My Library

edged wild rote to me. Smooth, slick handle—anything, AA hitting a high one like that! What got into him?) (Being a female, a woman.) I plied carefully. (Must have lived it three, four hundred years back, uh, past, uh, before now.) BB blanked. Serial time was too much for him. I had a percept that was new to me, too. I had always assumed repeaters lived sequential lives relative to time. Either this is not the case or AA is the rare exception. BB opened slightly. (That’s the way it is being female?) I flickered. (Well, uh … that’s the way most females lived back then. It’s different now … I mean, different for some of them.) (And how many of you humans are female?) I flickered again. (About half, I guess. Ought to be half.) BB vibrated. (Why would anybody want to be a woman!) I smoothed. (There are compensations, balances. Some males suspect women secretly rule the earth.) BB focused intently. (Do they?) I turned inward, then rolled. (I’m male at this point, and I suspect they do.) BB turned inward and closed. I was indeed learning from him in an inverted form. Evidently his KT-95 was nothing remotely like being physical and human. Explaining the process even with a cloud of rotes seemed too big to me. Still, there was a sense of warmth, friendliness, even familiarity with BB that didn’t fit. I liked him. Nice fellow. Very human in his responses. Maybe the energy base is common through all systems, physical or otherwise. Only the experience, the rote is different. BB popped open. (So what about AA?) (We can try again.) (But you’re not on it.) I blanked. (On it?) (Your percept has it as wasted effort.) I lighted. (I leaked again?) BB rolled. (A little.) (AA is in a pattern. I’m not very smart, but my percept is, you can’t