Silver Metal Lover Part 18

I walked out of the shop, guilt blazoned on my face, trembling. In the street I literally didn't know which way to turn, and went randomly leftward, and so into another raining street, and so into another, without knowing or looking or caring where I was going.

Demeta, of course, had stopped my card as soon as she could, on the first of the month. Why not? She had every reason. I'd run away from home with scarcely a good-bye. I couldn't expect to go on taking her money. I could see that now as clearly as I could see nothing else. How could I have reckoned to get away with it? It was some silly childhood thing that had prevented me from guessing. Some part of me had still believed the implication she'd always given me that, because I was her daughter, her money was mine. Stupid. Of course it wasn't.

Why then was I hesitating at this phone kiosk, standing in the rain until the woman came out, and then moving in myself and closing the door. Altogether I had ten units left in cash. Not enough to pay my rent. More than enough to call my mother's house.

Even as I put the coins in and pressed the b.u.t.tons, I thought, But she's so busy, she might not be there- and then I thought:She'll be there. She'll be sitting there waiting for this call. Waiting for my voice, for my frantic weeping words: Mother, Mother-help me!

And then I didn't feel afraid anymore, only dreary and small and very tired. It was true, after all, wasn't it? I'd rung her for help, for forgiveness, to plead with her, or beg her.

I leaned my forehead on the cold dank gla.s.s that someone had cracked on the outside with a stone. There was no video in this part of the city. She couldn't see me. Was that good or bad? I counted the signals.

She made me wait through twelve of them before she turned on the autoanswer that, left to itself, replies after two.

"Good morning. Who is calling, please?"

"Jane," I said. Rain had fallen on my lips, and I tasted it for the first time as I spoke. Jane. A pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender pale chain- "Please wait, Jane. I will connect you with Demeta's studio."

My humiliation had sunk, and I was hollow. I heard her voice presently. It was politely warm, almost approachable. It said: "Hallo, Jane." Like the lift.

I clenched my hand so hard on the speaker of the phone it seemed to melt like wax in my grip.

Jain, Mother.Jain .

"Hallo, Mother," I said. "Isn't it lovely weather?"

An interval.

"I'm sure, dear," she said, "you didn't call me to discuss the weather."

I smiled bitterly at my dim reflection, bisected by the crack.

"Oh, but I did. And to say hallo, Mother. Hallo, Mother."

"Jane. Try to be sensible. Your recent actions have been rather unusual, and very unlike you. I'm hoping that this will be an adult exchange."

"Mother," I said, "I'm sixteen. Not twenty-six. Not ninety-six. Sixteen."

"Indeed? Then why have you acted like a child of six?"

I shuddered. I'd drawn her. She'd lashed back at me, neatly and calmly-and decidedly. The rain drizzled. I could smell onions frying and wet pavements, and...La Verte. La Verte filled up the kiosk.

"I really just called you," I said, "to tell you how happy I am."

My eyes filled with tears, but I held them inside me, and they drained away.

"I'm sure you actually phoned me, dear, to ask why your monthly I.M.U. credit has been stopped."

I felt a surge of awful triumph.

"Oh," I said. "Has it?"

She wouldn't believe me. She knew she spoke the truth and I was the liar. But still, she'd had to say it, and not me.

"Yes, Jane," she said patiently. "Your account has been frozen. Permanently. Or until such time as I unfreeze it."

I stood and watched the rain. My hand had left the speaker, and I was drawing a rabbit on the steamy flawed gla.s.s.

"Jane?" she said firmly.

"Mother, why did you call me 'Jane'? I mean, why not Proserpina? That was Demeta's daughter in the legend, wasn't it? Didn't you think I'd be glamorous enough to be called Proserpina, Mother?"

"Where are you?" asked my mother suddenly. It was a trick. I was meant to blurt out a location.

"In," I said, "a phone kiosk."

"And where is the kiosk?"

Too late, Mother.

"The kiosk is on a street, and the street is in a city."

"Jane," she said, "have you been taking an illegal drug of some kind?"

"No, Mother."

"I don't think, dear, that you quite understand your situation. Your card is inoperable. There is no other lawful way you can obtain money. I think I had better explain to you, in case you're thinking of it, that finding a job of any sort will be next to impossible for you. To begin with, you will have to possess a labor card. Before any employment bureau will give you one, they will take a body print reading. They will then check you out and see that you are the daughter of a rich woman. Accordingly, they will ask me if I am prepared to support you. There's a serious shortage of work, Jane, which I've no doubt even you are partially aware of. No one who doesn't need to work is even considered. And when they ask me if I will support you, I will reply that of course I will, you are my chosen child. You have only to return home, and everything you need will be supplied, including money."

"You once said," I murmured, "that I ought to get a job in the city, to appreciate the struggle the poor go through."

"With my sanction, that could have been arranged. Not, however, without it."

It was warm in the kiosk, so warm the rabbit was running all down the gla.s.s.

"All you need to do," said my mother, "is go into any bank, anywhere in the state, and identify yourself.

You will then be able to draw the exact fare money to get you home."

"Home," I said.

"Home. I've already redesigned and refurnished your suite. You know me better than to think I would ever say anything about the state in which you left it."

I burst out laughing.

"Jane. I must ask you, once more, to control yourself."

"Mother, you've left me no choice but to become a thief. I'll have to rob a store or take someone's wallet."

"Please don't be silly, Jane. This sort of hysteria is distressing-however well I may be able to interpret your motivation, we are still mother and daughter. It's my very concern for your inability to cope with real life that makes me insist you come back to the house. You know in your heart this is true, Jane, and that I'm only thinking of you."

A cliche. Never be afraid of a cliche, if it expresses what you wish to say, Jane. The kiosk was hot and I couldn't breathe. I put my hand inadvertently to my throat, and felt the policode, and I said: "Does my policode still work, Mother?"

"Yes, Jane," she said. "For three more days. And then I'm withdrawing your print from the precinct computer."

"That's for my own good, too, is it?"

"You know the expression, Jane, I must be cruel only to be kind."

"Yes," I said. "Shakespeare. Hamlet." I drew in a hard impossible breath. "Spoken by a lunatic who's just killed an old man behind a curtain, and who has a deep-seated psychological desire to sleep with hismother ."

I slammed down the switch so violently I broke the skin and my hand started to bleed.

It was raining fiercely now. Vaguely through the rain I could see someone else was waiting outside to come in and use the phone.

It became a matter of enormous importance then, not to let them see my face or what sort of state I was in. Though I wasn't even sure myself. So I pretended I hadn't hit the switch, and went on listening, and talking to the receiver-speaker for a few moments. My face was burning, and my hands were cold. I couldn't really think about what had just happened. "No, Mother," I said to the dead phone.

"No, Mother. No." I'd feel better when I got out of the stuffy kiosk. Better when I'd walked to the apartment, dodged the caretaker after the rent, gone, with my arms empty of packages, into the room empty of Silver. Of course, he wouldn't be there. Perhaps he'd guessed. Perhaps robots picked up special telepathic communications from other machines. I wasn't solvent. So he might be now with Egyptia, his rich legal owner. What was I going to do?

My head tucked down, I pushed open the door of the kiosk and almost fell out. The cold and the water hit me like a wave and I seemed to be drowning. Someone caught me, the person waiting for the phone, and a horrible embarra.s.sment was added to my illness.

"I'm all right," I insisted.

And then a scent, a texture, the touch itself-I looked up through the rain, and my head cleared and the world steadied-"You!"

"Me!"

Silver looked down at me, amused, compa.s.sionate, unalterable. His hair was nearly black with rain and plastered over his skull as if in the shower. Beads of rain hung and spilled from his lashes. His skin wasmade of rain.

"How did you-"

"I saw you come out of the store, when I was several blocks away. I could have caught you up, but I'd have had to run fast, and you want me to pretend I'm human, don't you? So I walked after you, and waited till you finished your call."

"Silver," I said, "it's all over. Everything's hopeless. But I'm so glad you didn't leave me."

"Jane, if you need to cry, couldn't you cry against me and not into that pillow?"

"Wh-Why?"

"Because the green stuff you covered it with obviously isn't dye-proofed, and your face is acquiring a most abnormal green pattern."

I started up and ran to the mirror. What I saw there made me laugh and weep together. I washed my face in the bathroom and came back. I sat down beside him.

"I don't want to cry against you, or you to comfort me, or hold me anymore," I said, "because soon I'll have to do without you, won't I?"

"Will you?"

"You know I will. I told you what happened. There's no money. No food, no rent. No chance of work- even if I coulddo anything. I can't stay here. And she-my mother-won't let me bring you to the house, I'm sure of it. Even if she did, she'd sort of-what can I say?-dissect my feelings... She doesn't mean to hurt me. Or-Oh, I don't know anymore. The way I spoke to her was so odd. It wasn't even like me, speaking. But I do know it's hopeless."

"I saw the caretaker," Silver said. "I went down when you were crying your way through the shawls. He thinks we're actors from a street company that's folded. I didn't tell him that, by the way, he told me. He was having a good day, no pain and no side-effects. He said we can sit on the rent for another week.

Everyone else does, and at least you paid the first quarter."

"But there won't be any more money in a week."

"There could be. And no need of a labor card, either."

"No."

"Yes."

He drew the guitar to him, and reeled off a reeling wheel of a song, clever, funny, adroit, ridiculous, to the accompaniment of a whirling gallop of runs and chords. Breathless, I watched and listened. His eyes laughed at me. His mouth makes marvelous shapes when he sings and his hair flies about as if it's gone mad.

"Throw me a coin, lady," he said seductively, as he struck the last note.

"No. It must be illegal."

"People do it all the time."

"Yes,people . But you can do it better than people. It can't be fair. Can it?"

"We won't pitch where anyone else sings. We won't ask for cash. We'll just play around with some music and see what happens."

"Supposing someone recognizes you-what you-are?"

"I have a suspicion," he said, "that you'll find itis legal. Look at it this way," he stared at me seriously over the guitar, absurdist as only he could be. "You bought a performing seal that can do tricks no other performing seal can do. Then you run out of money. So you put the seal on the street with a ten-ton truck balanced on its nose, and you walk round with a hat."

"You're not a seal."

"I don't want a ten-ton truck on my nose, either."

"It seems-I can't imagine how it could work out."

He put the guitar aside, took my hands and held them under his chin. He looked up into my face.

"Listen," he said, "is it just that you'd prefer to go back to your house in the clouds? If I've stopped amusing you, if you're no longer happy-"

"Happy?" I cried. "I was only ever happy with you. I was only ever alive with you!"

"Are you sure? Because you have a number of options. If you're simply worrying about my side of things, let me remind you, for the hundredth time, that I'm a robot. My function is service, like any piece of metal junk you buy in a corner store to sh.e.l.l eggs."

"Stop it," I said.

"It's true."

"It isn't."

"It is."

He lowered his head to rest it in my hands. His face was hidden, and my fingers were full of his hair.