“If something can be worked out,” he agreed. “To save the frames, and still be together.”
“Aye. And raise our foal ourselves.”
“To be perhaps the best of unicorns—”
“Or the best of men.”
“Perhaps like both: able to change form freely, yet able also to practice magic.”
“Flach, the Unicorn Adept!” she exclaimed.
Why not? “Why not unite our species with a truly superior composite?”
“And needs must we set up a house, for I fear the Herd will welcome him not.”
“Why not a castle? I am Adept now; I can make what I choose. Our son should have the best.”
“The Rovot Demesnes,” she said, smiling.
She wasn’t serious enough, so he kissed her again. Whatever the outcome of this round, they would have that success together.
It was the day of the first game. Now at last Mach discovered how they were going to make it possible to play across the frames. As before, the two selves would overlap, standing together at one end of the table. Each would play his side. But the ball, instead of passing through the no-longer-existent curtain, would fly across the net to a simulacrum of the other player at the far end.
To Mach, it looked as if Bane were standing there, paddle in hand, in Mach’s robot body, but it was probably a golem provided by the Brown Adept. The golem would not literally play; it would merely emulate Bane’s motions.
But the ball could not physically cross between the frames. What would the golem be striking?
This might be an irrelevant detail, but Mach wanted to know, as it could affect his attitude and therefore his play. He didn’t want to ask openly, which he realized was foolish; he was adapting increasingly to living ways, as he spent more time in this living body. Living creatures had awareness of pain, both physical and mental, and tended to be much more careful about things they did not quite understand than machines were. Mach was now far more sensitive than he had ever been in Proton, and he liked to believe that was an asset. So he wanted to know whether a hornet’s nest was inhabited without getting stung during the investigation, and to know the exact nature of the appearance of his opponent without suffering any embarrassment about his naïveté in asking. So he practiced another aspect of personality that came more readily to the living than to the machine: innocuous deception.
He went to Fleta for one more embrace. “Is that a golem?” he whispered to her ear.
Her ear twitched. She did retain some unicorn mannerisms in her human form! “Nay, it has no smell,” she replied. “It be a wraith.”
“Thank you.” So the whole thing, ball and player, was merely an image, a projection from the information coming through him. Trool’s spells from the Book of Magic could readily accomplish that; indeed, Mach himself could do something similar, at need.
“That be all thou dost want of me?” Fleta inquired.
Oops. “All I can ask in public,” he said, giving her backside a squeeze.
She sniffed, but she was mollified.
He returned to the table and took up his paddle. It was the standard one that Trool had made for him, without magic. In this first game, the equipment was equivalent, with each paddle meeting set specifications. The idea was to see how well each played with no advantage of equipment. “Let’s rally a little first,” he suggested.
“Aye,” Bane agreed. “This be a strange arrangement.”
Suddenly Mach wished that the two of them could be together like this when not opposing each other. That they could do without illusion what now required illusion. Maybe, after this contest was settled, they could see about that.
He picked up the ball and served it, throwing it up from his left palm in the prescribed manner, so that it was evident that his hand imparted no spin to it. It bounced on his side of the table and crossed the net. He knew that it became illusory at that point, transformed by magic to an image, while in the frame of Proton the Game Computer introduced a physical ball with the exact velocity, azimuth and spin of the one in Phaze. In Proton Mach was the image, generated holographically, seeming as real as Bane did on this side. It was an amazingly sophisticated interface, to make the appearance of an ordinary game.
Bane returned the ball, seeming at ease. It crossed back over the net. Was there a flicker as it did so? Mach could not be sure. In any event, he should not allow himself to be distracted by the intricacies of the system; he had to play as well as he could. If he even started wondering how he could move freely about, to play the ball to either side or far back from the table, without losing his overlap-contact with Mach, he would start fouling up! How much of his own motion was also illusion?
They played for a few minutes, becoming acclimatized. All was in working order. “Time for business,” Mach said, with both excitement and regret.
“Aye.” Bane caught the ball in his hand, put his hands behind him, brought them out closed and held them just below the level of the table. Mach pointed with his paddle to Bane’s right hand. Bane lifted it: empty. That meant that Bane had the first serve.
Bane served. The ball came across the net, low and fast, striking Mach’s right corner. Mach fielded it with a chop, using a short, sharp downstroke to return the ball with a backspin. This tended to slow its progress, causing it to drop to the center of Bane’s table rather toward the back edge. But the backspin did more than that. It changed the nature of the bounce, so that the ball tended to lift and fall short; an incautious player could have misjudged it and missed it for that reason. And more yet: when the other paddle touched it, the spin would tend to carry the ball down, perhaps into the net, for a miss.
But Bane now knew all that Mach did about the dynamics of play. He met the ball with a chop of his own, that countered and reversed the spin, sending the same kind of shot back.
Mach, ready for this, touched the ball lightly with his backhand, so that it bobbed up over the net and down just the other side: a shot that could be far more troublesome than it appeared, because normally a player stood back from the table.
But Bane was there, and with a quick flick of his wrist plunked the ball down and to Mach’s right, so that it bounced near the edge of the table and dropped to the side. Mach leaped to intercept it, but the table was in the way, and he could not get there in time to do more than flip it way up in a high arch over the net.
That, of course, was a setup. Bane slammed it off the far side, and Mach had no way to return it.
One-love, for Bane. Now the game was truly under way!
Mach recovered the ball and tossed it back. Bane caught it in his hand and took his stance for the next serve.
This one was backhand, cutting across to Mach’s left side. He returned it the same way as he had the first, with backspin. Mach’s return was similar again; the machine body and mind tended to stay in familiar channels. That was apt to be a weakness.
Mach followed through with the same sort of shot he had made at this point in the first rally, nipping the ball gently over the net to the center of the table. And Bane replied as he had before, with the dropshot to the side, only this time to Mach’s left. Again Mach was caught in a squeeze, and made a poor return, and got it smashed past him. Two-love for Bane.
But Mach was verifying what might be weaknesses in his opponent; that was more important than the points, at the moment. Mach had qualities of imagination he had lacked as a machine, and now he was using them for what he hoped would be his advantage. If he charted Bane’s weaknesses, he could exploit them before the game was done.
Bane’s third serve was forehand, to Mach’s backhand. One forehand crosscourt, one backhand crosscourt, one forehand downcourt—the next should be backhand downcourt, and the fifth a new variation. If so, Mach would know what to expect later in the game, and that would help immensely.