Out of Phaze

Stile nodded. “We all be starved for news! But thou— if thou be the son of mine other self, who is thy mother?”

“Sheen.”

“Sheen be the best and loveliest of women, but she also be a robot. Do robots bear babies now?”

“No. I am a robot too.” Quickly Mach explained.

“Yet thou dost resemble Bane, physically?”

“Precisely, as far as I can tell.”

“And thou dost have a soul, for now it be here.”

“And his is in my robot body,” Mach agreed.

“I suspected that a machine could have a soul when I knew Sheen,” Stile said, and his eyes looked far beyond the chamber. “Now it seems we have the proof.” He shrugged. “Tell thy mother I remember her, and be glad for her fortune in marrying Blue.” Then he left, and only the golem remained, brown and wooden, the melting ice cream untouched before it.

“He seemed not much interested in thee!” Fleta said indignantly.

Mach smiled. “He was interested. He is like my father; only a small fraction of the thought and emotion in him leaks out. I’m glad to have met him, and I shall carry back his message.”

“Methinks Stile was a bit too restrained,” Brown remarked. “He will be watching thee, Mach.”

“I know it.” Mach looked at Fleta. “I think our time together is limited, now that I have the key to my return.”

“Aye,” she agreed faintly.

“I will provide you with a suite here, until the time,” Brown said.

It was a nice suite. “She understands,” Fleta whispered.

“She understands,” Mach agreed. “She may have had some forbidden love of her own.”

For the first time, they spent a night in human quarters, without fear of pursuit or discovery, and it was sheer delight. They made love with the desperation born of the knowledge of coming separation.

“But surely I need not stay always in Proton,” Mach murmured. “If I could come here once, I could come here again, at least for a visit, to see you.”

“Aye,” she breathed with sudden hope. “If Bane agreed. I don’t know how he would feel—“

“Bane be a good man. He would do it.” They lay in silence for a time. Then he asked: “You told the Brown Adept that you love me.”

“I had no right,” she said.

“Surely it has happened before! With animals being able to assume human form, and sharing human intelligence—has no unicorn, or werewolf, or vampire ever before loved a human being?”

“Oh, aye,” she said. “But it be discouraged for aught but play.”

“Play—as in bed? But not serious, as in love?”

“Aye. Love be special.”

“Surely it is! And until I occupied this human body, I think play was all I ever experienced. But now I believe I love you, Fleta, and I don’t see how that can be wrong. I know what you are, and if you love me too—“

She shook her head. “Mach, mayhap there be secret love twixt our kinds on occasion, but ne’er open. Sometimes a human man will take a werebitch as a concubine, and she would do it not if she loved him not. Sometimes an animal be so fetching, like Suchevane the vampiress, that she could take a human man.”

“Who?”

“Suchevane. She be the loveliest of her kind. Methinks Bane played a game with her, too.” She grimaced. “But thou dost have no need to meet her,” she concluded firmly.

“So animals and human beings never marry.”

“Nor speak the three,” she agreed.

“The three? Three whats?”

“When thy kind—and sometimes other kinds—bespeak true love, the one will address the other three times, and then there be no doubt.”

“Three times? You mean if I said ‘I love you’ three times, then you would believe me?”

“Thee,” she said. “But say it not, Mach.”

“Thee? But I don’t talk that way.”

“Aye. Thou art not of Phaze.”

“Thee—three times?”

“Say it not!” she repeated. “This be ne’er offhand!”

“I don’t understand.”

“Aye,” she murmured, and kissed him.

In the morning they joined Brown for breakfast, then went out for a walk around the Demesnes. Mach paused to concentrate on his other self—and felt Bane much more definitely than before. “He’s closer!” he said. “He must be tuning in on me, making his way here.”

“Aye,” she said, her lip trembling.

He kissed her. “I will return!”

“I will wait for thee.”

They were coming into a pleasant flowery garden, whose blooms were all shades of brown. “I’m getting to like the color,” Mach remarked.

“These be grown on the best fertilizer there be,” Fleta said.

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Unicorn manure.”

He laughed, thinking it a joke. But she was serious. “When my dam, Neysa, met Brown, and Brown helped Stile, the unicorns agreed to provide her fertilizer for her garden, and so it has been e’er since.”

That reminded him of her nature. She had not assumed her natural form since their arrival at the Brown Demesnes. “Fleta, before we part, would you—“ She glanced askance at him.

“Would you play me a tune? I think your music is lovely.”

“But to do that—“