The Silver Metal Lover (4 page)

Pretending to see me for the first time, acting friendship now where she had acted Cleopatra-in-lust a second before, she rose and swam toward me.

(We spend our lives acting.)

“Darling Jane. You came after all.”

She threw her arms around me. I felt comforted in the midst of fear, and I clutched her, being careful not to spoil her clothes, a trick I sort of mastered with my mother. Over her shoulder, the silver robot looked away and began to tune the guitar. People were sitting down by him, asking him things, and he was answering, making them laugh over and over. I hadn’t seen him before because he was surrounded by people. Built-in wit. If only I had some.

“Jane, you look adorable. Have some champagne.”

I had some champagne.

I kept hoping the leaden feeling would go away, or the other feeling of burning up inside would go, but neither did. Later he played again, and I sat alone, far away amid the bushes, forcing back the stupid uncontrollable tears. In the end, the nasty Lord took me to a grove in the gardens, and seated under the vines there, which were heavy with grapes, he fondled me and kissed me and I let him, but I kept thinking: I can’t bear this. How can I make him stop?

About one in the morning, as he was telling me to come along, we’d go to his apartment, I thought of a way.

“I—I haven’t had my contraception shot this month. I’m overdue for it.”

“Well, I’ve had mine. And I’ll be careful.”

“No, I’m a Venus Media, very fertile. I can’t risk it.”

“Why didn’t you bloody well tell me before?”

Acutely self-conscious and ashamed, I stared at the grapes. If I cried again, my mascara would run and he would hate me and go. So of course, I couldn’t cry. I thought of the robot. I thought of the robot kissing Egyptia, and all the women who would ask to be kissed. If I asked, he would kiss me. Or bite me. Or—do anything I said, providing someone paid Electronic Metals Ltd.

“I feel sick,” I said to Lord. “Nauseous. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t vomit over me,” he said, got up, and fled.

There was some wine left, so I sat in the grove and drank it, though it had no taste. I tried to make believe I was in Italy, long ago, the grapes around me, the heavy autumn night pressed close as a lover to the city. But I heard gusts of a band somewhere, or a rhythm tape elsewhere.

Catching the lights in the leaves, his silver skin glowed, though his hair only fired up when he was ten feet from me. I thought he was coming toward me and my heart stopped. Then I realized I was close to the non-moving stair going down to the street, and he was simply leaving the gardens, the guitar on its cord over one shoulder, and a blood-red cloak from the old Italy I’d been trying to go back to slung over the other.

He went by me and down the steps. He ran down them lightly. A eucalyptus tree screened him and he was gone.

My heart restarted with a bang that shook me to my feet.

Holding up my long skirt, I ran down the steps after him.

There were bright lights, and quite a few people out on the sidewalk, and cars hurtling by. All the shops and theatres and bars which stayed open flared their signs and their windows. And he passed through the lights and the neons and the people and the fumes of the traffic, now a slim dark silhouette, now a crimson and white one. He walked with a beautiful swagger. When a flyer went over like a prism, he put back his head to look at it. He
was
human, only his skin gave him away—and the skin might be makeup. He moved like an actor, why not paint himself like one? People on the street looked at him, looked after him. How many guessed? If they hadn’t heard Electronic Metals’ advertising,
no one
.

I followed him. Where was he going? I supposed he was pre-programmed to go back to—to what? A store? A factory? A warehouse? Did they put him away in a box? Turn off his eyes. Turn out the smile and the music.

A man snatched my arm. I snarled at him, surprising him, and myself. I broke into a run in my high-heeled shoes.

I caught up with the robot at the corner of Pane and Beech.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was out of breath, but not from running or balancing on my high heels. “I’m sorry.”

He stopped, looking ahead of him. Then he turned slowly, and looked down at me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated quickly, blinded by the nearness of him, of his face. “I was rude to you. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

“What,” he asked me, “did you say?”

“You know what I said.”

“Am I supposed to remember you?”

A verbal slap in the face. I should be clever and scornful. I couldn’t be.

“You sang that song to embarrass me.”

“Which song?”

“Greensleeves.”

“No,” he said, “I simply sang it.”

“You stared at me.”

“I apologize. I wasn’t aware of you. I was concentrating on the last chord, which required complicated fingering.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can’t lie,” he said.

Something jerked inside me, like a piece of machinery disengaging. My eyes refused to blink, had set in my face, felt huge, as if they had
swallowed
my face.
I
couldn’t swallow at all.

“You—” I said. “You can’t be allowed to act this way. I was scared and I said something awful to you. And you froze me out and you walked away, and now—”

He watched me gravely. When I broke off, he waited, and then he said, “I think I must explain an aspect of myself to you. When something occurs that is sufficiently unlike what I’m programmed to expect, my thought process switches over. I may then, for a moment, appear blank, or distant. If you did something unusual, then that was what happened. It’s nothing personal.”

“I said,” I said, my hands clenched together, “you’re horrible. How dare you talk to me?”

“Yes,” he said. His gaze unfocused, re-focused. “I remember you now. I didn’t before. You started to cry.”

“You’re trying to upset me. You resent what I said. I don’t blame you, but I’m sorry—”

“Please,” he said quietly, “you don’t seem to understand. You’re attributing human reactions to me.”

I backed a step away from him and my heel caught in a crack in the pavement. I seemed to unbalance very slowly, and in the middle of it, his hand took my elbow and steadied me. And having steadied me, the hand slipped down my arm, moving over my own hand before it left me. It was a caress, a tactful, unpushy, friendly caress. Preprogrammed. And the hand was cool and strong, but not cold, not metallic. Not unhuman, and not human, either.

He was correct. Not playing cruelly with me, as Clovis might have done. I had misunderstood everything. I had thought of him as a man. But he didn’t care what I thought or did. It was impossible to insult or hurt him. He was a toy.

The heat in my face was white now. I stared at the ground.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but I have to be at The Island by two A.M.”

“Egyptia—” I faltered.

“I’ll be staying with her tonight,” he said. And now he smiled, openly, sweetly.

“You and she will go to bed,” I got out.

“Yes.”

He was a robot. He did what he was hired to do, or bought for. How could Eygptia—

“How can
you
?” I blurted.

I would never have said that to a man, for Egyptia’s lovely. It would be obvious. But he, with him it was a task. And yet—

“My function,” he said, “is to amuse, to make happy, to give pleasure.” There was compassion in his face for me. He could see me struggling. I, too, a potential customer, must be pleased, amused, left laughing.

“I suppose you’re a wonderful lover,” I shocked myself by saying.

“Yes,” he answered simply. A fact.

“I suppose you can—make love—as often as—as whoever hires you—wants.”

“Of course.”

“And sing songs while you’re doing it.”

He himself laughed. When he did, his whole person radiated a kind of joy.

“That’s an idea.”

Irony of the gentlest sort. And he hadn’t remembered me. The wicked flatness of his eyes had been a readjustment of his thought cells. Of course. Who else had been averse to him?

I raised my head and my eyes looked into his, and there was no need to shy away from him because he was only a machine.

“I was at the party you were hired for. You’re still hired, aren’t you, until tomorrow? So.” The last words didn’t come out bravely, but in a whisper. “Kiss me.”

He regarded me. He was totally still, serene. Then he moved close to me, and took my face in his silver hands, and bowed his auburn head and kissed me with his silver mouth. It was a mannered kiss, not intimate. Calm, unhurried, but not long. All he owed me as Egyptia’s guest. Then he stepped away, took up my hand and kissed that too, a bonus. And then he walked toward the subway, and left me trembling there. And so I knew what had been wrong all day.

I tell myself it’s the electric current running through the clockwork mechanisms that I felt, as if a singing tide washed through me. His skin is poreless, therefore not human. Cooler than human, too. His hair is like grass. He has no scent, being without glands or hormones or blood. Yet there was a scent, male, heady and indefinable. Something incorporated, perhaps, to “please.” And there was only him. Everything else became a backdrop, and then it went away altogether. And he went away, and nothing came back to replace him.

I’ve written this down on paper, because I just couldn’t say it aloud to the tape. Tomorrow, my mother will ask what I wanted to discuss with her. But this isn’t for my mother. It’s for some stranger—for you, whoever you are—someone who’ll never read it. Because that’s the only way I could say any of it. I can’t tell Demeta, can I?

He’s a machine, and I’m in love with him.

He’s with Egyptia, and I’m in love with him.

He’s been packed up in a crate, and I’m in love with him.

Mother, I’m in love with a robot…

Spoiled little rich girl. Always someone to do things for you. Always someone to rescue you. Your mother. Clovis. And always a castle in the clouds to run back to.

And now?

It’s so dark, I can hardly see to write this, and I’m not certain why I’m writing it. Superstitiously, I think I believe I made everything happen by writing the first part of it down. And so, if I write another part of it, another part will come after. But things may only get worse. As if they could. But no, they could.

And then, somewhere inside myself, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything, because the thing I need is something else than what I’ve lost. And then again, I go on thinking, beyond this grimy darkness and the shadows like purple rust flaking on the page. I think about tomorrow and the next day, and I wonder what will become of me.

In the morning, at seven A.M., because I couldn’t sleep, I got up and made a short tape for my mother. I said: “My problem was about Clovis and the callous way he treats his boyfriends, and about how M-Bs behave to each other anyway. But I’m over it now. I was just being silly.”

It was not exactly the first time I’d lied to my mother. But it was the first time I knew I’d have to stick to the lie. I couldn’t break down. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t decide if I was desperate, or only desperately ashamed. But I’d tried to cry myself out in the night, and by six A.M. the pillows were so wet I’d thrown them on the floor.

I knew there was no solution.

At eleven-thirty A.M., the video phone rang in the Vista. I knew who it was so I didn’t answer. At noon, it rang again. Somehow it sounded louder. Soon my mother would emerge from her suite, and then I’d have to answer it, so I answered it.

Egyptia reclined in the video in a white kimono.

“Jane. You look terrible.”

“I didn’t sleep well.”

“Neither did I. Oh Jane—”

She told me about Silver. She told me in enormous detail. I tried not to listen, but I listened. Beauty, acrobatics, tenderness, humor, prowess.

“Of course, the stamina, the knowledge, the artistry are built in. But I believed he was human. Oh, he’s magic, Jane. It’s ruined me for a man for weeks. But I nearly fainted this morning. So much ecstasy is destructive. I think I have a migraine attack. This awful pain in my temple. Oh, he should carry a government health warning, like the windows by the Old River.”

A wire was stretching tighter and tighter in my spine, and the end of the wire was in my head. She hadn’t said which temple had the migraine, so both my temples beat as narrow spikes ran through and through them. The room clouded. When the wire snapped in the middle I would scream.

“I checked my account to see if I could buy one, but I’ve overdrawn for this month. And then there’s the Theatra. Oh, Jane. He’s taught me so much about myself. He found such sensual nuances in me—I was a woman with him. That’s so strange. He’s a robot, but he made me feel more like a woman, more conscious of my desires, my needs, than any man ever did. But I had to beg him to stop—”

One of the spacemen entered with a breakfast tray for my mother, and I said, “My mother’s just coming, Egyptia.”

“Oh. All right. Call me back.”

“Yes.”

I turned off the phone and started to fall, but I landed on my knees in an attitude of prayer as my mother walked through the doors.

Even when she gets up, my mother is beautiful, her face empty of makeup and full of green eyes, her hair loose on her shoulders.

If only I could tell her—

“Hallo, darling.”

“Hallo, Mother.”

“Did you drop something under the couch, darling?”

“Oh—I—” I stood up. “I was speaking to Egyptia,” I added, for this might well explain any strange behavior.

“In half an hour,” said my mother, “you can tell me what it was you wanted to talk to me about.”

I must tell her, I must. No, no, no.

“I left a tape. But it doesn’t seem important now. Mother, I’m so tired. I have to go back to bed.”

Shut in my suite, I wept all over again. How I needed, how I wanted to tell her what had happened to me. She’d be able to rationalize it all. She would show me why I felt as I did, and how to get over it.

Thank God Egyptia couldn’t buy him this month.

How horrible, to sleep with—

I shut my eyes and knew his kiss again on my mouth, that silver metal kiss.

I fell asleep lying on the wet pillows on the floor, and I dreamed of all kinds of things, but not of Silver.

At two P.M., my mother called my suite on the internal phone, and asked me to have lunch with her in the Vista My mother was very concerned about my having privacy, and the feeling that I could be alone when I wished; she never simply knocked on the door. But I felt I had to go down, so I went down and we ate lunch.

“You’re very quiet, darling. Has anything else happened that you want to tell me about?”

“Nothing, really. Was the dinner interesting?”

My mother told me about the dinner, and I tried to hear what she said. Sometimes what she said was very funny and I laughed. I kept beginning to say to her, “I’ve fallen in love,” and preventing myself. I imagined saying: “I’d like to buy a special format robot.” Would my mother let me? Generally, I pay for things I want with a credit card that links into my mother’s own account, but there was a monthly one thousand I.M.U. limit on the card. This was just so I’d appreciate about not overspending, because my mother always made it quite clear that what was hers was mine. But she wanted me to be sensible. A verisimulated robot would cost thousands. The ionized silver alone would cost thousands. A purchase like that wouldn’t seem sensible at all.

In any case, if Egyptia hadn’t bought him, someone else had. He belonged to
them
. To an Egyptia, or an Austin. Did he enjoy giving joy? What happened to
him
when he made love?

After lunch, my mother switched on the news channel of the Vista visual, and took notes. She’s a political and sociological essayist and historian, too, but mainly as a hobby. There had been another bad subsidence in the Balkans. Social collapse seemed likely again in Eastern Europe, but reports were garbled. An earthquake had rocked the top off a mountain somewhere. There were subsistence riots in five Western cities. My mother didn’t switch to the local news channel, which might have carried something about the Sophisticated Format robots, but when she switched the visual off my throat had closed together with nerves.

Then I realized she’d made a sacrifice to be with me, since generally she watches the visual in her study. She must guess something was wrong, and I didn’t really know how long I could hold out. What would she say if I told her? “Darling, this would be quite all right if you were sexually experienced. But you’re a virgin. And to make love, initially, with a nonhuman device, is by no means a good idea. For all sorts of complicated reasons. Firstly, your own psychological needs…” I could just distinguish her voice in my head. And she’d be right. How could I ever hope to have a proper relationship with a man if I began by going to bed with a robot? (He
is
a man. No, fool, he isn’t. He
is
.)

I went down to the library and took a book, and sat in the balcony-balloon watching the sky drifting out from the house and fathoming away in a luminous nothingness below me. And eventually I seemed to be hanging by a string over the nothingness, and I had to move from the balcony, and go back to my suite and lie down on the bed. It was the only time I’d ever had vertigo in Chez Stratos, though Clovis won’t visit us, saying all the while he’s in the house he can feel his groin falling farther and farther away below him.

Finally I called Clovis, not knowing what to say.

“Hallo?” said Austin invisibly. Clovis has never incorporated a video.

“Oh. Hallo. This is Jane.”

“James?”

“Jane. Can I speak to—”

“No. He’s in the shower.”

Austin sounded like a fixture, despite the seance, if a not very happy one.

“Is that a
woman
?” Austin demanded.

“It’s Jane.”

“I thought you said James. Well, look, Jayven, why don’t you call later. Like next year?” And he switched off.

As a matter of course, then, I dialed Chloe, but she didn’t answer. I looked at Jason and Medea’s number, but didn’t dial it.

My mother called me on the internal phone.

“I’ve run your tape, Jane. It’s rather vague. What did Clovis do?”

“He had another seance.”

“And this disturbed you.”

“Only because he plays with people like a cat.”

“Cats don’t play with people. Cats play with mice. The seance table is rigged, I seem to recall.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“The spirit world can be reached, under the correct circumstances,” said my mother.

“Oh, you mean ghosts.”

“I mean the psychic principle. A soul, Jane. You mustn’t be afraid to use the correct terminology. A released soul, unattached to the physical state, and which has lived through many lives and a diversity of bodies may sometimes wish to communicate with the world. There was a great incidence of this at the turn of the century, for example, prior to the Asteroid Disasters. A theologian notes a connection. Clovis shouldn’t be meddling with table-tappings.”

“No, Mother.”

“I’ve left you some vitamins in the dispenser. Robot three will give them to you when you come down.”

“Thank you.”

“And now, I must get ready.”

Having avoided her for hours in terror of giving away my awful secret, I was now stricken with horror.

“Are you going out?”

“Yes, Jane. You know I am. I’m going upstate for three days. The Phy-Amalgamated Conference.”

“I’d—I’d forgotten—Mother—I really must speak to you after all.”

“Darling, you’ve had all day to speak to me.”

“Only four hours.”

“I really can’t stop now.”

“It’s urgent.”

“Then tell me quickly.”

“But I can’t!”

“Then you should have spoken earlier.”

“Oh Mother!” I burst into tears. Where did so many tears come from? A lot of the human body is water. Did I have any left?

“Jane, I’m going to make an appointment for you with your private doctor.”

“I’m not ill. I’m—”

“Jane. I will take half an hour away from my schedule. I will come up to your suite now, and we’ll talk this through. Do you agree?”

Panic. Panic.

The door opened, and my mother, already burnished, pomaded, glittering, stepped through. An abyss gaped before me. And behind me. I could no longer think. I’d always, always leaned on my mother. Was anything so perverse, so precarious, so precious I couldn’t share it with her, especially now she’d wrecked her schedule for me?

“As precisely as you can, dear,” said Demeta, beckoning me into her arms, into
La Verte
, into bliss and anchorage. “Now, does this have anything to do with Clovis?”

“Mother, I’m in love!” I tumbled against her, but not too hard. I could tell her. I
could
. “Mother, I’m in love.” No, I couldn’t. “Mother, I’m in love with Clovis,” I shrieked.

“Good Lord,” said my mother.