Yes, I said to myself. He’s fooled you all this while, played with you, made a clown of you, the way he played with the crowd.
Isn’t this clever, I said to myself. To keep on and on about his unhumanness, on and on until he feels it like a knife.
I was either terribly cold or terribly hot, and my legs were leaden. I wanted to sit down and there was only the dank paving, so I sat on that. And next second he’d pulled me to my feet. Holding me by the arm hard enough to hurt me, he propelled me into the arcade and through it, and back into the outer streets. Wise move, robot. You guessed—computed—I’d be quieter out here, where it’s less private.
The sun was low, burning out over Kacey’s Kitchens, like one of their molecular stoves.
There was a bus and he pulled me onto it. We had to stand. The bus felt like a furnace and people came between us as we hung on the rails. I could see him then, his pale only faintly metallic face, staring out of the windows at nothing. His face was fixed, cold, and awesome. I would have been afraid of that face on anyone else. But because it was him, I couldn’t be afraid. And my anger died in me, and my mistrust, and a deep sickness came instead. A sickness at myself. A sickness that I couldn’t express to him, or to me.
We got off at the boulevard and walked to Tolerance, and into the apartment block and up the stairs. Neither of us spoke. The apartment looked icy, even its jewel colors were numbed.
I walked in and stood with my back to him.
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 How the sperm was put inside her by a machine, and how I was withdrawn by another machine in the Precipta method.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.
* * *
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?”