Cyrus
jumped, almost falling off his donkey. “Who said that?”
“Get
thee to a nunnery.”
This
time he placed the source. “You’re talking!” he said to
the donkey.
“Who
said that?” the animal said. “You’re talking.”
“You’re
repeating whatever you have heard most recently,” Cyrus said,
catching on. “That voice unit was supposed to be for braying.
How can you speak words?”
“Defective
workmanship,” the donkey said. “You installed the wrong
unit.”
Cyrus
sighed. So using lead instead of iron wasn’t his only error when he
constructed the donkey. When the mechanical animal was too heavy lo
function effectively, Cyrus’s father Roland had given him blunt
advice: remove the lead. So he had done so, and had a robot animal
he could ride.
“Who
said the other?” he asked, “About the nunnery. That’s like
a monastery, isn’t it?”
“Your
barbarian mother said it,” the donkey
answered. “You weren’t paying attention. She was not referring
to nuns.”
“Not.
According to my defective data bank, it’s old Mundanian slang for a
house of ill repute.”
“What
is that? I never heard of an ill house.”
“Naturally
you wouldn’t know. You were created halfway innocent, for some
obscure reason. But she thought it would make a man of you.”
