Out of Phaze by Piers Anthony Page A

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. “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