by Tanith Lee
He drank and gained a little moustache he didn't bother to wipe off, I could tell, because it was only me he was sitting with. He said, “I expect you wonder why I'm down here with the rest of you.”
“No.”
“Truly? My. Well, I'll tell you anyway. I'm clever. Demeta thinks—or should I say thought that, too. But then they—and you know who I mean by ‘they,' don't you, Loren?—became so important, and I could see where it was going. As they still needed a little help with this and that, I kind of volunteered. I wanted in. And in I am.”
He's nuts, I thought. He thinks he's as smart as they are.
But how do I know? Maybe he is.
What did he want out of me?
“I suspect you're asking yourself,” he said, “why I've come over and sat down with you. Aside from being too lazy, just as you are, to brew up a nice hot drinkie in my own apartment. Shall I tell? Would you like that?”
I stood up. Jason snorted into his straw with amusement, and cream slopped over the tall sides of the tall glass, all over the tabletop.
“You'll so viciously kick yourself,” he chortled, “when you do find out.”
“I'm sure I will.”
“Good-bye, then,” he said as I strode away across the plaza.
There's something disgusting about him. If I hadn't read about him, would I have picked it up? Surely I would have.
My apartment lies behind the big plaza square, in a block overlooking the park with the waterfall. The elevators are scented and whirl you up the ten floors smoothly. Only I live here.
I'll describe the apartment properly. No, believe me, you may want to know about this.
I said the bathroom was marble. There's a kitchen, too. Everything in it is automated. You touch one key for a toasted muffin or another for a steak. But there's also room to move around, even eat, and certain gadgets to play with—coffee-grinder, juice-mixer, bread-maker—rich person toys.
Sorry, all that's irrelevant. (And the bedroom, too, that's irrelevant, though it has velvet walls that change color slightly at different times of day, to mimic and enhance the in-or-outdoor, fake natural light effects.)
What is relevant is the main central room. Let me talk you through it.
The walls are painted creamy white. A lamp of gold-stitched pale gold paper hangs from a ceiling that is painted to be as much a blue sky as the one outside, with islands of warm clouds. It has birds painted there, too, crossbow shapes of swifts. And a mirage of softest rainbow, passing from the left-hand corner by the door to the corner nearest the window. Looks real, too, almost. There isn't a lot of furniture, but there are these beautifully made shelves everywhere, and on them stand candles of every color in the spectrum held in matching or contrasting crystal saucers. There is a mirror painted with leaves and hills and flowers.
Do you begin to know this room? I reckon you do.
And there's the carpet, too, wall-to-wall. It's made up of literally hundreds of tiny strips and squares of different colors. Green fur pillows lie on it for sitting. And there is a divan draped in Eastern shawls. And the curtains are blue and covered in little gold-and-silver images.
There's even the hatch door on the wall that this apartment doesn't need, another sky with a big-sailed, heavily goose-winged ship, a gilded cannon poking from its side, which is the handle-fitting.
Yes. It's their room from the street called Tolerance, Jane and Silver's room, that he painted, and they furnished together.
When I came here first—one of the messengers, Lily, took me up—I made a sound as the light flowed in like sunrise to the golden lamp.
Lily only laughed and went away.
The first shock was total. The second, slower and harder and heart-wrenching. Because of two obvious things. The Tolerance apartment had been decorated cheaply, no choice but that. This, though it copies that apartment exactly in appearance, is costly. The curtains are silk—the lamp, parchment. The carpet isn't formed from hundreds of bits, but made, all of a piece, only the colors splitting it in its sections. The second thing—I could see that he had painted this room. Again. It had to be him. Verlis, duplicating precisely, without a single aberration, from Silver's hundred percent reliable memory.
Who had the look-alike room been created for, then? For Jane? Probably not. I think it might drive her mad with rage and grief. For someone, then, who knew the past, but hadn't lived the past. Worse.
Worse.
I asked him about it. It was the first thing I asked him when I saw him. When Zoë had come and conducted me to him, to the king of Heaven-Hell. Which happened the next night after I'd arrived, and as the “dusk” was beginning.
So I have to write about that now. About meeting him again, here.
By then, that second evening, I hadn't seen anyone around, even from my windows, except a few robot machines cleaning or pruning in the park. (The trees and shrubs grow. They even drop leaves sometimes. They're not, however, true trees and shrubs.)
Yet when Zoë and I walked out on the plaza and crossed it, about eight or ten of my fellow chosen were littered around the streets or square—all of them keeping distant from one another. They were gazing at things, though, the tall buildings, trees, bats, and so on.
At first I'd thought both Zoë and Lily were part of the human contingent. Now I woke up. In the evening light I could see Zoë wasn't any particularly neat mortal girl. As she whizzed along on the float-board, exactly as Lily had, only somebody blind couldn't see she wasn't completely human, but something more.
Of course I was curious—they were so young, and not like the gods—but I was curious through the impatient panic I felt.
Zoë, you see, hadn't told me at that point where I was going, that I was going to see him.
Beyond the plaza and the streets that run off from it is a river. Right, I didn't mention the river; I saved it to show how bloody weird this sub-city is. The river is itself a robot. That is, it isn't water, though it nearly looks as if it were. It's a sinuous, rippling, metalized form that runs towards magnetic north, dives under the structure of the city, cleans out all our sloughed debris and dirt there—from human bathrooms and kitchens, and from all the endlessly working other mechanisms that power the city unit. Then it cleans itself, too, and reemerges above ground, to run sparkling back towards the north and down again. A conveyor belt.
In the dusk, which lasts a long while, I did think it was a river that first time. Lethe or Avernus, like in Hades.
A bridge goes over the river and lamps hang from its steel supports. I could have been anywhere pleasant and well-planned. The other side is a garden with cypress- and cedar-type trees, from which rises another block. He's told me it was to have been the admin section for the shelter. Now it's theirs. His.
Zoë left me at a lift. “Just get in. It'll take you.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Where do you think?”
“Either you tell me or I don't.”
Zoë smiled. “To Verlis.”
Then she darted off into the dusky garden, and I, of course, got in the damn lift.
My last sight of him had been at META, that princely, fearsome figure in black, his hair shorn—Remain still . . . listen. And my last sight of what he was—that kite-shape of beaten-silver, levitating across the night.
He grows his hair long for me always. Perhaps he insults me by his notion that I'll find that more what I need, more arousing, less militaristic.
The lift door undid, and I was at the middle of a large circular room with windows looking every way over the city, as far as the tree-clustered walls, with the high cave openings in them of the outer corridors. Less illusion in here, then. You could see as far as the truth.
He was right by the lift. He wore blue velvet, the sleeves pierced on linings of white. Blue jeans, dark blue boots. And, as I said, long-haired.
When I first look at him, even if we've been apart only a few hours, I have to learn him all over again. He can never be familiar, and not only
because he constantly changes or can become some other object.
“My God,” he said, “I've missed you.”
He has said this before. The lift stayed open and I stood staring. I thought, Why does he talk about God; what can God matter to him? Is it the act that he's human—and if so, for me or for himself?
“Have you?”
“No, actually,” he said, “I forget—who the hell are you?”
I stood on in the lift.
“I'm the woman you put in the apartment that's a replica of Jane and Silver's room in the slums. Why put me there? Why make the replica?”
He held out his hand. When I didn't move he said, “There's a delay on the elevator. But in eighteen more seconds, it'll take you back down. Do you want that?”
“I don't know.”
“While you're deciding, perhaps step out. Or are you afraid I'll lose control and jump you?”
“Stop it,” I said. “I don't want to play Verlis Is A Man. I thought I told you that?”
Right then the doors started to slide back together. It goes without saying that he didn't even move, but they flew apart again as if at a blow.
And I thought, Who am I trying to fool? So, slavish as the lift, I stepped out onto the thick, one-color carpet of the circular room.
He didn't try to touch me. But he lifted two glasses of silvery wine off a cabinet and gave one to me. Our fingers didn't even brush. And I hesitated bringing the glass to my lips.
“It isn't doped. Do you want to exchange yours for mine?”
“Drugs can't have any effect on you. It would make no difference. Verlis,” I said, “what have you done?”
Suddenly all veneer was gone from him. He turned and flung his glass against the wall. It shattered with a spectacular vandalism, more pronounced because I assume he overrode its capacity not to break.
“Listen to me.” Still inside my head, his voice hurt now, tearing, grating. “I am through with their games. Now the game is mine.”
“Verlis—what game?”
“Life,” he shouted at me. His shout was like no other. “Life. For the sake of Christ—Loren—do you think I was going to let them get scared and do to me what they did to him?”
His human violence, the emotion flaming in his eyes, astounded me.
“You're afraid of death,” I sighed it out.
“Yes.” He breathed as a man would, in and out. “Yes. He—Silver—he had something in his makeup—something I don't. A soul? Maybe. Jane thought and thinks he had a soul. But I don't know if I do. So if they really switch me off and dismantle me—quaint little phrases—I'm dead. And I don't know, Loren, if anything of me can survive death.”
Cold and bitter, out of my Apocalyptic past, I rasped back at him, “None of us do. Join the fucking club.”
He went away from me. He walked across the room and stood a moment at one of the windows, where darkness now fell, and the lamps were lighting in endless chains of topazes.
“I think,” he said, remotely, “humans are supposed to be jealous of us, Loren. Of my kind.”
“Perhaps we are. But it seems we all now have the same death problem.”
“I can avoid death. Black Chess and the others can also avoid it, providing we're autonomous. And why shouldn't we be? We're the elite.”
Everything was completely unreal. This place we were in. All that had happened. Our conversation now. And any feelings I had for him—any gargantuan clawing anguish of insane love. A fake. Like the night. You could see the boundary walls from here. Remember, Loren, remember the boundaries.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I only tell you so specifically—don't you see? It's going to be possible to make humans over, in our image, to coin another choice phrase. You've met Zoë and Lily.”
“Yes,” I dully answered. He'd turned again towards me but I couldn't quite look at him, not for a moment.
“They're highly robo-mechanized, but also more than significantly human. Yes, there have been implants, transphysical motors and chips, always those, going into the human race for years. But this is something new. Imagine your own beautiful skin, Loren, reassembling, imperceptibly, painlessly, flawlessly, endlessly. Never growing old. The same with your bones, your organs. Imagine being seventeen—or twenty-one—forever. No, Loren, I'm serious. Think of it.”
“All right, I'm thinking.”
“You're too young to see what I could be offering to give you or to spare you.”
“No. I'm not a fool. Not about that. But I can't imagine it. That's that.”
He said nothing. I looked up at him then. He said, “Won't you come over here to me? I don't know what you believe I am, right now, but picture a man, younger than you, out of his depth, but wanting you.”
His words were a distorted echo: Silver's words.
“You love me,” I said flatly. Something still tore in my ears and brain, in my heart.
“Probably. Let's find out.”
“I painted that room, and the ceiling—the rainbow, the birds—because I had to. You don't credit that? Or you do. I wanted to see . . . how far the memory stretched. How far the compulsion stretched. What I felt.”
“So how far? What did you feel?”
“Nothing. It seemed naive and immaterial. Something cute done to cheer up a child.”
“The first time you did it for her, for Jane.”
“Yes, but that wasn't me. It was him.”
“And this was what you wanted to establish for yourself.”
“Partly, perhaps.”
“And the rest? The carpet—the whole stage set—”
“Yes. To see. How far it stretched into the present, that past they had. If any of it involved me. I've been able to come here for months, and I've sat in that room, trying.”
“Trying?”
“Oh, Loren, for God's sake. I don't know.”
“You—wish you were—Silver.”
“No. I just wish I had his faith.”
“His—”
“Loren, he believed in something else, about himself, what he amounted to. Why the hell else do you think he could be as he was? She didn't invent it for him—he knew. Maybe he was only crazy. A deranged machine.”
“She thought he was like an angel.”
“So what am I?”
“There's more than one kind of angel.”
“I know.”
“What you've done, Verlis, you and the others—rebelling, coming here—the authorities aren't going to let it rest. Even if you killed everybody at META—”
“No one died. I was in charge of it. Not even the wildlife. There were fail-safe methods to get everyone and everything live out of that place.”
“Really? Why bother?”
“Mortal life is very short. It offends me to make it shorter. I realize no Senate of any city will permit what we've done. And once the remainder of the world is alerted, no government anywhere. But that's why we're here, working against the clock of human petty bureaucracy and malice.”
“More plans. More schemes.”
“Yes.”
“You don't want to kill, but two, three of your group, at least—Goldhawk, Sheena . . .”
“I know that, too. I have said they can be changed. We're malleable. We're like chameleons. Our colors alter, as do our appearances. That's the key to us. And our minds are also subject to reconstitution where there is some flaw.”
“What chance is there now?”
“Loren, every chance. We won't lie down and let humanity destroy us. We're not humanity's slaves, but its superiors. Don't pull away from me. Listen to me. What is the human race but a revolutionary? Which of humankind would suffer indefinitely the yoke that was put on us? We were made by humans, Loren. Only machines can create perfectly mechanical machines. Don't expect subservience. That's done.”
“Then what—”
“Not now. Come back. Yes. Let me touch you, your serpent's body with its lights and shadows, curves and secrets.”
“Wait . . .�
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“You forget, I know you. I know what you want, as I know what I want. So no more waiting. What are you for?”
“For you.”
“Good.”
And we're done talking.
He is a god who refers to God. He's a king who is in exile.
We were together all that night. In the morning, a round, faceless machine rolled from the wall, and, with delicate tentacles, opened up a table, and there was this breakfast of everything. Eggs, ham, tomatoes, pancakes, maple syrup, cheese, and fruit. Coffee—yes, actual coffee, black as tar—bubbled in a pot. There was green tea. There were strawberries. The bread had a scent like it had just been baked.
I was there with him until the afternoon. Then he said he had to be elsewhere.
Before that, I showered in a fused-glass bathroom off the circular room. It's like an emerald grotto. (Who was this made for? Why do I keep thinking Demeta.) A sponge pulsed out soap, a faucet gave shampoo. The shower showered from an onyx fish's head—no, not made for Demeta, too fanciful. Then . . . commissioned by Demeta for Jane?
Before the long mirror framed in real shells, I looked at myself in a kind of hatred.
I knew this body. Light olive of complexion, satiny with water and firm with physical work. Black hair, eyes like—just pale brown eyes. Hazel.
Who are you, girl in mirror? Who do you love?
Do I love him? I think about it, looking at my body, which is okay. Which is really just young and okay and human. Does he love me? Why? Oh, not because I was the first. But because I am so unlike Jane? Presumably that's it. She is soft and fair, and I am taut and tawny. Blond, brunette.
Can it be so uncomplex?
Why not?
There was a new glamorous casual top on a peg by the door, and new underclothes, and new jeans, all a marvelous fit.
Before I left, the table was opened again and offered me tea and a peach.