Unicorn Point

“What would a machine know about niceness?” he re torted, smiling.

“Certainly not a great deal from association.” He grabbed her and kissed her. “How long have we been married? Two and a half years?”

“You may have slipped a decimal, sir.”

“I get that from association.”

“I doubt it.”

He held her a moment more. “Thou dost still so much resemble the metal maid I met and loved, when I returned to life.” He reverted to his native pattern of speech only in times of emotion, or for effect.

“I am the same!” she protested. “Crafted to please your other self, shaped to his taste.”

“And to mine,” he agreed. “I loved one before thee, but she came to love me less, and so I left her—and found thee.  Thy love never flagged.”

“Because you never changed my program. If you want me to have another personality—”

“Tease me not! In my life must needs there be one thing constant, and that be thee and thy program.” He squeezed her close, and kissed her again.

“Careful, Blue,” she murmured in his ear. “You are get ting aroused before schedule.”

“Trust thee to remember that!” he exclaimed, for it was true.

He released her and faced the exit panel. “Mustn’t keep my audience waiting,” he said, reverting to the Proton mode of speech.

“Play thy role well, my love,” she said.  He smiled. She normally used Phaze language only to tease him, but this time he knew it was more than that. “Fear thou not, 0 Lady Sheen. I shall play them a game that shall keep them rapt.” Then he stepped out.

For this was the point of this exercise. He had trained his grandchild Nepe carefully, as Stile had trained Flach in Phaze.  He knew about this because the two children were able to communicate with each other: a secret only Stile and Blue and their ladies (Agnes included) had known until this point.  Now Stile had given the signal for the children to hide, and Blue had to trust his other selfs judgment. He did not know where Nepe had gone, but he did know she would need about twenty-four hours to secure her situation. It was now his job to provide her that period. The future of this ploy, and likely the planet, depended on his success in creating an effective diversion.

Now we shall play a game, he thought as he emerged into the hall. A game of high stakes! He knew that every word he spoke and every action he took would be noted, outside the protection of his Citizen’s sanctuary. The Contrary Citizens believed he had some complicity in Nepe’s disappearance, as indeed he had. He had made his provocative calls to ensure that belief. Now he was going out, and they should believe that he was going to contact his granddaughter. If they were assured of that, they would put all their resources into watch ing him, instead of into the more routine but effective effort of a cordon and pattern search for her. It was a ploy so obvious that only a fool should fall for it—and he hoped to make a fool of the enemy Citizens.

He walked around the halls as if merely exercising—or making sure he was unobserved. Of course there should be no way to shake the hidden observation of the enemy; he depended on that. If they lost him, they might by default get moving on the pattern search, expensive and disruptive, as that would be. He was offering them a seemingly much easier route.

After he was satisfied that he was alone, he approached a Citizen portal and summoned his transport. This was a box somewhat like an ancient elevator, that traveled through channels unavailable to serfs. The sides consisted of holographs of Phaze, so that it looked as if he were in a glass cage swinging along over the Phaze surface. He loved Phaze, of course, and wished he could revisit it; but he loved this technological frame more. To him, the ways of magic were familiar and frankly somewhat dull, while the ways of science were, even after a quarter century, novel and exciting. With magic, each spell could be invoked only once; with science there was no limit. And Sheen was a creature of science. He had been fascinated by her from the outset, knowing her nature; she represented in one package all the wonders of this frame. To the locals, the notion of a living man loving a robot was ludicrous—but Blue was not a local, he was an immigrant from a foreign frame. Sheen was beautiful, she was conscious, she was feeling, she was loving. Science had fashioned the whole of her, and that was much of her allure. She had loved Stile, and lost him to the Lady Blue; but she had been ready to accept Stile’s alternate self instead, and that had been the key. A living woman would not have done it, but the robot lacked the particular consciousness of self that counted here. Blue had Stile’s body and Stile’s nature; he was Stile’s other self. Sheen was programmed to love the first two, and though she knew of the third, her programming did not find it significant. She had, in effect, Stile under another name.