Robot Adept

The second grid was 5G, Separate and General: obviously she had had the numbers again, and chose to keep the two of them apart, as an uncertain unicorn would. This category contained such things as origami (paper-folding), crosswords, cryptograms and other noninteractive paper games. The assisting tools were pencil or paper or both, nominally; actually it was all done on the console screen.

The final determination was Cryptogram: the interpretation of a set of symbols that represented a quotation in English. Mach didn’t like this; Agape could handle it, but Fleta would have real trouble. Unicorns had no literary education to draw upon, and indeed, it was sheer luck that Fleta was even literate; xnost did not go to that extreme when adapting to the human form. The danger was that Agape would play too well, and reveal her nonunicorn nature.

RULES: the screen said, for the contestants and for the private viewers, such as Mach. EACH NUMBER STANDS FOR ONE LETTER OF THE ALPHABET. SPACING AND PUNCTUATION ARE NORMAL. TO PLACE LETTERS, TOUCH NUMBER AND LETTER SIMULTANEOUSLY; TO MAKE CORRECTION, TOUCH AGAIN. A FULL LIST OF QUOTATION AUTHORS IS AVAILABLE, OR AN AUTHOR MAY BE REQUESTED BY DESCRIPTION. CONTESTANTS WILL WORK INDEPENDENTLY ON IDENTICAL QUOTATIONS. WINNER IS FIRST TO COMPLETE QUOTATION AND AUTHOR CORRECTLY. PLAY COMMENCES WHEN BOTH PLAYERS SIGNIFY READINESS BY TOUCHING “READY” SQUARE.

In a moment, the screens appeared on Mach’s screen: Agape’s on the left. Sharp’s on the right. The players would not know who was doing better, but the watchers could see it plainly. There was a row of letters across the top, and other directives at the bottom. Each screen looked like this:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

123456!-4758-975830’94

(11)(12)-32(13)26(14)-(15)4-4729-758(16):

(18)2332(15)1-(18)5(16)09(18)5(16)47

LETTERS NUMBERED FROM 1 TO (18) AUTHORS: LIST DESCRIPTION

Mach was experienced as a gamesman, and would have been happy to tackle this challenge. He would have started by touching AUTHORS and DESCRIPTION and requesting a selection of authors with first names of seven letters and last names of ten; that could have given him an immediate break, though the computer tried to foil that approach by having a number of authors for every such combination, sometimes too many to make it feasible. But neither contestant tried that.

Sharp knew some of the basics. He counted, and discovered that there were eight 7’s, more than any other letter. He knew that E was the most common letter used in English, so he filled in E’s above the 7’s. That gave him a quick start, but Mach wasn’t sure; in short quotations like this, distribution could be atypical, and Mach noticed that five of those 7’s were preceded by 4’s. Why were so many locked together like that? It was certainly possible, but not usual.

Agape, trying to think like a unicorn, was having more trouble. She did not count letters, she just pondered the whole, biting her lip. (He assumed that last detail; she was not shown on the screen.)

Sharp, buoyed by his success with E, pondered the doubled 12’s near the end. He tried MESS for the last word, but that gave him -SS- for the third one from the end, and he didn’t like that. So he changed the last to TELL, and that gave him -LL- for the other. He struggled with that, and was in the process of coming to the conclusion that he could not make it with that E; but he obviously did not want to give it up.

Agape, meanwhile, in a fit of inspiration calculated to convince everyone that she was Fleta, however badly she might lose the game, suddenly touched letters rapidly and filled in that last word as THEE. Mach had to applaud the genius of that; of course that was the way a creature from Phaze would see it!

Now she filled in her E’s, T’s, and H’s, and suddenly she had a lot of notions to pursue. She found the second word beginning with TH and immediately filled in THOU, as Fleta would, and followed through with the 0’s and U’s elsewhere in the sample. The word following THOU was -HOU—‘-T; she had no hesitation about completing it as SHOULD’ST and filling in its other letters elsewhere. Her display now looked like this:

_ _ L T O _!—T H O U—S H O U L D ‘S T

1 2 3 4 5 6!—4 7 5 8—9 7 5 8 3 0 ‘9 4

_ E—L _ _ _ _ _—_ T—T H _ S—H O U _:

(11)(12)-32(13)26(14)-(15)4-4729-758(16):

E _ _ L _ _ D—H _ T H—_ E E D—0 _—T H E E!

(12)6(14)3(15)60-7(15)47-6(12)(12)0-5(17)-47(12)(12)!

_ _ LL _ _ _—_ O _ D S _ O _ T H

(18)2332(15)1—(18)5(16)09(18)5(16)47

Mach stared at it. Could she actually be on the right track? This certainly seemed to have possibilities! Sharp, meanwhile, was still agonizing over the loss of his easy E. That was a mistake; he was wasting time, being emotionally committed to an approach that wasn’t working.

Fleta—no, Agape, he corrected himself—filled in the a for HATH, which also gave her AT. This was definitely falling into place!

She filled in F for FEED. Unicorns were always interested in that. But that made the first word—LTOF, which was awkward.