Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

  Jane said the coppers were actors. Now they acted with more than mere apparent flair. Something in the voice boxes—the singers had this, too—you heard the words up there overhead, as the raft cruised up and down over the plateau of the park, but you heard them, too, as if they spoke inside your ear, for you alone. Such voices. Every word like a drop of light or darkness. But there was more. What the coppers acted was an old play, I don't know from where—ancient Greek, maybe? She and he—as they stepped forward, they changed. I mean, their clothes changed, in front of our eyes.

  Their green panoply had been modern. But suddenly her breasts were bare, exquisite copper half-globes tipped with red buds. She wore a flounced metal skirt, dull gold, and in her flowing lemon hair, snakes were plaited. All this happened meltingly, unassisted, and unobscurely, as we all watched. The copper male had also changed his garments to a kilt of metal scales, his arms bound with bronze rings, a crown of some sort of pale flower on his yellow hair.

  The flowers, the metal and clothing, had emanated from their nonfleshly flesh, replacing the original clothing, which had melted into nothing.

  The audience applauded this magical action as much as they did the subsequent drama, a brief, weird exchange, sexual and disturbing, yet unexplicit.

  After the coppers, the silvers sang and played instruments. Quake-rock was what the silvers gave us. One-handed, he slammed rhythm from a drum, and it sounded like two drummers, four hands. She sang, her range incredible, unassailable, thin, almost whistling notes dropping to a dark purr in the lower registers. But she also had two voices. And next her second voice sang a harmony to her first.

  Then he played the flute. He did it this way: placing the flute almost sexually between his lips, then taking up the lute Glaya had tuned for him. As with the drum, he played the lute one-handed, and it had a sound as if three hands were on it, his fingers a silvery blur. The lute also raced in quake-rock, but the flute he played more classically, its slender tones silking over the lute's galloping, as he held the flute in his white teeth, somehow working it with his tongue. . . . All the while, his other hand still beat sharp thunders from the drum.

  After the coppers and silvers, the golds fenced. He and she. They leapt yards upwards, somersaulted and spun in the air, sprang up cliffs of nothingness and catapulted back. But again, more than this.

  The golds had two fencing swords, which had slid out from their arms. I mean, out of the muscle and the skin of them. Obviously it wasn't muscle and skin, but it looked as if it were, and the swords were simply—born out of it. And when they had grown all the way out, they sheered off, soft as snow, forming their shapes as they went, hardening, to nestle, flexed and inimitable, in the hands of what had birthed them.

  No. Humans couldn't do this. No one could mistake one of these for anything human ever again.

  (I put this down as if I had lost sight of him, forgotten him. I hadn't. I saw him, as if I saw him through their bodies. But I saw all the rest, and what they did. They were all one thing, the eight beings on the raft. And even though right then I didn't know it, to love him now was to be in thrall to each and everyone of them.)

  Last were the asterions. We were to see why. She stepped forward, and became altogether something else. Like the double voices, triple playing, extraction of clothes and weapons, but again, more than that.

  The crowd in the hot night garden, in the district called Russia, made a low, primal noise.

  The black woman had become, literally, a pillar of black glass. Obsidian. You could really see through her. At the pillar's top, her lovely face, classic African, but still, and also glass, also semitransparent. Only her eyes moved. Other galaxies danced, slow and calm, in those eyes.

  But then he, the asterion man, he—

  The crowd shrieked in five thousand voices—pleasure and thrill, or terror?

  Did I shriek, too?

  I couldn't hear if I screamed, couldn't hear my heart. Perhaps I was dead. Perhaps we all were, and that wouldn't be a problem now, for here the new race was. God had given up on flesh and blood. He wouldn't fuss with a flood now, no ultimate apocalyptic quake. Now God had just made robots.

  There in full view of every one of us, the asterion male changed into a dragon. He was the prehistoric demon of our dreams. Scaled and sheened and glorious, and terrible, gold-washed over jet, towering and coiling there with its head against the sky, suns streaming in its glances, fire glinting far back in its jaws.

  How excellently judged.

  The crowd on the brink of panic, swirling, ready to stampede (How many would die?), and all at once, everything again altered, as if some switch had been thrown inside the vast machine of the night.

  No dragon. No pillar. No miracles. All gone.

  Had it been an illusion? Had we collectively imagined everything we'd seen?

  A kind of cooling spray of no-fire fireworks were softly detonating over our heads.

  The beings from Olympus smiled upon us, all now formed in our image, only so much better.

  I thought, Drugs—that's what made it seem like that—even a robot can't . . .

  Normalcy was being made to break out. Not only the pretty lights, but warm rain was raining down. The crowd, contained again, scattering about, defused, giggling.

  Had they made the rain, too, whoever they were, these people who had acted God, and called it The Show?

  Pushing, the crowd forced me back, and I saw through the rainy, fiery air, the golden raft-boat of God-made gods flying low and away over the park. Nearly two hours had gone by. It had seemed much less. Much more.

  Someone else bumped into me from behind. This time a firm hand steadied me.

  “Quelle joie. This is all going a bit out of control,” he said. “I thought it might.”

  I half-turned. I didn't know him. Then I did.

  “You are getting so wet,” he observed sympathetically. “And in your attractive dress. Are you with someone?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well,” he said kindly, under the racket of the crowd, “perhaps I can amend that.”

  He was the guy from the visual I'd seen back in the city, on the blonde's VS. The guy with the actor's voice, who had helped advertise META and all META's works.

  “My name's Sharffe.”

  “Loren.”

  “Pleased to acquaint avec toi, ma chère.”

  I don't run to much French, but got the gist. It seemed he liked me somewhat.

  We had already moved out of the worst crush, he weaving us with the knack of practice through the wet but now partying crowd, upon which little painted balloons with cans of alcohol and bags of chocolate-type candy attached, were coming down in the rain. “All free gifts courtesy of META,” he told me. “Do you want any of those?” I said, “Maybe not.” “A woman of taste,” he decided. By then we'd reached a stand of big trees and he drew me under. There was a dim-lit mesh wall with a small gate. It only looked like some private maintenance area of the gardens. Sharffe unlocked the gate by winking one eye at it. It's true, plenty of people are partly robot, at least among the tech-protected plutocracy. He must have an eye-code booster override built in somewhere, which gives him, as it were, the keys to the city, or some of them.

  The other side of the gate was a gravel path. And then a steel-brick wall. A door opened for him in this wall, too. We went through to a lot with several large cars exclusively parked.

  “Mine's that one,” he said.

  I looked at his car. It was a reverse auto self-drive Orinoco Prax, glimmering gold like nail polish . . . or a G.O.L.D. E.R. robot.

  Drunk on possible hallucinogens and desolate, unnameable emotions, Loren the Liar looked dewily from her (actually) mad eyes and told him, “What a beautiful car.”

  The rain didn't fall so fiercely here. Either there was a partial shield up over the lot, or the storm was ebbing. I glanced at him, and away. He was definitely the one from the VS news. And he was here at The Show, seemed to know all about it, and to be w
ealthy enough to own this vulgar vehicle.

  “Shall I take you for a drive?” he asked me, winningly, aware he was quite young and sort of handsome, as well as stinking rich.

  “Why me?” I innocently asked.

  “Oh, I was watching you from the control center back there. We were supposed to be monitoring not only how our team performed but also the crowd, to gauge reactions, that kind of thing. But then I spotted you. I had my eyes on you quite a bit after that. Did you enjoy them, the team? What did you think?”

  The team. He meant the robots. The gods.

  “They were spectacular.”

  “Good. That's exactly the reaction we want.”

  We walked over to the Orinoco. God, the seats were white fake fur; they'd be soft as toy Siberian tigers.

  “Come for a drive,” he said. “Then dinner? I'm quite in love with you, Loren, you know—amour fou, coup de foudre—all of that. It can happen. Or don't intelligent young women like you believe in that—love at first sight?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Quelle joie. Get in. The seats are fun. You sink for miles. Fur's real, by the way. Don't tell anyone.”

  He could have been a psychopath. And I suppose he is, really. But in this instance, he seemed just some man pleased with himself and expecting a bonus from his bosses, therefore sexed-up and eager to take any nice-looking, half-okay pleb to bed.

  How did he think anyone would look at him after—them?

  How could he look at a woman, after them? Well, the car-seat fur was real. Maybe that explained quite a bit.

  I didn't hesitate, or only long enough to fuel his fire.

  I'd never been a professional, a prostitute. I had sex randomly because I wanted to, and earned cash by work. Of course, it wasn't cash I was after now.

  Though the fur was real, it had been carefully treated and didn't mind my wet dress or the drops he shook off his tailored one-piece suit. The light jacket, shirt and pants combo were all linked by zippers, whose metal was solid silver. (Silver.) He also had a diamond ring, a rock, polished, not cut. But it might have been a cultured diamond, after all, never mined.

  The ghastly car ripped through the city like a missile. It went so fast I couldn't see anything, except in the distance—humps of architecture, veiled heights, and garish city valleys. On the horizon, the ghosts of mountains were drawn in by their edges of moonlit snow. It had stopped raining—if it had ever started, out here.

  I itched and howled to ask him questions about the robots. I kept quiet. Almost certainly he'd start to gabble, if not now, then if we got to the dinner date.

  There were a lot of parks, especially in the district called Russia, and the next one over called Bohemia. “Used to be a Romania, too, once,” he said. “Burnt down—power main blew.”

  I wondered if he'd just pull over and begin mauling me. But he didn't. He was high as that moon. Who's a clever boy, then?

  He was ready to muse aloud by the time we were nearing some out-of-town restaurant he knew of. He abruptly switched the car to auto, and sat back.

  “It's been quite a month, I can tell you, getting The Show ready. Advance publicity and so on. Then the performad—jargon, I mean the advertising performance tonight. Everyone seemed to like it, didn't they? There was all that talk before—people getting scared robots'd take over all the available work—but that's never been what they're for. I take it you know all this was already tried, twelve years back?”

  I looked vague. “I was only a kid then.”

  “Sure. Mais naturellement. Just a little girl, five or six. You must tell me all about that—” But he didn't pause, so I didn't have to. “You see, they are purely recreational, these robots. The first outfit, E.M., they did the whole damn thing all wrong. Then had to recall every single model. There were nine of them. I think I have that right. . . . Nine deluxe, plus some cute semi-humanoid stuff—nothing astounding there, boxes with humanized heads, that kind of junk. We only have eight deluxe models now. Four men. Four gals. Neat.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Which was your favorite at the performad?” he asked me suddenly, turning his face hard as the edge of a blade towards me. No fool, then. Or not the sort you could necessarily handle.

  “I kind of liked the asterions best.”

  “Yeah! Aren't they divine. Shape-changers. Like magicians in old novels. But I'll tell you, they can all do that, to a limited extent. You saw the golds produce weaponry out of their arms and hands? They can do that all over, even out the chest cavity, or the skull. And the coppers altered their clothes out in plain view. But you see, again, they can all do that—alter clothing, produce weapons. I hasten to add, in case I'm scaring you, they can produce nothing in the weapon line that actually can work, except for the purposes of display. No chance of firing off a real gun at anybody, or throwing a knife. They just can't do that. Back with E.M., the golds were marketed as bodyguards. No one's going to allow that now. To take any sort of work away from real people is off the menu.” He cogitated, looking abruptly middle-aged and smug. He probably was, just had access to plenty of Rejuvinex. The car swam slower now down a side track, curtained by pines. “But tell me,” he said, gazing away through the windshield, “what did you think of the silvers?”

  Specific. He knows something. But what? And how can he? I said, “They were wonderful.”

  “The male,” he said. “What did you think of him?”

  “Gorgeous,” I said.

  “But I forgot, you liked the asterion male best, didn't you?”

  I simpered. I suppose that was what it was.

  “Yeah,” said Sharffe. “You ain't alone there. They are one heck of a big hit, those two. Have to admit that. But the reason I asked about the silvers, especially the male—” (Yes, what is your reason, Mr. Sharffe?) “Well, he has kind of a personal history. Not the others, only that one. He's called Verlis, by the way.”

  Something jumped in my brain. No—he's called Silver. I didn't say a word. And the name Verlis slipped across my inner eye until its letters repositioned. Verlis was an anagram of Silver.

  Sharffe said, “What we did there, we reforged from the original model. He was first made, and extant, over twelve years ago, and though the other eight basically got smelted down for scrap, the company didn't do that with him. There was something about Verlis that had never checked out. They dismantled him, but still kept on trying to find what it was that made him tick differently. Didn't manage to. And then they just kept him in store. So when META took over the commission, we broke him out first and rebuilt him. He's the same model, like he was back then. With, of course, the latest improvements the others have. I personally never see anything that weird about him. He's just like the others, for my money. Too handsome to live, and he don't live, ma chère. So that's okay.”

  Up ahead, the pines withdrew about a gracious lawn, above which stood a type of Roman temple, its façade bearing the legend O'Pine.

  “Hey,” said my happy escort, “how do you rate that name?”

  “They're Irish?”

  “Oh, Loren, I thought you'd see the pun.” He explained to me: restaurant in pine forest and the word opine—to hope. I pretended I hadn't gotten any of that till he said it.

  As we were defurring out of the car, he turned to me and said in a hoarse aside, “Jaybeeh.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jaybeeh. You don't know. Sure you don't?”

  “What is it? Somewhere to eat?”

  “Maybe,” he said, amused. We walked up the steps to the doors.

  Over my mind the new sound Jaybeeh floated. He had uttered it like a password. In some quarters it was. On the top step, the sound translated in my head to symbols. He had spoken the phonetic of the two letters J-B. Jane's Book. I nearly missed the last step, but didn't. Gambled he'd make nothing of it.

  I have absolutely no recollection of what we ate. We drank wine with the meal, and liqueurs at the end. We talked about him, I generally think. But I can't reca
ll much of what he had to say, only those parts about working for META. And that was fairly guarded. This work, plainly, was Senate-sponsored, if not directly government-sponsored. He would keep saying, coyly, “Ah, but I can't blab about that. Top secret. Commercial spies are everywhere. Do you realize how many other countries are trying to perfect these things? And not all of them, I may add, for peaceful purposes.”

  He said nothing targeted again about the silvers. But he did tell me all the robots' new names. The silvers were Verlis and Glaya; the coppers, Copperfield and Sheena; the golds, Goldhawk and Kix; and the asterions, Black Chess and Irisa. It struck me that every one of the males carried a reference in his name to his metal, even Verlis in anagram. The females did not.

  After the meal we left and got back in the car. He switched on the auto at once, saying he'd been drinking a lot. Deep in the fur, we drove off the beaten track and in among the pines, then he put his arm around me, and I thought, This is it, now. This is where I perform my role. So I cuddled up, and when he kissed me, I played along.

  I'd never before had sex with anyone I didn't fancy. I'd been lucky there. The few who tried that I hadn't wanted, had been easy to put off with words or deeds—like the guy I kicked that time in the underpass, as it were.

  But Sharffe was ultrahygienic and unnervingly presentable, and I wouldn't even need protection. The ones who can afford it take their contraception shots by law.

  Nevertheless, when he leaned back from me, his hand still on my breast but both of us still clothed, and not even at first base, I felt a wave of shattering relief.

  “Hey, Loren, ma petite chère, you really like human men, too, don't you, n'est-ce pas?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Mmm. Sometime soon we must entirely investigate this. But for now—” What had I done wrong? He wasn't going to dump me, was he? The next installment of relief cascaded as he said, “I think you should come to the party tonight.”

  “Party?”

  “It's a good one, baby. Gargantuan apartment, gold-plated everything, and champagne flowing like piss. Up on the top of the city. Montis Heights. Heard of it?”