by Tanith Lee
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was subconsciously and consciously trying to drive you into feeling human.”
I thought he’d laugh. He didn’t. He looked down at my hand in his. The light seemed to darken, intensify, which perhaps was because some of the candles were burning out.
“I do feel human,” he said at last. “I’m supposed to feel human, in order to act in a human manner. But there are degrees. I know I’m a machine. A machine that behaves like a man, and partly feels like a man, but which doesn’t exactly emote like a man. Except that, probably very unfortunately, I have gained emotional reflexes where you’re concerned.”
“Have you?” I said softly. I believed him. There was no doubt in me. I felt amazingly gentle.
“Viewed logically,” he said, “all that’s happened is that I’m responding to your own response. You react to me in a particular way, an emotive way. And I react to your reaction. I’m simply fulfilling your need, if you like.”
“No, I don’t like. I’m tired of your fulfilling my needs. I want to fulfill yours. What do you need, Silver?”
He raised his eyes and looked at me. His eyes seemed to go a long way back, like sideways seas, horizontal depths….
“You see,” he said, “nobody damn well says ‘What do you need?’ to a bloody robot.”
“There is some law which forbids me to say it?”
“The law of human superiority.”
“You are superior.”
“Not quite. I’m an artifact. A construct. Timeless. Soulless.”
“I love you,” I said.
“And I love you,” he said. He shook his head. He looked tired, but that was my imagination, and the fluttering light. “Not because I can make you happy. If I even can. Not for any sound mechanical pre-programmed reason. I just Goddamn love you.”
“I’m glad,” I whispered.
“You’re crazy.”
“I want,” I said, “to make you happy. You have that need in you. Well, it’s just the same in me.”
“I’m only three years old, remember,” he said. “I have a lot of ground to make up.”
I kissed him. We kissed each other. When we began to make love, it was just the same, just as marvelous as it always was. Except that now I didn’t think, didn’t concentrate on what was happening to me. The wonderful waves of sensation passed over and through me, and I swam in them, but the promise of light I swam toward on the horizon was altered. It wasn’t mine.
I don’t think I’d have presumed, even considered it, unless I’d drunk brandy on an empty stomach and with a slight benign fever, in the aftermath of my mother’s rejection and my public song. It seems rather unbelievable even as I write it down. I know you won’t believe me, even though you know what I’m going to say. If you ever read this, if I ever let you read it.
I don’t want to, won’t describe every action, every murmur. Egyptia would. Read her manuscript—there won’t be one, she pours her life like champagne through your video phone.
Only suddenly, when I no longer even knew for sure, the road or the way, or how I was idiot enough even to dream of it, lulled and almost delirious, and yet far far from myself, out of my body and somehow in his body—all at once I knew. In that instant, he raised himself and stared down at me in a kind of bewilderment. In the veiled, multi-colored light, his face was almost agonized, closing in on itself. And then he lay down on me again, and I felt his body gather itself, tense itself as if to dive through deep waters. His hair was across my eyes, so I shut them, and I tasted the silken taste of his hair in my mouth. I felt what happened to him, the silent, violent upheaval shaking itself through him. Earthquake of the flesh. I was the one who cried out, as if the orgasm were mine. But my body was only shaken with his pleasure and my pleasure in his pleasure. So I knew what he’d known before, the joy in my lover’s joy.
The silence was very long, and I lay and listened to the candle wax crackling in the saucers. As I listened, I kissed him, his hair, his neck; I stroked him, held him.
Eventually, he lifted himself again. He lay on one elbow, looking down at me. His face was unchanged. Amused, tender, contemplative.
“Technically,” he said, “that just isn’t possible.”
“Did something happen? I didn’t notice.”
“Of course,” he said quietly, “a human man would have left you proof. You’ll never be sure it wasn’t—”
“Faked? I’ve heard so much about you. I know how it goes when you fake. Not like that. As for proof, it’s just as well there isn’t any. Along with everything else, I missed my contraception shots last month.”
“Jane,” he said, “I love you.”
I smiled. I said, “I know.”
He lay down next to me, and for another hour at least I was drowsily making up songs in my head, before I fell asleep.
* * *
—
So, we’re at the end of the story now. If you read so far. You don’t want to know any more of what we say to each other, or how we feel about each other. And I don’t need to write about it. The record—it is a record—is for…? Even Silver hasn’t seen it, though he knows I’ve written it. But maybe, it’s a record for people who fall in love with machines. And—vice versa.
I write songs. I always could, and didn’t credit it. I can improvise sometimes, too. I am very good with hideous puns.
They groan, and they pay. The man who gave us a button, gives me another button. The first time he heard me sing, he gave us two, the double price Silver had stipulated.
Sometimes I see myself, a sort of bird’s-eye view of me in the distance, doing these things, singing solos and harmonies, playing at the crowd, and with the crowd. Sometimes it’s two hundred strong. And I’m astounded—is this me? But of course it isn’t. This is Jain. Jain with her blond hair, her twenty-two-inch waist, her silver skin, her peacock jacket, her cloak of emerald green velvet, lined with violet satin. It was as if a skin encased me. I could only just see through it. Then the skin tore wide open.
One month and a half now we’ve lived here in this wonderful squalid place.
It snowed yesterday and today, early, fierce snow, so we stayed in. We made love and homemade wine. The latter nearly blew the kitchen hatch off when the sugar exploded. I stress, the latter. And I finished writing all this.
The white cat comes to visit, and is lying like a blob of warm snow in the middle of the brass bed we bought two weeks ago, almost literally for a song. It makes a luxurious creaking noise when we move about on it—the bed, not the cat. Actually, the cat belongs to the caretaker. We get the rent to him in bits and pieces, and he doesn’t make a fuss. He’s also frankly but unconsciously in love with Silver.
Some days we still don’t eat. Sometimes we dine in expensive places. Performing, no store has ever told us to move on; occasionally they ask us to sing inside.
So many years of days since I saw Clovis, Egyptia, Chloe. My mother, Demeta. The temptation to call her is often very strong, but I resist it. I don’t need to crow. She doesn’t know where I am, but she knows I’ve won. Sometimes I dream about her, and I wake up sobbing. He comforts me. I apologize for being a bore. We argue about my paranoia, the fight ends in sex, the bed creaks and the white cat, if present, yowls.
There are things I try not to think about. When I’m sixty and he’s just the same as now. There’s Rejuvinex—we might be rich by then. He stresses that there’s metallic decay and creeps round the room making sinister clonking noises. And a comet could always hit the earth. To hell with all that.
The subsidence is white with ice and snow. The rooms glow, and we in our colors.
I love him. He loves me. It isn’t a boast. I can hardly believe it myself. But he does. Oh God, he does.
And I’m happy.
Look, everyone,” said the star, “I’m burning so bright.” And then it went nova. And whe
n the light faded, the star was nowhere to be seen.
The moral of this story is obvious.
My whole arm hurts too much for me to write this. I don’t know why I’m trying to. Is there any point? Is it a sort of therapy? I’m not writing it for a record, anymore. How childish. But then, if I’m not writing it, childishly, for anyone else, I must be writing it for me. And it won’t help me, so that’s that.
* * *
—
No. I have to write it.
It will be easier if I just start. Just go on. From those words—I’m happy. But I can’t.
* * *
—
I’m happy. I’m burning so bright.
* * *
—
Ohgodiwishiwasdeadandthewholebloodyworldwasdeadwithme.
* * *
—
No. I have to write it, so I will. And I don’t wish the world were dead. But I won’t even cross that out, or tear it up. I’ll just go on. Please help me, someone. Jain, please help me.
The snow became porcelain under a pane of blue sky. The weather was exquisite, the cold like diamond. After a couple of days, the wine and the raisins ran out, and we emerged again. We opted for most of the indoor pitches, particularly Musicord-Ectrica, on the corner of Green and Grande. If you don’t know, Musicord is the biggest all-day, all-night instrumental store that side of the city, and caters to the rich from the center as well as the starving dreams of the poor from the Arbors. There are so many anti-vandal and anti-thief devices in the shop, the decor mostly consists of them, and they hire their own robot poliguard. Silver was welcome because he could play any instrument in the store and make it sound its full worth and something extra, a wonderful inducement to customers to buy. Rather than take coins here, Musicord offered us a fee, and now and then a free late dinner in the lush restaurant above.
At first, I thought we’d keep meeting people I knew in the store, and wondered uneasily how I’d deal with them in my new persona. But my friends aren’t musical, knowing little except for the most recent songs and the odd snob-value bit of Mozart.
There were a couple of meetings, though, with musicians who came in and fell in love with Silver’s musicianship. Jealous and elated and intrigued, I’d listen to the oddest conversations, as they tried to find out what band he’d been with, why he wasn’t professional, and so on. As a liar, this creature who’d told me he couldn’t lie, proved most accomplished. I watched him languish esoterically over his escape from the rat race of the professional stage in some far-off city, I heard him invent curious debilities of the wrist or spinal cord that would let him down and so prohibited full-time public playing. Of course I came to realize these weren’t actually lies. He improvised, just as he did with songs. But a handful of musical evenings followed, extraordinary firework displays of talent, invention and good humor, in damp basement rooms or craning attics or quasi-derelict lofts. They played and he played. The excitement generated was insane and wonderful. Only his brilliance made them wary, and occasionally stumble. But I used to sit through these sessions and think: I like this. This is so good. And then I’d think, quite consciously, just as I wrote it down: I’m happy.
We came out of Musicord-Ectrica about two in the morning, then, and stood in the golden snow where the glow of the store lights was falling. We looked, from the outside, back in at the scarlet pianos, one of which Silver had been playing most of the afternoon and evening. A large visual screen, with a loudspeaker wired out to the street, blared in the adjoining window, and I glanced and saw reports of an earth tremor somewhere, and looked away.
“Are you tired?” I asked him.
“You always ask me that, mad lady.”
“Sorry. You’re not tired. You don’t get tired.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“We could walk over to the Parlor, then, and you could make yourself sick on lemon fudge ice cream again.”
“Or go home and see if the cat’s eaten any more candles.”
“I told you, if you bought the cat a bone, it would stop.”
We stood in the snow. I wished I could buy him a scarlet piano.
“Did you write out the words of the new song you were working on in there?” he asked me.
“Not yet. But I told you and you’ll remember it. I do, too. White fire—God—it’s a weird song. The ideas keep coming. Maybe it won’t last. I’ll dry up. What would you do if I dried up?”
“Water you.”
The visual screen switched channels automatically, and the sound stepped up. We’d have to move. But my eye slid back to it involuntarily. I saw a rainbow neon in front of a drab glass-sprayed frontage, and the neon read ELECTRONIC METALS LTD. For a second it meant absolutely nothing. And then the sign went out, the letters became just a black skeleton, and I heard the news reader’s voice over the loudspeaker say: “Tonight, E.M. switches off its lights for the last time. The firm that wanted to make robot dolls as good as men finally admitted there’s no substitute for a human after all.”
“Silver,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
We waited there, watching, and the snow drummed slowly under my feet with the pulse of my blood.
Now the screen showed a small blank room with leather chairs. Someone was facing out at me. He had tinted glasses, and this time, a five-piece suit, trousers, jacket, waistcoat, shirt and cravat, all of cream wool. Swohnson. The front man. I recognized the stance. His easy affable charm, his relaxed willingness to give information, and the two manicured hands holding on tight to each other.
“It was a great idea we had,” he said. “Ultimate service to the customer. Robots, not only aesthetically pleasing, but a source of constant domestic entertainment. Singers, dancers, conversationalists. Companions. But it’s a fact, there’s only so much you can program into a chunk of metal.”
The screen flicked. Swohnson was gone, and there was a line of yellow metal boxes with smiling humanoid faces. “Good day,” they sang out like canaries. “Good day. Welcome aboard. May I take your fare?”
The screen flicked. Swohnson was back.
“That line isn’t, er, too bad,” he said. “More welcoming than just a slot. They’ve caught on quite well. The Flyer Company is considering installation. We, ah, we recognized our limitations, there….”
Flick. A grey metal box with a friendly head, and two pretty girl’s hands. “Good morning, madam. How would you like your hair styled today?”
Flick. “Where we came unstuck,” said Swohnson, “was in trying to create a thing which could rival the human artist. The creative individual. Our Sophisticated Formats. Of course, computers have been fooling with that for years. And we all know, it just doesn’t work. Man is inspirational. Unpredictable. He, ah, he has the genius a machine can never have.”
Flick. A young woman was standing on a stage a long way off. The camera glided toward her slowly, and as it did so, highlights gleamed and flowed across her white-wine-colored gown, her copper skin, her wheat yellow hair. Her sweet and musical voice said effortlessly and surely: “Gallop apace, you fiery footed steeds—” And said again: “Gallop apace, you fiery footed steeds—” and again and again and again. And every time with the same inflexion.
“A perfect performance,” Swohnson said, as the camera glided about her, “and the same every time. No variation. No—um—no ingenuity.”
Flick. Swohnson sat, beaming, holding his hand.
“But very lifelike,” said an invisible interviewer, subtle and insinuating. He was accusing Swohnson of something. Swohnson knew it.
Swohnson beamed, broader and broader, as if exercising his facial muscles.
“Verisimulated,” said Swohnson.
“Could be mistaken for human,” accused the newsman.
“Well, yes, ah, from a distance.”
&
nbsp; Flick. A golden man in black oriental garb sewn with greengage daggers swung a curved sword into the air, and was transfixed. The camera raced to him. At about four feet away, he ceased being a man. You saw the impervious metal of his skin—which was hard as the veneer of a heatproof saucepan.
“The skin is always the giveaway,” said Swohnson, as the camera slid along the canyon of a metallic eyelid, its lashes like black lacquer spikes. “And, although they looked quite real at their routines, the head movements, the walk, always let them down.”
Flick. A copper-skinned man in yellow velvet strode across the screen. You could just see it, the stiltedness, and once having seen it, you could see nothing else.
“The crazy thing is,” said Swohnson, “the public hysteria that got stirred up, the day we introduced these robots to the city. A publicity gimmick—but what a surprise—”
“Yes, indeed.” (The interviewer.) “A kind of myth was created, wasn’t it? Totally autonomous robots who could find their own way about.”
“Naturally,” (Swohnson) “every robot had a human attendant, however circumspect. They could hardly have managed otherwise. Absurd, the things people actually credited our robots with. Oh, yes, er, they were clever, the best yet—but no machine can do the things our robots were supposed to have done. Traveled on flyers alone, taken ferries, subways—”
Flick. Old film, and I knew it. A crowd of demonstrators in East Arbor, the police lights playing over them. Someone threw a bottle. The camera followed it. It hit the facade of Electronic Metals and shattered.
I must have made a sound. Silver took my palm between his cool fingers, which felt of human skin.
“It’s all right.”
“It isn’t. Don’t you see—wait,” I said.
Swohnson was back on the screen.
“Whatever else, the final failure of E.M. will please those people out there who got scared by what we did—or what they thought we did.”
