by Tanith Lee
When I dialed the robot operator, my hands and my voice were shaking.
“What number do you require?”
“The number of Electronic Metals Ltd.”
“At your service.”
The video shook with me, in little lines of light, then cleared. There was a small blank area with a man projected like a cutout on it, in one of those four-piece suits, jacket, pants, waistcoat and shirt of a matching pale grey silky material, and tinted glasses on a classic nose. He looked cheerfully at me, his manicured hands holding on tight to each other. A small sign lit up in front of him, which said: SWOHNSON.
“Swohnson of Electronic Metals. How can I help you?”
And he beamed and licked his lips. He was eager. For a sale?
“This is just an inquiry,” I said. I pitched my voice over its own cracks and tremors. “You are the firm that sent those robots out into the city yesterday?”
“Er, yes. Yes. Electronic Metals. That’s us.”
“The special and the Sophisticated formats?”
“The specials. Twenty-four models. Metal and reinforced plastic. Sophisticated Format line. All-metal. Nine models. What was your inquiry?”
My white face flamed, but perhaps he couldn’t see it.
“I’m interested in the cost of hire.”
“Hire not sale. Er. We’re thinking of cutting back on that.”
“I happen to know one of the Sophisticated line was hired last night.”
“Oh, yes. They all were. But that was part of the, ah, the advertising campaign. A one day, one night venture. These robots are really for exhibition only. At the present.”
“Not for sale.”
“Ah. Sale might be a different matter. Did you have purchase in mind?”
I wouldn’t let him upstage me. For some reason, he was as nervous as I was.
“No. I had hire in mind. Let me speak to the Director.”
“Ah—just wait a moment—I’m not trying to give a bad impression here.” Human employee, a good job, worried about losing it. I felt mean. “Ah. We have a few problems at this end.”
“With the robots.”
“With, er, transportation.”
“Your robots are locomotive. They were walking all over the city like people yesterday. If I hire one, why can’t it just walk out of the door with me?”
“Um. Between ourselves, not everyone likes the idea of what these magnificent robots can do. A further threat to the last bastions of human employment potential. You know the sort of thing. Bit of a crowd. Bit of trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“The, ah, the police have arrived. But it’s a peaceful demonstration, so far. Until any violence breaks out, the crowd probably can’t be moved. And if it does break out—well, we’d rather none of our merchandise was in the thick of it—Ah!” He glanced downward, and his eyes behind the tinted spectacles bulged. A white glow was playing over his chin and through the sign with his name. I realized a message panel must have lit up out of sight on his desk console. The message didn’t look as if it was very comforting. “Um,” he said. “I, er, think I said more than I ought. Ha, ha. Look, madam, I’ll patch you through to our contact department on relay. Leave your code and number and E.M. can call you tomorrow to discuss your wishes. Just hold, if you will, and I’ll put you through.”
The video fluttered, and I hit the switch wildly.
And why did I do that? Maybe only because tomorrow was a hundred years away, and would be too late.
And what now?
I walked along the Vista, past all the bubbles of sky, and back again. It was a red dog-end of a sunset tonight. Claret-colored, like Silver’s cloak. Like Silver’s hair.
I thought about the subsistence riots on the news channel. They say no one can really live on a sub. check. Sometimes robot circuits were vandalized by the frenzied unemployed, though usually the built-in alarms and defense electric-shock mechanisms deter vandals. But the news channel had reported a machinery warehouse had burned down in one riot. That was thousands of miles away. But suppose the peaceful crowd outside Electronic Metals got out of hand? Not water, but fire. His face, like a wax angel’s, dissolving—
I ran to the phone and called Clovis again.
“This is Clovis’s answering tape. Right now Clovis is committing sodomy. Call back in an hour, when I regret you may still receive the same answer.”
(Clovis, actually, leaves this message even if he’s gone out to a restaurant, or to the beach for a week. Davideed, who once got the message over and over for two days, rushed to the New River apartment and shouted at the door, which was locked. And when one of Clovis’s discarded, left-behind, just-packing-to-leave lovers opened it, Davideed hit him.)
The sunset turned to hot ashes, and then to cold ones. The night would gather in the city and the lights would flower. The crowd waiting outside Electronic Metals would begin to understand how pretty buildings look when they burn in the dark.
I switched on the local news channel. They talked about a new subway to be built, about a gang fight near the Old River, about a rise in cigarine prices due to the heavy crop losses in one of the more earthquake-active zones. Then I heard and saw the crowd, which had gathered in East Arbor around the gates of Electronic Metals Ltd., and they were growing restless. People shouted before the shabby glass facade. The newscaster told me about robots, how they’re important, and why workers hate them. The news didn’t seem to have grasped that E.M.’s robots were different. Or perhaps they were just trying not to advertise. The crowd went on shouting. There only appeared to be a couple of hundred people. Enough to start a fire. But I would be safe. The policode I wore would protect me, with its guaranty that it takes exact body-readings of anyone who assaults the wearer, while instantly summoning the police. There were police anyway, watching the crowd. I could see their little planes going over and back against the deepening sky of dusk in the screen, and sometimes their lights played on the building and the people.
But if I were there, what would I do? What difference could I make? It was pointless to go, to be there. If I negotiated the mob, who would open E.M.’s door to me with all that outside? I might be a ringleader determined to force an entry.
I left the news channel on as I walked up and down the Vista. Then someone threw a bottle. The camera followed it. It hit the facade of Electronic Metals and shattered.
Outside, across the Canyon, the seven P.M. flyer would be floating like a moth toward the platform. In fifteen minutes I could be over the Old River, in twenty I could be getting off at South Arbor, running the three blocks to East. The Arbors are a rough area, a big trash can of derelict offices and subsided stories not yet rebuilt after the Asteroid tremors, with, here and there, a nightclub perched like a vulture deliberately on the ruins, or some struggling enterprise starting up in a renovated warehouse, with a frontage of sprayed-on glass.
If I let the flyer go, there wouldn’t be another one until nine P.M. If I dialed a cab, I might have to wait for half an hour.
The police would stop anything from happening, and I could do nothing, and here was my unfinished martini, and there my strawberry sedative, and here my purse with my credit card with the thousand I.M.U. a month limit on it, which meant I could not afford a robot. It would be much better if I stayed at home. Much better if I forgot about everything. Starting with the first sight of his hair and the mirror fragments on his jacket, ending with the kiss which had meant nothing to him because he couldn’t feel emotion, except, perhaps, the delight of giving, for which he was randomly pre-programmed.
I almost missed the flyer. There were twenty or so other travelers on it, some in gaudy evening clothes going to the city for a night out, some with grey harried faces, night workers going in to work at some job a robot couldn’t do. But the mechanical driver was without a head.
I don’t recall seeing t
he city appear in its constellations, or even getting off at the South Arbor platform. I think there were some docile men drinking on a corner as I ran. And then the sky over my head was full of little robot planes, a swarm of them with their lights blinking and their sirens hooting, and buzzing away into the city center.
Almost instantly I met with a stream of people jeering and swearing and arguing. A board trailed on the ground. By means of stray street lamps I read: SCREW THE MACHINES. The surge broke around me to let me through, or else pushed me aside out of its way, and was gone. Bits of glass, scraps of paper, were left in its wake. It seemed the demonstration had lost heat, or been compulsorily broken up before real violence erupted. A solitary police cab cruised up the uneven concrete, showered me over with its spots, registering my code, and nosed on after the crowd, leaving me in the long shadows between the erratic lamp poles.
When I came to it, the gate of Electronic Metals, illumined now in rainbow neon, stood open. Another police car lurked on the forecourt. A knot of human beings huddled in a corner, lost in debate, sometimes caught by a winking light on the police machine that constantly circled them.
It was a strange scene, one I’d often looked at on a visual, or in a side street, but never been part of. But I walked through the gate and across the forecourt. No one paid any attention to me. I touched the visitor’s panel in the door. A luminous dot appeared. It said softly: “This building is now closed.” Since most display warehouses in the city are mechanically staffed and stay open all night, eager for custom, I wondered if E.M. had closed itself for good in dismay.
“I called earlier,” I said to the door panel. “I’m interested—in buying one of your Sophisticated Format robots.”
“Please visit, or telephone, tomorrow.”
“I’ve come twenty miles,” I said, as if that meant anything.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances,” said the door, “this building is now closed. Please visit, or telephone, tomorrow.”
Quite without warning, my legs changed to air, to nothing: I had no legs. I slid down the door and sat in the dirty shadows of the portico, in my black dress. I might have been a robot with my power switched off. I, too, might have been closed for the night.
Presently the people and the police went away. I went on sitting on the ground, like a lost child who doesn’t know the way home. I knew I ought to get up and go and find a taxi. If I stayed here, another police patrol might pick me up, thinking I was ill.
Beyond the gate, I could see the Asteroid burning like a green-blue flaw in the darkness. The skeleton of a tremor-smashed apartment block teetered on a slope, stripped of lives like a winter tree of leaves. I saw it this way, knowing the insecurity of life as I never had before. How smug, how complacent I’d been. Egyptia was right to be afraid.
If I went home, I’d get into bed in my suite in Chez Stratos, I’d pull the green sheets over my head, and I’d never have the courage to come back here. For all I knew, they’d dismantled him. An exhibition robot. Perhaps there was a fault somewhere, the man on the video—Swohnson—had sounded so unsure. Was it more than the unemployment demo? There were always demonstrations. Perhaps the City Senate had approached Electronic Metals and vetoed this omen of ultimate redundancy, men who excelled men in every way.
Finally, I got up, and dusted off my dress carefully, though I couldn’t see properly, even in the neon from the open gate.
What happened next was odd, because it was almost as if I made it happen, somehow. I suddenly concluded that the open gate was a mistake the mechanism left unattended in the confusion, for if the building was shut, so should the gate be. And then I judged how somebody would have to come back and shut it. And about one second after that, a lean black picard drove through onto the forecourt, pulled up, and a man got out. Two lightnings streaked over his upper face—the neon shining in his spectacle lenses. He almost walked into me, and grunted with surprise. He fumbled at his jacket.
“I’m coded,” he said. “Don’t try anything.”
It was Swohnson.
“Are you going,” he said, “or do I, ah, signal the police?”
It would have been nice to say something razor-sharp and succinct. Clovis would have. But it was my mouth, not my wit, that was dry.
“I called you. You spoke to me on the video, earlier.”
“Threats won’t do you any good.”
In a moment he would press his silly code button.
I blurted rapidly: “I decided I’d buy one of the formats.”
“Uh—oh,” said Swohnson. “Oh,” he said, shifting so he could see the candy neon on my face. “Madam, I do apologize. But I never thought you’d come here, after the operator cut us off.”
His indiscretion with me before had caused a row, perhaps, and now he might redeem himself with a sale. Or was he just feeling unorthodox?
“I came back to lock up,” said Swohnson. “Dogsbody, that’s me.” He palmed the door panel. He had been drinking. “Director’s daughter’s lover,” he said, “that’s me, too. My qualifications. How I got the job. Liaison, public relations, locker-up of doors. But I mustn’t put all this onto you, madam.” The door recognized him and opened with a sullen hiss. “Please walk inside.”
He thought I was a rich eccentric. The rich part was easy. It’s awful, the way we have this look to us, of being rich. Eccentric because I waited in doorways in East Arbor, alone, on the off chance people like Swohnson would come by to shut the gate.
In the foyer, which was also glass-sprayed and dismal, he hit some switches and saw to the gate, and summoned a lift. Then he took me up to the shop floor.
The place we came into was a tepid office in leather, and by now my bluff was already turning cold inside me, congealing. I told myself I could back out, so long as I didn’t handprint or sign anything, or as long as I didn’t record my assent verbally on tape. He’d need my permission for any of those. Or, if I did, maybe Demeta would have to honor the transaction? Maybe it would be clever to do just that. But basically I hate lying, big lies. It’s so complicated.
He sat in a chair and a drinks tray came out of the wall. We had a drink. His hands trembled, and my hands trembled. But both our hands still trembled on our second drinks, his around the rye whisky, mine around the lemon juice. I guess we had both, in our different ways, had a rough day. He told me all about Electronic Metals, but I don’t remember what he said. I had to pretend I was alert, or thought I did, the prospective buyer making sure everything was in order, and all my concentration went into that. I think I heard one word in twenty. I still couldn’t quite believe I’d gotten into the building.
“There’s an exhibition formula we have here,” he said, and I heard that because instinctively I knew it was a prelude to the display of E.M.’s wares. “I dreamed it up myself, actually, to show off the three types to full advantage. If you’ll step through?” He drained his glass, took another, and held my arm as one of the walls folded back. “Excuse me, madam, but you’re ver-ry young.”
“I’m eighteen.” Should I have tried for twenty?
“Gorgeous age, eighteen. Can just remember it, I think.” (It occurs to me now, writing it out, that he may have been making a halfhearted pass at me. He was attractive in a stereotyped way, and knew he was attractive and not that he was stereotyped, merely in the mode. And he’d made it with a rich girl before. Perhaps he thought I’d be useful, somehow, if I fell for him and poured cash over him. How embarrassing. I never even thought of this at the time.) “Actually, um, I think I know which of the Formats you’ll choose. It’s proficient in pre-Ast. oriental dance—one of the female Golder range. But wait till you see.”
He knew I wasn’t even eighteen. He thought me an innocent, even if he made a pass, unless he thought I was M-B. How would I be able to tell him now, past the barriers in my throat and soul, that my chosen robot was masculine?
Riven with my s
hyness, I moved away from his guiding hand, and into the area beyond the reception office. It was a large room we entered, windowless, with a soft suffused light all over the ceiling. The floor was polished.
“Don’t step beyond the red line,” said Swohnson. “Let’s just sit here and see what happens.” Proud of his innovation in the boss’s workshop, he waved us into tubular chairs. Obviously that activated a control somewhere. A slot opened in the far wall, and a woman came through.
She was tall and slender and beautiful. Hair blond as cereal haloed her head and shoulders. Her tawny-yellow cat’s eyes fastened on mine and she smiled. She was pleased to see me, you could tell. A dress like a tulip flame swathed her, and she held a purple rose. Her skin was a pale creamy copper.
“Hallo,” she said. “I’m one of Electronic Metals’ experimental range. My registration is Copper. That is C.O.P.P.E.R.: Copper Optimum Pre-Programmed Electronic Robot.” She half closed her eyes. A stillness seemed to enfold her. The music of her voice grew hushed, hypnotic. “Gallop apace,” she said, “you fiery footed steeds, to Phoebus’ lodging….” She spoke Juliet’s lines in a way I never heard before. The air scintillated, my eyes filled with tears. She spoke of love, knew love, was love. “…If he should die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night—” Two men stepped through the wall. They were Copper’s brothers. One wore a jacket of yellow velvet with medieval sleeves, and white denim jeans. The other wore damson jeans, a sauterne-colored shirt, and a magenta sash from the Arabian Nights. Each smiled at me. Each told me he, too, was registration Copper. They acted a scene together from a drama I’d sat through the month before. It far outshone the original performance. The three copper robots linked arms, bowed smiling to me, and went back through the wall, which closed.
The left hand wall opened.
A man strode through. Hair like smooth black ink, splashing over his head to his shoulders. Black silk eyes. Skin like molten gold. He wore black, his cloak lined with the green of sour apples. His registration, he told me, was Golder: G.O.L.D.E.R.: Gold Optimum Locomotive Dermatized Electronic Robot. His eyes smoldered at me, burning through to my deepest awareness. He flung himself suddenly into an aerial cartwheel that flowed and sliced, and landed in strange graceful menacing ripplings and contortions of his frame. It was a dance, but a dance capable of dealing death.
