Silver Metal Lover Part 20

He turned to shoulder out of the crowd, and Silver called dulcetly to him.

"To hear the lady sing costs more than to hear me."

The b.u.t.ton man glared at him.

"Oh,why ?"

"Because," said Silver reasonably, "I think she's worth more than I am, and I'm setting the prices."

The b.u.t.ton man swore, and the crowd approved Silver's chivalry. And I stood in a bath of icy sweat, staring at the money on the ground by the jar.

Silver accepted two more requests, and then, to howls of protest, said the session was over for the day.

When they asked why, he said he was cold.

When the crowd had filtered away, Silver divided the money between the inner pockets of the cloak and my purse. A m.u.f.fled clanking came from both of us, like a distant legion on the move, and I said grimly, "We'll be mugged."

"We haven't earnedthat much."

"This is a poor area."

"I know."

"My policode soon won't work. And you couldn't stop anyone if they attacked us."

He raised an eyebrow at me.

"Oh, why not?"

"You're not programmed for it. You're not a Golder." Why did my voice sound so nasty?

He said, "You might be surprised."

"You surprise me all the time."

"What's the matter?" he said.

"Nothing. Everything. It's all so easy for you. How you must despise us. Putty in your hands. Yourmetal hands." I was crying slightly,again , and didn't really know what I was saying, or why. "That man will come back. He's the type. He'll come back and bully me."

"He fancies you. If you don't want to sing, we'll just ignore him."

"Youcan.I can't."

"Why not?"

"Youknow why not. I trusted you, and you let them all think I'd sing. After I said-"

"I let them all think youmight . You don't have to. It's a wonderful gimmick. The mysterious dumb blonde-dumb, I hastily add, in the vocal sense. Your earning ability will soar. In a month's time, if you just sang a line of 'Happy Birthday,' they'd go wild."

"Don't be silly."

"I am idiosyncratically silly."

"Shut up," I said.

He froze, turned up his amber eyes, and stood transfixed, a mechanism switched off.

"d.a.m.n you," I said, as once before. "I shouldn't be with you. It's all a game to you. You don't feel, and you don't understand. Do you laugh at me inside your metal skull?" My voice was really awful now, and the words it said, awful, awful. "You're a robot. A machine." I wanted to stop. Pale memories of what I'd thought earlier, my triumph, my joy at the sudden human vulnerability I'd glimpsed in him, seemed only to increase my need to-tohurt him. I'd been hurt. Someone's hurt me, hurt me, and I never knew. So now I'll hurt you if I can. "A circuit engages," I said, "and a little light comes on." There was fear, too.

After all, it might be true, mightn't it? "The light says: Be kind to Jane. To stupid Jane. Pretend she can sing. Pretend she's nice in bed. Pretend, pretend, 'cos otherwise she'll send you back to Egyptia, who knows exactly what you are. Egyptia who puts you in the robot storage at night because she prefers real human men. But Jane's maladjusted. Jane's twisted. Jane's kinky for robots. Gosh, what luck. Jane'll keep you, let you make believe you're human, too. Plain Jane, always good for a sn.i.g.g.e.r."

I was trembling and s.h.i.+vering so much the coins in my purse sounded like a cash register in an earthquake. He was looking at me but I wouldn't look at him.

"The reason," he said, "why I packed up the session here was that I could feel you freezing to death beside me. We'll get you back to the apartment, and I'll do the next stint alone. The market's probably a good place."

"Yes. They love you there. And you can go home with one of the women. Or with a man. And make themhappy ."

"I would prefer to make you happy." His voice was perfectly level. Perfect.

"You'd fail."

"I'm sorry."

"You're not sorry. You don't have any emotions to be sorry with."

That's enough, I said to myself. Leave it. None of this is true.

Yes, I said to myself. He's fooled you all this while, played with you, made a clown of you, the way he played with the crowd.

Isn't this clever, I said to myself. To keep on and on about his unhumanness, on and on until he feels it like a knife.

I was either terribly cold or terribly hot, and my legs were leaden. I wanted to sit down and there was only the dank paving, so I sat on that. And next second he'd pulled me to my feet. Holding me by the arm hard enough to hurt me, he propelled me into the arcade and through it, and back into the outer streets. Wise move, robot. You guessed-computed-I'd be quieter out here, where it's less private.

The sun was low, burning out over Kacey's Kitchens, like one of their molecular stoves.

There was a bus and he pulled me onto it. We had to stand. The bus felt like a furnace and people came between us as we hung on the rails. I could see him then, his pale only faintly metallic face, staring out of the windows at nothing. His face was fixed, cold, and awesome. I would have been afraid of that face on anyone else. But because it was him, I couldn't be afraid. And my anger died in me, and my mistrust, and a deep sickness came instead. A sickness at myself. A sickness that I couldn't express to him, or to me.

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 pa.s.sionless. "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.

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 a.n.a.lysis.

I realized I'd begun to a.n.a.lyze him, then, like a man I knew.

The a.n.a.lysis 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 hurtyou . 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 peac.o.c.k 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 butSilver.

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 G.o.dlike. 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. AJain 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed, know where it came from. Obligingly, I slipped off the fur, and let the peac.o.c.ks s.h.i.+ne 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.