by Tanith Lee
I sighed. I thought about being polite. At last I said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. Any chance of Clovis being there?”
“No. He’s out.”
“Dammit. Would you tell him Leo rang?”
Would I?
“All right.”
“Leo. L as in Love. E as in Edible. O as in Oh my God why doesn’t this M-B idiot get off the line.”
“Leo,” I said dully, missing his wit, I suppose offensively.
“Good-bye,” he said, and switched off.
I scribbled across the bottom of Clovis’s note to me: LEO CALLED.
I went into the green bathroom and lay in the bath three or four hours. Sometimes I would try to cry. My mind went plodding on and on. It’s wrong to repress grief. Was I repressing grief? I thought about Silver. I tried to cry. No tears would come. I’d cried for so many trivial reasons, over visuals, dramas, books, out of embarrassment and childish fear. Now I couldn’t cry.
When I heard the lift come up, I was glad, with a sort of deadly gladness, not to be alone anymore. I heard Clovis come into the apartment, and move about there, and once he whistled a snatch of tune, and then stopped himself suddenly.
Perverseness made me go out of the bathroom, carrying my robe, naked, and walk across the room in front of him to the bedroom. He stared at me as I passed, then turned away.
I got back into the spare bed and lay there, and eventually he came in.
“Are you hungry? The servicery is bursting with food. Truffles, pâté, eggs angéliques, roast beef…mince on toast.”
I became aware it gave me a horrible relief to ignore him, providing he was there to be ignored.
Then suddenly he yelled at me.
“Christ, Jane, it wasn’t me. Do you want me to tell you what happened?”
I didn’t reply and he began to curse me. Then he went out again. I lay a long while, and then my stomach began to growl with avid hunger. My hunger was far away but insistent. Finally I got up, and opened the guest closet where he’d neatly hung all my few clothes out of the bags. My stomach growled and gurgled, and I touched my clothes, and remembered how I had worn them with Silver, and I tried to cry, and the tears wouldn’t come. The black, paint-spotted scruffy jeans, taken in so badly at hips and waist and taken in so much. The fur jacket. The embroidered wool dress. The Renaissance dress. The emerald cloak, its hem stained by melted snow, and here, at the back, this dress I’d never actually worn in the slums, this black dress I’d worn the night I went to Electronic Metals and saw all the robots perform, all but Silver. For Silver, who was too human to check out, was in the cubicle, eyeless, handless—I opened my mouth to scream, but I didn’t scream. What use was grief or terror or rage? Who would they move? Who would set things right? The law? The Senate? God? But I pulled the black dress from the closet and held it up before me, and saw with uncaring surprise that one of the sleeves was ripped out.
I stood there a moment, then I let the dress fall. I picked up my robe and put it on again. I walked out. Clovis was reclining on the couch among the black cushions, drinking applewine.
“I see Leo called,” said Clovis. “What it is to be irresistible.”
“It was Jason and Medea,” I said.
“Your note says Leo.”
“You know what I mean. It was Jason and Medea.”
“It was Jason and Medea seems grammatically unsound. They were Jason and Medea, perhaps? It was Jason, and also it was Medea.”
“Stop it, Clovis. Just answer.”
“Would you believe me?”
“The sleeve in the black dress.”
“Jason’s device was stuck on the fabric. Color absorbent, so almost invisible. About the size of your little fingernail. But very adhesive. I didn’t think you’d want it in your clothes anymore. I put it in the garbage disposal. If you want to go on being poor, I’ll buy you a new dress. Or a new sleeve.”
I went into the servicery and made instant toasts and ham and eggs and ate them standing by the hatches, greedily. I didn’t think of Silver as I ate. Or of Jason. Or of Medea.
Clovis had put some Mozart on the player. When I came into the room again, he was sketching something, I don’t know what it was.
“If you’d like to know the truth,” he said, “I will tell you.”
“Does it matter?”
“I think so. To me. I don’t like this idea you have that I’m the modern miniaturized version of the Black Death.”
I stood at the window and looked out at the river. The light was going, and a tin-foil of ice glimmered on the water. The mud was long gone, cleaned away. Jewels lit the buildings. So what?
“Did you know, Egyptia has become a star?”
“At the Theatra?” I asked.
“Not precisely. Most of the Theatra fell down in the tremor. An antiquated shed indeed. A lovely line for the visuals, though. They called her The Girl Who Rocked The City. And what was the other one? Oh, yes, how could I forget? The Girl Who Brought The House Down.”
“I’m glad,” I said, parroting, minus feeling, my earlier thought, “that it didn’t happen when the play was on.”
“No. It happened during the party afterward. Oh, yes, we were all in the auditorium at five past five, drinking some rather filthy champagne, when the bloody roof fell in on us. It was a damn silly evening anyway. The drama. Egyptia. She can’t act, you know. She just is. But the magic of Egyptia consists of her own self-hypnosis. She believes in herself, despite what she says, and it’s catching. She’s a star all right. There are contracts signed for a visual. They’ll be shooting in Africa. She’s already over there. I’m telling you all this for a reason,” he said. “You may abruptly want to know where she is.”
I had been at this window, I had said to the reflection: I love you. And he had known. A pain came through me so vast, incapable of expression. I pressed my forehead to the glass. Why hadn’t they let me die? I would be in blackness now, or in some spiritual state which no longer cared, no longer had any links with a soulless robot. For he had been only the sum of his metals, his mechanisms. Soulless, timeless.
“Jane, are you listening?”
“Yes. I think so.”
Had he been afraid? Despite what he said to console me? He’d virtually pretended he disbelieved in pursuit, when he reckoned it a fact, to console me. Had it been like pain for him to die that way, although he couldn’t feel pain? I’d taught him to feel pleasure, or rather, he’d taught himself, through me. But if pleasure, why not agony? I’d let him learn fear and need. And he’d let me learn to live. And all I wanted was to die.
“Oh, Jane,” said Clovis. He was standing by me, and awkwardly, with none of his normal elegance, he took my hand. “Please, Jane. You have to get over it. No. You won’t ever get over it. But you have to get over this.”
“Why?” I asked. I think I wanted to know.
“Because—Oh God, I don’t know. Why do you?”
“Because,” I said, “he told me there was all the world. Because he told me he was a part of me, that he’d be with me all my life and that nothing could change that. Because now I’m the only part of him that’s left. They took him to pieces and put him in a fire.”
“I know,” Clovis said. He held my hand.
“Melted down. Scrap metal.”
“I know.”
“I’m all of him that’s left. All of him there’ll ever be anymore.”
And the tears came and I cried tears. And Clovis, not wanting to, but amazingly gentle, held me.
* * *
—
I cried then, and now I don’t think I’ll ever cry again, the rest of my life.
Much later, he told me how E.M. had known about us, and how to find us.
I’d left the theatre and the play had gone through to more and more enthusiastic responses fr
om the audience. Egyptia had held them, and gradually most of the cast gave up trying to bulldoze her from the limelight. This was their livelihood, and a winner is a winner. By the second interval, the actors were in and out of her dressing room, having frozen roses sent in and making love to her. And she, generous, vulnerable Egyptia, had taken them all back into her heart. In the last scene, Antektra stabs herself, a libation of blood to appease the rampaging shade of her brother. It went on film, with everything else. The visual crew, overcome, were fighting to push out shots on the three A.M. local newscast. In the wake of all this, the party was riotous. Clovis, whose inclination was to leave, was cornered by Leo, an actor-manager from a rival company who had come to sneer and stayed to cheer. He was playfully trying to persuade Clovis to act Hamlet in a new skit version of the play called Bloody Elsinor when the tremor hit the building. At first it looked like nothing, and then the ceiling cracked in half and lumps of plaster and cement crashed into the auditorium.
Nobody was killed, but casualties were various, and this time the blood was real.
Clovis, unscathed, emerged from shelter to discover Egyptia standing up on the stage, white even under her makeup, rigid, in a sort of catatonic trance.
She’d always been so afraid of earthquakes. Her dreams and her fantasies of death and destruction had prepared her for this moment. She knew she had reached a pinnacle, and she knew the gods could sweep her from it. But she stood in the middle of carnage and she had survived. She hadn’t apparently noticed until then I wasn’t there. But when she started to come back from her trance she asked where I was. And Jason, mopping up his own blood from sundry cuts, said, “Jane’s gone back to the slum to play with her robot lover.” And, in the face of her non-comprehension, he had elaborated on his magical device and how he’d almost tracked us. I can see now, Jason and Medea would never have told any authority about us. It was more fun to have us to themselves; they didn’t want to end the game. But Egyptia—I think I know what went through her head.
She must have heard and been aware, unconsciously, of what had been said about E.M.’s Sophisticated Formats. She must have been consciously aware from her own experience that it was more than true. The wonderful lover, the wonderful musician. Men could become redundant, she’d said. And of course that really meant, humans could become redundant. And I think, just the way the mob of unemployed hate the machines that take their work away from them, Egyptia knew the terror of losing what she had only just got hold of. She was a genius. She had sensed it in herself. Now everyone knew it, and fell before her feet, and her Destiny opened in front of her like a shining road. But what if a machine had more genius than she did? Oh, I don’t suppose she thought it through. Egyptia doesn’t think, she feels. As Clovis said, she just is. Probably, at the beginning, after the Babylon party, the actors had talked a lot about Silver, and how clever he was. Maybe they talked about the other robots, too, the ones that could act. Sometime, some seed had been planted in her. The earth tremor was like an after-image—or a fore-image. It had been for her the omen it had seemed for me. She was still half Antektra, and Antektra was good at reading portents. It shook her, liberated her even as it threatened her, into the grisly savagery of the id. She went home, still mainly in her trance, and Corinth went with her. Perhaps she made another kind of comparison that night, and it clinched matters. For if Silver was superior in her bed, he might also, so easily, be superior in her profession. About nine A.M., as Silver and I were walking up through the city, she called Electronic Metals. Legally she owned him. Illegally, I had him. But they could probably find me. Someone had me tabbed. Then she gave them the address of Jason and Medea.
Jason wouldn’t have wanted to cooperate, but E.M. had the City Senate behind them, pushing. Arms were twisted. I hope it hurt a lot. E.M. took Jason’s homing transmitter, and their luck was in. Medea told Clovis all this later, including Egyptia’s part. Especially Egyptia’s part. Corinth, wandering from Egyptia’s bed, had spread the tale by then anyway.
That night I came away from Electronic Metals, twenty-five years old, self-assured, knowing I didn’t love him, that a piece of electric equipment meant nothing to me, and I walked into Jagged’s restaurant and I sat drinking coffine through a chocolate-flavored straw—Jason, or Medea, had pinched me on the arm. A ferocious pinch. It was typical of them. I hadn’t even choked on my drink. What the pinch was, however, rather than a cheery social opening gambit, was the gadget being stuck firmly on my sleeve. Tiny, camouflaged, not detected. I thought they’d done it the night on the bridge, but it was that earlier night, in Jagged’s, that they’d been waiting for prey, and rejoiced when I was it.
I must have bored them at first. I went to Clovis, and then I went to Chez Stratos—they could guess my goals from the directions the trace ran to. And then I went, what a surprise, to the slums. And stayed there.
(Having taken it off, why did I pack that dress to take with me into exile? There were others. I never even wore it. A symbol, perhaps, that I had redeemed him from death, that first time. It was that dress which killed him.)
They’d really tried quite hard, the twins, to find me. I think even that night we met them on Patience Maidel Bridge, they’d been working their way around, portioning the area, looking. The weakness of the homing device was that it faded off inside a building. It had been easy for them to deduce that if I went to New River and the trace failed, I was in Clovis’s apartment block. Or if I went out toward the Canyon and it failed, then I was at my mother’s. But in the slum, intrigued, they’d hunted up and down, never quite able to unearth my location, near, never near enough. And then, when it really did matter, Silver and I left the block on Tolerance, with the black dress packed into one of the cloth bags, and the signal came up like a star. By the time E.M. had confiscated and begun to operate the pickup of the transmitter, there was only the thin shell of a taxi to blur the trace. They found it simple to come after us, even allowing for the post-tremor traffic and diversions. Simple to catch up with us at the Fall Side. And the VLO was late.
So that was how it was. I shan’t comment on it anymore. It’s done.
And I think I can stop writing now, I think so.
Maybe my arms will ache less when the stitches come out, or it might be a psychosomatic pain, and will last months or years, or all the rest of my life.
I’m glad it wasn’t Clovis. I’m glad that time Jason called, Clovis switched the phone off at once. Egyptia is like a story someone told me. I don’t even hate her. You need energy for hatred, too. My mother called and I spoke to her. It was like speaking to someone I don’t know. We were polite. She says my I.M.U. card works again, two thousand a month. And my policode’s being renewed. I thanked her. I won’t use her money. Somehow, I’ll find a way not to. The policode I left behind at the apartment on Tolerance. Clovis mutters about providing me with one when the new coding comes through. Chloe came to see me. She didn’t know what to say. Leo came in with Clovis the other night, and stayed two days. Clovis is beginning to look hunted.
I still wish I’d died. That’s a fact. But I couldn’t do it again. I’m too afraid to do it now. That horrible, creeping, deadly warmth, like freezing to death. The gathering dark, the stars of my lover whirling in it.
Sometimes now I dream of him. I dream of him as he was when I saw him that time, eyeless, the clockwork interior exposed. Great hammers pound on him. Furnaces dissolve him. He seems to feel nothing. When I wake up, I lie and stare into the darkness of Clovis’s spare room.
A night or so ago, after one of these dreams, I got up and put on the light and started to write this last chapter.
I told Clovis about this writing. It’s a book now. An autobiography. Or is it a Greek Tragedy? Clovis said, “Don’t try and publish it, for heaven’s sake. They’ll throw you in jail. I hear the food is awful.”
Somehow, I never thought of publishing. Only of someone coming on the pages, years from now, buried in th
e ground in a moistureproof container, say, or hidden under a random floorboard in the slum.
But it’s pointless. There isn’t any reason. Reasonless. All of it.
It’s strange. I didn’t want to start writing this last part, and now I can’t seem to stop. You see, when I stop, I break my last link with him. With my love. Yes, he’ll always be with me, but not him. I’ll be alone. I’ll be alone.
But I am alone. These pieces of paper can’t help me.
And so I’ll stop writing.
Mother. Do you realize you’re rich enough to buy the City Senate?
Yes, Jane. A number of times over.
I’m so glad, Mother, because that’s exactly what I want you to do.
Jane, I don’t understand you at all.
No, Mother. You never understood me. But let’s be adult about this.
That would be an excellent plan, dear.
The reason I want you to buy the Senate, Mother, is so that I can safely publish this manuscript.
Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the manuscript contains?
You’re quite right, Mother, it mentions you. Not in a very luminous light. However, I can change all the names. Put your house, for example, somewhere else, instead of where it is. And so on.
Jane. I should like to know why you want to publish.
Not to make money. Not to discredit anyone. Not to inflame the poor, of whom I’m now one. In fact, I really don’t know. It isn’t melancholia, either, or bitterness. Even exhibitionism. But this crazy thing happened. You’d react to the last chapter, Mother, really you would. Perhaps you ought to read it….
By the time they’d taken the stitches out, and I’d had my first descarring treatment (“Jane, you can’t go about looking like a walking advert for Nihilism”), Leo had made his third and most successful attempt to move into Clovis’s apartment. Of course, Clovis’s apartment was three hundred times better than Leo’s. But mostly it was infatuation. Leo, dark-haired, tall and slim, as usual, would loll about the place, unable to take his eyes off Clovis. Leo would actually spill tea and wine from looking at Clovis instead of at what he was doing. And once Leo had an attack of migraine, the kind that affects the sight, and as he sat there with his hands over his eyes, waiting for his pills to get rid of it, he quaveringly said, “I always panic it’ll never go, that I’ll stay blind. And then I’d never see you again.” “How true,” said Clovis unkindly. “You wouldn’t see me for dust.”
