Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

He can lie. Even about having a mother. To give pleasure, maybe that was still the driving force—because certainly the man here had been very pleased to find a fellow Italian. The symbol of META on Verlis's card hadn't meant a thing. After all, it was on my card, too.

  Probably I should go back now and pack up and run, just like I'd been thinking of doing before I faced up to my feelings. Maybe you'll judge me an idiot. But I've said, haven't I, that I may be spineless.

  I stayed out till afternoon. There wasn't any rain, but in the end I cut back through the underpass between Mason Park and the corner market, and there were a lot of people there busking. About fifty, all told. Girls, guys, kids juggling, an old man with a blue violin and a young one with a pink violin, and a gray dog that took round a Victorian top hat for donations. I dropped in some coins. But all those acts and musics clashed noisily with one another. That was the reality, then. Since none of us was living in a book—not Jane's, not mine.

  In the elevator going up to my rooms, I became aware of a perfume. I thought, at first, the caretaker, who occasionally put in an appearance brooming the front hall or scowling at leaked-in rain puddles in the upper corridors, had sprayed something for “freshness.” But it was a very expensive scent. When I got out of the lift I could still smell it. It went all along the passage leading to my door. Something said to me, I know this scent. But I didn't, couldn't. It was a fragrance only the rich would use.

  Someone had been here, someone—

  So did I turn tail and flee—or let myself in and see if I could locate any implanted surveillance devices, any microchips?

  Madness. I wasn't that important they would do that.

  When I unlocked the door and went inside the apartment, the perfume vanished. It wasn't in there at all. And everything seemed exactly as I had left it: the bed sprawled open, with the faint impress of two bodies still there on the sheet and pillows; the dirty plate and mugs from earlier yesterday, still lined up in the kitchen sink. I looked into my closet and a couple of drawers. I felt over a random selection of my garments, carefully, every inch. Nothing.

  Crazy, as I said.

  I thought, I'm just trying to hang on to him, by telling myself META is hanging on to me. My God, I even imagine perfumes now—

  Then I went back to the apartment door and opened it, to see if I could catch any last lingering scent. I didn't think I did, but something else was there. Two something else's.

  “Hi,” said silver Glaya.

  “Hi,” said black Irisa.

  Glaya's claret hair was done in dozens of long narrow plaits with crystal beads. She wore a short black dress in the latest “ragged” fashion, with carefully tailored holes along the arms and hem. Irisa had hair so short now, her head seemed covered by a skullcap of thick black fur. She wore an ethnic dress down to her strong narrow ankles, red cloth painted with golds and lavenders, one peerless shoulder bare. Like Black Chess, her asterion mate, Irisa could just pass as black; Glaya's skin was silver, uncamouflaged in any way, unless you counted her sapphire lipstick and the blue jewels pasted—or formed—on her eyelids.

  I didn't (uselessly) slam shut the door.

  “May we come in?” asked Glaya, deliciously formal.

  I moved back and let them by.

  “Thank you,” said Irisa, “Loren.”

  They knew me. We were all old in acquaintance.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “We've been sent to help you get ready for tonight,” said Irisa.

  “What about tonight?”

  “You haven't seen any advertisements or vispos? Verlis is playing in concert tonight.”

  They looked at me benignly, two special friends who had come to lighten my darkness. In the maddest way, I was reminded of Grandfather's Apocalytes.

  Had I seen any vispos? All I'd seemed to see were vispos and ads of them all, doing this, appearing here, there. I'd gotten myself to the stage of looking away or turning off the VS. It had seemed to me, meanwhile, the whole city, at least, would know him—all of them. But, like before, a great portion of the city evidently hadn't noticed a thing.

  “Of course you'll be at the concert,” said Irisa. “META will be giving you one of the best seats.”

  “Why?”

  They smiled wickedly, like the two long-standing and conspiratorial friends of mine they were.

  “But you know, Loren.”

  I felt trapped. Panic was snapping at me, pulling bits of me away. Blankly I thought, I'll see him again.

  “And as you're to be in the best seats,” said Irisa, “META thought you, too, would like to be at your best. It's part of our skills, you understand? To prepare a customer for any important occasion.”

  My slaves. Slaves on tethers that stretched to infinity. Slaves who kill. Slaves who are gods.

  Better give in, Loren.

  I gave in.

  Had you ever wondered—I don't think I ever had—reading the Book, what the other first robots really were like, those other eight? Jane mentions them and stresses they weren't like Silver. But they must have been fairly convincing, mustn't they? A lot of people back then, presumably, took them up, enjoyed everything about them. For Jane, for me—for you, too, maybe—there had only been one silver, one robot who was supremely human. That's what love does.

  But Glaya and Irisa seemed entirely human. If gorgeously, divinely so.

  They even unpinned my rose and left it in water. They made Prittea for me, and made little jokes, and chatted to each other and to me. We (they) discussed what shades of color or styles of hair would suit me the most, and how would I like this or that done? Their hands on me were very decorous. I'd made it plain before, and evidently with my reaction to Verlis, that males were my sole sexual option.

  I became Cleopatra, waited on by two favorite, clever, loving, and lovely servants.

  Perhaps it's only what you'd get in the most ten-star beauty parlor. I wouldn't know. I've never been in one.

  Did I like any of it? Honestly? No. I was uncomfortable throughout, knotted up with tension even as Irisa gently kneaded my shoulders to relax me, and Glaya's pedicure tingled my toes.

  My mind, too, was busy, anywhere but there. It was leaping like a squirrel through boughs of excited distrust and near rage. I even thought rebelliously, Well, if they want to make me beautiful, that isn't going to happen.

  They saw me stripped, too. But plenty have, here and there, even women, when I roomed with Margoh and others in Danny's gangs—I mean, you don't always bother to shove on a shirt coming from the shower when you know each other, and know that none of you is going to take it as an invitation.

  Now, while I was conscious how inferior my young, quite firm body must be to their technologically flawless state, I almost flaunted myself. I sort of clutched it to me, my inferiority.

  Unnoticing, or programmed to total indifference, Glaya and Irisa ushered me through the scented herbal bath and hairwash, the painless dipilations, the cleansings and creamings and maquillage, the hairdressing, the dressing.

  They had produced the ingredients of the entire makeover from the tiniest purse. The dress they had brought, with undergarment, emerged from a little bag they unrolled—but at a flap everything was uncreased. They told me the dress was mine, from now on. But personally (like in the dream), I wondered if it would actually vanish in twenty-four hours—or, as with Cinderella, at midnight.

  It nearly made me laugh, the dress. Of course, it was in my size. A precise fit. It was of heavy amber silk, and had no seams. You drew it on, or they did, and then it lay against you. It described every curve and indentation, softly, then from the pelvis fountained away to the feet.

  The only underclothes were the amber silk briefs.

  They finished the makeup after the dress was on. Then they put a bracelet on each of my bare arms—the bracelets were both of amber, the one on the left arm loose and fretted and milky, the right one translucent inside, and full of tiny inclusions, bubbles, little fronds, and fern-th
ings from prehistory.

  “Amber is magnetic,” said Irisa.

  “Would you like to see yourself now?” said Glaya.

  Do they take a weird pride in me, their handiwork? Don't be a fool, Loren. They only make it seem like that.

  And I thought, Now I'll see the travesty, this new “Loren,” dressed up like a million dollars and still a nobody, a clown.

  There was only one big mirror, and it was in the bathroom. The steam had gone by now. They glided me in, one on either side.

  We stood, looking in the glass.

  Will you believe this? Believe it. The liar is being painfully frank.

  For a second I looked into the reflection, and I saw there were three of them—of us. They had made me into one of their own kind.

  Yes, that is insane. It was only cosmetic. My skin, though good, and now apparently poreless and smoother than the looking glass, wasn't metallic. In fact, there wasn't any hint of metal anywhere on me. Not about the black brows or smoky eyelids, the succulent mouth, nor in the amber jewels or sculpted gown or palest apricot pumps. Ebony hair in a cascade without even a clip. Nails enameled to pearl.

  Here is one of our new range, the Verisimulated Nonelectronic, Nonmetallic Robot. . . .

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” chanted Irisa like a spell.

  “Who,” chanted Glaya, “is fairest of us all?”

  “Loren!” they both cried, like happy children.

  Then they stood by me and waited patiently—but for what? They didn't want or need my grovelings or thanks. They didn't need to know, or care, if I was thrilled or sickened by this stupendous metamorphosis.

  I said to the mirror, watching my painted lips move and the sound come out—so it really was me in there—“Just tell me, how am I going to travel any place like this?”

  “It's arranged, Loren,” said Irisa. “Don't get in a fuss.”

  Hours had passed in my preparation. The apartment was rich with sunfall.

  Now, in the passage outside was a guy in a one-piece and shades. He was a bodyguard. No mistaking it.

  “Ready, ladies?” he coolly asked. There was some type of gun under his arm. Despite the tailoring, I could just decipher it.

  We went along to the lift, and inside was another bodyguard, who perhaps had been riding up and down all afternoon to keep the elevator clear.

  No one, certainly, was about in the house. Outside, the street had a few people going along it. Most of them were gawping at the big car by the sidewalk. It was a Rolls Matrix Platinum Ghost. When we got in, the sightseers gazed at us. Thinking us celebrities, someone on the corner had gotten out a little vid camera, but one of our bodyguards held up one finger and shook his head, and the vid went straight back into its case.

  The bodyguards rode in front with the driver.

  The windows were polarized, and, I'd take a bet, bullet- and explosives-proof.

  A platinum robot device in the car, shaped like a trumpet lily, served us—Glaya and Irisa and me—champagne. Did they like it? They drank it. I must have, too, but I don't recall.

  I felt frightened. And I felt alive. I wanted not to be left alone. I wanted to see him again.

  We drove along at a fair lick. I thought we'd go out into the countryside, or up to the heavenly heights of the city. Instead, as neons began to harden on the dusk, daggering along our dark windows, the Rolls turned into a long white tunnel that had restrictions on either end to keep most traffic out. The other side of the tunnel was a wide crowded avenue with tall streetlamps already burning up.

  “This is Bohemia,” said Glaya.

  Irisa said, “There's the concert hall.”

  It was impressive, a huge domed building, all carved, pillared, and paneled around, in the mode of something from eighteenth-century Eastern Europe.

  Across the concourse outside milled a lot of people. They let the car through, peering in at the blind windows—pale faces, human, curious, some laughing and some almost . . . urgent.

  The Rolls slid into the side of the building and down into a private car park.

  “META,” said the cool bodyguard to a globe that floated up to us. The password. Presumably backed by body ID and chip. A private elevator carried us up into the hall. There were mirrors all around the lift. We three robot women, and our human bodyguards, were repeated to eternity through glass reflecting in glass.

  When he walked out on the semicircle of stage below, he was like the only living thing in that whole vast space. The rest of us? Machines.

  The applause and calls were deafening.

  He raised his head and his hand to us, a greeting, a recognition. He looked relaxed and profoundly together. All he wanted in the world was to delight us, and he knew he could do it. I saw a healer once, one of the Sect. He was bending over a woman with a headache, not touching her, but smiling into her skull. And the pain went, or she said it went. And that was how this man looked, just the way Verlis did, as if the power of Heaven was on him, and he would use it only for good, but with utter enjoyment.

  An announcing voice rang through the auditorium before Verlis came on. It told us to prepare ourselves.

  There had been plenty of advance publicity. The place was packed, including the exclusive seats to which a uniformed usher had taken me. Irisa and Glaya were gone by then. I was on my own, sitting on a lush plush chair, and all around me the rich and pampered glittered, who, seeing me, didn't bat an eyelash, for obviously I was rich and pampered, too.

  Now all the lights were out, apart from those left burning over the stage. The air smelled aromatic but not drugged. He wore that dark red clothing, like wine in a smoked glass, or sunset under night.

  He played a song to us on a guitar, and sang. A simple start, deceptively so. Though the song was popular and most of us had been hearing it on and off for about six months, naturally it hadn't ever sounded like this. What is Verlis's voice like, would you say? Or maybe you haven't heard it. My musical knowledge is limited. I know books better. I think his voice was most like a keyboard instrument. It had an effortless range, as such an instrument would. But there was a hot feral darkness in its deeper notes, and a central quality more like warmth. The high register had elements of spatial silver. Yes, the vocal colors were like his own. And perhaps that is the only reason I see it that way.

  He made the guitar, too, sound like another voice, or voices. It sang around him, harmonized and patterned over him, raised its own echoes and prefaces, like shadows cast from a moving lamp.

  After he sang, he played a guitar solo. That was classical, I think, from Spain or Italy. It had a rhythm like horses galloping. It was like—what else?—two or three guitars in synchrony: six hands, eighteen strings, and somewhere a drum tapped that didn't exist. While this happened, an orchestra began to come up through vents in the stage, as if his playing summoned it.

  There were drums there now, a whole percussion section, even bells and cymbals. There were ranks of tall stands with flutes perched on them, like waiting snakes, and those curly horns—I don't know their name. There were two violins (like the underpass buskers, and not), also on stands, with their bows somehow fixed across them. Four oboes appeared to one side, and two lutes at the other. A piano, itself shining silver, lifted at the middle of the stage.

  I—we?—thought other musicians would now walk out from the wings.

  Verlis had finished the solo, and even greater applause thrashed against the hall's high roof. He spoke to us, thanking us, like a king. (Did I say? There was no microphone, no acoustic boost at all . . . it was only there, the music, his voice, inside some secret room of the mind, yet wide as a sky.)

  “I want to play you,” he said, “a song I wrote last night.”

  The tiers of people on velvet or fake velvet chairs fell silent.

  Verlis said, “This song is for you.”

  The faintest murmur. To me it sounded like the groan of pleasure at a kiss.

  Then once more the silence, in which he sang and played.


  He played—the orchestra.

  Were you there? Do you remember? Do I? I'm not sure. It— Put it this way, I've been told how it was done. No, I don't mean he told me. I mean, something in me . . . I don't know what I mean.

  A chip was in every instrument. It responded to his control. His unhuman brain mathematically spacing and allocating each portion and particle of music without a single physical touch. The lutes, the flutes on their stands, the violins, bows skimming, the drums and bells. He, as the conductor did in the historic past, was at the piano. Everything else took its cue and tempo from him.

  His face was like that of a serene and smiling statue.

  The best seats, you see, were quite close to the stage. I suppose, as he played, I was sitting about twenty feet from him. Whenever I speak of him I feel impelled to describe him over and over, and how he was exactly like a man, and how he wasn't, and how I (selfishly) hung from his physicality and persona like a filament drifting from the sun.

  The song he'd composed was the best song ever written. And the orchestral accompaniment was like an architecture of sound that rose high above the concert hall. Or so it seemed.

  He played other things after that. At one juncture, he even asked for requests, and all those he received, frenziedly shouted across the auditorium, he performed, transmuting them at once through the medium of Verlis, into the shining new and perfect.

  There was a thirty-minute interval. I was afraid people from META, or robots, would gather round me and compel me to the bar or the ladies' room. But no one arrived. I went up myself and drank a vodka out on a crowded terrace. They were all talking about him. None of them seemed afraid, not even offended. All of them knew what he was, wasn't. That he was only there for them.

  When everyone went back, I wasn't going to. Then I simply did. (No one had accepted payment for my drink. They gave me the glass on a little white mat that said META.) So I thought, If I don't go back, presumably they will make me. Maybe not.

  The second half was like the first, but you didn't get tired of it. It didn't become monotonous. It was ever-changing, though the same. Like Jane's bloody sea.