Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

  “You noticed.”

  “Perhaps I would expect you to be. You seem also intelligent and imaginative, and unease tends to come with both those territories.”

  “But not for you, of course.”

  “Unease? No. Never for me.”

  “Fearless,” I said. “Omnipotent. Perfect.”

  “And eager,” he said, “to please.”

  Something in his voice—what was it—irony—or something stronger and more loaded?

  I walked across the room and stood in front of him. Did I even believe we were together?

  “Listen,” I said, “I have— I want to say one more thing.”

  “Of course.”

  Gentle. His eyes interested and amused. Tender. A lover's eyes. A friend's.

  I wet my lips and said the name, like one bead of water falling into the light. “Jane.”

  Only one reaction. Slowly his face became serious and intent. He responded, but only by repeating that single name again. “Jane.” No question. No reply.

  “Yes. Jane. Do you recollect Jane?”

  “I have memories. I told you that soon after we met.”

  “Memories of Jane.”

  “Among other people and events, I have memories of Jane.”

  “Among other—but she,” I said, “she was more than simply people and events. Wasn't she? I thought she was—” I'd been convinced I'd be ashamed to say it. Now, though, there was passion, outrage in my voice that startled me. Let's be honest. I'd meant to have him. Yes, even though it would make Sharffe and META happy. And yet—

  He said, “There was a book written, I believe. Maybe you read it? If you did, Loren, I have to say to you that sometimes one person's view of events is at variance with what someone else, whether human or not, may or may not have seen, experienced, or concluded.”

  “Are you telling me—”

  “I'm telling you that those things belong in another life. And that, just possibly, what Jane innocently wrote in her book wasn't entirely either what anyone else supposed had happened, or what in fact did happen. The one she thought she knew as Silver—isn't necessarily who I am.”

  A surge of actual nausea punched through my guts. Perhaps you will feel it, too.

  I scrabbled at my thoughts. Was he saying to me that Jane had invented it, her colossal, luminous love of him—worse—his awakening to blatant humanity through her love, and his? Was he saying that he never loved, and that she was a blind idiot who lied—to herself, to all the rest of us?

  Outside, the sky was yellowing. A ray of infant sun tilted down into the room, and burnished the silver of his cheekbone to orichalc-gold.

  He put out one hand and ran over my hair a light caress like electric fire.

  “It's better to forget Jane,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “But one other thing.” Patiently, his hands already resting on me, molten through my flesh into my bones. “Did you send a message to her from—I mean, when you were dead?”

  He shook his head. The long, long hair flamed, shadowed. “Loren,” he said regretfully, “how could I? I wasn't dead, only switched off and dismantled. Death is for humans. Souls, if they exist, are for humans.”

  The sunray struck over my eyes as his first deep kiss bent back my head on his arm. I sealed my eyelids tight.

  I am with the demon lover.

  I am making love with the statue of a god cast in metal, and Jane's Book was a lie.

  Without excuses, I have to tell you, I still wanted him. Desired and yearned to make love with him. For if he was the statue of a god, it was one of the gods of love, so how could I—anyone (almost anyone)—resist? I tingled with need—with lust.

  Do I quote her again now, our lying, self-deceiving little Jane? (Yes, a liar. She lied about the names of streets, didn't she? Other things. She even hinted she was going to, to protect certain people, her god-awful mother, and so on. . . . )

  She said:

  But he was beautiful and silver, with the blaze of a fire at his groin. All of him was beautiful. All. His hair swept me like a tide. No part of him is like metal, except to look at. To touch, like skin . . . without unevenness or flaw.

  No lie there. None.

  He stripped us both with a deft and gracious economy. Then we were naked, moving over each other, searching, amalgamating, linked. Everything he did to me was exquisite, unbearably so. I felt a hundred times glorious annihilation plunge towards me along a tunnel of lightning—but, just like Jane the Virgin, in the very end, I knew I couldn't dive off that final precipice.

  I didn't confess. He knew, anyway. He tried, resourceful and tactful, to make it happen for me. With Jane (unless it was another lie) the

  rollers of ecstasy

  rushed in and claimed her. But not me.

  She'd been innocent, as he said. And I, who'd climaxed so mundanely and successfully and often in the arms of lesser creatures like myself, lay at last numbed by struggle—and a type of frightened boredom.

  Then, at my laxity and unwillingness, my stasis, he drew away.

  “Can I do something else? Is there anything special you would like?” (His library of abilities must also include, naturally, our kinks and perversions.)

  “No. I'm only tired. Human, you see. A nontechnical fault in my libido.”

  “I'm sorry I couldn't give you what you needed. Perhaps,” he said, as he put on his clothes again, pristine still, no sweat, no need to shower or shave or eat or sleep, “we might try this again. In the future.”

  “Yes,” I said. But I didn't know what I said.

  I wanted him to stay with me. I wanted him—oh, yes—I wanted him gone.

  It was I who'd failed the bloody test, not this angel of the fiery firmament.

  “I have to go,” he said. “I'm registering they want me home.” He said that quirkily. He grinned at me his fantastic grin. No confidence lost by this missed hit. Why would there be, for him?

  Don't leave me.

  Leave me—go—hurry.

  He leaned over me. For the last? He kissed me on the mouth. “Ah, Loren,” he said. “Don't worry about it. Next time.”

  “Will there be one?”

  He stood against the light. His white clothes had changed to dusty gray denim. I hadn't noticed him do that, but it would have taken only seconds. Yet how had he done it? They had been removable garments—I'd seen them lying on the floor.

  Whatever, it seemed he'd been aware of the unpopularity of the rich or famous on the lower streets, after all. His personal colors and his metal, though, were the same. Would mere denim be enough?

  The morning window was behind him. I couldn't see his face anymore, only the gleam at an eye's corner, the whiteness of his teeth.

  “Ah, Loren,” he said again. “I do so want to take you there. Carry you up and throw you off into the stars. That's built into me. So, I insist. There'll be a next time. You and me. Believe it.”

  I lay there and he went out the door, which he closed. Noiselessly he descended the apartment house stairs. Should I creep to the window and watch him stride off along the street?

  I turned onto my stomach, and slept like the soulless human dead.

  • 3 •

  Those two magpies that live in the quake-site garden out back are dipping around today like crazy. There's that bronzy burnish on the trees down there, still green, but getting ready to turn for the fall. It's warm, but clear. This afternoon you can just see the ghostly shape of the Asteroid, as sometimes you can when the moon, also a ghost, visits the daytime sky. Men have walked on both. And then, as we know, governments around the world decided that to blast the Asteroid to “safer” smaller bits, or try to shift it off orbit and back into space, were both too risky. Instead they rigged up some kind of early warning on it, about the time they collected stones, and carefully mined a little surface metal (asterion). The idea of the warning is so we'd all know if it ever goes ballistic again and starts to drop the conclusive miles right on top of us. But, of course,
they'd never tell us. Only the so-called important ones would scuttle down into their huge secret shelters, about which, over the years, quite a mythology has been invented. Some are supposed to be no better than deep dungeons. Others the apex of fantastic luxury. Not that this will be of any use to the rest of us. We'll find out as soon as the damn thing hits us, and that will be that. You'd think, wouldn't you, nobody could go on living a quarter-way normal life with that kind of Damocletian Sword hanging over our heads. But we do, don't we? People always have. Humans are survivors. We have to be, or we wouldn't put up with a single minute in this place. I remember Danny used to say that babies cried, not to get air into their lungs, but to say, “Oh, God, I'm not here again!” Danny believed in reincarnation and rebirth. So did I, once.

  When I woke up again that day in the apartment house, it wasn't day, it was sunset, day was done.

  I'd slept all that while, apparently, lying on my arms, and both had gone to sleep.

  Silly, that. I found it quite awkward to get myself off my face, being used to at least one working arm for a lever. I started laughing, then I made it.

  Then the depression came down like the cloud of polluted night.

  Unlike the babies, I don't cry. Jane said, and I believe this part of her story still, that she often cried. She judged she did it too much. At Grandfather's Hell-house, if you shed tears, you got whupped. He beat it out of us, at least out of me. And anyhow, there's always so much to cry at. Why waste the time.

  But the depression was like a fog.

  I got up and went down the hall and used the showers. No one in there again. Either they all got clean in the mornings, or they were a filthy lot on West Larch.

  After I was back in my room, I sorted my possessions and began to pack up. I could see no point in staying there now. I'd found what I'd come to find and never knew I really could. And it was—or wasn't—it was nothing I recognized. I hated what I'd found.

  Despite that, did I take the panel out of the closet and retrieve the Book? Oh, yes.

  I was going to sling the silver shoes and the dress in the waste chute. A life of being mostly on subsistence made me aware I'd much rather sell them. So then I put on jeans and a top, and with the dress and shoes in a bag, went out to look for a fourth-owner store, of which, downtown, there were plenty.

  Off Main Boulevard is an eatery called Gobbles. Someone stepped out of the lighted foyer into my path.

  “Pardon me. Are you the young woman known as Loren?”

  He looked official, like a plainclothes cop. He'd only need to ask for my ID, and if I couldn't or wouldn't produce one, arrest me.

  So “Yes,” I said.

  “I was headed for your flat.”

  “Really.”

  “Sharffe—you remember him? He's just in that car over there.”

  I glanced and saw, not the appalling Orinoco Prax, but something discreetly sleeker and more businesslike, parked at the sidewalk. Even as I looked, a polarized black window went down. Sharffe, in a cream one-piece, put out his head and arm, and waved to me like my friendliest and most trustworthy uncle.

  The cop-man walked me across. It was casual and relaxed. I didn't make any fuss.

  “Bonsoir, Loren, ma chère. How are you?”

  “Great, thanks. And you?”

  “Couldn't be better. Why don't you allez in?”

  At that, I hesitated. He watched me with his bright eyes. I said, “I have to meet—”

  “That's fine. I won't keep you more than twenty minutes. Have to be back at META HQ myself.”

  What did he want? To collect on his dinner? I thought he'd done that already, since I hadn't been picked up for his delectation but a robot's. But the door was opening and the cop-man assisted me in. What was going to happen? Everything went too fast to really panic.

  I was in the car. The cop hadn't gotten in. There was a driver, human, in the front, shut off from us by a watery dark partition.

  The car smelled expensive, even more than the Orinoco with its rain-resistant fur.

  We drove off slowly. There wasn't much traffic, certainly nothing much of the caliber of this car.

  “We'll take a run or two around the block, Loren, if that's okay? I just wanted to thank you.” I turned and looked right at him. “Yes,” he said. “I know. I wasn't really fair to you, was I. But you've come out of it splendidly. You cooperated like a soldat en combat.”

  “Like—what?”

  “Pardonez. A real trooper, shall I say. Not everyone we selected was as reliable, or as brave. Or as sane. Oh, my, do we have a nice little batch of funks and stalkers.” He smacked his lips. “And it wasn't quite as you may have expected?”

  He knew all about it. All?

  Perhaps he read my brain, perhaps the override chip in back of his eye could sometimes sift the thoughts of others; the scare-mongers say they can. He said, “Obviously, each of our team reported in to us.”

  “Then you know.”

  “Not quite compatible. It can happen. You prefer a human man. You're lucky, Loren. These things—well, some people have no option but to hire a machine. You'll have plenty of real-life choice for a long while. Nevertheless, you put him through his paces. We are impressed by the readings. What did you think of him, really?” Sharffe, though seated, advanced forward, prurient with—not voyeurism—but scientific demand. “When it came to it, forgive the indelicacy, but were you put off that he was what he actually is?”

  “No.”

  “Then it was something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “Perhaps you are a romantic.”

  I smiled. Loren, the romantic. “Sure,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “And anyway, you preferred Black Chess, didn't you? Pity about that. Perhaps . . . but I can't promise.”

  The car was doing what he'd said it would, idling round the three blocks between Main and Correlli, reaching the beginning and idling round again.

  “Listen, Loren. Whatever else, we're very appreciative. We'd like to offer you a small reward, if you'll allow us to.”

  “You mean, META.”

  “That's it. It's a big company, and likes to look after its own. Put it this way, you were kind of a company employee last night, albeit volunteer class.” He put a steel-colored paper packet into my lap. “You'll find all the documents there. Only one minor thing. We want you to keep quiet for now about all this. I don't just mean not run off and tell a vid reporter. I mean, don't even tell your friends.”

  “I haven't.”

  “I know you haven't,” he said.

  They had somehow been watching the apartment house? Even in my room? What else. Watching till I came out. Silver—Verlis—must have left something there to connect them up . . . or did it, with the type of hi-tech he now was, happen automatically? (Had they watched us having sex? Oh, very likely.)

  I inspected the packet without opening it. Sharffe was putting something else on the seat between us, a tiny wafer of some obscure material.

  “I've keyed the pad. If you'd just put your voice-print on that—simple to do. Lay your finger here, see, then speak.”

  He had picked up my left hand, and put my index finger on the wafer.

  “What do I say?”

  “That's swell, Loren.”

  Saying What do I say had of course been enough.

  “And I know you'll keep your side of the bargain,” he added flirtatiously. “The print is only, well, red tape.”

  Red in tooth and tape. Red in hair and claw—

  “One evening,” he said, as the car drew in again to the sidewalk outside Gobbles and slowed to a halt, “maybe you and I can take another private drive. It really was such a pleasure. I was cursing I had to let you go.” The door opened at a blink of his eyes. As I was getting out, he said, “It's just possible, Loren, we might ask you to see him again. Would that be unreasonable of us?”

  Reflected neons littered over the pavement. People hurried by. The night's aroma was gasoline (affluent, reliable pear-
oil from the META car), hot food, perfume, the far away cold mountains.

  “Why?” I said.

  “He seems to have become interested in you.”

  I said, toneless, “He's a robot.”

  “Precisely. Isn't it fascinating? That is what it is with him. He's not like the rest.”

  I know.

  I shrugged. I was shaking, as I hadn't until now. But chilled air was blowing up from an outlet in the wall, I could pretend it was that.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Yes. Okay.”

  “Good girl. Take care of yourself now. I think”—the door was closing him back in like a thing in a shell—“you'll be happy about what's in that packet. A bientot, petite.” The car drove away.

  When I looked about, the cop had gone. But anyone might be in their pay. Conspiracy was all around, wearing a million masks.

  So I walked into Gobbles and ordered a mineral water I couldn't drink, and sat at a table in the bar area, moving the unopened packet about on the tabletop.

  It was only later I recalled the bag with my dress and shoes. I must have left them in his car. More evidence for them, conceivably, those pieces of plastic, lamé, and silk that had recorded every crash and leap of my heart.

  There were four printed reinforced-paper documents in the envelope.

  One was an address, and included transport information and map, with an old-fashioned set of nickel keys attached. The agent's report, printed below, read: “Pre-Asteroid but relatively undamaged and well-maintained apartment. Comprises three living rooms, bathroom, and full kitchenettery, with water, and some power on reliable meter. Situated in the lower-middle income area of Russia, noted for its quaint allocations, and several, mostly quake-cleared parks.”

  There was no rent listed. Across the bottom of the paper had been stamped, in angular purple, SOLD. Care of META Staffing Provision.

  The second document carried my name and a number I assume had now been given to me (like a robot's registration?), and the declaration that I owned, through the META Corporation, the apartment described on the previous page. The third document stipulated an income I would be entitled to draw from any accredited banking station, or in goods from any large store, for one year, on production of the attached card, which bore the paramount symbol I'd only ever seen in visuals: I.M.U. The amount wasn't high, but it represented twice the maximum I had ever earned in any one year, and I could draw on it every month.