“No, Mother.”
“I don’t think, dear, that you quite understand your situation. Your card is inoperable. There is no other lawful way you can obtain money. I think I had better explain to you, in case you’re thinking of it, that finding a job of any sort will be next to impossible for you. To begin with, you will have to possess a labor card. Before any employment bureau will give you one, they will take a body print reading. They will then check you out and see that you are the daughter of a rich woman. Accordingly, they will ask me if I am prepared to support you. There’s a serious shortage of work, Jane, which I’ve no doubt even you are partially aware of. No one who doesn’t need to work is even considered. And when they ask me if I will support you, I will reply that of course I will, you are my chosen child. You have only to return home, and everything you need will be supplied, including money.”
“You once said,” I murmured, “that I ought to get a job in the city, to appreciate the struggle the poor go through.”
“With my sanction, that could have been arranged. Not, however, without it.”
It was warm in the kiosk, so warm the rabbit was running all down the glass.
“All you need to do,” said my mother, “is go into any bank, anywhere in the state, and identify yourself. You will then be able to draw the exact fare money to get you home.”
“Home,” I said.
“Home. I’ve already redesigned and refurnished your suite. You know me better than to think I would ever say anything about the state in which you left it.”
I burst out laughing.
“Jane. I must ask you, once more, to control yourself.”
“Mother, you’ve left me no choice but to become a thief. I’ll have to rob a store or take someone’s wallet.”
“Please don’t be silly, Jane. This sort of hysteria is distressing—however well I may be able to interpret your motivation, we are still mother and daughter. It’s my very concern for your inability to cope with real life that makes me insist you come back to the house. You know in your heart this is true, Jane, and that I’m only thinking of you.”
A cliché. Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say, Jane. The kiosk was hot and I couldn’t breathe. I put my hand inadvertently to my throat, and felt the policode, and I said: “Does my policode still work, Mother?”
“Yes, Jane,” she said. “For three more days. And then I’m withdrawing your print from the precinct computer.”
“That’s for my own good, too, is it?”
“You know the expression, Jane, I must be cruel only to be kind.”
“Yes,” I said. “Shakespeare. Hamlet.” I drew in a hard impossible breath. “Spoken by a lunatic who’s just killed an old man behind a curtain, and who has a deep-seated psychological desire to sleep with his mother.”
I slammed down the switch so violently I broke the skin and my hand started to bleed.
It was raining fiercely now. Vaguely through the rain I could see someone else was waiting outside to come in and use the phone.
It became a matter of enormous importance then, not to let them see my face or what sort of state I was in. Though I wasn’t even sure myself. So I pretended I hadn’t hit the switch, and went on listening, and talking to the receiver-speaker for a few moments. My face was burning, and my hands were cold. I couldn’t really think about what had just happened. “No, Mother,” I said to the dead phone.
“No, Mother. No.” I’d feel better when I got out of the stuffy kiosk. Better when I’d walked to the apartment, dodged the caretaker after the rent, gone, with my arms empty of packages, into the room empty of Silver. Of course, he wouldn’t be there. Perhaps he’d guessed. Perhaps robots picked up special telepathic communications from other machines. I wasn’t solvent. So he might be now with Egyptia, his rich legal owner. What was I going to do?
My head tucked down, I pushed open the door of the kiosk and almost fell out. The cold and the water hit me like a wave and I seemed to be drowning. Someone caught me, the person waiting for the phone, and a horrible embarrassment was added to my illness.
“I’m all right,” I insisted.
And then a scent, a texture, the touch itself—I looked up through the rain, and my head cleared and the world steadied—”You!”
“Me!”
Silver looked down at me, amused, compassionate, unalterable. His hair was nearly black with rain and plastered over his skull as if in the shower. Beads of rain hung and spilled from his lashes. His skin was made of rain.
“How did you—”
“I saw you come out of the store, when I was several blocks away. I could have caught you up, but I’d have had to run fast, and you want me to pretend I’m human, don’t you? So I walked after you, and waited till you finished your call.”
“Silver,” I said, “it’s all over. Everything’s hopeless. But I’m so glad you didn’t leave me.”
* * *
“Jane, if you need to cry, couldn’t you cry against me and not into that pillow?”
“Wh—Why?”
“Because the green stuff you covered it with obviously isn’t dye-proofed, and your face is acquiring a most abnormal green pattern.”
I started up and ran to the mirror. What I saw there made me laugh and weep together. I washed my face in the bathroom and came back. I sat down beside him.
“I don’t want to cry against you, or you to comfort me, or hold me anymore,” I said, “because soon I’ll have to do without you, won’t I?”
“Will you?”