by Tanith Lee
We got off at the boulevard and walked to Tolerance, and into the apartment block and up the stairs. Neither of us spoke. The apartment looked icy, even its jewel colors were numbed.
I walked in and stood with my back to him.
I started to say something then, I don’t recall what, and in the middle of it the door quietly closed, and I turned, for I knew he was on the wrong side of it. I heard the coins, but not his feet, sound as he went down the stairs, and one strange hollow plunking note from the guitar, when his cloak must have brushed its strings.
He’d gone to earn the rent money for me. The food money, for me. The clothing money. For me. I knew that he’d stand in the grey afternoon that was now deepening to a greyer twilight, singing out gold notes, amber songs, silver and scarlet and blue. Not because I’d bought him, not because he was a slave. But because he was kind. Because he was strong enough to put up with my disgusting weakness.
I was ill with the cold, and wrapping myself in the rugs from the bed, sat in front of the wall heater.
I thought about my mother. About me. How the sperm was put inside her by a machine, and how I was withdrawn by another machine in the Precipta method. And how I was incubated, and how she breast fed me because it would be good for me—her milk taken from her by a machine, and put into my mouth by a machine. There were so many machines involved, I might have been a robot, too.
I thought about Silver. About his face, so fixed, so passionless. “You don’t have any emotions.” And I thought about his look of pleasure when I laughed, or in bed with me, or when he sang. Or when the sun shone through the girders in the subsidence, gilding them, and three wild geese darted like jets over the sky.
It got dark, and I lit some of the candles and drew closed the blue curtains. I thought how this morning he had left me, and I’d been afraid he wouldn’t come back. I wondered if I was afraid of the same thing now, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Only so cold, and so sick of myself.
I got into the bed and fell asleep. I dreamed I sang to a huge crowd, hundreds of them, and I sang badly, but they cheered. And Silver said to me in the dream: “You don’t need me anymore now.” He was all in pieces, wires, wheels, clockwork.
I woke up slowly, not with a start, not in terror, and my eyes were dry. I felt resigned, but I wasn’t sure to what. I also felt calm. I’d picked up some sort of chill, some minor ailment, a sign only of my physical inadequacy. That’s why things had looked so bad. I felt a lot better now, physically.
I slept, and woke up much later. I could tell it was much later, much, much later.
Finally I got dressed and went down to the phone in the foyer, and dialed for the time. It was three in the morning, and he hadn’t come back.
• 5 •
All kinds of things went through my mind. Not one of them, anymore, that he’d—ultimate autonomy—left me. But I began to consider what I’d said about muggings, and though he was amazingly strong, I wondered how he’d make out against a gang of ten or eleven desperate maniacs. Even if his programming would allow him to defend himself, where it might allow him to defend me. What on earth would happen if someone hit him with a club and mechanical parts rolled all over the street? It was macabrely funny, and somehow didn’t seem to fit. Despite my knowledge and my words, and my dreams, he remained mortal for me.
Then too, my calmness stayed with me through all of that. Also my mother’s training in psychological analysis.
I realized I’d begun to analyze him, then, like a man I knew.
The analysis said, quite bluntly, He hasn’t been mugged. You did hurt him. He has, or has acquired, emotions. The gambit now is to worry and to hurt you. Return in kind. The way only a human would do it. But maybe he doesn’t even know it’s human, or that it’s what he’s doing. So he can’t handle it.
I was surprised by the revelation, and made drunken. I was running a slight temperature and wasn’t aware of it, but the fever was undoubtedly what made me so elated and so sure and so calm in the face of such weirdness.
I put on my boots and my peacock jacket, and my fur jacket over the top. Then I looked at myself in the mirror.
“Where are you going, Jane? Sorry. Jain.”
“To find Silver.”
“You don’t know where he is.”
“Yes, I do. He’s at the market, singing under the fish-oil flares.”
“Oh Jain. That’s brilliant. I never knew you were brilliant. The all-night market. Of course, there are two…”
“It’s the first one.”
“Yes it probably is.”
“Before you go, Jane.”
“Yes, Jain?”
“Make me up.”
So I stood before the mirror, and she made me up. She was pale as snow, with a soft fever-rouge in the cheeks. Her lids became silver from a tube of eyeshadow. And then she made my lashes thick and black as midnight bushes from a tube of mascara. We painted each other’s mouth, sensual, alluring, a translucent amber.
The fever gave us the steadiest hands we ever had.
I ran out on the street. I ran up Tolerance. At the corner of the boulevard I saw the Asteroid, and it made me laugh.
In one of the streets I started to sing, and for the first time, because my voice seemed to come from somewhere else, I heard my voice. It rang light as a bell through the frosty air. It was thin and pure. It was—
“She’s happy,” someone said, going by.
“She’s got a nice voice, even if she is blind drunk.”
Thank you, my unknown and friendly critic.
The market exploded before me, day-bright and golden.
Silver’s in the gold. Look for fire, look for the sun’s rising.
Lucifer. I should have called you that. An angel. A wicked angel. Bringer of light. But it’s too late now. I’ll never call you anything but Silver.
He was singing, and so I heard him, and so I found him. The crowd about him was thick, but I saw his face at last, between their shoulders. It was like the second time I ever saw him. Oh my love, my love. His face, bowed to the guitar as he made love to it. There’s a kind of beam, a ray that he draws to him. He draws all the energy of the crowd, and contains it within him, and then focuses it out again upon them. A ray like a star, a sun. I could see it now. I could see what it was. He wasn’t human and he wasn’t a machine. He was godlike. How dare I want to alter him? It didn’t matter if I couldn’t alter him. Not anymore. But to be with him, to love him—that mattered.
The song finished. The crowd roared. He looked up, and he saw me, right through the crowd, as he had seemed to see me that second time, as I think he did, after he sang “Greensleeves” in the Gardens of Babylon. And now his face grew still, so still it might be questioning. What did I do? What should I do? I knew. I remembered how he had been with me. I walked through the crowd. I walked up to him and brushed his hand very gently with my hand. “Hallo,” I said. And I stood by him, turning to confront, or to meet the crowd. A heap of coins and bills lay all over the ground. And now someone shouted for a particular song. Silver glanced at me, and hesitated. “You told me,” I said. “I trust you.”
He struck the chord, and started to sing. I came in on the third word, and straight into a harmonic I’d sung so often, it was easy. As I did, I caught the faintest spray of approval from the crowd. It was good. Silver didn’t check, or even look at me. The crowd began to clap in time with the rhythm.
I heard our voices go up together, his voice, hers. They had the same colors as our hair, his fire, auburn, darker, richer. Mine transparent and pale, a blond chain of notes. Chain. Jain. A Jain voice. And it was beautiful.
When the song ended, the crowd stamped and yelled. And I knew they were yelling and stamping for me too. Coins fell. But the sounds were far away. I wanted it to go on. I wanted to sing again. But Silver shook his head at the crowd. It began to melt away. It seemed to go very quickly. I think I wanted to call it back.
Then a woman came pushing through. She
handed Silver a mug of something which steamed, and had an alcoholic scent.
“That’ll keep out the cold,” she said. She saw me. “Well, if it isn’t Blondie. Got the jacket on, I see.” My topcoat was open; this was the woman from the clothing stall. “Didn’t know you were here, or I’d have brought a drop for you.”
“She can share mine,” said Silver, and handed me the mug.
I drank. It was coffine, but it had brandy in it.
“Nice jacket,” said the woman, letting the remnants of the crowd, and any who passed, know where it came from. Obligingly, I slipped off the fur, and let the peacocks shine forth on the market.
“Wonderful value,” I said, loud and clear. “And so warm—”
“A bit too warm,” said the woman. She touched my forehead. “Not too bad, but you ought to get home.”
“My mother used to do that,” I said.
“She ought to be in bed,” the woman said to Silver. She winked. I suddenly knew she and he weren’t in some sexual conspiracy. We all were in it, it included me. So I laughed.
Silver was fastening my fur jacket.
“I’m packing up for the night,” he said.
“I should think so,” she said, “you’ve made enough. But you’re good for business, I’ll say that. And I liked that song. That song about the rose. How does it—?”
He sang it to her as he thrust the money in a thick cloth bag.
“A rose by any other name would get the blame for being what it is—the color of a kiss, the shadow of a flame.”
It was an improvisation. I rested against the golden night, and I added in my own, my very own strange new voice, extending his melody: “A rose may earn another name, so call it love, so call it love I will. And love is like the sea, which changes constantly, and yet is still the same.”
The woman looked at me.
Silver said, “That verse is Jane’s verse.”
“Love is like the sea. I love him,” I said to the woman. The brandy filled my head and the fever my blood.
“Well, love off home,” she said, grinning at us.
We walked out of the market, and he had me under a fold of his cloak, as if I were literally under his wing.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“A mild and minor human disease,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I wanted to be with you.”
“Why did you sing?”
“Did I sing?”
His arm held me.
“You’ve got through some barrier in yourself.”
“I know. Isn’t it ridiculous.”
The walk home went in a moment. Or seemed to. As we went up the cement steps, Silver said, “We’ve got half the rent now. I think we can risk buying doughnuts for breakfast.”
We went into the apartment. I’d left the heater on, and ten candles burning, wasteful and dangerous. But it didn’t matter.
“I’m going to buy silver makeup,” I said. “And make my skin like yours. How silly that will be. Will it annoy you?”
“No.”
I sat on the couch and found I was lying on it. It was strange, I could feel my temperature actually going down. I was leveling, the way a flyer does as it approaches a platform. I knew I wasn’t ill, wouldn’t get ill. I knew everything, would be all right.
Silver’s cloak and the guitar were leaning together against the wall catching candle glints on wood and folds, the way they would in a painting or an artistic photograph. Silver was sitting next to me, looking at me intently.
“I am all right,” I said. “But how nice you care.”
“Don’t forget,” he said, “you’re all that stands between me and Egyptia’s robot storage.”
“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 happe
n? 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.
