The Silver Metal Lover(32)

I let him hold me. I knew everything was useless, was over, dead, like brown leaves crushed off the trees.

“I do care about leaving you, Jane.”

“But you’ll be just the same with them.”

“I’ll be what they need me to be.”

I left the bed and went into the bathroom. I ran the taps and held my hands under the water for a long while, for no reason at all. When I came back, he was dressing, pulling on the mulberry boots.

“I wish you wanted to stay with me,” I said.

“I do.”

“Only me.”

“You can’t change me,” he said. “You have to accept what I am.”

“I may never see you again.”

He moved to me and took me back into his arms. I knew the texture of these clothes now, as I knew the texture of his skin and hair, which are neither. Even in my misery, his touch soothed me.

“If you never see me again,” he said, “I’m still part of you, now. Or do you regret that we’ve spent time together?”

“No.”

“Then be glad. Even if it’s finished.”

“I won’t let it be finished,” I said. I held him fiercely, but he kissed me and put me away, tactfully and finally.

“There’s a flyer in ten minutes,” he said.

“How will you—”

“By running a lot faster than any human man you’ll ever see.”

“Money.”

“Robots travel free. Tap the slot and it registers like coins. Electronic wavelengths.”

“I hate your cheerfulness. When you leave me, there’s nothing.”

“There’s all the world,” he said. “And Jane,” he stood in the doorway of the suite, “don’t forget. You are,” he stopped speaking, and framed the word with his lips only: “beautiful.”

Then he was gone, and all the colors and the light of the day crumbled and went out.





* * *




I don’t have to describe that day, do I? I thought a lot about him. I saw him arriving at Clovis’s apartment. The conversation, the innuendo, saw him playing along with the repartee, giving better than he got, and the wonderful smile like sheer sunlight. I saw them in bed. Almost. Like a faulty visual—the swimmers’ movement of arms, a glint of flesh. My mind wouldn’t let me see. And yet my mind wouldn’t leave it alone. I wanted to kill Clovis, take a knife and kill him. And Egyptia. And I wanted to run away. Out into the gathering darkness. Out into another country, another world.

About seven P.M., something happened like a page turning over. I sat bolt upright in the welter of the stricken bed, and the plan began to come. The insane plan, the stupid plan. It was as if he’d taught me how to think. Think in new, logical, extraordinary ways.

I couldn’t remember where the Phy-Amalgamated Conference was, and had to get the information operator. All the while I waited, I waited too for the conviction to go, but it didn’t.

Then I got the Conference and held the line for the twenty minutes the pager needed to find my mother. And the conviction was still there.

“What’s wrong, darling?” said my mother.

“Mother, I’ve bought something terribly expensive I couldn’t get on my card.”

“Jane. There’s a meeting I’m chairing in five minutes. Could this perhaps have waited?”

“No, Mother. Sorry, but no. You see, Clovis paid for it.”

“You’ve been seeing Clovis after what you told me. Should you have been more cautious?”

“I’m over all that,” I said tersely.

“Darling,” said my mother, “switch on the video, please.”

I switched it on, defiantly, and saw her see me, naked in my bed, my love bed, with my cream skin and my cowrie shell eyes I’d never known I had. And somehow, she seemed to realize it was someone new she was dealing with, somebody she’d not really met before.

“That’s better,” said my mother, but I knew it wasn’t. “I’m glad you’ve been resting.”

She had always told me to get to know my body. To be at ease with it. She now seemed to think it faintly unnecessary that I had, I was.

“Mother, Clovis paid for this thing, and now I can’t get to use it. Can you wire a cash order through to him tonight?”

“How much does this item cost?”

I opened out the receipt and read the figure off cold.

My mother became cold, too.

“That’s rather a lot of money, darling.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.” (But we can pay it, can’t we? We’re rolling about in riches, aren’t we?)

“You’ve never done anything like this before, Jane. What exactly is this thing? Is it a car?”

“It’s a Sophisticated Special Format Robot.”

Mother, I’m in love with—

“A robot. I see.”

“It can play the piano.”

“At the price you quoted, one would hope so.”

“The point is, Mother, I’ve been thinking about this a long time, but I rather want, sort of would like—” Don’t blow it, Jane, Jaen, Jain. “I think it would do me good to get an apartment of my own. Just for a few months, in the city.”