Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

  “Kissed. Then came out to walk. They hear snatches, not all. I monitor which ones. I can do that easily while we're talking. The Asteroid, you see, effects that kind of pickup if I'm outside. They're still working to try to get around that.”

  “Like the old mobile phones.”

  Very quietly he produced for me, from his own voice box, the exact sound of a cell phone's signaling tone. The sort you still hear in old movies. I jumped. I said, “A party trick.”

  “I was trying to make you laugh. Not shock you.”

  “Of course you shock me.”

  “Say my name,” he said.

  I looked at him. Then I said, “Verlis.” Getting it right the first time, not stumbling over any unspoken leading S for Silver.

  “We can have,” he said, “the rest of the day. All night, if you want. Not for sex, if you don't want that. We can walk, talk, go someplace and dance, or gamble on this bottomless card of mine. Or eat. How is your stomach, by the way?”

  “I lied,” I said. “I got sick from nerves.”

  “Another failure on my part,” he said. “Loren, I really think you'd better come out with me tonight, or I'll have no confidence left.”

  “This won't work with me,” I said, shaking my wine slowly round and round inside the glass.

  “Because you read Jane's Book, and know how it goes. I've been trying to tell you, it doesn't go like that.”

  “She wanted to make believe you were human.”

  “Lots of human beings want, and are going to want, to do that. And if that's what they like, I accept it. With you, if you prefer, I can use the cell phone call-tone, when we're in private.”

  His smile was so—winning. And anyway, I was already won. So I kept playing with my wine.

  Then he said to me, in his own voice, hushed and close against the drums of my ears, “You have a tiger's eyes.”

  “Not cowrie shells, then?” I answered sharply, before I could stop it.

  “Jane's words,” he said.

  “Jane's eyes. Or so she said you told her.”

  “I don't want to talk about Jane.”

  “You told me they located her.”

  “They have. And I did tell you. I think we have that organized now.”

  Something—his smile—yes, now I saw it, turning to ice. And how he looked away, as if I abruptly bored him. Showing my persistence was losing me his intense, temporary regard.

  Then he got to his feet. “Shall we go?”

  We collected our coats, unspeaking. As we walked out past the man at the counter, Verlis spoke one further time in Italian, like “his mother.” They shook hands, man and machine. Outside on the sidewalk, Verlis nodded at me. “Thank you,” he said, cool and unfriendly, like others I'd known, “for your time. We must do it again. Get wet together.”

  I turned my head and looked across the street. I didn't know what to say to him.

  Then he said, “Perhaps one thing you should know. You were the first. Not interested? Okay. See you, Loren.”

  I jerked round and stared back at him, frowning. “First.”

  “In the sack.”

  “You . . . said you'd been given two previous partners.”

  “Naturally. I explained about my skill of lying. Wouldn't you have been very profoundly uneasy about screwing me, if you thought I'd had no prior experience? Yes, I'm the demon lover. I can do it all, and all the other All most of you never tell anyone you want. I can do all that, too. But I never had.”

  “I don't believe you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I thought, vaguely, we must look like any couple having a spat.

  “You say you were a virgin,” I said. “But that's stupid, you're not. You've slept with other people in the past, before—”

  “The one I was isn't the one I am now. Get that through your head, Loren. Got it? I am brand-new, all over again. Why the fuck do you think I am dreading seeing her again, that woman from before? I was, it seems, everything to her. But now I don't fucking feel anything about her. If you want to know, I feel more about you.”

  “Stop,” I blurted. “For Christ's sake—”

  “Scares you, doesn't it? What do you think it does to me?”

  The—disgust in his voice.

  Can he do this? How is it his programming allows—but he can lie, he can deflect built-in surveillance and forge re-imaging. He can imitate a cell phone. He can maybe shape-shift. Oh, I guess he can just about manage to be disgusted, too.

  I leaned back on the wall of the café. I felt weak and dizzy, and he frightened me. All of it did. And I couldn't make myself say to him, Leave me alone.

  I'd sworn my vows. Dust, rust, must.

  “I apologize,” he said. He had said that before. He sounded neutral. “I'll take you home. Come on, give me your hand.”

  I gave it.

  • 2 •

  Turquoise.

  More blue than green. That's the color of love, then, for me. At least, of sexual love.

  Will I always think that now? Associate that shade with that act?

  Who knows.

  It wasn't like any other time. Nor like the time with him before.

  Modest Jane said she wouldn't give you details.

  I want to give you details.

  That is, I mean, I want to write them here, pages, a whole book about that single joining together on the turquoise sheets of the bed.

  He took off the tan for me because I asked him to. He did that in the shower, alone, and when he came back from the shower, he was naked, except for the curtain of his hair, which was that other red again, that red like velvet, streaming down from his head, and for the red hair coiled at his groin. Red and silver. Oh, he had the eyes of a tiger, or perhaps each of his eyes was a tiger, its amber pelt luminous yet barred with darkness.

  Dusk was in the rooms. No lights except a couple of large candles I'd lit because they were there, expecting to be lit, their wicks still white, which they say is unlucky, to leave a candle with its wick unsinged, even if not in use, because then it means you'll never burn them for a celebration. . . .

  “Tell me what you want,” he said to me.

  “You.”

  “Loren, I won't let them see.”

  “Let them.”

  But he shook his head at me again. He was tender, cruel and omniscient, this god from the machine.

  I have always very much liked sex. Found it simple. Ultimately unimportant.

  His hands on me—do I describe that? How can I? What words are there that are any use? My hands on him—easier—textures like skin and muscle, of a new being, not mortal, silk that's steel, steel that's pliant as the body of a puma. Hair—like grass, hot and full of summer scents and the aroma of a distant sea, and of pines—hair like ropes of fire, like a wave. His mouth—a cool furnace. The passing of one body across another—planets striking, sweet, unbearable completion. Worlds without end.

  No, I don't have the words. There are no words for that act with him.

  In all this earth, is there any place a word or phrase to describe it, as truly it can be? Not sex, not fucking, not humping or rocking or riding. No, not making love, that almost queasy emphasis on what isn't always there at that moment, even if love is a part of it.

  Find me a word. A beautiful and savage word that makes the hair rise on the scalp, the blood change to stars, the bones melt, the atoms flower. Is there such a word? No? Then, like the books of long ago that always left out the more basic, “uglier” words, I must resort to this: We——. That is what we did. We——.

  I thought it could never end. It had no end, scarcely any beginning. It goes on still, even now. Even now, as I write this down, my hand cramped from every other ordinary describable emotion than love or pleasure or sex, even now it goes on. That——that we did, he and I, together on the blue-green candle-flicker plain of sheets, above a street whose name I have changed.

  It was night eventually, and returning, as if from sleep or a trance, seeing hi
m lying beside me, a silver lion maned only with darkness in the dark, for both candles had by then been, like other things, consumed, I whispered.

  “Silver . . .” I said.

  “Loren, don't call me that. He's gone. Recognize that now I'm someone else.”

  “Silver Verlis,” I said. “An adjective, not a name.”

  I went to sleep against his shoulder. He held me.

  Yes, only once, for that act of——.

  Once and forever. The sequel to the future.

  • 3 •

  Since the train, I hadn't recollected any of my dreams. But that night I had a dream I recalled. At the time it seemed to go on for hours. It was oddly coherent, too, and unnonsensical, as sometimes dreams are. It seemed entirely to be happening, and I was full of regret and nervous fear—and sorrow. Though in the dream, I'd forgotten what he said about Jane, how he would have to meet her. It just started with that thing about his clothes.

  Morning light was there, and he was dressing again, putting the clothes on, the pale shirt, dark pants and boots, and I said, “How do you do that? I mean, if you can make them come out of you, then how can you still . . . take them off . . . and put them back on?” He said, “I can get the firm to mail you their manual.” “You won't explain.” “Look,” he said. He came over to me and, in that mercurial twilight, held out his hand. As I stared, a ring . . . evolved around one of his fingers. It was instantly solid, silver, with a flat pale turquoise at its center. I didn't see how that had happened. It was only there. He took the ring off and said, “Now I'll make this fit you,” and he did something and the metal—still fresh as risen metallic dough from the oven of his body—crimped in, and he slipped the ring onto the middle finger of my right hand. “It won't last,” he said, “away from me. About twenty-four hours.” And there in the jaws of a technology beyond what I'd ever truly believed in, in the dream all I thought was: He means anything between us, too. Twenty-four hours, and it's done. It was like a fairy tale—fairy gold—the sort that vanishes at midnight or in the rays of the sun. Sorcery, not science fiction. But I'd witnessed, and he'd shown me. I said, “Only the fake tan was different?” “Yes, and now I have to reapply it.” At which he took a flask out of the dark coat and said, “This coat, actually, was made elsewhere.” “Why can't you make the tan, like everything else?” He said, “That's the thing they've said isn't allowed, Loren. To pass that fully as human. I'd need META's say-so for that.” I got up and went to use the bathroom. (Yes, in the dream. Even those details are there.) The bathroom he didn't need. I wondered if he would leave while I was showering. When I came out, he was sitting on my main room couch, watching morning VS.

  I stood there in the long T-shirt I sometimes wear after the shower, watching him watch VS, like any young human male, just no coffine mug, and I thought, If I make coffine or tea, will he stay—play at drinking it— Then the door to my apartment called melodiously, “Loren, someone is here.”

  Dreaming, I jumped. Out of my body nearly. Verlis said, “That's okay. I think I know who.”

  “Who?” I said.

  It was the door that replied, “It is Copperfield; it is Black Chess; it is Goldhawk.”

  “Okay if they come in?” asked the alien on the couch.

  “Can I stop them?”

  He smiled and said, “It's only that META prefers us to travel together now, on the flyers, or in the streets.”

  Together. Like Kix and Goldhawk, on the train to Russia.

  The door said, with the same melodious insistence, “Loren, someone is here. It is Copperfield; it is—”

  “Let them in,” I said.

  I walked into the bedroom and shut the door as I put on clothes. In the dream I was very fast.

  Yet outside I heard their noiselessness enter the rooms. My dream-mind was like a waking one. Did I feel invaded? I didn't. The apartment—like the ring—wasn't mine. None of it would last.

  When I came out, four beautiful young men in smartish casual wear, hair long and tied back in tails, were standing across from the VS. They were laughing. Only Black Chess wasn't brown-tanned. He'd pass as black, I supposed, if you didn't inspect that immaculate poreless skin too closely. Yes, all this was that real.

  Did I feel anything? I don't know. I think I felt overwhelmingly alone.

  Then Verlis turned and came across and kissed me again, lightly, on the lips. “Take care of yourself, Loren.”

  He means good-bye.

  The tanned man with lacquer black hair and long, Oriental eyes, spoke behind Verlis. All their voices are musical. Even asleep, you wanted to listen. No matter what.

  “She is the one from the train,” said Goldhawk.

  Verlis said, still looking at me, not looking round, “What does that mean, Gee? Which train?”

  “The overland here, last month.”

  I thought, Why are they talking? They can surely communicate some other mechanical, inner way. Part of the conditioning, when with humans, then, even in a scenario of threat like this one, is to speak aloud?

  Verlis said, “I don't think I understand what you mean, Gee.”

  “She does. The woman.”

  “Do you, Loren?” Verlis asked me quietly.

  “The train,” I said. “It was derailed, or so they told me. I don't remember much. I had a knock on the head. It was all very quick.”

  “She was in the same carriage,” said Goldhawk. “She remembers.”

  I glared across at him. “What carriage?” I demanded. “Why are you going on about it? I got hurt. So what's your problem?”

  It's as if we are all the same, a family, arguing . . .

  But “You remember me,” said Goldhawk. His face was like a vivid mask. “Kix. Me. In the carriage you were in.”

  No, we're not the same. No family here.

  I didn't like looking into Goldhawk's black-green eyes. I knew I recalled perfectly the violent episode before the train went off the track. (And in the dream I thought about it more, too. I considered if even the forcing open of the doors at top speed could have caused the crash. Or if there had been some little extra instruction fed back down the power artery from gold robot to robot engine.)

  “So. We were all in one carriage. I don't remember,” I repeated stubbornly, and flooded my mind with a blank nothing.

  Verlis put his hand on my arm, warm and steadying, like the hand of a kind father. Something I never knew.

  “Leave it, Gee,” he said. “She's told you, she was concussed. Yes, it can happen. She doesn't recall.”

  “We both know she does. She's clever. I would like her to take a chemical test on whether she recalls,” said Goldhawk.

  My guts went to ice water.

  Verlis said, “That's enough.”

  Now it was a command. There could be no moment's doubt. I glanced at him, then back at Goldhawk, who lowered his head very slightly. Goldhawk said, “Very well.”

  “Loren,” said Verlis, light as his kiss, “is my special companion out here. All right? Whatever she says, is fine.”

  “And you'd better listen, Gee,” said Black Chess softly.

  Goldhawk: “Yeah, Verlis. Fine.”

  And then Copperfield said, smiling his own irresistible young-man smile at me, “Nice to meet you, Loren.”

  “Hi, Loren,” said Black Chess. “Great place you got here.”

  Suddenly, for five seconds, it was a party.

  But already they were moving, all four of them, towards the main door.

  Special companion. Did that mean client?

  Lean and coordinated, they undid the door, and walked through: Goldhawk silent; Copperfield blowing me a kiss as he went, playful, rather M-B; Black Chess a panther who paused to look along the outer passage, profile cut from stone.

  Verlis was the last to go.

  He said nothing, but his eyes stayed on me. I was caught full in the ray of them. His gaze might mean anything, and I couldn't read it.

  Neither of us spoke. The door closed.

&
nbsp; Everything had tangled in my head. Squeezed in my clenched fist, the twenty-four-hour ring pinched my flesh. I felt it, like a vise.

  No idea of danger. Not now. Only his unreadable eyes, looking at me. I was his special companion out here. What did he mean by out here—the district of Russia? The world of human things?

  When I woke up, it was dawn, like the dream, but he wasn't there. He had gone, even as I slept and dreamed he left me.

  When I moved my head, on the pillow lay a flower; it was a dark red rose. I put my hand on it, asking myself if he had made it from his own body, like clothing, or the ring in my dream. It felt as if it was a rose—petals, stem, a single trimmed thorn. No smell.

  What wins then, between anger, danger, and love?

  Love.

  Danger and anger are everywhere. Love is the rarity, the gem buried in the core of the mine, the outpost of God.

  Walking back into Café Tchekova, with the rose pinned on my collar, I saw the man at the counter recollected me. He smiled and offered a little bow. I'd put on new jeans and an okay top I'd bought a week ago with my I.M.U. card. I had the card, too.

  “All by yourself today, yes?”

  “Afraid so.”

  I ordered a coffine and a doughnut, and he gave the counter over to someone else and brought the things to my table.

  “How is your friend?” he asked me. I had known he would.

  “He's well.”

  “How long you know him?” asked the man.

  “Seems like forever.”

  “Ah. I thought something is between you. His mother, he say to me, she from the Venetian places. Good to hear Italian spoke so good. But he is a marvelous young man. I seen such a face on the great classic statues, or pictures—like from Leonardo.”

  “He's very handsome,” I agreed, modest in my familiarity with the paragon.

  The man accepted I was shy, and still smiling, left me to my breakfast. I couldn't eat the doughnut, managed only about a quarter of it, it stuck in my mouth and throat like lumps of sugary gauze.

  And why had I come here? To recapture yesterday? Or to test this man, see if Verlis really had fooled him so completely. I was naive to suspect, even for a moment, it could be otherwise.