by Tanith Lee
“E.M. has egg on its face, then?” The newsman. Pleased. Congratulatory.
“A lot of egg. We found out the hard way. These ultra-sophisticated machines use up so much energy, they just short out.”
Flick. A golden girl, dancing. A spray of electric static. A metal statue, poised at an unearthly angle, one leg extended, her hair in her eyes. Stupid, ungainly. Laughable. A machine that couldn’t be as good as any human, that couldn’t even finish its act.
(“Some run-down heap,” said Clovis, “that will probably permanently seize up as it walks through the door. Or at some other, more poignant, crucial moment.”)
As if he read my mind, the interviewer said: “And surely, how shall I put it, these things had a friendly social function as well. A stand-in for a girlfriend, perhaps. Awkward if your girlfriend seized up like that.”
“Um. It could have happened.”
“Oh, dear,” said the interviewer.
Swohnson grinned. The grin said: Hit me again, I love it.
“So I guess we remain,” said the interviewer, “the superior species, to date. Man stays at the top of the heap as artist and thinker. And lover?”
“Um,” said Swohnson.
“And dare I ask, what are E.M.’s plans for the future?”
“Ah. We’re thinking of moving out of state. Somewhere east. Farm machinery for derelict agricultural areas.”
“And will any of your tractors have a winning smile?”
“Only if some maniac paints one on.”
And flick, there was a cartoon filling the screen. It showed a metal tractor with a great big smile, eyelashes and long, long golden hair.
I shut my eyes and opened them. The snow dazzled, and I turned in fear to see if anyone but us had stopped to watch the local news broadcast. A drunk rolled across the street, oblivious, slipping. In the sky high above, a distant string of jewels revealed the approach of a flyer. The city roared gently to itself on every side. But it didn’t really matter who had seen the visual here. All over the city people had seen it. Seen it, but believed it?
“Very strange,” Silver murmured.
“I’m scared.”
“I know you are. Why?”
“Don’t you see?”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go home,” I said. “Please. Quickly.”
We walked in silence, cloaks brushing the snow, like two Renaissance princes. And every time we had to pass someone, I was afraid. Will they recognize him? Will they confront us?
But how could they? Hadn’t the news bulletin just told them that a robot can never be mistaken for a human? Go close, you’ll see the skin like a saucepan, hard, hard metal. (I had lain closer than any camera, or treated still shot designed to deceive. Skin which was poreless, yet not lifeless, smooth but not hard. Metallic, but not metal….) And the walk, disjointed, a little stiff, and the ungainly gestures which always gave them away—a puppet, slightly out of control. And the inability to find its own way about the city. To decide for itself. All those of us who saw those robots that day when they walked among us, did we all now believe that we’d made a great big silly mistake? Yes. Why not? We believe what we want to, don’t we. And no one wants to believe the machines that take the jobs away from those of us that need jobs could also take our songs away, our fantasies, our lovers.
Someone had told Electronic Metals what it had to do and what it had to say. And Swohnson, as ever in the hot seat, had done it and said it. Lies. Logical, credible, soothing lies. How much compensation had the City Marshal been authorized to pay E.M.? A lot. They’d had to take their most exciting product off the market. They’d had to mess about with it until it gave an efficient display of being useless, for the benefit of the visual cameras. And then—and then, no doubt, they’d dismantled it. Golden torsos dismembered, golden wheels turning where black eyes had looked out, or copper wheels, where golden eyes had looked out.
“Your teeth are chattering,” he said to me.
“I know. Please don’t let’s stop.”
The visual hadn’t shown any of the silver range. The silver girl at the piano, the silver man (Silver’s brother and sister), neither of these. Why was that? So as not to remind anyone there was a Silver Format? Tell the people that our robots, which they’ve seen to be exactly human, are really shambling bumbling automatons. And they’ll accept that. Tell the people, by omission, that the only robots they saw were gold or copper. And they’ll forget the silver range. The Silvers with their burgundy hair and auburn eyes. But why, Mr. City Marshal, Mr. Director of E.M., do they have to forget about the Silvers? Why? Because one of the damn things is still at large. Out there in the city. One flawless, human, better-than-human, godlike, beautiful, genius of a creative inspired robot. And if they realize, the citizens may lynch us all.
I thought I’d been living in the real world, bravely coming to terms with the truth of life. But I hadn’t. I’d missed all the upheaval that must have been happening, somehow, all about us. The apartment on Tolerance Street, our pitches, our romantic, poetic existence. How far from life they really were. Only another cocoon. But now the axe blow of fact had broken through.
I’d told no one where I was. No one knew. Therefore, no one knew where Silver was. Had they been looking? No, that was insane.
We were in our block, going up the stairs. I imagined shadows looming up from the dark by the door. But no shadows loomed. We opened the door. Lights would flare, a voice would shout: Surrender yourselves! But the room was empty. Even the cat had let itself out through the flap. (Remember when he cut the flap, efficient and stylish? “I just read the instructions.”)
He guided me over to the wall heater, switched it on, and together we watched the heat come up like dawn.
“Silver,” I said, “we won’t go out.”
“Jane,” he said. “This has been going on some while, and we never knew. And we never had any trouble. Did we?”
“Luck. We were lucky.”
“I was bought and paid for,” he said. “They’ve probably written me off.”
“They can’t write you off. The City Senate has done a deal with them. They can’t just leave you loose.” I stared at him, his profile drawn on the dark by the heater’s soft fire. “Aren’t you afraid, too?”
“No, I’m not. I don’t think I can get to be afraid. You’ve taught me several emotions, but not that one. Like pain, fear is defensive. I don’t feel pain, or fear. I’m not intended, perhaps, to defend myself, beyond a very basic point.”
“Don’t,” I said. “That makes it much worse.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“We won’t go out,” I said again.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Food,” he said. “Rent money.”
“Then I’ll go alone.”
I grasped his wrists, lace and skin. Skin. The fluid movement of the strong fingers, shifting, returning my grip.
“Please don’t argue with me,” I said.
“I’m not arguing,” he said. His face was grave.
We stood there, motionless in the firelit darkness, a long while.
* * *
—
Gone to earth, we stayed in the flat five days. It was a fearsome, banal, claustrophobic existence. We discussed strange topics, as for example that he could protect me from attack, and maybe not himself, the distances between certain types of stars, what the insides of the walls were like. We also talked of constitutionals through the subsidence—but didn’t risk them. I lived on apples and crackers. It was hopeless, since there was no foreseeable end. Finally something embarrassing and embarrassingly simple drove me out on the street. As I’d missed my contraceptive shots, I began again to menstruate, as I had at twelve and thirteen. I’d been aware it might happen, but never got around to more than the most curs
ory of the provisionings against the event. So, rather than starvation, hygiene forced me back into the unsafe world.
I ran along Tolerance, along the boulevard. Eyes everywhere accused me. Under the elevated a woman stepped out of a shed and caught me eagerly by the arm. “You’re the bitch who sleeps with a robot!” But she didn’t say that. She said: “We missed you at the market. People asked after you both. Where’s he? Not sick, is he?”
“Oh, no. It’s just so cold out.”
I forget what else we said. Something, and then she let me go. When I got back into the apartment, I was shaking. But later I realized, and Silver explained to me, over and over, that all this proved nothing had changed.
Next day, I went out alone again. I walked through the streets, through the stores. A couple of times people said hallo to me. No one accused me. Something inside me, a tense wire, sagged and slackened. E.M.’s retraction was a tiny little wave, which had hit the beach of the city, and passed unnoticed.
He sat cross-legged on the brass bed, playing the guitar softly, and said to me, “Go out again tomorrow, and if nothing happens, we’ll go out together tomorrow night. One pitch only. An experiment.”
“No—”
“Yes. Or you’ll be down to eating the poor cat’s candles.”
So the next day I went out, about three in the afternoon. I walked along the frozen sidewalks and around into the arcade where he’d sung the first time and I’d been so afraid of singing myself. As if to sing were something to fear. To sing.
I glanced around the arcade. No one was in the archway, but people trotted to and fro and in and out of the shops. A long translucent icicle hung down from one of the ledges above, pointing like an arrow to the spot on the snow beneath, where Jason and Medea stood and looked back at me, with two tight little matching smiles.
Hallo, Jane.”
“Hallo, Jane.”
“Ooh, what a silver face you’ve got.”
“Yes, Jane, it is rather silver. Makeup, or did you catch it off him?”
I’d forgotten, my heart hammering its way through my ribs, my breath snarled up in my throat, forgotten that when you learn to sing you learn to control your voice. But I was doing it anyway.
“Catch what off whom?” I said.
“Gosh,” said Jason, “what impeccable grammar. Off that peculiar actor friend of yours.”
Do they know? How can they be here? As if they’re waiting for me—
Don’t answer. Switch. Throw them.
“Isn’t it cold?” I said.
“Not for you in that lovely green cloak.”
“Is that his?” Medea inquired.
“Whose?”
“Your rude friend.”
“I have a lot of rude friends.”
“Oh,” said Medea. “Does she mean us?”
“She doesn’t want to talk about him. Obviously had a lovers’ tiff. What a shame, when you’re living here in the slums to be with him.”
They know. I think they know it all. Do they know where I live? Where Silver is? How can they….
“If you mean the man with the red hair you saw on the bridge,” I said, “we’ve split up, yes. He’s gone east.”
“East?”
“Out of state.” (Like Swohnson and E.M. and their new line in farm machines.) “There’s the chance of a good part there, in a drama.”
“And left you all alone? In this slummy bit of the city?”
“Jason,” I said, “what gave you the idea that I live around here?”
“Well. You’ve left your mother, and your mother’s stopped your credit and your policode and all that. Then we asked around rather. Described you very accurately—diet-conscious, bleached hair—And we heard about how you sang in the street with your friend who’s gone east. How brave, when you can’t sing. Do you do it the way we do? Someone said you come here, to this arcade.”
They’d been searching for me. It couldn’t be for any reason but pure nosiness and spite. And today was the day Silver and I used to come to the arcade—they’d found that out too, and stationed themselves here, waiting. And, used to coming to this spot at this time, on this day, I’d done it without considering. And walked right into them. (They know he’s a robot, they’ve spoken to Egyptia, or Clovis. They know.) But—they hadn’t found out where we were living—or they’d have turned up there. (I can just imagine their smiling faces in the doorway.) Of course. Nobody did know where we lived, we’d never told anyone, even the musicians whose lofts we’d visited had never yet been invited back.
“Well actually,” I said, “I don’t live this end, at all. It’s sheer chance we met.”
“Ah. A Dickensian coincidence,” said Jason.
“Where do you live, Jane?” asked Medea, smiling, her eyes like thin slices of cobra. How I hated her, and her awful crimped blue hair.
“Where do I live? Near the Old River.”
“And you never open the windows.”
“Not often.”
“It’s interesting there.”
“Yes. Anyway, I must go. Good-bye,” I said.
“Good-bye, Jane.”
“Good-bye, Jane.”
They stood totally static as I walked out of the arcade, and I almost turned and ran for home. But as the cold of the open street breathed over me and my boots crunched in the deeper snow, I suddenly understood I’d escaped too easily. With a queasy, dizzying sensation I walked over the road and into Kacey’s Kitchens, and straight down an aisle of servicery fixtures. Pausing before a chromium insta-mix I saw, reflected in its curved surface, a distorted runny image of Jason and Medea flowing in at the door.
Pretend not to be aware. Find a crowd, lose them.
Oh God. There may not be a crowd. It’s cold, and cash is low.
There has to be a crowd.
There wasn’t.
Not in Kacey’s, not in the Cookery. Not in the dozen or so stores and shops I walked through. I tried to lose them in alleyways, too, twisting and turning, going along walks I only knew because of going along them with him. Darting across hurtling roads, trying to get ahead of them—or perhaps, get them run over. But somehow they kept after me. I’d see their storefront reflections melt in, a few yards behind mine.
The sun went. The streets darkened with dusk and brightened with extra lighting. It was getting late, and I couldn’t go home. I ached with the cold, and with hunger, and with anger and fear. I hurried into a second owner clothing store, and tried to shake them off among the moth-eaten fur coats. I almost thought I had, and then, going through the hats toward the other door, most horribly I heard Jason give a raucous hoarse sneeze. It went through me like a bullet, and then I ran. I ran out of the store, and down the street outside, skidding and sliding, clutching at intermittent lampposts to steady myself. Would they run too? Oh let them fall over and break all their legs—
They ran. They must have. I didn’t hear them, they ran like weasels, better than me. Without knowing quite how, I’d reached the square that led to the all-night market with the fish-oil flares. As I stopped, panting and gasping, with a stitch jabbing in my stomach, they came up, one on either side of me, like the slatey shadows.
“Jane, whyever were you running?”
“Are you following me?” I cried.
“Are we?” Medea asked Jason.
“Sort of,” he said reasonably. “We thought we’d walk you home.”
“Only, the river isn’t in this direction at all, Jane.”
What now? I let myself gasp for breath, because it gave me time to think, if only I could. I mustn’t go toward Silver and the apartment on Tolerance. Nor must I go toward the Old River, since they would go with me right to the door, and I didn’t own a door over there.
“I don’t need you to walk me home,” I said.
“We think you do,” said Medea.
“We were certain, with your policode not working and everything, it might be dangerous for you.”
“You were certain you wanted to see where I lived.”
“Is there some reason you don’t want us to?”
“Why could that be, Jane?”
“We’re your friends.”
Where could I go? Where could I take them, so they’d get bored and leave me alone? I had hardly any cash on me, a few coins, no more. I couldn’t go and sit in a restaurant. And I had to get out of the cold, somehow, I couldn’t stand it anymore. My hands had no feeling, or my feet. Perhaps I’d broken all my toes as I ran and just couldn’t feel it yet—My eyes were burning. And they’d say, You’re frozen, you want to go home—why won’t you, if you’ve got nothing to hide, and no robots stashed there?
“I’m not going home,” I blurted out.
“Why not, Jane?”
“I’m going to see Egyptia.”
“Oh.” Both their faces fell. I’d scored, and I wasn’t sure how and then, “You mean that utterly abysmal moronic play she’s in.”
“She kept saying,” said Medea, “Jane’s got to come to my first night. Jane’s got to be there, or I’ll die. How could she abandon me like this?” Medea frowned slightly. “But you aren’t.”
It sounded very like Egyptia when Medea said it, only without Egyptia’s beautiful voice. And in the midst of panic I felt a stab of guilt. Egyptia had been wonderful to me, and I’d never called her to tell her she was wonderful, and that she would be safe. Hoping she’d now lost all interest in me and in him, my love who was her gadget, I’d shut her from my mind, as if to make it happen by sympathetic magic. But she’d shown me no malice. She’d been gloriously, sweetly kind. And tonight was her first night as Antektra, asking the peacock about brothers and dust. Through my own sick fear, I could just visualize her agonies.
“Oh, well,” said Jason, “we’d better go with you. We thought of going, actually. At least over to The Island first.”
We were walking, the three of us. Their policodes glinted, his on a necklet, and hers on a bangle, and I wished there were no such things and I could kill them. The tremor sites had snow on them. The sky was snowing out stars. Silver! Silver!
