by Tanith Lee
“Hallo,” he said.
No resentment, of course. I could almost be resentful at his lack of resentment.
“Listen to me,” I said, quietly, “I’m going to explain, too. I’m not going to look at you, but I’ll lean here, and I’ll say it. I’m still slightly high on the wine, and very relaxed. Is that all right?”
“Yes, Jane,” he said.
I closed my eyes.
“I’m very stupid,” I said, “and very selfish. That’s because I’m rich and I don’t know much about real life. And I’ve been sheltered. And I have a lot of faults.”
He laughed softly.
“You mustn’t interrupt,” I said, very low. “I want to apologize. I know you’re indifferent to my—my tantrums. But I have to apologize for my own sake. Tell you I’m sorry. And why. I’m confused. I’ve never had a sexual relationship with a man. I’ve had dates, but nothing important. I never enjoyed—I’m a virgin.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“Most of my friends had sexual experience at thirteen or fourteen. Anyway. Anyway, I never will go with a man now. I don’t want to.” I waited, not for effect, but to contain myself. “Because,” I said, “I’m in love with you. Please don’t laugh or reason with me. Or say it will go away. It won’t. I love you.” My voice was calm, and I heard it with admiration. “I know you don’t love. Can’t love. I know we’re just all like slices of cake or something—don’t,” I said, for I felt him tremble with laughter. “But I have less than two days with you, because then my mother comes home and Egyptia will want you back. And I don’t know if I’m ready or not, but please make love to me. Not so I can boast, or to get rid of something, like cutting my nails, or because I’m bored. But because, because—” I stopped talking and rubbed my cheek against him. His long fingers curved over my skull and held me close. I knew I had struck the right note at last. He could give me pleasure of the emotions if not of the body. He could help me. Function fulfilled. But his sweetness came to me, his strength and his sweetness. I trusted him. I’d trusted him with the truth, undramatized, and with no prop—my weakness, my childishness—to take the blame for what I did. I didn’t know him. He was unknowable. But I trusted him.
I got up slowly, and reached down my hand and he took it and left the chair and stood with me, looking into my face. His eyes were full of tenderness, and a kind of wicked joy. It was wicked, and it was joy.
“I love you,” I said, meeting his eyes.
“I know,” he told me. “You said it in Clovis’s apartment, at the window.”
“You heard me? But I didn’t even whisper—”
“I saw your reflection in the glass, as you saw mine. Lip movements.”
“Well…you know, then. I didn’t want to be afraid of saying it. Accidentally.”
“ ‘I love you,’ she said accidentally. Don’t be afraid to say it. To my knowledge, you’re the first human who ever did love me.”
“Oh, but—”
“Magnetized, yes. Obsessed. Not love.”
“You’re not going to patronize me.”
“No, Jane.”
“Can we make believe,” I said, “that I don’t need to give any instructions. Please.”
“You don’t,” he said.
He drew me into his arms. It was like the pull of the sea. Kind. Irresistible. Swimming. The texture of the mouth, its moisture—human, the same…only the sensations of the kiss were utterly changed. Then he picked me up as if I weighed nothing at all, and carried me into the lift.
* * *
—
I’m not Egyptia. I don’t want to go into endless details. I was afraid, and not afraid. I was elated, and filled by despair. His nakedness dazzled me, though Demeta long ago saw to it that male nakedness was familiar to me in her selection of my visuals. But he was beautiful and silver, with the blaze of a fire at his groin. Why is the male penis supposed to be ugly? All of him was beautiful. All. And I—I was self-conscious, but his gentleness and his care of me made nothing of that. His gentleness, his care. I didn’t even tear, or bleed. I wasn’t even hurt. Yet he filled me, gloriously. His hair swept me like a tide. No part of him is like metal, except to look at. To touch, like skin, but perfect skin, without unevenness or flaw. And when I said at last, abashed, regretful, but content—“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can, I mean, I won’t climax—I won’t climax”—even the awful jargon didn’t jar, even to speak of it was acceptable. And almost at once a pressure began to grow inside me, and suddenly there were rollers of ecstasy and I caught my breath and clung to him, until they let me go.
He held me in his arms, and I said,
“But you, what about you?”
“No.”
“But—can’t you—don’t you—”
“It isn’t necessary for me.” And then, his voice amused in the darkness, “I can fake it, if you want. I frequently have.”
“No. Don’t fake it with me. Not ever. Please don’t.”
“Then I won’t.”
I fell asleep, until the Asteroid, rising, cut a hole through the blind. I woke, and he lay by me, his arms about me, his eyes closed as if he slept. But when he felt me stir, he opened his eyes. We looked at each other, and he said, “You’re beautiful.”
I would have denied it, but I felt it to be true. With him, for that moment, true.
My joy was his joy. I’d been crazy to say what I had, that he couldn’t love. He can love all of us. He is love.
* * *
—
In the morning, we showered together.
“Do you need to?”
“City dirt makes no exceptions,” he said, soaping his hair under the green waterfall. “Don’t worry, I’m entirely rustproof.”
He ate breakfast with me, to please me. He ate just like a young man, economically wolfing the food down.
“Can you taste it?”
“I can if I put the right circuits into action.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, and giggled.
My laughter intrigued him. He went into routines that made me helpless with it. Idiotically convincing voices, other personae, absurd songs, jokes.
One of the spacemen came to clear the breakfast things and I fell silent, embarrassed by this other robot, so unlike him. The spaceman gave me a little tray with vitamins on it, and my Phy-Excellence capsules. I meant to take them. I did. But I forgot.
We went back to bed. When the ecstasy left me, I cried again.
“It must be horrible for you,” I sobbed.
“Do I seem to find it horrible?”
“You’d act. It’s part of your character. And to say I’m beautiful.”
“You are. You have a skin like cream.”
“Do I?”
“And eyes like cowrie shells, with every color of the sea in them.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do.”
“You say this to everyone.”
“Not quite. Besides which, they would be different things. And only when they were true.”
I got out of bed and went to the mirror, and looked at myself, lifting my hair over my head, widening my eyes. He lay in the sheets like a sleeping dog-fox, smiling, aware of my delight.
“Did you fake orgasm,” I said boldly, “with Egyptia?”
“Many many times,” he said, with a note of such ironic dismay that I laughed again.
The next time he made love to me, the ecstasy was like a spear going through me. I screamed out, and was astonished.
“Just pretending,” I said.
The phone gave a sound a few minutes before noon, the low purring it makes on the console by my bed. Correction: made. I turned off the video, and answered it. I needn’t have bothered with the video.
“
Bad news,” said Clovis.
“That isn’t me,” I said, “or is that who’s calling?”
“Jane, don’t be witty. When’s Demeta coming back?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I hate to break up your amour impropre early, but Egyptia has decided to assert her rights. She says she signed your metal playmate over to you for six hours. Only. You want him, I paid for him, but we can’t do a thing. She’s eighteen and he’s in her name.”
“You could stall her….”
“No. Anyway, I’ve got other things to do with my day. Or did you think my only mission in life was to be your nursemaid?”
Rancor. I could hear it. Something grated inside him. Because he’d helped me and he’d lost out. And because he’d seen Silver.
“What do I do, Clovis?”
“Send him over to The Island on a fast ferry. Or she may make a hysterical call to a lawyer. Or her awful mother in that trench.”
“But—”
“You didn’t think she was a friend of yours, did you?”
Everything in the room had stopped moving. It was funny, of course nothing had been moving, yet everything had looked alive, and now it didn’t anymore.
“All right,” I said.
“Or,” he said, “you can send it here, if you want. It, him. Egyptia can collect him, and maybe I can calm her down.”
“To your apartment,” I said.
“To my apartment. I’m so glad you didn’t think I meant the middle of the river.”
“I’ll pay you back the money,” I said. I had twisted the edge of the sheets into a hard corded knot.
“Oh, no rush.”
I switched the phone off.
“What is it?” my lover said to me. His arm came round my shoulders.
“Didn’t you hear?”
“Yes.”
“Clovis wants you. And then Egyptia wants you.”
“Well apparently I legally belong to them.”
“Don’t you care?”
“You want me to say I care about leaving you.”
I let him hold me. I knew everything was useless, was over, dead, like brown leaves crushed off the trees.
“I do care about leaving you, Jane.”
“But you’ll be just the same with them.”
“I’ll be what they need me to be.”
I left the bed and went into the bathroom. I ran the taps and held my hands under the water for a long while, for no reason at all. When I came back, he was dressing, pulling on the mulberry boots.
“I wish you wanted to stay with me,” I said.
“I do.”
“Only me.”
“You can’t change me,” he said. “You have to accept what I am.”
“I may never see you again.”
He moved to me and took me back into his arms. I knew the texture of these clothes now, as I knew the texture of his skin and hair, which are neither. Even in my misery, his touch soothed me.
“If you never see me again,” he said, “I’m still part of you, now. Or do you regret that we’ve spent time together?”
“No.”
“Then be glad. Even if it’s finished.”
“I won’t let it be finished,” I said. I held him fiercely, but he kissed me and put me away, tactfully and finally.
“There’s a flyer in ten minutes,” he said.
“How will you—”
“By running a lot faster than any human man you’ll ever see.”
“Money.”
“Robots travel free. Tap the slot and it registers like coins. Electronic wavelengths.”
“I hate your cheerfulness. When you leave me, there’s nothing.”
“There’s all the world,” he said. “And Jane,” he stood in the doorway of the suite, “don’t forget. You are,” he stopped speaking, and framed the word with his lips only: “beautiful.”
Then he was gone, and all the colors and the light of the day crumbled and went out.
I don’t have to describe that day, do I? I thought a lot about him. I saw him arriving at Clovis’s apartment. The conversation, the innuendo, saw him playing along with the repartee, giving better than he got, and the wonderful smile like sheer sunlight. I saw them in bed. Almost. Like a faulty visual—the swimmers’ movement of arms, a glint of flesh. My mind wouldn’t let me see. And yet my mind wouldn’t leave it alone. I wanted to kill Clovis, take a knife and kill him. And Egyptia. And I wanted to run away. Out into the gathering darkness. Out into another country, another world.
About seven P.M., something happened like a page turning over. I sat bolt upright in the welter of the stricken bed, and the plan began to come. The insane plan, the stupid plan. It was as if he’d taught me how to think. Think in new, logical, extraordinary ways.
I couldn’t remember where the Phy-Amalgamated Conference was, and had to get the information operator. All the while I waited, I waited too for the conviction to go, but it didn’t.
Then I got the Conference and held the line for the twenty minutes the pager needed to find my mother. And the conviction was still there.
“What’s wrong, darling?” said my mother.
“Mother, I’ve bought something terribly expensive I couldn’t get on my card.”
“Jane. There’s a meeting I’m chairing in five minutes. Could this perhaps have waited?”
“No, Mother. Sorry, but no. You see, Clovis paid for it.”
“You’ve been seeing Clovis after what you told me. Should you have been more cautious?”
“I’m over all that,” I said tersely.
“Darling,” said my mother, “switch on the video, please.”
I switched it on, defiantly, and saw her see me, naked in my bed, my love bed, with my cream skin and my cowrie shell eyes I’d never known I had. And somehow, she seemed to realize it was someone new she was dealing with, somebody she’d not really met before.
“That’s better,” said my mother, but I knew it wasn’t. “I’m glad you’ve been resting.”
She had always told me to get to know my body. To be at ease with it. She now seemed to think it faintly unnecessary that I had, I was.
“Mother, Clovis paid for this thing, and now I can’t get to use it. Can you wire a cash order through to him tonight?”
“How much does this item cost?”
I opened out the receipt and read the figure off cold.
My mother became cold, too.
“That’s rather a lot of money, darling.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” (But we can pay it, can’t we? We’re rolling about in riches, aren’t we?)
“You’ve never done anything like this before, Jane. What exactly is this thing? Is it a car?”
“It’s a Sophisticated Special Format Robot.”
Mother, I’m in love with—
“A robot. I see.”
“It can play the piano.”
“At the price you quoted, one would hope so.”
“The point is, Mother, I’ve been thinking about this a long time, but I rather want, sort of would like—” Don’t blow it, Jane, Jaen, Jain. “I think it would do me good to get an apartment of my own. Just for a few months, in the city.”
“An apartment.”
“I’m such a baby, Mother. All my friends have their own places.”
“You have your own suite.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Your suite belongs to you, Jane, and everything in it, just the same as it would in an apartment. You can do there and with exactly as you choose. You have total freedom. More so than in an apartment, where you would be governed by certain domiciliary regulations.”
“Oh—I—”
“I agree, you are rather immature.
How would you propose to cope with the everyday chores of life on your own? Do you even understand what they are? Even an automatic apartment needs cohesion. And you are not—Jane, I really think we must discuss this when I get home.”
“I bought the robot to help me run the apartment.”
“Yes. Your priorities are quite original.”
“But will you please pay Clovis?”
“Darling, you sound as if you’re trying to give me a command, and I’m sure you realize that would be very foolish of you.”
“Please, Mother.”
“I have to go now, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, and we’ll talk this through. Why not put your views on tape? You’re always so much better at expressing yourself unspontaneously and with consideration. Good night, sleep tight, dear.”
The line and the video blanked out.
I was shivering and swearing and gnawing the sheet.
I’d have to go through all this again with her tomorrow, and she’d win. That was silly. I wasn’t in a battle with my mother. Was I? Egyptia had had full access to her mother’s fortune since she was fifteen, the limit being on a monthly basis only because otherwise she tended to overdraw on funds that hadn’t yet built up. But the terms of the limit were a monthly twenty thousand I.M.U. And Clovis had no limit I knew of. And Chloe and Davideed didn’t, though they were habitually frugal. And Jason and Medea, who still lived at home, had their own beach house at Cape Angel, a Rolls Amada car with push-button dash, and spent money by forging their father’s signature, which he never noticed, or by use of one of their six credit cards each with a two-week thousand limit, and they still shoplifted.
And I. I had a thousand I.M.U. a month. Which had always been more than enough until now.
More than enough, frankly, because half the time my mother bought my clothes. Even my sheets, my soap…I looked round the rooms of my suite wildly. I had everything I could possibly need, and more. I should be grateful. My eye was caught by a gorgeously vulgar (“The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.”) antique oriental lamp, by a jade panther. My mother lavished money on me. The carpets alone would be worth thousands—