“Yes—”
I ran into the green bathroom and banged the door. I hung over the pale green lavatory basin, which I matched, but I wasn’t sick at all. Eventually I lay down full length on the marble tiles, not knowing what was wrong with me, or where I wanted to be, or who I wanted to be with. As I lay there, I heard the lift, and the apartment door, and Clovis saying with irritation: “Don’t blow that foul corner-store marijuana over me.”
When I came sheepishly out, Austin had put on a rhythm tape and was gyrating before the window, perhaps hoping someone with powerful binoculars on the other side of the river would see him.
“Shall I call you a taxi?” said Clovis. “There’s a new line running from Jagged’s with human drivers. A gimmick. It won’t last.”
“I’ll take the flyer. There’s one due at the corner of Racine at five P.M.”
“Racine is a rough stop. I shouldn’t like your little blond face to get carved up.”
“I’ve got my policode.”
“Ever called the cops with it? I once did, and it was two whole minutes before they arrived to rescue me, by which time I could have been structurally redesigned.”
Austin giggled, waving his hips wildly.
Everything was normal again. I would be normal. I had already recollected Egyptia, and wondered if I should try to find her, at the Theatra, or her apartment block on The Island, or the Gardens of Babylon where she sometimes sat drinking among the flowery vines. Or I could go off alone, there were a hundred places I could go to. Or I could call Chloe, or Medea. But I knew I wouldn’t do any of those things. I knew I’d go home, just as Clovis anticipated.
Chez Stratos was my security. Whenever anything went wrong, I felt shaky until I got back there. I would go home, and I’d tell my mother what had happened to me—Clovis had merely been a way of putting it off. Already I felt safer, just thinking of telling her, though probably it would turn out that my reactions were suspect.
Anyway, Clovis wanted me to go. He doodled on a pad on the coffee table, drawings of a beautiful young man with long hair and a key protruding from his back.
“Don’t look so stricken, Jane,” he said. “You have it out of proportion. As usual. Go home and relax.”
Austin ran his hands down his body and blew me a kiss.
I didn’t like Clovis then, and I turned on my heel just like the robot and went to the door and out.
It must be odd to live on Social Subsistence. Odd to have to palm print every month and get a sub. check in the mail every week. There are all sorts of training schemes, aren’t there, but mostly they’re dead ends. The colossal boom in robot circuitry, essential after the Asteroid threw everything into confusion, has left all these gaping holes with human beings in them, frantically swimming and trying not to go down. Mother says the creative arts are the safest, there are jobs there. But if robots can start to make music beautifully and expertly, and sing like angels, what then?
And if they can even make love—
I’d been very silly to get sick over that. Was it so revolting? After all, if they could make love, then they must feel of skin and flesh to the touch, feel human, too, in… every way. Only it wasn’t revulsion, somehow. Somehow, it was worse. I sat in the cab I had, after all, dialed from a kiosk, sticking my nails in my hands to stop my recurring nausea from getting a grip.
I’m not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I’m old, perhaps, when I’m thirty— The cab drove fast on the highway, and the dust spooned up on either side, glowing a lovely gold in the westering sun, that calmed me. The robot driver was just a panel and slot for coins and notes. The flyer costs much less and is much nicer, because it travels a hundred feet above the ground.
The Baxter Empire travels in the air too, one of those old vertical lift-offs. Mother used it in the jungle, its blades smashing the forest roof out of the way as it went up, and portions of severed monkeys falling past the windows. Although I’ve forgotten all the important parts of my early travels, that’s one part I do remember, and I remember I cried. Mother then told me nothing dies ever, animal or human. A psychic force inside us survives physical death, and continues on both in the spiritual, and in other bodies. At the time I thought rebelliously for five minutes she was just making an excuse for killing the monkeys, as if killing them didn’t matter, because they weren’t really dead. But even so, I guessed she was right. It was easier to believe it anyway.