JonVon’s words came to her in two steps—the flash of their general sense, followed an instant later by an arranged sentence. That was her speech center operating in reverse, taking a series of swift, fleeting inputs from JonVon and forming them into prim, linear sentences.

“What a work of art we are,” she said.

“Taken vaguely from him, yes.”

She constantly forgot how quickly JonVon could search out and scan a vast literature. “I’ll have to keep up your poetry lessons. You show a certain aptitude.”

She guessed that the program was reluctant to use feel and chose perceive only after a long comparison search and an inner struggle. Machines did not share a human’s casual confusion of senses and thoughts, since their input paths were vastly different. JonVon, though, could fool laymen into thinking he was a real person by using the terms in the normal, slippery human way. People commonly said I feel for I think; machines usually kept ironclad walls between the two meanings.

Which was one of the reasons she was doing all this, as well. Throw a rock at a woman and she could quickly digest the information incoming on sense channels, process it into intuitive vectors, speeds, and angles—then race forward, project, make approximate solutions-all to see where she should dodge.

Silicon-based machines could do that, but quite differently. They much preferred—meaning, humans were far better at programming them to—taking it as a problem in introductory physics, setting out the initial conditions all neat and clean, then integrating the equations of motion forward to see the exact result. Fine. Only by then you’re dead.

“Another spurt of humor! You’re doing that more often now.”

“That was irony you used, not yuk-yuk.”

She suspected JonVon used dimly see as a speaking convention. He did not have real power of language metaphor yet. “Well, all humor is based on two elements—ridicule and incongruity. Irony has…” She frowned.

YES?

“There are some things…”

“Nope, wrong cliché. There are some subjects beyond explanation.”

“Boy, you’re fast-accessing today. Can you do that and monitor this experiment at the same time?”

Virginia could not remember inserting that smug lilt into this particular simulation. Was it mimicking Saul? JonVon had been in link contact with her lover a lot, lately. And she should never forget that JonVon, as a bio-organic construct, was midway between humans and silicon computers in his information processing. That led to unexpected capabilities.

“Can you stop the tickling?”

JonVon’s input broke into two channels, which she felt as a sluggish red stream of rusty words, with blue darting commentary slipping in and around them.

“Stop! I don’t want my sex life played back by you.”

“I did?”

Her head was clamped in close-packed foam, which proved to be good foresight—she would’ve flinched with embarrassment, otherwise.

“How much do you…” Well, of course. The times with Saul.

“Oh, it’s not your fault.”

“No! I need this for the mechs.”

She supposed this last sentence was supposed to be reassuring. The program had an uncanny way of responding to her apprehensions. Still… “Just out of curiosity, what has my motor skill at handling tools—that is what we’re trawling for in my middle lobes, isn’t it? —what has that got to do with spreading my thighs?”

“Self-programming?”

“Oh. Experience, you mean.”

“Maybe. Some things I’d rather get safely out of a book.”

He’s being diplomatic. After all, he doesn’t have the option of directexperience. “Can you scan the nearby memory tie-in?”

Was there a hint of reluctance? “Can you assign a date when those complexes were laid down?”

Yes. That warm spring Hawaiian evening, fragrant with promise. A movie and a shake and off to the beach for some friendly necking. Only the warm kisses and gently probing, caressing hands hadn’t stopped there. Something powerful had seized her in a way she had never imagined—no matter how many thousands of times she had already thought of it, tried to visualize it—and then they were actually, unbelievably, doing it. And rather than a fiery yet lofting sensation, a cosmic rapture, a mystical union, as her dreams had envisioned, it was raw, crude, uncomfortable, painful, and finally depressing.

“A simple rhyme isn’t poetry,” she said primly.