“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.”