|
(Continued)
"Do you
have my hat?" the girl asked, twirling her umbrella in her
tiny hands.
"Oh.
No," Lilah lied. She did have the hat; she'd taken it with
her after leaving the common. She was unsure why she had. It was a
pretty thing, dainty and white, full of ribbons, with a
counterfeit flower on the rim which did nothing to detract from
its own beauty, silk or no.
It was on the
couch across the room.
Dori could see
it, peering around Lilah from outside. Slyly, she grinned.
"Liar." And she slid into the room, somehow. She glanced
around, surveying the decor—or lack thereof—critically.
"Simply Spartan," she appraised, "aren't you? But I
suppose that's what comes of being bred more for brawn than brain,
isn't it?"
"What?"
said a confused Lilah.
"My point
exactly," Dori agreed. She fluttered onto the sofa. "I
like it, anyway. It's clean, nice. Not like at home. Ran always
makes me clean it."
With a sigh,
Lilah hit the button to close the metal door. "Isn't that
what you were made for?"
"What,
cleaning? Me?" Dori scoffed. "No, of course not.
I was made to provide companionship, Lilah, silly Lilah. By
the time Ran got me, he'd lost the regular maid in the divorce.
You remember that."
"Where
were you from before?" Lilah sat beside her.
"I was
manufactured, special order, as a gift for Ran's daughter. It was
after a game, about a year ago. He got drunk. She got killed when
the car crashed. His wife got mad. My legs were destroyed in the
collision, but Ran had me repaired so I could work. That's
all." The girl sounded bitter.
Lilah had to
ask. "Is he an asshole?"
"It would
go against my ethical documentation to give you an
affirmative," Dori replied, chewing her lip, scooping up her
hat and turning it in her hands, "but I could stand a lack of
ethics on occasion."
"An
opinion, you mean?"
Dori giggled.
"Yeah, you could call it that." She took out the pins
that held her intricate hair aloft, and the bunched locks fell
smoothly down to the small of her back in a straight,
uncomplicated wave.
Lilah took
Dori's molded-jade hair decoration with a leaf on it, examined it,
and asked, "Why do you wear so much green?"
Grinning,
kicking off her shoes and lying across the length of the couch,
Dori explained. "That's a funny thing. You know, back in the
days before The Boom? There used to be green plants. Green
everywhere. Some places you couldn't get away from all the trees,
and grass, and ferns, and the flowering green things.
"Then
people destroyed it all, created the factories, built the cities,
made the bombs. The plants gave us clean air, but people didn't
think about that. Now everything's all gray, and since I was made
in a factory, I feel obligated to replace at least some of color
Earth used to have.
"Can you
imagine?! A world that was green instead of gray!”
Lilah couldn't.
"There
were animals, too. Living things that weren't human. Flying
things, covered in feathers like old-lady-fashions. They sang. And
scaly things, like they were covered in gravel. And slippery
things that couldn't breathe out of water."
"I
wouldn't want to breathe water," Lilah stated dubiously.
"Of
course, because now the water is gray like everything else. But then!
Then the water was clear," Dori reflected solemnly.
Lilah didn't
believe her.
Dori asked the
time.
Lilah told her.
Dori's face
fell. She stood. "I need to go. I'll be in trouble if I
stay." The girl smiled, gathering up her hat and umbrella and
shoes. "Goodbye!" she called, and was gone.
***
They all
remember the first time they saw her. The Coyotes saw Ran with the
android, sitting in the stands. A new girlfriend, they were sure,
but they soon found out what she really was: a legless android in
a wheelchair, good for little but sitting around and being—if it
can be attributed to a robot—depressed. She didn't cry, just sat
around, and at the end of the game, alongside Ran, she told them
all in a bitter, disdainful tone:
"Football
is barbaric."
She said
nothing more.
They've hated
Dori since.
There exists
among the team a consensus that Dori is, for being metal,
"pretty cute." For a thinking doll, wow, just imagine
what that mouth, those dainty hands, could do. She's got breasts
up top; what might be found below, if anything at all? If Ran
knew, which he certainly did, he wasn't telling.
All
conversation and advances she rebuffs. "Give me a kiss,"
a girl jeers, and Dori politely declines. "Come over
later," a boy offers, and she walks away without a word in
exchange. The girls on the team say she's narrow, the guys that
she's completely off the path.
If she really
can like girls or boys, or anyone at all, was never the point. No
one cares to discuss technicalities. She's just there, and doesn't
she look good standing in her spot? In fact, if Dori did say
"yes" to a team member, just once, he or she wouldn't
know what to reply, how to respond, what they would want to do.
Thinking ahead
wasn't a football player's forte, or even pianissimo.
(Turn
the page) |
