Free Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg Page B

true,” Manuel said. “I love you, Lilith. What you are is no news to me. And makes no difference at all. I love you. I love you.”
    “Would you like a drink?” she asked. “A weed? A floater? You’re all worked up.”
    “Nothing,” he said. “It’s been a long day. I haven’t even had lunch yet and I think I’ve been going for forty hours. Let’s just relax, Lilith. No weeds. No floaters.” He unsnapped his clothing, and she helped him out of it Then she pirouetted before a doppler; there was a brief rising burst of sound and her gown disappeared. Her skin was light red, except for the dark brown of her nipples. Her breasts were full, her waist was narrow, her hips flared with the impossible promise of fertility. Her beauty was inhumanly flawless. Manuel fought the dryness in his throat.
    She said sadly, “I could feel the change in you the moment you touched me. Your touch was different. There was—fear?—in it. Disgust?”
    “No.”
    “Until tonight I was something exotic to you, but human, like a Bushman would be, an Eskimo. You didn’t keep me in a separate category outside the human race. Now you tell yourself that you’ve fallen in love with a mess of chemicals. You think you may be doing something sick by having an affair with me.”
    “Lilith, I beg you to stop it. This is all in your mind!”
    “Is it?”
    “I came here. I kissed you. I told you I loved you. I’m waiting to go to bed with you. Maybe you’re projecting some guilts of your own on me when you say—”
    “Manuel, what would you have said a year ago about a man who admitted he’d been to bed with an android?”
    “Plenty of men I know have been “
    “What would you say about him? What kind of words would you use? What would you think of him?”
    “I’ve never considered such things. They simply haven’t concerned me, ever.”
    “You’re evading. Remember, we promised that we wouldn’t play any of the little lie-games people play. Yes? You can’t deny that at most social levels, sex between humans and androids is regarded as a perversion. Maybe the only perversion that’s left in the world. Am I right? Will you answer me?”
    “All right.” His eyes met hers. He had never known a woman with eyes that color. Slowly he said, “Most men regard it as, well, cheap, foul, to sleep with androids. I’ve heard it compared to masturbation. To doing it with a rubber doll. When I heard such remarks, I thought they were ugly, stupid expressions of anti-android prejudice, and I obviously didn’t have such attitudes myself, or I never could have fallen in love with you.” Something in his mind sang mockingly, Remember the vats! Remember the vats! His gaze wavered and moved off center; he stared intently at her cheekbone. Grimly he said, “Before the whole universe I swear, Lilith, that I never felt there was anything shameful or dirty about loving an android, and I insist that despite what you’ve claimed to detect in me since my visit to the factory, I don’t have any such feelings even now. And to prove it——”
    He gathered her to him. His hand swept down her satiny skin from her breasts to her belly to her loins. Her thighs parted, and he clasped his fingers over the mount of Venus, as fleeceless as an infant’s, and suddenly he trembled at the alien texture he felt there, and found himself unmanned by it, though it had never troubled him before. So smooth. So terribly smooth. He looked down at her, at her bareness. Bare, yes, but not because she had been shaven. She was like a child there. Like—like an android. He saw vats again. He saw moist crimson alphas whose faces were without expression. He told himself sternly that to love an android was no sin. He began to caress her, and she responded, as a woman would respond, with lubrication, with little ragged bursts of breath, with a tightening of her thighs against his hand. He kissed her breasts and clutched her to him. It seemed then that the blazing image of