The Silver Metal Lover(31)

He held me in his arms, and I said,

“But you, what about you?”

“No.”

“But—can’t you—don’t you—”

“It isn’t necessary for me.” And then, his voice amused in the darkness, “I can fake it, if you want. I frequently have.”

“No. Don’t fake it with me. Not ever. Please don’t.”

“Then I won’t.”

I fell asleep, until the Asteroid, rising, cut a hole through the blind. I woke, and he lay by me, his arms about me, his eyes closed as if he slept. But when he felt me stir, he opened his eyes. We looked at each other, and he said, “You’re beautiful.”


I would have denied it, but I felt it to be true. With him, for that moment, true.

My joy was his joy. I’d been crazy to say what I had, that he couldn’t love. He can love all of us. He is love.

In the morning, we showered together.

“Do you need to?”

“City dirt makes no exceptions,” he said, soaping his hair under the green waterfall. “Don’t worry, I’m entirely rustproof.”

He ate breakfast with me, to please me. He ate just like a young man, economically wolfing the food down.

“Can you taste it?”

“I can if I put the right circuits into action.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, and giggled.

My laughter intrigued him: He went into routines that made me helpless with it. Idiotically convincing voices, other personae, absurd songs, jokes.

One of the spacemen came to clear the breakfast things and I fell silent, embarrassed by this other robot, so unlike him. The spaceman gave me a little tray with vitamins on it, and my Phy-Excellence capsules. I meant to take them. I did. But I forgot.

We went back to bed. When the ecstasy left me, I cried again.

“It must be horrible for you,” I sobbed.

“Do I seem to find it horrible?”

“You’d act. It’s part of your character. And to say I’m beautiful.”

“You are. You have a skin like cream.”

“Do I?”

“And eyes like cowrie shells, with every color of the sea in them.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

“You say this to everyone.”

“Not quite. Besides which, they would be different things. And only when they were true.”

I got out of bed and went to the mirror, and looked at myself, lifting my hair over my head, widening my eyes.

He lay in the sheets like a sleeping dog-fox, smiling, aware of my delight.

“Did you fake orgasm,” I said boldly, “with Egyptia?”

“Many many times,” he said, with a note of such ironic dismay that I laughed again.

The next time he made love to me, the ecstasy was like a spear going through me. I screamed out, and was astonished.

“Just pretending,” I said.

The phone gave a sound a few minutes before noon, the low purring it makes on the console by my bed. Correction: made. I turned off the video, and answered it. I needn’t have bothered with the video.

“Bad news,” said Clovis.

“That isn’t me,” I said, “or is that who’s calling?”

“Jane, don’t be witty. When’s Demeta coming back?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I hate to break up your amour impropre early, but Egyptia has decided to assert her rights. She says she signed your metal playmate over to you for six hours. Only. You want him, I paid for him, but we can’t do a thing. She’s eighteen and he’s in her name.”

“You could stall her…”

“No. Anyway, I’ve got other things to do with my day. Or did you think my only mission in life was to be your nursemaid?”

Rancor. I could hear it. Something grated inside him. Because he’d helped me and he’d lost out. And because he’d seen Silver.

“What do I do, Clovis?”

“Send him over to The Island on a fast ferry. Or she may make a hysterical call to a lawyer. Or her awful mother in that trench.”

“But—”

“You didn’t think she was a friend of yours, did you?”

Everything in the room had stopped moving. It was funny, of course nothing had been moving, yet everything had looked alive, and now it didn’t anymore.

“All right,” I said.

“Or,” he said, “you can send it here, if you want. It, him. Egyptia can collect him, and maybe I can calm her down.”

“To your apartment,” I said.

“To my apartment. I’m so glad you didn’t think I meant the middle of the river.”

“I’ll pay you back the money,” I said. I had twisted the edge of the sheets into a hard corded knot.

“Oh, no rush.”

I switched the phone off.

“What is it?” my lover said to me. His arm came round my shoulders.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“Yes.”

“Clovis wants you. And then Egyptia wants you.”

“Well apparently I legally belong to them.”

“Don’t you care?”

“You want me to say I care about leaving you.”