A rose by any other name

Would get the blame

For being what it is—

The color of a kiss,

The shadow of a flame.

A rose may earn another

name,

So call it love;

So call it love I will.

And love is like the sea,

Which changes constantly,

And yet is still

The same.

• 1 •

I dreamed of him that night, after I wrote the second chapter of what had happened. The first time I ever dreamed of him. We were flying over the city. Not in a flyer, but on the wings of angels out of an old religious picture. I could feel the beat of the wings through my body as they opened and closed. It was effortless and lovely to fly, to watch him fly just ahead of me. We passed over the broken girders and our shadows fell on the ground among the orange foliage of the autumn weeds. It’s supposed to be a sexual dream to dream of flight. Maybe it was. But it didn’t seem to be.

When I woke, it was early morning, just like the dream, and I looked out of the window at the orange twining the girders, where our shadows had fallen. Beyond the subsidence was a blue ghost of the city I could just see, cone-shaped blocks all in a line, and the distant column of the Delux Hyperia Building. The view wasn’t ugly or dismal anymore. The sun was shining on it. In five years, if they left the subsidence alone, a young wood of weed trees might be growing there. The sky was blue as Silver’s shirt had been.

Dazed by the dream and the sunlight and the autumn weeds, I went into the bathroom and ran hot water, though it was expensive. I showered and dressed, and brushed my hair. My hair looked different. And my face. My hair, I guessed, was fading out of tint and needed molecular restructuring or the bronze tone would all go, but I’d sold my hairdresser unit. I could go to a beauty parlor, and get a color match and molecular restructure done, but it might not be the exact shade. Anyway, it would cost a lot. I’d have to revert to being dull brown, or whatever it was I’d been that hadn’t suited me on my coloressence charting. My face though, what had happened to that? I turned three quarters on and saw that my flesh had hollowed slightly. I had cheekbones, high and slender but unmistakably there. I looked older, and peculiarly younger, too. I leaned close to the spotted glass, and my eyes became one eye, flecked with green and yellow.

I put the Casa Bianca P.O.D. check in a sling purse over my shoulder, and went out and down the cracked cement stairs.

I couldn’t tell what I felt, but I didn’t feel as I had. The street turned into a run-down boulevard with an elderly elevated running overhead, the lines long unused, and rusting. I bought a bun and an apple and a plastic cup of tea at a food counter, and ate and drank as I waited for the city center bus. By daylight, I knew my way about far better than I’d thought, even here. Of course, I’d sometimes been in ramshackle areas, always with other people, always a tourist, but still enough to have a few scraps of knowledge.

The blue sky made the sidewalk interesting. People moved about, ran, argued, and steam came out of food shops. Flowers spilled from the elevated.

I’d always known the city. I had no reason to be afraid of it, even now. And my jeans looked shabby because I’d slept in them on the hairy old couch, shabby enough not to attract attention. The shirt would get shabby.

“Bus late again,” one woman said to another behind me, in the verbal shorthand of the usual. “Thought of walking to South for the flyer, but it’s too much money.”

“Mechanical failure at the depot,” said the other woman. “They don’t service regularly downtown, that’s the trouble. City center runs, that’s fine. But out here, we can walk all the way.”

Then they muttered together, and I knew they were talking about me, and I went hot and cold with nervous fear. Then I caught the word “actress” spoken with pity, scorn and interest. I was startled, to have myself compared to exotic Egyptia, even on the streets of the poor. Glad, also. To be an actress from this end of town meant I was struggling, too. They wouldn’t hate me. I was a symbol of possibility, and anyway would probably starve.

The bus finally came. I got off at Beech and went into the Magnum Bank, and cashed the check.

Actress. They thought I was an actress, just like Copper.

Then a flyer came, and I took it from force of habit, regretting it as I paid the coins. I was being so meanly careful of money, and then lapsing in unnecessary extravagance, and it was all a proof that I couldn’t deal with the situation, but I wasn’t going to think of it just now. Or of my mother. Or Clovis, or Egyptia, or even of him.

I got off at Racine, and walked over the New River Bridge, to Clovis’s apartment block.

As I came to the outside of his door every bone in my body seemed suddenly to turn to fluid, but I spoke to the door, anyway, asking to come in.

Maybe he, they, were out. Or—busy. And the door wouldn’t open.

The door didn’t open and didn’t open, and then it did.

I walked in, holding my purse in front of me like a sort of shield, and not looking around at the living area with its couches and pillows and tasteful decor. No one was there.

Snakes fought each other in my stomach, but I ignored them. I sat down on the couch with black cushions, and stared across at the window where I’d said “I love you” to his reflection in the glass, and he’d seen me and known.

After a few minutes, Clovis came through from the main bedroom in a dark blue three-piece suit, as if he were going out. He appeared elegant and casual, as he always does, but as soon as he looked at me, he blushed. I’d never seen the adult Clovis blush, a wave of painful color, hitting the inside of his skin so fast the pulses jumped in his temples. I remembered again, he’s seventeen. And I started to blush in sympathy, but I wouldn’t look down, and it was Clovis who turned his back and walked over to the drinks dispenser.

“Hallo, Jane. What’ll you drink?”

“I don’t want a drink. I’ve brought your money.”

“Dear me, and I was hoping to get the pound of flesh.”

He turned around with something in a glass, drinking it, cool again.

I got up, opened my purse, and counted out the large-unit notes on a table in front of him. It took quite a long while. He watched, sipping the drink from time to time, and there was lace on his shirt sleeves, like the Renaissance shirt Silver had worn on the Grand Stairway.

When I stopped, he said,

“He isn’t here, you know.”

“I know.” I had known, too. Nerves or not, I’d have sensed if he were there, that near me. “Now please just tell me what you spent on Egyptia. Did you buy her the fur coat?”

“No. She bought it herself on her delay account.”

“Do you want the money for the lunch you bought her?”

“No, Jane,” said Clovis. “Jane, it really could have waited.”

“No it couldn’t.”

“Did you have to cry all over your mother to get it?”

I stared at him. It was funny how I could dislike him, detest him so much, and still feel such affection. I didn’t really want to fight with Clovis, I didn’t really want to confide in him, but something made me, perhaps because he was the first person I could tell.

“Would you really like to know how I got the money?”

“Am I going to be awfully shocked?”

“You might be,” I said doggedly. “I sold everything I own. At least, I think I owned it. The contents of my suite. Bed, chairs, ornaments, books, stereo. Everything. And most of my clothes, and—”

“Oh my God,” said Clovis. He took a cigarette out of the box, brushed it over the automatic lighter and started to smoke. “That explains why Demeta called me at seven-thirty this morning.”

I drew away from him, actually backed a step.

“What did she say?”

“Oh, calm and collected, as ever, and not much. Just, Is Jane with you, Clovis? And when I said No, and Did she know what time it was, she said, Please don’t try to be rude to me, Clovis. Do you know where Jane might be? And I said, I haven’t a notion, and I find it quite easy to be rude, I don’t need to try. At which she switched off.”

“Were you alone?” I said.

“Quite alone.”

“He wasn’t with you.”

“Who? Oh, the robot. No. I sent him back to Egyptia. She wanted him. For something.”

“You wanted him.”

“Ah. You saw through my transparent falsehood. Unsubtle little me.”

“But I’ve repaid your money now. So your claim is nonexistent.”

“True. Egyptia, though—”

“I can handle Egyptia.”

“Can you?” Clovis stared back at me. “Is this our sweet little Jane talking? Such wonders, such chemical changes, can love perform upon the human spirit.”

I didn’t know I was going to do it any more than I’d known I’d tell him what I had done. My arm flew up as if on a spring, and I hit him across the face. It must have stung. And to Clovis, who fastidiously abhors any contact except in a bedroom, it had an added horror.

Yes, it must have stung. He moved away from me and stopped looking at me, but he said very coolly:

“If you’re going to start that, get out.”

“Did you think I wanted to stay?”

“No. You want to chase your bit of metal excitement round the city.”

“Just to Egyptia’s, where you sent him. What was wrong, Clovis? Had to turn him out before you started getting serious?”

“Oh please. Just because you’re bloody maladjusted doesn’t mean we all have to be.”

I gulped, and holding on to my now almost empty purse, I ran to the apartment door.

In the lift, I said the word over—maladjusted. Then I laughed hysterically. Of course I was maladjusted. So what? I got out of the lift hysterically laughing and greatly surprised a heavily Rejuvinexed couple waiting to get in.

Life was a shambles. I mustn’t hesitate now. If I paused, I’d be afraid, or recognize my fear for what it was. But how interesting, a month ago I’d have shriveled with shame if anyone had found me laughing alone in a lift—or anywhere, for that matter. I’d hit Clovis, but he was right. I had changed.

I had to ride the ferry across to The Island because the bridge was shut for repairs. Otherwise I’d have walked the thirty minutes it takes on foot.

The basin of water that surrounds The Island used to be a reservoir, and trees grow out from the waterline, that the ferry has to curve around. Maybe you know it, my unknown, would-be, nonexistent reader. And the concrete platform rising on its pylons, with the rich people’s towers standing amid their landscaped gardens.

Egyptia has the top floor, and therefore a private roof-garden, with miniature ten-foot palm trees at the center, and a pool. Floating up to her oval, gilded doorway in the external lift, it all seemed suddenly unbelievable after the rental block on Tolerance. Or was it that the rental block seemed unbelievable? Surely this was just a social call, and I’d be going home directly to Chez Stratos.

(Is Jane with you, Clovis? Do you know where she might be? She’d have called Egyptia, too. And Jason and Medea. And Chloe. But not Davideed. He’s at the equator, Mother. And it will only have taken Egyptia to tell my mother about Silver, what Clovis had probably revealed. Silver. I don’t want to call him that. It’s a registration—Am I going to have to fight with Egyptia?)

The lift stopped adjacent to the gilded oval door and let me out in the high-walled enclosure before it. Egyptia’s pot plants are dying. She forgets to turn on the hose. When they lie there in brown husks, she weeps for them. Too late.

I touched the door panel.

“Who is here?”

The door-voice is Egyptia’s voice, reproduced, velvety, carnal.

“Jane.”

“One moment, Jane.”

He must love her voice. He’s a musician. Her voice is so musical, has such a variegated tonal inflexion. He’s here. I can feel it. I’m going to make a fool of myself. I’ve sold my world, and if Egyptia says “No,” I’ve lost everything. And she’ll say “No,” won’t she? Yes, all right. I supposed Clovis lied about Egyptia demanding him back. But Clovis, to be perverse, having—enjoyed, that’s the word, enjoyed him—sent him back to Egyptia, just as he implied he had to. A sort of neat, spiteful tying up of ends. And Egyptia, having received her lover, has been with him all night again. Or part of the night. The fact that she owes the price of him to someone, now me, isn’t going to stop her from being overwhelmed and playing her ace card, her legal ownership. She’ll say No.

After ten minutes, I touched the panel again.

“Who is here?”

“Jane. I’ve already told you.”

“I am still signaling Egyptia, Jane. Please wait.”

She’s in bed with him right now. That’s why she won’t answer, won’t let me in. She’s locked against him, she’s crying out in ecstasy, just as I did. His face is poised above her, or buried in her long dark hair. She’s so beautiful. And the apartment is so rich. He appreciates artistry.

What can I give him to appreciate? That ghastly room. Me. I ought to go away.

I didn’t.

And suddenly the door swung open.

At once I heard a tremendous, unexpected noise, which alarmed me. I shrank away from the door involuntarily, then moved forward, then stood indecisively on the threshold, not allowing the door to close.

As I did so, Lord slunk down the long, much-mirrored corridor. I remembered it was Lord, limp-handed Lord who’d guided me through the Gardens of Babylon that night I saw Silver again. And Lord remembered me.

“Oh hell, it’s you,” he said, striking a pose.

“Oh hell, it’s me,” I said. I amazed myself, for it sounded clever, even though I was only repeating what he’d said. (A trick worth keeping?)

“Well, you’d better come in. We’re in the throes of Peacock.”

He must mean the play.

“Normally, we rehearse at that Godvile theatre,” he added, looking into a mirror at himself. “But darling Egyptia brought us here. Then we’re going to lunch at Ferrier’s. You’re not coming, are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I shall always recall you, I’m afraid, as the girl who gets drunk and throws up.”

I’d have liked to say something to that, but I couldn’t think of anything. Then I did.

“That must happen to your girlfriends a lot,” I said, “but are you sure it’s because of the drink?”

I walked past him and down the hall into Egyptia’s vast salon, my brain singing and ringing. I couldn’t quite believe in myself, and I stood there, stunned, intoxicated, and looked for him and found him not. Instead, I saw how the floor had been cleared and five male actors were on it, viciously fighting each other, while three women actors stood to one side, their heads tilted back, their eyes veiled, their hands and arms outstretched. Six or seven others of all sexes stood on the edge, or lay over the pushed-back chairs. One had swathed himself in an Indian tiger skin. A man with a small machine by him sat cross-legged on the coffee table, checking the script. Thin and handsome, he once or twice called out, in a thin, handsome voice, “No, Paul, to the groin, dear, the groin. Corinth, you look as if you’re selling him ice cream, not trying to disembowel him.”

“You eaten any of my ice cream?” Corinth, a young man in glint-stitched jeans, yelled back.

A comfit tray on a nearby cabinet was knocked to the floor with a dull clang.

Egyptia stood on the little stair that went up to the bedroom half-floor above. Her face was so white I feared for her life. Then I realized she had painted herself for her part. She leaned forward slightly. Her eyes were holes through into space, with golden centers. She was living the scene in a depth none of the others even knew about. She was flawless and unreal. It was true. In some indescribable luscious way, she was like a robot. Did he respond to that? Her sheer unblemished skin like that of a smooth and succulent fruit, her oceanic hair?

The last actor fell.

Egyptia’s lips parted. She was going to speak her lines, and, despite everything, love, trauma, the chaos of my life, my fear and doubt at not finding him, I was mesmerized, waiting for what would come out. And in that second Lord shouted across the room at her: “Egypt. Your little blond friend’s here. Can you come out to play?”

I could have killed him. I was abashed, the focus of all eyes, blamed for his fault. Egyptia’s robotic optic lenses flickered as if she were coming to after losing consciousness. She looked at me, not knowing me. Who was I? No one from Antektra’s tortured world.

I went over to her.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“That’s… all right. What is it?”

“I need to talk to you. Not now. When you’ve finished.”

“Oh.” Her eyes closed. I thought she’d collapse. My head spun. “Oh, Jane,” she said.

“Where is he?” I said. “Just tell me. Please. Please, Egyptia.”

“Who?”

Suddenly, both in our separate agonies, our wires touched.

“Silver.”

“Somewhere—the bedroom—or the roof—”

“Not with you. Why not with you?”

“Darling, he’s a robot.”

Suddenly as the touch of the wires, I heard the vague intransigent brutality in her voice. Instead of recoiling, I took her by the arms, and her huge eyes swam on me, so sensitive to everything, and nothing.

“Egyptia, I sold every scrap I own. I left my mother’s house. I paid Clovis the money for—him.”

I’d reached her, over the gliding honeyed slope of her inward-turned concentration.

“All of it?” She breathed. “But you—”

“I know. I could only afford it by selling everything. Even my clothes, Egyptia. But you, you of all people, understand why.”

Behind and around us the actors sighed with boredom, unable to overhear, drinking Egyptia’s minerals and spirits, popping her vitamins and pills. I ceased to believe in them, but I held her fast.

“Listen, Egyptia. You’re so aware, so sensitive. You have so much love in you—He’s a robot, but I’m in love with him. However silly that would sound to anyone else, I know I can tell you, I know you’ll understand. I love him, Egyptia.”

I had her measure. Her eyes filled voluptuously with tears, just as I realized mine must have.

“Jane…”

“Egyptia, he’s my life.”

“Yes, Jane, yes—”

“Egyptia, let me take him. Away from you. You have so much. You have your genius—” I meant it, I’d glimpsed it, like a smell of fire, and it was so useful to lie with the truth—“You have your genius, but I—I need him, Egyptia. Egyptia!”

She held me rigidly to her, then away. She stared at me, imperiously. She was Antektra. She was God.

“Take him,” she said. And let me go.

I went by her up the stair, turned into the bedroom foyer. A door led out on to the roof-garden, and I took it randomly, for I was reeling. I walked to the pool and sank down beside it, and I laughed, laughed as if I had really gone mad, holding myself in my arms, rocking, crowing for breath, shaking my hair around myself like a faded golden shawl.

I had handled her. But, the stupid thing was, I’d believed every word.

Presently I stood up.

Fleets of immaterial sponge-cake-color clouds were blowing slowly sideways over the blue sky. The little potted palm trees rattled. The pool was green as a fruit acid. With the guitar across his body and resting in his arms, he was sitting not ten feet from me at the brink of the water. He wore dark blue and the shadows tangled over him, hid his face. His expression was serious and still, and the eyes were expressionless and flat—circuits switching over. His face cleared very gradually, and he didn’t smile. And I was afraid.

He said to me: “What’s happened to you?”

“Why?” I said. I didn’t know what to say. “Aren’t you pleased to see me? I thought you were always pleased to see anyone. Did you have a lovely time with Clovis? And a lovely, lovely time with Egyptia?”

He didn’t answer. He set the guitar aside. (The guitar, the extra clothes, these must be in Egyptia’s keeping. He hadn’t brought them with him when he had gone with me.) He got up and walked over to me, and stood close to me looking down into my face.

I couldn’t look at him. I said, again: “I’ve left my mother’s house. I’ve paid Clovis all the money. I’ve told Egyptia I need you, and she’s agreed to let you go.” I frowned, puzzled. How could she bear to let him go? “I’m living in a place like a rat-hole, in a slum. You’ll have to pretend to be human, and my lover. I don’t know how I’ll survive and probably in the end I shan’t, and you’ll come back to Egyptia. Did you sleep with her last night?”

“I don’t sleep,” he said.

“You know what I mean. Did you?”

“No,” he said. “I slept in her robot storage compartment. She was with a man last night.”

I raised my eyes to his contemplative, noncommittal, beautiful face.

“She—you—”

“You look incredibly perturbed.”

“Blast her!” I cried. A puerile oath, but I meant it literally. I knew a fury like no other fury I had ever known and my eyes grew blind.

He took my hands very lightly.

“Jane. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters.”

“I am a machine.”

“And Clovis—I suppose Clovis—”

“Clovis didn’t put me in the robot storage.”

“I bet. Oh God. Oh God.”

“Be more gentle with yourself.”

“Oh God. Oh God,” I said in despair, and he took me in his arms, and we leaned together, our reflection perfect and still in the acidulous pool.

At last, I said,

“If you don’t want to come with me, I’d understand. It’s more artistic here.”

He said, “What perfume have you got on? It has a beautiful smell.”

“Nothing. I didn’t—nothing.”

“Then it must be you.”

“It can’t be. Human flesh must seem disgusting to you, if you can smell us.”

“Human flesh is extremely seductive. After all, it’s only another form of material.”

“With a jumble of organs underneath.”

“Just another kind of machinery. Sometimes less effective. Biologically more attractive.”

“Ugh,” I said, like the child I am. He laughed.

I looked at him then and said,

“It doesn’t matter, it’s my decision, but I think I sold my soul for you.”

“I see,” he said. “Do you want to buy it back?”

“I only want you.”

His eyes were dark, something to do with the shadows.

“Then I’ll have to try to make it worth your while.”

• 2 •

“Why is it so awful?” he said to me two hours later, as I stood cringing on the threshold of the slum apartment on Tolerance.

“I suppose I can heat it. By winter, if I’m careful and save money, I can. And I suppose there’s a way to plug up the cracks and the holes.”

“Yes, there is.”

“But it looks so awful. And it smells—”

“There isn’t any smell,” he said.

“Yes there is. Of people being miserable.”

“Be happy then, and it will go.”

I stared at him, distraught. He promptly told me a ridiculous joke and I laughed. The color of the rooms lightened. I remembered the sun coming in after the dream.

“But,” I said, touching the flaking plaster, “I don’t know where to start. Or how.”

“I can see,” he said, “I was an investment.”

We went out again into the city. He led me over walkways, along side streets, into strange cheap food-o-marts and household stores. He, who had no need of food, told me what groceries to buy, and sometimes I even thought of things myself. He found open sheds under arches in the elevated, where cans of glue and planks of wood balanced against unbevelled mirrors. He knew where everything was. The strangest places, all useful.

The day began to go, and we paused at a food stall. I’d asked him to pretend to be human, but my fears had faded. To me, he was. Or at least, for fifty minutes out of every hour he was. But at the stall, hunger surprising me as I devoured the inexpensive greasy tasty food, I ate alone, and began to be concerned about this and other matters.

“The money is low,” he said. “It would be crazy to waste it on fake meals for me.”

“At least, drink some coffine. And it’s cold now. Everyone else has a coat on.” (Even I. I’d rolled my fur jacket all over the couch, and even rubbed loose plaster into it, to be camouflaged.) “Oh, I should have got your clothes from Egyptia.”

He was amused. “We could still get them. Or I could.”

“No!”

“Afraid she’ll drug and abduct me.”

“Yes. Well, can you try to look cold?”

“I can foam at the mouth and throw a fit on the sidewalk if you really want me to.”

“Stop it,” I said, having nearly choked.

Someone came up to the stall beside us, lured by the smoke of frying peppers, onions, bread, beef and mustard.

“God, I’m freezing,” said Silver, clearly, stamping his feet.

The newcomer glanced at him and nodded.

In the dusk, as the speckled stars began to come on with the speckled street lamps of downtown—far fewer than the stars—Silver walked me over a grid of blocks and between high walls, into a market lit by flaring fish-gasoline jets. The light caught him, and turned him to coolest gold. He guided me from pillar to post, his arms already effortlessly loaded with paper bags of planks, glue, solvent, insti-plast, loaves, cartons of dry milk, oranges. Despite these, he looked fabulous, literally of a fable. I couldn’t stop looking at him. I’d forgotten I’d bought him. Everywhere, they looked at him, I wasn’t the only one. And he, mostly not noting it, when he caught their eyes, smiling at them so their faces lit like flares.

“How,” I said, “did you know this market was here?”

“I know where everything is. Every building and back alley of the entire city. It was pre-programmed into me. Partly for convenience during the advertising campaign, partly to be of general service. You are going to find me,” he said, “very useful, lady. God, I’m frozen,” he added as someone went by.

We halted at a clothing stall. There was clothing on the stall, tarnished, gorgeous, permissible. From theatres which had closed their doors. From those second owners who, like the rich ones that had first fallen, had themselves crashed on hard times. My mother would have been repelled at the notion of buying any article another had formerly worn. I don’t think she’d even want to wear anything of mine.

The woman on the stall fell passionately in love with him. She knocked prices in half. There was a sixteenth-century cloak of black-red velvet, destined to be his. She swathed him into it, embracing him as she did so, because he remarked how cold he’d felt before.

“Oh, that hair,” she said to him. “It can’t be natural.”

He said, “Not quite.”

“Suits you,” she said. “And the skin makeup. Here,” she said, suddenly including me. “Look at this. I’ll let you have this for twenty.”

Under the flares, it was warm, summer day heat shot up against the black autumn sky. Far away, the core of the city rose in cliffs of sugar, and the grains of the sugar were lights. The jacket sparkled too. It had green peacocks and bits of mirror—I thought of his jacket, the day I first saw him…

“She can’t afford twenty,” he said to the woman. “Not in cash.”

“Well,” she said, “what else have you got?”

I felt myself tense inside my skin, but he only grinned, shaking his head, his eyes devilish and irresistible, so I wondered if he had hypnotized her when she said: “Ten. She can have it for ten. Suit her with her white face and her big eyes.”

I wanted the jacket. Because I was with him, because it recalled him to me. Because of the peacocks. But I’d look too fat in it.

“I think it’s a bargain,” he said to me.

And I found myself paying, out of what was left of the Casa Bianca cash.

As we walked away, I said, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Yes, you should. It’s not like the food. You’ll look good in it. And there are ways of making money,” he said, “not just spending it.”

I was dubious and suddenly anxious. I knew a moment of terrible insecurity, even with him beside me. The oil light fell hard as hail into my eyes.

“How?”

“There you go, mind in the gutter again,” he said, and I realized what my face must have shown. “Songs. I’ve sung on the street for E.M. Ltd. I can do it for you.”

“No,” I said. This idea unsteadied me further. I wasn’t sure why, but the mutinous crowd with their banners, their wise distrust of the excellence of machines, were mixed in my fear. “It’s wrong—if they pay you.”

“Not if they enjoy it enough to pay me.”

I stared at him. The human supernatural face looked back, inquiringly.

“I’m afraid,” I said, and stopped still, holding my small burden of the peacock jacket to me.

“No, you’re not,” he said. He moved close to me, obscuring everything from me except his presence. Even the light was gone, remaining only as a conflagration at the edges of his hair. “You’ve pre-programmed yourself,” he said, “to go on being afraid. But you’re not afraid anymore. And,” he said to my astonishment, “what have you decided to call me?”

“I—don’t know.”

“Then that’s what you should be worrying about. So much anticipation on my part, and still no name.”

We walked on. We paused, and bought an enormous jar of silk-finish paint, and color mixants.

“All the women love you,” I said jealously.

“Not all.”

“All. The woman on the stall cut her prices by half.”

“Because she was charging twice too much already and thought we’d haggle. The only genuine reduction was the jacket she offered you.”

We, I, bought some drapery, a pillow that would need recovering.

I felt a burst of childlike excitement, as on a birthday morning. Then another surge of alarm.

“What on earth am I doing,” I said vaguely.

“Turning your apartment into somewhere you can bear to live.”

“I shouldn’t…”

“Programmed and activated,” he said, and proceeded to an extraordinary imitation of a computer mechanism running through a program, gurgles, clicks and skidding punctuations.

“Please stop it,” I muttered, embarrassed.

“Only if you do.”

I frowned. I looked into the depth of the jacket wrapped in flimsy tissue, the sausage of wrapped pillow. I’d never exercised freedom of choice before, and now I was, and it was peculiar. And he. He wasn’t a robot. He was my friend, who’d come to help me choose (not tell me what to choose), and to carry my parcels, and to give me courage.

“Have I been brave?” I asked him in bewilderment as we strolled out of the market and through a deserted square. “I think I must have been.”

Tremor-sites rose against the stars. Birds or bats nested in them, I could hear the whickering sounds of their wings and little squeaking noises.

“And do I feel afraid only because I still think I should—not because I’ve left my mother and my home and my friends, because I haven’t got any money, because I’ve lost my heart to a beautiful piece of silverware.”

We laughed. I saw what had happened. I was beginning to catch the way he talked. It had never been really possible with anyone else. I’d envied Clovis’s wit, but it was usually so vicious I hadn’t been able to master it, but with Silver—damn. Not Silver.

“Silver,” I said, “I know you can adapt to anyone and anything, but thank you for adapting to me, to this.”

“I hate to disillusion you,” he said, “you’re easier than most to adapt to.”

We walked home. Odd. Home? Yes, I suppose that was already true, because anywhere he was was my home. Silver was my home. A milk-white cat was singing eerily among the girders in the subsidence, like the ghost of a cat. (Did cats have ghosts, or souls?)

“It’s so cold,” I wailed in the room.

“That’s my line, surely.”

I looked at the wall heater unhappily.

I was down to nickels and coppers now, and the three hundred on my card, until next month.

He swung off the cloak and folded it over me, then holding me inside it and against him.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any body heat to keep you warm.”

“I don’t care.”

We kissed each other quietly, and then I said,

“Don’t ever make love to me if you don’t want to.”

“If you want me to, I shall want to.”

“I just don’t believe that. There may be times—”

“No. My emotional and physically simulated equilibriums never alter.”

“Oh.”

“I also swallowed a couple of dictionaries someplace.”

We dragged the mattress off the couch. The bed under it had a padded top-surface and was less used. I pulled the almost new, dappled rugs, faintly scented from their recent cleaning, over us. Under them, I lay a long while, caressing him, exploring him, making love to him.

“Do you mind if I do this?” I asked timidly, quite unable to stop.

“Oh, I mind dreadfully.”

“I’m probably clumsy.”

“Far from it. You’re becoming a wonderful lover.”

“How would you know? It can’t mean anything to you.”

“Not as it would to a flesh-and-blood man. But I can still appreciate it.”

“Artistically,” I sneered. “When the proper circuits are put in action.”

“Something like that.”

“Egyptia—” I murmured, drowning in his hair, the taste of his skin—unmortal and yet flesh—the flesh of a demon—“if you didn’t find pleasure with Egyptia—”

“You make it sound like a cafe we were looking for. I did.”

“Yes… She’d be terribly clever.”

“Egyptia is totally passive. The pleasure is in finding what pleases her.”

Minutes later, as the strange wing-beats began to stir inside me, I couldn’t prevent myself from saying, “I wish I could find what pleases you. I wish, I wish I could.”

“You please me,” he said. It was true. The delight mounted in his face as my delight mounted within me—different, yet dependent.

“You fool,” I gasped, “that isn’t what I mean—”

When I fell back into the silence, the room of the apartment thrummed gently. It had the scent of oranges, now, and glue, and paper bags…

“I can stay here with you,” he said, “or I can start work on this place.”

“I want you with me,” I said. “I want to sleep next to you, even if you can’t—don’t—sleep.”

“You mean,” he said, “you aren’t going to ask me if I wouldn’t rather be anywhere except beside you?”

“Am I as paranoid as that?”

“No. Much worse.”

“Oh.”

“Your hair’s changing color,” he said.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Are you? I think you may be quite pleased when the change is complete.”

“Oh, no. It will be horrid.” Curled against him, lulled and childishly almost asleep, I felt safe. I was whole. We were in a boat, or on the back of a milk-white bird.

“Birds?” he asked me softly. “As well?”

“Yes,” I said. “And a rainbow.”

He must have left me at some point during the night. When I opened my eyes in the effulgent, now-curtain-filtered sunrise, there was blue sky on the ceiling, blue sky and islands of warm cloud, and the crossbow shapes of birds, like swifts, darting statically between. And a rainbow, faint as mist, yet with every transparent color in it, passing from the left hand corner by the door, to the corner nearest the window. It was real. Almost.

He was sitting on top of a rickety old chromium ladder he must have borrowed from somewhere in the building, from the bad-tempered caretaker perhaps. He was taking a devilish joy in my amazement as I woke and saw.

“But you’re a musician, not an artist,” I said dreamily.

“There’s a leaflet in with the paint which explains how to do this sort of thing. Being a machine—well, it’s easy for me to get a good result.”

“It’s beautiful—”

“Then wait till you see the bathroom.”

I ran into the bathroom. The ceiling was sunset in there, soft crimson nearnesses, and pale rosy distance. A white whale basked in the shallows of the clouds.

“A whale in the sky?”

“Make the metaphysical assumption the bath is the sea. And that the whale’s a damn good jumper.”

Five days later, you came up the cracked steps, opened the door, and walked into somewhere else.

He would ask me what I wanted, and we’d work on it together. Ideas escalated. He worked most of the nights, too. Once I woke up in the dark, crying for some reason I didn’t remember, and he came back into the bed to comfort me, and in the morning we and the rugs had become glued together and had to soak ourselves apart in the bath. His invention, and his mechanized knowledge of the city and its merchandise and price ranges, meant that fantastic things were done for very little outlay. I only cut a small way into the three hundred I.M.U. Admittedly I lived on sandwiches and fruit and wonderful junk foods found in sidewalk shops. My mother’s thorough understanding of nutrition, demonstrated in the perfectly balanced meals served from the mechanical kitchen and the servicery at Chez Stratos, the awareness of the best times to eat what, and why, and the grasp of vitamins, in which she had tried to educate me—all that stayed with me like a specter. But I didn’t get pimples or headaches, or throw up. Probably she’d nourished me so well that I was now immune. The way I ate and lived, of course, the way I slept and worked and made love, all these were enormous barriers against my ever calling her, although: “Hallo, Mother, this is Jane,” I said, over and over in my head a hundred times a day. Once I said to him, “I think I’m afraid of my mother.” And he said, holding my hand as we walked up the stairs, “From the sound of it, it could be mutual.” Puzzled, I demanded an explanation. Smiling, he sidetracked me, I forget how—

What would she say about this apartment? She wouldn’t cry out with delight, every time she came into it, as I do. “How beautiful!” No, she wouldn’t say that. Even the brass bed, with the headboard like a huge veined leaf, wouldn’t impress her, and anyway, the brass bed came later…

The walls, now sealed and burnished, and smooth, are painted cream-white. The pale gold paper lamp that hangs from the clouds and the swifts has a gold metal stitching on it, and when the light burns at night, gold flecks are thrown all over the walls. There are also wonderful scintillas and glows that are wavered from the colored candles standing on the shelves Silver put up. Each candle is a different color, or colors, and stands in a scoop of colored glass. These scoops are, in fact, a batch of flawed glass saucers bought for nickels, and painted over with glass enamel. The mirror, too, has a glorious glass painting on it, of leaves and hills and savage flowers. Every slope and tendril and petal totally hides some spot or chip in the mirror. We have wall to wall carpet, too. It’s made of literally hundreds of tiny carpet remnants given away as free samples. We spent a whole day walking from store to store, asking about carpets and, “Unable to decide” on one, going off with handfuls of pieces to “match with our furnishings.” It took hours to glue every scrap in place. The effect is astonishing, a mosaic that rivals the rainbow in the ceiling. No chairs, but large dark green fur pillows to sit on, or the couch, draped with rugs and shawls like the divan of a potentate. Curtains for the clean window, are to encourage the sky, being the color of blue sunlight. (The scatter of little tears in them are concealed by one whole packet of heat-and-press-on embroidered badges—tiny gold and silver mythical animals and castles.) The door is cream-white and vanishes into the wall. The horrible functional kitchen hatch (with the crotchety miniature oven and electric ring behind it that hardly ever get used) has become a wall-painting. It’s blue with clouds, like the ceiling, and a big-sailed, heavily winged ship is flapping over it, with a gilded cannon poking from its side, which is the handle fitting. We both painted this, and it’s remarkably silly. The wings on the ship are modeled after geese. The bathroom is madder. The walls were raw cement and broken tiles, and when patched up to seal, they looked impossible. Then, in another market, there were sky-blue tentlike waterproof coveralls going at four in the morning for next to nothing because no one wanted them, and the stall-keeper had a virus and was dying to get home. These, cut in lengths with a kind of spontaneous but enticed shining and ruching, are glued over every inch of the walls. The waterproofing looks like silk, and they make the room into a weird oriental fantasy, particularly when the rose-red paper lamp hanging from the rose-red clouds comes on, and hits every pleat and fold with an electric magenta streak of shine. We re-enamelled the bath, hand basin, drinking-tap basin, and the lavatory, all blue. The enamel is cheap and will probably crack inside six months. But for now, each area is reminiscent of a lagoon. The second night, Silver stripped the floor and put the new planks down, polished and varnished them. The bathroom floor is now a golden fake pine, and looks as if it cost a thousand. Well, at least five hundred.

“How do you know how to do all that?” I asked him, endlessly.

“I read the instructions,” he endlessly and innocently replied.

Of course, a robot can just read instructions and then know exactly how to follow them, and get it absolutely right. I kept saying to myself I mustn’t persist in thinking of him as an exceptionally talented man, no I mustn’t. Yet it was difficult, and besides, that’s what I’d asked him to pretend to be.

On the last afternoon of the first week, the caretaker came puffing and grumbling up the stairs to collect the rent, plainly thinking he wouldn’t get it.

“It’s just the one quarter month,” he announced as I stood there, a plum in one hand and a long artist’s paintbrush in the other. “Just the one week. Then I shan’t be up till the first of next month for the three quarters.” As the end of the month was also only a few days off, that meant nothing. He implied, in any case, I’d have run away by then in arrears. “It’s legal, you know,” he said. But already his eyes had gone past me and were bulging on the room. “Well,” he said. “I wondered what your boyfriend wanted the steps for.” He tried to edge in by me, so I let him. He stood and gaped, as if in a famous cathedral. “Not everyone’s taste,” he said, “but it’s cheerful.” Which is more, I thought, than can be said for you.

I waited for him to go on and say: “Now you’ve spent your rent money on all that, you’ll have to get out.” But he only glanced at the huge evergreen plant which Silver and I had dug out of the subsidence the night before and planted in a big cracked beer jeroboam of wondrous amber glass. “That’ll die,” he said.

“Perhaps you’d like to come to its funeral,” said Silver, who was seated on a pillow, reading, at fifteen seconds per page, a job-lot of books we’d picked up that morning.

The caretaker scowled.

“This flat,” he said, “is only supposed to accommodate one person.”

I felt a stab of terror, but Silver said, “I’m not paying her any rent. I’m her guest.”

Grudgingly, the caretaker accepted that this was all right, and Silver smiled at him.

I was already fumbling out the rent and electric money, all in small change by now, when Silver rose and graciously gave the monstrous visitor a tour of the bathroom. I could hear the monster grunting away, things like: “Don’t know I’d want it myself,” or “What’s that white thing in the ceiling? Oh.” And then, surprisingly: “Quite like that.”

They came back, and Silver poured the caretaker, and me, a mug of very cheap and vinegary wine, which the caretaker gulped down. When we finally got rid of him, and the rent, I lost my temper. The beautiful apartment, on which we’d slaved, smeared by that old man’s stupid carping.

“He’s just forgotten how to respond,” said Silver. “And he’s sick. He has to take a prescription medication that gives him another sickness as a side effect.”

“How do you know?”

“The night I borrowed the ladder, we sat around for a while, and he told me.”

“Still trying to make everyone happy,” I said.

“Still trying. Uphill work all the way.”

I looked at him and we laughed. And I went to him and put my arms round him. The carpet floor is nice to make love on, too.

The evergreen plant, by the end of the month, had spread up to the ceiling in a lustrous fan.

Which brings me to the end of the month.

• 3 •

The night before the first day of the new month, we were sitting out in the subsidence, on one of the girders, watching the stars stare their way past the last of the clinging leaves, and the distant city center blooming into its lights. We often came out there, which had firstly been his suggestion. Sometimes he played the guitar there quietly and sang to me. It was beautiful in the subsidence. Mysterious at dusk, and wild, like the heart of some forest, with the safe edges of civilization around it. Now and then, the white cat appeared, and we’d bring a plate of cat’s meat and leave it by. Despite its apparent homelessness, Silver had spotted, with his faultless sight, the little mark on the hindquarters of the cat, which means it’s had its anti-rabies shots quite recently. I had a wish to lure the cat into the apartment. But that night the cat didn’t come, just the stars. And as I lay against him, wound with him in the cloak, I said, “This is the happiest time of my whole life.”

He turned and kissed me, and he said, “Thank you.”

I was touched suddenly by the innocence inherent in his sophistication. I held him. The coolness though not coldness of his body had never troubled me, and now, from proximity to mine, he seemed warm.

“I don’t even mind that you don’t love me,” I said. “I’m so happy.”

“But I do, of course, love you.”

“Because you can make me happy.”

“Yes.”

“Which means I’m no different from anyone you make happy, you can love us all, so it’s not what I mean by love.” At last, it didn’t hurt; I was arch and unconcerned, and he smiled.

I shall never grow tired of, or familiar with, his beauty.

“I love you,” I said. “Let’s go. out to dinner. Do you mind? Will you pretend?”

“If you’re sure you want to spend money on it.”

“Yes, yes, I do. Tomorrow I’m back to a thousand.”

“I confess,” he said, “I rather like the taste of food.”

“You do?”

“Should I be ashamed, I wonder?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Most reprehensible.”

Our positions were reversed for an instant, our dialogue, our speech mannerisms. He was playing, but I had still learned.

“You’ve changed me,” I said. “Oh thank God you have.”

We went in, and I washed my hair. I’d hardly seen it since we’d started work. It had been bound up in scarves as I painted and glued things, and it was thick with dry shampoos because it takes so long to dry without a dryer when I wash it. But tonight I was lavish with the wall heater. As my hair began to dry before the painted mirror, I saw emerge among those blue hills and that tigerish foliage, a mane of light, the color of blond ash.

My mother had got something wrong. Or had she? Or the machines, perhaps, the coloressence charting. Or had my natural hair color simply altered as I grew older? Yes, that must be it, because—

“Oh,” I said, touching my hair, “it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful in a way it never was.”

“And that,” he said, “is your own.”

I put on one of my oldest dresses, which Egyptia once gave me, and which had been hers. Demeta hadn’t thought it suited me, and neither had I, but I’d kept it for the material, which was strange, changing from white to blue to turquoise, depending on how light struck. And tonight it did suit me, and I dared to put on the peacock jacket and buttoned it, and it fit. I was slim. I was slim and tall. And my hair was moonlight. And I wept.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why—”

“Yes you do,” he said. He held me until I began to laugh instead. “Poor Demeta,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“If I told you,” he said, “I was hungry, you wouldn’t believe me?”

“No. Tell me why my mother is supposed to be ‘Poor Demeta.’”

“I think you know. Look at your hair, and ask yourself if you do.”

But I was feverish and elated. I thrust thought aside and hurried us out of the building, through the streets which now I knew quite well, up onto the only partly moving escalator on South Arbor, to the flyer platform.

We sailed into the center of the city. I wasn’t afraid of meeting anyone. Part of me, perhaps, almost wanted to.

Who, after all, would know me? (And I forgot what he had said.)

As we sat in Hunger And Answer, eating charcoaled steak and tiny little roast potatoes shaped like stars, I thought: Now I can phone them, all of them. Egyptia, Clovis. My mother. The wine was red. It matched his hair. And like his own glamour, the wine didn’t interest him very much.

We walked home all across the city.

The ultimate leaves blew and crunched beneath our feet. The streets close to the Old River were shut off again, unless you bought those smelly throwaway oxy-masks at the cheek gate. We went over Patience Maidel Bridge though the center end had the Walk Fast notices up, and there were no buskers. When we got past the halfway mark, it was apparently clear, though empty. For some reason he and I started to sing, idiotic songs we made up as we walked, no longer fast, about the snarling fish in the purple water. Catch one for the cat—Oh hell—the fish has ate my cat—Oh well—dress the fish in fur—teach the fish to purr—kid me it’s the cat—Cat-fish can be swell.

The green light was on as we came off the bridge, and just as we moved down toward East Arbor, I saw there were two buskers. They weren’t performing, but seated on a rug, a boy and a girl, eating french fries out of a paper over a guitar with three broken strings.

Despite my thoughts of earlier, I hesitated. For they were Jason and Medea.

Once, a year ago, they’d done this before. It was a basic idea. Jason sang, rather badly, and Medea went around the crowd, if one was tone-deaf enough to gather, or if not, through the passersby with a plate. As she did so, she picked pockets. Usually she was caught out, or had been last time. Both were minors, but their father had had to pay a considerable fine.

“What’s wrong?” Silver asked, sensing how I held back.

“Some people I know, and don’t like.”

As we spoke, Jason looked up and right at me. An expression of astonishment went over his face. Very slowly, he nudged Medea. Their thin still eyes seemed to congeal identically. There was no other way but to walk on and meet them. Did they know about Silver? About me? About me and Silver? Or not?

“Hallo, Jane,” said Medea.

“Hallo, Jane,” said Jason.

I looked at them, pausing, my hand in Silver’s. The strength in his hand comforted me, though it seemed a long way off.

“Hallo,” I said. And then, rashly, coolly, “Do I know you?”

Jason laughed.

“Oh, I think so.”

“I think so,” said Medea. “Your name is Jane, isn’t it?”

“The bleached hair’s not bad,” said Jason. “And the diet. Does Mother know?”

Then they hadn’t been told I’d absconded from Chez Stratos. Or had they…

“Did you have a nice evening?” I inquired politely.

“Pickings were quite good,” said Medea flatly.

Jason smirked. He smirked beyond me, at Silver. Suddenly Jason’s smirk faltered.

I glanced at Silver. There was that look I’d seen before, like a metal mask, the eyes burning, impenetrable, fearsome. Circuits switching?

“Who’s your gorgeous actor friend?” said Jason. His voice didn’t quite sound as sure as it usually did. “Or is it a big seekwit?”

“Does your mother know?” repeated Medea.

I stood there, my skull quite empty, and Silver said to them in the most gentle and reasonable and truly deadly of voices, as if it were an analogy for their lives: “You have just dropped a chip inside the sound-box of your guitar, which won’t do either of them much good.”

“Oh, thanks for caring,” said Jason.

“Personally, I don’t like silver makeup,” said Medea. “What drama are you in? Or are you out of work? It must be nice for you that you met Jane.”

“Yes, Jane’s very rich, isn’t she,” said Jason. “We’re rich too, of course. But we don’t make friends with out-of-work actors.”

“But Jane’s such a softy,” said Medea.

“Luckily for you,” said Jason.

They stopped. They’d said all they could think of for the moment.

I knew none of this mattered, but it was still awful. I didn’t look at Silver anymore. I could feel the roughness of the embroidered cuff of his shirt, which we’d bought in the market three nights ago, against my wrist. I supposed it was up to me to make the move to get away. To Silver, this was irrelevant.

Then I began to see what was happening to Jason and Medea, and I started to be fascinated. They were wriggling, actually and definitely physically wriggling, their little hard eyes glaring at him and slithering off him. And Medea had gone a dreadful yellow color, while Jason’s tanned ears were turning red—I’d never seen anything like this happen to them before, even when they were children. And now their hands were plucking feebly at the french fries, they were gazing at the ground, their backs were stiffening as if in the grip of a horrible paralysis. I didn’t turn to Silver anymore. I realized that cruel annihilating look of his, which he said meant nothing, was still trained on them like a radioactive ray, mercilessly letting them shrivel beneath it.

It was Medea who finally managed to say, in a shrill, wobbly wire of a voice: “Why won’t he stop staring? Doesn’t he know it’s rude. Make him stop it.”

But it was Jason who scrambled suddenly to his feet. Not waiting to pick up the guitar, the ill-gotten gains, the chips, or even for Medea, he thrust by me and jumped hastily away onto the escalator up to the bridge. Medea, in a speechless frenzy, snatched the money and the guitar and bolted after him. I felt Silver turn to watch them go, as I had turned. Medea turned too, just once, though Jason didn’t. She was at the top of the escalator. Her face was a yellow bone triangle and her mouth hissed, or looked as if it did. Then she ran after Jason.

I was shaken too. I didn’t move until Silver slipped his other arm round me.

I knew his face had changed then, so I looked up at him.

“I thought,” I said, “you wanted everyone to be happy.”

“Don’t I?” he said.

“Your circuits were just switching over,” I said.

“Not exactly.”

“You meant to frighten them.”

“I meant to shut them up.”

“But why did it matter to you?”

“The temperature of your hand changed. It went very cold.”

“And I bought you, so your loyalty was to me. Like the Golder robot being a personal bodyguard,” I said, with amazing stiltedness.

His eyes, unblinking and jewellike, looked back at me. There was a long pause.

“Jane,” he said. But nothing else.

And I was suddenly afraid. At the meeting with the twins, at the uncanny thing he’d been able to do to them. Afraid of being here with him, afraid for him, and for myself.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“I think it’s time we walked on,” he said.

And he let go of me, even my hand, and we walked on. Like two lovers who’d quarreled. And the night was cold as knives.

The bed was cold that night, too, and we didn’t make love in it.

In the morning, just as the light started to come, I woke up. Silver was sitting cross-legged on the rainbow carpet. He was dressed, and his hair fell forward over his face because his head was bowed. He looked like a beautiful advertisement for psychosthetic meditation. But sensing me awake, he looked up. He smiled at me, but the smile wasn’t the same as at any other time before.

“Do you mind if I walk about outside for a while?”

Of course. He was my property and had to ask my permission.

“No…”

I couldn’t even say, “Are you all right?” He was a machine. Obviously he was all right. And just as obviously, something was wrong.

“I’ll be back in an hour.”

“No. Come back when you want to.”

“Will you,” he said, “be okay?”

“Yes. I have to buy some groceries and start the card off for this month. I’ll need change for the rent money.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“Oh no.” I sounded bright and self-sufficient.

He got up, sort of melting to his feet as if every muscle were elastic, and probably it is.

After he went, I was alone for the first time since he’d come with me from Egyptia’s. “Alone” now had a new meaning. It felt as if I’d been cut in half. Half of me was here in the apartment, and half out on the street walking about, only I didn’t know where.

I got up, wrapped myself in the emerald shawl from the couch, and made some lime-spice tea. I sat and looked out of the window, drinking the hot tea, watching the last rags of leaves falling like dead birds.

I tried to go over what had happened, how everything had been fine until we met Jason and Medea. And then—but what had happened then? All that kept coming into my mind, dredged up like Davideed’s silt, were those words of the vile Swohnson’s: This one doesn’t check out. Not that I’d really thought about that aspect, only its nightmarish result—Silver, his eyes replaced by wheels… Yet now, I began to see a curious unevenness, a strange incoherence. Sitting there, shivering over the tea, I pictured those other Sophisticated Format robots, the Coppers, the Golders, the two Silvers, that I’d seen performing at Electronic Metals. How lifelike they’d been, in appearance and in attitude; mannerisms, movements, speech. So lifelike, if you hadn’t known, you’d have taken them for men and women. And yet there was something, something which gave them away, maybe only when you knew, but something which told you they weren’t men, weren’t women. Something that told you they were machines. And did I imagine it, or was Silver, my Silver—S.I.L.V.E.R.—not like that at all? Was Silver truly like a human man, truly believable as human—even when you knew he wasn’t? And was it this which had set E.M.’s computers ticking on the checkout? Some sort of independence, beyond any autonomy, however profound, that they’d programmed into him?

But how? And why?

No, that wasn’t what concerned me. I was just afraid because I might lose him, lose him even though I owned him. He wasn’t a slave in Imperial Rome. And yet, he was a machine. He was, he was. And suddenly the enormity and the insanity of my emotions boiled up before my startled inner eye. I loved a machine. Loved it, trusted it, had rested the foundations of my world on it. And on the game I played that it could be kind to me.

I had a terrible feeling. As if I’d been walking in my sleep, and woken up in the middle of an unknown and deserted plain.

In a daze, I showered and dressed, and took up my purse with the credit card, and wandered out into the city. I had a kind of need for the proof of money. I had a need, too, to be out of the apartment. Maybe when I went back, my arms full of fruit and soap, Silver would be home and everything would be as it had been. Yes, this must be the way to break the spell.

It was raining in the city. As I crossed over from the elevated, robot ambulances screamed past me. Someone had been run over outside the Hot-Bake Shop. I felt a dreary depression and fear.

I went into one of the large stores off the boulevard, because I’d seen a crimson glass jar there that I wanted to buy for the bathroom. It was purely ornamental, and I see now I was still basically acting just like someone rich. I hoped the jar would stop me from feeling the incredible sense of dread, and when they gave it to me and I put it in the wire basket with the crackers and the nectarines, it almost did. I picked up some bath towels, too, and a paper knife from the second-owner counter. Then one of the ambulances went by the windows. I remembered the man who had been stabbed at the visual, and how it hadn’t bothered me, except somewhere inside, some sort of mental bottom drawer, where it had obviously bothered me a lot. I stood in the queue to pay. I was thinking, My mother taught me about self-analysis and so I should be able to analyze why I’m suddenly so scared of death or injury. And then I thought: When I get back, he’ll be there. He’ll be sitting on the couch playing the guitar. I had a picture of the winter, and the snow coming; of being snowed up in the apartment block with him, a sort of glorious hibernation. And then I had a picture of going home and finding him not there.

Then it was my turn at the checkout. It was automatic, in this store, but sometimes got cranky, and so there was a bored girl supervisor sitting nearby, painting her nails.

My goods ran through and the total rang up, and I put my card into the card slot. Instead of the bell sounding and the groceries card, and change coming out of the other end of the machine, a buzzer went sharply. A red light appeared over the card slot, and my card was regurgitated. As I stood there, the bored girl glanced over, got off her stool and walked up.

“Your card must be overdue.”

“No. It’s an indefinite monthly.”

She picked it out of the slot and looked at it.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

A thousand I.M.U. indefinite was probably unusual in this area, and I hoped she wouldn’t say the amount aloud. She didn’t.

“Let’s try again,” she said, and pushed my card back into the slot. And once more the buzzer went and the card was vomited out.

People were piling up behind me. They muttered, unfriendly, and I blushed like fire. Even though my heart was growing cold, I already knew what had happened.

“Well,” said the girl, “looks like someone’s blocked your account at the other end. Anyone have authority to do that?”

I reached for the card, blinded by shame and fright.

“Do you want to pay for your things in cash?” she asked lazily. She seemed to be holding the card just out of my reach. In a moment I might leave it with her and run away.

“I haven’t got enough money on me.”

“No,” she said. She gave me the card. She thought the people I worked for, since in this part of town generally only firms issue credit cards to employees, had fired me, and I’d been trying it on to get free groceries.

I walked out of the shop, guilt blazoned on my face, trembling. In the street I literally didn’t know which way to turn, and went randomly leftward, and so into another raining street, and so into another, without knowing or looking or caring where I was going.

Demeta, of course, had stopped my card as soon as she could, on the first of the month. Why not? She had every reason. I’d run away from home with scarcely a good-bye. I couldn’t expect to go on taking her money. I could see that now as clearly as I could see nothing else. How could I have reckoned to get away with it? It was some silly childhood thing that had prevented me from guessing. Some part of me had still believed the implication she’d always given me that, because I was her daughter, her money was mine. Stupid. Of course it wasn’t.

Why then was I hesitating at this phone kiosk, standing in the rain until the woman came out, and then moving in myself and closing the door. Altogether I had ten units left in cash. Not enough to pay my rent. More than enough to call my mother’s house.

Even as I put the coins in and pressed the buttons, I thought, But she’s so busy, she might not be there—and then I thought: She’ll be there. She’ll be sitting there waiting for this call. Waiting for my voice, for my frantic weeping words: Mother, Mother—help me!

And then I didn’t feel afraid anymore, only dreary and small and very tired. It was true, after all, wasn’t it? I’d rung her for help, for forgiveness, to plead with her, or beg her.

I leaned my forehead on the cold dank glass that someone had cracked on the outside with a stone. There was no video in this part of the city. She couldn’t see me. Was that good or bad? I counted the signals. She made me wait through twelve of them before she turned on the autoanswer that, left to itself, replies after two.

“Good morning. Who is calling, please?”

“Jane,” I said. Rain had fallen on my lips, and I tasted it for the first time as I spoke. Jane. A pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender pale chain—

“Please wait, Jane. I will connect you with Demeta’s studio.”

My humiliation had sunk, and I was hollow. I heard her voice presently. It was politely warm, almost approachable. It said: “Hallo, Jane.” Like the lift.

I clenched my hand so hard on the speaker of the phone it seemed to melt like wax in my grip.

Jain, Mother. Jain.

“Hallo, Mother,” I said. “Isn’t it lovely weather?”

An interval.

“I’m sure, dear,” she said, “you didn’t call me to discuss the weather.”

I smiled bitterly at my dim reflection, bisected by the crack.

“Oh, but I did. And to say hallo, Mother. Hallo, Mother.”

“Jane. Try to be sensible. Your recent actions have been rather unusual, and very unlike you. I’m hoping that this will be an adult exchange.”

“Mother,” I said, “I’m sixteen. Not twenty-six. Not ninety-six. Sixteen.”

“Indeed? Then why have you acted like a child of six?”

I shuddered. I’d drawn her. She’d lashed back at me, neatly and calmly—and decidedly. The rain drizzled. I could smell onions frying and wet pavements, and… La Verte. La Verte filled up the kiosk.

“I really just called you,” I said, “to tell you how happy I am.”

My eyes filled with tears, but I held them inside me, and they drained away.

“I’m sure you actually phoned me, dear, to ask why your monthly I.M.U. credit has been stopped.”

I felt a surge of awful triumph.

“Oh,” I said. “Has it?”

She wouldn’t believe me. She knew she spoke the truth and I was the liar. But still, she’d had to say it, and not me.

“Yes, Jane,” she said patiently. “Your account has been frozen. Permanently. Or until such time as I unfreeze it.”

I stood and watched the rain. My hand had left the speaker, and I was drawing a rabbit on the steamy flawed glass.

“Jane?” she said firmly.

“Mother, why did you call me ‘Jane’? I mean, why not Proserpina? That was Demeta’s daughter in the legend, wasn’t it? Didn’t you think I’d be glamorous enough to be called Proserpina, Mother?”

“Where are you?” asked my mother suddenly. It was a trick. I was meant to blurt out a location.

“In,” I said, “a phone kiosk.”

“And where is the kiosk?”

Too late, Mother.

“The kiosk is on a street, and the street is in a city.”

“Jane,” she said, “have you been taking an illegal drug of some kind?”

“No, Mother.”

“I don’t think, dear, that you quite understand your situation. Your card is inoperable. There is no other lawful way you can obtain money. I think I had better explain to you, in case you’re thinking of it, that finding a job of any sort will be next to impossible for you. To begin with, you will have to possess a labor card. Before any employment bureau will give you one, they will take a body print reading. They will then check you out and see that you are the daughter of a rich woman. Accordingly, they will ask me if I am prepared to support you. There’s a serious shortage of work, Jane, which I’ve no doubt even you are partially aware of. No one who doesn’t need to work is even considered. And when they ask me if I will support you, I will reply that of course I will, you are my chosen child. You have only to return home, and everything you need will be supplied, including money.”

“You once said,” I murmured, “that I ought to get a job in the city, to appreciate the struggle the poor go through.”

“With my sanction, that could have been arranged. Not, however, without it.”

It was warm in the kiosk, so warm the rabbit was running all down the glass.

“All you need to do,” said my mother, “is go into any bank, anywhere in the state, and identify yourself. You will then be able to draw the exact fare money to get you home.”

“Home,” I said.

“Home. I’ve already redesigned and refurnished your suite. You know me better than to think I would ever say anything about the state in which you left it.”

I burst out laughing.

“Jane. I must ask you, once more, to control yourself.”

“Mother, you’ve left me no choice but to become a thief. I’ll have to rob a store or take someone’s wallet.”

“Please don’t be silly, Jane. This sort of hysteria is distressing—however well I may be able to interpret your motivation, we are still mother and daughter. It’s my very concern for your inability to cope with real life that makes me insist you come back to the house. You know in your heart this is true, Jane, and that I’m only thinking of you.”

A cliché. Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say, Jane. The kiosk was hot and I couldn’t breathe. I put my hand inadvertently to my throat, and felt the policode, and I said: “Does my policode still work, Mother?”

“Yes, Jane,” she said. “For three more days. And then I’m withdrawing your print from the precinct computer.”

“That’s for my own good, too, is it?”

“You know the expression, Jane, I must be cruel only to be kind.”

“Yes,” I said. “Shakespeare. Hamlet.” I drew in a hard impossible breath. “Spoken by a lunatic who’s just killed an old man behind a curtain, and who has a deep-seated psychological desire to sleep with his mother.”

I slammed down the switch so violently I broke the skin and my hand started to bleed.

It was raining fiercely now. Vaguely through the rain I could see someone else was waiting outside to come in and use the phone.

It became a matter of enormous importance then, not to let them see my face or what sort of state I was in. Though I wasn’t even sure myself. So I pretended I hadn’t hit the switch, and went on listening, and talking to the receiver-speaker for a few moments. My face was burning, and my hands were cold. I couldn’t really think about what had just happened. “No, Mother,” I said to the dead phone.

“No, Mother. No.” I’d feel better when I got out of the stuffy kiosk. Better when I’d walked to the apartment, dodged the caretaker after the rent, gone, with my arms empty of packages, into the room empty of Silver. Of course, he wouldn’t be there. Perhaps he’d guessed. Perhaps robots picked up special telepathic communications from other machines. I wasn’t solvent. So he might be now with Egyptia, his rich legal owner. What was I going to do?

My head tucked down, I pushed open the door of the kiosk and almost fell out. The cold and the water hit me like a wave and I seemed to be drowning. Someone caught me, the person waiting for the phone, and a horrible embarrassment was added to my illness.

“I’m all right,” I insisted.

And then a scent, a texture, the touch itself—I looked up through the rain, and my head cleared and the world steadied—“You!”

“Me!”

Silver looked down at me, amused, compassionate, unalterable. His hair was nearly black with rain and plastered over his skull as if in the shower. Beads of rain hung and spilled from his lashes. His skin was made of rain.

“How did you—”

“I saw you come out of the store, when I was several blocks away. I could have caught you up, but I’d have had to run fast, and you want me to pretend I’m human, don’t you? So I walked after you, and waited till you finished your call.”

“Silver,” I said, “it’s all over. Everything’s hopeless. But I’m so glad you didn’t leave me.”

• 4 •

“Jane, if you need to cry, couldn’t you cry against me and not into that pillow?”

“Wh—Why?”

“Because the green stuff you covered it with obviously isn’t dye-proofed, and your face is acquiring a most abnormal green pattern.”

I started up and ran to the mirror. What I saw there made me laugh and weep together. I washed my face in the bathroom and came back. I sat down beside him.

“I don’t want to cry against you, or you to comfort me, or hold me anymore,” I said, “because soon I’ll have to do without you, won’t I?”

“Will you?”

“You know I will. I told you what happened. There’s no money. No food, no rent. No chance of work—even if I could do anything. I can’t stay here. And she—my mother—won’t let me bring you to the house, I’m sure of it. Even if she did, she’d sort of—what can I say?—dissect my feelings… She doesn’t mean to hurt me. Or—Oh, I don’t know anymore. The way I spoke to her was so odd. It wasn’t even like me, speaking. But I do know it’s hopeless.”

“I saw the caretaker,” Silver said. “I went down when you were crying your way through the shawls. He thinks we’re actors from a street company that’s folded. I didn’t tell him that, by the way, he told me. He was having a good day, no pain and no side-effects. He said we can sit on the rent for another week. Everyone else does, and at least you paid the first quarter.”

“But there won’t be any more money in a week.”

“There could be. And no need of a labor card, either.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

He drew the guitar to him, and reeled off a reeling wheel of a song, clever, funny, adroit, ridiculous, to the accompaniment of a whirling gallop of runs and chords. Breathless, I watched and listened. His eyes laughed at me. His mouth makes marvelous shapes when he sings and his hair flies about as if it’s gone mad.

“Throw me a coin, lady,” he said seductively, as he struck the last note.

“No. It must be illegal.”

“People do it all the time.”

“Yes, people. But you can do it better than people. It can’t be fair. Can it?”

“We won’t pitch where anyone else sings. We won’t ask for cash. We’ll just play around with some music and see what happens.”

“Supposing someone recognizes you—what you—are?”

“I have a suspicion,” he said, “that you’ll find it is legal. Look at it this way,” he stared at me seriously over the guitar, absurdist as only he could be. “You bought a performing seal that can do tricks no other performing seal can do. Then you run out of money. So you put the seal on the street with a ten-ton truck balanced on its nose, and you walk round with a hat.”

“You’re not a seal.”

“I don’t want a ten-ton truck on my nose, either.”

“It seems—I can’t imagine how it could work out.”

He put the guitar aside, took my hands and held them under his chin. He looked up into my face.

“Listen,” he said, “is it just that you’d prefer to go back to your house in the clouds? If I’ve stopped amusing you, if you’re no longer happy—”

“Happy?” I cried. “I was only ever happy with you. I was only ever alive with you!”

“Are you sure? Because you have a number of options. If you’re simply worrying about my side of things, let me remind you, for the hundredth time, that I’m a robot. My function is service, like any piece of metal junk you buy in a corner store to shell eggs.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“It’s true.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is.”

He lowered his head to rest it in my hands. His face was hidden, and my fingers were full of his hair. And suddenly, with a little still shock, I knew what had happened, was happening, only I couldn’t quite believe it, either, and I wondered if he knew and if he believed it. “Silver,” I said so softly I could hardly hear myself, but his hearing would pick up a whisper. Perhaps even a soundless whisper. “The first time you saw me, what did you think?”

“I thought: Here is another customer.”

“Silver, the awful way you looked at me when I said that terrible thing to you—because I was afraid and confused—that was the same look you turned on Jason and Medea last night.”

“Maybe. Perhaps you taught me the value of it, as a means of antisocial behavior.”

“You reacted against them and for me.”

“I told you why.”

“And I told you why, but that isn’t enough.”

“Jane, we went through this a number of times. My reactions aren’t human. I can’t object to playing human here, because you asked me to, and there are good reasons. But when I’m alone with you, you’re going to have to accept—”

“No,” I said, still softly, “you’re the one who’s going to have to accept that you are not acting like a robot, a machine. That you never really have.”

He let go of my hands, and walked by me and stood looking out of the window. The embroidered shirt showed new pleats and tensions in the fabric that described the tension in his shoulders. Human tension.

“And you find it disturbing,” I said. “But please don’t. It isn’t anything bad. How could it be?”

He said nothing, so I stopped talking. I took up my brush and began to brush my still-wet hair, in long crackling strokes. And at each stroke I said to myself: I don’t care if it’s against the law. He’ll sing and I’ll collect the cash, just like Medea. Because I can’t let this go. Not ever. Especially not now. Not now.

When I finished brushing my hair, he had come away from the window and was standing in the middle of the room, looking at me. His face was truly serious now, and very attentive, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

“Of course,” I said, “if I do stay, my mother may hire men to track me down and drag me to her house.” It was meant as a sort of joke.

He said, “Your mother would never do that. She doesn’t want to publicize the fact that she hasn’t got the totally balanced, perfect, well-adjusted, enamored, brainwashed mindless child she intended.”

“How cruel you can be,” I said, astonished. “Crueler than Clovis. I think because Clovis’s cruelty is based on untruths.”

Relinquishing the window mood, Silver: smiled at me. He sat down on the couch, and said, “Brush my hair.” So I went to him and did just that, and felt him relax against me, and I thought about every moment I had spent with him, through and through.

“You have a beautiful touch,” he said at last.

“So do you.”

“Mine is programmed.”

And I smiled, too, with a crazy leaping inside me, because now it seemed he was protesting far too much. But I let him get away with it, magnanimous and in awe.

“What’s the best way for me to persuade money from the crowd?” I asked.

“So the lady agrees.”

“Yes. Do I walk round the edge, or just stand there?”

“I thought it was wrong to take their money as I’m so much better than a human performer?”

Of course I had triggered the change in him. By admitting that I thought him a robot—even when, really, I never, never had… How cunning of me, how psychologically sound. And I’d never even figured out what I was doing.

“I don’t care anymore,” I strategically said.

“Whatever we use to collect the money will be on the ground. Don’t forget, you’ll be singing too.”

I almost dropped the brush.

“I will?”

“Of course you will.”

“I can’t sing.”

“You can sing. I’ve heard you.”

“No.”

“Think of the human element it will add,” he said. “You have a natural instinct for spontaneous harmony. Half the time you sing with me, you slip into effective and very original descants. Didn’t you know you were doing it?”

“That’s—because I can’t hold the tune—”

“Not if it’s perfectly in harmony it isn’t. You’re a natural.”

“I—those were just fun. I’m no good at—”

“Was it, by any chance,” he said to me quietly, “Demeta who told you you couldn’t sing?”

I paused, thinking. I couldn’t remember, and yet—

“I just never thought I could.”

“Take it from me you can.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“How do you know you don’t?”

I had lost my omnipotence for sure.

“I can’t,” I squeaked. “I can’t.”

He smiled.

“Okay.”

At midday the rain stopped. The world was wet and grey and luminous and complaining as we went out into it, he wrapped in the red-black cloak, with the guitar slung from his shoulder, I in my now very grubby fur jacket and my now very grubby jeans with bright pretty accidental paint dabbings all over them. At intervals, as we walked off Tolerance, along the boulevard, under the elevated, I said to him: “I can’t, Silver.”

And he replied lightly, “Okay.”

People passed us, splashing and slopping through the craters in the streets that had turned into ponds and lakes. Some of the flat roofs were reservoirs, with picturesque waterfalls down onto the pavements below. It was the kind of day to hurry home on, not to walk out into. And helplessly I remembered days at Chez Stratos, curled up in the warm library with a book, or in the Vista eating candies while music tapes played, the cold unfriendly sky furling and unfurling like metallic cream, the rain falling like spears, while I was safe from the weather, safe in my cocoon, while I waited for my mother to come home. And: “Mother, can we have hot buttered toast?” And Demeta, recognizing my childish foible for classic home comforts, agreeing. And one of the spacemen wobbling in with a tray of china tea and toast and strawberry-and-orange jam. And my mother would tell me what she’d done, and I’d laugh up at her, and she’d ask me what I’d done, and I’d tell her, but what I’d done was also so boring, and I knew it was, and I’d hurry over it so as not to bore her. I knew she was bored, you see. Not with me, exactly. And she camouflaged it very well, but I could sense the camouflage somehow. And I’d have vague daydreams about doing something astonishingly interesting, and interesting her—like going back to college and reading comparative religions and traveling to South America, or what was left of it, and returning with a thesis, which I’d then read in public, and she’d be proud of me. And when we’d eaten the toast, she’d kiss me and go away to her study to do something incredibly erudite and worthwhile. And I’d fall asleep on the soft carpet, with the rain and the wind swirling in the balcony-balloons unable to harm me.

I adored my mother. But I was afraid of her. And I’d begun to see—just what exactly had I begun to see? See through the medium of my lover. My mechanical, not mechanical, my beautiful, my wonderful lover. Who said: Demeta is also afraid of you. Demeta has tried to cut you out like a pattern from a pattern book, only you didn’t quite fit. And so here I was with him, advancing along the wet chilly sidewalk, without any money. But I had only to go into any bank in the state to get my fare to my mother’s house. Think of that. Then think of how he had lain back against me as I brushed his hair, his eyes closed. He’d said, “You have a beautiful touch.” He’d said, “I like the taste of food.” He’d stared out of the window, unable or unwilling to reply, when I’d told him: You don’t act like a robot. You never really have.

Confused, almost happy, almost terrified, I saw my reflection go by with his in the glass fronts of shops. (Superstition. He doesn’t have a soul, therefore, he shouldn’t have a reflection, or cast a shadow.) My reflection was of a new Jane with barley blond hair, and slim, absurdly slim. My waist was now twenty-two inches. One of the many reasons why my jeans looked so awful was that I’d had to dart them—badly—to stop them from falling around my ankles.

So why shouldn’t I sing in the street? That was interesting, wasn’t it? More interesting than studying religions. Mother, I am a street singer.

I remembered dimly, singing as a child, sitting in the Chevrolet as my mother drove us somewhere. And after a while, she said, “Darling, I’m so glad you like that song. But try to hit the right notes, dear.” Sometimes I’d pick out tunes on the piano, and simple left-hand accompaniments, but only when she wasn’t able to hear them. My mother’s playing was brilliant. I’d known I was musically clumsy. No, when I’d sung with him I’d been so relaxed some quality came from me that wasn’t usually there. Sort of by mistake. But in public—in public I’d panic. I’d be dreadful. Rather than give us money they’d throw stones, or call the police.

We reached an arcade, warm-lit from the shops that lined it either side. A partly-roofed alley ran off through an arch between two stores. It was a wide alley, and people turned into it to avoid the cold, still-dripping sky. They also went up and down the arcade for the same reason. A good place for a pitch, even I could see that.

Silver strode into the entrance of the arch, as if he owned it and had come there every day for three hundred years.

As he brought the guitar around on its cord, I hissed nervously, “What do I do?”

He regarded me with astonishment.

“You mean you’re not going to sing?”

“Silver.”

“You can’t. All right. You stand by me and silently appeal to the heterosexual male element in the passersby. The cookie jar, by the way, goes on the ground. There will do.”

I put down the jar. I had a vision of myself standing there like a blancmange, and feeling even more embarrassed than if I’d sung. A grey rainy misery overcame me, after all. He’d been willing to do this alone, presumably. To earn money to keep me, my pet seal, my slave, my egg-shelling machine. I should have let him. Damn. How could I?

The first chord made me jump. It also alerted the attention of some of the people splashing about in the arcade. Not all, of course. Buskers are so common downtown.

Then he started to sing. It was a song I’d heard him sing before, about a train running somewhere, an old train that blew hot smoke and steam out of its stack. The melody rattled and bounded with the train. It was wild and cheering, a perfect song to diffuse the grey hapless day. (I found I wasn’t embarrassed, I was enjoying the song too much.)

I leaned on the alley wall, and partly shut my eyes. People might think I was just a hooked passerby. The song made me laugh inside, smile outside. Then I saw people stop. Four of them now, standing around the arch mouth. Someone came in from the grey end, and paused, too. When the first coin hit the inside of the jar, I jumped, and guiltily peered at it, trying to pretend I wasn’t. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a start.

It was odd how quickly I got used to it. Really odd, as if sometime I might have done it before. But I suppose that’s just because I’ve watched street performers a lot. I recalled their dignity in the face of the many who just walk by, or who listen and then walk by, giving nothing. And their equal dignity in the face of the gift. Once Clovis threw a whole sheaf of bills to a young man juggling fantastically with rings and knives and oil-treated burning tapers which somehow he always caught by the unlit end—to accompanying gasps from the crowd. And the young man, who I think Clovis found very attractive, called out to him, in the midst of the whirling blades and flames, in an accent that was real: “Merci, beau monsieur.”

Silver played, perfectly, of course, tirelessly, of course, on and on. Suddenly there were about fifty people squeezed in around the alley, and a coin had hit the inside of the jar and bounced out again since there was no room for it anymore. This time the busker’s etiquette failed me. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t very well tip the jar in my purse in front of fifty people, but on the other hand, a full jar might deter further giving. I lost the end of the song, worrying. Was brought back by a burst of applause.

Silver stopped playing, bowed to the audience, stifling my heart with his sheer medieval beauty of gesture. I felt safe under the umbrella of his personality. Who would notice me? No one in the crowd seemed prompted to move. The only movement came from two women, stealing in at the back of the alley to join it. None of them could have any work to go to, or else it was a rest day for them. That must be it, for surely the unemployed wouldn’t throw money. Or perhaps mostly they hadn’t, wouldn’t, just wanted to be entertained for free.

But it was unusual for a performer to draw such a big static crowd. Clever to pick this position. As yet none of the surrounding stores had had their doorways blocked, and so wouldn’t complain.

The crowd was waiting to see what Silver would do next.

He played a few notes on the guitar, as if considering, and then he said,

“This is the request spot, ladies and gentlemen. Request a song, and I’ll sing it. However, each song costs a quarter, paid in advance.”

Some of the crowd giggled with affront. I tensed. I’d been given no inkling of this—naturally I’d have argued. A rangey man called out:

“Suppose someone pays you a quarter and doesn’t like the way you do the song, huh?”

Silver fixed him with his fox-colored eyes, cool and tantalizing and playful.

“The quarter,” he said, with graceful maleficence, “is always returnable. As is the coat button you kindly gave us ten minutes ago.”

The man opened his mouth foolishly and the crowd laughed loudly. Somebody prodded the man, yelling, “Pay up, stingy bastard,” but Silver broke in, clearly and sweetly: “The button counts as payment. Even buttons are useful. We only draw the line at fruit pits and dried dog turds. Thank you. First request.”

They surged and muttered, and then a woman called out the name of some dull love-song from a theatrical that had recently won critical acclaim. Silver nodded, tuned the guitar, and played half a bar. The woman threw him a quarter daringly, and Silver caught it, and placed it neatly on the ground where the copper had previously fallen. Then he sang the song, and it became sad and meaningful.

When he finished, there was a long pause, and someone said to the woman, did she want her quarter back, and she came through the crowd and put a bill in Silver’s hand, and walked briskly away and out of the arcade. Her face was pink and her eyes were wet. Obviously the song meant something special to her. Her reaction disturbed me, but I hadn’t got time to concentrate on that, for there was another request, and another.

Some of them put the quarters in my hand, so they knew I was his accomplice. But I grew used to that. My feet were two blocks of ice, solid in my boots, and my back ached from standing. I didn’t know how long we’d been there. I felt dizzy, almost high, as if my body and my mind were engaged in two different occupations.

He must have sung twenty songs. Sometimes bits of the crowd went away. Generally more people accumulated. Then someone tried to catch him, asking for a song I didn’t think existed.

“I never heard of that,” said Silver.

“No one did,” a voice shouted.

“But,” said Silver, “I can improvise a song to fit the title.”

They waited, and he did. It was beautiful. He’d remember it, too. He never forgets any song, copied or invented.

A silver coin hit the wall behind my head and sprang down next to the jar. Excited, the crowd was getting rough.

“Thank you,” Silver said, “but no more missiles, please. If you put out my girlfriend’s eye, she won’t be able to see to count the cash tonight.”

His girlfriend. Stupidly I reddened, feeling their eyes all swarm to me. Then the rangey man who’d apparently given us the coat button, but was still there, called:

“Here’s my request. I want to hear her sing.”

It was so awful I didn’t believe my ears, didn’t even feel afraid. But, “Come on,” said the button man. “She’s got a voice, hasn’t she? When’s she going to sing?”

At which sections of the crowd, enjoying the novelty of it all, began to shout in unison that they wanted me to sing, too.

Silver glanced at me, and then he raised his hand and they ceased making a noise.

“She has a sore throat today,” said Silver, and my blood moved in my veins and arteries again. Then he added, “Maybe tomorrow.”

“You going to be here tomorrow?” demanded the button man.

“Unless asked to move elsewhere.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow then,” said the button man, morosely.

He turned to shoulder out of the crowd, and Silver called dulcetly to him.

“To hear the lady sing costs more than to hear me.”

The button man glared at him.

“Oh, why?”

“Because,” said Silver reasonably, “I think she’s worth more than I am, and I’m setting the prices.”

The button man swore, and the crowd approved Silver’s chivalry. And I stood in a bath of icy sweat, staring at the money on the ground by the jar.

Silver accepted two more requests, and then, to howls of protest, said the session was over for the day. When they asked why, he said he was cold.

When the crowd had filtered away, Silver divided the money between the inner pockets of the cloak and my purse. A muffled clanking came from both of us, like a distant legion on the move, and I said grimly, “We’ll be mugged.”

“We haven’t earned that much.”

“This is a poor area.”

“I know.”

“My policode soon won’t work. And you couldn’t stop anyone if they attacked us.”

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“Oh, why not?”

“You’re not programmed for it. You’re not a Golder.” Why did my voice sound so nasty?

He said, “You might be surprised.”

“You surprise me all the time.”

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing. Everything. It’s all so easy for you. How you must despise us. Putty in your hands. Your metal hands.” I was crying slightly, again, and didn’t really know what I was saying, or why. “That man will come back. He’s the type. He’ll come back and bully me.”

“He fancies you. If you don’t want to sing, we’ll just ignore him.”

“You can. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not. I trusted you, and you let them all think I’d sing. After I said—”

“I let them all think you might. You don’t have to. It’s a wonderful gimmick. The mysterious dumb blonde—dumb, I hastily add, in the vocal sense. Your earning ability will soar. In a month’s time, if you just sang a line of ‘Happy Birthday,’ they’d go wild.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I am idiosyncratically silly.”

“Shut up,” I said.

He froze, turned up his amber eyes, and stood transfixed, a mechanism switched off.

“Damn you,” I said, as once before. “I shouldn’t be with you. It’s all a game to you. You don’t feel, and you don’t understand. Do you laugh at me inside your metal skull?” My voice was really awful now, and the words it said, awful, awful. “You’re a robot. A machine.” I wanted to stop. Pale memories of what I’d thought earlier, my triumph, my joy at the sudden human vulnerability I’d glimpsed in him, seemed only to increase my need to—to hurt him. I’d been hurt. Someone’s hurt me, hurt me, and I never knew. So now I’ll hurt you if I can. “A circuit engages,” I said, “and a little light comes on.” There was fear, too. After all, it might be true, mightn’t it? “The light says: Be kind to Jane. To stupid Jane. Pretend she can sing. Pretend she’s nice in bed. Pretend, pretend, ’cos otherwise she’ll send you back to Egyptia, who knows exactly what you are. Egyptia who puts you in the robot storage at night because she prefers real human men. But Jane’s maladjusted. Jane’s twisted. Jane’s kinky for robots. Gosh, what luck. Jane’ll keep you, let you make believe you’re human, too. Plain Jane, always good for a snigger.”

I was trembling and shivering so much the coins in my purse sounded like a cash register in an earthquake. He was looking at me but I wouldn’t look at him.

“The reason,” he said, “why I packed up the session here was that I could feel you freezing to death beside me. We’ll get you back to the apartment, and I’ll do the next stint alone. The market’s probably a good place.”

“Yes. They love you there. And you can go home with one of the women. Or with a man. And make them happy.”

“I would prefer to make you happy.” His voice was perfectly level. Perfect.

“You’d fail.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry. You don’t have any emotions to be sorry with.”

That’s enough, I said to myself. Leave it. None of this is true.

Yes, I said to myself. He’s fooled you all this while, played with you, made a clown of you, the way he played with the crowd.

Isn’t this clever, I said to myself. To keep on and on about his unhumanness, on and on until he feels it like a knife.

I was either terribly cold or terribly hot, and my legs were leaden. I wanted to sit down and there was only the dank paving, so I sat on that. And next second he’d pulled me to my feet. Holding me by the arm hard enough to hurt me, he propelled me into the arcade and through it, and back into the outer streets. Wise move, robot. You guessed—computed—I’d be quieter out here, where it’s less private.

The sun was low, burning out over Kacey’s Kitchens, like one of their molecular stoves.

There was a bus and he pulled me onto it. We had to stand. The bus felt like a furnace and people came between us as we hung on the rails. I could see him then, his pale only faintly metallic face, staring out of the windows at nothing. His face was fixed, cold, and awesome. I would have been afraid of that face on anyone else. But because it was him, I couldn’t be afraid. And my anger died in me, and my mistrust, and a deep sickness came instead. A sickness at myself. A sickness that I couldn’t express to him, or to me.

We got off at the boulevard and walked to Tolerance, and into the apartment block and up the stairs. Neither of us spoke. The apartment looked icy, even its jewel colors were numbed.

I walked in and stood with my back to him.

I started to say something then, I don’t recall what, and in the middle of it the door quietly closed, and I turned, for I knew he was on the wrong side of it. I heard the coins, but not his feet, sound as he went down the stairs, and one strange hollow plunking note from the guitar, when his cloak must have brushed its strings.

He’d gone to earn the rent money for me. The food money, for me. The clothing money. For me. I knew that he’d stand in the grey afternoon that was now deepening to a greyer twilight, singing out gold notes, amber songs, silver and scarlet and blue. Not because I’d bought him, not because he was a slave. But because he was kind. Because he was strong enough to put up with my disgusting weakness.

I was ill with the cold, and wrapping myself in the rugs from the bed, sat in front of the wall heater.

I thought about my mother. About me. How the sperm was put inside her by a machine, and how I was withdrawn by another machine in the Precipta method. And how I was incubated, and how she breast fed me because it would be good for me—her milk taken from her by a machine, and put into my mouth by a machine. There were so many machines involved, I might have been a robot, too.

I thought about Silver. About his face, so fixed, so passionless. “You don’t have any emotions.” And I thought about his look of pleasure when I laughed, or in bed with me, or when he sang. Or when the sun shone through the girders in the subsidence, gilding them, and three wild geese darted like jets over the sky.

It got dark, and I lit some of the candles and drew closed the blue curtains. I thought how this morning he had left me, and I’d been afraid he wouldn’t come back. I wondered if I was afraid of the same thing now, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Only so cold, and so sick of myself.

I got into the bed and fell asleep. I dreamed I sang to a huge crowd, hundreds of them, and I sang badly, but they cheered. And Silver said to me in the dream: “You don’t need me anymore now.” He was all in pieces, wires, wheels, clockwork.

I woke up slowly, not with a start, not in terror, and my eyes were dry. I felt resigned, but I wasn’t sure to what. I also felt calm. I’d picked up some sort of chill, some minor ailment, a sign only of my physical inadequacy. That’s why things had looked so bad. I felt a lot better now, physically.

I slept, and woke up much later. I could tell it was much later, much, much later.

Finally I got dressed and went down to the phone in the foyer, and dialed for the time. It was three in the morning, and he hadn’t come back.

• 5 •

All kinds of things went through my mind. Not one of them, anymore, that he’d—ultimate autonomy—left me. But I began to consider what I’d said about muggings, and though he was amazingly strong, I wondered how he’d make out against a gang of ten or eleven desperate maniacs. Even if his programming would allow him to defend himself, where it might allow him to defend me. What on earth would happen if someone hit him with a club and mechanical parts rolled all over the street? It was macabrely funny, and somehow didn’t seem to fit. Despite my knowledge and my words, and my dreams, he remained mortal for me.

Then too, my calmness stayed with me through all of that. Also my mother’s training in psychological analysis.

I realized I’d begun to analyze him, then, like a man I knew.

The analysis said, quite bluntly, He hasn’t been mugged. You did hurt him. He has, or has acquired, emotions. The gambit now is to worry and to hurt you. Return in kind. The way only a human would do it. But maybe he doesn’t even know it’s human, or that it’s what he’s doing. So he can’t handle it.

I was surprised by the revelation, and made drunken. I was running a slight temperature and wasn’t aware of it, but the fever was undoubtedly what made me so elated and so sure and so calm in the face of such weirdness.

I put on my boots and my peacock jacket, and my fur jacket over the top. Then I looked at myself in the mirror.

“Where are you going, Jane? Sorry. Jain.”

“To find Silver.”

“You don’t know where he is.”

“Yes, I do. He’s at the market, singing under the fish-oil flares.”

“Oh Jain. That’s brilliant. I never knew you were brilliant. The all-night market. Of course, there are two…”

“It’s the first one.”

“Yes it probably is.”

“Before you go, Jane.”

“Yes, Jain?”

“Make me up.”

So I stood before the mirror, and she made me up. She was pale as snow, with a soft fever-rouge in the cheeks. Her lids became silver from a tube of eyeshadow. And then she made my lashes thick and black as midnight bushes from a tube of mascara. We painted each other’s mouth, sensual, alluring, a translucent amber.

The fever gave us the steadiest hands we ever had.

I ran out on the street. I ran up Tolerance. At the corner of the boulevard I saw the Asteroid, and it made me laugh.

In one of the streets I started to sing, and for the first time, because my voice seemed to come from somewhere else, I heard my voice. It rang light as a bell through the frosty air. It was thin and pure. It was—

“She’s happy,” someone said, going by.

“She’s got a nice voice, even if she is blind drunk.”

Thank you, my unknown and friendly critic.

The market exploded before me, day-bright and golden.

Silver’s in the gold. Look for fire, look for the sun’s rising.

Lucifer. I should have called you that. An angel. A wicked angel. Bringer of light. But it’s too late now. I’ll never call you anything but Silver.

He was singing, and so I heard him, and so I found him. The crowd about him was thick, but I saw his face at last, between their shoulders. It was like the second time I ever saw him. Oh my love, my love. His face, bowed to the guitar as he made love to it. There’s a kind of beam, a ray that he draws to him. He draws all the energy of the crowd, and contains it within him, and then focuses it out again upon them. A ray like a star, a sun. I could see it now. I could see what it was. He wasn’t human and he wasn’t a machine. He was godlike. How dare I want to alter him? It didn’t matter if I couldn’t alter him. Not anymore. But to be with him, to love him—that mattered.

The song finished. The crowd roared. He looked up, and he saw me, right through the crowd, as he had seemed to see me that second time, as I think he did, after he sang “Greensleeves” in the Gardens of Babylon. And now his face grew still, so still it might be questioning. What did I do? What should I do? I knew. I remembered how he had been with me. I walked through the crowd. I walked up to him and brushed his hand very gently with my hand. “Hallo,” I said. And I stood by him, turning to confront, or to meet the crowd. A heap of coins and bills lay all over the ground. And now someone shouted for a particular song. Silver glanced at me, and hesitated. “You told me,” I said. “I trust you.”

He struck the chord, and started to sing. I came in on the third word, and straight into a harmonic I’d sung so often, it was easy. As I did, I caught the faintest spray of approval from the crowd. It was good. Silver didn’t check, or even look at me. The crowd began to clap in time with the rhythm.

I heard our voices go up together, his voice, hers. They had the same colors as our hair, his fire, auburn, darker, richer. Mine transparent and pale, a blond chain of notes. Chain. Jain. A Jain voice. And it was beautiful.

When the song ended, the crowd stamped and yelled. And I knew they were yelling and stamping for me too. Coins fell. But the sounds were far away. I wanted it to go on. I wanted to sing again. But Silver shook his head at the crowd. It began to melt away. It seemed to go very quickly. I think I wanted to call it back.

Then a woman came pushing through. She handed Silver a mug of something which steamed, and had an alcoholic scent.

“That’ll keep out the cold,” she said. She saw me. “Well, if it isn’t Blondie. Got the jacket on, I see.” My topcoat was open; this was the woman from the clothing stall. “Didn’t know you were here, or I’d have brought a drop for you.”

“She can share mine,” said Silver, and handed me the mug.

I drank. It was coffine, but it had brandy in it.

“Nice jacket,” said the woman, letting the remnants of the crowd, and any who passed, know where it came from. Obligingly, I slipped off the fur, and let the peacocks shine forth on the market.

“Wonderful value,” I said, loud and clear. “And so warm—”

“A bit too warm,” said the woman. She touched my forehead. “Not too bad, but you ought to get home.”

“My mother used to do that,” I said.

“She ought to be in bed,” the woman said to Silver. She winked. I suddenly knew she and he weren’t in some sexual conspiracy. We all were in it, it included me. So I laughed.

Silver was fastening my fur jacket.

“I’m packing up for the night,” he said.

“I should think so,” she said, “you’ve made enough. But you’re good for business, I’ll say that. And I liked that song. That song about the rose. How does it—?”

He sang it to her as he thrust the money in a thick cloth bag.

“A rose by any other name would get the blame for being what it is—the color of a kiss, the shadow of a flame.”

It was an improvisation. I rested against the golden night, and I added in my own, my very own strange new voice, extending his melody: “A rose may earn another name, so call it love, so call it love I will. And love is like the sea, which changes constantly, and yet is still the same.”

The woman looked at me.

Silver said, “That verse is Jane’s verse.”

“Love is like the sea. I love him,” I said to the woman. The brandy filled my head and the fever my blood.

“Well, love off home,” she said, grinning at us.

We walked out of the market, and he had me under a fold of his cloak, as if I were literally under his wing.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“A mild and minor human disease,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I wanted to be with you.”

“Why did you sing?”

“Did I sing?”

His arm held me.

“You’ve got through some barrier in yourself.”

“I know. Isn’t it ridiculous.”

The walk home went in a moment. Or seemed to. As we went up the cement steps, Silver said, “We’ve got half the rent now. I think we can risk buying doughnuts for breakfast.”

We went into the apartment. I’d left the heater on, and ten candles burning, wasteful and dangerous. But it didn’t matter.

“I’m going to buy silver makeup,” I said. “And make my skin like yours. How silly that will be. Will it annoy you?”

“No.”

I sat on the couch and found I was lying on it. It was strange, I could feel my temperature actually going down. I was leveling, the way a flyer does as it approaches a platform. I knew I wasn’t ill, wouldn’t get ill. I knew everything, would be all right.

Silver’s cloak and the guitar were leaning together against the wall catching candle glints on wood and folds, the way they would in a painting or an artistic photograph. Silver was sitting next to me, looking at me intently.

“I am all right,” I said. “But how nice you care.”

“Don’t forget,” he said, “you’re all that stands between me and Egyptia’s robot storage.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was subconsciously and consciously trying to drive you into feeling human.”

I thought he’d laugh. He didn’t. He looked down at my hand in his. The light seemed to darken, intensify, which perhaps was because some of the candles were burning out.

“I do feel human,” he said at last. “I’m supposed to feel human, in order to act in a human manner. But there are degrees. I know I’m a machine. A machine that behaves like a man, and partly feels like a man, but which doesn’t exactly emote like a man. Except that, probably very unfortunately, I have gained emotional reflexes where you’re concerned.”

“Have you?” I said softly. I believed him. There was no doubt in me. I felt amazingly gentle.

“Viewed logically,” he said, “all that’s happened is that I’m responding to your own response. You react to me in a particular way, an emotive way. And I react to your reaction. I’m simply fulfilling your need, if you like.”

“No, I don’t like. I’m tired of your fulfilling my needs. I want to fulfill yours. What do you need, Silver?”

He raised his eyes and looked at me. His eyes seemed to go a long way back, like sideways seas, horizontal depths…

“You see,” he said, “nobody damn well says ‘What do you need?’ to a bloody robot.”

“There is some law which forbids me to say it?”

“The law of human superiority.”

“You are superior.”

“Not quite. I’m an artifact. A construct. Timeless. Soulless.”

“I love you,” I said.

“And I love you,” he said. He shook his head. He looked tired, but that was my imagination, and the fluttering light. “Not because I can make you happy. If I even can. Not for any sound mechanical pre-programmed reason. I just Goddamn love you.”

“I’m glad,” I whispered.

“You’re crazy.”

“I want,” I said, “to make you happy. You have that need in you. Well, it’s just the same in me.”

“I’m only three years old, remember,” he said. “I have a lot of ground to make up.”

I kissed him. We kissed each other. When we began to make love, it was just the same, just as marvelous as it always was. Except that now I didn’t think, didn’t concentrate on what was happening to me. The wonderful waves of sensation passed over and through me, and I swam in them, but the promise of light I swam toward on the horizon was altered. It wasn’t mine.

I don’t think I’d have presumed, even considered it, unless I’d drunk brandy on an empty stomach and with a slight benign fever, in the aftermath of my mother’s rejection and my public song. It seems rather unbelievable even as I write it down. I know you won’t believe me, even though you know what I’m going to say. If you ever read this, if I ever let you read it.

I don’t want to, won’t describe every action, every murmur. Egyptia would. Read her manuscript—there won’t be one, she pours her life like champagne through your video phone.

Only suddenly, when I no longer even knew for sure, the road or the way, or how I was idiot enough even to dream of it, lulled and almost delirious, and yet far far from myself, out of my body and somehow in his body—all at once I knew. In that instant, he raised himself and stared down at me in a kind of bewilderment. In the veiled, multi-colored light, his face was almost agonized, closing in on itself. And then he lay down on me again, and I felt his body gather itself, tense itself as if to dive through deep waters. His hair was across my eyes, so I shut them, and I tasted the silken taste of his hair in my mouth. I felt what happened to him, the silent, violent upheaval shaking itself through him. Earthquake of the flesh. I was the one who cried out, as if the orgasm were mine. But my body was only shaken with his pleasure and my pleasure in his pleasure. So I knew what he’d known before, the joy in my lover’s joy.

The silence was very long, and I lay and listened to the candle wax crackling in the saucers. As I listened, I kissed him, his hair, his neck; I stroked him, held him.

Eventually, he lifted himself again. He lay on one elbow, looking down at me. His face was unchanged. Amused, tender, contemplative.

“Technically,” he said, “that just isn’t possible.”

“Did something happen? I didn’t notice.”

“Of course,” he said quietly, “a human man would have left you proof. You’ll never be sure it wasn’t—”

“Faked? I’ve heard so much about you. I know how it goes when you fake. Not like that. As for proof, it’s just as well there isn’t any. Along with everything else, I missed my contraception shots last month.”

“Jane,” he said, “I love you.”

I smiled. I said, “I know.”

He lay down next to me, and for another hour at least I was drowsily making up songs in my head, before I fell asleep.

So, we’re at the end of the story now. If you read so far. You don’t want to know any more of what we say to each other, or how we feel about each other. And I don’t need to write about it. The record—it is a record—is for… ? Even Silver hasn’t seen it, though he knows I’ve written it. But maybe, it’s a record for people who fall in love with machines. And—vice versa.

I write songs. I always could, and didn’t credit it. I can improvise sometimes, too. I am very good with hideous puns.

They groan, and they pay. The man who gave us a button, gives me another button. The first time he heard me sing, he gave us two, the double price Silver had stipulated.

Sometimes I see myself, a sort of bird’s-eye view of me in the distance, doing these things, singing solos and harmonies, playing at the crowd, and with the crowd. Sometimes it’s two hundred strong. And I’m astounded—is this me? But of course it isn’t. This is Jain. Jain with her blond hair, her twenty-two-inch waist, her silver skin, her peacock jacket, her cloak of emerald green velvet, lined with violet satin. It was as if a skin encased me. I could only just see through it. Then the skin tore wide open.

One month and a half now we’ve lived here in this wonderful squalid place.

It snowed yesterday and today, early, fierce snow, so we stayed in. We made love and homemade wine. The latter nearly blew the kitchen hatch off when the sugar exploded. I stress, the latter. And I finished writing all this.

The white cat comes to visit, and is lying like a blob of warm snow in the middle of the brass bed we bought two weeks ago, almost literally for a song. It makes a luxurious creaking noise when we move about on it—the bed, not the cat. Actually, the cat belongs to the caretaker. We get the rent to him in bits and pieces, and he doesn’t make a fuss. He’s also frankly but unconsciously in love with Silver.

Some days we still don’t eat. Sometimes we dine in expensive places. Performing, no store has ever told us to move on; occasionally they ask us to sing inside.

So many years of days since I saw Clovis, Egyptia, Chloe. My mother, Demeta. The temptation to call her is often very strong, but I resist it. I don’t need to crow. She doesn’t know where I am, but she knows I’ve won. Sometimes I dream about her, and I wake up sobbing. He comforts me. I apologize for being a bore. We argue about my paranoia, the fight ends in sex, the bed creaks and the white cat, if present, yowls.

There are things I try not to think about. When I’m sixty and he’s just the same as now. There’s Rejuvinex—we might be rich by then. He stresses that there’s metallic decay and creeps round the room making sinister clonking noises. And a comet could always hit the earth. To hell with all that.

The subsidence is white with ice and snow. The rooms glow, and we in our colors.

I love him. He loves me. It isn’t a boast. I can hardly believe it myself. But he does. Oh God, he does.

And I’m happy.