Chapter 35 Permit

Sam didn’t have a chance to respond immediately, because as I finished speaking we arrived at the section of the market that offered a huge variety of scavenged and spare parts for mechanisms such as the ones the girls at the workshop were busied with. He proved to be an extremely adept negotiator, bargaining prices with such an aptitude that I felt it only fair to compliment him on it as we began our walk back to the workshop, the new purchases stowed in a calico bag at my hip. “With a silver tongue like that, you should have been a politician,” I teased. Sam laughed. “I don’t like the current state of the world nearly well enough to want to go into politics. I can effect far more damage and change as a quasi-legal smuggler, I think.” I had to smile at that. “You’re probably right, yes.” “To return to earlier topics for a moment,” Sam said. “I’m going to be in the city for quite some time—if I can get approved for a permit, that is, though I have every confidence in your girls—and it would suit me very well to have a regular lover I respected and liked talking to. Do you think that would—?” “It would suit me very well, too,” I told him, with another smile. He was pleasant, with just a hint of the rogue about him, and I found his conversation pleasing. Of course he’d be welcome in my bed. I may be a robot, but I’m not stupid. He grinned. “Good. Very good. How long until your, um, increased sex drive next needs—” “Tonight, if you aren’t busy. Meet me at the workshop after nightfall,” I told him. I wasn’t in dire need yet, and wouldn’t be for another day or so, but there was no logical reason to delay coupling with a willing partner. “It’s a date.” Sam grinned. Our conversation paused for several more minutes after that, as we pushed and darted our way through the shove of the crowd. The city is sometimes so full of life it scarcely seems able to contain it. “How did you come to have the workshop?” Sam asked when we were next able to converse easily, the crowds thinning as we reached the outskirts of the market. “Why was that the ambition that took root after your Liberation?” “Have you heard the saying about the watch in the desert?” “I think so,” Sam told me with a nod. “That’s the one about how, if you found a watch in the desert, you’d assume there’s a watchmaker. That it didn’t just appear there. That you can say the same about the world, that there must have been someone who created it; it didn’t just appear.” “Yes, that’s it,” I confirmed.