The Silver Metal Lover

“Does your mother know?” repeated Medea.

I stood there, my skull quite empty, and Silver said to them in the most gentle and reasonable and truly deadly of voices, as if it were an analogy for their lives: “You have just dropped a chip inside the sound-box of your guitar, which won’t do either of them much good.”

“Oh, thanks for caring,” said Jason.

“Personally, I don’t like silver makeup,” said Medea. “What drama are you in? Or are you out of work? It must be nice for you that you met Jane.”

“Yes, Jane’s very rich, isn’t she,” said Jason. “We’re rich too, of course. But we don’t make friends with out- of-work actors.”

“But Jane’s such a softy,” said Medea.

“Luckily for you,” said Jason.

They stopped. They’d said all they could think of for the moment.

I knew none of this mattered, but it was still awful. I didn’t look at Silver anymore. I could feel the roughness of the embroidered cuff of his shirt, which we’d bought in the market three nights ago, against my wrist. I supposed it was up to me to make the move to get away. To Silver, this was irrelevant.

Then I began to see what was happening to Jason and Medea, and I started to be fascinated. They were wriggling, actually and definitely physically wriggling, their little hard eyes glaring at him and slithering off him. And Medea had gone a dreadful yellow color, while Jason’s tanned ears were turning red—I’d never seen anything like this happen to them before, even when they were children. And now their hands were plucking feebly at the french fries, they were gazing at the ground, their backs were stiffening as if in the grip of a horrible paralysis. I didn’t turn to Silver anymore. I realized that cruel annihilating look of his, which he said meant nothing, was still trained on them like a radioactive ray, mercilessly letting them shrivel beneath it.

It was Medea who finally managed to say, in a shrill, wobbly wire of a voice: “Why won’t he stop staring? Doesn’t he know it’s rude. Make him stop it.”

But it was Jason who scrambled suddenly to his feet. Not waiting to pick up the guitar, the ill-gotten gains, the chips, or even for Medea, he thrust by me and jumped hastily away onto the escalator up to the bridge. Medea, in a speechless frenzy, snatched the money and the guitar and bolted after him. I felt Silver turn to watch them go, as I had turned. Medea turned too, just once, though Jason didn’t. She was at the top of the escalator. Her face was a yellow bone triangle and her mouth hissed, or looked as if it did. Then she ran after Jason.

I was shaken too. I didn’t move until Silver slipped his other arm round me.

I knew his face had changed then, so I looked up at him.

“I thought,” I said, “you wanted everyone to be happy.”

“Don’t I?” he said.

“Your circuits were just switching over,” I said.

“Not exactly.”

“You meant to frighten them.”

“I meant to shut them up.”

“But why did it matter to you?”

“The temperature of your hand changed. It went very cold.”

“And I bought you, so your loyalty was to me. Like the Golder robot being a personal bodyguard,” I said, with amazing stiltedness.

His eyes, unblinking and jewellike, looked back at me. There was a long pause.

“Jane,” he said. But nothing else.

And I was suddenly afraid. At the meeting with the twins, at the uncanny thing he’d been able to do to them. Afraid of being here with him, afraid for him, and for myself.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“I think it’s time we walked on,” he said.

And he let go of me, even my hand, and we walked on. Like two lovers who’d quarreled. And the night was cold as knives.

The bed was cold that night, too, and we didn’t make love in it.

In the morning, just as the light started to come, I woke up. Silver was sitting cross-legged on the rainbow carpet. He was dressed, and his hair fell forward over his face because his head was bowed. He looked like a beautiful advertisement for psychosthetic meditation. But sensing me awake, he looked up. He smiled at me, but the smile wasn’t the same as at any other time before.

“Do you mind if I walk about outside for a while?”

Of course. He was my property and had to ask my permission.

“No…”

I couldn’t even say, “Are you all right?” He was a machine. Obviously he was all right. And just as obviously, something was wrong.

“I’ll be back in an hour.”

“No. Come back when you want to.”

“Will you,” he said, “be okay?”

“Yes. I have to buy some groceries and start the card off for this month. I’ll need change for the rent money.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“Oh no.” I sounded bright and self-sufficient.

He got up, sort of melting to his feet as if every muscle were elastic, and probably it is.

After he went, I was alone for the first time since he’d come with me from Egyptia’s. “Alone” now had a new meaning. It felt as if I’d been cut in half. Half of me was here in the apartment, and half out on the street walking about, only I didn’t know where.

I got up, wrapped myself in the emerald shawl from the couch, and made some lime-spice tea. I sat and looked out of the window, drinking the hot tea, watching the last rags of leaves falling like dead birds.

I tried to go over what had happened, how everything had been fine until we met Jason and Medea. And then—but what had happened then? All that kept coming into my mind, dredged up like Davideed’s silt, were those words of the vile Swohnson’s: This one doesn’t check out. Not that I’d really thought about that aspect, only its nightmarish result—Silver, his eyes replaced by wheels… Yet now, I began to see a curious unevenness, a strange incoherence. Sitting there, shivering over the tea, I pictured those other Sophisticated Format robots, the Coppers, the Golders, the two Silvers, that I’d seen performing at Electronic Metals. How lifelike they’d been, in appearance and in attitude; mannerisms, movements, speech. So lifelike, if you hadn’t known, you’d have taken them for men and women. And yet there was something, something which gave them away, maybe only when you knew, but something which told you they weren’t men, weren’t women. Something that told you they were machines. And did I imagine it, or was Silver, my Silver—S.I.L.V.E.R.—not like that at all? Was Silver truly like a human man, truly believable as human—even when you knew he wasn’t? And was it this which had set E.M.’s computers ticking on the checkout? Some sort of independence, beyond any autonomy, however profound, that they’d programmed into him?

But how? And why?

No, that wasn’t what concerned me. I was just afraid because I might lose him, lose him even though I owned him. He wasn’t a slave in Imperial Rome. And yet, he was a machine. He was, he was. And suddenly the enormity and the insanity of my emotions boiled up before my startled inner eye. I loved a machine. Loved it, trusted it, had rested the foundations of my world on it. And on the game I played that it could be kind to me.

I had a terrible feeling. As if I’d been walking in my sleep, and woken up in the middle of an unknown and deserted plain.

In a daze, I showered and dressed, and took up my purse with the credit card, and wandered out into the city. I had a kind of need for the proof of money. I had a need, too, to be out of the apartment. Maybe when I went back, my arms full of fruit and soap, Silver would be home and everything would be as it had been. Yes, this must be the way to break the spell.

It was raining in the city. As I crossed over from the elevated, robot ambulances screamed past me. Someone had been run over outside the Hot-Bake Shop. I felt a dreary depression and fear.

I went into one of the large stores off the boulevard, because I’d seen a crimson glass jar there that I