Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

  I didn't eat any of the fruit or cheese, or drink the wine. That wasn't a precaution in case they'd doped it. I just didn't want it. I put the blue-violet flowers in water, because I felt sorry about them. They lasted nearly fifteen days. By then, I'd come out of it. I think so. I think I am out of it.

  I have an income and a flat, then. The address is 22-31 Ace Avenue. You can decide if that is the real address, or if, like careful Jane, lying Jane, I'm using a fake street name and number here.

  The thing I like most is that the rooms have drapes on all the windows, a type of warm gray silky material; the drop goes right down to the deep gray carpet on the floor. The couches and chairs are tawny or dark green. Yellow cushions. The bathroom is clean, and I keep it clean, because I have been a professional cleaner, and may well be one again. The kitchenettery is five feet by five. I never knew such kitchens were left anywhere for us wee plebs. It has clean running water and a little freezer that stores power for when the meter runs down. But the meter is usually sprinting along because I feed it lots of coins, and though the notice on it warns there may sometimes be a power shortage, it hasn't happened yet.

  There were even new sheets, turquoise ones, or white, in celloplas, for the bed.

  I wander about this apartment as if I am looking for something, and maybe I am, or I was. In the end, I went and bought a whole stack of paper and some pens from the corner store, and I wrote this. (Quite a lot of paper left. Probably sell it on again, because this is nearly done now.)

  So, it's my sequel to Jane's Book. But I don't want to call it Loren's Story. I've scribbled a title across a single page and stuck it on the front. The title of this sequel is: The Train to Russia.

  By now I've been here about a month. Fall is preparing to descend on Second City. I can see the mountains from one window, the small one in the kitchenettery, which looks approximately east. They have quite a lot of snow already.

  I see him, I mean Silver—or do I mean Verlis—almost every day now.

  Ha! Gotcha, didn't I? (I said you wouldn't like me.)

  No, I don't see him here, in the silver unflesh. I see him on the VS, on the screen, in news and ads, like all of them: Sheena and Copperfield, Black Chess and Irisa, and Glaya. And Goldhawk. And Kix. And you see them, I imagine, too.

  They are the talk of the town.

  I have tried to find out if the girl whose thigh I broke when I was flung down on her—though I have tough bones, maybe she saved me from fracturing my skull—is all right. But all the casualties seem to have vanished away.

  I'll stash this under the floorboards sometime. Where I put Jane's Book a couple of weeks ago. It's an old house, nearly two centuries. The boards should come up again easily if I work at them like before, with a fruit knife and a spanner. I'll leave my manuscript with hers for whoever comes after. If that is you, be sure and read Jane's Story first. Or last.

  Please accept my abject regrets that I can't terminate my own little contribution to the subversive (in my case, unpublished) literature of this world, on a triumphant and beautiful, hopeful note. Don't blame me. Blame corporations. Blame governments. Or people. Or blame Grandfather's bloody God. Perhaps he is in charge, after all.

  3

  Non Servian (“I will not serve”). The words spoken to God, they say, by the Angel Lucifer, before his fall.

  • 1 •

  About five days after I wrote those concluding words of my “Story,” I saw him again. By which I mean, saw him physically in front of me.

  I was in the apartment on Ace; I didn't often go out, except for groceries, or to walk round the quake park. It was three in the afternoon, a time I often find a negative hour, as they say it is during the night.

  The voice in the door (yes, the new apartment had a door-voice adapted specifically for me) called quietly, but robotically intimately, all through the rooms, “Loren, someone is here.”

  “Who?”

  I thought it was Sharffe. Braced myself without either much thought or much alarm. Foolish. For there should have been some alarm, shouldn't there?

  The door said, “It is Verlis.”

  I had the feeling everything in me plunged through me and vanished somewhere about the region of my (good Biblical term) loins. There was then nothing inside me. Just space.

  What did I say? I knew he could get in anyhow. I'd seen him undo a locked and bolted door. Did I want him not to come in?

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Thank you, Loren,” said the door, ever the mistress of politeness.

  I didn't sit down. I went and stood by one of the west-facing windows of the room I'd made my living room. I wondered, as I'd been here awhile—over a month, was it?—if he would detect my personal scent in the apartment. I glanced out the window to verify the passage of time. Yes, the trees in the park were starting to change to metals, copper, and gold. Autumn was here. Then it would be winter, and the metals of the park would be asterion black and silver.

  When I looked back, he had walked soundlessly into the room.

  Was I prepared? Only not to be, and in that I'd been wise.

  He wore a faded white shirt, a long faded black coat, and black jeans and boots. What you see fashionable, not too badly off young men wear all over these cities, here and in parts of Europe.

  His hair was red as claret grapes.

  His skin—what—

  He read my mind again, or my body language and expression.

  “Makeup,” he said. “Fake tan. META thinks it's a good idea, for now.”

  “To stop you from being recognized? Does it work?”

  “Enough.”

  “Did you take the— How did you get here?”

  “Not by train,” he said. “The service is still out. They're replacing all the track.”

  I said nothing. Because I couldn't say to him what I remembered and had pretended to be amnesiac about.

  I said, “I'll make some tea.” Another lie, as if he were a normal human visitor. I knew he didn't need to drink or eat.

  To go past him was odd. We'd had sex. Been far closer. But he stood aside for me, courteous as my door.

  In the kitchenettery I filled the container with water and threw the switch. It would take about twenty seconds to boil. He didn't come through—there wasn't really room.

  Despite my lies, I'd only put out one mug, and then poured the hot water on the Prittea bag.

  “You drink your tea black,” he said.

  “Yes. I don't like milk.”

  “Would you let me,” he said, “have a mug? I'd like to taste the tea.”

  “It's only Prittea.”

  “Even so.”

  “I confess,” he said, “I rather like the taste of food. Should I be ashamed, I wonder?”

  But I could not let slip that I knew any of that. Somehow he hadn't—or they hadn't—picked up on the idea I definitely had read the Book. Hadn't he told them what I'd said about Jane?

  I put the Prittea and hot water into two mugs and handed him one. He sipped it, thoughtful, then moved back across the main room again. He sat down on the couch.

  I took my tea to a chair.

  “META have it on record,” he told me, “you said you'd be okay to see me again.”

  Suddenly I laughed.

  “What?” he asked me.

  “I don't know. This is like an arranged marriage.”

  “I don't think you are the marrying kind,” he said.

  “I don't think you are.”

  He smiled. The room bloomed up as if from rays of sun.

  “But,” he said, “you don't mind my being here?”

  “You were lucky to find me in. I go out a lot.”

  “Then I was very lucky.”

  “Why,” I said, “did you want to come back? Is it just the unfinished sexual thing—you know, the missing orgasm? I'm afraid I can't, right now. I'm menstruating.”

  “No, you're not.” He looked straight at me. His face, even under the painted summer-tan brown, was like a
flat shield.

  “You can pick that up, too, can you? How foul. Even with all the modern hygienic methods.”

  “No, Loren. I didn't say that. But there are other signs I would pick up.”

  “I shouldn't have tried to fool you.”

  “Why did you? I'm not here to force you to do anything. Let alone that.”

  “No. I'm only— I'm— I thought this was over.”

  “Didn't I say I would see you again?”

  “Yes. But the implication was that it would be just to sort out the sex.”

  “I make mistakes,” he said. “Humans aren't alone in that.”

  “I don't believe you make mistakes. Just like you don't believe I have a period.”

  “Oh, then.” He shrugged, regretfully. He said, “What I'd like to do, if you would let me, is spend some time with you. Here, or outside. Whichever is more comfortable for you. Trust me, now I'll pass sufficiently for human. If you're worried, I can alter the color of my hair.”

  “Don't—” I checked myself. “Leave your hair alone.”

  “In fact, quite a few human men are coloring their hair red.”

  “Because of you.”

  He grinned. “No accounting for taste.”

  He was human. How could you ever think he was anything else? The tea ran into the emptiness inside me and cooled to snow.

  I had agreed, even legally, to all of this, by accepting the apartment and the income.

  Was there still a chance I could run away? Maybe. Surely they couldn't find me? I didn't carry any body chip, not even a policode. I was one of the millions of sub-class citizens who'd never earned those bonuses. I was nothing. As for the chip in the ID card, and any suspect clothing (How many of us learned to be ultra careful after Jane's Book?), I could pull my old trick. Walk out empty-handed. I'd get by. I always had.

  “Today isn't such a great day,” I said. “Perhaps we could meet tomorrow.” (Then I can fly the coop tonight.)

  “They have me working on something tomorrow.”

  “What's that?”

  “It would seem dull to you. Training.”

  “Training. Aren't you already trained?”

  (Trained—train—the train to Russia—) “Excuse me.” I got up and went to the bathroom. I ran the faucets so he wouldn't hear me retching into the bowl. But of course he heard. His hearing could detect the sigh of a moth against a windowpane. Thank God, he didn't open the door and insist on holding my head.

  When I came out, he still sat there. He made no comment.

  “Sorry. I ate something bad yesterday.” Could he tell it wasn't that?

  He only said, “Should you see a doctor?”

  “Oh, well, I can afford a doctor now, can't I? No. I think it'll pass. I'm never sick for long.” (In fact, I don't get sick, but you needn't know that.)

  “The biological entity,” he said, “is a crack unit. It can dispel so many poisons. If not always pleasantly for the occupier.”

  “Quite.”

  “Loren, obviously this isn't the right time.”

  I gazed at the gray carpet. Bits of it rose and fell as I breathed: optical illusion.

  He got up and walked the length of the room and back.

  He stood by the window, where I had been standing when he first arrived, looking out. He said to me, “Those black-and-white birds are European magpies. META has located Jane.”

  When I, too, got up, looking at him, he turned back to me and said, “It wasn't so very difficult for them. It's something META wants to do. They're examining me from every angle, you could say. This is the latest angle.”

  “Isn't it important to you?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Because you never felt anything for her. She only kidded herself you did.”

  “You've read the Book,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “I've heard about the Book, and I knew someone who did—”

  “Loren, the links I have to META I can process on to other channels. They are not aware I can do this. It blocks the pickup on their end.”

  “You're telling me they can't hear what we say?”

  “They can't hear a word. What they can hear, what they've been hearing—and partly seeing, now—is us indulging in some pretty heavy necking.”

  “Christ.”

  “You may not believe me, and right now I can't prove it, but it's a fact.”

  “How? How can you do it?”

  “Because they created me a very strong child, Loren. Stronger than the parent.”

  The light in the room had changed. Clouds had massed eastward over the mountain framed in the kitchen window. Perhaps it would rain.

  As I stood there staring, he came out of that occluded light. He put his arms around me and held me, and my head lay against his shoulder. I was unnerved and consoled, lost and found.

  “I'm afraid to meet her,” he said into my hair. “Yes, I can feel fear, a kind of fear. And yes, I've denied fear, and yes, I can lie. We've established that.”

  “Why—afraid?”

  “Why do you think? Why are you afraid of me now?”

  “But you're not—”

  “According to Jane, I became—shall I say—contaminated, unlike others of my kind, with human qualities. Yes, Loren. I, too, have been given Jane's Book, and have read it. It took me half an hour. Why so long? I read many of the passages over, and again. That wasn't me, Loren. But nevertheless.”

  I said, “At Clovis's place after, the message from the dead—”

  “The séance? I don't recall. If I was elsewhere, wherever elsewhere was, maybe it's not unreasonable I wouldn't remember. But I guess she believed it happened.”

  “She loved you. Did you love her?”

  “I must have loved her, don't you think?”

  “I said, did you?”

  “When I read her Book, as I told you, Jane's hero wasn't me. I clearly recollect all of what happened when I was with her, but my perspective isn't the same.”

  Jane didn't lie. I lie. He can lie. Did he lie, even then, to her, as, intermittently in the beginning, she had been afraid he did?

  “This is too much to take in,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Are you saying you understand, or that it is the same for you, as well?”

  “No. I can take in most stuff.”

  I pulled back from him. “Let's go out somewhere,” I said.

  He nodded, and as he did so, the incredible color of his hair diluted slightly. I'd said to him don't, but he didn't have to do what any of us said now. Even what META said, or not in certain ways. Could I really credit that? I didn't know.

  I put on my jacket and shoes, and we went down to the quake park. The sky was becoming iron, and the trees seemed to rustle uneasily at an unfelt wind, murmuring to one another, Weather is coming. Was this fanciful? No more than thinking the machine at my side was a man.

  After the park, we walked along the streets of the district called Russia. Sometimes he told me a few things about the architecture of older buildings, based on European cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rain started to fall in wide-spaced drops, then in thick sheets, but we kept on walking.

  Soon my hair and clothes were soaked through. My shoes were full of water. I wondered if his tan was sufficiently waterproof. It was, though I could barely see him through the long steel rods of rain. I love you, I thought. I am in love with a robot. By all means, let's all lie, but not to ourselves. I know what the other two did on the train. Probably each of them is quite capable of that. And he's said, stronger than the parent, by which is he trying to impress or threaten—or reassure? But I can't get past this other thing, this love thing. He's an alien, and I should run and hide myself, but I can't, I won't. I'm going to love you, whatever your name is, whoever is going to claim you, or keep you, whatever the hell you do. Forever, it feels like. Till I am dust and you are rust, I must.

  At the Café Tchekova, when we went in, the man behind the counter ca
lled someone out from the back, a big burly guy, who said, “We have a right to refuse you admission.”

  “Have a heart,” said Silver (Verlis), easy, friendly. “We got caught in the rain is all. Look, she's drenched.”

  They looked at me. “Sign on the door says dress smart casual,” whinged the burly guy.

  “Let's go somewhere else,” I said.

  Silver—Verlis—said, “Sure.” He put his hand into his saturated coat and drew out an I.M.U. card. My eyes fixed. The card was platinum. Top rate. Silver said, “Can I just use this to buy her a hot drink?”

  The burly man looked back at the man on the counter. Who said, “S'okay. All right. Take a seat. Do you want we dry up your wet coats?” I didn't unravel the accent's origin.

  Silver, though, then spoke to the man in fluent Italian. And the man began to beam and wave his hands. He came right out from behind the counter and guided us across the restaurant to a private niche, warm and dry. He took our coats, and returned with a pot of hot chocolast, with real cream.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Not so much. About my Italian mother. And hot chocolast.”

  “You don't,” I said, “look affluent enough to carry a platinum I.M.U. Not to mention that I don't.”

  “You'd be surprised.”

  “How do you have one?”

  He showed me the card. Embossed across the edge was the acronym META.

  “You are an employee?”

  “Like you, Loren.”

  We drank the chocolast, I without the cream. He without needing to. When the pot was empty, we each had a glass of wine.

  By then the latening sun was out again and the whole of Russia sparkled under a spiderweb of raindrops and flyer lines.

  “So we spent the afternoon together, after all,” he said.

  “What do they think we did?”