by Tanith Lee
“He’s just forgotten how to respond,” said Silver. “And he’s sick. He has to take a prescription medication that gives him another sickness as a side effect.”
“How do you know?”
“The night I borrowed the ladder, we sat around for a while, and he told me.”
“Still trying to make everyone happy,” I said.
“Still trying. Uphill work all the way.”
I looked at him and we laughed. And I went to him and put my arms round him. The carpet floor is nice to make love on, too.
The evergreen plant, by the end of the month, had spread up to the ceiling in a lustrous fan.
Which brings me to the end of the month.
• 3 •
The night before the first day of the new month, we were sitting out in the subsidence, on one of the girders, watching the stars stare their way past the last of the clinging leaves, and the distant city center blooming into its lights. We often came out there, which had firstly been his suggestion. Sometimes he played the guitar there quietly and sang to me. It was beautiful in the subsidence. Mysterious at dusk, and wild, like the heart of some forest, with the safe edges of civilization around it. Now and then, the white cat appeared, and we’d bring a plate of cat’s meat and leave it by. Despite its apparent homelessness, Silver had spotted, with his faultless sight, the little mark on the hindquarters of the cat, which means it’s had its anti-rabies shots quite recently. I had a wish to lure the cat into the apartment. But that night the cat didn’t come, just the stars. And as I lay against him, wound with him in the cloak, I said, “This is the happiest time of my whole life.”
He turned and kissed me, and he said, “Thank you.”
I was touched suddenly by the innocence inherent in his sophistication. I held him. The coolness though not coldness of his body had never troubled me, and now, from proximity to mine, he seemed warm.
“I don’t even mind that you don’t love me,” I said. “I’m so happy.”
“But I do, of course, love you.”
“Because you can make me happy.”
“Yes.”
“Which means I’m no different from anyone you make happy, you can love us all, so it’s not what I mean by love.” At last, it didn’t hurt; I was arch and unconcerned, and he smiled.
I shall never grow tired of, or familiar with, his beauty.
“I love you,” I said. “Let’s go. out to dinner. Do you mind? Will you pretend?”
“If you’re sure you want to spend money on it.”
“Yes, yes, I do. Tomorrow I’m back to a thousand.”
“I confess,” he said, “I rather like the taste of food.”
“You do?”
“Should I be ashamed, I wonder?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Most reprehensible.”
Our positions were reversed for an instant, our dialogue, our speech mannerisms. He was playing, but I had still learned.
“You’ve changed me,” I said. “Oh thank God you have.”
We went in, and I washed my hair. I’d hardly seen it since we’d started work. It had been bound up in scarves as I painted and glued things, and it was thick with dry shampoos because it takes so long to dry without a dryer when I wash it. But tonight I was lavish with the wall heater. As my hair began to dry before the painted mirror, I saw emerge among those blue hills and that tigerish foliage, a mane of light, the color of blond ash.
My mother had got something wrong. Or had she? Or the machines, perhaps, the coloressence charting. Or had my natural hair color simply altered as I grew older? Yes, that must be it, because—
“Oh,” I said, touching my hair, “it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful in a way it never was.”
“And that,” he said, “is your own.”
I put on one of my oldest dresses, which Egyptia once gave me, and which had been hers. Demeta hadn’t thought it suited me, and neither had I, but I’d kept it for the material, which was strange, changing from white to blue to turquoise, depending on how light struck. And tonight it did suit me, and I dared to put on the peacock jacket and buttoned it, and it fit. I was slim. I was slim and tall. And my hair was moonlight. And I wept.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why—”
“Yes you do,” he said. He held me until I began to laugh instead. “Poor Demeta,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“If I told you,” he said, “I was hungry, you wouldn’t believe me?”
“No. Tell me why my mother is supposed to be ‘Poor Demeta.’”
“I think you know. Look at your hair, and ask yourself if you do.”
But I was feverish and elated. I thrust thought aside and hurried us out of the building, through the streets which now I knew quite well, up onto the only partly moving escalator on South Arbor, to the flyer platform.
We sailed into the center of the city. I wasn’t afraid of meeting anyone. Part of me, perhaps, almost wanted to.
Who, after all, would know me? (And I forgot what he had said.)
As we sat in Hunger And Answer, eating charcoaled steak and tiny little roast potatoes shaped like stars, I thought: Now I can phone them, all of them. Egyptia, Clovis. My mother. The wine was red. It matched his hair. And like his own glamour, the wine didn’t interest him very much.
We walked home all across the city.
The ultimate leaves blew and crunched beneath our feet. The streets close to the Old River were shut off again, unless you bought those smelly throwaway oxy-masks at the cheek gate. We went over Patience Maidel Bridge though the center end had the Walk Fast notices up, and there were no buskers. When we got past the halfway mark, it was apparently clear, though empty. For some reason he and I started to sing, idiotic songs we made up as we walked, no longer fast, about the snarling fish in the purple water. Catch one for the cat—Oh hell—the fish has ate my cat—Oh well—dress the fish in fur—teach the fish to purr—kid me it’s the cat—Cat-fish can be swell.
The green light was on as we came off the bridge, and just as we moved down toward East Arbor, I saw there were two buskers. They weren’t performing, but seated on a rug, a boy and a girl, eating french fries out of a paper over a guitar with three broken strings.
Despite my thoughts of earlier, I hesitated. For they were Jason and Medea.
Once, a year ago, they’d done this before. It was a basic idea. Jason sang, rather badly, and Medea went around the crowd, if one was tone-deaf enough to gather, or if not, through the passersby with a plate. As she did so, she picked pockets. Usually she was caught out, or had been last time. Both were minors, but their father had had to pay a considerable fine.
“What’s wrong?” Silver asked, sensing how I held back.
“Some people I know, and don’t like.”
As we spoke, Jason looked up and right at me. An expression of astonishment went over his face. Very slowly, he nudged Medea. Their thin still eyes seemed to congeal identically. There was no other way but to walk on and meet them. Did they know about Silver? About me? About me and Silver? Or not?
“Hallo, Jane,” said Medea.
“Hallo, Jane,” said Jason.
I looked at them, pausing, my hand in Silver’s. The strength in his hand comforted me, though it seemed a long way off.
“Hallo,” I said. And then, rashly, coolly, “Do I know you?”
Jason laughed.
“Oh, I think so.”
“I think so,” said Medea. “Your name is Jane, isn’t it?”
“The bleached hair’s not bad,” said Jason. “And the diet. Does Mother know?”
Then they hadn’t been told I’d absconded from Chez Stratos. Or had they…
“Did you have a nice evening?” I inquired politely.
“Pickings were quite good,” said Medea flatly.
Jason smirked. He smirked beyond me, at Silver. Suddenly Jason’s smirk faltered.
I glanced at Silver. There was that look I’d seen before, like a metal mask, the eyes bu
rning, impenetrable, fearsome. Circuits switching?
“Who’s your gorgeous actor friend?” said Jason. His voice didn’t quite sound as sure as it usually did. “Or is it a big seekwit?”
“Does your mother know?” repeated Medea.
I stood there, my skull quite empty, and Silver said to them in the most gentle and reasonable and truly deadly of voices, as if it were an analogy for their lives: “You have just dropped a chip inside the sound-box of your guitar, which won’t do either of them much good.”
“Oh, thanks for caring,” said Jason.
“Personally, I don’t like silver makeup,” said Medea. “What drama are you in? Or are you out of work? It must be nice for you that you met Jane.”
“Yes, Jane’s very rich, isn’t she,” said Jason. “We’re rich too, of course. But we don’t make friends with out-of-work actors.”
“But Jane’s such a softy,” said Medea.
“Luckily for you,” said Jason.
They stopped. They’d said all they could think of for the moment.
I knew none of this mattered, but it was still awful. I didn’t look at Silver anymore. I could feel the roughness of the embroidered cuff of his shirt, which we’d bought in the market three nights ago, against my wrist. I supposed it was up to me to make the move to get away. To Silver, this was irrelevant.
Then I began to see what was happening to Jason and Medea, and I started to be fascinated. They were wriggling, actually and definitely physically wriggling, their little hard eyes glaring at him and slithering off him. And Medea had gone a dreadful yellow color, while Jason’s tanned ears were turning red—I’d never seen anything like this happen to them before, even when they were children. And now their hands were plucking feebly at the french fries, they were gazing at the ground, their backs were stiffening as if in the grip of a horrible paralysis. I didn’t turn to Silver anymore. I realized that cruel annihilating look of his, which he said meant nothing, was still trained on them like a radioactive ray, mercilessly letting them shrivel beneath it.
It was Medea who finally managed to say, in a shrill, wobbly wire of a voice: “Why won’t he stop staring? Doesn’t he know it’s rude. Make him stop it.”
But it was Jason who scrambled suddenly to his feet. Not waiting to pick up the guitar, the ill-gotten gains, the chips, or even for Medea, he thrust by me and jumped hastily away onto the escalator up to the bridge. Medea, in a speechless frenzy, snatched the money and the guitar and bolted after him. I felt Silver turn to watch them go, as I had turned. Medea turned too, just once, though Jason didn’t. She was at the top of the escalator. Her face was a yellow bone triangle and her mouth hissed, or looked as if it did. Then she ran after Jason.
I was shaken too. I didn’t move until Silver slipped his other arm round me.
I knew his face had changed then, so I looked up at him.
“I thought,” I said, “you wanted everyone to be happy.”
“Don’t I?” he said.
“Your circuits were just switching over,” I said.
“Not exactly.”
“You meant to frighten them.”
“I meant to shut them up.”
“But why did it matter to you?”
“The temperature of your hand changed. It went very cold.”
“And I bought you, so your loyalty was to me. Like the Golder robot being a personal bodyguard,” I said, with amazing stiltedness.
His eyes, unblinking and jewellike, looked back at me. There was a long pause.
“Jane,” he said. But nothing else.
And I was suddenly afraid. At the meeting with the twins, at the uncanny thing he’d been able to do to them. Afraid of being here with him, afraid for him, and for myself.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“I think it’s time we walked on,” he said.
And he let go of me, even my hand, and we walked on. Like two lovers who’d quarreled. And the night was cold as knives.
The bed was cold that night, too, and we didn’t make love in it.
In the morning, just as the light started to come, I woke up. Silver was sitting cross-legged on the rainbow carpet. He was dressed, and his hair fell forward over his face because his head was bowed. He looked like a beautiful advertisement for psychosthetic meditation. But sensing me awake, he looked up. He smiled at me, but the smile wasn’t the same as at any other time before.
“Do you mind if I walk about outside for a while?”
Of course. He was my property and had to ask my permission.
“No…”
I couldn’t even say, “Are you all right?” He was a machine. Obviously he was all right. And just as obviously, something was wrong.
“I’ll be back in an hour.”
“No. Come back when you want to.”
“Will you,” he said, “be okay?”
“Yes. I have to buy some groceries and start the card off for this month. I’ll need change for the rent money.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“Oh no.” I sounded bright and self-sufficient.
He got up, sort of melting to his feet as if every muscle were elastic, and probably it is.
After he went, I was alone for the first time since he’d come with me from Egyptia’s. “Alone” now had a new meaning. It felt as if I’d been cut in half. Half of me was here in the apartment, and half out on the street walking about, only I didn’t know where.
I got up, wrapped myself in the emerald shawl from the couch, and made some lime-spice tea. I sat and looked out of the window, drinking the hot tea, watching the last rags of leaves falling like dead birds.
I tried to go over what had happened, how everything had been fine until we met Jason and Medea. And then—but what had happened then? All that kept coming into my mind, dredged up like Davideed’s silt, were those words of the vile Swohnson’s: This one doesn’t check out. Not that I’d really thought about that aspect, only its nightmarish result—Silver, his eyes replaced by wheels… Yet now, I began to see a curious unevenness, a strange incoherence. Sitting there, shivering over the tea, I pictured those other Sophisticated Format robots, the Coppers, the Golders, the two Silvers, that I’d seen performing at Electronic Metals. How lifelike they’d been, in appearance and in attitude; mannerisms, movements, speech. So lifelike, if you hadn’t known, you’d have taken them for men and women. And yet there was something, something which gave them away, maybe only when you knew, but something which told you they weren’t men, weren’t women. Something that told you they were machines. And did I imagine it, or was Silver, my Silver—S.I.L.V.E.R.—not like that at all? Was Silver truly like a human man, truly believable as human—even when you knew he wasn’t? And was it this which had set E.M.’s computers ticking on the checkout? Some sort of independence, beyond any autonomy, however profound, that they’d programmed into him?
But how? And why?
No, that wasn’t what concerned me. I was just afraid because I might lose him, lose him even though I owned him. He wasn’t a slave in Imperial Rome. And yet, he was a machine. He was, he was. And suddenly the enormity and the insanity of my emotions boiled up before my startled inner eye. I loved a machine. Loved it, trusted it, had rested the foundations of my world on it. And on the game I played that it could be kind to me.
I had a terrible feeling. As if I’d been walking in my sleep, and woken up in the middle of an unknown and deserted plain.
In a daze, I showered and dressed, and took up my purse with the credit card, and wandered out into the city. I had a kind of need for the proof of money. I had a need, too, to be out of the apartment. Maybe when I went back, my arms full of fruit and soap, Silver would be home and everything would be as it had been. Yes, this must be the way to break the spell.
It was raining in the city. As I crossed over from the elevated, robot ambulances screamed past me. Someone had been run over outside the Hot-Bake Shop. I felt a dreary depression and fear.
I went into one of the large stores off the boulevard, because I’d seen a crimson glass jar there that I wanted to buy for the bathroom. It was purely ornamental, and I see now I was still basically acting just like someone rich. I hoped the jar would stop me from feeling the incredible sense of dread, and when they gave it to me and I put it in the wire basket with the crackers and the nectarines, it almost did. I picked up some bath towels, too, and a paper knife from the second-owner counter. Then one of the ambulances went by the windows. I remembered the man who had been stabbed at the visual, and how it hadn’t bothered me, except somewhere inside, some sort of mental bottom drawer, where it had obviously bothered me a lot. I stood in the queue to pay. I was thinking, My mother taught me about self-analysis and so I should be able to analyze why I’m suddenly so scared of death or injury. And then I thought: When I get back, he’ll be there. He’ll be sitting on the couch playing the guitar. I had a picture of the winter, and the snow coming; of being snowed up in the apartment block with him, a sort of glorious hibernation. And then I had a picture of going home and finding him not there.
Then it was my turn at the checkout. It was automatic, in this store, but sometimes got cranky, and so there was a bored girl supervisor sitting nearby, painting her nails.
My goods ran through and the total rang up, and I put my card into the card slot. Instead of the bell sounding and the groceries card, and change coming out of the other end of the machine, a buzzer went sharply. A red light appeared over the card slot, and my card was regurgitated. As I stood there, the bored girl glanced over, got off her stool and walked up.
“Your card must be overdue.”
“No. It’s an indefinite monthly.”
She picked it out of the slot and looked at it.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
A thousand I.M.U. indefinite was probably unusual in this area, and I hoped she wouldn’t say the amount aloud. She didn’t.
“Let’s try again,” she said, and pushed my card back into the slot. And once more the buzzer went and the card was vomited out.