The Silver Metal Lover

by Tanith Lee

“Yes. He suppressed the idea because it revolted him.”

  “Does it revolt you?”

  “Here we go again. You asked that already, in another form, and I answered you.”

  “You’re bi-sexual.”

  “I can adapt to whoever I’m with.”

  “In order to please them?”

  “Yes.”

  “It gives you pleasure to please.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re pre-programmed to be pleased that way.”

  “So are humans, actually, to a certain extent.”

  I came back into the room.

  I said, “What do you want me to call you?”

  “You intend to rename me?”

  “Silver—that’s the registration. Not a name.”

  “What’s in a name?” he said.

  “A rose by any other name,” I said.

  “But don’t, I think,” he said, “call me Rose.”

  I laughed. It caught me by surprise, like Clovis’s surprise, but unlike.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “I like your laugh. I never heard it before.”

  Like a sword going through me. How could I feel so much, when he felt nothing. No, when he felt so differently, so indifferently.

  “Please call me,” I said, “Jane.”

  “Jane,” he said. “Jane, a pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender, pale chain of a name.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too easy for you. Nobody ever made a poem out of my name, and you can do it with anything. It’s a very ordinary name.”

  “But the sound,” he said, “the sheer phonetic sound, is clean and clear and beautiful. Think about it. You never have until now.”

  Amazed, I lifted my head.

  “Jane,” I said, tasting my name, hearing my name. “Jaen. Jain.”

  He watched me. His tiger’s eyes were lambent, absorbing me.

  “I live with my mother,” I said, “twenty miles from the city, in a house up in the air. Really up in the air. Clouds go by the windows. We’re going to go there.”

  He regarded me with that grave attention I was coming, even so soon, to recognize.

  “I don’t know what I want from you,” I said unsteadily. Not true, not true, but what I wanted, being impossible, must be left unsaid. “I’m not,” I said, “Egyptia—I’m not—ex-perienced. I just—please don’t th—”

  “Don’t ever,” he said, “be afraid of me.”

  But I was. He’d driven a silver nail through my heart.

  I’d known I didn’t want us to stay there, at Clovis’s. Clovis might come back any time, though probably he’d spin it out. Then again, he’d irresistibly picture us making love, sliding all over those black satin sheets. And everything complicated by his own reaction to Silver, who I wasn’t going to call Silver, but couldn’t think what else to call.

  And then again, as we sat in the cab rushing along the out-of-town highway, I knew I didn’t want to take him to my suite at Chez Stratos. And suddenly then, suddenly but absolutely, and with a dreadful feeling of shock, I knew I hadn’t got a home. I simply stayed with people. Clovis, Chloe, Mother. And if my mother had been home right now, I couldn’t have taken him there, because he would need explaining. “We have three locomotive robots, dear. Not to mention all the other robotic gadgets.” “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 c
ome 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.