The Silver Metal Lover

I’ve sung on the street for E.M. Ltd. I can do it for you.”

“No,” I said. This idea unsteadied me further. I wasn’t sure why, but the mutinous crowd with their banners, their wise distrust of the excellence of machines, were mixed in my fear. “It’s wrong—if they pay you.”

“Not if they enjoy it enough to pay me.”

I stared at him. The human supernatural face looked back, inquiringly.

“I’m afraid,” I said, and stopped still, holding my small burden of the peacock jacket to me.

“No, you’re not,” he said. He moved close to me, obscuring everything from me except his presence. Even the light was gone, remaining only as a conflagration at the edges of his hair. “You’ve pre-programmed yourself,” he said, “to go on being afraid. But you’re not afraid anymore. And,” he said to my astonishment, “what have you decided to call me?”

“I—don’t know.”

“Then that’s what you should be worrying about. So much anticipation on my part, and still no name.”

We walked on. We paused, and bought an enormous jar of silk-finish paint, and color mixants.

“All the women love you,” I said jealously.

“Not all.”

“All. The woman on the stall cut her prices by half.”

“Because she was charging twice too much already and thought we’d haggle. The only genuine reduction was the jacket she offered you.”

We, I, bought some drapery, a pillow that would need recovering.

I felt a burst of childlike excitement, as on a birthday morning. Then another surge of alarm.

“What on earth am I doing,” I said vaguely.

“Turning your apartment into somewhere you can bear to live.”

“I shouldn’t…”

“Programmed and activated,” he said, and proceeded to an extraordinary imitation of a computer mechanism running through a program, gurgles, clicks and skidding punctuations.

“Please stop it,” I muttered, embarrassed.

“Only if you do.”

I frowned. I looked into the depth of the jacket wrapped in flimsy tissue, the sausage of wrapped pillow. I’d never exercised freedom of choice before, and now I was, and it was peculiar. And he. He wasn’t a robot. He was my friend, who’d come to help me choose (not tell me what to choose), and to carry my parcels, and to give me courage.

“Have I been brave?” I asked him in bewilderment as we strolled out of the market and through a deserted square. “I think I must have been.”

Tremor-sites rose against the stars. Birds or bats nested in them, I could hear the whickering sounds of their wings and little squeaking noises.

“And do I feel afraid only because I still think I should—not because I’ve left my mother and my home and my friends, because I haven’t got any money, because I’ve lost my heart to a beautiful piece of silverware.”

We laughed. I saw what had happened. I was beginning to catch the way he talked. It had never been really possible with anyone else. I’d envied Clovis’s wit, but it was usually so vicious I hadn’t been able to master it, but with Silver—damn. Not Silver.

“Silver,” I said, “I know you can adapt to anyone and anything, but thank you for adapting to me, to this.”

“I hate to disillusion you,” he said, “you’re easier than most to adapt to.”

We walked home. Odd. Home? Yes, I suppose that was already true, because anywhere he was was my home. Silver was my home. A milk-white cat was singing eerily among the girders in the subsidence, like the ghost of a cat. (Did cats have ghosts, or souls?)

“It’s so cold,” I wailed in the room.

“That’s my line, surely.”

I looked at the wall heater unhappily.

I was down to nickels and coppers now, and the three hundred on my card, until next month.

He swung off the cloak and folded it over me, then holding me inside it and against him.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any body heat to keep you warm.”

“I don’t care.”

We kissed each other quietly, and then I said,

“Don’t ever make love to me if you don’t want to.”

“If you want me to, I shall want to.”

“I just don’t believe that. There may be times—”

“No. My emotional and physically simulated equilibriums never alter.”

“Oh.”

“I also swallowed a couple of dictionaries someplace.”

We dragged the mattress off the couch. The bed under it had a padded top-surface and was less used. I pulled the almost new, dappled rugs, faintly scented from their recent cleaning, over us. Under them, I lay a long while, caressing him, exploring him, making love to him.

“Do you mind if I do this?” I asked timidly, quite unable to stop.

“Oh, I mind dreadfully.”

“I’m probably clumsy.”

“Far from it. You’re becoming a wonderful lover.”

“How would you know? It can’t mean anything to you.”

“Not as it would to a flesh-and-blood man. But I can still appreciate it.”

“Artistically,” I sneered. “When the proper circuits are put in action.”

“Something like that.”

“Egyptia—” I murmured, drowning in his hair, the taste of his skin—unmortal and yet flesh—the flesh of a demon—“if you didn’t find pleasure with Egyptia—”

“You make it sound like a cafe we were looking for. I did.”

“Yes… She’d be terribly clever.”

“Egyptia is totally passive. The pleasure is in finding what pleases her.”

Minutes later, as the strange wing-beats began to stir inside me, I couldn’t prevent myself from saying, “I wish I could find what pleases you. I wish, I wish I could.”

“You please me,” he said. It was true. The delight mounted in his face as my delight mounted within me—different, yet dependent.

“You fool,” I gasped, “that isn’t what I mean—”

When I fell back into the silence, the room of the apartment thrummed gently. It had the scent of oranges, now, and glue, and paper bags…

“I can stay here with you,” he said, “or I can start work on this place.”

“I want you with me,” I said. “I want to sleep next to you, even if you can’t—don’t—sleep.”

“You mean,” he said, “you aren’t going to ask me if I wouldn’t rather be anywhere except beside you?”

“Am I as paranoid as that?”

“No. Much worse.”

“Oh.”

“Your hair’s changing color,” he said.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Are you? I think you may be quite pleased when the change is complete.”

“Oh, no. It will be horrid.” Curled against him, lulled and childishly almost asleep, I felt safe. I was whole. We were in a boat, or on the back of a milk-white bird.

“Birds?” he asked me softly. “As well?”

“Yes,” I said. “And a rainbow.”

He must have left me at some point during the night. When I opened my eyes in the effulgent, now-curtain- filtered sunrise, there was blue sky on the ceiling, blue sky and islands of warm cloud, and the crossbow shapes of