It remained a question who would want to do such a thing, but on the other hand, people did odd things all the time. And making an artificial human was a very old dream. Maybe it was pointless, but it had a tradition. And here they were, after all, and she wasn’t sure yet what she was facing. That in itself was interesting.

If you had sex with a machine, was that interesting, or just a complicated form of self-satisfaction? Would a qube register your responses to it one way or another? Would it too be having sex?

She would have to try it if she wanted to find out. It would be just another approach to the more general problem of qube consciousness. What one had to remember with qubes was that no matter the evidence to the contrary, there was no one home: no consciousness, no Other, just a mechanism programmed to respond to stimuli in a certain fashion by its programmers. No matter how complex the algorithms, they did not add up to a consciousness. Swan fully believed this, but even Pauline fairly often surprised her, so it could be hard not to fall for the illusion.

“Your skin is beautiful. You feel like flesh of my flesh.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you think, do you think?”

“I most definitely think,” the feminine one replied.

“So you have a sequence of thoughts that wander from one thought to the next in a more or less continuous flow, free associating from one topic to the next, across all the possible thoughts you could have?”

“I’m not sure it’s quite like that. I think it’s more a matter of stimulus and response, with my thoughts responding to the stimuli of my incoming information. Now, for instance, I think about you and your questions, about the green of my dress as compared to the green of this grass, about what I will eat for dinner, as I am a bit hungry—”

“So you eat food?”

“Yes, we eat food. In fact I have a hard time not eating too much!”

“Me too,” Swan said. “So, do you ever think about having sex with me?”

The three of them stared at her.

“Well, but we have just met,” one said.

“That’s often when people think of it.”

“Really? I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Believe me, it’s true.”

“I don’t have any good reason to believe you,” the second one said. “I don’t know you well enough for that.”

“Does one ever know one well enough for that?” the third one asked.

They laughed.

“ Believesomeone else?” the feminine one said. “I don’t think so!”

They laughed again. Maybe they were laughing too much.

“Are you people on drugs?” Swan asked.

“Is caffeine a drug?”

Now they were giggling.

“You three are silly girls,” Swan said.

“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.”

“ Peoplewill, 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!”

The feminine one had stood up and taken a step toward them, as if to intervene, and Swan turned and pushed her off her feet, so that she splashed hard into the shallow water. “What are you doing!” the girl cried fearfully, and Swan popped her on the mouth with a left jab. Immediately the girl’s head flew back and her mouth started to bleed, and she cried out and rushed away. The two nondescripts splashed between her and Swan, blocking Swan from her, shouting at Swan to get back. Swan raised her fists and howled as she pummeled them, and they splashed backward to get away from her, amazed and appalled. Swan stopped following them, and after they climbed out of the pool they stopped and huddled together, looking back at her, the hurt one holding her mouth. Red blood.