The Silver Metal Lover

I started to say something then, I don’t recall what, and in the middle of it the door quietly closed, and I turned, for I knew he was on the wrong side of it. I heard the coins, but not his feet, sound as he went down the stairs, and one strange hollow plunking note from the guitar, when his cloak must have brushed its strings.

He’d gone to earn the rent money for me. The food money, for me. The clothing money. For me. I knew that he’d stand in the grey afternoon that was now deepening to a greyer twilight, singing out gold notes, amber songs, silver and scarlet and blue. Not because I’d bought him, not because he was a slave. But because he was kind. Because he was strong enough to put up with my disgusting weakness.

I was ill with the cold, and wrapping myself in the rugs from the bed, sat in front of the wall heater.

I thought about my mother. About me. How the sperm was put inside her by a machine, and how I was withdrawn by another machine in the Precipta method. And how I was incubated, and how she breast fed me because it would be good for me—her milk taken from her by a machine, and put into my mouth by a machine. There were so many machines involved, I might have been a robot, too.

I thought about Silver. About his face, so fixed, so passionless. “You don’t have any emotions.” And I thought about his look of pleasure when I laughed, or in bed with me, or when he sang. Or when the sun shone through the girders in the subsidence, gilding them, and three wild geese darted like jets over the sky.

It got dark, and I lit some of the candles and drew closed the blue curtains. I thought how this morning he had left me, and I’d been afraid he wouldn’t come back. I wondered if I was afraid of the same thing now, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Only so cold, and so sick of myself.

I got into the bed and fell asleep. I dreamed I sang to a huge crowd, hundreds of them, and I sang badly, but they cheered. And Silver said to me in the dream: “You don’t need me anymore now.” He was all in pieces, wires, wheels, clockwork.

I woke up slowly, not with a start, not in terror, and my eyes were dry. I felt resigned, but I wasn’t sure to what. I also felt calm. I’d picked up some sort of chill, some minor ailment, a sign only of my physical inadequacy. That’s why things had looked so bad. I felt a lot better now, physically.

I slept, and woke up much later. I could tell it was much later, much, much later.

Finally I got dressed and went down to the phone in the foyer, and dialed for the time. It was three in the morning, and he hadn’t come back.

• 5 •

All kinds of things went through my mind. Not one of them, anymore, that he’d—ultimate autonomy—left me. But I began to consider what I’d said about muggings, and though he was amazingly strong, I wondered how he’d make out against a gang of ten or eleven desperate maniacs. Even if his programming would allow him to defend himself, where it might allow him to defend me. What on earth would happen if someone hit him with a club and mechanical parts rolled all over the street? It was macabrely funny, and somehow didn’t seem to fit. Despite my knowledge and my words, and my dreams, he remained mortal for me.

Then too, my calmness stayed with me through all of that. Also my mother’s training in psychological analysis.

I realized I’d begun to analyze him, then, like a man I knew.

The analysis said, quite bluntly, He hasn’t been mugged. You did hurt him. He has, or has acquired, emotions. The gambit now is to worry and to hurt you. Return in kind. The way only a human would do it. But maybe he doesn’t even know it’s human, or that it’s what he’s doing. So he can’t handle it.

I was surprised by the revelation, and made drunken. I was running a slight temperature and wasn’t aware of it, but the fever was undoubtedly what made me so elated and so sure and so calm in the face of such weirdness.

I put on my boots and my peacock jacket, and my fur jacket over the top. Then I looked at myself in the mirror.

“Where are you going, Jane? Sorry. Jain.”

“To find Silver.”

“You don’t know where he is.”

“Yes, I do. He’s at the market, singing under the fish-oil flares.”

“Oh Jain. That’s brilliant. I never knew you were brilliant. The all-night market. Of course, there are two…”

“It’s the first one.”

“Yes it probably is.”

“Before you go, Jane.”

“Yes, Jain?”

“Make me up.”

So I stood before the mirror, and she made me up. She was pale as snow, with a soft fever-rouge in the cheeks. Her lids became silver from a tube of eyeshadow. And then she made my lashes thick and black as midnight bushes from a tube of mascara. We painted each other’s mouth, sensual, alluring, a translucent amber.

The fever gave us the steadiest hands we ever had.

I ran out on the street. I ran up Tolerance. At the corner of the boulevard I saw the Asteroid, and it made me laugh.

In one of the streets I started to sing, and for the first time, because my voice seemed to come from somewhere else, I heard my voice. It rang light as a bell through the frosty air. It was thin and pure. It was—

“She’s happy,” someone said, going by.

“She’s got a nice voice, even if she is blind drunk.”

Thank you, my unknown and friendly critic.

The market exploded before me, day-bright and golden.

Silver’s in the gold. Look for fire, look for the sun’s rising.

Lucifer. I should have called you that. An angel. A wicked angel. Bringer of light. But it’s too late now. I’ll never call you anything but Silver.

He was singing, and so I heard him, and so I found him. The crowd about him was thick, but I saw his face at last, between their shoulders. It was like the second time I ever saw him. Oh my love, my love. His face, bowed to the guitar as he made love to it. There’s a kind of beam, a ray that he draws to him. He draws all the energy of the crowd, and contains it within him, and then focuses it out again upon them. A ray like a star, a sun. I could see it now. I could see what it was. He wasn’t human and he wasn’t a machine. He was godlike. How dare I want to alter him? It didn’t matter if I couldn’t alter him. Not anymore. But to be with him, to love him—that mattered.

The song finished. The crowd roared. He looked up, and he saw me, right through the crowd, as he had seemed to see me that second time, as I think he did, after he sang “Greensleeves” in the Gardens of Babylon. And now his face grew still, so still it might be questioning. What did I do? What should I do? I knew. I remembered how he had been with me. I walked through the crowd. I walked up to him and brushed his hand very gently with my hand. “Hallo,” I said. And I stood by him, turning to confront, or to meet the crowd. A heap of coins and bills lay all over the ground. And now someone shouted for a particular song. Silver glanced at me, and hesitated. “You told me,” I said. “I trust you.”

He struck the chord, and started to sing. I came in on the third word, and straight into a harmonic I’d sung so often, it was easy. As I did, I caught the faintest spray of approval from the crowd. It was good. Silver didn’t check, or even look at me. The crowd began to clap in time with the rhythm.

I heard our voices go up together, his voice, hers. They had the same colors as our hair, his fire, auburn, darker, richer. Mine transparent and pale, a blond chain of notes. Chain. Jain. A Jain voice. And it was beautiful.

When the song ended, the crowd stamped and yelled. And I knew they were yelling and stamping for me too. Coins fell. But the sounds were far away. I wanted it to go on. I wanted to sing again. But Silver shook his head at the crowd. It began to melt away. It seemed to go very quickly. I think I wanted to call it back.

Then a woman came pushing through. She handed Silver a mug of something which steamed, and had an