Spoiled little rich girl. Always someone to do things for you. Always someone to rescue you. Your mother. Clovis. And always a castle in the clouds to run back to.

And now?

• 1 •

It’s so dark, I can hardly see to write this, and I’m not certain why I’m writing it. Superstitiously, I think I believe I made everything happen by writing the first part of it down. And so, if I write another part of it, another part will come after. But things may only get worse. As if they could. But no, they could.

And then, somewhere inside myself, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything, because the thing I need is something else than what I’ve lost. And then again, I go on thinking, beyond this grimy darkness and the shadows like purple rust flaking on the page. I think about tomorrow and the next day, and I wonder what will become of me.

In the morning, at seven A.M., because I couldn’t sleep, I got up and made a short tape for my mother. I said: “My problem was about Clovis and the callous way he treats his boyfriends, and about how M-Bs behave to each other anyway. But I’m over it now. I was just being silly.”

It was not exactly the first time I’d lied to my mother. But it was the first time I knew I’d have to stick to the lie. I couldn’t break down. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t decide if I was desperate, or only desperately ashamed. But I’d tried to cry myself out in the night, and by six A.M. the pillows were so wet I’d thrown them on the floor.

I knew there was no solution.

At eleven-thirty A.M., the video phone rang in the Vista. I knew who it was so I didn’t answer. At noon, it rang again. Somehow it sounded louder. Soon my mother would emerge from her suite, and then I’d have to answer it, so I answered it.

Egyptia reclined in the video in a white kimono.

“Jane. You look terrible.”

“I didn’t sleep well.”

“Neither did I. Oh Jane—”

She told me about Silver. She told me in enormous detail. I tried not to listen, but I listened. Beauty, acrobatics, tenderness, humor, prowess.

“Of course, the stamina, the knowledge, the artistry are built in. But I believed he was human. Oh, he’s magic, Jane. It’s ruined me for a man for weeks. But I nearly fainted this morning. So much ecstasy is destructive. I think I have a migraine attack. This awful pain in my temple. Oh, he should carry a government health warning, like the windows by the Old River.”

A wire was stretching tighter and tighter in my spine, and the end of the wire was in my head. She hadn’t said which temple had the migraine, so both my temples beat as narrow spikes ran through and through them. The room clouded. When the wire snapped in the middle I would scream.

“I checked my account to see if I could buy one, but I’ve overdrawn for this month. And then there’s the Theatra. Oh, Jane. He’s taught me so much about myself. He found such sensual nuances in me—I was a woman with him. That’s so strange. He’s a robot, but he made me feel more like a woman, more conscious of my desires, my needs, than any man ever did. But I had to beg him to stop—”

One of the spacemen entered with a breakfast tray for my mother, and I said, “My mother’s just coming, Egyptia.”

“Oh. All right. Call me back.”

“Yes.”

I turned off the phone and started to fall, but I landed on my knees in an attitude of prayer as my mother walked through the doors.

Even when she gets up, my mother is beautiful, her face empty of makeup and full of green eyes, her hair loose on her shoulders.

If only I could tell her—

“Hallo, darling.”

“Hallo, Mother.”

“Did you drop something under the couch, darling?”

“Oh—I—” I stood up. “I was speaking to Egyptia,” I added, for this might well explain any strange behavior.

“In half an hour,” said my mother, “you can tell me what it was you wanted to talk to me about.”

I must tell her, I must. No, no, no.

“I left a tape. But it doesn’t seem important now. Mother, I’m so tired. I have to go back to bed.”

Shut in my suite, I wept all over again. How I needed, how I wanted to tell her what had happened to me. She’d be able to rationalize it all. She would show me why I felt as I did, and how to get over it.

Thank God Egyptia couldn’t buy him this month.

How horrible, to sleep with—

I shut my eyes and knew his kiss again on my mouth, that silver metal kiss.

I fell asleep lying on the wet pillows on the floor, and I dreamed of all kinds of things, but not of Silver.

At two P.M., my mother called my suite on the internal phone, and asked me to have lunch with her in the Vista My mother was very concerned about my having privacy, and the feeling that I could be alone when I wished; she never simply knocked on the door. But I felt I had to go down, so I went down and we ate lunch.

“You’re very quiet, darling. Has anything else happened that you want to tell me about?”

“Nothing, really. Was the dinner interesting?”

My mother told me about the dinner, and I tried to hear what she said. Sometimes what she said was very funny and I laughed. I kept beginning to say to her, “I’ve fallen in love,” and preventing myself. I imagined saying: “I’d like to buy a special format robot.” Would my mother let me? Generally, I pay for things I want with a credit card that links into my mother’s own account, but there was a monthly one thousand I.M.U. limit on the card. This was just so I’d appreciate about not overspending, because my mother always made it quite clear that what was hers was mine. But she wanted me to be sensible. A verisimulated robot would cost thousands. The ionized silver alone would cost thousands. A purchase like that wouldn’t seem sensible at all.

In any case, if Egyptia hadn’t bought him, someone else had. He belonged to them. To an Egyptia, or an Austin. Did he enjoy giving joy? What happened to him when he made love?

After lunch, my mother switched on the news channel of the Vista visual, and took notes. She’s a political and sociological essayist and historian, too, but mainly as a hobby. There had been another bad subsidence in the Balkans. Social collapse seemed likely again in Eastern Europe, but reports were garbled. An earthquake had rocked the top off a mountain somewhere. There were subsistence riots in five Western cities. My mother didn’t switch to the local news channel, which might have carried something about the Sophisticated Format robots, but when she switched the visual off my throat had closed together with nerves.

Then I realized she’d made a sacrifice to be with me, since generally she watches the visual in her study. She must guess something was wrong, and I didn’t really know how long I could hold out. What would she say if I told her? “Darling, this would be quite all right if you were sexually experienced. But you’re a virgin. And to make love, initially, with a nonhuman device, is by no means a good idea. For all sorts of complicated reasons. Firstly, your own psychological needs…” I could just distinguish her voice in my head. And she’d be right. How could I ever hope to have a proper relationship with a man if I began by going to bed with a robot? (He is a man. No, fool, he isn’t. He is.)

I went down to the library and took a book, and sat in the balcony-balloon watching the sky drifting out from the house and fathoming away in a luminous nothingness below me. And eventually I seemed to be hanging by a string over the nothingness, and I had to move from the balcony, and go back to my suite and lie down on the bed. It was the only time I’d ever had vertigo in Chez Stratos, though Clovis won’t visit us, saying all the while he’s in the house he can feel his groin falling farther and farther away below him.

Finally I called Clovis, not knowing what to say.

“Hallo?” said Austin invisibly. Clovis has never incorporated a video.

“Oh. Hallo. This is Jane.”

“James?”

“Jane. Can I speak to—”

“No. He’s in the shower.”

Austin sounded like a fixture, despite the seance, if a not very happy one.

“Is that a woman?” Austin demanded.

“It’s Jane.”

“I thought you said James. Well, look, Jayven, why don’t you call later. Like next year?” And he switched off.

As a matter of course, then, I dialed Chloe, but she didn’t answer. I looked at Jason and Medea’s number, but didn’t dial it.

My mother called me on the internal phone.

“I’ve run your tape, Jane. It’s rather vague. What did Clovis do?”

“He had another seance.”

“And this disturbed you.”

“Only because he plays with people like a cat.”

“Cats don’t play with people. Cats play with mice. The seance table is rigged, I seem to recall.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“The spirit world can be reached, under the correct circumstances,” said my mother.

“Oh, you mean ghosts.”

“I mean the psychic principle. A soul, Jane. You mustn’t be afraid to use the correct terminology. A released soul, unattached to the physical state, and which has lived through many lives and a diversity of bodies may sometimes wish to communicate with the world. There was a great incidence of this at the turn of the century, for example, prior to the Asteroid Disasters. A theologian notes a connection. Clovis shouldn’t be meddling with table-tappings.”

“No, Mother.”

“I’ve left you some vitamins in the dispenser. Robot three will give them to you when you come down.”

“Thank you.”

“And now, I must get ready.”

Having avoided her for hours in terror of giving away my awful secret, I was now stricken with horror.

“Are you going out?”

“Yes, Jane. You know I am. I’m going upstate for three days. The Phy-Amalgamated Conference.”

“I’d—I’d forgotten—Mother—I really must speak to you after all.”

“Darling, you’ve had all day to speak to me.”

“Only four hours.”

“I really can’t stop now.”

“It’s urgent.”

“Then tell me quickly.”

“But I can’t!”

“Then you should have spoken earlier.”

“Oh Mother!” I burst into tears. Where did so many tears come from? A lot of the human body is water. Did I have any left?

“Jane, I’m going to make an appointment for you with your private doctor.”

“I’m not ill. I’m—”

“Jane. I will take half an hour away from my schedule. I will come up to your suite now, and we’ll talk this through. Do you agree?”

Panic. Panic.

The door opened, and my mother, already burnished, pomaded, glittering, stepped through. An abyss gaped before me. And behind me. I could no longer think. I’d always, always leaned on my mother. Was anything so perverse, so precarious, so precious I couldn’t share it with her, especially now she’d wrecked her schedule for me?

“As precisely as you can, dear,” said Demeta, beckoning me into her arms, into La Verte, into bliss and anchorage. “Now, does this have anything to do with Clovis?”

“Mother, I’m in love!” I tumbled against her, but not too hard. I could tell her. I could. “Mother, I’m in love.” No, I couldn’t. “Mother, I’m in love with Clovis,” I shrieked.

“Good Lord,” said my mother.

• 2 •

It was almost six P.M. when I did what, of course, I had been bound to do virtually from the start. My mother had at last gone, and I had plunged deep in my lagoon of guilt because I’d lied to her this terribly, and—much worse—made her late. She really is so concerned to do the best for me. It’s her grail, or one of them. Luckily, I was able to plaster over my lie very swiftly. “I know Clovis is M-B and will never return my feelings,” I’d said, again and again. “It’s just a silly crush. I’ve done what you taught me, and gone through my own psychological motivations. I’m almost over it. But I had to let you know. I always feel better when I tell you things.” Oh, how could I cheat her of the facts like that? Why should I have felt so sure I mustn’t reveal the truth? Eventually she mixed me a sedative and she left me. The sedative was whipped-strawberry flavor and I was tempted to drink it, but I didn’t. Quite suddenly, about ten minutes after I heard the Baxter rumble up out of the roof-hatch, and the Vista had stopped vibrating, what I had said about loving Clovis abruptly struct me as hilarious, and I howled with laughter, rolling all over the couch. It was, possibly, the stupidest thing I could have come up with, even in sheer desperation. One day I might tell him, and Clovis would howl, too.

When I stopped laughing, I keyed the alcohol dispenser and got it to pour me one of the martinis my mother likes. I had another bath, and put on a black dress, and plugged in the hairdresser unit and let it put rollers in my hair. My face in the mirror was white, and my eyes, too dark to be properly green, were almost black I don’t like makeup, actually. It feels sticky on my skin and sometimes I forget I’m wearing it and rub my hand over my cheeks and smear my rouge. But there was a lot of mascara left on I hadn’t taken off last night or cried of this morning. It’s supposed to be runproof, and it partly is I tidied it and added some more, and crayoned my mouth Autumn Beech Leaf. I drank the salty martini, pretending I liked it, and the hairdresser took out the rollers and brushed my hair, and I painted my nails black. All of which, in a way, tells you what I was about to do.

When I dialed the robot operator, my hands and my voice were shaking.

“What number do you require?”

“The number of Electronic Metals Ltd.”

“At your service.”

The video shook with me, in little lines of light, then cleared. There was a small blank area with a man projected like a cutout on it, in one of those four-piece suits jacket, pants, waistcoat and shirt of a matching pale grey silky material, and tinted glasses on a classic nose. He looked cheerfully at me, his manicured hands holding on tight to each other. A small sign lit up in front of him, which said: SWOHNSON.

“Swohnson of Electronic Metals. How can I help you?”

And he beamed and licked his lips. He was eager. For a sale?

“This is just an inquiry,” I said. I pitched my voice over its own cracks and tremors. “You are the firm that sent those robots out into the city yesterday?”

“Er, yes. Yes. Electronic Metals. That’s us.”

“The special and the Sophisticated formats?”

“The specials. Twenty-four models. Metal and reinforced plastic. Sophisticated Format line. All-metal. Nine models. What was your inquiry?”

My white face flamed, but perhaps he couldn’t see it.

“I’m interested in the cost of hire.”

“Hire not sale. Er. We’re thinking of cutting back on that.”

“I happen to know one of the Sophisticated line was hired last night.”

“Oh, yes. They all were. But that was part of the, ah, the advertising campaign. A one day, one night venture. These robots are really for exhibition only. At the present.”

“Not for sale.”

“Ah. Sale might be a different matter. Did you have purchase in mind?”

I wouldn’t let him upstage me. For some reason, he was as nervous as I was.

“No. I had hire in mind. Let me speak to the Director.”

“Ah—just wait a moment—I’m not trying to give a bad impression here.” Human employee, a good job, worried about losing it. I felt mean. “Ah. We have a few problems at this end.”

“With the robots.”

“With, er, transportation.”

“Your robots are locomotive. They were walking all over the city like people yesterday. If I hire one, why can’t it just walk out of the door with me?”

“Um. Between ourselves, not everyone likes the idea of what these magnificent robots can do. A further threat to the last bastions of human employment potential. You know the sort of thing. Bit of a crowd. Bit of trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“The, ah, the police have arrived. But it’s a peaceful demonstration, so far. Until any violence breaks out, the crowd probably can’t be moved. And if it does break out—well, we’d rather none of our merchandise was in the thick of it—Ah!” He glanced downward, and his eyes behind the tinted spectacles bulged. A white glow was playing over his chin and through the sign with his name. I realized a message panel must have lit up out of sight on his desk console. The message didn’t look as if it was very comforting. “Um,” he said. “I, er, think I said more than I ought. Ha, ha. Look, madam, I’ll patch you through to our contact department on relay. Leave your code and number and E.M. can call you tomorrow to discuss your wishes. Just hold, if you will, and I’ll put you through.”

The video fluttered, and I hit the switch wildly.

And why did I do that? Maybe only because tomorrow was a hundred years away, and would be too late.

And what now?

I walked along the Vista, past all the bubbles of sky, and back again. It was a red dog-end of a sunset tonight. Claret-colored, like Silver’s cloak. Like Silver’s hair.

I thought about the subsistence riots on the news channel. They say no one can really live on a sub. check. Sometimes robot circuits were vandalized by the frenzied unemployed, though usually the built-in alarms and defense electric-shock mechanisms deter vandals. But the news channel had reported a machinery warehouse had burned down in one riot. That was thousands of miles away. But suppose the peaceful crowd outside Electronic Metals got out of hand? Not water, but fire. His face, like a wax angel’s, dissolving—

I ran to the phone and called Clovis again.

“This is Clovis’s answering tape. Right now Clovis is committing sodomy. Call back in an hour, when I regret you may still receive the same answer.”

(Clovis, actually, leaves this message even if he’s gone out to a restaurant, or to the beach for a week. Davideed, who once got the message over and over for two days, rushed to the New River apartment and shouted at the door, which was locked. And when one of Clovis’s discarded, left-behind, just-packing-to-leave lovers opened it, Davideed hit him.)

The sunset turned to hot ashes, and then to cold ones. The night would gather in the city and the lights would flower. The crowd waiting outside Electronic Metals would begin to understand how pretty buildings look when they bum in the dark.

I switched on the local news channel. They talked about a new subway to be built, about a gang fight near the Old River, about a rise in cigarine prices due to the heavy crop losses in one of the more earthquake-active zones. Then I heard and saw the crowd, which had gathered in East Arbor around the gates of Electronic Metals Ltd., and they were growing restless. People shouted before the shabby glass facade. The newscaster told me about robots, how they’re important, and why workers hate them. The news didn’t seem to have grasped that E.M.’s robots were different. Or perhaps they were just trying not to advertise. The crowd went on shouting. There only appeared to be a couple of hundred people. Enough to start a fire. But I would be safe. The policode I wore would protect me, with its guaranty that it takes exact body-readings of anyone who assaults the wearer, while instantly summoning the police. There were police anyway, watching the crowd. I could see their little planes going over and back against the deepening sky of dusk in the screen, and sometimes their lights played on the building and the people.

But if I were there, what would I do? What difference could I make? It was pointless to go, to be there. If I negotiated the mob, who would open E.M.’s door to me with all that outside? I might be a ringleader determined to force an entry.

I left the news channel on as I walked up and down the Vista. Then someone threw a bottle. The camera followed it. It hit the facade of Electronic Metals and shattered.

Outside, across the Canyon, the seven P.M. flyer would be floating like a moth toward the platform. In fifteen minutes I could be over the Old River, in twenty I could be getting off at South Arbor, running the three blocks to East. The Arbors are a rough area, a big trash can of derelict offices and subsided stories not yet rebuilt after the Asteroid tremors, with, here and there, a nightclub perched like a vulture deliberately on the ruins, or some struggling enterprise starting up in a renovated warehouse, with a frontage of sprayed-on glass.

If I let the flyer go, there wouldn’t be another one until nine P.M. If I dialed a cab, I might have to wait for half an hour.

The police would stop anything from happening, and I could do nothing, and here was my unfinished martini, and there my strawberry sedative, and here my purse with my credit card with the thousand I.M.U. a month limit on it, which meant I could not afford a robot. It would be much better if I stayed at home. Much better if I forgot about everything. Starting with the first sight of his hair and the mirror fragments on his jacket, ending with the kiss which had meant nothing to him because he couldn’t feel emotion, except, perhaps, the delight of giving, for which he was randomly pre-programmed.

I almost missed the flyer. There were twenty or so other travelers on it, some in gaudy evening clothes going to the city for a night out, some with grey harried faces, night workers going in to work at some job a robot couldn’t do. But the mechanical driver was without a head.

I don’t recall seeing the city appear in its constellations, or even getting off at the South Arbor platform. I think there were some docile men drinking on a corner as I ran. And then the sky over my head was full of little robot planes, a swarm of them with their lights blinking and their sirens hooting, and buzzing away into the city center.

Almost instantly I met with a stream of people jeering and swearing and arguing. A board trailed on the ground. By means of stray street lamps I read: SCREW THE MACHINES. The surge broke around me to let me through, or else pushed me aside out of its way, and was gone. Bits of glass, scraps of paper, were left in its wake. It seemed the demonstration had lost heat, or been compulsorily broken up before real violence erupted. A solitary police cab cruised up the uneven concrete, showered me over with its spots, registering my code, and nosed on after the crowd, leaving me in the long shadows between the erratic lamp poles.

When I came to it, the gate of Electronic Metals, illumined now in rainbow neon, stood open. Another police car lurked on the forecourt. A knot of human beings huddled in a corner, lost in debate, sometimes caught by a winking light on the police machine that constantly circled them.

It was a strange scene, one I’d often looked at on a visual, or in a side street, but never been part of. But I walked through the gate and across the forecourt. No one paid any attention to me. I touched the visitor’s panel in the door. A luminous dot appeared. It said softly: “This building is now closed.” Since most display warehouses in the city are mechanically staffed and stay open all night, eager for custom, I wondered if E.M. had closed itself for good in dismay.

“I called earlier,” I said to the door panel. “I’m interested—in buying one of your Sophisticated Format robots.”

“Please visit, or telephone, tomorrow.”

“I’ve come twenty miles,” I said, as if that meant anything.

“Due to unforeseen circumstances,” said the door, “this building is now closed. Please visit, or telephone, tomorrow.”

Quite without warning, my legs changed to air, to nothing: I had no legs. I slid down the door and sat in the dirty shadows of the portico, in my black dress. I might have been a robot with my power switched off. I, too, might have been closed for the night.

Presently the people and the police went away. I went on sitting on the ground, like a lost child who doesn’t know the way home. I knew I ought to get up and go and find a taxi. If I stayed here, another police patrol might pick me up, thinking I was ill.

Beyond the gate, I could see the Asteroid burning like a green-blue flaw in the darkness. The skeleton of a tremor-smashed apartment block teetered on a slope, stripped of lives like a winter tree of leaves. I saw it this way, knowing the insecurity of life as I never had before. How smug, how complacent I’d been. Egyptia was right to be afraid.

If I went home, I’d get into bed in my suite in Chez Stratos, I’d pull the green sheets over my head, and I’d never have the courage to come back here. For all I knew, they’d dismantled him. An exhibition robot. Perhaps there was a fault somewhere, the man on the video—Swohnson—had sounded so unsure. Was it more than the unemployment demo? There were always demonstrations. Perhaps the City Senate had approached Electronic Metals and vetoed this omen of ultimate redundancy, men who excelled men in every way.

Finally, I got up, and dusted off my dress carefully, though I couldn’t see properly, even in the neon from the open gate.

What happened next was odd, because it was almost as if I made it happen, somehow. I suddenly concluded that the open gate was a mistake the mechanism left unattended in the confusion, for if the building was shut, so should the gate be. And then I judged how somebody would have to come back and shut it. And about one second after that, a lean black picard drove through onto the forecourt, pulled up, and a man got out. Two lightnings streaked over his upper face—the neon shining in his spectacle lenses. He almost walked into me, and grunted with surprise. He fumbled at his jacket.

“I’m coded,” he said. “Don’t try anything.”

It was Swohnson.

“Are you going,” he said, “or do I, ah, signal the police?”

It would have been nice to say something razor-sharp and succinct. Clovis would have. But it was my mouth, not my wit, that was dry.

“I called you. You spoke to me on the video, earlier.”

“Threats won’t do you any good.”

In a moment he would press his silly code button.

I blurted rapidly: “I decided I’d buy one of the formats.”

“Uh—oh,” said Swohnson. “Oh,” he said, shifting so he could see the candy neon on my face. “Madam, I do apologize. But I never thought you’d come here, after the operator cut us off.”

His indiscretion with me before had caused a row, perhaps, and now he might redeem himself with a sale. Or was he just feeling unorthodox?

“I came back to lock up,” said Swohnson. “Dogsbody, that’s me.” He palmed the door panel. He had been drinking. “Director’s daughter’s lover,” he said, “that’s me, too. My qualifications. How I got the job. Liaison, public relations, locker-up of doors. But I mustn’t put all this onto you, madam.” The door recognized him and opened with a sullen hiss. “Please walk inside.”

He thought I was a rich eccentric. The rich part was easy. It’s awful, the way we have this look to us, of being rich. Eccentric because I waited in doorways in East Arbor, alone, on the off chance people like Swohnson would come by to shut the gate.

In the foyer, which was also glass-sprayed and dismal, he hit some switches and saw to the gate, and summoned a lift. Then he took me up to the shop floor.

The place we came into was a tepid office in leather, and by now my bluff was already turning cold inside me, congealing. I told myself I could back out, so long as I didn’t handprint or sign anything, or as long as I didn’t record my assent verbally on tape. He’d need my permission for any of those. Or, if I did, maybe Demeta would have to honor the transaction? Maybe it would be clever to do just that. But basically I hate lying, big lies. It’s so complicated.

He sat in a chair and a drinks tray came out of the wall. We had a drink. His hands trembled, and my hands trembled. But both our hands still trembled on our second drinks, his around the rye whisky, mine around the lemon juice. I guess we had both, in our different ways, had a rough day. He told me all about Electronic Metals, but I don’t remember what he said. I had to pretend I was alert, or thought I did, the prospective buyer making sure everything was in order, and all my concentration went into that. I think I heard one word in twenty. I still couldn’t quite believe I’d gotten into the building.

“There’s an exhibition formula we have here,” he said, and I heard that because instinctively I knew it was a prelude to the display of E.M.’s wares. “I dreamed it up myself, actually, to show off the three types to full advantage. If you’ll step through?” He drained his glass, took another, and held my arm as one of the walls folded back. “Excuse me, madam, but you’re ver-ry young.”

“I’m eighteen.” Should I have tried for twenty?

“Gorgeous age, eighteen. Can just remember it, I think.” (It occurs to me now, writing it out, that he may have been making a halfhearted pass at me. He was attractive in a stereotyped way, and knew he was attractive and not that he was stereotyped, merely in the mode. And he’d made it with a rich girl before. Perhaps he thought I’d be useful, somehow, if I fell for him and poured cash over him. How embarrassing. I never even thought of this at the time.) “Actually, um, I think I know which of the Formats you’ll choose. It’s proficient in pre-Ast. oriental dance—one of the female Golder range. But wait till you see.”

He knew I wasn’t even eighteen. He thought me an innocent, even if he made a pass, unless he thought I was M-B. How would I be able to tell him now, past the barriers in my throat and soul, that my chosen robot was masculine?

Riven with my shyness, I moved away from his guiding hand, and into the area beyond the reception office. It was a large room we entered, windowless, with a soft suffused light all over the ceiling. The floor was polished.

“Don’t step beyond the red line,” said Swohnson. “Let’s just sit here and see what happens.” Proud of his innovation in the boss’s workshop, he waved us into tubular chairs. Obviously that activated a control somewhere. A slot opened in the far wall, and a woman came through.

She was tall and slender and beautiful. Hair blond as cereal haloed her head and shoulders. Her tawny-yellow cat’s eyes fastened on mine and she smiled. She was pleased to see me, you could tell. A dress like a tulip flame swathed her, and she held a purple rose. Her skin was a pale creamy copper.

“Hallo,” she said. “I’m one of Electronic Metals’ experimental range. My registration is Copper. That is C.O.P.P.E.R.: Copper Optimum Pre-Programmed Electronic Robot.” She half closed her eyes. A stillness seemed to enfold her. The music of her voice grew hushed, hypnotic. “Gallop apace,” she said, “you fiery footed steeds, to Phoebus’ lodging…” She spoke Juliet’s lines in a way I never heard before. The air scintillated, my eyes filled with tears. She spoke of love, knew love, was love. “… If he should die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night—” Two men stepped through the wall. They were Copper’s brothers. One wore a jacket of yellow velvet with medieval sleeves, and white denim jeans. The other wore damson jeans, a sauterne-colored shirt, and a magenta sash from the Arabian Nights. Each smiled at me. Each told me he, too, was registration Copper. They acted a scene together from a drama I’d sat through the month before. It far outshone the original performance. The three copper robots linked arms, bowed smiling to me, and went back through the wall, which closed.

The left hand wall opened.

A man strode through. Hair like smooth black ink, splashing over his head to his shoulders. Black silk eyes. Skin like molten gold. He wore black, his cloak lined with the green of sour apples. His registration, he told me, was Golden G.O.L.D.E.R.: Gold Optimum Locomotive Dermatized Electronic Robot. His eyes smoldered at me, burning through to my deepest awareness. He flung himself suddenly into an aerial cartwheel that flowed and sliced, and landed in strange graceful menacing ripplings and contortions of his frame. It was a dance, but a dance capable of dealing death.

“Based on Japanese martial arts,” Swohnson muttered to me. “Not only elegant, but will make an excellent bodyguard for someone who likes that kind of show. And particularly good skinlinings in this type.” Having started to talk, Swohnson didn’t stop. As the golden midnight figure swirled and leapt, Swohnson said, “the Copper line are the actors, the Silvers the musicians, the Golds are dancers.” He went on, and I forgot to listen. Two women, the golden robot’s sisters, came into the room, their hands lightly connected, and repeated who they were. Their long fingers had long nails, one set jade green, one set jade white. Their trousers were Asian, cream silk, green silk. Above the trousers one wore a bolero and gold-embroidered shirt. The other a waistcoat of emerald spangles, fastened with three malachite butterflies. The dance was slow, incredible, balletic, impossible. Human muscles would have evaporated and human bones dislocated. Their black hair mopped the floor and furled over the ceiling. “Jetté, lift measured at seven feet from the ground. But they make good teachers. Charming teachers. Wonderful exercise for the human body, even if you can never be as good. My God, they are good, aren’t they?” Swohnson drank his rye and sighed. His attitude to the Golder female robots was not innocent, as mine was expected to be.

They went away, and my heart burst, disintegrated, as it had begun to do when the Coppers went out. I was waiting for the third door to open. This time, it would have to be—

It opened. Silver’s sister came through. Her auburn hair was dressed with blue carnations. She wore snow fringed with blood. A keyboard glided after her on runners. She stood before it, and played something I didn’t know, like a shower of sparks shooting from a volcano. Then she looked at me, smiling. I knew what she’d say. “I’m Silver…”

A man walked through the opening, and I stopped breathing. Because it wasn’t him. Alike, but not like. The same hair, but different. The same amber eyes; different, different. The movements, the voice, the same, the same, yet different. Different, different. Utterly, wholly different. Not like at all. I forget what he wore. I couldn’t seem to see him properly.

“I’m Silver. S.I.L…”

The features of the face weren’t even similar. I was so glad, I could have wept. The silver woman played Vivaldi on the electric piano and the silver man sang a futuristic melody against it, in a beautiful, unrecognized voice. The words were about a star, a girl in love with the star, and the star saying to the girl, “I am too old for you.”

“Dammit,” said Swohnson. “Where’s the other one?”

My eyes blurred. The silver robots were walking into the wall.

“There’s another of the bloody things. I beg your pardon, er, madam. It’s been a helluva day. These exhibition models are in blocks of three. There’s a third one with the silvers. A guy. Damn. Wrecks the whole display. He’s supposed to come in with a guitar. God. You spend days and nights dreaming up these gimmicks, and then the relay screws it. Excuse me.” He went to a wall phone and hit buttons unsteadily. He’d forgotten I would want the Golder format. He was angry because his artistic interpretation had been spoiled.

My eyes were filming over. The lemon juice had a smoky taste. Where is the third silver robot? Where? Where? Oh, he’s in bits, taken apart. Piece of wiring fouled, cog busted. Have to scrap it. Put it in the dustbin. Melt it down. Make it into objets d’art for rich bitches like this fourteen-year-old I’ve got in here right now.

Don’t be stupid. Why are you so obsessed with the idea that he has been… taken to bits.

How could I have—

Swohnson was spluttering at the phone.

“What? Why wasn’t I told? When? Um. Um? I didn’t see it.”

Then he came back from the phone. He looked at me.

“Well, you can judge anyway, bright, er, lady like you. You don’t need to see that other one. He’s just like the other male silver. Of course, some customers would want to see the full physique. Stripped. But really, madam—do I have to keep calling you that?—I don’t think that’s your problem. Is it?”

I gripped the tube arms of the chair, and refused to think about what he’d just said.

“The other robot,” I said.

“Oh, some damn machine left me a memo. Never got it. Something they’re checking for. Er—nothing wrong with the model, you understand.” Even drunk, he recalled his valuable-employee’s lines just in time. “It’s a routine check E.M. runs when we put any display mechanism out. We’re very thorough. The slightest thing—we’ve been testing, perfecting these models for years. How else could we let them roam the city without escort? (Which, actually, I thought was taking a bit of a risk, but, ah, who the hell listens to me around here?) Still. Looks good. Then, um, of course, one comes back and doesn’t check out.”

“What—” I said. I didn’t know what to say. How do you ask after a robot’s health? I was shaking, shaking. I tried to be my mother. “What’s wrong with this one?”

“Nothing. Nothing the E.M. computer can pin down. Just some of the readings are altered. Nothing that affects any of the other, er, models, I can assure you, ah, of that. You know computers. An eyelash out of place… I don’t understand a word of that side of it. Jargon. Nothing for you to worry about. There’s a makeshift check they’ll run here. Then tomorrow it’ll go down to the production center.”

“Where?”

“The production center? The basement. Curious little thing, aren’t you, madam? Can’t take you there, I’m afraid. Big hush-hush. Lose me my wonderful enviable job as doorman.”

“The robot,” I said, “this one, the one that doesn’t check out, is the—one I wanted to buy.” Oh God, how did I ever get it out? His eyes goggled. I swallowed. I couldn’t tell if I was red or white, but cold heat was all over my face, my body. I tried to be self-assured in the middle of the raging of the cold heat and the shaking, and in my breathless, stilted voice: “He was recommended to me by a friend. He’s the one I wanted. The only one.” And then, while Swohnson went on standing there gaping, “If the format is still up here, I’d like to see him. It. I’d like to see it now.”

“Ah,” said Swohnson. Suddenly he smiled, remembering about whisky, and drinking some. And getting some more. “Er, how old did you say you were?”

“Eighteen. Almost nineteen.”

“You see why I’m asking? To buy an item of goods like this, not just a servant but a companion, a performer… in all sorts of ways, you have to be over eighteen. Or we need your mother’s signature. What’s your name?”

“My name isn’t any of your business,” I said, amazing myself. “Not until I agree to buy. And I haven’t, because the one robot I want you can’t give me.”

“Didn’t say that, did I?”

“Then let me see him.”

“Keep calling it ‘him,’ don’t you. Must make a note of that. Most of the callers we’ve had do. Him, her. Really got you all fooled, ain’t we. Good old E.M. Good old my lover’s daddy.”

I shrank, but somehow I kept hold.

“Are you going to let me see him?”

“Visiting the sick,” said Swohnson, viciously hitting on the exact horrid sensation I had, and hadn’t been able to explain to myself. “Okay. Come on. Madam. Let’s go and see the patient.”

Rye in hand, he led me, no longer opening doors for me which were not automatic, so they almost banged in my face each time. I couldn’t go back now and find the way—I didn’t see it. We came into a corridor with unlit cubicles. Then into a cubicle that made a humming noise, and, as Swohnson’s white suede shoes went over the threshold, switched a light on. A cold light, very stark and pale, like in a hospital theatre in a visual.

There was a thing like a closed upright coffin, with wires coming out of holes and into a box that was ticking and whirring to itself.

“There you are,” said Swohnson. “Just press that knob there, and you can see it. In all its glory.”

I was afraid to, and I didn’t move for a long time.

Then I walked over and touched the knob, and the machine stopped making a noise, and the front of the coffin slid slowly up. There’s no point in dragging this out, though I don’t like putting it down on paper, no I don’t. The figure in the checking coffin was swathed in a sort of flaccid opaque plastic bag, to which the wires were attached. Only the head was visible at the top of the bag. And it was Silver’s head, clouded round by auburn hair, but under the long dark cinnamon eyebrows were two sockets with little slim silver wheels going round and round in them, truly just like the inside of a clock.

“You can see a bit more, if you like,” said Swohnson, spitefully. He went to the bag and split a seam somewhere, and so I saw the shoulder and the arm of a silver skeleton, and more of the little wheels turning, but no hand. That had been removed. Swohnson painstakingly pointed this out.

“Special check on the fingers. Important in a musician model. Wonder what else has gone?” He peered into the bag.

I remembered Silver as he played the guitar and sang the songs that were like fires, the fiery chords. I remembered how he kissed Egyptia, and ran lightly down the stair in the gardens with the claret velvet cloak swinging, and how he sauntered along the street, and put back his head to watch the flyer go over, and how he rested his mouth on mine.

“Not very glamorous now, is it?” said Swohnson.

Something odd was happening to me. I felt it uncertainly in my confusion, and got to know it, and was dully, stonily, relieved. I’d been cured of my crush. Of course. Who wouldn’t be?

“No,” I said to Swohnson. “It’s a mess.”

And I turned and walked out of the room.

I waited in the corridor, no longer shaking, until—disappointed—he slunk out and guided me back to the office, where I told him I’d think about it, and when he protested, I said: “I’ll have to ask my mother.”

“Goddamn. I knew you were a minor. Wasting my time—”

“Let me out,” I said.

“You little—”

“Let me out, or I’ll use my policode.”

“Just looking for kicks. I’d like to kick you. Rich kid. Never needed to do a day’s work in your, ah, life.”

“My mother,” I said, “knows E.M.’s Director, intimately.”

Swohnson stared at me. He didn’t believe me, but nevertheless he dimly began to try to recollect everything he’d said about the Director, father of his girlfriend, and E.M., and what he thought of them. And as he did so, he absentmindedly got the lift for me.

I went down, coolly. Self-possessed. I went into the forecourt and the gate opened for me. Not wavering, I walked out The gate didn’t close behind me, and I smiled a superior smile because he’d forgotten to auto-lock it, again.

• 3 •

I felt twenty-five. I felt sophisticated. I was free of my silliness, my adolescent dreams. I could do anything I wanted now. What a fool I’d been. I was proud of myself, for coming through, for. growing old and wise, and for liberating myself. My mother’s training was at last paying off, and I was a whole person. I understood myself.

I thought about Silver, and was faintly sorry for it, not that it had any emotions. But all in bits like that, though they would put him, it, together again, skin-spray over the joints to keep the smoothness of the muscles and complexion. Re-articulate. I wondered for half a second what it must be like for him, it, in a bag, a coffin—then realized it didn’t know anything about it, having been shut off like a lamp. Tomorrow they’d put it in the basement and take it all to bits, and maybe not reassemble it.

I rode the escalator up on to Patience Maidel Bridge, and walked over the Old River in the oxygenated glass tunnel, sometimes stopping to watch the lights of apartment blocks reflecting downward into the poisoned water, or the gleaming river boats with their glass tops and wakes of foam and snarling mutated fish. There were three or four people busking on the bridge, as there often are. They were all quite good. One was juggling in time to music a girl played on a mandolin. One had a marvelous voice. Not, of course, as good as the robot’s voice.

Off the bridge, there had been a break-in at Staria’s Second Owner Emporium, and another at Finn Darl’s Food-o-Mart, a soup of police and flashing lights and hospital wagons. A giant can of baked fruit had rolled into the road and was being flung away from each rushing car, into the path of another.

I was blasé. I knew the violence of the city, and the uneven quality of its life. I took a bus to Jagged’s and went into the restaurant for iced coffine, and as I drew the first sip through the chocolate-flavored straw, someone pinched my arm.

“You’re out late,” said Medea, seating herself opposite me.

“Does your mother know?” said Jason, seating himself next to her.

They both watched me with their narrow eyes.

I hadn’t choked at the ferocious pinch, I had been through too much to let a pinch bother me, was too collected, or perhaps anesthetized.

“My mother’s upstate.”

“Ooh,” said Medea. “Naughty goings-on at Chez Stratos.” like Egyptia, Medea had had her hair toned dark blue, but unlike Egyptia’s long silken rope, Medea’s hair had been crimped and crinkled. Jason’s hair was coloressence charted, a sort of beige, and he had a deep tan from surfing at Cape Angel. But Medea just lies under a black sunshade and never tans. I never know why they’re my friends, because they’re not.

“Did you go to see the anti-robot demo?” I asked. I knew they hadn’t, and I said it deliberately, to bask in my uninvolvement.

“What demo?” said Medea.

“Oh, those robots that are supposed to look like people,” said Jason. “Some morons making a fuss. How long is your mother away?” Jason asked me.

“Not long.”

“Why not have a party before she comes back?”

“She’s much too good to do that,” said Medea.

“Are you?” Jason demanded.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re getting very fat,” said Medea. “Why don’t you come off those capsules? I’m supposed to be a Eunice Ultima—terribly thin. But I just put the pills in the disposal.”

I was twenty-five and clever. For once, I knew I was only a little plump.

“Why don’t you try red hair for a change?” Jason said to me.

That was odd. My stomach turned over. Had Jason heard about my silliness? I hoped not. Jason liked to gain an advantage. When I was a child, he took care of me once when I was frightened. He was my age, but he was very kind, or seemed to be. But he liked the power. Later the same day he tried to frighten me again, just so he could reassure me. He’d do that sort of thing a lot. He used to have several little pets, and they were always getting sick so he had to care for them. But then they would get sick again, and one day Jason’s father—Jason and Medea have a father—stopped Jason from having pets. Since then he’s played with electric gadgets instead.

“She won’t do anything Mother doesn’t want,” said Medea.

She got up again, and Jason got up too, as if he were attached to her by a string. She’s sixteen and a half, and he is sixteen. They were born by the Precipta Split-Tempo method, and are really twins.

“Good-bye, Jane,” said Jason politely.

“Good-bye, Jane,” said Medea.

They went out, and the robot waiter came over on its tripod of wheels and charged me with Jason and Medea’s bill, which they’d told it I’d be paying. Not that they couldn’t pay it, it was just a joke. So I joked too, and refused, and gave the waiter their address. Their father would be furious (again), and normally I wouldn’t have done such a thing, just paid for them. But tonight. Oh, tonight, I had wings.

Worlds flying like birds; my car’s in flight. The city lights are spattered on my windshield like the fragments of the night. And I’m in flight. The sky’s a wheel, a merry-go-round of wings and snow and steel, and fire. We’ll tread the sky, we’ll ride the scarlet horses—

What was that? A song—what—what—Silver’s song.

I left the waiter robot and my unfinished coffine. I went into a booth and dialed Clovis.

“Infirmary,” said Clovis, cautiously.

“Hallo,” I said.

“Thank God. I thought it was Austin ringing back.”

“Clovis,” I said.

“Yes, Jane,” said Clovis.

“Clovis,” I said. “Clovis. Clovis.”

A pause.

“What’s the matter?” he asked me so gently his voice was, for a second, like the voice, the voice—

“Clovis, you see—Clovis—Clovis—”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She’s—away. Clovis—”

“Yes, I’m Clovis. Where are you?”

“I can’t remember. Yes. I’m in Jagged’s. I’m in the restaurant.”

“I’m not coming to get you, do you understand? Go down to the taxi-park. Get a cab and come here. If you’re not here in ten minutes I’ll worry. Jane?”

“Yes?”

“Can you do it?”

“Clovis! Oh, Clovis, black water’s coming out of my eyes!”

“Your mascara is running.”

“Oh—yes. I forgot I had any on.” I laughed.

“Pull yourself together and get a taxi,” he said.

I was quite calm and rather amused. I walked into the ladies room and washed my face, and then went down to the taxi-park. I looked at the wonderful star-fields of the city below, above and alongside. The city lights are spattered on my windshield—I’m in flight—we’ll tread the sky—

“Block 21, New River Road,” I said to the driver, who was an astoundingly humanlike robot. “Good Lord,” I said, waving my black nails at him, “you’re almost as realistic as the special E.M. formats.”

“Which?” he asked.

“Electronic Metals. Copper, Golder and Silver.”

“Never heard of ’em.”

“Have you ever been dismantled?”

“Not so you’d notice.”

“I wonder what it’s like. He looked so—he looked—”

“Could you please,” he said, “not cry like that when you get out of the cab? It might be bad for business.”

He was human of course, I’d forgotten about Jagged’s gimmick line of real drivers.

He’d been more forbearing than Egyptia.

Lights hit the windshield. We flew.

I managed to stop crying. The worst thing was not knowing why I was.

When I got up to the fifteenth gallery of Clovis’s block, his door rushed open before I even spoke to it, set for sight. Clovis stood in the middle of the rug, barefoot, in a shower robe, frowning.

“He’s dying,” I said. “They’re going to kill him.”

The sedative Clovis gave me wasn’t flavored. It had a bitter taste. I slept in the spare bedroom, which has black satin sheets, alternating with green or oyster satin sheets. The satin is a deliberate gesture, for you slide all night from one end of the bed to the other. Clovis usually makes his guests uncomfortable, in the hopes they’ll soon go away. Drugged, I slept. When I woke up, he gave me China tea and an apple.

“If you can find anything to eat in the servicery, you can eat it.”

Sleepwalking, drug-dazed, I found some instant toasts. Clovis stood in the doorway.

“I think I gave you too much Serenol. Do you remember what you told me last night? You were in very dramatic shock.”

I watched the instant toast rising from the hot plate, and I saw two silver eye-sockets with wheels turning.

“No, I didn’t give you enough Serenol,” said Clovis, as I wept.

I had told him everything, sitting on his couch, giving a performance Egyptia might have envied.

“I’m surprised you went as far as you did,” Clovis now said, handing me a large box of tissues, and removing the jumping toast from the floor. “Timid little Jane, confronting the might of Electronic Metals Ltd. What was the name of that prat?”

“Sw-Sw-Sw—”

“Swohnson, that’s right. I’m quite looking forward to meeting him.”

“What?”

“What?” Clovis copied my astonishment.

“Clovis, I can’t go back. I can’t do anything. I told him I was under eighteen. I haven’t enough money. And my mother wouldn’t—”

“It’s too boring to explain twice. Follow me.”

Clovis walked back across the main living area and dialed a number on the videoless phone, turning up the sound reception as he did so.

I stood where he had in the servicery doorway, and presently I heard Egyptia’s sultry, seductive, sleepy voice.

“Good morning, Egyptia.”

“Oh God. Do you know what time it is. Oh, I can’t bear it. Only an idiot would call at this hour.”

“An idiot would be unable to use the telephone. I take it you were asleep.”

“I never sleep.” She yawned voluptuously. “I can’t sleep. Oh Clovis, I’m terrified. Too terrified ever to sleep. I have a part. Theatra Concordacis are doing Ask the Peacock For My Brother’s Dust. They said only one person could play Antektra. Only I could play her. Only I had the resonance, the scope—But, Clovis, I’m not ready for it. I can’t. Clovis, what shall I—”

“I’m going to buy you a lovely, lovely present,” said Clovis.

“What?” she demanded.

“Jane tells me you’re hooked on a robot.”

“Oh! Oh, Clovis, would you? But, no. I can’t. I have to concentrate on this part. I have to be celibate. Antektra was a virgin.”

“I’m happy to reveal I don’t know the play.”

“And Silver—he’s called Silver—he is the most wonderful lover. He can—”

“Please don’t tell me,” said Clovis. “I shall feel inadequate.”

“You’d love him.”

“Everybody, apparently, loves him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran for Mayor next year. Meantime, they’re dismantling him at E.M. Ltd. in a hellish basement that also produces a sideline of meat pies.”

“Clovis, I can’t follow you.”

“It seems you did something to the metal-man. His clockwork has ganged agley. He’s for the chop. Or the pie.”

“I didn’t do anything. Do they expect me to pay for it?”

“I’m paying. For possession. In your eighteen-year-old name. At a reduction, if I play my cards right. Faulty goods.”

“Clovis you are wonderful, but I really can’t let myself accept.”

“Then you can loan him to Jane until you’re free. Just to keep his hand in, if you’ll excuse the expression.”

“Jane wouldn’t know one end of a man—”

“I think she might. Might you not, Jane?”

Egyptia fell silent. I had turned to glass, immovable, easily broken.

“One hour,” said Clovis. “The Arbor side of the bridge.”

“I’m not going to the Arbors. I’ll be mugged and raped.”

“Of course you will, Egyptia. Wish on a star.”

Clovis killed the line. He dialed.

“Electronic Metals? No, I don’t want the contact department. I want somebody by the avian name of Swohnson.”

He waited. I said, “Clovis, they won’t,” and stopped because Swohnson’s voice came on the line and my whole body withered like an autumn leaf. I sat on the floor and put my head on the wall, and the Serenol swam over me.

Out of the haze I heard Swohnson start to wither too.

“How do you know one of the Silver Formats is faulty?”

“My spies,” said Clovis, “are everywhere.”

“What? Er. Look here—”

“I don’t happen to use a video.”

“It’s that—ah—that darn girl. Isn’t it? And you’re another rich kid—”

“I am another very rich kid. And I advise you to calm down, my feathered friend.”

“What? Who the—”

“Swan,” said Clovis clearly, “son.”

“It’s spelled S.W.O.H.,” exclaimed Swohnson.

“I don’t care if it’s spelled S.H.I.T.,” said Clovis. “I’m calling on behalf of the lady who hired your ballsed-up, badly-made substandard rubbish the night before last.”

I got up and went into the green bathroom, and ran a tub. I couldn’t bear to listen anymore.

About fifteen minutes after, as I lay there in the water, Clovis knocked on the door and said,

“You’re a rotten audience, Jane. Are you all right? If you’ve slashed your wrists, could you hold them down in the bath and try not to mark the wall covering? Blood is very difficult to clean off.”

“I’m all right. Thank you for trying.”

“Trying? Son of the Swohn is pure cast-iron jello. I’m assuming, by the way, you’ll pay me back in hard cash as soon as you can wring Demeta’s blessing from her. Then we can edge Egyptia out of the picture, too.”

“They won’t let you,” I said. Tears ran in the water. I was a bath tap, which nobody could turn off.

“Why am I doing this?” Clovis asked someone. “Moving heaven and Earth to get her some run-down heap of nuts and bolts that will probably permanently seize up as it walks through the door? Or at some other, more poignant, crucial moment. Oh, more! More! Sorry, honey, my spring’s bust.”

He went away and I heard the shower sizzle alive in the mahogany bathroom.

A timeless gap later, I heard him go out of the apartment, whistling. It isn’t true what they say about male M-Bs. At least, Clovis can certainly whistle.

I lay in the tub, letting the vital oils be washed from my skin, as my mother had always told me not to. (“You can put skin elements back from a jar. But nature should never be wasted, darling.”)

Clovis couldn’t mean what he said. If he did, Electronic Metals would never let a faulty robot go. Or the demonstrators would have come back. Or Egyptia, if she signed, would assert her legal claim, and keep him. Or he would already be a pile of cooling clinker.

Yet even as I wept, the tempo of my tears had abruptly changed. I was now weeping quickly, and I was hurrying suddenly to get out of the bath. Hurrying as I had on the night I went to Egyptia’s party. Because somehow I already knew.

When I heard the lift again, another lift went down through my insides. When the door asked me to let someone in I didn’t stop to reason. I flung the door open. And there was Austin.

“Where’s Clo?” said Austin.

I stared at Austin. I had expected anything but him.

“Well, I know I’m beautiful,” he said.

“I thought you had a key,” I stammered.

“Threw it back in his face,” said Austin. “All that crap about a seance. Did you know that table’s rigged? Bet you did, you girl.”

“Clovis isn’t here,” I said.

“Then I’ll wait.”

“He’s gone to the beach.” Another lie. Austin believed it.

“Hope someone kicks sand in his face.”

He turned, flowed straight down the corridor and banged the button for the lift to come back. I felt guilty and glad, and the lift swallowed him and he was gone.

It was one P.M., according to Clovis’s talking clock when I switched it on. I had combed my hair for the thirtieth time. I sat in my black frock and black nails and white strained face, and gazed at the New River through the window. There were bruised-looking clouds. It might rain. I had stopped raining; my tears were dry. I made some real coffee, of which Clovis has accumulated a whole cupboard. But I couldn’t drink it. There was dust on the coffee table. Obviously the block’s automatic cleaner had remained unsummoned for days.

What was I waiting for? For Clovis to call and say he’d failed? For the door to open and Clovis to come through, shrug and say—what surprisingly he hadn’t last night—you’d better forget it, Jane. After all, it’s this fear of men thing again, isn’t it, due to your lack of a physically present father?

Last night, I had known where I was, for all of one hour. I’d known that women don’t love robots. That a doll with its clockwork showing meant nothing to me. But I hadn’t been able to hang on to that truth. For me—he was alive. A man, Clovis. Real.

I heard the lift.

Wasn’t there another small apartment in an annex at the end of this gallery? It might be the people from there.

The door seemed to tremble, ripple, as if underwater, and opened. Clovis and Silver walked through it.

Silver wore blue clothes, mulberry boots. I couldn’t stop looking at them. Then I looked at Clovis’s face. Clovis was surprised. He had been surprised, one could tell, for quite a while. He came over to me and said, “Jane, Jane, Jane.” Then he handed me a plastic folder. “Papers,” said Clovis briskly. “Duplicates of reassembly order, possession rights and receipt for cash transfer with bank stamp. Two-year guaranty, with a bar sinister on it due to incomplete check being waived by customer. And Egyptia’s signed confirmation that you have right of loan. For six months it may say, or years, or something. Egyptia is vaguely aware, by the way, of having been cheated of something, so I’m taking her to lunch, and buying her a steel-grey fur cloak. For which you’ll also owe me the money.”

“I may not be able to repay you,” I said. I was numb. Silver was standing near the door, standing at the edge of my vision, blue fire burning the rest of the room to cinders.

“See you in court, then,” said Clovis.

Inanely I said, “Austin came up. I said you were at the beach.”

“I think I am,” said Clovis. “Certainly there is a distinct notion of sand underfoot. Shifting, I surmise.” His face was still surprised. He turned from me and walked back to Silver, glanced at him, walked by him, and reached the door. “You know where everything is,” Clovis said to me. “And if you don’t, now is the time to find out. Jesus screamed and ran,” added Clovis. The apartment door slammed behind him, jarring its mechanisms. And I was alone. Alone with Egyptia’s robot.

I had to force myself to look at him. From the boots to the long legs, and across—one hand, two hands, loosely at rest by his sides. Arms. Torso. Shoulders with the hair glowing against the blue shirt. Throat. Face. Intact. Whole. Tiger’s eyes. In repose. And yet, what was it? Was I inventing it? The ghost of something, some disorientation, the look on the face of someone who has been sick and is convalescing… No, imagination.

Did he know the legal position, who owned him, who was borrowing him? Did I have to tell him?

His amber eyes went into a long, slow blink. Thank God they worked. Thank God they were as beautiful as when I’d first seen them. He smiled at me. “Hallo,” he said.

“Hallo,” I said. I was so tense I scarcely felt it. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what to say to you,” I said.

“Say whatever you want.”

“I mean, do I say: Please sit down, won’t you? Will you have some tea?”

He laughed. I loved his laugh. Always loved it. But it broke my heart. I was so sad, so sad now he was here with me. Sadder than I’d been at any time, a sadness beyond all tears.

“I’m quite relaxed,” he said. “I’m always relaxed. You don’t have to work at that one.”

I was thrown, but now I expected to be thrown. I had to say something to him, which I kept biting back. He saw my hesitation. He raised one eyebrow at me.

“What?” he said. Human. Human.

“Do you know what happened? What they did to you?”

“They?”

“Electronic Metals.”

“Yes,” he said. No change.

“I saw you then,” I said. It came out raw and harsh.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That can’t have been very nice for you.”

“But you,” I said. “You.”

“What about me?”

“Were you unconscious?” I said.

“Unconscious isn’t really a term you can apply to me,” he said. “Switched off, if you mean that, then partially. To perform the check, at least half of my brain had to be functioning.”

My stomach knotted together.

“You mean you were aware?”

“In a way.”

“Did it—was it painful?”

“No. I don’t feel pain. My nerve centers react by a method of alarm reflex rather than a pain reflex. Pain isn’t necessary to my body as a warning signal, as it would be in a human. Therefore, no pain.”

“You heard what he said. What I said.”

“I think so.”

“Are you incapable of dislike?”

“Yes.”

“Of hate?”

“Yes.”

“Of fear?”

“Maybe not,” he said. “I don’t analyze myself the way a human does. My preoccupations are outward.”

“You’re owned,” I said. “You belong to Egyptia. You’ve been lent to me.”

“So?”

“So, are you angry?”

“Do I look angry?”

“You use the ego-mode: ‘I’ you say.”

“Yes. Rather ridiculous if I spoke any other way, not to mention confusing.”

“Do I irritate you?”

“No,” he laughed again, very softly. “Ask whatever you want.”

“Do you like me?” I said.

“I don’t know you.”

“But you think, as a robot, you can still get to know me?”

“Better than most of the humans you spend time with, if you’ll let me.”

“Do you want to?”

“Of course.”

“Do you want to make love to me?” I cried, my heart a hurt, myself angry and in pain and in sorrow, and in fear—all those things he was spared.

“I want to do whatever you need me to do,” he said.

“Without any feeling.”

“With a feeling of great pleasure, if you’re happy.”

“You’re beautiful,” I said. “Do you know you’re beautiful?”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“And you draw people like a magnet. You know that, too?”

“You mean metaphorically? Yes, I know.”

“What’s it like?” I said. I meant to sound cynical. I sounded like a child asking about the sun. “What’s it like, Silver?”

“You know,” he said, “the easiest way to react to me is just to accept me, as I am. You can’t become what I am, any more than I can become what you are.”

“You wish you were human.”

“No.”

I went to the window, and looked at the New River, and at the faint sapphire and silver reflection of him on the glass.

I said to it, forming the words, not even whispering them: I love you. I love you.

Aloud, I said: “You’re much older than me.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “I’m only three years old.”

I turned and stared at him. It was probably true. He grinned at me.

“All right,” he said. “I’m supposed to appear between twenty and twenty-three. But counting time from when I was activated, I’m just a kid.”

“This is Clovis’s apartment,” I found myself saying then. “What did you say to him to startle him like that?”

“Like you, he had trouble remembering I’m a robot.”

“Did he… want to make love to you?”

“Yes. He suppressed the idea because it revolted him.”

“Does it revolt you?”

“Here we go again. You asked that already, in another form, and I answered you.”

“You’re bi-sexual.”

“I can adapt to whoever I’m with.”

“In order to please them?”

“Yes.”

“It gives you pleasure to please.”

“Yes.”

“You’re pre-programmed to be pleased that way.”

“So are humans, actually, to a certain extent.”

I came back into the room.

I said, “What do you want me to call you?”

“You intend to rename me?”

“Silver—that’s the registration. Not a name.”

“What’s in a name?” he said.

“A rose by any other name,” I said.

“But don’t, I think,” he said, “call me Rose.”

I laughed. It caught me by surprise, like Clovis’s surprise, but unlike.

“That’s nice,” he said. “I like your laugh. I never heard it before.”

Like a sword going through me. How could I feel so much, when he felt nothing. No, when he felt so differently, so indifferently.

“Please call me,” I said, “Jane.”

“Jane,” he said. “Jane, a pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender, pale chain of a name.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too easy for you. Nobody ever made a poem out of my name, and you can do it with anything. It’s a very ordinary name.”

“But the sound,” he said, “the sheer phonetic sound, is clean and clear and beautiful. Think about it. You never have until now.”

Amazed, I lifted my head.

“Jane,” I said, tasting my name, hearing my name. “Jaen. Jain.”

He watched me. His tiger’s eyes were lambent, absorbing me.

“I live with my mother,” I said, “twenty miles from the city, in a house up in the air. Really up in the air. Clouds go by the windows. We’re going to go there.”

He regarded me with that grave attention I was coming, even so soon, to recognize.

“I don’t know what I want from you,” I said unsteadily. Not true, not true, but what I wanted, being impossible, must be left unsaid. “I’m not,” I said, “Egyptia—I’m not—ex-perienced. I just—please don’t th—”

“Don’t ever,” he said, “be afraid of me.”

But I was. He’d driven a silver nail through my heart.

• 4 •

I’d known I didn’t want us to stay there, at Clovis’s. Clovis might come back any time, though probably he’d spin it out. Then again, he’d irresistibly picture us making love, sliding all over those black satin sheets. And everything complicated by his own reaction to Silver, who I wasn’t going to call Silver, but couldn’t think what else to call.

And then again, as we sat in the cab rushing along the out-of-town highway, I knew I didn’t want to take him to my suite at Chez Stratos. And suddenly then, suddenly but absolutely, and with a dreadful feeling of shock, I knew I hadn’t got a home. I simply stayed with people. Clovis, Chloe, Mother. And if my mother had been home right now, I couldn’t have taken him there, because he would need explaining. “We have three locomotive robots, dear. Not to mention all the other robotic gadgets.”

“But he’s a personal robot, Mother.”

“What does he do that the others can’t?” Well…

So I became almost petrified with worry in the cab. But then, I’d turned to wood the moment we were on the street. Everyone looked at him, like before, and, like before, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them not because they knew he was a robot. We crossed a busy intersection and he took my hand, like my lover, my friend. Looking after me. It was an act of courage on my part to make us walk to the nearest taxi-park, all of three blocks. His responses were normal. Interest, alertness, apparent familiarity with subways, escalators, which streets led where, as if he’d lived in the city always. His senses and reflexes were, of course, abnormal. Once he drew me away from walking under an overhang. “There’s water dripping down from the air-conditioning above.” I hadn’t seen and didn’t see it, but I saw two people walk into it, pat themselves and curse. He also drew me aside from rough paving, and slipped us through crowds as a unit, without the usual periphery collisions that always happen to me.

The cab had a robot driver. He didn’t react to that at all. I wondered how he would have reacted to the thing with the head on the flyer, out of the same workshop as himself.

On the street, I kept asking nervous questions, couldn’t stop. Some were the same questions, in different forms; I wasn’t even aware of the repetition half the time. Some were unsubtle fierce awful questions. “Do you sleep in a crate?”

“I don’t sleep.”

“But the crate?”

“Somebody switches my circuits off and they prop me up in a corner.” Which sounded like a macabre joke, and I didn’t believe him even though he’d said he couldn’t lie. Sometimes people caught fragments of our conversation and stared.

Something else began to dawn on me, a seeping amazement that something so weird as this had had so little publicity. Even the advertising campaign and the demonstration had done hardly anything to promote the news. Perhaps that was the idea—to infiltrate, show how these things could be passed off as human—and then really sound trumpets: See, they’re that good. (These things.)

This makes me sound rational. And I wasn’t.

I was glad to get into the cab, and then not glad, because I was again alone with him. I felt inadequate, and short and fat, and plain, and infantile. I’d taken on more than I could cope with. But how could I have left him in their testing cubicle, once Clovis gave me the chance to rescue him. Eyeless, machinery exposed, dying, and knowing it?

I said, brutishly, and ashamed of myself: “If they’d run the full check and taken you apart, is that your kind of death?”

“Probably,” he said.

“And does that scare you?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Not thought about dying.”

“Do you?” he said.

“I suppose, not often. But when—the test, your eyes, your hands—”

“I was only partly aware.”

“But you—”

“You’re trying again, Jane, to get me to do something I’m not geared to do, which is analyze myself emotionally.”

I looked at the geography going past, the dust and the mauve-tinted sky. Thunder murmured somewhere, hitting distant hills. He, too, looked out of the windows. Did he like the landscape, or didn’t it matter to him? And was human beauty or lack of it equally unimportant?

We reached the approach to the house, and I paid off the cab. A mauve dust wind was rattling along the concrete and powdering the conifers. The steel supports of the house, in the softened, curious storm-light, were almost the same color as Silver.

“Hallo, Jane,” said the lift.

He leaned on the wall as we soared upward, looking about him. And I looked at him. I shouldn’t have done this. I’m a fool. I can’t cope.

When the lift opened on the foyer, one of the three spacemen was trundling across to the hatches. I wondered what Silver would do, but Silver took no notice, and neither did the spaceman.

We got in the birdcage lift and went up to the Vista.

As we came in, there was a colossal thunderclap, and the whole room turned pink-white, then darkest purple. Insulated and stabilized as Chez Stratos is, there’s still something utterly overpowering about a storm seen so close. As a child, I was terrified, but my mother used to bring me down here and show me the storm, explaining why we were safe and how magnificent Nature was. So that by the time I was ten, I was convinced I was no longer afraid of storms, and would come into the Vista to watch them and win Demeta’s approval. But as a second flash and sear and roar exploded about the room, I wasn’t so sure I was unafraid.

Silver, though, was walking along the room and into the balcony-balloons, and the storm was hitting him, turning him white, then cobalt. A cloud parted like a breaking wave only a hundred feet away, and rain fountained from it. The reflection of the rain ran over Silver’s metallic face and throat.

“What do you think of the view?” I said brightly.

“It’s fascinating.”

“You can appreciate it?”

“You mean artistically? Yes.”

He moved from the window, and touched the top of the piano, in which the clouds seethed and foamed, making me dizzy. He and it were in a sort of impossible motion, their skins gliding, yet stationary. He ran both hands suddenly across all the keys in a lightning of notes.

“Not quite in tune,” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Not quite.”

“I’ll tell one of the robots to fix it.”

“I can fix it now.”

“My mother plays it. I’d have to ask her.”

His eyes flattened out. This time I knew. The thought process was switching over, because I’d reacted oddly. He, too, was a robot, and could retune the piano exquisitely. But I, instead of agreeing delightedly, said “No,” as if he might humanly botch the job.

“My suite,” I said, “is up here.”

I turned and went through the annex and up the stair, anticipating that he’d follow me.

The moment I entered, I touched the master button in the console that brought all the green silk blinds down across the windows. I looked around at the Persian carpets, the baskets of hanging plants, the open door showing the mechanically neatly made bed, another showing the ancient Roman bathroom. The stereophonic tape-player, the visual unit, the clever games beamed at me, burnished, costly. Like a stranger, I moved forward, touched things. The books in their cases, clothes in their closet, (each outfit with its two matching sets of lingerie), I even opened the doll cupboard and saw my old toys, preserved for me in neat formal attitudes, as if they were in a doctor’s waiting room. There wasn’t a thing I’d ever bought for myself. Even the things I had bought—recent things, unimportant things, like nail varnish and earrings—they were there because my mother had said, “You know, this sort of thing would suit you,” or maybe Clovis had said it. Or Egyptia had. Or Chloe had given it to me. Even my toys, long ago, had been chosen, and how I’d loved them. But here they sat, poor things, that love outgrown, waiting for the doctor who never would come and play with them again. Their sad fur made my eyes fill with tears. I know I’ve told you how I cry a lot.

I was aware he hadn’t followed me after all, and I sat on the couch with the rain rolling down my face and no reflection, till I heard the piano burst into syncopation and melody. The thunder cracked, and the piano chased up the thunder, and danced over the other side.

I wiped my face with a lettuce-green tissue from a bronze dispenser, and went down again. I stood at the south end of the Vista, until he finished, watching his satin hair bouncing up over the lifted fan-shape lid of the piano as he dipped and dived in and out of the music. Then he got up and walked around the piano, smiling at me.

“I did fix it.”

“I didn’t say you should. You were meant to come upstairs with me.”

“Something else we have to get clear,” he said. “Being locomotive and Verisimulated, I’m also fairly autonomous. If you want me to do something specific, you’ll have to make it more obvious.”

I balked. “What?”

“Try saying: Come upstairs with me. Then I’d leave the piano and follow you.”

“Damn you!” I shouted. I hadn’t meant to, didn’t want to. It didn’t even mean anything, except some basic symptom of what was happening deep inside me somewhere.

And his face grew cold and still, and his eyes were satanic.

“Don’t look at me that way,” I said.

His face cleared, changed. He said, “I told you about that.”

“The thought process switching over. I don’t believe you.”

“I told you about that too.”

“I don’t think you know!” I cried.

“I know about myself.”

“Do you?”

“I have to, to function.”

“My mother ought to love you. It’s so important to know oneself. None of us does. I don’t.”

He looked at me patiently, attentively.

“I have to give you orders,” I said, “to make you do what I want.”

“Not exactly. Instructions, perhaps.”

“What instructions did Egyptia give you when she took you to bed?”

“I already knew what the instructions were.”

“How?”

“How do you think?”

Human. Human.

“Egyptia’s beautiful. Artistically, you’d be able to appreciate that.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m sorry you got stuck with me.”

“You do sound,” he said, “as if you regret it.”

“Tomorrow, I’ll send you back to her. To Clovis.” What was I saying? Why couldn’t I stop? “I don’t need you. I made a mistake.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“You regret failing me. Not making me happy.”

“Yes.”

“You want to make everyone happy?” I screamed. The thunder blazed. The house shook, or was it my pulse? “Who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?”

Lightning. Fire. Drums. I lost the room, and when it came back, he was in front of me. He put his hands lightly on my shoulders.

“You’re going through some personal trauma,” he said. “I can try to help you, if you tell me what it is.”

“It’s you,” I said. “It’s you.”

“There is a school of thought which predicts human beings will react as you’re doing.”

“Egyptia was your first woman,” I announced.

“Egyptia’s a young girl, as you are. And not the first, by any means.”

“Tests? Performance tests? Piano, guitar, voice, bed?”

“Naturally.”

“What’s natural about it?” I pulled away from him.

“Natural from a business point of view,” he said reasonably.

“But there’s something wrong,” I said. “You don’t check out.”

He stood and looked down at me. He was about five feet eleven. The sky was bleeding into darkness behind him, and his hair bleeding into darkness, too. His eyes were two flames, colorless.

“My bedroom is up the stair,” I said. “Follow me.”

I went up, and he came after. We walked into the suite. I pushed the door shut. I walked over to the green auto-chill flagon of white wine, and poured two glasses, then remembered, then took up the second glass anyway and pushed it into his hand.

“You’re wasting it on me,” he said.

“I want to make believe you’re human,” I said.

“I know you do. I’m not.”

“Do it to please me. To make me happ-y.”

He drank, slowly. I drank quickly. I started to float at once. The lightning burst through the blinds, and I didn’t mind it.

“Now,” I said, “come into my bedroom, exclusively designed by my mother to match my personal coloressence chart. And make love to me.”

“No,” he said.

I stood and stared at him.

“No? You can’t say no.”

“My vocabulary is less limited than you seem to think.”

“No—”

“No, because you don’t want me, or your body doesn’t, which is more important.”

“You have to make me happy,” I got out.

“I won’t make you happy by raping you. Even at your own request.”

He put down the glass. He bowed to me from the waist, like a nobleman in an old visual, and went out.

I stood with my mouth open, as the lightning splashed on the blinds, and the thunder faded. He began to play the piano again. It was the silliest thing, the silliest and the most disheartening thing, that could have happened to me. And I knew I deserved it.

I got rather drunk alone in my suite, listening to the piano. Sometimes, when alone, I’d secretively play it—but so badly. He played, fantastically, for an hour. Things I knew, things I didn’t. Classical, futurist, contemporary, extempore. It was like a light on in the Vista, burning even if I couldn’t see it. The day after tomorrow my mother would come home. And there would be trouble to sort out. Trouble large as hills on my horizon. Only today then, and tomorrow, and I’d ruined everything.

I showered and washed my hair, and let the machine warm-comb it dry. I put on dress after dress, but none of them was right. Then I put on black jeans which were too tight for me (and found they weren’t, but then, I’d hardly eaten today, and my Venus Media capsules were due again tomorrow), and a silk shirt Chloe gave me that I never wore because Demeta didn’t like it.

The piano had long since stopped. It was about five forty-five P.M., and the storm was over in the Vista. A blue sunset covered the sky and the furnishings, and I couldn’t see him. He wasn’t there.

I’d told him I’d send him back, and Egyptia owned him. Could he have left? Was it possible for a robot to make that sort of decision? I went out of the Vista, and the lift was down on the mezzanine, but not the foyer. A surge of blood went through me, as if my circulation had been waiting for information. I got the lift back and went down. He was in the library, in the long chair across the balcony-balloon. The lamp was on. He was reading. He seemed to need light, but it took him about fifteen seconds to take in each page.

I went into the library. I was humbled. I walked over to him and sat on the floor by the chair, and leaned my head against his knee. It seemed natural. And his hand coming to stroke my hair, that was natural too.

“Hallo,” he said.

No resentment, of course. I could almost be resentful at his lack of resentment.

“Listen to me,” I said, quietly, “I’m going to explain, too. I’m not going to look at you, but I’ll lean here, and I’ll say it. I’m still slightly high on the wine, and very relaxed. Is that all right?”

“Yes, Jane,” he said.

I closed my eyes.

“I’m very stupid,” I said, “and very selfish. That’s because I’m rich and I don’t know much about real life. And I’ve been sheltered. And I have a lot of faults.”

He laughed softly.

“You mustn’t interrupt,” I said, very low. “I want to apologize. I know you’re indifferent to my—my tantrums. But I have to apologize for my own sake. Tell you I’m sorry. And why. I’m confused. I’ve never had a sexual relationship with a man. I’ve had dates, but nothing important. I never enjoyed—I’m a virgin.”

“You’re sixteen.”

“Most of my friends had sexual experience at thirteen or fourteen. Anyway. Anyway, I never will go with a man now. I don’t want to.” I waited, not for effect, but to contain myself. “Because,” I said, “I’m in love with you. Please don’t laugh or reason with me. Or say it will go away. It won’t. I love you.” My voice was calm, and I heard it with admiration. “I know you don’t love. Can’t love. I know we’re just all like slices of cake or something—don’t,” I said, for I felt him tremble with laughter. “But I have less than two days with you, because then my mother comes home and Egyptia will want you back. And I don’t know if I’m ready or not, but please make love to me. Not so I can boast, or to get rid of something, like cutting my nails, or because I’m bored. But because, because—” I stopped talking and rubbed my cheek against him. His long fingers curved over my skull and held me close. I knew I had struck the right note at last. He could give me pleasure of the emotions if not of the body. He could help me. Function fulfilled. But his sweetness came to me, his strength and his sweetness. I trusted him. I’d trusted him with the truth, undramatized, and with no prop—my weakness, my childishness—to take the blame for what I did. I didn’t know him. He was unknowable. But I trusted him.

I got up slowly, and reached down my hand and he took it and left the chair and stood with me, looking into my face. His eyes were full of tenderness, and a kind of wicked joy. It was wicked, and it was joy.

“I love you,” I said, meeting his eyes.

“I know,” he told me. “You said it in Clovis’s apartment, at the window.”

“You heard me? But I didn’t even whisper—”

“I saw your reflection in the glass, as you saw mine, Lip movements.”

“Well… you know, then. I didn’t want to be afraid of saying it. Accidentally.”

“‘I love you,’ she said accidentally. Don’t be afraid to say it. To my knowledge, you’re the first human who ever did love me.”

“Oh, but—”

“Magnetized, yes. Obsessed. Not love.”

“You’re not going to patronize me.”

“No, Jane.”

“Can we make believe,” I said, “that I don’t need to give any instructions. Please.”

“You don’t,” he said.

He drew me into his arms. It was like the pull of the sea. Kind. Irresistible. Swimming. The texture of the mouth, its moisture—human, the same… only the sensations of the kiss were utterly changed. Then he picked me up as if I weighed nothing at all, and carried me into the lift.

I’m not Egyptia. I don’t want to go into endless details. I was afraid, and not afraid. I was elated, and filled by despair. His nakedness dazzled me, though Demeta long ago saw to it that male nakedness was familiar to me in her selection of my visuals. But he was beautiful and silver, with the blaze of a fire at his groin. Why is the male penis supposed to be ugly? All of him was beautiful. All. And I—I was self-conscious, but his gentleness and his care of me made nothing of that. His gentleness, his care. I didn’t even tear, or bleed. I wasn’t even hurt. Yet he filled me, gloriously. His hair swept me like a tide. No part of him is like metal, except to look at. To touch, like skin, but perfect skin, without unevenness or flaw. And when I said at last, abashed, regretful, but content—“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can, I mean, I won’t climax—I won’t climax”—even the awful jargon didn’t jar, even to speak of it was acceptable. And almost at once a pressure began to grow inside me, and suddenly there were rollers of ecstasy and I caught my breath and clung to him, until they let me go.

He held me in his arms, and I said,

“But you, what about you?”

“No.”

“But—can’t you—don’t you—”

“It isn’t necessary for me.” And then, his voice amused in the darkness, “I can fake it, if you want. I frequently have.”

“No. Don’t fake it with me. Not ever. Please don’t.”

“Then I won’t.”

I fell asleep, until the Asteroid, rising, cut a hole through the blind. I woke, and he lay by me, his arms about me, his eyes closed as if he slept. But when he felt me stir, he opened his eyes. We looked at each other, and he said, “You’re beautiful.”

I would have denied it, but I felt it to be true. With him, for that moment, true.

My joy was his joy. I’d been crazy to say what I had, that he couldn’t love. He can love all of us. He is love.

In the morning, we showered together.

“Do you need to?”

“City dirt makes no exceptions,” he said, soaping his hair under the green waterfall. “Don’t worry, I’m entirely rustproof.”

He ate breakfast with me, to please me. He ate just like a young man, economically wolfing the food down.

“Can you taste it?”

“I can if I put the right circuits into action.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, and giggled.

My laughter intrigued him: He went into routines that made me helpless with it. Idiotically convincing voices, other personae, absurd songs, jokes.

One of the spacemen came to clear the breakfast things and I fell silent, embarrassed by this other robot, so unlike him. The spaceman gave me a little tray with vitamins on it, and my Phy-Excellence capsules. I meant to take them. I did. But I forgot.

We went back to bed. When the ecstasy left me, I cried again.

“It must be horrible for you,” I sobbed.

“Do I seem to find it horrible?”

“You’d act. It’s part of your character. And to say I’m beautiful.”

“You are. You have a skin like cream.”

“Do I?”

“And eyes like cowrie shells, with every color of the sea in them.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

“You say this to everyone.”

“Not quite. Besides which, they would be different things. And only when they were true.”

I got out of bed and went to the mirror, and looked at myself, lifting my hair over my head, widening my eyes.

He lay in the sheets like a sleeping dog-fox, smiling, aware of my delight.

“Did you fake orgasm,” I said boldly, “with Egyptia?”

“Many many times,” he said, with a note of such ironic dismay that I laughed again.

The next time he made love to me, the ecstasy was like a spear going through me. I screamed out, and was astonished.

“Just pretending,” I said.

The phone gave a sound a few minutes before noon, the low purring it makes on the console by my bed. Correction: made. I turned off the video, and answered it. I needn’t have bothered with the video.

“Bad news,” said Clovis.

“That isn’t me,” I said, “or is that who’s calling?”

“Jane, don’t be witty. When’s Demeta coming back?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I hate to break up your amour impropre early, but Egyptia has decided to assert her rights. She says she signed your metal playmate over to you for six hours. Only. You want him, I paid for him, but we can’t do a thing. She’s eighteen and he’s in her name.”

“You could stall her…”

“No. Anyway, I’ve got other things to do with my day. Or did you think my only mission in life was to be your nursemaid?”

Rancor. I could hear it. Something grated inside him. Because he’d helped me and he’d lost out. And because he’d seen Silver.

“What do I do, Clovis?”

“Send him over to The Island on a fast ferry. Or she may make a hysterical call to a lawyer. Or her awful mother in that trench.”

“But—”

“You didn’t think she was a friend of yours, did you?”

Everything in the room had stopped moving. It was funny, of course nothing had been moving, yet everything had looked alive, and now it didn’t anymore.

“All right,” I said.

“Or,” he said, “you can send it here, if you want. It, him. Egyptia can collect him, and maybe I can calm her down.”

“To your apartment,” I said.

“To my apartment. I’m so glad you didn’t think I meant the middle of the river.”

“I’ll pay you back the money,” I said. I had twisted the edge of the sheets into a hard corded knot.

“Oh, no rush.”

I switched the phone off.

“What is it?” my lover said to me. His arm came round my shoulders.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“Yes.”

“Clovis wants you. And then Egyptia wants you.”

“Well apparently I legally belong to them.”

“Don’t you care?”

“You want me to say I care about leaving you.”

I let him hold me. I knew everything was useless, was over, dead, like brown leaves crushed off the trees.

“I do care about leaving you, Jane.”

“But you’ll be just the same with them.”

“I’ll be what they need me to be.”

I left the bed and went into the bathroom. I ran the taps and held my hands under the water for a long while, for no reason at all. When I came back, he was dressing, pulling on the mulberry boots.

“I wish you wanted to stay with me,” I said.

“I do.”

“Only me.”

“You can’t change me,” he said. “You have to accept what I am.”

“I may never see you again.”

He moved to me and took me back into his arms. I knew the texture of these clothes now, as I knew the texture of his skin and hair, which are neither. Even in my misery, his touch soothed me.

“If you never see me again,” he said, “I’m still part of you, now. Or do you regret that we’ve spent time together?”

“No.”

“Then be glad. Even if it’s finished.”

“I won’t let it be finished,” I said. I held him fiercely, but he kissed me and put me away, tactfully and finally.

“There’s a flyer in ten minutes,” he said.

“How will you—”

“By running a lot faster than any human man you’ll ever see.”

“Money.”

“Robots travel free. Tap the slot and it registers like coins. Electronic wavelengths.”

“I hate your cheerfulness. When you leave me, there’s nothing.”

“There’s all the world,” he said. “And Jane,” he stood in the doorway of the suite, “don’t forget. You are,” he stopped speaking, and framed the word with his lips only: “beautiful.”

Then he was gone, and all the colors and the light of the day crumbled and went out.

• 5 •

I don’t have to describe that day, do I? I thought a lot about him. I saw him arriving at Clovis’s apartment. The conversation, the innuendo, saw him playing along with the repartee, giving better than he got, and the wonderful smile like sheer sunlight. I saw them in bed. Almost. Like a faulty visual—the swimmers’ movement of arms, a glint of flesh. My mind wouldn’t let me see. And yet my mind wouldn’t leave it alone. I wanted to kill Clovis, take a knife and kill him. And Egyptia. And I wanted to run away. Out into the gathering darkness. Out into another country, another world.

About seven P.M., something happened like a page turning over. I sat bolt upright in the welter of the stricken bed, and the plan began to come. The insane plan, the stupid plan. It was as if he’d taught me how to think. Think in new, logical, extraordinary ways.

I couldn’t remember where the Phy-Amalgamated Conference was, and had to get the information operator. All the while I waited, I waited too for the conviction to go, but it didn’t.

Then I got the Conference and held the line for the twenty minutes the pager needed to find my mother. And the conviction was still there.

“What’s wrong, darling?” said my mother.

“Mother, I’ve bought something terribly expensive I couldn’t get on my card.”

“Jane. There’s a meeting I’m chairing in five minutes. Could this perhaps have waited?”

“No, Mother. Sorry, but no. You see, Clovis paid for it.”

“You’ve been seeing Clovis after what you told me. Should you have been more cautious?”

“I’m over all that,” I said tersely.

“Darling,” said my mother, “switch on the video, please.”

I switched it on, defiantly, and saw her see me, naked in my bed, my love bed, with my cream skin and my cowrie shell eyes I’d never known I had. And somehow, she seemed to realize it was someone new she was dealing with, somebody she’d not really met before.

“That’s better,” said my mother, but I knew it wasn’t. “I’m glad you’ve been resting.”

She had always told me to get to know my body. To be at ease with it. She now seemed to think it faintly unnecessary that I had, I was.

“Mother, Clovis paid for this thing, and now I can’t get to use it. Can you wire a cash order through to him tonight?”

“How much does this item cost?”

I opened out the receipt and read the figure off cold.

My mother became cold, too.

“That’s rather a lot of money, darling.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.” (But we can pay it, can’t we? We’re rolling about in riches, aren’t we?)

“You’ve never done anything like this before, Jane. What exactly is this thing? Is it a car?”

“It’s a Sophisticated Special Format Robot.”

Mother, I’m in love with—

“A robot. I see.”

“It can play the piano.”

“At the price you quoted, one would hope so.”

“The point is, Mother, I’ve been thinking about this a long time, but I rather want, sort of would like—” Don’t blow it, Jane, Jaen, Jain. “I think it would do me good to get an apartment of my own. Just for a few months, in the city.”

“An apartment.”

“I’m such a baby, Mother. All my friends have their own places.”

“You have your own suite.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Your suite belongs to you, Jane, and everything in it, just the same as it would in an apartment. You can do there and with exactly as you choose. You have total freedom. More so than in an apartment, where you would be governed by certain domiciliary regulations.”

“Oh—I—”

“I agree, you are rather immature. How would you propose to cope with the everyday chores of life on your own? Do you even understand what they are? Even an automatic apartment needs cohesion. And you are not—Jane, I really think we must discuss this when I get home.”

“I bought the robot to help me run the apartment.”

“Yes. Your priorities are quite original.”

“But will you please pay Clovis?”

“Darling, you sound as if you’re trying to give me a command, and I’m sure you realize that would be very foolish of you.”

“Please, Mother.”

“I have to go now, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, and we’ll talk this through. Why not put your views on tape? You’re always so much better at expressing yourself unspontaneously and with consideration. Good night, sleep tight, dear.”

The line and the video blanked out.

I was shivering and swearing and gnawing the sheet.

I’d have to go through all this again with her tomorrow, and she’d win. That was silly. I wasn’t in a battle with my mother. Was I? Egyptia had had full access to her mother’s fortune since she was fifteen, the limit being on a monthly basis only because otherwise she tended to overdraw on funds that hadn’t yet built up. But the terms of the limit were a monthly twenty thousand I.M.U. And Clovis had no limit I knew of. And Chloe and Davideed didn’t, though they were habitually frugal. And Jason and Medea, who still lived at home, had their own beach house at Cape Angel, a Rolls Amada car with push-button dash, and spent money by forging their father’s signature, which he never noticed, or by use of one of their six credit cards each with a two-week thousand limit, and they still shoplifted.

And I. I had a thousand I.M.U. a month. Which had always been more than enough until now.

More than enough, frankly, because half the time my mother bought my clothes. Even my sheets, my soap… I looked round the rooms of my suite wildly. I had everything I could possibly need, and more. I should be grateful. My eye was caught by a gorgeously vulgar (“The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.”) antique oriental lamp, by a jade panther. My mother lavished money on me. The carpets alone would be worth thousands—

My skin crawled. Something clicked in my head.

“No,” I said aloud. “No, no—”

I saw Silver, who I’d wanted to give another name to, and hadn’t, walking along the sidewalk, putting back his head to watch the flyer go over. I saw his face against the dark sky in the balcony just before he kissed me the second time. I felt him hold me, and a spear divided me. I remembered the cubicle, the clockwork nerves of his body exposed. I visualized Clovis and Egyptia squabbling over him.

Like a sleepwalker, I got off the bed. I thought of my mother, and I could smell La Verte, but the scent of him had lingered on my own skin, blotting out my mother’s psychologically conjured perfume.

“All right,” I said. “Why not? If it’s supposed to be mine.”

You should make the decision yourself, my mother would say. Once I’d asked her what to do, and she’d told me.

“Yes, Mother. I’m going to make a decision.”

The auto-chill had refilled with wine, and I drank some, however, before I called Casa Bianca, the largest and most expensive second owner store in the city.

Before I quite knew what I’d done, I’d invited their representative over to Chez Stratos to assess the entire contents of my suite. Rich people fall on hard times and sell things, but I could tell, when I got through to the human assistants at Casa, that they were rather surprised—surprised and greedy. Of course, they’d cheat me. I looked at the receipt from E.M., seeing the wording for a S.I.L.V.E.R. The Sophisticated Format Robot, and at the charge. I’d get enough. And enough for other things, for a run-down apartment somewhere. And then, with the thousand I.M.U. card, I could manage there, if I was careful.

What was I doing? Did I know? Ice water ran down my back, my head throbbed, I felt sick. But I only drank some more wine, and got dressed and powdered my face to put up a barrier between me and the rep. from Casa Bianca. Then I gave admittance instructions to the lift, which said: “Hallo, Jane. Yes, Jane, I understand.”

The rep. arrived an hour later, very smart, about forty but not on Rejuvinex, or not on enough of it. She had long, blood-red nails, a bad psychological mistake in her line of work. Or perhaps it was done to intimidate. She looked predatory as she came out of the lift into the foyer.

“Good evening,” she said. “I’m Geraldine, representing Casa Bianca.”

“Please come this way,” I said. Party manners. Well, I’d often felt just as scared as this at parties.

We went up in the birdcage to the Vista.

“Excuse me,” said Geraldine, “is any of the rest of the house involved?”

“No. Just my suite.”

“Pity.”

We walked through the Vista, and she exclaimed. Indigo clouds were humped against the balcony-balloons with puddles of stars in them. The Asteroid blazed in the East like a neon, advertising something too ethereal to be real.

“My God,” said Geraldine, proclaiming a monopoly. “By the way,” she said, as we went up the annex stair, “I’m afraid we’ll require proof of your ownership of the properties you want to sell. You did realize that?”

She thought I was about ten years old and she would make corn hash of me. She probably would. I was allergic to her. I wished my mother would come home unexpectedly and end all this. What had I done?

“In here,” I said, as we went into my suite, which one of the spacemen had tidied.

“Oh, yes,” said Geraldine. “You said on the phone everything was to go.”

“If you can give me a reasonable price for it,” I said. My voice trembled.

“Why the heck are you leaving?” marveled Geraldine.

“I’m going to live with my lover,” I said. “And Mother wants to restyle the suite.”

Geraldine opened her big leather bag and removed a lightweight mini-computer which she set up on a side table.

“I’ll just run the ownership proof through now, if you don’t mind.”

I handed her the inventory tape. It had my individual body code, and the description and sonic match for everything in the rooms, which her computer would test and find correct. The inventory was kept in Demeta’s tape store, but I’d sent one of the spacemen for it.

As the computer chittered through its routine, Geraldine walked round and about, now and then picking things up and running a little calculator over them.

“The computer will take the full scan in a moment,” she said. “But you have some nice things. I think Casa Bianca will be able to take most of this off your hands.”

“There are clothes, too. And makeup cabinet. And a hairdresser unit. And all the tapes with the deck. You can take the bath fittings if you want, so long as you tie off the plumbing.”

“Well, I shan’t be doing it personally,” she corrected me.

I cringed, and just managed not to apologize to her.

“Well,” said Geraldine. “I just hope your lover can give you all of this.”

I kept quiet, this time. That was my business, wasn’t it.

What my lover, my love, my beloved, gave me. Or could he give me anything.

I opened the doll cupboard.

“My!” said Geraldine. “Some of these are—” she stopped herself. “Of course, secondhand toys are much harder to sell. But they seem well-preserved. Did you ever play with them?”

“They’re durables.”

My mother had wanted me to be able to work out my aggressions with my toys, so they were the kind whose hair didn’t come out, and whose ears didn’t fall off. There was my unicorn rocking horse, unscratched, and my bear in shining coal-black fur. “See,” I thought to them, “people are going to buy you and love you and play with you, after all.” I wouldn’t cry in front of Geraldine. I wouldn’t.

I poured some wine and didn’t offer her any. She hated me anyway.

The computer put up a white light and a piece of paper. Geraldine read it carefully. “Yes, that’s all in order. I’ll just switch on the scan. There. Our relay department can let you know the offer we’re prepared to make first thing tomorrow. Or late tonight, if you prefer.”

“I’m afraid I want everything cleared by tomorrow. And the money. Or else I’ll have to try another firm.”

“Oh, come on now,” said Geraldine. “Our service is fast. But not that fast. And no one’s is.”

If I held the glass much more tightly, I’d break it, like people do in visuals.

“Then I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” I said.

Geraldine stared at me. She looked impressed.

“So okay,” she said. “What’s the hurry? Your mother doesn’t know you’re doing this?”

“Your computer has just told you that I own everything in the suite.”

“Yup. But Mother still doesn’t know the bird’s flying the nest. Right?”

My mother did know. I’d told her.

Geraldine looked at the white leather suitcase.

“What’s in there? Don’t tell me. A few clothes, a bag of your favorite makeup, your boyfriend’s photo. What is this? You’ve fallen in love with some adolescent on Subsistence?”

The computer put up a yellow light and closed itself off. The scan was complete.

“What about the bathroom and bedroom?” I asked.

“Oh, Fred here can see through walls. What about you?”

I forced myself to turn and look at her. My eyes watered but I didn’t blink. The lenses of my eyes were flat and cruel. My face was silver.

“I want your firm to call me with its offer in no more than two hours. If I agree to it, I want your removal machinery in here and out in one hour more.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Geraldine. “I’ll pass on your message.”

“If I don’t get the call by ten P.M., I’ll go elsewhere.”

“Nobody else could take this on in the middle of the night,” said Geraldine. She re-bagged the computer, dropped in the calculator. “I might be able to swing it for you,” she said. She picked up the jade panther. “I might.”

I’m so slow. It was ages as she stood there with the panther, before I knew she wanted me to bribe her. I started to panic, as if I’d committed some breach of social etiquette. I didn’t know how to get over it. As I fumbled about in my mind, Geraldine put down the panther and walked crisply out.

I followed her into the birdcage lift and touched the button. Geraldine looked into space with her hard sad eyes that had parcels of lines in the thick mascara under them. I wondered frenziedly if everyone always tipped her with some valuable piece, if her apartment was stuffed with collectors items, against her compulsory retirement, which would have to be any year now. I began to feel sorry for her, her tired skin, her carnivorous nails.

We reached the foyer and she stepped out and over to the lift in the support. At the door she hesitated. She turned and looked at me.

“You’re going to find it difficult,” she said, “being poor. But you’re a tryer, I’ll say that for you.”

I was overwhelmed. It was ridiculous.

“Geraldine,” I said, blatant, because suddenly I wanted her to have the panther, and so being devious was unimportant, “where do I send—?”

“Keep it,” she said. “You’re going to need every money unit you can get your hands on.”

The doors shut. I sat down on the foyer floor, wondering if she was ever someone’s daughter, too. I was still sprawled there three quarters of an hour later, when the phone went. It was Casa Bianca. They’d be at the house by midnight and they’d pay me—it was more money than I’d ever had, and it would just be enough.

Guess what I did as the Casa Bianca removal took away all my things? I cried. (I feel I ought to edit out my tears by now. But, they happened.) It was my life going. Strange, when I’d hardly ever thought about any of it. Strange, that when I had thought about it, none of it had seemed like mine, yet there I was, wandering from place to place in the swiftly emptying rooms to avoid the machines, crying. Good-bye, my books, good-bye, my necklaces, good-bye my ivory chessmen. Good-bye my coal-black bear.

Good-bye, my childhood, my roots, my yesterdays. Good-bye, Jane.

Who are you now?

I made a tape for my mother, and left it on the console for her, with the light ready to signal when she came in. I wasn’t very coherent, but I tried to be. I tried to explain how I loved her and how I’d call her, soon. I tried to explain what I’d done. I didn’t say anything about Silver. Not one word. Yet everything I said, of course, was about him. I simply might have been saying his name over and over. And I knew she’d know. My wise, clever, brilliant mother. I couldn’t hide anything from her.

I and my white suitcase, with Casa Bianca’s Pay On Demand check in it, caught the four A.M. flyer to the city. There was a gang on the flyer, and they shouted obscene things at me, but didn’t dare do anything else because of the rightly suspected policode. I was afraid of them anyway. I’d never been so close to people like that, always taking cabs when it was late, always on the bright streets, or in another corridor, or on the other side of the walk. It was as if my mother’s aura had protected me, and now I had exiled myself, and now I was no longer safe.

When I remember doing all this, I’m shattered. I still don’t quite believe I did. I dialed an instant-rental bureau from a kiosk at the foot of Les Anges Bridge, and then gave in and took a taxi to the address they gave me.

The caretaker was human, and he swore at me for getting him up. It was very dark. There were no streetlights outside; the nearest was five hundred feet away up the street. My window looks on to a subsidence of brickwork and iron girders. I don’t know what it could have been before the tremor shook it down, but weeds have seeded all over it. I didn’t see till daylight crawled through the dirty window, and then the autumn colors of the weeds, smeared on the dereliction, made me unhappy. Unhappier.

I didn’t sleep, of course. I huddled by my suitcase on the old couch by the window. I knew I couldn’t stay here. I knew I would have to go home. But where was home?

When day came, I went on huddling. I knew my next move was to go to Egyptia, and then to Clovis. Repay Clovis, persuade Egyptia. And then I’d take Silver. I’d really have bought him, as Casa Bianca had bought my furniture. He’d belong to me. And I couldn’t. After everything, I couldn’t. Couldn’t buy him or own him. Couldn’t bring him here to this frightful place.

I dozed, and when I woke, the day was shrinking away behind the girders as if it were scared of them. My stomach was queasy and sore because I hadn’t eaten, except for a sort of sandwich I’d made myself in the servicery at the house. I drank some water from the drinking tap in the muddy bathroom of the rented apartment. The water tasted very chemical, and full of germs.

My mother would be home, soon. I wondered what she would do. I became frantic, and saw her shock as she found the suite stripped of furnishings and me. I began to believe I’d done something truly awful to her. I wanted to run down to the pay phone in the foyer of the rental apartment block, down all the cracked cement steps, for the lift here didn’t work anymore. But then I knew I couldn’t. And then at last I knew that I was afraid, terribly, violently afraid, of Demeta, who only wants the best for me, the very best, as she sees it.

Eventually, I found the paper pad I’d written on and which I’d put in the suitcase with the money and the few clothes, and I started to write this, the second chapter of what’s happened to me.

When it got pitch dark, I turned on the mean bare overhead light, but it will cost money, so I worry about it. I have three hundred left on my card for the rest of the month. Whatever did I spend the rest of it on? I’m cold tonight, and I’d like to turn on the wall heater. Maybe I can wait a little longer?

Stars are caught in the girders. The name of this street, actually, is Tolerance.

Silver, I need you. I need you. All this is because of you and yet, how could I blame you for it? I’m nothing to you. (Does the touch of real flesh secretly repel you?) But I was beautiful with you. All night, all the hours of the day you were with me: Beautiful. And I never was before.

I’m so tired. Tomorrow, I must make up my mind.

There’s a flyer going over. It’s quiet here, I can hear the lines whistling, and below, the roar of the city, that never lies down to sleep.