Free Millennium by John Varley Page B

got my face wet and left me exhausted. Sherman carried me to bed and stroked me gently for a while, then left me alone. That fucking machine is the best friend I ever had.
    I was not telling
anybody
about the kid. If the universe had to be destroyed because of that, so be it.
    *    *    *
    Sherman coaxed me out of it.
    He’s the only machine I’ve ever had any use for. At one time I scorned robots like Sherman. I thought they were only good for jaded femmedrones looking for a thrill. I used the pronoun “it” when referring to them, called them walking vibrators or humanoid dildos.
    I stopped doing that after I got Sherman. He is definitely a male robot. One glance between his legs could leave no possible doubt of that.
    He let me…weep.
That’s
the word I was looking for. I have cried before, but it usually comes from fury and I remain rigidly in control as the tears drip down my cheeks. I had never been helpless like this. Not even on the day she died.
    If Sherman was surprised, he never let on. He stroked me, let me curl up in his arms. He could never make up for the mothering I missed and we both knew that, but goddam it, he was the next best thing. I could no longer handle the idea of a real human man. I hadn’t been with one for years.
    Sherman’s attentions grew more meaningful. I didn’t think I wanted to fuck, but he would know that better than I. His fingertips are lie detectors. He can read my feelings as though they were punched on my skin in Braille. Presently he pushed me onto my back and entered me.
    I fell into a dream state. He fucked me for three hours, from late morning to early afternoon. (Made love? Don’t make me laugh. I know when the merely ludicrous turns into the psychotic. I am well aware that, technically, what I did that afternoon was masturbate with the world’s smartest solid-state life-size inflatable rubber novelty.)
    I had very little to do with it. That’s my custom with Sherman, the Lord of Latex; I just lie there and he ravishes me.
    What the hell else should I do? He can’t feel a thing. He’s an extremely complex series of programmed responses. He feeds off my responses and always does the right thing at the righttime. He’s a
machine.
I might as well worry about satisfying a pop-up toaster.
    *    *    *
    Sherman has no face.
    He’s a competent therapist, and he told me directly what that means in psychological terms. It is a very common female fantasy to be roundly and thoroughly fucked by a faceless stranger. At first glance, it looks like a rape fantasy. It most emphatically is not. Rape is not sex for a woman, and it has little to do with sex for a man.
    Sherman does not ask me what I want. He doesn’t ask me when I want to screw; he knows. He simply takes me.
    And I am so totally in control of the experience that I don’t even have to tell him what to do. Each step he takes is perfectly in tune with what my body is telling him I want.
    He is a reasonable facsimile of the perfect lover.
    When I first got him he had a face. I couldn’t stand it. I choose when and where to tell myself lies, and the lie his face told—I am a real man, with real emotions—was not one I wanted to hear. So I had him rebuilt with a head round and smooth as an egg. Like all the rest of his skin, it feels just like the real thing. As does my own “skin.”
    Sometimes he pastes pictures of faces over the front of his head and we pretend he’s performing as some famous figure from the past would have. I’ve fucked my way through several history books.
    Bizarre? All right. But it depends on what neighborhood you live in. I won’t say it was as good as making love with a real man. I won’t say it was worse, either. There was no emotional component. Sometimes I missed that; then I would think of Lawrence, and take Sherman to bed and practically wear him out. Sherman was a
lot
safer.
    My reasons for this preference were complex and incompletely understood. Part of it was