The Silver Metal Lover(57)

“Have you?” I said softly. I believed him. There was no doubt in me. I felt amazingly gentle.

“Viewed logically,” he said, “all that’s happened is that I’m responding to your own response. You react to me in a particular way, an emotive way. And I react to your reaction. I’m simply fulfilling your need, if you like.”

“No, I don’t like. I’m tired of your fulfilling my needs. I want to fulfill yours. What do you need, Silver?”

He raised his eyes and looked at me. His eyes seemed to go a long way back, like sideways seas, horizontal depths…

“You see,” he said, “nobody damn well says ‘What do you need?’ to a bloody robot.”

“There is some law which forbids me to say it?”

“The law of human superiority.”

“You are superior.”

“Not quite. I’m an artifact. A construct. Timeless. Soulless.”

“I love you,” I said.

“And I love you,” he said. He shook his head. He looked tired, but that was my imagination, and the fluttering light. “Not because I can make you happy. If I even can. Not for any sound mechanical pre-programmed reason. I just Goddamn love you.”

“I’m glad,” I whispered.

“You’re crazy.”

“I want,” I said, “to make you happy. You have that need in you. Well, it’s just the same in me.”

“I’m only three years old, remember,” he said. “I have a lot of ground to make up.”

I kissed him. We kissed each other. When we began to make love, it was just the same, just as marvelous as it always was. Except that now I didn’t think, didn’t concentrate on what was happening to me. The wonderful waves of sensation passed over and through me, and I swam in them, but the promise of light I swam toward on the horizon was altered. It wasn’t mine.

I don’t think I’d have presumed, even considered it, unless I’d drunk brandy on an empty stomach and with a slight benign fever, in the aftermath of my mother’s rejection and my public song. It seems rather unbelievable even as I write it down. I know you won’t believe me, even though you know what I’m going to say. If you ever read this, if I ever let you read it.

I don’t want to, won’t describe every action, every murmur. Egyptia would. Read her manuscript—there won’t be one, she pours her life like champagne through your video phone.

Only suddenly, when I no longer even knew for sure, the road or the way, or how I was idiot enough even to dream of it, lulled and almost delirious, and yet far far from myself, out of my body and somehow in his body—all at once I knew. In that instant, he raised himself and stared down at me in a kind of bewilderment. In the veiled, multi-colored light, his face was almost agonized, closing in on itself. And then he lay down on me again, and I felt his body gather itself, tense itself as if to dive through deep waters. His hair was across my eyes, so I shut them, and I tasted the silken taste of his hair in my mouth. I felt what happened to him, the silent, violent upheaval shaking itself through him. Earthquake of the flesh. I was the one who cried out, as if the orgasm were mine. But my body was only shaken with his pleasure and my pleasure in his pleasure. So I knew what he’d known before, the joy in my lover’s joy.

The silence was very long, and I lay and listened to the candle wax crackling in the saucers. As I listened, I kissed him, his hair, his neck; I stroked him, held him.

Eventually, he lifted himself again. He lay on one elbow, looking down at me. His face was unchanged. Amused, tender, contemplative.

“Technically,” he said, “that just isn’t possible.”

“Did something happen? I didn’t notice.”

“Of course,” he said quietly, “a human man would have left you proof. You’ll never be sure it wasn’t—”

“Faked? I’ve heard so much about you. I know how it goes when you fake. Not like that. As for proof, it’s just as well there isn’t any. Along with everything else, I missed my contraception shots last month.”

“Jane,” he said, “I love you.”

I smiled. I said, “I know.”

He lay down next to me, and for another hour at least I was drowsily making up songs in my head, before I fell asleep.

So, we’re at the end of the story now. If you read so far. You don’t want to know any more of what we say to each other, or how we feel about each other. And I don’t need to write about it. The record—it is a record—is for… ? Even Silver hasn’t seen it, though he knows I’ve written it. But maybe, it’s a record for people who fall in love with machines. And—vice versa.

I write songs. I always could, and didn’t credit it. I can improvise sometimes, too. I am very good with hideous puns.

They groan, and they pay. The man who gave us a button, gives me another button. The first time he heard me sing, he gave us two, the double price Silver had stipulated.

Sometimes I see myself, a sort of bird’s-eye view of me in the distance, doing these things, singing solos and harmonies, playing at the crowd, and with the crowd. Sometimes it’s two hundred strong. And I’m astounded—is this me? But of course it isn’t. This is Jain. Jain with her blond hair, her twenty-two-inch waist, her silver skin, her peacock jacket, her cloak of emerald green velvet, lined with violet satin. It was as if a skin encased me. I could only just see through it. Then the skin tore wide open.