The Silver Metal Lover(27)

I came back into the room.

I said, “What do you want me to call you?”

“You intend to rename me?”

“Silver—that’s the registration. Not a name.”

“What’s in a name?” he said.

“A rose by any other name,” I said.

“But don’t, I think,” he said, “call me Rose.”

I laughed. It caught me by surprise, like Clovis’s surprise, but unlike.

“That’s nice,” he said. “I like your laugh. I never heard it before.”

Like a sword going through me. How could I feel so much, when he felt nothing. No, when he felt so differently, so indifferently.

“Please call me,” I said, “Jane.”

“Jane,” he said. “Jane, a pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender, pale chain of a name.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too easy for you. Nobody ever made a poem out of my name, and you can do it with anything. It’s a very ordinary name.”

“But the sound,” he said, “the sheer phonetic sound, is clean and clear and beautiful. Think about it. You never have until now.”

Amazed, I lifted my head.

“Jane,” I said, tasting my name, hearing my name. “Jaen. Jain.”

He watched me. His tiger’s eyes were lambent, absorbing me.

“I live with my mother,” I said, “twenty miles from the city, in a house up in the air. Really up in the air. Clouds go by the windows. We’re going to go there.”

He regarded me with that grave attention I was coming, even so soon, to recognize.

“I don’t know what I want from you,” I said unsteadily. Not true, not true, but what I wanted, being impossible, must be left unsaid. “I’m not,” I said, “Egyptia—I’m not—experienced. I just—please don’t th—”

“Don’t ever,” he said, “be afraid of me.”

But I was. He’d driven a silver nail through my heart.





* * *




I’d known I didn’t want us to stay there, at Clovis’s. Clovis might come back any time, though probably he’d spin it out. Then again, he’d irresistibly picture us making love, sliding all over those black satin sheets. And everything complicated by his own reaction to Silver, who I wasn’t going to call Silver, but couldn’t think what else to call.

And then again, as we sat in the cab rushing along the out-of-town highway, I knew I didn’t want to take him to my suite at Chez Stratos. And suddenly then, suddenly but absolutely, and with a dreadful feeling of shock, I knew I hadn’t got a home. I simply stayed with people. Clovis, Chloe, Mother. And if my mother had been home right now, I couldn’t have taken him there, because he would need explaining. “We have three locomotive robots, dear. Not to mention all the other robotic gadgets.”

“But he’s a personal robot, Mother.”

“What does he do that the others can’t?” Well…

So I became almost petrified with worry in the cab. But then, I’d turned to wood the moment we were on the street. Everyone looked at him, like before, and, like before, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them not because they knew he was a robot. We crossed a busy intersection and he took my hand, like my lover, my friend. Looking after me. It was an act of courage on my part to make us walk to the nearest taxi-park, all of three blocks. His responses were normal. Interest, alertness, apparent familiarity with subways, escalators, which streets led where, as if he’d lived in the city always. His senses and reflexes were, of course, abnormal. Once he drew me away from walking under an overhang. “There’s water dripping down from the air-conditioning above.” I hadn’t seen and didn’t see it, but I saw two people walk into it, pat themselves and curse. He also drew me aside from rough paving, and slipped us through crowds as a unit, without the usual periphery collisions that always happen to me.

The cab had a robot driver. He didn’t react to that at all. I wondered how he would have reacted to the thing with the head on the flyer, out of the same workshop as himself.

On the street, I kept asking nervous questions, couldn’t stop. Some were the same questions, in different forms; I wasn’t even aware of the repetition half the time. Some were unsubtle fierce awful questions. “Do you sleep in a crate?”

“I don’t sleep.”


“But the crate?”

“Somebody switches my circuits off and they prop me up in a corner.” Which sounded like a macabre joke, and I didn’t believe him even though he’d said he couldn’t lie. Sometimes people caught fragments of our conversation and stared.

Something else began to dawn on me, a seeping amazement that something so weird as this had had so little publicity. Even the advertising campaign and the demonstration had done hardly anything to promote the news. Perhaps that was the idea—to infiltrate, show how these things could be passed off as human—and then really sound trumpets: See, they’re that good. (These things.) This makes me sound rational. And I wasn’t.

I was glad to get into the cab, and then not glad, because I was again alone with him. I felt inadequate, and short and fat, and plain, and infantile. I’d taken on more than I could cope with. But how could I have left him in their testing cubicle, once Clovis gave me the chance to rescue him. Eyeless, machinery exposed, dying, and knowing it?