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“It’s true,” the feminine one admitted. She poured tea from the teapot into four little cups, passed them to the others. The second one opened a hamper and took out biscuits and cakes, handing them around along with small white cloth napkins. They all fell to with an appetite. The three locals ate just like people.

“Do you swim?” Swan asked. “Swim, or bathe in hot tubs?”

“I bathe in hot tubes,” the third one said, causing the others to cackle muffledly into their napkins.

“Can we do that?” Swan asked. “Do you bathe without clothes on? Because that way I could see your whole bodies.”

“And we could see yours!”

“That’s fine.”

“Looks like it would be more than fine,” the feminine one murmured, and the others threw back their heads and laughed.

“Let’s do it!” the second one exclaimed.

“I want to finish my tea,” the feminine one said primly. “It’s good.”

When they were done, the three of them stood up with the grace of dancers and led Swan to the edge of the pool, where a few people were already swimming, some clothed, some bare. There were small children in the shallowest pool, where a fountain of water fell on a rounded little roof and made a water-walled refuge. Swan’s three hosts put down their lunch gear on the deck and then pulled their dresses over their heads and walked over to the water. The feminine one was slight and girlish, and the other two had the willowy bodies of gynandromorphs: slightly wide hips, rounded pecs that were not quite breasts, in-between torso-to-leg ratio and waist-to-hip ratio, furry genitals that appeared to be mostly female, but with dark masses that might have been small penises and testicles, like Swan’s-one couldn’t say more without a further exploration. Although it would prove little, as genitals would be far easier to simulate than hands, being already rubbery.

Into the water then. Swan saw that they swam well, almost floated; seemed to have the same specific gravity as human beings. Probably not steel bones, then. Probably not a completely machine interior, covered by a layer of grown flesh and skin. Taking a deep breath floated them, almost, just like it did her. Their eyes too-their eyes blinked, stared, glanced sidelong, were wet. Could you make every part of a human, put it all together, and have it work? Print up a composite? It seemed unlikely. Nature itself was not that good at it, she thought as her bad knee twinged. To make a simulacrum… well, maybe you could focus on just the functional aspects. But wasn’t that what brains did too?

“You silly girls are kind of amazing,” Swan said. “I can’t figure you out.”

They laughed.

“No real people would spend all day pretending to a stranger that they were robots,” Swan objected. “You must be robots.”

“The oddest things are most likely to be true,” the second one said. “It’s a well-recognized test in Bible exegesis. They think Jesus probably did curse a fig tree, or else why have the story in there?”

More laughter. They really were silly girls. Maybe you could make a robot think only up to the level of a twelve-year-old.

But the way they swam. The way they walked. These were hard things to do; or so it seemed.

“This is weird,” she said to herself, pleased. She had thought it was going to be easy.

As she walked into a knee-deep area of the pool, they stared up at her frankly, as she had stared at them.

“Ooh, nice legs,” the third one said. “Nice body.”

“Thank you,” Swan said, over the moans of the other two. The feminine one exclaimed, “No, that’s not all right to say, some people are offended by comments about the aesthetic impacts of their bodies on others!”

“I’m not,” Swan offered.

“All right, good then,” said the feminine one.

“I was only being polite,” said the third one.

“You were being forward. You had no idea whether it was polite or not.”

“It was just a compliment. There’s no reason to be overfine about such things. If you stray over limits, people will simply assume you don’t know the protocols of their culture but are well-intentioned nevertheless.”

“ People will, but how do you know this person isn’t a simulacrum, sent here to test us?”

And they laughed till they choked, splashing each other all the while. Swan joined the splashing, then sat in the water and ottered around them for a while. Then she seized the third one to her and kissed it on the mouth. The nondescript kissed back for a second, then pulled away. “Hey what’s this! I don’t know you well enough for this, I don’t think!”

“So what? Didn’t you like it?” And Swan kissed it again, followed its twists away, feeling its tongue be surprised to be touched by another tongue.

Pulling away, the nondescript said, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop!”