The Silver Metal Lover

“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?

I said, brutishly, and ashamed of myself: “If they’d run the full check and taken you apart, is that your kind of death?”

“Probably,” he said.

“And does that scare you?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Not thought about dying.”

“Do you?” he said.

“I suppose, not often. But when—the test, your eyes, your hands—”

“I was only partly aware.”

“But you—”

“You’re trying again, Jane, to get me to do something I’m not geared to do, which is analyze myself emotionally.”

I looked at the geography going past, the dust and the mauve-tinted sky. Thunder murmured somewhere, hitting distant hills. He, too, looked out of the windows. Did he like the landscape, or didn’t it matter to him? And was human beauty or lack of it equally unimportant?

We reached the approach to the house, and I paid off the cab. A mauve dust wind was rattling along the concrete and powdering the conifers. The steel supports of the house, in the softened, curious storm-light, were almost the same color as Silver.

“Hallo, Jane,” said the lift.

He leaned on the wall as we soared upward, looking about him. And I looked at him. I shouldn’t have done this. I’m a fool. I can’t cope.

When the lift opened on the foyer, one of the three spacemen was trundling across to the hatches. I wondered what Silver would do, but Silver took no notice, and neither did the spaceman.

We got in the birdcage lift and went up to the Vista.

As we came in, there was a colossal thunderclap, and the whole room turned pink-white, then darkest purple. Insulated and stabilized as Chez Stratos is, there’s still something utterly overpowering about a storm seen so close. As a child, I was terrified, but my mother used to bring me down here and show me the storm, explaining why we were safe and how magnificent Nature was. So that by the time I was ten, I was convinced I was no longer afraid of storms, and would come into the Vista to watch them and win Demeta’s approval. But as a second flash and sear and roar exploded about the room, I wasn’t so sure I was unafraid.

Silver, though, was walking along the room and into the balcony-balloons, and the storm was hitting him, turning him white, then cobalt. A cloud parted like a breaking wave only a hundred feet away, and rain fountained from it. The reflection of the rain ran over Silver’s metallic face and throat.

“What do you think of the view?” I said brightly.

“It’s fascinating.”

“You can appreciate it?”

“You mean artistically? Yes.”

He moved from the window, and touched the top of the piano, in which the clouds seethed and foamed, making me dizzy. He and it were in a sort of impossible motion, their skins gliding, yet stationary. He ran both hands suddenly across all the keys in a lightning of notes.

“Not quite in tune,” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Not quite.”

“I’ll tell one of the robots to fix it.”

“I can fix it now.”

“My mother plays it. I’d have to ask her.”

His eyes flattened out. This time I knew. The thought process was switching over, because I’d reacted oddly. He, too, was a robot, and could retune the piano exquisitely. But I, instead of agreeing delightedly, said “No,” as if he might humanly botch the job.

“My suite,” I said, “is up here.”

I turned and went through the annex and up the stair, anticipating that he’d follow me.

The moment I entered, I touched the master button in the console that brought all the green silk blinds down across the windows. I looked around at the Persian carpets, the baskets of hanging plants, the open door showing the mechanically neatly made bed, another showing the ancient Roman bathroom. The stereophonic tape-player, the visual unit, the clever games beamed at me, burnished, costly. Like a stranger, I moved forward, touched things. The books in their cases, clothes in their closet, (each outfit with its two matching sets of lingerie), I even opened the doll cupboard and saw my old toys, preserved for me in neat formal attitudes, as if they were in a doctor’s waiting room. There wasn’t a thing I’d ever bought for myself. Even the things I had bought—recent things, unimportant things, like nail varnish and earrings—they were there because my mother had said, “You know, this sort of thing would suit you,” or maybe Clovis had said it. Or Egyptia had. Or Chloe had given it to me. Even my toys, long ago, had been chosen, and how I’d loved them. But here they sat, poor things, that love outgrown, waiting for the doctor who never would come and play with them again. Their sad fur made my eyes fill with tears. I know I’ve told you how I cry a lot.

I was aware he hadn’t followed me after all, and I sat on the couch with the rain rolling down my face and no reflection, till I heard the piano burst into syncopation and melody. The thunder cracked, and the piano chased up the thunder, and danced over the other side.

I wiped my face with a lettuce-green tissue from a bronze dispenser, and went down again. I stood at the south end of the Vista, until he finished, watching his satin hair bouncing up over the lifted fan-shape lid of the piano as he dipped and dived in and out of the music. Then he got up and walked around the piano, smiling at me.

“I did fix it.”

“I didn’t say you should. You were meant to come upstairs with me.”

“Something else we have to get clear,” he said. “Being locomotive and Verisimulated, I’m also fairly autonomous. If you want me to do something specific, you’ll have to make it more obvious.”

I balked. “What?”

“Try saying: Come upstairs with me. Then I’d leave the piano and follow you.”

“Damn you!” I shouted. I hadn’t meant to, didn’t want to. It didn’t even mean anything, except some basic symptom of what was happening deep inside me somewhere.

And his face grew cold and still, and his eyes were satanic.

“Don’t look at me that way,” I said.

His face cleared, changed. He said, “I told you about that.”

“The thought process switching over. I don’t believe you.”

“I told you about that too.”

“I don’t think you know!” I cried.

“I know about myself.”

“Do you?”

“I have to, to function.”