by Tanith Lee
“Heck! It's her!”
He was all excited. A lot of them were like that, pointing and even applauding. Champagne and corporate brainwashing. And they'd never read the Book, had they?
Bare trees in the park ruffled and shuddered with the wisdom of trees.
The black VLO sank down, its blades spinning in the landing lights. Everyone craned and called out, as if the moon had descended on a visit.
“Look—look—there she is. That's Demeta!”
Across the distance, about two hundred feet away, I saw the side of the VLO move. Something stepped out, gleaming and pale. Camera flash went off all over the garden, and from below. She must have sanctioned it, this taking of her picture. But then, we were all quite a ways away, and perhaps telescopic magnification hadn't been allowed.
I couldn't yet see much about her. Only that slender metallicness. Demeta, at that point, and in the wake of learning her second name, looked to me like one more robot. The Platinum range, registration C.U.— Someone else can supply the rest.
She didn't let them conduct her over for another seventy-five minutes. By then, the never-ending relays of champagne had the crowd, as they say, in a roar. (If I'd needed to be cured of liking champagne—I didn't—META would have done that. Theirs was the absolute best. A combination vine out of France via the reclaimed California Islands. And by now, just a snatch of it turned my guts.) I eventually located the carbonated water, a wallflower all alone in an annex, with only two out of forty bottles gone. Despite their strictures for the lower staff, it seemed First Unit personnel could get off their skulls with no questions asked.
I'd also lost Alizarin, which was a piece of luck. But he was keen on one of the execs and went off out of sight, to drape himself, as he had with me, winningly over various chairs and tables in front of him.
When she came into the room, I was standing on my own by two of the pseudo-Greek pillars in the upper area. I had now a good view of Demeta. Everyone clapped again, so did I. (Always be a chameleon where you can.) There was cheering, too, though, and that I didn't join.
I guess we all have a picture of Demeta from what Jane's Book says, though really, physically, she never says much, and near the end Jane plans to tell her mother:
I can change all the names. Put your house, for example, somewhere else . . . and so on.
The very fact Jane didn't alter her mother's first name, not even its alternate spelling (a instead of er) indicates Jane must otherwise have concealed her.
And the Book says, two or three pages in:
My mother is five feet seven inches tall. She has very blond hair and very green eyes. She is sixty-three, but looks about thirty-seven, because she takes regular courses of Rejuvinex.
That's all you ever get on Demeta—unless I forgot something. I mean, what you do get, is how she is, this manipulating, fearsome viper of a woman, who understands every psychology except maybe her own, an intellectual specialist at minor science, gems, theology, and mind-fuck extraordinaire.
The first thing that hit me was a blast of perfume. I was about thirty feet away, and thought she must have sprayed it on lavishly. And then I grasped it wasn't the strength of the scent, it was that I, too, had a memory of it. How the hell was that?
All the time, I was staring down at her walking through the lower part of the room to the upper area, on the corner of which I was. There was a kind of dais beyond that, and that was her destination. I was trying to work out how I could ever have smelled that pricelessly expensive scent before. No one in my world, even in the fake world META had recently given me, had ever been wealthy enough to use a perfume like this. Demeta, no doubt, made it exclusively for herself. La Verte. That's the name Jane gives it: The Green One.
She's shorter than five feet seven, more five five, I'd say, with her shoes off. Thin, that sort of healthy, polished, starved, tanned thinness only some older women get, and which can go scraggy later, only with her it can't, because of the juicing up of her tissues from plenty of Rejuvinex. I'd have said she was fifty-eight. Well. Fifty, perhaps. But she is, of course, seventy-five. Her hair's no longer blond. She's made a form of patronizing concession to her known age, and all of us who see her now, by going the most ethereal shade of palest shining gray—true platinum. I wasn't near enough to see the color of her eyes. But she wore an evening dress of a softly metallic shade, silvery green, with a slinking iridescence of mauve. And behind her head rose a collar like the raised fan of some male lizard, shot with purple.
As she went along, sometimes she stopped and spoke to a scatter of people, even shook a few hands with her thin, strong, jeweled one, like antique royalty.
And they were all so impressed, scared of her and adoring.
She never glanced up at us, the redundant ones not important enough to be marshaled on the margin of her processional route.
Jane was in the little group moving along behind her. She'd put up her white-blond hair, and she wore another plain black dress. I thought, Jane's colors used to be the peacock colors—turquoise and green and purple. Now Demeta had those on. Tirso wasn't with Jane, either he was kept out or kept himself out, or Jane suggested it. She looked utterly blank, Jane, and she smiled at people who spoke to her and answered them like one more robot, but this time not quite fully programmed.
They were all past, walked up onto the area where I stood, then on and up to the dais.
And I remembered where I'd smelled La Verte before.
After Verlis, that second time in Russia. I'd gone out, come in, and as I went up in the lift, went along the passage to my door—then. La Verte had been everywhere. And now I only knew what it was because I knew what Demeta wore, and she was wearing it.
Demeta had been to my flat. Why? Why?
“Oh, say, here you are. Sorry to neglect you. Jason gets a bit stressed about her. I've just been reassuring him. She likes him, for God's sake. He's the Platinum Lady's protégé.”
Alizarin was back, flushed with some sort of personal triumph in the love-game.
I nodded vaguely.
He went on, all aglow. “He's such a loner, Jason. He really needs someone to look out for him. He's simply brilliant, you know. That's why Madam Draconian picked him for First Unit here. She'd known him since he was a child. He's loaded—doesn't need a job—but hey, if you are a genius, you have to use it. But then there was that awful affair about his sister.”
Something jigged in my mind. My awareness split neatly in two, one half watching Demeta on the dais, surrounded by her suited sychophants, the other peering back down another tunnel of memory.
I heard myself say, bemused, “Oh, was that Medea?”
“Right. Yes, Medea, Jason's sister. You heard about it?”
“Something. Can't quite recall.”
“She died, Loren,” muttered Alizarin in hushed tragic tones. “She drowned at their beach house at Cape Angel. Absolute shitsville. And their father died there, too, in his powerboat. Can you believe it?”
Jason and Medea. Do we remember them? I think we do. The evil twins who percolate through Jane's Book. He made the clever tracking chip and both of them planted it on Jane, and so ultimately ensured Silver's entrapment.
Jason had been good at that. And now such chips are a feature of everything. Jason's doing?
Wonder about how Medea really died? And their father, who Jane said they were always at odds with, wonder how he died, too?
Jason.
Alizarin fancies Jason.
The two separate brain halves slammed back together into my complete, limited, mind, as somebody triggered the audio system on the dais. A little fanfare played, and all the room erupted at once in more applause for the Platinum Lady.
She has one of those voices. Cut diamond, but a bit scratchy at the edges. Actor-trained, she can drop whole octaves all deep and purry, and then harden like granite. You hear this all the time, people who can speak like this, on VS. It gets samey.
What did she say? Not so much. She was t
hanking us all, telling us how successful META's robot lines were, and it was all due to the talent and commitment of everyone in this room. She named a few personnel and a few products—but the named robots were the type that don't look like people, or not very much. Then she got to the deluxe line. She didn't call them “the team.” She named them individually, starting with the asterions, ending, without comment, with the silvers. She mentioned nothing about previous models, or any instability or any worry with the current batch. And I looked around, to see if anybody registered the creepy duplicity of this. But no one seemed to. Oh, they were drunk, and they were smoking, and there were even tidbits of drugs set out amid the buffet—high-class, just-legal-in-private things, clearly labeled, and with lots of eager takers.
If anyone knew anything about technical problems, they never said a word, never looked as if they would. Perhaps they couldn't even think about it. You imagined them washing off in the shower all the secret nasty crap they might have picked up during the day in the warm lap of META.
“I'm very glad tonight,” said Demeta, her voice on the low purr, “that my daughter, Jane, could be with us to celebrate the occasion, despite her busy schedule in Europe as a singer.” Jane didn't react, she just smiled slightly at the audience, and Demeta put her arm coolly around Jane, as if to keep her cold. They were now the same height, but Demeta was wearing three-inch heels. (I could see their greeting in the library, Demeta maybe saying, “Now, darling, you know black isn't really your color.” Or making some remark on Jane's “busy schedule as a singer”—which doesn't seem to be professional.) But Jane has grown taller and Demeta has shrunk. There's always that.
The crowd “yayed” again, and a few whistled “Jane”—Hey, c'mon, didn't matter, did it, all friends and family here. Demeta kissed Jane on the cheek. I thought of Judas Iscariot. Perhaps that would have been a better pseudonym than Draconian. A traitor's name.
Had Demeta said something else? I'd lost it. She was sitting down, and Jane was modestly moving back out of the limelight, to get away from her. And now some guy in a pure silk one-piece was announcing we were going to see the culminating demo of our work. The lights started to dim.
I had a mental flash, like the camera flashes earlier. I thought, They've been working on them, all eight of them, in the labs, on the elaborate workbenches. Yes, they've been taking them apart, testing them, to see what it was that malfunctioned. And they have played along. Verlis has told them to, and how to do it. (The silk-suit man was talking to us again. He was going on a bit. He sounded too bright. Is he filling in because there is some hitch?)
Somehow Verlis has reined in Goldhawk and Kix and Sheena and any others of them with rampantly homicidal tendencies. For how long? Long enough that they've passed the tests. And here they are, or will be when this guy stops prattling on, to assure this amoeba of META First Unit that whatever rumors they may have come across, or incident they have seen, now everything is absolutely okay.
He really was going on. Stumbling a little—a couple of unfunny jokes, spills of laughter from the drug-jolly crowd— Why the delay? I sensed a slight flurry of apologies to Demeta on the dimmed-out dais.
Next to me Alizarin self-righteously whispered, “Come on, come on, don't balls it up, girls.” He added, “And where's Jason? He was supposed to be up there with her—Madam, I mean. She isn't going to like that, either, him not showing up.”
Suddenly the man stopped waffling. New lights bloomed up in the subfusc, along the middle of the lower room, where Demeta and Jane had walked in procession. I glanced at the dais again. It was dark there, but the lighted central area lit it enough that I was sure I couldn't see Jane up there anymore. Her hair alone—that would have caught some light, as Demeta's did. Had Jane left? Perhaps she'd gone to throw up.
A stage was rising up through the floor.
They stood on it, two at each corner of a square. Black Chess and Irisa, Goldhawk and Kix, Copperfield and Sheena, Verlis and Glaya.
They were, all of them, naked, unjeweled, only their hair, the hair at their genitals, their metals.
Perfection is garment enough. Somebody wrote that sometime. I can't recall who. In this case alone, right here and now, it was unarguably true.
Verlis was the farthest away from me. Even from the back I would know him, but so must anyone.
And now, he wasn't any Verlis I knew, and anyway, I'd never known him, had I? Be honest, little lying Loren, you don't know this being from Adam.
It's Grandfather's fault I sometimes see things Biblically. Maybe I was the first to connect with what was happening on the stage.
First, Irisa walked to the middle of the stage and raised her arms. And there in the full light, we watched her change. She rose and elongated, a column of darkness, then a fount of tinsels. She extended her body and hair swiftly and steadily, and we saw, breathless and elated, how she became a high and spreading tree. Only her face stayed, up there among the arching ebony boughs, just her beautiful and patrician robot features, eyes half-lidded over, lips half-curved, and from the branches bright black leaves evolved, each like a blade, and then a single brilliant fruit that slowly spun. A golden apple.
In the beginning—
Genesis.
Glaya crossed the stage. Her metamorphosis was curiously, if anything, more startling. She ran suddenly up the trunk of the tree Irisa had become, and as Glaya ran, her lower limbs, her body, were something other. She was a serpent of glimmering mercury, with garnet scales still framing her humanesque face, and two scaled arms and hands, with which she clasped the tree, easing the rings of her python tail about it.
Some of the oldest symbols in the world. The Tree and Fruit. The Snake.
Goldhawk and Kix dropped down on all fours. Forelimbs and back limbs were evenly placed. Their bodies writhed, without either of them moving. They were leopard-creatures—sphinxes—with golden manes of hair but the faces of a man and a woman. They prowled about the Tree and drew aside, and the Serpent, looking down, hissed at them in one long low horrible hiss, and across the unlit spaces somebody (human) giggled, and a glass fell with a far-off splintering crack.
Black Chess and Silver moved together. They grasped each other in a fierce embrace, as if about to wrestle in some theater of Ancient Rome—and became one figure. One man, one elemental—tall, half-black, half-silver, and two-faced, and four-winged—one pair of wings scarlet and one pair gold. They were turning about and about on columnal legs doubled in size, the great arms quiescent, the wings flickering—the heads, set slightly sidelong each to each, watching us always with red-black, gleaming eyes. What beast was this? An Angel. With a furling, instant contortion, it recoiled and was gone into the bark of the Tree.
Now Copperfield and Sheena moved. Had we forgotten them? Their beauty was unspeakable, it was—unfair. Their skins were sunsets, their hair showered in ropes of molten saffron. There was nothing to either of them that was either homosexual or sexual, let alone mortal. Beneath the Tree, under the watchful eyes of the golden Sphinxes, they kissed, twining a moment in an erotic sexless synchronicity that was beyond—before—arousal.
The flawlessness of the Beginning. Adam and Eve, the Apple Tree, the double-faced Angel, the feline Guardians of God.
Only I'd known Grandfather, but could there have been anyone in that drugged and drunken room who didn't know the basic story of the Fall?
The message was obvious. If God created man, or if anything did, META had now created super-beings more excellent in concept and construct than mankind.
Sheena and Copperfield beneath the Tree acted out an evocation of the Garden of Eden. The words were of average literary worth, but the acting skill, and the whole ambience, raised this scene to an impossible intensity, less poetic than fearful.
Until Glaya, coiling and uncoiling, reached out her serpent hand, and stroked Sheena's wonderful hair, attracting her gradually into a dialogue. Copperfield-Adam didn't see, he was playing with the golden Sphinx-Leopards as Sheena-Eve was le
d astray by Glaya the Serpent, and the spinning, shining Apple was plucked.
Adam and Eve examined the Apple. When it first split in two halves (like my mind had, twenty minutes ago), a sparkling little robot worm crawled out and wriggled away, unnoticed by any save all the audience, which gave off slight rustlings of aversion.
Their debate was brief. They ate the Apple, or appeared to. And Glaya basked on the Tree of Irisa.
In this version, it needed no God to come walking through the Garden in the cool of the day. Adam and Eve fell into the awful plummet all alone.
Shape-shifting, they became flawed. And it wasn't a sudden awareness of their nakedness that alarmed them, but how they had changed. He grew stooped and lumpen, and his hair shriveled like burned grass. She grew fat, a swollen belly and bulging sagging breasts. Their unmarked skins were marked with boils and bulges and scars. This horrifying transfer happened in slow, repulsive ripples.
The audience was silent now. They could see, even they, the mirror held up in front of them.
Was this what the Fall meant? Not the loss of innocence or the rage of Grandfather's insane God, but a dropping down into the state of being human? Imperfect, debased, deformed—worthless?
We, beside the handmade children of creation, were dross?
Yes.
Then the double Angel stepped from the Tree and cast them out, the whining, cringing, crawling, weeping things that had been beautiful and confidently happy. As the ruined specters of Sheena and Copperfield ran across the stage, the alchemical Angel separated again.
Black Chess was only there one moment. As Irisa had done, he soared upwards from himself, extending in a curl of black tidal wave that fanned the roof—He had become, once more, the dragon.
Maybe none of those here had ever physically seen the transformation, or at least seen it so close. Exclamations and thin shouts clattered around. And he, the ultimate Serpent, opened wide his veined scaled wings of black basalt and laval bronze, and swung his crocodilian head. At the performad, Black Chess had done all this, but that time he had been up in the air, divided from the watchers—and even then, there'd been near panic.