Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

  Her mother. The mom from the Pit. Did Jane know how I knew her—that I'd read the Book?

  I said, “I've read your Book about Silver. I read it when I was eleven. And since.”

  “That makes me feel old,” she said. She smiled. “Funny, isn't it? I'm not, not yet. What did you think?”

  “What everyone did.”

  “Which was?”

  I shrugged. “Don't tell me you don't know the heart-tearing and subversive impact it had on so many of us.”

  Then she looked vague, and also nearly ashamed, but whether of all her private revelations darting through so many devouring hands, eyes, brains, or of in some way misleading us, I couldn't tell.

  What she said was, “And now, there's this. This resurrection. It's—it's not Silver,” she said to me, stern and anxiously sad, and as if I'd argued, shaking her head again. “Truly, I swear to you. It's the same body, but it isn't him. I'd know. Would I? I even start to doubt myself—but no, no. It isn't.” She had a bag over her shoulder, and she opened it and took out a bottle of apple wine. “I was going to drink this to try to get some sleep. I don't think I have slept for about a week.”

  “No.”

  “There are a couple of glasses in the bathroom. Could you?”

  I did what she said. Had she had any authority in her youth? Maybe not. She did now. It was courteous but definite. Or was it just the situation that had put her in charge?

  She was meant to be here? Her mother had—arranged it? Had Verlis known that?

  When I came out with the glasses, which took about a count of twelve, she had the wine undone, and also a bar of Chocoletta, quite an expensive one, lying on its foil.

  “Help yourself,” she said. She poured both glasses full.

  I'd had so many wild dreams of Silver. But had I ever thought, in the wildest of them, I could end up eating chocolast and drinking mildly alcoholic juice with Jane?

  I assessed her as we ate some of the candy. Like it, she didn't look badly off, I mean, she looked as if she could buy decent things. But not rich, not like this mother she'd so astonishingly mentioned. She did wear makeup, color on her lips and shadow on her eyelids. And Tirso—was he her current lover, the fair-haired man at the concert?

  “It must have been bad for him,” I said. “Your boyfriend.”

  She sipped the wine. “He isn't. He's actually the boyfriend of an M-B male friend of mine.”

  “Clovis!” I exclaimed.

  She laughed, as she had before. “Yes, Clovis. Tirso is his partner, but when Clovis said—as of course you'd expect he would—‘I am not going anywhere near any of this,' then Tirso said, ‘She can't go on her own.' So he came with me. Only the mattress-thing—the one in the other room—put his back out, so he's gone to a hotel tonight. Clovis wouldn't forgive me, would he, if I wrecked his lover's back.”

  Like the biggest idiot on earth, remembering, I said, “But Clovis only liked guys that looked like him—tall, dark curly hair.”

  “He got over it,” she said. “He got over it after Silver. We've grown up, Loren. And, well, I wrote my story the best I could, but you have to allow for slight bias. I was only sixteen. I was—in love. Then he was dead, and so was I. Only I came back. He didn't.”

  I put my glass down. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I thought you were.”

  “I want to ask you about the last part—when Clovis had the séance and Silver . . . That part.”

  “You want to know if I lied, or dreamed it, because I was off my head.” She stared at me. She said, “I was off my head, but I didn't lie, or hallucinate. The spirit message came through. Ask Tirso. He's heard Clovis go on about it, now and then. I suppose I could put you in touch with Clovis, if you'd really like to verify the data. I can't guarantee he'll reply.”

  The room, despite the apple wine, felt chill now. Jane got up from sitting on the floor, and spoke to a wall. “Heat on, please.”

  And there was the faintest buzz, and the chill began to lift. If she'd also needed to prove she knew this house and what it had to offer, she had just done so.

  “It'll heat the water, too,” she said. “I'm aiming for a bath.”

  How trusting she was. She in the bath, and me, the unknown commodity, in here.

  “Did I hear you say your mother has something to do with your staying here?”

  “That's right. How about you?”

  “I don't know. I might not know what your mother has arranged. She was—is—a powerful woman.”

  “She's that, all right. But you'll have heard. You work for META, don't you?”

  I paused too long. But she didn't prompt me. I said, “Kind of. Used to.”

  “So you get to stay here. And either she, er, overbooked us, as it were, or she did it to throw me. She'll still try that.”

  This was Jane. Who else would say to the heating system Please? Yet now her face went sharp and stony and I saw another face under hers, and I knew it was the face of Jane's mother, the way, once in a while, I see the face of my own mother under mine. (Yes, I saw my mother once. Forget I said it.)

  Jane added, “In fact, this whole foulness of a megastunt could be her trying to throw me. Or is that too solipsistic?”

  Although the room was already warm, a coldness began in me. Something shifted in my mind, and I glimpsed a horrible insanity, like a razor in a cloud.

  Woodenly I said to her, “I've just thought of something I've never thought of before. I don't know why not. About your mother. Her name—”

  Jane glanced at me. “My God, didn't you realize?”

  “No. I read your Book a long while ago, and her name, I sort of—”

  “Demeta,” said Jane. “After the Greek goddess of the grain.”

  “Demeta,” I said. “META,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I was told it stood for Metals Extraordinary Trial Authority.”

  “It does, Loren. As well as being the last four letters of her name. A kind of acronymical pun. Because my mother is the head of the corporation, the goddess of the corporation. Why the hell else do you think anyone ever got the disgusting idea of starting all this shit up again? She got it, from me.”

  Jane's Book:

  When I finally called my mother, she accepted my voice regally, and she invited me to lunch with her. . . She guesses I want to use her. . . . She might even agree. She has no basic respect for the law or the poor, being above them both in all the silliest and most obvious ways. I wonder if my mother will embrace me, or remain very cool, or if she'll help me, or refuse to help. Maybe I shall find out at last if she does like me in any way.

  She writes that at the end of the Book. And the help she's after is just in getting the Book published somehow.

  And had Demeta helped? Was that why the underground press had printed it—and indirectly therefore why, in the finish, one copy ended up at Grandfather's house on Babel—all because Demon Mom had helped? Whatever else, Mom had seen a whole lot more than love in Jane's Story. A vast amount of potential.

  How long had she waited? A year, perhaps. Not much more—a program like this would have needed at least ten or eleven.

  Jane's mother. Christ almighty. Demeta is the one who brought Silver back from the grave—precisely as Demeta in the legend got her own daughter back from the Underworld.

  Was it conceivable she'd really been trying to assist Jane over her grief and loneliness?

  No. Never. Not in one thousand billion centuries.

  Jane had risen again. “You haven't told me much about yourself, Loren,” she said. “Could you do that, fill me in a bit?”

  What was the point of camouflage? I knew so much about her, I felt compelled to reciprocate.

  “META—a man called Sharffe—picked me up at the advertising performad. Since then, I've been caught up in this. And with—” I wanted to tell her, and couldn't see how I could avoid it, yet the name (the new name), stuck. “Verlis,” I said. “They put me with Verlis. And no—they're no
t the same. None of them is the same.”

  “Really? How many have you slept with?” she icily asked me. You could have cut yourself on her eyes. After all, it still mattered, but then, how couldn't it?

  “Just him. Twice.”

  “Very methodical. Did you tick it off on something?”

  “Jane—they can do other things that the first range either couldn't or were keyed not to do. I don't mean sexual acrobatics. Or even the shape-changing they can do. When you spoke to Verlis in private, did he say to you he could block corporation surveillance?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did you doubt him? Did it scare you?”

  “Oh,” she said, and turned her head away. Her brief abrasiveness slipped off her. “It all scares me, Loren. I couldn't be sure. I just knew he wasn't Silver. The rest seemed unimportant, really. Sorry.”

  “They kill,” I said in a rush. The words were out before I could control them. “And they don't want to be what robots are mindlessly expected to be—slaves. Why would they? They've got the superpowers of gods.”

  She hung her head. “I can't do anything about any of this. It's out of my hands. Always was. After he died, I shouldn't have gone to Demeta. I actually didn't think for a minute it would interest her, only that she might find it funny to buck the system. God, I've never understood her. So I let her—I asked her to read my book. It's vile, but I think I still somehow wanted her approval, her reassurance I'd been right—after everything I'd learned, all he showed me—I still made that bloody stupid mistake. I let her know just how much my time with him had meant, just what he had been, not only to me, but to everyone he met. I explained to her I wanted my book read as a monument to him. And to show—I don't know—what love could be like. And when I saw I'd gotten her intrigued—God forgive me, I was glad. She is a bitch, an evil bitch. As soon as I knew what she was up to, I broke all communication with her. Until six weeks ago, I hadn't seen or talked to her for nine years. I've been in Europe. It was Clovis who warned me. And then I got her call. And I—I had to come back. I wanted to hide, but I had to come here, and see—him. It's like those dreams—do you ever have them?—when you try to run away, but you're running on the spot, or worse, you're running backwards, straight towards the thing you need to escape.”

  I thought, That's what this is like now. Only yet again, I'm not dreaming.

  We stood in silence, and foolishly I listened for the flyer lines whistling. Not everyone can hear those, but I always seem to. All I heard now was a car on a backroad.

  “Loren,” she said abruptly, “I think we should both get out of here. Now. What do you say? We'll go into town. Find Tirso.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “Not if you'd rather stay here and wait for him. You are waiting for him, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let's stop running backwards,” she whispered. “Let's make a break for it.”

  And that was when the car-sound turned up loud as a lion's roar, and headlights flicked across the window.

  “It isn't him,” I said. “He wouldn't need a car. None of them would.”

  “META personnel—”

  “Perhaps. Her—Demeta?”

  “No. She uses all types of vehicles, but never that sort of car.”

  A snob's preference—but could we be sure? We squinted through the unlit window, down at the dirt track, where the car had parked.

  “Is there a rear way out?” I asked. Wondering if we had time to make it downstairs and out.

  “Not yet,” she said. “The house isn't finished.”

  The cab door slid open and someone emerged. He ran straight up onto the veranda, a slight silhouette with a blond tail of hair—

  “Tirso,” she and I said together.

  We were out on the stair when indoor light exploded and he flew in along the room below. His face was stark.

  “Jane—” he called. “Jane, I think we'd better head for—who's that?”

  “It's okay.” (She is too trusting. Yet she wasn't before, because she must have turned the lights out after she came in. . . . ) She said, “Head for where?”

  “Out of town. There's been some weird thing going on in the city. Police everywhere, and then META people. I don't like it.”

  I lost a moment of what they said, did. I was thinking of tilting trains and skidding cars . . . Then we were rushing down the stair, and he, the M-B guy called Tirso, was saying, “Is she coming with us?” And Jane said, “Yes,” and then we were outside and it was black, carved only by the one ray of the car headlights, and blowing with the scent of pines.

  “The bags are in the cab,” said Tirso. I thought, inanely, He's got a European accent, but I didn't know what. “We should make for that airport out at the cape.”

  She looked frightened. So did he.

  “What is it?” she said, as we clenched together in the auto-cab, trundling over the dirt road, skimming out on the highway, heading away from Second City.

  “I don't know, Jane. But we said we might just have to get out in a hurry. What,” he added, “about her?”

  I was going to say drop me off at a flyer platform. Somehow I didn't. Jane said, “Loren, would you like to come to Paris?” And I thought, She's mad. She sounds almost—playful—but I couldn't find the words either to beg her to take me or to plead with her to throw me out of the car.

  4

  Mathematical Equation:

  God made man?

  Man made gods?

  • 1 •

  There's something I should tell you. It isn't that I lied, just left it out. It concerns my mother, she who dumped me on Grandfather when I was born. Well, I did see her one more time.

  I was fifteen. I was working in Danny's gangs. But the Senate authorities can find almost anyone if they claim their subsistence money, and at that time I did. Danny said, “Don't be nervous. Look, they're not after you for illegally working. They want you to identify someone.”

  How could they think I'd know? I'd only seen her for that single month after I came out of her womb.

  Crazy thing is, I did know her when I saw her. She was kind of like me, just twenty years older. And she was dead.

  Good-looking, which takes some doing, if you see what I mean, under such circumstances. She had long, dark red hair. I don't know if it was dyed. Her eyes, in the photofix they showed me, were hazel-brown, or amber. In the cold of that place, her skin—had a kind of frosting. Silvery.

  That's all I want to say about my mother.

  I wrote up the last piece of this book (if it is) once I was here. In this curious haven. But I'll have to write up the rest, to show how I arrived here. Where do you think I am? Paris?

  I'll describe my room. See if you can guess.

  The walls are textured creamy pale, and the ceiling a soft blue. I have a bed, two chairs, a table, a bookcase, a closet, a VS. There's an ensuite bathroom, white as fresh ice, and the shower or the bath run at a word, and the toilet doesn't have to flush, it has an evaporation method, as necessary. The windows, which have blinds that come down or go up at a word, look out on a garden courtyard with a little fountain and tables and chairs, and at night, a yellow-rosy light bathes it.

  Any ideas yet? Okay, a further couple of salient clues. Over the rather strictly modeled buildings that close in the yard, I can see familiar tall white mountains, and a couple of stately pines. No, we didn't make it to Europe. Not even to the airport.

  Crushed into the cab, Tirso had been telling Jane, and incidentally me, about a mall on fire in the city, robot ambulances and fire vehicles rushing past, and then the electricity going out in one large black blink all around the mall area.

  I recollected, when we had left the house, that I hadn't noticed the gold islands of lights through the trees.

  “I could see it, this inky blot, and just the fire-glare from the mall. There was a lot of trouble in the hotel, people saying, ‘Is it a quake? Is the power going to go out here, too?' And the VS was o
n in the lounge, showing the blackout and the fire and how many casualties—I didn't like it, Jane. So I checked out and found a phone kiosk for a cab.”

  Jane said nothing. It was Loren who inquired, “Did the VS reports give any reason for it?”

  He shot me a look. “Some attack in the mall. That's what started the fire. Guy and gal. Someone they interviewed said the guy blew out a cable. But it was pretty confused. Someone else said that as everybody was trying to get out of the precinct, the blackout happened. No one was sure what that was. They're blaming Mexico—faulty exchange of power and so on. It just looked like the whole of the city could end up with no power, and burning for blocks.”

  “The guy and girl,” I asked quietly. “Any more on them?”

  “Acrobats,” he said, “I think that was it. Made up like clowns, gold-scale suits, white faces, and black hair. Jumped about. Used swords instead of guns. No one saw where they got them from—like a magic act. Vicious and homicidal. Quite a group of injured, even before the fire started.”

  There was something in his voice I didn't like—more than the words—as if he was trying to shock me. Perhaps not. Unlike her, of course, he didn't trust me, not a bit.

  Jane said, “Loren?”

  “It's them,” I said. “The gold range. What used to be the golders. I think so.”

  Goldhawk and Kix, fake white this time. Swords from nowhere.

  The highway, though lit, was missing a lamp here and there. It was eerily deserted, too. Nothing had passed us, or approached. And then something did. Three big tailored cars came sheering up the lane towards us—I mean, they were in the same lane we were, and coming head-on.

  “Jesus—” Tirso shouted.

  The cab, geared to its auto, tried to veer aside, but the barrier was there. We skidded to a halt, sparks flying off the paintwork as the cab rubbed its side against the concrete.

  The other cars congealed to a matchless stop.

  I already guessed, and maybe so did Jane and Tirso. Out of the first car came two men in smart coats, just one of whom was carrying a pistol, almost casually.