Robot Adept

“She nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said. And so it was that he found himself in the Tourney, though he had always been a duffer in the Game and knew he would quickly wash out and be deported. But his years of service still counted (for he had not been fired) and would represent a very nice payment on his departure; he would leave with an untarnished record. He was duly grateful for this, knowing how much worse it could have been, and his respect for his employer was undiminished. But still in his dream he had the temerity to wonder: was it possible that in some tiny way the Citizen had returned his interest, and perhaps been nattered by his inability to hold back when given the opportunity to indulge his passion with her? Could she have been unable to admit any trace of an interest so far beneath her, yet not displeased to have had the indulgence of it forced upon her? Would that account for her uncommon generosity in dealing with the one who had ravished her?”

Jimbo gazed out across the audience. “I do not know the answer, but I would like to think I might guess it.”

Fleta knew before she spoke that Jimbo had won this game. She had thought that her own crisis was unique, and that the others in the Tourney were merely competing for the prize of Citizenship. Now she saw that that was not necessarily the case; each contestant might have as good reason to be here as she. She did not begrudge Jimbo the evident sympathy he had evoked in this audience.

FLETA SPEAKS SECOND, the big screen announced.

Now it was upon her! Encouraged by her opponent’s example of discretion and candor, she told her own story in similar fashion.

“There was once in the Frame o’ Phaze a unicorn filly,” she began. “She was happy in her Herd, grazing the plains and running with her companions and learning the ways o’ her kind. She labored to master her transformations, choosing one original form and one common form to complement her natural one. Her dam could become a firefly, so the filly liked the notion o’ a flying form, and chose the smallest o’ the avians, the hummingbird. Most other unicorns chose fierce hawks or fast falcons or lovely feathered birds, or even flying dragons, and some were amused that she should aspire to such an insignificant creature, but she had no fear o’ smallness, for her dam was the smallest o’ mares yet well respected by all the members o’ the Herd and o’ the neighboring Pack o’ werewolves too. Indeed, it turned out that she could feed more readily than others, needing only the nectar o’ some flower, and hide well, and it was a good choice.

“The common form was the most challenging, however, because that was human. The form itself was not difficult, but just as she had spent more time learning to fly than she had learning the birdform, she had to spend far more time learning to speak like a human than she had achieving girlform. To speak, she had to learn to think like a human, and the ways o’ human thought were marvelous and weird. So she sought help, first from acquaintances among the werewolves and vampires who came more naturally by girlform, then from the most feared o’ human folk, one o’ the Adepts. This was because her dam was oath-friend to one Adept, and he was friend to some other Adepts, and so one o’ them was willing to help the filly o’ the oath-friend. Thus it was that the filly spent some time as the guest o’ the Brown Adept, serving her as a serf might serve a Citizen, but also learning from her the complete human language and much o’ the social ways of the human species too.

“Then did the filly come to maturity, and learned the identity o’ the herb that suppressed her cycle o’ heat so that she would not be bred too soon, for the Herd Stallion was her uncle and banned from breeding her. She played with the human son o’ her dam’s oath-friend, and he showed her how his kind mated, though it were meaningless in the absence o’ heat. E’en so, she came to like that young human man, and wished she could be truly human, that she might be always with him. But he, o’ course, knew her for an animal, and while he treated her always as a companion and e’en friend, there was no way he saw her as one to breed with or, as the humans put it, marry. So she kept her desire for him hidden, knowing that any union between them was forbidden. He was after all the son o’ an Adept, one year to be Adept himself; he was far beyond the aspiration o’ a normal human woman, let alone a mere animal.”