by Tanith Lee
“How,” I said, “did you know this market was here?”
“I know where everything is. Every building and back alley of the entire city. It was pre-programmed into me. Partly for convenience during the advertising campaign, partly to be of general service. You are going to find me,” he said, “very useful, lady. God, I’m frozen,” he added as someone went by.
We halted at a clothing stall. There was clothing on the stall, tarnished, gorgeous, permissible. From theatres which had closed their doors. From those second owners who, like the rich ones that had first fallen, had themselves crashed on hard times. My mother would have been repelled at the notion of buying any article another had formerly worn. I don’t think she’d even want to wear anything of mine.
The woman on the stall fell passionately in love with him. She knocked prices in half. There was a sixteenth-century cloak of black-red velvet, destined to be his. She swathed him into it, embracing him as she did so, because he remarked how cold he’d felt before.
“Oh, that hair,” she said to him. “It can’t be natural.”
He said, “Not quite.”
“Suits you,” she said. “And the skin makeup. Here,” she said, suddenly including me. “Look at this. I’ll let you have this for twenty.”
Under the flares, it was warm, summer day heat shot up against the black autumn sky. Far away, the core of the city rose in cliffs of sugar, and the grains of the sugar were lights. The jacket sparkled too. It had green peacocks and bits of mirror—I thought of his jacket, the day I first saw him…
“She can’t afford twenty,” he said to the woman. “Not in cash.”
“Well,” she said, “what else have you got?”
I felt myself tense inside my skin, but he only grinned, shaking his head, his eyes devilish and irresistible, so I wondered if he had hypnotized her when she said: “Ten. She can have it for ten. Suit her with her white face and her big eyes.”
I wanted the jacket. Because I was with him, because it recalled him to me. Because of the peacocks. But I’d look too fat in it.
“I think it’s a bargain,” he said to me.
And I found myself paying, out of what was left of the Casa Bianca cash.
As we walked away, I said, “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Yes, you should. It’s not like the food. You’ll look good in it. And there are ways of making money,” he said, “not just spending it.”
I was dubious and suddenly anxious. I knew a moment of terrible insecurity, even with him beside me. The oil light fell hard as hail into my eyes.
“How?”
“There you go, mind in the gutter again,” he said, and I realized what my face must have shown. “Songs. I’ve sung on the street for E.M. Ltd. I can do it for you.”
“No,” I said. This idea unsteadied me further. I wasn’t sure why, but the mutinous crowd with their banners, their wise distrust of the excellence of machines, were mixed in my fear. “It’s wrong—if they pay you.”
“Not if they enjoy it enough to pay me.”
I stared at him. The human supernatural face looked back, inquiringly.
“I’m afraid,” I said, and stopped still, holding my small burden of the peacock jacket to me.
“No, you’re not,” he said. He moved close to me, obscuring everything from me except his presence. Even the light was gone, remaining only as a conflagration at the edges of his hair. “You’ve pre-programmed yourself,” he said, “to go on being afraid. But you’re not afraid anymore. And,” he said to my astonishment, “what have you decided to call me?”
“I—don’t know.”
“Then that’s what you should be worrying about. So much anticipation on my part, and still no name.”
We walked on. We paused, and bought an enormous jar of silk-finish paint, and color mixants.
“All the women love you,” I said jealously.
“Not all.”
“All. The woman on the stall cut her prices by half.”
“Because she was charging twice too much already and thought we’d haggle. The only genuine reduction was the jacket she offered you.”
We, I, bought some drapery, a pillow that would need recovering.
I felt a burst of childlike excitement, as on a birthday morning. Then another surge of alarm.
“What on earth am I doing,” I said vaguely.
“Turning your apartment into somewhere you can bear to live.”
“I shouldn’t…”
“Programmed and activated,” he said, and proceeded to an extraordinary imitation of a computer mechanism running through a program, gurgles, clicks and skidding punctuations.
“Please stop it,” I muttered, embarrassed.
“Only if you do.”
I frowned. I looked into the depth of the jacket wrapped in flimsy tissue, the sausage of wrapped pillow. I’d never exercised freedom of choice before, and now I was, and it was peculiar. And he. He wasn’t a robot. He was my friend, who’d come to help me choose (not tell me what to choose), and to carry my parcels, and to give me courage.
“Have I been brave?” I asked him in bewilderment as we strolled out of the market and through a deserted square. “I think I must have been.”
Tremor-sites rose against the stars. Birds or bats nested in them, I could hear the whickering sounds of their wings and little squeaking noises.
“And do I feel afraid only because I still think I should—not because I’ve left my mother and my home and my friends, because I haven’t got any money, because I’ve lost my heart to a beautiful piece of silverware.”
We laughed. I saw what had happened. I was beginning to catch the way he talked. It had never been really possible with anyone else. I’d envied Clovis’s wit, but it was usually so vicious I hadn’t been able to master it, but with Silver—damn. Not Silver.
“Silver,” I said, “I know you can adapt to anyone and anything, but thank you for adapting to me, to this.”
“I hate to disillusion you,” he said, “you’re easier than most to adapt to.”
We walked home. Odd. Home? Yes, I suppose that was already true, because anywhere he was was my home. Silver was my home. A milk-white cat was singing eerily among the girders in the subsidence, like the ghost of a cat. (Did cats have ghosts, or souls?)
“It’s so cold,” I wailed in the room.
“That’s my line, surely.”
I looked at the wall heater unhappily.
I was down to nickels and coppers now, and the three hundred on my card, until next month.
He swung off the cloak and folded it over me, then holding me inside it and against him.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any body heat to keep you warm.”
“I don’t care.”
We kissed each other quietly, and then I said,
“Don’t ever make love to me if you don’t want to.”
“If you want me to, I shall want to.”
“I just don’t believe that. There may be times—”
“No. My emotional and physically simulated equilibriums never alter.”
“Oh.”
“I also swallowed a couple of dictionaries someplace.”
We dragged the mattress off the couch. The bed under it had a padded top-surface and was less used. I pulled the almost new, dappled rugs, faintly scented from their recent cleaning, over us. Under them, I lay a long while, caressing him, exploring him, making love to him.
“Do you mind if I do this?” I asked timidly, quite unable to stop.
“Oh, I mind dreadfully.”
“I’m probably clumsy.”
“Far from it. You’re becoming a wonderful lover.”
“How would you know? It can’t mean anything to you.”
“Not as it would to a flesh-and-blood man. But I can still appreciate it.”
“Artistically,” I sneered. “When the proper circuits are put in action.”
“Something like that.”
“Egyptia—”
I murmured, drowning in his hair, the taste of his skin—unmortal and yet flesh—the flesh of a demon—“if you didn’t find pleasure with Egyptia—”
“You make it sound like a cafe we were looking for. I did.”
“Yes… She’d be terribly clever.”
“Egyptia is totally passive. The pleasure is in finding what pleases her.”
Minutes later, as the strange wing-beats began to stir inside me, I couldn’t prevent myself from saying, “I wish I could find what pleases you. I wish, I wish I could.”
“You please me,” he said. It was true. The delight mounted in his face as my delight mounted within me—different, yet dependent.
“You fool,” I gasped, “that isn’t what I mean—”
When I fell back into the silence, the room of the apartment thrummed gently. It had the scent of oranges, now, and glue, and paper bags…
“I can stay here with you,” he said, “or I can start work on this place.”
“I want you with me,” I said. “I want to sleep next to you, even if you can’t—don’t—sleep.”
“You mean,” he said, “you aren’t going to ask me if I wouldn’t rather be anywhere except beside you?”
“Am I as paranoid as that?”
“No. Much worse.”
“Oh.”
“Your hair’s changing color,” he said.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Are you? I think you may be quite pleased when the change is complete.”
“Oh, no. It will be horrid.” Curled against him, lulled and childishly almost asleep, I felt safe. I was whole. We were in a boat, or on the back of a milk-white bird.
“Birds?” he asked me softly. “As well?”
“Yes,” I said. “And a rainbow.”
He must have left me at some point during the night. When I opened my eyes in the effulgent, now-curtain-filtered sunrise, there was blue sky on the ceiling, blue sky and islands of warm cloud, and the crossbow shapes of birds, like swifts, darting statically between. And a rainbow, faint as mist, yet with every transparent color in it, passing from the left hand corner by the door, to the corner nearest the window. It was real. Almost.
He was sitting on top of a rickety old chromium ladder he must have borrowed from somewhere in the building, from the bad-tempered caretaker perhaps. He was taking a devilish joy in my amazement as I woke and saw.
“But you’re a musician, not an artist,” I said dreamily.
“There’s a leaflet in with the paint which explains how to do this sort of thing. Being a machine—well, it’s easy for me to get a good result.”
“It’s beautiful—”
“Then wait till you see the bathroom.”
I ran into the bathroom. The ceiling was sunset in there, soft crimson nearnesses, and pale rosy distance. A white whale basked in the shallows of the clouds.
“A whale in the sky?”
“Make the metaphysical assumption the bath is the sea. And that the whale’s a damn good jumper.”
Five days later, you came up the cracked steps, opened the door, and walked into somewhere else.
He would ask me what I wanted, and we’d work on it together. Ideas escalated. He worked most of the nights, too. Once I woke up in the dark, crying for some reason I didn’t remember, and he came back into the bed to comfort me, and in the morning we and the rugs had become glued together and had to soak ourselves apart in the bath. His invention, and his mechanized knowledge of the city and its merchandise and price ranges, meant that fantastic things were done for very little outlay. I only cut a small way into the three hundred I.M.U. Admittedly I lived on sandwiches and fruit and wonderful junk foods found in sidewalk shops. My mother’s thorough understanding of nutrition, demonstrated in the perfectly balanced meals served from the mechanical kitchen and the servicery at Chez Stratos, the awareness of the best times to eat what, and why, and the grasp of vitamins, in which she had tried to educate me—all that stayed with me like a specter. But I didn’t get pimples or headaches, or throw up. Probably she’d nourished me so well that I was now immune. The way I ate and lived, of course, the way I slept and worked and made love, all these were enormous barriers against my ever calling her, although: “Hallo, Mother, this is Jane,” I said, over and over in my head a hundred times a day. Once I said to him, “I think I’m afraid of my mother.” And he said, holding my hand as we walked up the stairs, “From the sound of it, it could be mutual.” Puzzled, I demanded an explanation. Smiling, he sidetracked me, I forget how—
What would she say about this apartment? She wouldn’t cry out with delight, every time she came into it, as I do. “How beautiful!” No, she wouldn’t say that. Even the brass bed, with the headboard like a huge veined leaf, wouldn’t impress her, and anyway, the brass bed came later…
The walls, now sealed and burnished, and smooth, are painted cream-white. The pale gold paper lamp that hangs from the clouds and the swifts has a gold metal stitching on it, and when the light burns at night, gold flecks are thrown all over the walls. There are also wonderful scintillas and glows that are wavered from the colored candles standing on the shelves Silver put up. Each candle is a different color, or colors, and stands in a scoop of colored glass. These scoops are, in fact, a batch of flawed glass saucers bought for nickels, and painted over with glass enamel. The mirror, too, has a glorious glass painting on it, of leaves and hills and savage flowers. Every slope and tendril and petal totally hides some spot or chip in the mirror. We have wall to wall carpet, too. It’s made of literally hundreds of tiny carpet remnants given away as free samples. We spent a whole day walking from store to store, asking about carpets and, “Unable to decide” on one, going off with handfuls of pieces to “match with our furnishings.” It took hours to glue every scrap in place. The effect is astonishing, a mosaic that rivals the rainbow in the ceiling. No chairs, but large dark green fur pillows to sit on, or the couch, draped with rugs and shawls like the divan of a potentate. Curtains for the clean window, are to encourage the sky, being the color of blue sunlight. (The scatter of little tears in them are concealed by one whole packet of heat-and-press-on embroidered badges—tiny gold and silver mythical animals and castles.) The door is cream-white and vanishes into the wall. The horrible functional kitchen hatch (with the crotchety miniature oven and electric ring behind it that hardly ever get used) has become a wall-painting. It’s blue with clouds, like the ceiling, and a big-sailed, heavily winged ship is flapping over it, with a gilded cannon poking from its side, which is the handle fitting. We both painted this, and it’s remarkably silly. The wings on the ship are modeled after geese. The bathroom is madder. The walls were raw cement and broken tiles, and when patched up to seal, they looked impossible. Then, in another market, there were sky-blue tentlike waterproof coveralls going at four in the morning for next to nothing because no one wanted them, and the stall-keeper had a virus and was dying to get home. These, cut in lengths with a kind of spontaneous but enticed shining and ruching, are glued over every inch of the walls. The waterproofing looks like silk, and they make the room into a weird oriental fantasy, particularly when the rose-red paper lamp hanging from the rose-red clouds comes on, and hits every pleat and fold with an electric magenta streak of shine. We re-enamelled the bath, hand basin, drinking-tap basin, and the lavatory, all blue. The enamel is cheap and will probably crack inside six months. But for now, each area is reminiscent of a lagoon. The second night, Silver stripped the floor and put the new planks down, polished and varnished them. The bathroom floor is now a golden fake pine, and looks as if it cost a thousand. Well, at least five hundred.
“How do you know how to do all that?” I asked him, endlessly.
“I read the instructions,” he endlessly and innocently replied.
Of course, a robot can just read instructions and then know exactly how to follow them, and get it absolutely right. I kept saying to myself I mustn’t persist in thinking of him as an exceptionally talented man, no I mustn’t. Yet i
t was difficult, and besides, that’s what I’d asked him to pretend to be.
On the last afternoon of the first week, the caretaker came puffing and grumbling up the stairs to collect the rent, plainly thinking he wouldn’t get it.
“It’s just the one quarter month,” he announced as I stood there, a plum in one hand and a long artist’s paintbrush in the other. “Just the one week. Then I shan’t be up till the first of next month for the three quarters.” As the end of the month was also only a few days off, that meant nothing. He implied, in any case, I’d have run away by then in arrears. “It’s legal, you know,” he said. But already his eyes had gone past me and were bulging on the room. “Well,” he said. “I wondered what your boyfriend wanted the steps for.” He tried to edge in by me, so I let him. He stood and gaped, as if in a famous cathedral. “Not everyone’s taste,” he said, “but it’s cheerful.” Which is more, I thought, than can be said for you.
I waited for him to go on and say: “Now you’ve spent your rent money on all that, you’ll have to get out.” But he only glanced at the huge evergreen plant which Silver and I had dug out of the subsidence the night before and planted in a big cracked beer jeroboam of wondrous amber glass. “That’ll die,” he said.
“Perhaps you’d like to come to its funeral,” said Silver, who was seated on a pillow, reading, at fifteen seconds per page, a job-lot of books we’d picked up that morning.
The caretaker scowled.
“This flat,” he said, “is only supposed to accommodate one person.”
I felt a stab of terror, but Silver said, “I’m not paying her any rent. I’m her guest.”
Grudgingly, the caretaker accepted that this was all right, and Silver smiled at him.
I was already fumbling out the rent and electric money, all in small change by now, when Silver rose and graciously gave the monstrous visitor a tour of the bathroom. I could hear the monster grunting away, things like: “Don’t know I’d want it myself,” or “What’s that white thing in the ceiling? Oh.” And then, surprisingly: “Quite like that.”
They came back, and Silver poured the caretaker, and me, a mug of very cheap and vinegary wine, which the caretaker gulped down. When we finally got rid of him, and the rent, I lost my temper. The beautiful apartment, on which we’d slaved, smeared by that old man’s stupid carping.
