by Tanith Lee
I wished at once I hadn’t said it. He, like Egyptia and me, was rich, and would have his own code round his neck or on his wrist or built into a button. I felt I’d been very discourteous and rash, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll write to Electronic Metals and complain. A piece of my mind.”
(I saw this as some sort of surgical operation, the relevant slice delivered in a box.)
But Egyptia spun to him abruptly. She fixed him with her eyes which matched the topaz, and screeched wordlessly like a mad bird of prey. The man who thought she was a robot backed sideways along the steps. Egyptia seemed to close her soul to us both. She flung her mantle round herself and stalked away up the stairs.
I watched her go, not really wanting to follow. Mother would say I should, in order to observe and be responsible.
It was a beautiful day in autumn, a sort of toasted day. The sides of the buildings were warm, the glass mellow, and the sky was wonderful, very high and far off, while in the house it looks near. I didn’t want to think about the man or about Egyptia. I wanted to think about something that was part of the day, and of me. Without warning, I felt a kind of pang, somewhere between my ribs and my spine. It might have been indigestion, but it was like a key turning. It seemed as if I knew something very important, and only had to wait a moment and I would recall what it was. But though I stood there for about five minutes, I didn’t, and the feeling faded with a dim, sweet ache. It was like being in love, the moment when, just before the visual ends, I knew I must walk away into the night or morning without him. Awful. Yet marvelous. Marvelous to be able to feel. I put this down because it may have a psychological bearing on what comes next.
I began to imagine Egyptia acting death in the Theatra, and dying. So finally I went up the Grand Stairway.
At the top is a terrace with a fountain. The fountain pours over an arch of glass, and you can stand under the glass with the fountain pouring, and not get wet. Across from the fountain is the scruffy peeling facade of the once splendid Theatra. A ticking clockwork lion was pacing about by the door. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it, and wondered if this was the Sophisticated Format. Then something caught my eye.
It was the sun gleaming rich and rare on auburn.
I looked, and bathed my eyes in the color. I know red shouldn’t be soothing to the eyes, but it was.
Then I saw what the red was. It was the long hair of a young man who was standing with his back to me, talking to a group of five or six people.
Then he began to sing. The voice was so unexpected. I went hot again, with embarrassment again, because someone was singing at the top of his lungs in a crowded busy place. At the same moment, I was delighted. It was a beautiful voice, like a minstrel’s, but futuristic, as if time were playing in a circle inside the notes. If only I could sing, I vaguely thought as I heard him. How wonderful to have such sounds pour effortlessly from your throat.
There were bits of mirror on his jacket, glinting, and I wondered if he was there for an interview, like Egyptia, and warming up outside. Then he stopped singing, and turned around and I thought: Suppose he’s ugly? And he went on turning, and I saw his profile and he wasn’t ugly. And then, pointing something out to the small gathering about him, he turned fully toward me, not seeing me. He was handsome, and his eyes were like two russet stars. Yes, they were exactly like stars. And his skin seemed only pale, as if there were an actor’s makeup on it, and then I saw it was silver—face, throat, the V of chest inside the open-necked shirt, the hands that came from the dripping lace at his cuffs. Silver that flushed into almost natural shadings and colors against the bones, the lips, the nails. But silver. Silver.
It was very silly. I started to cry. It was awful. I didn’t know what to do. My mother would have been pleased, as it meant my basic emotions—whatever they were—were being allowed full and free reign. But she’d also have expected me to control myself. And I couldn’t.
So I walked under the fountain and stared at it till the tears stopped in envy. And then I was puzzled as to why I’d cried at all.
When I came out, the crowd, about twenty now, was dispersing. They would all have taken his registration, or whatever, but most of them couldn’t afford him.
I stood and gazed at him, curious to see if he’d just switch himself off when the crowd went away. But he didn’t. He began to stroll up and down. He had a guitar slung over his shoulder I hadn’t noticed, and he started to caress melodies out of it. It was crazy.
Then, quite abruptly and inevitably, he registered that someone else was watching after all, and he came toward me.
I was frightened. He was a robot and he seemed just like a man, and he scared me in a way I couldn’t explain. I would have run away like a child, but I was too frightened to run.
He came within three feet of me, and he smiled at me. Total coordination. All the muscles, even those of his face. He seemed perfectly human, utterly natural, except he was too beautiful to be either.
“Hallo,” he said.
“Are you—” I said.
“Am I?”
“Are you—the—are you a robot?”
“Yes. Registration Silver. That is S.I.L.V.E.R. which stands for Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot. Neat, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “No.” Again without warning, I began once more to cry.
His smile faded. He looked concerned, his eyes were like pools of fulvous lead. His reactions were superb. I hated him. I wished he were a box on wheels, or I wished he were human.
“What’s the matter?” he said eventually, and very gently, making it much worse. “The idea is for me to amuse you. I seem to be failing. Am I intruding on some sort of personal grief?”
“You horrible thing,” I whispered. “How dare you stand there and talk to me?”
The reactions were astounding. His eyes went flat and wicked. He gave me the coldest smile I ever saw, and bowed to me. He really did turn on his heel, and he walked directly away from me.
I wished the concrete would open and swallow me. I truly wished it. I wanted to be ten years old and run home to my mother, who might comfort or lecture me, but who would be omnipotent. Or I wanted to be a hundred and twenty, and wise, and not care.
Anyway, I raced off the terrace, and to Clovis.
• 2 •
Clovis’s apartment overlooks a stretch of the New River, which is clean and sparkling. People who live along the banks can open their windows on it, unlike the people who live along the banks of the polluted Old River, who have to use the filtered air-conditioning even in winter. Every apartment there has a warning notice cut into the window frame, which says: The Surgeon General has established that to open this window for more than ten minutes every day can seriously damage your health. Clovis has friends on the Old River who leave their windows open all the time. “Will you look at the muck on the buildings,” they say. “Why don’t the Godawful Surgeon General and the Goddamn City Marshal clean up the air and the traffic fumes before going dippy over the Godball river?” Clovis also asserts that he never opens his own windows as the view of the New River is too hygienic and bores him. But so far he hasn’t moved.
When I arrived on the fifteenth gallery and spoke to Clovis’s door, it wouldn’t let me in for a long time. When it did, I found Clovis was in the process of trying to get rid of a live-in lover by holding a seance.
Clovis doesn’t like relationships, except sometimes with women, and they are non-sexual. He once shared his apartment with Chloe for ten months, but his boyfriends come and go like days of the week. Actually, the term Mirror-Biased really applies to Clovis. He doesn’t just sleep with his own sex, his lovers always look like him. This one was no exception. Tall and slim, with dark curly hair, the young man lay on the couch among the jet black cushions, eyeing me solemnly.
“This is Austin,” said Clovis.
“Hallo,” said Austin.
I remembered the
robot saying “Hallo” to me in his smiling, musical voice. I wished I hadn’t come here.
“And this is Jane,” said Clovis to Austin. “Jane is really a boy in drag. Awfully effective, isn’t it?”
Austin blinked. He looked rather slow-witted, and I felt sorry for him, trying to cope with Clovis.
Clovis finished arranging the plastic cards with letters, basic punctuation and numbers one to ten around the seance table.
“Get up and come and sit down, Austin. And Jane, since you’re there, come here.”
This playful phraseology showed Clovis was in a deadly mood. He seated himself cross-legged on the rug before the table.
“Oh, Clo,” said Austin in a whine, “what ever do you think you can pick up in a modern building like this?”
“You’d be surprised what I’ve picked up here,” said Clovis.
Austin didn’t get this. But he slunk over to the table.
“But the apartment is so new,” whined Austin.
“Siddown,” barked Clovis.
“Oh all right. If you’re going to go all brutal. I’ll sit down. But it’s infantile.”
He folded himself on the rug like a rope. I went over and sat on the other side. A cut-glass goblet, that had been chipped a year ago when one of Clovis’s lovers had thrown it at him, rested in the table’s center. We each put a finger on it.
“This is so childish,” said Austin. “If it does move, it’s just pressure. Your hand trembling.”
“My hand doesn’t tremble,” said Clovis.
“Oh, I know, dear,” said Austin.
I felt very alone, and I began to cry again, but neither of them noticed me. By lowering my head, I could let the tears just fall straight out of my eyes onto my lap, where they made a strange abstract pattern of dark polka dots. It became quite interesting, wondering where the next tear would land.
“Oh, dear,” said Austin. “This is dull.”
“I do it all the time,” said Clovis.
“How dull of you.”
“I am dull.”
“I just hate dull men.”
The glass began quite suddenly to move. It glided across the table and back again, and started a liquid circling motion around the fringe of letters and numbers.
“Ooh,” said Austin. “You’re doing it.”
Clovis took his finger off the glass. The glass, with Austin and me still adhering, went on.
“She’s doing it,” sneered Austin. “I might have known.”
“Take your finger off the glass, Jane,” said Clovis.
I did. The glass went on twirling with Austin still attached.
“Ah!” screamed Austin. He let go as if it had bitten him. Undeterred, the glass swirled about the table.
“Oh God,” said Austin.
“I don’t think it’s actually God. You could ask.”
“I’m not speaking to it.”
“Everyone,” said Clovis, as if addressing a crowd of thirty people, “put your fingers back on. First Jane, then Austin. Then I will.”
I did as Clovis said, and Austin anxiously followed suit, yelping as he touched the glass. Clovis put his finger on the glass and Austin said, “Has someone died in this room?”
“Not yet,” said Clovis.
“Then how can it get anything?”
“People have died everywhere. And don’t forget, twenty years before this block went up, there was a condominium on the site. It fell down with a massive loss of life. And we are sitting, as it were, on the rubble and the bones.”
“You do have a horrible turn of phrase. Why did it fall down anyway?”
“Did you not,” said Clovis patiently, “ever hear of the earthquakes, tsunamis and geological collapses that occurred when we captured the Haemeroid?” (The Haemeroid is Clovis’s name for the Asteroid.) “When a third of Eastern Europe sank and North America gained seventy-two Pacific islands it hadn’t had before. Little, easily overlooked things like that.”
“Oh,” said Austin. “Is this a history lesson?”
The glass jumped up from the table and came down again with a noisy crack.
I thought of all the people dying in the earthquakes, and swept away, shrieking, in the seas, and tried not to sob aloud. I had seen lots of ruins, lots of swamps, but I had been too young and didn’t remember them. I saw Chez Stratos falling out of the sky. I saw the city tilt into the purple river and the clean river, and Silver lying trapped under the water, not dead because water couldn’t kill him, but rusting away, and my tears joined together in the lap of my dress, making the map of a weird new continent.
“What do we do now?” said Austin, as the glass made bullfrog leaps all over the table.
“Ask it something.”
“Um. Is there anyone there?”
“Obviously there isn’t,” said Clovis.
“Oh. Er, well. Who are you?”
The glass rushed to the letter N, and then to the letter O.
“In other words,” said Clovis sternly, “mind your own damn business. Do you have,” Clovis demanded of the energetic glass, “a message for someone here?”
The glass flew to the letter A, letter U, letter S, letter T—
“Ooh!”
“Sit down, Austin.”
“But it’s—”
“Yes, Austin. Austin would like to know what the message is.”
“No,” cried Austin, alarmed. “I don’t want to know.”
“Too late,” said Clovis with great satisfaction.
Swiftly the glass spelled out, Clovis reading off the letters and then the words: There is a negative influence about you. You must take a risk. Excitement is waiting for you, but not here. Be warned.
“Well, thanks,” said Clovis.
The glass shuddered to a halt.
“You’ve frightened it off,” complained Austin.
“Well, you saw what it said. I’m supposed to be a negative influence. Bloody thing. Comes into my home and insults me. Where are you going?”
Austin had risen and sauntered to the apartment door.
“I need some cigarines,” said Austin.
“I thought you gave them up.”
“Oh, that was yesterday.”
The door let him out, the closet handing him his three-tone jacket as he passed. The door buzzed shut, and presently we heard the lift.
“If only it could be so quick,” mourned Clovis, clearing the seance table. “But he’ll come back. He’ll come back and he’ll brood for at least another day before he takes the message to heart and goes.”
The table is rigged. Jason, who’s very clever with electrical stuff, did it for Clovis, and put the electronic magnet, the size of a pinhead, in the glass—you can just see it, if you know. Clovis memorized the sequence of letters and the message is always nearly the same. Clovis is really very cruel. He prefers to play with his lovers and watch them react to just telling them to get out. Of course, this probably works better, in the long run.
“Hallo, Jane,” said Clovis, after the sound of the lift had faded. “If you were trying to water the plants, your aim is a little out.”
“I didn’t think you saw me.”
“Weeping so bitterly? Since when have I been blind?”
I stopped crying, and Clovis brought me a glass of applewine. His comfort is limited to words and gestures at a distance. I don’t think he’s ever touched me, and I never saw him touch one of his lovers, though they constantly touch him. To be hugged by Clovis would, now, be embarrassing.
I told him about S.I.L.V.E.R., rather fast, not really explaining it properly, partly because I didn’t understand myself, and partly in case Austin came back quickly.
Clovis listened, detached and elegant, and beyond the window, the New River quivered in the late afternoon sunlight.
“What a nasty idea,” Clovis said when I stopped. “A metal man. Sounds like a comic strip. Decidedly kinky.”
“No, no, it wasn’t like that—he—he was—”
“He wa
s beautiful. Well, he sounds beautiful.”
“It’s simply that—how can he be a robot and a—”
“He can’t. He isn’t. He’s just a bit of metal. Worked metal that can move fluidly, like a sort of skin. They’ve been easing up to it for years, you know. Someone had to make one. Clockwork and machinery designed to look like musculature from the outside. A wonderful sort of super male doll. Take off the skin and you find cogs and wheels—what’s the matter? Oh, Jane, you’re not going to throw up on my rug, are you?”
“N-no. I’m all right.”
“If he—it—has this effect on everyone else, Electronic Metals Ltd. are going to regret their advertising campaign.”
“Everyone else was fascinated.”
“And you were allergic.”
“I was—” My eyes spilled water again.
“Poor Jane,” said Clovis. “What a gargantuan emotional reaction. I wonder if,” said Clovis, “he’d go with the furnishings? I could buy a model and install it in the wardrobe. Then, when I wanted to get rid of an Austin, I’d just trundle out the robot. They’re fully equipped, I suppose.”
“What?”
“Jane, your innocence can only be assumed.”
“Oh. I suppose they are.”
“I do believe you’ve missed the point of the Sophisticated Formats altogether. They’re sex toys. Nine models, the flyer robot said? Nine Sophisticated Formats—”
“No, Clovis.”
“Yes.”
“But he sang. He was playing a guitar.”
“All extras built in. A robot can do anything. Pretty soulless music, I’d say.”
“No, it was—”
“And pretty soulless in bed. Still, buggers can’t be choosers.”
When Clovis says things like that he is disturbed in some way. Perhaps my own disturbance was affecting him. Most of the time I forget that he’s only a year older than I am. Much of the time, he seems a great deal older, twenty, maybe. The robot had looked about twenty.
“And,” elaborated Clovis, “he could march out and play Austin a tune—you are going to be sick.”