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. "Invoke 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.