by Tanith Lee
“But he’s a personal robot, Mother.”
“What does he do that the others can’t?” Well…
So I became almost petrified with worry in the cab. But then, I’d turned to wood the moment we were on the street. Everyone looked at him, like before, and, like before, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them not because they knew he was a robot. We crossed a busy intersection and he took my hand, like my lover, my friend. Looking after me. It was an act of courage on my part to make us walk to the nearest taxi-park, all of three blocks. His responses were normal. Interest, alertness, apparent familiarity with subways, escalators, which streets led where, as if he’d lived in the city always. His senses and reflexes were, of course, abnormal. Once he drew me away from walking under an overhang. “There’s water dripping down from the air-conditioning above.” I hadn’t seen and didn’t see it, but I saw two people walk into it, pat themselves and curse. He also drew me aside from rough paving, and slipped us through crowds as a unit, without the usual periphery collisions that always happen to me.
The cab had a robot driver. He didn’t react to that at all. I wondered how he would have reacted to the thing with the head on the flyer, out of the same workshop as himself.
On the street, I kept asking nervous questions, couldn’t stop. Some were the same questions, in different forms; I wasn’t even aware of the repetition half the time. Some were unsubtle fierce awful questions. “Do you sleep in a crate?”
“I don’t sleep.”
“But the crate?”
“Somebody switches my circuits off and they prop me up in a corner.” Which sounded like a macabre joke, and I didn’t believe him even though he’d said he couldn’t lie. Sometimes people caught fragments of our conversation and stared.
Something else began to dawn on me, a seeping amazement that something so weird as this had had so little publicity. Even the advertising campaign and the demonstration had done hardly anything to promote the news. Perhaps that was the idea—to infiltrate, show how these things could be passed off as human—and then really sound trumpets: See, they’re that good. (These things.)
This makes me sound rational. And I wasn’t.
I was glad to get into the cab, and then not glad, because I was again alone with him. I felt inadequate, and short and fat, and plain, and infantile. I’d taken on more than I could cope with. But how could I have left him in their testing cubicle, once Clovis gave me the chance to rescue him. Eyeless, machinery exposed, dying, and knowing it?
I said, brutishly, and ashamed of myself: “If they’d run the full check and taken you apart, is that your kind of death?”
“Probably,” he said.
“And does that scare you?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“Not thought about dying.”
“Do you?” he said.
“I suppose, not often. But when—the test, your eyes, your hands—”
“I was only partly aware.”
“But you—”
“You’re trying again, Jane, to get me to do something I’m not geared to do, which is analyze myself emotionally.”
I looked at the geography going past, the dust and the mauve-tinted sky. Thunder murmured somewhere, hitting distant hills. He, too, looked out of the windows. Did he like the landscape, or didn’t it matter to him? And was human beauty or lack of it equally unimportant?
We reached the approach to the house, and I paid off the cab. A mauve dust wind was rattling along the concrete and powdering the conifers. The steel supports of the house, in the softened, curious storm-light, were almost the same color as Silver.
“Hallo, Jane,” said the lift.
He leaned on the wall as we soared upward, looking about him. And I looked at him. I shouldn’t have done this. I’m a fool. I can’t cope.
When the lift opened on the foyer, one of the three spacemen was trundling across to the hatches. I wondered what Silver would do, but Silver took no notice, and neither did the spaceman.
We got in the birdcage lift and went up to the Vista.
As we came in, there was a colossal thunderclap, and the whole room turned pink-white, then darkest purple. Insulated and stabilized as Chez Stratos is, there’s still something utterly overpowering about a storm seen so close. As a child, I was terrified, but my mother used to bring me down here and show me the storm, explaining why we were safe and how magnificent Nature was. So that by the time I was ten, I was convinced I was no longer afraid of storms, and would come into the Vista to watch them and win Demeta’s approval. But as a second flash and sear and roar exploded about the room, I wasn’t so sure I was unafraid.
Silver, though, was walking along the room and into the balcony-balloons, and the storm was hitting him, turning him white, then cobalt. A cloud parted like a breaking wave only a hundred feet away, and rain fountained from it. The reflection of the rain ran over Silver’s metallic face and throat.
“What do you think of the view?” I said brightly.
“It’s fascinating.”
“You can appreciate it?”
“You mean artistically? Yes.”
He moved from the window, and touched the top of the piano, in which the clouds seethed and foamed, making me dizzy. He and it were in a sort of impossible motion, their skins gliding, yet stationary. He ran both hands suddenly across all the keys in a lightning of notes.
“Not quite in tune,” he said.
“Isn’t it?”
“Not quite.”
“I’ll tell one of the robots to fix it.”
“I can fix it now.”
“My mother plays it. I’d have to ask her.”
His eyes flattened out. This time I knew. The thought process was switching over, because I’d reacted oddly. He, too, was a robot, and could retune the piano exquisitely. But I, instead of agreeing delightedly, said “No,” as if he might humanly botch the job.
“My suite,” I said, “is up here.”
I turned and went through the annex and up the stair, anticipating that he’d follow me.
The moment I entered, I touched the master button in the console that brought all the green silk blinds down across the windows. I looked around at the Persian carpets, the baskets of hanging plants, the open door showing the mechanically neatly made bed, another showing the ancient Roman bathroom. The stereophonic tape-player, the visual unit, the clever games beamed at me, burnished, costly. Like a stranger, I moved forward, touched things. The books in their cases, clothes in their closet, (each outfit with its two matching sets of lingerie), I even opened the doll cupboard and saw my old toys, preserved for me in neat formal attitudes, as if they were in a doctor’s waiting room. There wasn’t a thing I’d ever bought for myself. Even the things I had bought—recent things, unimportant things, like nail varnish and earrings—they were there because my mother had said, “You know, this sort of thing would suit you,” or maybe Clovis had said it. Or Egyptia had. Or Chloe had given it to me. Even my toys, long ago, had been chosen, and how I’d loved them. But here they sat, poor things, that love outgrown, waiting for the doctor who never would come and play with them again. Their sad fur made my eyes fill with tears. I know I’ve told you how I cry a lot.
I was aware he hadn’t followed me after all, and I sat on the couch with the rain rolling down my face and no reflection, till I heard the piano burst into syncopation and melody. The thunder cracked, and the piano chased up the thunder, and danced over the other side.
I wiped my face with a lettuce-green tissue from a bronze dispenser, and went down again. I stood at the south end of the Vista, until he finished, watching his satin hair bouncing up over the lifted fan-shape lid of the piano as he dipped and dived in and out of the music. Then he got up and walked around the piano, smiling at me.
“I did fix it.”
“I didn’t say you should. You were meant to come upstairs with me.”
“Something else we have to get clear,” he said. “Being locomotive and
Verisimulated, I’m also fairly autonomous. If you want me to do something specific, you’ll have to make it more obvious.”
I balked. “What?”
“Try saying: Come upstairs with me. Then I’d leave the piano and follow you.”
“Damn you!” I shouted. I hadn’t meant to, didn’t want to. It didn’t even mean anything, except some basic symptom of what was happening deep inside me somewhere.
And his face grew cold and still, and his eyes were satanic.
“Don’t look at me that way,” I said.
His face cleared, changed. He said, “I told you about that.”
“The thought process switching over. I don’t believe you.”
“I told you about that too.”
“I don’t think you know!” I cried.
“I know about myself.”
“Do you?”
“I have to, to function.”
“My mother ought to love you. It’s so important to know oneself. None of us does. I don’t.”
He looked at me patiently, attentively.
“I have to give you orders,” I said, “to make you do what I want.”
“Not exactly. Instructions, perhaps.”
“What instructions did Egyptia give you when she took you to bed?”
“I already knew what the instructions were.”
“How?”
“How do you think?”
Human. Human.
“Egyptia’s beautiful. Artistically, you’d be able to appreciate that.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m sorry you got stuck with me.”
“You do sound,” he said, “as if you regret it.”
“Tomorrow, I’ll send you back to her. To Clovis.” What was I saying? Why couldn’t I stop? “I don’t need you. I made a mistake.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“You regret failing me. Not making me happy.”
“Yes.”
“You want to make everyone happy?” I screamed. The thunder blazed. The house shook, or was it my pulse? “Who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?”
Lightning. Fire. Drums. I lost the room, and when it came back, he was in front of me. He put his hands lightly on my shoulders.
“You’re going through some personal trauma,” he said. “I can try to help you, if you tell me what it is.”
“It’s you,” I said. “It’s you.”
“There is a school of thought which predicts human beings will react as you’re doing.”
“Egyptia was your first woman,” I announced.
“Egyptia’s a young girl, as you are. And not the first, by any means.”
“Tests? Performance tests? Piano, guitar, voice, bed?”
“Naturally.”
“What’s natural about it?” I pulled away from him.
“Natural from a business point of view,” he said reasonably.
“But there’s something wrong,” I said. “You don’t check out.”
He stood and looked down at me. He was about five feet eleven. The sky was bleeding into darkness behind him, and his hair bleeding into darkness, too. His eyes were two flames, colorless.
“My bedroom is up the stair,” I said. “Follow me.”
I went up, and he came after. We walked into the suite. I pushed the door shut. I walked over to the green auto-chill flagon of white wine, and poured two glasses, then remembered, then took up the second glass anyway and pushed it into his hand.
“You’re wasting it on me,” he said.
“I want to make believe you’re human,” I said.
“I know you do. I’m not.”
“Do it to please me. To make me happ-y.”
He drank, slowly. I drank quickly. I started to float at once. The lightning burst through the blinds, and I didn’t mind it.
“Now,” I said, “come into my bedroom, exclusively designed by my mother to match my personal coloressence chart. And make love to me.”
“No,” he said.
I stood and stared at him.
“No? You can’t say no.”
“My vocabulary is less limited than you seem to think.”
“No—”
“No, because you don’t want me, or your body doesn’t, which is more important.”
“You have to make me happy,” I got out.
“I won’t make you happy by raping you. Even at your own request.”
He put down the glass. He bowed to me from the waist, like a nobleman in an old visual, and went out.
I stood with my mouth open, as the lightning splashed on the blinds, and the thunder faded. He began to play the piano again. It was the silliest thing, the silliest and the most disheartening thing, that could have happened to me. And I knew I deserved it.
I got rather drunk alone in my suite, listening to the piano. Sometimes, when alone, I’d secretively play it—but so badly. He played, fantastically, for an hour. Things I knew, things I didn’t. Classical, futurist, contemporary, extempore. It was like a light on in the Vista, burning even if I couldn’t see it. The day after tomorrow my mother would come home. And there would be trouble to sort out. Trouble large as hills on my horizon. Only today then, and tomorrow, and I’d ruined everything.
I showered and washed my hair, and let the machine warm-comb it dry. I put on dress after dress, but none of them was right. Then I put on black jeans which were too tight for me (and found they weren’t, but then, I’d hardly eaten today, and my Venus Media capsules were due again tomorrow), and a silk shirt Chloe gave me that I never wore because Demeta didn’t like it.
The piano had long since stopped. It was about five forty-five P.M., and the storm was over in the Vista. A blue sunset covered the sky and the furnishings, and I couldn’t see him. He wasn’t there.
I’d told him I’d send him back, and Egyptia owned him. Could he have left? Was it possible for a robot to make that sort of decision? I went out of the Vista, and the lift was down on the mezzanine, but not the foyer. A surge of blood went through me, as if my circulation had been waiting for information. I got the lift back and went down. He was in the library, in the long chair across the balcony-balloon. The lamp was on. He was reading. He seemed to need light, but it took him about fifteen seconds to take in each page.
I went into the library. I was humbled. I walked over to him and sat on the floor by the chair, and leaned my head against his knee. It seemed natural. And his hand coming to stroke my hair, that was natural too.
“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.