Miss Smith was not wearing the sort of undergarments Will had seen his mother and his sister wear. In fact, she wasn’t wearing any at all. He froze solid, right there in the tunnel. She stripped off her long skirt and slips, and pulled off her thin gray boots. Miss Smith was definitely not a riath, whatever Hart had heard. Will felt joy welling up in his chest—he felt it distantly, in a dreamlike sort of way, as though it were a physical thing having nothing to do with himself.
The whole evening had been verging on the unreal. Will had never done anything so bold, and certainly not without Hart pushing him on. Now the limits of reality started to make themselves felt.
This was a very awkward place to be in. He’d better leave. With great difficulty he managed to move back a little.
And the unreal became the surreal. Will looked out for one last glance, like Lot’s wife in the book, and he turned into something else.
Miss Smith was rubbing a lotion over her skin. She put down the tube, raised her left hand and, in a curious motion, pulled off her right arm. She began applying lotion to the arm at the place where it had joined the shoulder.
It was a jolt of electricity. All the laws of life collapsed. He must have made some sort of noise because she stopped. She listened. Willie heard his own breathing. She called, “Is anyone there?”
That was it, he broke. He clicked the hatch shut, turned the inner bolt, and scuttled backward down the tunnel all within a second. He backed into the first main branch and then started headfirst in the other direction.
Behind him he heard a hatchway being pulled open. He went, impossible though it seemed, even faster. There was a branching in the main tunnel ahead. Some people of the Cities had an innate sense of three-dimensional direction that kept them from ever being quite lost; Willie was one of them, though he didn’t quite know it yet. He only knew that if he wanted to get back to the route over the courtyard, he had to go right. And he did, without hesitation.
Perhaps it was that; perhaps it was the speed of fear. Perhaps it was the fact, which came to him many years later, that androids have no sense of smell. For when he finally emerged unscathed from the access route in the main tunnel alongside the plant, he found that he’d defecated into his pants. And though he had no memory of doing it, he knew in his heart it must have happened when he heard the sound of the hatchway being tom open.
He ran. He ran all the way to the foot of Tanamonde Street, where Hartley Quince lived with his guardian.
The guardian was a strange old man with an accent, who didn’t want to get Hart out of bed; but Hart appeared anyway, in his nightclothes, and asked the man to leave.
And to Willie’s wonder, he did leave. Hart looked at him and said, “What’s the matter?”
Suddenly Will felt exhausted. “Can I use your spit?”
“Sure. Probably a good idea—you stink.” He pointed to a door.
There was a mirror in here, too, and as Willie stood bracing himself on the sink he saw a stranger in the glass: wild-eyed and sweaty and with disheveled hair. He cleaned himself off and splaslied water on his face and under his arms and then put his shirt back on, still clammy and damp with sweat. He ran his fingers through his hair, which did a little good but not much. Then he went back out to Hart.
“I’m in the kitchen,” called Hart. Will followed the voice to a small room with a table and two chairs. Hart had pulled out one of the chairs for Will. He’d never seen a kitchen in a place where only two people lived.
Will sat down, and Hart gave him some stuff he said was coffee, and Will told him everything that had happened that night.
Hart put his hand on Will’s forehead. “You’re not hot. In fact you’re sort of cold.”
Will jerked his head. “I’m not sick. I’m telling you the truth.”
“So she’s a machine? Outsider technology? They’ve got a tool of Satan teaching school in Sangaree? It’s not probable.”
“It’s true.”
It did not occur to either of them that the arm might have been a prosthetic device. Such were rarely used on Opal, and when they were they were deliberately made as unlike flesh as possible. Nor were they ever very technically efficient. And somehow it just hadn’t looked to Will like a false arm—it looked like part of a larger mechanical thing.
Hart said, “Maybe all the teachers are machines. Maybe old Miss Ryneth and Miss Hoagland and their complaints about arthritis are just a cover. Maybe—”
Will jumped up from his seat. “Stop it! It’s true, it’s true, it’s true—”
“All right,” said Hart quietly. He put his hands on Will’s shoulders. “I believe you.” Will was breathing hoarsely. “Why would you lie?” said Hart, and Will sat down again.
Hart stared distantly at the walls. “You know,” he said, “she’s not a very good teacher. She does the same math lesson over and over again.”
“So what?”
“She wasn’t designed for teaching. I wonder what she was designed for.”
“Does it matter?”
Hart smiled. “Maybe not.” He topped off Will’s cup again. “But if she was designed for teaching, she’d’ve hit us. Right?”
“I guess so. I didn’t think of that.”
“ ‘No machine may do a man or woman’s proper work.’ That’s what the Book says. Teaching by machine is against the canons. But I bet her primary work is something else.”
“She shouldn’t be teaching, though. It’s against
