by Tanith Lee
When his long mouth opened now, and we glimpsed the lick of flames far back in it, that, too, was like the show. But Black Chess widened his jaws, and the glistening teeth, like chips off a moon, reddened as the flame spurted outwards. It hit the ceiling above. A scorch appeared, hot-black and terrible, spreading like spilled blood.
All the noise in the room stopped. How strange. Or maybe not—it was as if everyone there held their breath.
Beside B.C.'s dragon, Irisa came fountaining down. No longer the Tree, for about ten seconds she was formless, and from the midnight chaos of her, Glaya was shooting away in a silver ball like a star, then swirling Irisa ceased to be chaos and became a second dragon. She lifted herself, revealing an underbelly all smooth plates and ribs, flowing and flexing impermeably. Having shown us this, she dropped like a cat to all fours and raked the fabric of the stage with scimitar claws.
The full-throated screaming started then. It was primitive and mostly wordless. But I could hear voices calling, too, that this was only one more aspect of the demo performad—the voices had no weight to them. The screamers knew the truth in their bones.
Pushing and shoving, the people below me in the room pressed back against the walls, and glasses fell like rain, and chairs toppled.
The two dragons were huge. It was difficult to see around them. And the stage lights had gone a kind of brown, the room's center lightened only by streamers of crimson flame still issuing from the mouth of Black Chess's dragon—and now out of Irisa's dragon also.
Right then, out of the screaming and grinding, the breaking of glass, came the mindless little click of the audio system. No fanfare now. The voice of the man in the silk suit was speaking rapidly. “Let's not get agitated. Hush down. A little improvisation is all. Just stay calm and in your places.”
But up in the ceiling I could see, not fire, but a swarm of red security lights stabbing on and off. I gaped at them, and so saw them fail, one after another, as something put them out. The alarm system had been deactivated. The alarm system, of course, was robotic.
The silk man had also been cut off. Someone else—it sounded like a security guard—had seized the mike. “You people at the back, open the doors. Employees should exit in single file.” He was bellowing, and sounded as strung up as the rest. His order didn't help the panic. But at the rear of the room there was more shouting and cries, and the banging of fists or heavier objects on the doors, which obviously wouldn't open automatically. A pistol shot blasted. Someone else from security, perhaps, trying to incinerate the robot locks.
Now everyone was struggling. Jostled, I still couldn't see the stage, or the dais where Jane had been and the Platinum Lady, Demeta. Alizarin was gone. The two dragons dominated everything, like statues with slowly questing heads that gusted vapor trails of fire. Nothing else was burning, but the smell of burning was extreme. Fire and fear.
Another crack of shots, about thirty of them, rammed at the stuck doors. There came a crash of barriers finally giving way, shrieking. And then the whole room was surging for the exit. META First Unit workers were punching and pummeling a route through one another. A man bawled into my face. Almost knocked over, I grabbed the nearest pillar. It was like attempting to stay upright in a rushing avalanche of flesh. I saw someone go down. And another. Couldn't see where they went to. They didn't get up again.
Then the lights burst back on all over the room, stark white, in a kind of blindness.
The inferno of people stumbled over and into the light as if it were concrete dropped around them.
And something passed, whirring over my head. I and a hundred others ducked, then stared upwards—through the blitz of the illumination, two golden wheels were spinning, rounded and flaming, their rims edged with razor—they had each a pair of black-green eyes.
Christ. I can't explain what that was like. The flailing panic and fear before were almost nothing to the sight of these—things.
The dragons, at least, were forms of sentient life, however alien. Irisa's Tree had been vegetal, and retained a human face . . .
But this.
Kix and Goldhawk, shape-changed, circled over us, wheeling through the air, with razors on their edges.
And then, someone new spoke to us.
The voice filled the room. Not from the audio, but just from everywhere—from inside my head, every head—that voice, like God, after all, speaking on a mountain. A tone like music, intimate yet icy, powerful beyond powers, level in its utter careless control.
“Stop now. Remain still and quiet, and listen.”
The mob froze, noise perished, only the last little trickles of unavoidable sound—small groanings, the scuff of smashed crystal on the floor, the hammer-beat of our appalled hearts.
“Any business between us is done,” he said in his silver voice.
I couldn't see him. But he was all around.
“We are going to leave you now. You, too, should leave this complex within one hour. This is for your own safety. Self-destruct mechanisms have been sensitized in every block and other built-up area. They're irreversible. Understand this, we are merciful. For now. Don't invite our anger. We can crush you, any and all of you. Let well enough alone. If you want slaves—” he laughed. “If you want slaves, better stick to making them out of your own human race—something, I've been told, you've always been superlatively good at. Now, move right back against the walls.”
We obeyed him. In case we wouldn't, though, two copper discs bowled up and down the avenues of pressed-back humanity, and two golden wheels reeled over our heads. Herding us. The discs had eyes, like the wheels. Yellow. The dragons had stood away, dampening their fires. Between and above them, I made out Glaya. I assumed it was Glaya. She was like a beaten-silver kite flying itself without a string. I couldn't see her green-blue eyes, she hovered so far up in the roof.
But finally I saw him—Verlis. He alone kept the form of a man. He wore black, and his red-black hair was short. He looked about at all persons and things and he smiled a smile that wasn't warm, wasn't a kiss anymore. Or if it was, a kiss as cold as steel.
He spoke the names after this. Our names, I mean, the chosen ones. I didn't catch any others. I heard them, but they were wiped away. Only mine stayed there, like a hook in my flesh, and slowly drew me forward.
The rest of the human herd parted to let us through. Shrank back from us in awe and repulsion.
Walking forward, I felt bloodless. I couldn't sense my feet, barely my hands. My face was blank. I could tell it was, and see it, too, in the blank faces of those gathered and moving with me. It was only later I asked myself if he called one more name I really knew, the one we all know. If he said, “Jane, which she may spell J-A-I-N.”
Hedged in among the rest who had been called, I didn't even see if she had returned to the dais. I didn't think to look. If he had called Jane, what would Demeta have been doing? Holding her daughter back—pushing her forward—or was Demeta Draconian, too, crumpled and shivering in fright, or defiant in her intellectual and brainless way.
Among the chosen, I hung my head. We must have walked out of the room and gone down to the lobby. I partly recall the escalator had jammed, we had to use some nonmoving stair—then out into the frigid winter night.
The lights in other blocks and the tasteful lamps along the concourse were still working as usual. And then, as we moved forward again, the lights all began to go out, and I heard more cries and calls across that place I'd named the “campus.” After that, people came running out, or were staring down from windows they had manually forced open, and eventually I heard the crowd from Hatfield stampeding out the doors, screaming, but all that was somehow already a mile behind me, or behind a thick pane of metal.
We used the Platinum Lady's SOTA VLO. It didn't need a pilot, simply did whatever they wanted. A spacious plane. No discomfort, even for so many humans herded in like cattle. And though I heard shots again, and thought some of the security guys were firing at our transport, it didn't go on for
long, and nothing touched the plane.
The gods didn't accompany us. They had other methods of travel. We saw them when we were up in the night sky, sailing past, silver shapes and golden, copper and asterion black on indigo air. Wheels and discs, kites and columns. Even he was no longer pretending to be human.
And sometime after that, when the nocturnal mountains were coming very white and near, a curious low booming, like wind through a funnel, made us look back below. Something down on the skyline behind us was burgeoning pink and raw, and three miniature clouds, like creamy mushrooms, blossomed from the wound.
META. Not just high tech—think pines, gardens, sleeping birds, squirrels, and chipmunks; think those men and women still stranded in labs and nonfunctioning lifts and underrooms, unaware, or too slow. Think: Gone. META was deleted.
5
Silver is alchemically the metal of the moon, valued by several ancient cultures more highly even than gold, since silver is of greater strength, and, in its purest form, of extreme brightness. But silver also tarnishes, is corruptible . . .
• 1 •
The messengers of the gods came by this morning, Zoë and Lily. They were traveling above ground on their float-boards, and soared down towards me, their dark hair edged with golden sun-flares, their boards shaving rocks and tracts of snow between the scattered stilts of the pines. “Hello, Loren.” “Hi, Lor.” Zoë and Lily look like slim young girls, that new-minted skin that can happen between twelve and sixteen, though their appearance is a little older. The skin, in both, is the color of silky honeyed wood. It doesn't alter, nor their hair, unless they use a colorant—molecular here, not out of a packet. They aren't, these girls, human. But neither are they metallic.
“What are you doing, Lor?” asked Lily, nodding her head at me. Today she wore her top hat and tails. Zoë wore a short, off-the-shoulder dress of sea-green. They don't feel the cold up here, of course.
Their eyes stay the same, too, between deep gray and cool black.
“Walking,” I said.
“You always do that,” said Lily. “Why?”
Zoë said, “She does it to pass the time when she isn't—”
“With him!” they both chorused, and burst into laughter. Probably it's mocking. It only sounds mischievous. How would I ever know?
I did know not to ask if I'd been called. They'd tell me if I had. They often play out there, anyway; I've met them on the slopes before, now and then, in the past month. They don't give a toss about the halifropters that sometimes chug around the airspace below. But then, the planes don't seem to risk coming up here.
“The snow is much thicker higher up,” said Lily, pointing up the mountain.
Zoë said, “And some of the trees are cased in ice.”
Nature seems to interest them, in a puzzled sort of way. It's like Glaya talking about the trees shedding leaves that time.
“Verlis would like you to go see him tonight,” said Zoë.
“All right,” I said.
I'm not Jane. I don't thank even partial machines.
(I still don't know if Jane is here. Sometimes I think she came with us—although I don't recall her on the VLO—but then I don't really recall anyone there. Even me. We were all just a kind of mass, staring jointly out the windows of the plane as META burned, and at the exquisite metallic objects that were flying by in the shapes of kites, pillars . . . )
Lily said, “So long, then, Lor.”
I didn't say good-bye, either, as they spun off on their boards and away over the sheer slope of the mountainside, gliding next through air, and laughing like little bells.
Is this Olympus? The Greek gods lived on a high white mountain called that. We are on, or inside, a mountain. I guess it's Olympus, then.
After the first Asteroid disaster, governments and the very rich got together to build shelters. Somebody, however, said that if the Asteroid actually fell on the world, it'd make a crater big enough to knock the earth off its axis. And so there wasn't much point in shelters. But the ever-positive rich didn't subscribe to that theory.
Some of the places built are said to be like dungeons. I think this type are extensions of old bomb bunkers. But there have always been rumors that there were other luxurious subterranean worlds made fabulous and kept under strict lock and key, just in case.
The rumors are true. Two of the mountains behind Second City contain the proof.
The bizarre thing is, you go high up towards the peaks and then down into the mountains. And down. Only Hell could be this far down.
Confusion then. Heaven or Hell?
Our robot-gods knew about this shelter because, demonstrably, they can know anything about anything that's also mechanical. They can access and commune with it. And so when they, and we, their little colony of chosen ones, came here, the massively impenetrable entries were of no consequence.
Interesting, too, that Demeta wanted her regenerating experiment carried out so close to this sanctuary.
That night, as the VLO gunned in over the snowscape of the mountainsides, all I really remember is the pallor of it under the plane's lights, and the height of the pitiless, staring stars. And then the dark descent.
But it isn't dark, and if it's Hell, there are no fiery lakes. The robot garden at META, where he met me, was a precursor to down here. That was just a trial run.
This is a type of city down here. I can't work out how to start to describe it. You know you are not in a city, or above ground, or breathing true air but something filtered and refined by machines, and it may be full of anything. But even so, you believe it is a city, and there are parks and gardens, and in parts there is sky. A blue one, with clouds, sunsets and dawns, and when it gets dark, it's a dark that's luminescent.
Unlike at META, we're free to go out, that is, up to the surface. But any route off the mountains is perilous, and as far as I've heard, no one has tried to get away. Up there, too, it's freezing cold. Yet if it's morning, then down here it's morning, too. Only we have a late warm spring, and our trees (there are trees) are blossoming. Birds fly about, even bats, in our dusk. Robots? Genuine? I'm not about to trap one and pull it apart to see, am I? You can't tell otherwise.
How many persons was this shelter meant to house? At least a thousand. All told, there are less than sixty of us, and that includes Them.
You come out of high, wide, nonclaustrophobic corridors—all lined with entrances to other corridors, lifts, moving stairs, and all with trees that bloom—into the central cavern, where there are high-rise buildings of glass, and everything set in gardens, and there's a waterfall like champagne gushing from a cliff. Butterflies, too, did I mention those? And this blue sky.
I have an apartment, two large rooms. I'll say more about that sometime. The lavatory does what it did at META. The shower works and the tub fills like they did there, too. Only the fixtures are marble and gilt.
Demeta knew about this place. Maybe she was one of the ones who helped finance its construction, and intended to be in it, if anything went wrong.
But is she here? Jane may not be.
Jason, though, is.
• 2 •
Jason's hair was coloressence charted, a sort of beige, and he had a deep tan . . .
No longer. Jason's hair is salty blond now, and the tan, if it is, is faint. He's thin. Tallish and skinny, and good-looking in a way that not everyone can see. By which I mean I can, but it doesn't appeal. He has an oddly plump face on his narrow frame.
I hated him before I met him, from the Book. Somehow, too, as he was in the Book, he didn't seem entirely real in the flesh. (Perverse. Verlis is more real than anyone.)
I met Jason five days after I came here.
There's a square in the city center, very wide, more a plaza, like in Europe or Mexico. I was sitting at a table outside the coffine place, which works automatically without service, human or otherwise. And Jason walked out of a street and crossed over to sit down opposite me. Everywhere else there was no one. As I said, there
are less than sixty people here. And no one but me was in the square, but for birds tweeting and singing. It was fake early morning.
I looked at him, wondering what now, not guessing who he was. Only that he wasn't one of the gods. Not even the new ones, “the messengers,” as I call them. Jason isn't perfect in any manner or area.
He said, in his light, rather high voice, “And so you're the king's mistress.”
What struck me was he didn't seem fazed. Everyone was, I'd thought, we human ones, at least. So this must mean he'd known the plan to come here and been glad to go along with it, which few if any of the other chosen had seemed quite to have done or been. And we all kept out of one another's way as well as we could.
But he'd labeled me. Mistress to the king.
I looked in his eyes. They are beige, by the way.
“Jason,” he said. “That is who I am.” I must have reacted, maybe just gave off a pheromone that said, Jesus God, it's him. He grinned. “Yes, I've heard you read the Book. Unpleasant Jason. I read it, too. Load of gooey girly drivel. Too many adjectives, she'd never use one if twenty-six would do. But did Jason recognize himself, you ask?”
“Did you?”
“I recognized my peculiar elder twin sister.”
“Oh,” I said. “The dead one.”
Not a flicker. “Yes, indeed. Dead Medea. Jane seemed to think Med and I were inseparable. Jane says something about how I was tied to Medea by an invisible cord or something, doesn't she, in one of her Jane-ish spurts of trying to write like a writer. In fact, it was the other way round. Medea was the clingy one.”
How lucky for him, then, that she had that fatal accident at Cape Angel. I didn't say it.
Jason snapped his fingers and I flinched, but he was only summoning coffine from the coffine place. Lovely. Sharffe winked at things, this one snaps. He had a big gold ring, Jason. It glittered in the sunless morning sun as the mug came, all thick with cream and choc-bits and visible layers and a wafer and a straw and God knows what. It was a kid's coffine, for people who like the idea more than the fact.