“I know. Isn’t it ridiculous.”
The walk home went in a moment. Or seemed to. As we went up the cement steps, Silver said, “We’ve got half the rent now. I think we can risk buying doughnuts for breakfast.”
We went into the apartment. I’d left the heater on, and ten candles burning, wasteful and dangerous. But it didn’t matter.
“I’m going to buy silver makeup,” I said. “And make my skin like yours. How silly that will be. Will it annoy you?”
“No.”
I sat on the couch and found I was lying on it. It was strange, I could feel my temperature actually going down. I was leveling, the way a flyer does as it approaches a platform. I knew I wasn’t ill, wouldn’t get ill. I knew everything, would be all right.
Silver’s cloak and the guitar were leaning together against the wall catching candle glints on wood and folds, the way they would in a painting or an artistic photograph. Silver was sitting next to me, looking at me intently.
“I am all right,” I said. “But how nice you care.”
“Don’t forget,” he said, “you’re all that stands between me and Egyptia’s robot storage.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was subconsciously and consciously trying to drive you into feeling human.”
I thought he’d laugh. He didn’t. He looked down at my hand in his. The light seemed to darken, intensify, which perhaps was because some of the candles were burning out.
“I do feel human,” he said at last. “I’m supposed to feel human, in order to act in a human manner. But there are degrees. I know I’m a machine. A machine that behaves like a man, and partly feels like a man, but which doesn’t exactly emote like a man. Except that, probably very unfortunately, I have gained emotional reflexes where you’re concerned.”
“Have you?” I said softly. I believed him. There was no doubt in me. I felt amazingly gentle.
“Viewed logically,” he said, “all that’s happened is that I’m responding to your own response. You react to me in a particular way, an emotive way. And I react to your reaction. I’m simply fulfilling your need, if you like.”
“No, I don’t like. I’m tired of your fulfilling my needs. I want to fulfill yours. What do you need, Silver?”
He raised his eyes and looked at me. His eyes seemed to go a long way back, like sideways seas, horizontal depths…
“You see,” he said, “nobody damn well says ‘What do you need?’ to a bloody robot.”
“There is some law which forbids me to say it?”
“The law of human superiority.”
“You are superior.”
“Not quite. I’m an artifact. A construct. Timeless. Soulless.”
“I love you,” I said.
“And I love you,” he said. He shook his head. He looked tired, but that was my imagination, and the fluttering light. “Not because I can make you happy. If I even can. Not for any sound mechanical pre-programmed reason. I just Goddamn love you.”
“I’m glad,” I whispered.
“You’re crazy.”
“I want,” I said, “to make you happy. You have that need in you. Well, it’s just the same in me.”
“I’m only three years old, remember,” he said. “I have a lot of ground to make up.”
I kissed him. We kissed each other. When we began to make love, it was just the same, just as marvelous as it always was. Except that now I didn’t think, didn’t concentrate on what was happening to me. The wonderful waves of sensation passed over and through me, and I swam in them, but the promise of light I swam toward on the horizon was altered. It wasn’t mine.
I don’t think I’d have presumed, even considered it, unless I’d drunk brandy on an empty stomach and with a slight benign fever, in the aftermath of my mother’s rejection and my public song. It seems rather unbelievable even as I write it down. I know you won’t believe me, even though you know what I’m going to say. If you ever read this, if I ever let you read it.
I don’t want to, won’t describe every action, every murmur. Egyptia would. Read her manuscript—there won’t be one, she pours her life like champagne through your video phone.
Only suddenly, when I no longer even knew for sure, the road or the way, or how I was idiot enough even to dream of it, lulled and almost delirious, and yet far far from myself, out of my body and somehow in his body—all at once I knew. In that instant, he raised himself and stared down at me in a kind of bewilderment. In the veiled, multi-colored light, his face was almost agonized, closing in on itself. And then he lay down on me again, and I felt his body gather itself, tense itself as if to dive through deep waters. His hair was across my eyes, so I shut them, and I tasted the silken taste of his hair in my mouth. I felt what happened to him, the silent, violent upheaval shaking itself through him. Earthquake of the flesh. I was the one who cried out, as if the orgasm were mine. But my body was only shaken with his pleasure and my pleasure in his pleasure. So I knew what he’d known before, the joy in my lover’s joy.
The silence was very long, and I lay and listened to the candle wax crackling in the saucers. As I listened, I kissed him, his hair, his neck; I stroked him, held him.
Eventually, he lifted himself again. He lay on one elbow, looking down at me. His face was unchanged. Amused, tender, contemplative.
“Technically,” he said, “that just isn’t possible.”
“Did something happen? I didn’t notice.”
“Of course,” he said quietly, “a human man would have left you proof. You’ll never be sure it wasn’t—”
“Faked? I’ve heard so much about you. I know how it goes when you fake. Not like that. As for proof, it’s just as well there isn’t any. Along with everything else, I missed my contraception shots last month.”
“Jane,” he said, “I love you.”
I smiled. I said, “I know.”