The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

was pre-programmed to go back to—to what? A store? A factory? A warehouse? Did they put him away in a box? Turn off his eyes. Turn out the smile and the music.
    A man snatched my arm. I snarled at him, surprising him, and myself. I broke into a run in my high-heeled shoes.
    I caught up with the robot at the corner of Pane and Beech.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. I was out of breath, but not from running or balancing on my high heels. “I’m sorry.”
    He stopped, looking ahead of him. Then he turned slowly, and looked down at me.
    “I’m sorry,” I repeated quickly, blinded by the nearness of him, of his face. “I was rude to you. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
    “What,” he asked me, “did you say?”
    “You know what I said.”
    “Am I supposed to remember you?”
    A verbal slap in the face. I should be clever and scornful. I couldn’t be.
    “You sang that song to embarrass me.”
    “Which song?”
    “Greensleeves.”
    “No,” he said, “I simply sang it.”
    “You stared at me.”
    “I apologize. I wasn’t aware of you. I was concentrating on the last chord, which required complicated fingering.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “I can’t lie,” he said.
    Something jerked inside me, like a piece of machinery disengaging. My eyes refused to blink, had set in my face, felt huge, as if they had
swallowed
my face.
I
couldn’t swallow at all.
    “You—” I said. “You can’t be allowed to act this way. I was scared and I said something awful to you. And you froze me out and you walked away, and now—”
    He watched me gravely. When I broke off, he waited, and then he said, “I think I must explain an aspect of myself to you. When something occurs that is sufficiently unlike what I’m programmed to expect, my thought process switches over. I may then, for a moment, appear blank, or distant. If you did something unusual, then that was what happened. It’s nothing personal.”
    “I said,” I said, my hands clenched together, “you’re horrible. How dare you talk to me?”
    “Yes,” he said. His gaze unfocused, re-focused. “I remember you now. I didn’t before. You started to cry.”
    “You’re trying to upset me. You resent what I said. I don’t blame you, but I’m sorry—”
    “Please,” he said quietly, “you don’t seem to understand. You’re attributing human reactions to me.”
    I backed a step away from him and my heel caught in a crack in the pavement. I seemed to unbalance very slowly, and in the middle of it, his hand took my elbow and steadied me. And having steadied me, the hand slipped down my arm, moving over my own hand before it left me. It was a caress, a tactful, unpushy, friendly caress. Preprogrammed. And the hand was cool and strong, but not cold, not metallic. Not unhuman, and not human, either.
    He was correct. Not playing cruelly with me, as Clovis might have done. I had misunderstood everything. I had thought of him as a man. But he didn’t care what I thought or did. It was impossible to insult or hurt him. He was a toy.
    The heat in my face was white now. I stared at the ground.
    “Excuse me,” he said, “but I have to be at The Island by two A.M.”
    “Egyptia—” I faltered.
    “I’ll be staying with her tonight,” he said. And now he smiled, openly, sweetly.
    “You and she will go to bed,” I got out.
    “Yes.”
    He was a robot. He did what he was hired to do, or bought for. How could Eygptia—
    “How can
you
?” I blurted.
    I would never have said that to a man, for Egyptia’s lovely. It would be obvious. But he, with him it was a task. And yet—
    “My function,” he said, “is to amuse, to make happy, to give pleasure.” There was compassion in his face for me. He could see me struggling. I, too, a potential customer, must be pleased, amused, left laughing.
    “I suppose you’re a wonderful lover,” I shocked myself by saying.
    “Yes,” he answered simply. A fact.
    “I suppose you can—make love—as often as—as