Piers Anthony - Blue Adept

“Walk, or I must carry you,” Stile said sternly, knowing she would not allow him to harm himself by touching her burning surface.

She walked with decreasing stability. Charred fragments fell from her. Something rattled and buzzed inside. Finally she crashed forward, still smoking. But she was half across the curtain.

Stile located an unsmouldering spot on her torso and touched his finger to it and willed them both across the curtain. The grass appeared, the air freshened, and her body sizzled in the greater moisture. He removed his finger before it burned.

The Red Adept, as he had surmised, was gone. He had been besting her; she had wanted to escape all along, salvaging time and resources to meet him again in a situation more favorable to herself. He didn’t like letting that hap-pen, but he had been afraid that if he left Sheen too long it might not be possible to restore her—or that he himself would die or lose power and be unable to return to her. If he had let her perish in favor of his vengeance, he would 2 have sacrificed much of what he valued: his own humanity. He might have gone on to establish his power and security as the Blue Adept—and become more like the other Adepts, corrupted by power, cynical and sel5sh to the point of worthlessness.

There was the sound of hooves. Neysa was catching up, Ere snorting from her nostrils, bringing the harmonica just when he needed it. He would be able to use his magic to restore Sheen as he had before, and then would return her to Proton for reanimation. Maybe he could include a spell to make her feel better about the situation; that probably would not work, but it was at least worth a try. Then it would be time to set up for the next Round of the Tourney. Round Eight brought him up against a young woman of the Age 22 ladder, a fair player whose skills he knew from prior experience. She was Tulip, a gardener-tender for a Citizen who favored ornamentals. She was as pretty as a flower herself, and not averse to using her sex-appeal to gain advantage. But Stile had no intention of prejudicing a likely victory by such dalliance. He put it into MENTAL, and so nullified her choice of NAKED. No body-contact sport this time! They wound up in WORD GAMES. “Travel from FLESH to SPIRIT,” the Game Computer said. “Time five minutes.”

Stile and Tulip got to work. The challenge was to fashion a chain of words linked alternately by synonyms and homonyms, converting “Flesh” to “Spirit” by readily definable stages. Both length and time counted; within five minutes, the shortest viable chain would win. Beyond that time limit, the first person to establish any viable chain of any length would win. So it behooved them each to take up most of that five minutes to seek the shortest possible chain. To settle on a given chain too quickly would be to invite the opponent to come up with a shorter one within the time limit and win; to take too long beyond the time limit invited loss to a longer but sooner-announced chain. The point of decision could be tricky.

Flesh, Stile thought. Synonyms would be Body, Meat, Fatten—there would be others, but these sufficed. If he explored every single avenue, he would not complete any one chain in time. Selectivity—there was the key to this challenge.

Now try Meat, as the best prospect for homonyms:

Meet as in proper. Meet as in a competitive event. Mete as in measure. Try the competition-event for synonyms: Contest, Race, Competition. Then Race, jumping to the homonym, meaning subspecies, and the synonym Color, and on to Hue—was this leading to Spirit? Not rapidly. Better try an alternate, and return to this if necessary. His first job was to establish a viable chain, any chain, within five minutes. That would be an automatic win if Tulip failed to find one.

Of course, if they both came up with the same chain, the first to announce it would win. So if he found a good one, he should announce it regardless of time. But he was not worried about that; he had pretty good judgment on word-chains.

He glanced covertly at Tulip. She was chewing on her lip, making little gestures with her left hand, as though shaping a slippery sequence. Was she making faster progress? He didn’t think so, as she really wasn’t that bright, but it was possible. Then she caught him looking, and made a suggestive motion with her hip. He had to turn his eyes away, lest she bring his thoughts right back to Flesh and cost him the Game. That was what she was trying to do, the flirt. Maybe that was how she had gotten this far.

Try Meet as in proper. Synonym Fit, homonym Fit as in the contour of clothing. Yes, then Suit, and its homonym Suit as in satisfy, or the synonym Please. Homonym Pleas, as in several requests. Synonym—was he returning to Fit, as in a fit plea for favor? If so, this was a dead-end, a waste of time, like a loop in the maze-puzzle he had fallen into in another Game with another woman. Too much time had passed; he couldn’t afford that! This simple game became confusingly tricky under the pressure of competition. No, no loop here; define it as a wish, as desire. And Desire as a homonym, meaning the urgency to possess, achieve, prevail—he certainly had that!—which was a possible synonym for team spirit—

Spirit! There it was! And jump to homonym Spirit as in Soul, and his chain was complete.

Unless that Desire link was faulty. Pleas—Desire—

Spirit. The Computer might reject that as inexact. Better to work out a tighter chain.

But four minutes were passed. Not enough time to figure out a new chain. Tulip looked as if she were on the verge of completing her own chain. Stile decided to go with this one. “Chain!” he announced.

“Damn!” Tulip muttered.

“Present,” the Computer said.

Stile presented it, trying to conceal his nervousness about the Desire connection. But the Computer did not challenge it; it was fairly liberal on the adaptations of language.

Still, Tulip had another minute to produce a shorter chain, or a better one of the same length. Stile waited nervously.

But she seemed to have given up. The time expired without her entry. Stile had won, more or less by default. “It would have been different in NAKED/PHYSICAL,” Tulip said tearfully. She had choked at the crisis-point in this Game, and now suffered the reaction.

“That’s why I avoided it,” Stile said, though he would have put it into some subcategory like foot-racing and probably beaten her anyway. She really hadn’t lost much; with her appearance, she should do well enough in the wider human galaxy. But it had the mild distaste of an unjustified victory.

The separations between Rounds were diminishing.

Round Nine was due in the afternoon of the same day. Stile planned to spend the interim devising strategy and spells to finish the Red Adept, and to get some rest and refreshment. He was also concerned about Sheen; he had restored her in Phaze, again, and she was now fully operational. But how could he abate the hurt of her nonliving heartbreak? His attempted spell had not taken effect. She seemed to have lost much of her will-to-animation, and there seemed to be no way he could restore it. She needed the one thing he could not give—his complete love. Maybe, he thought again, he should have let her perish, instead of languishing like this. He had promised a clean death to the Red Adept; could he do less for his friend? There was a knock on the apartment door. That was unusual; visitors usually announced themselves on the screen. Sheen, alert to threats, went to see to it. “Oh,” she exclaimed, in a perfect representation of surprise. “You survived!”

“I must speak to—Stile,” the visitor said. Stile snapped alert. That was the Lady Blue’s voice! He went to the door. There she stood, a little disheveled but irremediably splendid. Bluette, of course; she had escaped the robot and sought out the name and description Hulk had given her. Smart woman!