Out of Phaze

  They threaded a virtual labyrinth, arriving at last at a strange complex. The girl took a stance before a kind of pedestal with a blank window set into it.

  She glanced at Bane. “Well, get on over there, Mach,” she said. “You scared to play me?”

  He went to the other side of the pedestal, where a similar window was set. But he did not know what was expected of him next.

  The window lighted. A crosshatch of lines appeared. Across the top was written a combination of numbers and words, and down the side were letters and words. The top ones were brighter: 1. PHYSICAL, 2. MENTAL, 3. CHANCE, 4. ARTS.

  “What’s keeping you?” the girl demanded.

  Bane didn’t want to admit that he had no idea what to do, because obviously his other self understood this business, and he didn’t want to give away the fact that he was not Mach. “Why dost thou not make a suggestion?” he inquired.

  She smiled. “Oho! The fish is eager! Well, I’ll be direct, Mach. The news is fresh that the cyborg dumped you, so I figure maybe you’ll fare better with your own kind. I don’t want to beat you, I want to win you. If you’ve got any interest, give me the physical. You won’t regret it.”

  Her words were indecipherable, but her manner suggested intimacy. This girl wanted romance! Bane didn’t want to get his other self into anything he might regret upon his return, but feared that turning down this offer could be awkward. “Just tell me what to do.”

  She licked her lips. “So it’s that way, is it?” Her voice lowered. “Touch the one, lover.”

  Bane realized that she referred to the print. He brought his finger to the lighted number 1 and pressed it.

  Abruptly the first square of the pattern became bright, and the words PHYSICAL and NAKED. This was like the paper game, that his father had shown him, wherein one person chose from one border, and the other from the other, and where their choices intersected was the decision. The challenge was to outguess the opponent, so that what he thought would bring him success actually brought him defeat.

  But what did PHYSICAL/NAKED mean? The girl’s attitude suggested one thing, but since they were already naked, he hesitated to assume too much.

  The square expanded to fill the window. A new cross-hatch appeared, and new numbers and words. Across the top was written 5. SEPARATE, 6. INTERACTIVE, 7. COMBAT, 8. COOPERATIVE, and down the left side, more brightly, E. EARTH, F. FIRE, G. GAS, H. H2O. He recognized the four elements, earth, fire, air and water, which were fundamental to the various types of magic. Of course there was another element, more important.

  “Come on, Mach,” the girl urged. “Make your play.”

  So he touched a lighted word at random: GAS.

  A new square illuminated, on the line he had selected, and in the second column. INTERACTIVE/GAS. He wasn’t sure he liked the notion. Then a smaller pattern of nine squares appeared, with a list of words down side: PILLOW-FIGHTING, SEX, TAG, TRAPEZE.

  “You know what Tilly wants!” the girl said. In the center square appeared the word SEX. “Make your picks Macho!”

  Uncertainly, he touched the word PILLOW. Immediately it brightened. Then, catching on, he touched corner square, and the word jumped into it. Who said there was no magic in the science frame!

  Tilly put SEX into another corner. So it went, with Bane selecting a variety of terms, she only one. Then they touched their lighted sides, and the chosen square appeared: PILLOW-FIGHTING.

  “Oh, damn!” Tilly swore. “You cheated!”

  “I thought I would surprise thee,” he said, somewhat lamely. He had picked randomly again, but was just as glad it hadn’t finished with the word she so evidently desired. It was not that she was unattractive, but surely such a thing was no game between strangers!

  “You surprised me,” she agreed. She smiled. “You surprised me when you even agreed to play! You never gave me a tumble before, you know.” Then she cocked her head at him. “Thee?”

  Bane realized that he had made an error of language. The girl had consistently used “you.” That was evidently the way they spoke, here. In perpetual plural.

  He smiled. “See? Surprised you again.”

  She pursed her lips. “You are different today! Doris must have made you flip out.”

  She had mentioned that he had been “dumped” by a “cyborg.” Was that a description of another person? If so, it must be Doris. So he—or at least Mach—was suffering from a romantic separation. And Tilly was eager to step in to take Doris’ place. Assuming he had interpreted the signals correctly. But how did this game of patterns of words relate?

  “Well, come on, robot,” she said. “You want pillows, I’ll give you pillows! I’ll knock you into the muck!”

  She led the way to another chamber. Bane followed, glad to let her maintain the initiative. He believed he knew what pillow-fighting was; it was a favorite game in Phaze. He had played many physical and mental games, and become quite good at several, including this one.

  He was correct. This chamber was a huge muddy pit, with a heavy pole crossing it from side to side. A walkway around the edge provided access to the far side of the pole. A number of solid pillows were suspended from hooks near the entrance.

  They each took a pillow. Bane made his way to the far side of the pole, then hiked himself onto it. Tilly did the same from her side.

  How serious was this supposed to be? Tilly was about his own size, as he was small for a male, but she massed less because of the difference in proportions. He surely could knock her off the pole if he wanted to. But why dump a lovely young woman into the mud? He would have to take his cue from her, again.

  They worked their way toward each other until they met in the center. Tilly grinned. “Dump or get dumped!” she exclaimed, and swung her pillow at him in a great circle.

  Bane ducked his head, and her pillow passed over his head. Such a miss could cause a person to overbalance and fall untouched, but she was experienced; she simply continued her swing in a full circle and came at him again, bopping him soundly on the shoulder. Her proficiency caught him by surprise.

  Bane started to fall. To restore his balance, he had to swing his own pillow hard. He caught her on the side of the head with a loud and harmless smack. But already she was swinging again, aiming for his face—and when he ducked, she brought her pillow down to score anyway.

  This was fun! Apparently it was to be a real fight; she wanted to bop and be bopped. He whipped his pillow about in a confined arc, scoring on her bosom.

  “So that’s the way you want it!” she cried gleefully. “Take that, machine!” And she whammed him on his own chest.

  The contest turned out to be about even. Tilly was good at this, and kept her balance, and had surprising endurance for a woman; she did not seem to be tiring at all. Neither was he; in fact he wasn’t even breathing hard.

  Breathing hard? He wasn’t breathing at all! He had been taking breaths only when he talked.

  Stunned, Bane forgot where he was. Tilly caught him with a powerful whomp, and he lost his balance and spun down. He dropped into the mud below, chagrined.

  But almost without pause, she dropped too. “I beat you, robot!” she cried, and smacked him on the ear with a handful of mud.

  “Hey!” he protested. He scooped up some mud himself and dropped it on her fair hair.

  “Oh, yeah?” she exclaimed with zest. “Take that!” She flung herself upon him, bearing him back into the muck, her body literally plastered against his. Their heads sank under the surface, but it seemed to make no difference; he felt no suffocation and his eyes did not smart.

  He tried to extricate himself, but she held him tight, her face rubbing against his. There was mud on her mouth, but that didn’t stop her; she jammed her lips against his for a kiss.

  Bane would have found all this far more intriguing if he had not been distracted by his discovery. How could he not be breathing, yet feeling no discomfort? That was impossible!

  “Come on, react!” Tilly said in his ear. “In
voke your passion circuit, and we’ll do it right here!”

  Passion circuit? She referred to him as if he were some kind of inanimate thing like the pedestal with the magic windows. What was it called? A machine.

  A machine? She had called him that, and “robot.” Vaguely he remembered: a robot was a walking machine. His mother had mentioned one she had encountered that looked and acted exactly like a living woman, with a suggestive name, Sheen. Sheen, machine. But a good person, his mother had said.

  Tilly wrapped her legs around him, hauling him in so close that the mud squeezed out between them. “Come on, make with the self-will! Mine’s all the way on! What’s that cyborg got that I haven’t got?”

  Sheen machine. Mach machine. Circuits. Unbreathing. Tilly wasn’t breathing either, except when she talked. “We’re both machines!” he exclaimed, appalled.

  “It took you nineteen years to catch on to that?” she asked, sliding against him. “But we can do it just as well as the live ones can! Let’s prove it!”

  Bane was rescued from his predicament by a new voice. “Players vacate the chamber,” it boomed. “New contestants entering.”

  “Oh, plop!” Tilly said, hurling a mudball out. “Why couldn’t you have hurried, Mach?”

  They climbed out, and made their way to the shower at the side, where the mud was quickly rinsed away. Then they returned to the hall.

  “Let’s go to my chamber,” Bane said, before she could come up with something worse.

  She ran her hand caressingly across his shoulder. “Oho! So that’s why you held off!”

  They walked back. Tilly knew the way, which was just as well, because Bane had lost track. Soon they stood before the section of wall he had stepped through.

  “Well, say your code,” she urged him.

  A code. Something he must utter, like a spell, to make the wall become porous? He had no idea what word was required. “I-I seem to have forgotten,” he said.

  “Forgotten!” she cried, laughing. “As if a computer could ever forget anything by accident!” Then she sobered. “But you’ll not get out of it that readily, Mach. We’ll use my chamber.”

  “Your chamber,” he agreed numbly. So machines did not forget. How long could he maintain this charade?

  She led him to her chamber, nearby. She spoke a word, and the wall fogged. They passed through.

  Her room was very much like his, small and almost devoid of decoration. Machines, it seemed, did not require many human artifacts.

  “How would you like it?” Tilly inquired. “We’re private here; no limits.”

  There was too much he didn’t understand. Bane decided it would be better to tell her the truth. “I must explain—I’m not what you take me for,” he said.

  “Not through with Doris?” she asked. “Look, Mach, she’s so hot with that android now, you’d better write her off. She’s never coming back to you. What’s a cyborg, anyway, but a pickled human brain stuck in a robot body? I never did see what you saw in her. You’re a robot, Mach! And not just any robot. You’re going to be a Citizen one year.”

  A human brain in a robot body? That sounded grotesque! “It’s not—not Doris. I don’t even remember her. It’s—I’m not Mach. And I think I need help.”

  She eyed him. “This is a private game, right? What are you up to?”

  “I’m from another frame,” he said. “I switched places—”

  “Another frame,” she repeated. “What do you claim you are?”

  “A human being. Alive. Only now I’m caught in—”

  “So you want to pretend you’re not a machine,” she said. “That’s not a good game. It hasn’t been that long, historically, since we self-willed machines were granted the status of serfs. The Citizens would love to take it away from us. All they need is a pretext. You know that. So find some other game; this one’s dangerous.”

  “This is no game!” Bane protested. “I’m from Phaze, the frame of magic, but—”

  “All right, so you won’t get serious,” she said, pouting. “So let me show you something.”

  “Show me?”

  She brought her left hand to her face. She put her little finger between her teeth and bit down on it. Her white teeth sank into the flesh and tore a small hole in it. She worked at the wound, biting deeper. There was no blood.

  “There,” she said after a moment, surveying the damaged finger. “I reached the nerve-wire. Now give me yours.”

  “Mine?”

  She reached out and caught his left hand, and brought it to her mouth. Bane did not resist. He watched while she put his own little finger to her mouth, and bit into it. He felt no pain, though soon the substance of his finger was torn open. It seemed to be padding, and deeper inside, a wire. Exactly like hers.

  He was, indeed, a machine. Rather, his other self, Mach, was. A nonliving robot in human form. That much Tilly had demonstrated beyond question.

  “Now I’ll show you how to bypass the clumsy human sexual process,” Tilly said. “We robots have something much better.”

  She held his left hand with her right hand, and brought her left hand to it. She touched her chewed little finger to his, pushing them together so that their central wires touched.

  Suddenly Bane was transported by a pleasure so wild and strong as to be unutterable. It originated in his finger, but was so potent that it spread immediately throughout his body. It was indeed like sexual fulfillment, but more intense, and it kept on and on, never diminishing. He realized that Tilly, too, was experiencing it. Her face was fixed in an expression of rapture.

  Then the contact slipped, and the pleasure faded. Now Bane felt depleted. He sat heavily on the bed.

  “See?” Tilly asked. “It continues as long as contact is kept, as long as our energy sustains it. Living people can experience it only for a few seconds, but we have no such limit.”

  “No such limit,” Bane agreed, staring at his torn finger. This was illicit pleasure, surely—but what potency it had!

  “Now tell me more about how you aren’t really a robot,” she said.

  He realized that she was unable to believe his story. She was a machine, subject to the limitations of that state. Her imagination simply was insufficient.

  Yet the truth was the truth. And he still had to locate his other self, so as to be able to change back. He certainly didn’t want to be trapped forever in this frame, where machines made love by touching torn fingers!

  “We’ve recharged some,” she said. “Let’s do some more time.” She extended her little finger.

  For a moment Bane was tempted. The pleasure was indeed compelling! But he realized that if he allowed himself to be caught up in that again, he might never want to resume his search for his other self, and that would not be right. He exercised what discipline he could muster. “No. I have another job to do.”

  “You mean I wrecked my finger, and I’m going to get in trouble with the repair authority, and you’re not even going to let me get full measure from it?” she demanded.

  “It—it’s an illicit pleasure,” he said. “We—we’re supposed to do it in the human fashion.”

  Suddenly she was alarmed. “You aren’t going to tell!”

  Telling—about the illicit act. That would surely bring trouble to them both, and further complicate his effort. “No. I just—just don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “Then get out of here!” she cried angrily. “I never want to see you again!”

  He walked to the wall. It fogged, needing no spell from this side, and he stepped into the hall.

  So at last he was free of the robot woman. That was a mixed satisfaction; she was very pretty, and she had shown him a lot that he needed to know, about the Game and the premises. And physical pleasure such as he had never before known. But it was best that he stay away from her; he knew that. She was not, in his idiom, a nice girl. Rather, a nice machine. She would get in trouble, if not today, some future day.

  But what was he to do now? He still har
dly knew his way around these premises, and it was evident that his other self was long gone from this region, and now he had an injured finger that would be difficult to explain.

  He needed help. But where was he to find it?

  Disconsolately, he walked down the hall. Other naked young folk passed him, and he acknowledged their greetings, but kept his left hand curled into a fist to conceal the finger.

  Obviously he wasn’t going to locate his other self by aimless wandering. He had to get smart about his search. He had to figure out where he was in relation to Phaze, knowing that the geographies of the two frames were identical, and where Mach would be likely to wander, and go there. Simple enough, surely; he could step outside and study the landscape. He knew the features of his world, and could normally locate his position by a simple survey of the horizon.

  But where was outside? This building seemed endless!

  He set about it methodically: finding his way out. If he went in any single direction far enough, he had to come to the edge of the building. Then he would follow that edge until he found an exit. It was like locating water in the wilderness: keep going down, and sooner or later water would appear, for it also sought the lowest regions.

  But when he tried, he discovered that the halls did not go in single directions. They curved this way and that, and made right-angle turns, and took magically moving stairs to upper floors, and magically descending chambers to nether regions. It was like one huge labyrinth that threatened to get him hopelessly lost before he really got started. In the wilderness he could have coped readily enough; this foreign environment had him baffled.

  He would have to inquire. But the others thought he was Mach, who should know the way out; to ask would only get laughter, or perhaps some interaction like that with Tilly, the opportunist female machine. Better to avoid that.

  So he continued to walk the halls, his frustration mounting. The others he passed glanced at him with increasing perplexity, but did not interfere.

  Then a young woman approached. She had flowing red hair, very full breasts, and a kind of rippling walk that forced him to avert his eyes lest he suffer an embarrassing reaction. He hoped she would not try to talk with him.