coming through him. Trool’s spells from the Book of Magic could readily accomplish that; indeed, Mach himself could do something similar, at need.

“That be all thou dost want of me?” Fleta inquired.

Oops. “All I can ask in public,” he said, giving her backside a squeeze.

She sniffed, but she was mollified.

He returned to the table and took up his paddle. It was the standard one that Trool had made for him, without magic. In this first game, the equipment was equivalent, with each paddle meeting set specifications. The idea was to see how well each played with no advantage of equipment. “Let’s rally a little first,” he suggested.

“Aye,” Bane agreed. “This be a strange arrangement.”

Suddenly Mach wished that the two of them could be together like this when not opposing each other. That they could do without illusion what now required illusion. Maybe, after this contest was settled, they could see about that.

He picked up the ball and served it, throwing it up from his left palm in the prescribed manner, so that it was evident that his hand imparted no spin to it. It bounced on his side of the table and crossed the net. He knew that it became illusory at that point, transformed by magic to an image, while in the frame of Proton the Game Computer introduced a physical ball with the exact velocity, azimuth and spin of the one in Phaze. In Proton Mach was the image, generated holographically, seeming as real as Bane did on this side. It was an amazingly sophisticated interface, to make the appearance of an ordinary game.

Bane returned the ball, seeming at ease. It crossed back over the net. Was there a flicker as it did so? Mach could not be sure. In any event, he should not allow himself to be distracted by the intricacies of the system; he had to play as well as he could. If he even started wondering how he could move freely about, to play the ball to either side or far back from the table, without losing his overlap-contact with Mach, he would start fouling up! How much of his own motion was also illusion?

They played for a few minutes, becoming acclimatized. All was in working order. “Time for business,” Mach said, with both excitement and regret.

“Aye.” Bane caught the ball in his hand, put his hands behind him, brought them out closed and held them just below the level of the table. Mach pointed with his paddle to Bane’s right hand. Bane lifted it: empty. That meant that Bane had the first serve.

Bane served. The ball came across the net, low and fast, striking Mach’s right corner. Mach fielded it with a chop, using a short, sharp downstroke to return the ball with a backspin. This tended to slow its progress, causing it to drop to the center of Bane’s table rather toward the back edge. But the backspin did more than that. It changed the nature of the bounce, so that the ball tended to lift and fall short; an incautious player could have misjudged it and missed it for that reason. And more yet: when the other paddle touched it, the spin would tend to carry the ball down, perhaps into the net, for a miss.

But Bane now knew all that Mach did about the dynamics of play. He met the ball with a chop of his own, that countered and reversed the spin, sending the same kind of shot back.

Mach, ready for this, touched the ball lightly with his backhand, so that it bobbed up over the net and down just the other side: a shot that could be far more troublesome than it appeared, because normally a player stood back from the table.