Robot Adept

They retired to the private chamber they now shared, and opened the bags. Bane took a bite of pudding, but found it tasteless. This was not because it lacked taste, but because his body, having no need for food, had no taste sensors. What he chewed and swallowed went to a stomach receptacle that he could evacuate subsequently, either by vomiting or by opening a panel and removing the soiled unit. Eating was a superfluous function for a robot, but the ability had been incorporated in order to enable him to seem completely human. He was glad of it; he wanted to reassure her by eating what she had baked. Digestibility was irrelevant.

Her mode of eating differed. She set the brownie lump on the table, leaned over it, and let her top part melt. Her features blurred and became puddingy, indeed resembling the consistency of what she had baked. She drooped onto the food, her flesh spreading over and around it. Her digestive acids infiltrated it, breaking it down, and gradually the mound subsided. When all of it had been reduced to liquid and absorbed into her substance, she lifted her flesh from the table. Her head formed, and her shoulders and arms and breasts. Her eyes developed, and her ears and nose and mouth, assuming their appropriate configurations and colors. She had a human aspect again.

“I hope it doesn’t poison thee,” Bane said, not entirely humorously.

“It was solid and burned, but not inedible,” she reassured him. “You made it; that is all I need to know.”

He took her in his arms. “I have never before known a creature like thee.”

“I should hope not,” she said. “I am the only Moebite on this planet.”

“I wish I could love thee in thy natural form.”

“I have no natural form,” she reminded him. “I am merely protoplasm. I assume whatever shape pleases you.”

“And I am pleased by them all. I never loved an alien amoeba before.”

“And I never loved a terrestrial vertebrate before. But—”

“Say it not!” he protested. “I know we must part, but fain would I delude myself that this moment be forever.”

“If we continue speaking of this, I will melt,” she warned him.

“And thou leave me, I may melt,” he said.

“Perhaps, when I am safe among my own kind, you could visit?” she asked hesitantly.

“Let me go with thee now!”

“No, you must remain, and communicate with your opposite self, and return to your own frame. Our association is only an interlude.”

“Only an interlude,” he repeated sadly.

“But we can make it count. Tell me what to do, and I shall do it for you.”

She was not being facetious. She had come to Proton to learn human ways, including especially the human mode of sexual interplay, because the Moebites wanted to work toward bisexual reproduction. They understood the theory of it, but not the practice. They believed that their species development was lagging because they lacked the stimulus of two-sex replication, and they wanted to master it.

But in the pursuit of this quest, Agape had run afoul of another aspect of such reproduction: she had fallen in love. Now she had much of the information, but lacked the desire to return to her home world and demonstrate it to others of her kind. She wanted only to remain with Bane.

Now that it was feasible to do, Bane found that he had lost the desire for sexual activity. Part of it might have been her sheer accommodation; no challenge remained, when she was completely willing and malleable. But most of it was his foolish gut feeling that once Agape had learned all that he might teach her in this regard, there would be no need for her to remain with him. Thus he wanted to conserve the experience rather than expending it, to keep her with him longer. He knew this was nonsensical, but it unmanned him for the moment.

“Let’s play another game,” he said.

She gazed at him in surprise. “Another game? But I thought—”

“Thou didst think rightly! But I—I find I be not ready. I want to experience more things with thee, a greater variety, while I may. I want to build up a store o’ precious memories. Or something. I know not exactly what I want, only that I want it to be with thee.”

“I see I have much to learn yet about the human condition,” she said, perplexed.

“Nay, it be not thee, but me,” he reassured her. “Only accept that I love thee, and let the rest be confused.”

She spread her hands in a careful human gesture. “As you wish, Bane.”

They went out to play another game, and another, and another, the victories and the losses immaterial, only the experience being important. So it continued for several days, with physical, mental and chance games of every type. They raced each other in sailcraft, they played Chinese checkers, they bluffed each other with poker, they battled with punnish riddles. Sometimes they cheated, indulging in one game while nominally playing another, as when they made love while theoretically wrestling in gelatin. Whatever else they did, they lived their joint life to the fullest extent they could manage, trying to cram decades into days.