The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee Page A

to do whatever you need me to do,” he said.
    “Without any feeling.”
    “With a feeling of great pleasure, if you’re happy.”
    “You’re beautiful,” I said. “Do you know you’re beautiful?”
    “Yes. Obviously.”
    “And you draw people like a magnet. You know that, too?”
    “You mean metaphorically? Yes, I know.”
    “What’s it like?” I said. I meant to sound cynical. I sounded like a child asking about the sun. “What’s it
like
, Silver?”
    “You know,” he said, “the easiest way to react to me is just to accept me, as I am. You can’t become what I am, any more than I can become what you are.”
    “You wish you were human.”
    “No.”
    I went to the window, and looked at the New River, and at the faint sapphire and silver reflection of him on the glass.
    I said to it, forming the words, not even whispering them: I love you. I love you.
    Aloud, I said: “You’re much older than me.”
    “I doubt it,” he said. “I’m only three years old.”
    I turned and stared at him. It was probably true. He grinned at me.
    “All right,” he said. “I’m supposed to appear between twenty and twenty-three. But counting time from when I was activated, I’m just a kid.”
    “This is Clovis’s apartment,” I found myself saying then. “What did you say to him to startle him like that?”
    “Like you, he had trouble remembering I’m a robot.”
    “Did he… want to make love to you?”
    “Yes. He suppressed the idea because it revolted him.”
    “Does it revolt you?”
    “Here we go again. You asked that already, in another form, and I answered you.”
    “You’re bi-sexual.”
    “I can adapt to whoever I’m with.”
    “In order to please them?”
    “Yes.”
    “It gives you pleasure to please.”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re pre-programmed to be pleased that way.”
    “So are humans, actually, to a certain extent.”
    I came back into the room.
    I said, “What do you want me to call you?”
    “You intend to rename me?”
    “Silver—that’s the registration. Not a name.”
    “What’s in a name?” he said.
    “A rose by any other name,” I said.
    “But don’t, I think,” he said, “call me Rose.”
    I laughed. It caught me by surprise, like Clovis’s surprise, but unlike.
    “That’s nice,” he said. “I like your laugh. I never heard it before.”
    Like a sword going through me. How could I feel so much, when he felt nothing. No, when he felt so differently, so indifferently.
    “Please call me,” I said, “Jane.”
    “Jane,” he said. “Jane, a pane of crystal, the sound of rain falling on the silken grain of marble, a slender, pale chain of a name.”
    “Don’t,” I said.
    “Why not?”
    “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s too easy for you. Nobody ever made a poem out of my name, and you can do it with anything. It’s a very ordinary name.”
    “But the sound,” he said, “the sheer phonetic
sound
, is clean and clear and beautiful. Think about it. You never have until now.”
    Amazed, I lifted my head.
    “Jane,” I said, tasting my name, hearing my name. “Jaen. Jain.”
    He watched me. His tiger’s eyes were lambent, absorbing me.
    “I live with my mother,” I said, “twenty miles from the city, in a house up in the air. Really up in the air. Clouds go by the windows. We’re going to go there.”
    He regarded me with that grave attention I was coming, even so soon, to recognize.
    “I don’t know what I want from you,” I said unsteadily. Not true, not true, but what I wanted, being impossible, must be left unsaid. “I’m not,” I said, “Egyptia—I’m not—experienced. I just—please don’t th—”
    “Don’t ever,” he said, “be afraid of me.”
    But I was. He’d driven a silver nail through my heart.

----
    I’d known I didn’t want us to stay there, at Clovis’s. Clovis might come back any time, though probably he’d spin it out. Then again, he’d irresistibly picture us making love, sliding all over those black