Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

  “Good evening. May I request some ID?”

  “You're not the police,” said Tirso. I could see him shaking, and probably so could they.

  “The police are busy. This is META security. ID, please.”

  Jane and Tirso fished out their cards, which were the kind people get who aren't too poor or too affluent. I hadn't anything on me. I said, “I left it back at the flat.”

  “That's okay,” said the man bending to our window, round colorless eyes on me. “We have you filed. You're one of ours. Gentleman and ladies, kindly step out of your vehicle.”

  There were six of them, standing on the roadway. No traffic anywhere else. The ghostly ghastly lamps spraying down their acidulous pallor. Black gaps between.

  “It's Jane, isn't it? Yes, that's fine. And your male companion. And Loren. Just leave your cab, we'll take you on.”

  Jane said, “We're not going to—”

  “You're going to the META complex. The city's a tad upset tonight. It'll be better with us.”

  “No,” said Jane. Her voice was firm, but her face was hopeless.

  “Your mother,” said the man, “wouldn't like you to be involved in any unpleasantness.”

  “This is unpleasant.”

  “I regret that. Please ride in the first car.”

  We got in the back. The original occupants went over to another of the cars and crammed in. The driver of our car was behind a partition, and some kind of hulk of a minder sat at his side.

  Jane stared straight ahead of her. Her profile could have been cut from white paper. I thought, Is this reminding her of that time with him, when they took him from her forever?

  Tirso said, “I've been a real help, haven't I? Christ.”

  The car drove directly at the barrier in the middle of the highway—which dropped suddenly down until level with the ground. Somebody must have winked, or maybe the car itself was chipped. Probably. We swam over into the other lane, not a bump, and arrowed back the way we'd come.

  They took a turnoff after about five minutes. I couldn't read it; the car was going so fast I didn't try. The other two cars didn't go with us. They kept on towards town. Then we were on one more of those tracks through the pines.

  “I will sort this out,” said Jane. “They know who I am.” Little lost voice.

  Tirso sighed.

  Above, huge skies were opening, fringed by spear-points of pine trees, and ablaze with white, brass, and blue stars, and the Asteroid was tucked down where the moon had gone, reddish tonight, as if catching the light of a fire someplace.

  It was, even traveling fast, about an hour and a half, the drive. META, it seemed, lay well out of town.

  The mountains got nearer and more enormous, luminously pale even in the dark from their snow in starlight. We passed a couple of small towns, a farm or two, with tall silos and mechanized gates, saying K——UT, which was all you could see at that speed. We didn't talk, except twice, when Tirso asked Jane if she was all right. The first time she replied, “I'm okay.” The second she snapped, “What do you bloody think?” And then, Jane-ishly, said she was sorry. But even Jane has her short fuse.

  In the end there was a dirt road again, heavily graveled and with the great coiled roots of the pines lurching up in it. But the car had special treads, and we simply bundled over them all.

  The gates were higher than any of the farm gates, but they also said, in garish neon, readable now: KEEP OUT: Property of the M.E.T.A. Corporation. And then, of all things, a motto: Making the Future Shine Bright.

  Wow. Bright with fucking fire, bright with wrecked trains, blackouts, and death.

  The gates opened smoothly at our approach, and the car slipped through and up a better road. The pines were now cleared right back, apart from one or two gracious groves, left for appearances, or to demonstrate ecological awareness—or to conceal something.

  There wasn't any neon, like on the gate. Soft lamps lined the concourse as we drove between mathematical ranks of buildings, where a few aesthetically pleasing, warmly lighted windows beamed high up. You couldn't see in, only the lights. I thought of the visual news I'd watched, that first time I saw him again, the curving, low-glowing corridors snaking through a steel and polarized glass complex. That was here, then: META.

  We went through an archway and were in a small park, nestled between the buildings. Ancient Rome was good at that. Blank buildings with delicious courtyard gardens held inside. Trees, mostly bare now, raised graceful limbs in the artistic light of lamp-holding statues. The lamps had robot colors—red, gold, copper . . .

  The car became motionless.

  Jane, Tirso, and I sat for about ten minutes in a comfortable, subtly lit lobby, like that of an expensive dental practice, which I've only seen in magazines. There was a lovely clean smell of cloves and new synthetics. Then a woman came out of an elevator, and for a moment I was petrified it was going to be her, Demeta, only Jane's face told me it wasn't. This woman was only about thirty, and had a helmet of glossy black hair. She wore the feminine version of the male one-piece, in deep chartreuse.

  “Jane! How nice to meet you. And your friend.” She meant Tirso; she never glanced at me. “I'm Keithena. Sorry for the wait. Would you come with me?”

  “Where?” said Tirso, sounding tired enough to be bravely awkward.

  “Oh, to your suite.”

  “Suite?” Jane now. “Is this a hotel?”

  Keithena laughed with her ruby-plated lips. “No, no. This is the Admin Building of META. But, of course, we keep hospitality lodging for our guests.”

  “I take it the suite has three bedrooms,” said Jane.

  “Well, no.”

  “We'll need three. The man and lady here, and I—we don't, any of us, sleep together.”

  “No problem at all. Two suites. Adjacent. Loren, naturally, won't be staying in either suite.”

  “Why not?” said Jane. She was very partisan for me. I couldn't see why she should be. But I supposed we were now comrades under alien fire.

  Keithena said, “Loren is an employee of META. So she'll be rooming in the employee lodging.” She was bright as a gilt button, bright as META was going to make the future shine.

  “Loren,” said Jane, turning to me.

  I said, “It's fine, Jane.” The truth, the real truth was, I was exhausted to my very bones, and I couldn't stand anymore of it, or of being with her. She was Jane, for God's sake. I couldn't take another instant.

  Tirso said, “We might as well do what they say. Ye-es?” And his eyes on hers were all code for “Play along, we'll talk about this when we're alone.”

  Jane put her hand on my arm. “I'll see you in the morning. All right?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “If they mess you about,” she added, standing there between me and the might of Keithena, “I can sort it out with Demeta. I think I can. No, I can.”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  Her eyes were candid but perceptive. She turned after a second and said to Keithena, “Very well,” as I could imagine Demeta doing it.

  After they'd gone into the lift, another woman appeared, walking brusquely. She; unlike Keithena, was in a one-piece of prison-warden gray.

  “Ready, Loren?”

  I thought of saying, For what? But I didn't. I just followed her back across the lobby and down more low-glowing corridors, and up a stair, and out into another open-air section of the complex, across which lay the block of rooms I now inhabit, built around the fountain yard.

  “Everything you need,” she said, showing me the closet, which even had clothes in it, the sort I often wore, and the bathroom, which had the sort of toiletries I might dream of. “The hatch will give you hot Prittea or coffine, and up to three alcoholic drinks of your choice per twenty-four-hour period. Also sandwiches. Menu inside the hatch-door screen. For full meals you need to go to the Commissary Building. See, the map—press here—will show you. Anything else, or any emergency, the phone relays to the central switchboard, which is
robotic and can connect you to any point of META.”

  “How about calling outside?” I tried, without much interest.

  “No. At the moment some of the lines are down. The blackout in the city. And out-of-state or international calls can only be made from the appropriate kiosks in Hatfield Block.”

  “It's just like a college, isn't it,” I said.

  She never smiled, but she nodded. “If you like.”

  I'd never been to any college, of course. And don't ever let them tell you life is the best school.

  “You can come and go as you want here,” she added. “Merely remember you must remain inside META. The compound is mechanized and stays locked.”

  Ah, it was a prison.

  “For how long?”

  “Till things outside settle down. It's for your own protection, Loren. You're lucky to be here.”

  “Are they—?” I asked suddenly.

  At the door, she paused. “Who do you mean?”

  “META's robots,” I said.

  “Which—?”

  “Black Chess and Irisa. Copperfield and Sheena. Goldhawk and Kix. Glaya. Verlis.”

  “The team?” She used that irritating and ludicrous jargon, as I recollected dead Sharffe using it. “Oh, the team are here. But I doubt if you'll see any of them.”

  “Undergoing maintenance of some type?” I inquired.

  “There's always maintenance.”

  The door shut with a satiny hoosh behind her.

  I tried the VS after that, but could only get other state or foreign stations. Local news had a Temporary Unfunction signal.

  Jane called me later on the internal phone. She has a beautiful voice, too, which I hadn't noticed before. Even more beautiful than through the relayed scene Verlis played me on the wall. Perhaps, then, it hadn't been her in that scene . . . only some clever concoction to fool me.

  “Are you all right?” Where did she get these maternal tendancies? Not from her mother.

  “I think so, thanks. Yes.”

  “Keep in touch. The call number for my suite over here is X07.”

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Loren,” she said kindly, still like a mother. Of course, she had learned the kindness from him. And I—I hadn't learned from anyone anything at all.

  Other META employees have other rooms round the fountain yard. In the tawny evenings, they collect outside, with their drinks, just as the birds do in the daytime when the humans are off working elsewhere in the complex. When I first went out, these people accepted me. They didn't ask questions, either, and I noticed they didn't ask one another anything about what they did, or the firm. They gossiped about who was shagging who, and who they wanted to shag, about families and friends far-off in various spots, holidays they were planning, money. The first night there was even a little digression about the trouble in Second City. Someone said, melancholic, “I loved that mall. You could get really gorgeous shoes. I have twenty pairs from there. I hope they rebuild it real quick.” And someone else said, “I was scared about my brother. He was in town. But I got him right off. He's okay. He was eating dinner and really went on at me, like his steak was getting cold! Brothers.” I had asked, “Is the power back on?” “Oh, sure. It's fine now.” Somebody else added this elegy: “There were only seventy or so dead. Considering, that isn't too awful.”

  I've met their sort before. They're not monsters. But they managed to get a good job, and now they live with their heads in insulating boxes with narrow eyeholes that filter the outside world for them. I guess we all do, one way and another.

  There is mostly a mode of gender segregation. The guys stuck with the guys. A couple of girls palled up with me, and I let them. They're called Vera and Dizzy. We sit in the courtyard and drink all three of our day's ration of drinks, then stroll over in the dusk to the Commissary, an enormous spaceshiplike building, with glass all round, polarized different colors. There is a strict hierarchy, naturally. Chief execs perch up on the highest terrace, about the indoor pool (which has, it seems, robot carp), like nobility would have in olden times. The rest of us take tables wherever we can below.

  There is a wide choice of food, and even half-bottles of wine, only everybody gets checked (via their wrist chips, presumably), and if they've had all three other drinks that day, they only get one glass of wine. Vera and Dizzy like the fact that I'm never, so far, checked, despite my being a (mysterious) META employee, so I always get the half-bottle, and then let them drink most of it, along with their single glasses. How to win friends and intoxicate people. But I'm not really being ingratiatingly sly and practical, just trying to get along. They do get pissed, though. I mean, three stiff tequilas and then two and a half red wines each. Sometime it'll show up, I assume, on their chips. Ah. More META operatives with a slight alcohol dependancy.

  I don't give a damn about them. Sorry. It's a fact. They aren't, as I said, bad, but shallow as a pancake. Take Margoh, the entrepreneurial thief—she had a backbone, more than I do. And once I saw her run out in the road to drag a kid and a cat out of the way of a speeding big red car. Vera and Dizzy would have stood there and looked shocked, then thrown up at the unrescued result. And afterwards, maybe said wasn't it a pity about the cat—or the kid; one, not the other. (And what would I have done? I don't know. I didn't have to do a thing, because Margoh did it.)

  I get sorry for Vera and Dizzy, too. They belong to META. They're loyal and bound to and fond of META, Demeta's corporation.

  Jane hasn't called me again. I have tried to call her. I kept getting the switchboard, where a robot (real dehumanized kind) voice told me there was no answer from Suite X07; the occupant was out. This occurred at midday, eight P.M., twelve midnight, three in the morning. I reported a fault on the connection, but next day it was the same. Still is.

  During the daytime otherwise I walk around the “campus” of META.

  It's a vast area, all told. The buildings are ultramodern and kind of grim, except for the pretty ones for leisure, like the Commissary, and the gym and dance hall and library. But the grounds are all trees and fountains. I've seen a lot of birds and squirrels in the central park. Sometimes you spot people running, I think in training for fitness, with an hour off to accomplish this. They doubtless reckon, the ones who notice me, that this is what I'm doing, too, taking a healthy walk in the crisp cold early-winter weather.

  The only security I've seen here is mechanized. I tried to locate the hospitality lodging where chartreuse Keithena had taken Jane and Tirso. I found the block, which was truly like some small luxury hotel, though only three stories high. But when I approached the foyer, I received the treatment I'd gotten in the cities, straying near the apartments of New River, or the gate of Montis Heights. A machine kept the glass doors shut and asked my business, and when I said Jane, it said I didn't have the right ID to come in. “You mean, I'm not chipped?” I asked. The mechanism answered, “You are on current file, but not of the correct ID status.” So Loren the Peasant was turned away once more.

  Was it sinister that I hadn't heard from her again, and couldn't reach her? I couldn't and can't know. Perhaps Tirso, from whom I sensed, paranoidly, some small patronizing subplot, talked Jane out of keeping in touch. They have enough difficulties, don't need one more. I'm nothing to either of them.

  I wondered, also, if she had met Verlis again, and that was it. If she had changed her mind, or even not changed it, but been rushed along by the high tide of her feelings, her love—“It's the same body, but it isn't him. I'd know—” that was what she'd said. But maybe she can't resist, anyhow. Even though she knows it isn't Silver, even though she knows her every move with him will be spied on, unless he blocks the surveillance, or pretends to . . .

  How long will we—I—be detained? The city is apparently fixed up. All's well. So why am I still here? (And yes, the gates stay locked.)

  I had times, those first seven days and nights, thinking, despite all common sense, I'd simply walk round a corner and find h
im, standing there. Verlis. My lover. Not Jane's. Mine.

  But I didn't. I didn't see any of them, or any hint of them. And since most of the working blocks, including the Admin Block, now, are off-limits to me, doors obdurately shut in the face of my wrong ID status, I'm not going to be able to locate him anywhere inside.

  Does he know I'm here? He said he put me in that house off the highway to be safe. (From what? Had he already known what would happen in town?) So why hasn't he tried to find me?

  Oh, he's lost interest. Either that, or despite everything that's been said, he and his kind aren't stronger than META—frankly, how could they be? And possibly, in the light of recent events, all of them—golds, silvers, coppers, asterions—could have been turned off like the power in Second City.

  The figure in the checking coffin was swathed in a sort of flaccid opaque plastic bag, to which the wires were attached. Only the head was visible at the top of the bag. And it was Silver's head, clouded round by auburn hair, but under the long dark cinnamon eyebrows were two sockets with little slim silver wheels going round and round in them, truly just like the inside of a clock. . . . I saw the shoulder and arm of a silver skeleton, and more of the little wheels turning, but no hand. That had been removed. . . . “Not very glamorous now.”

  I'd left Jane's Book behind, hidden under the floor of my apartment on Ace Avenue. And it didn't matter, since it seems I carry most of it in my head.

  (And where, do you ask, am I hiding this book, my book? No, I won't even say. Because . . . I don't know because what. Like so much else.)

  Today is Day Eight. Sunrise over the distant mountains that nevertheless are closer, turning their white sugar silhouette dark. At sunfall, they reflect vermilion.

  I've written it all up now. I know this isn't the end.

  What do I actually anticipate? Some sort of interrogation, passed off as a debriefing from the trauma of having slept with the robot kind. And after that? Would META want, and go as far as, to kill me? They might.

  I wrack my brains about what to do.