by Tanith Lee
“There are hothouses here,” he told me.
The peach was pink and lemon. It smelled of summer.
I took it back to my room by the waterfall park, and put it on a clear red saucer, one of the ones that had had a candle on it. I've left it there, the peach, day after day, night after night. Though it was without a fault, now it's spotted with decay. I need to see it rot, that fruit. Sometimes I stand and look at it, watching. It'll be my birthday soon.
It'd be easy for me to say I have no choice, and I can't get away. The mountains, after all, are impassable, or so they seem without some liftoff vehicle. I've been up top and trudged the more negotiable areas, which have tall man-made railings for safety. I look over into tree-clung abysses between the upland snows, through the dark spruces and pines at the occasional frozen waterway. Deer roam down there. They don't trouble in turn to look up to see who's gaping down at them, as they forage through the clearings. Only if a fropter gets close, or Zoë or Lily whizz over on their float-boards, do the deer look up, seeming less startled now than inquisitive. If deer can be inquisitive about anything.
How could I escape? I think of it quite often, but as a mind exercise. I visualize picking down the mountainside, somehow not spotted or pursued, not tripping any of the defense systems that unarguably must exist hereabouts. I think of falling and breaking my tough bones, that even falling down a staircase once didn't break, but would be bound to here, of course.
There's no point in escaping. Escaping to what? And if the answer to From what? is From Verlis, then escape is out of the frame. Go wherever I might, I'll never be free of him. Like he'll never be free of Silver.
I haven't said. There's no VS in my apartment here. I thought at first that, too, was to mimic the Tolerance room. But soon enough I saw there are active screens outside various places around the plaza, and in the bars. They play only entertainment vispos and visuals. There's no way you can get them to show any news. Perhaps it was deliberate. If people had come down here after an Asteroid apocalypse, it wouldn't cheer them much, staring at the collapse of the world outside, assuming they could even maintain reception. I'm sure, though, there is some means of keeping communication. Kept maybe in the block across the river. I've seen no sign. No doubt, they don't need anything like that in order to find out what goes on.
After I met Jason on day five (by which time I'd not visited Verlis again in the block over the river), I began restlessly going out more, though not yet above ground. I walked around the city, and along the outer corridors. I found the exit elevators unguarded and operating without any prevention, though I didn't get in one.
Meeting Jason had truly rattled me. And as I received no further royal summons during this time to Verlis, I didn't have the chance to ask him about Jason, or even decide I wouldn't ask him. Would I ask him about Jane? And what had happened to Tirso?
It was likely the same authorities who might anytime swoop down on us, would grab anyone outside our hornet's nest, anyone who'd survived META's destruction. A lot of questions would be asked of them, and for a long while.
Another week went by. I was coming across the rest of the chosen now, my fellow pets. Sometimes one or other of them might exchange a word or two with me. A handsome guy in trendy clothes and long hair caught up with me and walked along at my side in the park, and admired to me the nontree trees, wanting to give me, I assumed, a lesson on how they worked, only I didn't understand the science of it. Then, quite casually, as we were standing under this spreading yellow-blossoming one he called an Acasiatic, he said, “Who are you with, here?”
“I'm by myself.”
“Oh, sure. I meant, who's your protector?”
Not “master” or “owner.” Not “companion.” My “protector.”
Not intending to say, I told him, “I came in with the group with Glaya.”
“Oh, right. Yummy,” he congratulated me.
“You?” I asked. He seemed to expect it, but I was curious, too.
“Kix,” he said.
Alerted, I glanced hard at him. He looked proud of himself, pleased with his ascent up the ladder of mortal success.
“Kix is a fighter, isn't she?” I suggested.
“Sure is. Wow, what she's taught me. We don't—we don't have sex. That isn't her thing. But she likes to do what she calls ‘kitten-fight.' I can tell you, her idea of kittens is more like full-grown panthers. But she never really hurts me, can judge to a centimeter obviously. I was fortunate to get picked. I wasn't her first. Tenth candidate, I think she said. But she likes it with me.”
I imagined him with Kix, ducking and diving and weaving and springing, and her like a golden wheel with arms and legs, slashing, kicking, leaping—and never harming a long hair of his head. It hadn't been like that on the train.
“Who's with Goldhawk, do you know?”
“Gee? Oh, Gee has a veritable harem. Twelve, fifteen girls. Some for sex, some for fighting, some for war games. Some for all three.”
“You must know who's with everyone,” I said. I thought he probably interrogated everyone, as he had me.
But he shook his head. “I've gotten a notion B.C. has two pairs, two matched black girls and two matched whites.”
“Matched”—it broke out before I could stop it—“you mean, like dogs, or horses—”
He smiled. Could see nothing wrong in it, or his comment on it. Had he always been obtuse, or just gone mad down here? “That's about the size of it, I guess. My name's Andrewest. And you?”
“Lucy.”
He raised one eyebrow, then turned and leaned into me a little. “We could go to that auto-café over there and have a drink. Then, well. How are you fixed this afternoon?”
This stunned me. I shook my head.
He said, “Aren't you able to? I'm sure you'll find it's okay, if you ask. They don't mind; I never heard that they mind if we have a nice time with each other, too, when they don't need us. Let's face it, we'll get pretty lonely if we don't.”
“No,” I said.
“Sure? I'd thought you'd like both, you know, women and guys.”
“I'm not allowed anyone else,” I said, partly to see how he'd react. I should have guessed. He backed off at once.
“Shit, rough. I suppose in your case—I didn't know you couldn't, all right? No need to tell.”
“I won't tell Glaya.”
He now looked dubious. “Ha ha. Okay. No, don't.” He squinted deeply into empty distance. “I'd better go. I have my training program—I run most afternoons. Gotta keep in shape for my golden lady.”
And that was Andrewest.
Apart from Andrewest, I saw over the next days the pets were generally now beginning to talk to, and even make friends with, one another. Supposedly, some had even been friends before they were brought here.
They'd try to rope me in to the social whirl sometimes. You'd come on a group of them, at the bar tables on the plaza, or in some garden gymnastically working out, or involved in some sport—basketball, tennis even—they were all fairly athletic. They're generally good-looking, too, some of them beautiful, in the way human things can be, that way that doesn't ever last. How many more years would they have, being favorites of the gods? Fifteen, thirty if they were genetically lucky and also kept to their diets and “programs.”
But then, none of this was going to last. If we had—have—a year, we and our lords, I'll be surprised.
(I was already getting a recurring nightmare, a high sky entirely full of VLO's and fropters, detonations and deadly gas.) Even though this underworld's meant to be impregnable.
More likely they'll seal us in, or our robot elite will have to do it. How much high-power explosive can they withstand? We, of course—not much. Or somehow the water will be poisoned, or a virus introduced.
These ideas were (are) so terrible I push them out of my brain, and so apparently do all my peers.
At other times I believe the authorities will just find the means to invade us. And if not dead, any
survivor will then be “debriefed” for about ten years in maximum secure custody.
I haven't spent much time with the other pets. I am uncomfortable with these people, afraid to see in a mirror precisely what I, too, am. But also they get on my nerves. At least, the ones I meet do. I'm certain there are others who hide themselves away—there, that flick of a blind going up in some flat high above the street, a glimpse of someone slipping away round a corner or a copse of trees, in order to avoid, as I so often do, their own kind.
For slaves, we have a sweet life. Even the training programs and food restrictions some of them have been put on are perhaps good for them.
Why hasn't he demanded anything like that of me? I'm not flawless by any standard. Wouldn't he rather I was thinner or more fleshy? (There are even capsules for that, the Venus or Eunice range, Optima to Ultima.) Wish I was able to run a mile, or turn long slow somersaults, or sing, or perform ancient Greek dances?
Can't he be bothered? Or does he like me best flawed. Not to belittle me or indulge his own splendor, but to make out to himself we are the same, young strong finite people, Verlis and Loren.
Like Jane did (the inevitable catastrophe aside), I consider what all this will be like in twenty years. Oh, he won't want me twenty years; I'll be thrown on the garbage long before that. But if not, then I'll be thirty-seven, thirty-eight—and then I'll be forty and forty-seven and forty-eight and sixty and seventy, and then I'll be dead. He looks about twenty-four years of age. He always will—but, no. No, of course he won't. Shape-changer. He'll make himself old with me. He'll go gray and stooping, his skin, whether silver or tan, fissured over. He'll make out like he can only move in slow motion. He'll do all that, take delight in doing it. My God.
All that he said to me about being able to change me—renewable skin, bones, a kind of built-in mechanical Rejuvinex—it isn't possible. Human bodies can't take that. Spare parts are fine—an artificial hip or knee for the rich, a set of replaced “grown” teeth. But not anything that tries to uncode the physical self-destruct of aging. We know this. They have tried and failed. So he's lying, or dreaming. Anyhow, he's never spoken about it again. He sent somebody else to do that.
I've seen him now six times since the first time here, up to this latest summons Zoë and Lily gave me on the mountain in the snow.
I mean by seeing him, seeing him personally, in private. (Do I remark anything in those private meetings? There's nothing . . . unusual. We make love. Have sex. We say very little. What is there to say? I—no, nothing to remark.)
However, there have been several times I've seen him from far-off, in the sub-city. He was always alone.
I've seen some of the others, too. B.C. walking with only one slender black (human) woman, talking to her, up on a distant roof garden. Sheena and three men, running together—many times for them—in the waterfall park, spotted from my apartment window. She must mitigate her own speed to let them keep up, though they did look fast. They race with her, grinning and panting and happy, like dogs. Irisa, I saw, also alone, one pseudoviolet dusk, furling through the upper “air,” a black pillar with a classical face and flowing hair, in a sort of ballet with the evening bats. Copperfield I've watched quite often carried in a kind of sedan chair from history, by four muscular young men in one-piece suits, laughing and joking with one another and him. If he'd thrown them bananas or nuts I wouldn't have been shocked. Goldhawk and Kix I haven't seen, though once, after Andrewest, I heard some others of their special chosen discussing them joyfully, in a café.
Elsewhere I have seen some of them, too. Twice.
After I started to go out on the mountain. One afternoon, abruptly, a copper disc was drifting down from the heaven of empty blue. Catching sun, it was like one of the chariots of fire in Grandfather's Bible. It sank beyond the pines. There are other entries to the underground city up there. Which was it, that disc? Copperfield or Sheena? The other time, true twilight had come in along the peaks. So I'd stood there and, just the same, out of nowhere, dropping from the sky, a black pillar, a silver kite, a golden wheel—I hadn't waited to see where they'd land. I'd hurried back and gone down at once, afraid of what I'd already known existed, afraid to have it proved to me all over again.
How, like that, did they evade surveillance—the watching lower slopes, patrolled by fropters. Do they block it off the usual way? How? Surely, like this, they can be seen. I haven't asked him. Perhaps the robot screens on the sentry planes are showing blown debris, or tiny examples of space-junk feathering down?
The silver kite I saw—him or Glaya? Him. I know it was him. Why I ran away.
But I've seen Glaya, too. She called on me today. About seven hours ago, after I came in off the mountain.
My door in this apartment does more than speak, it murmurs, “Loren, Loren” and then shows me a picture in an oval screen of who is there. I thought it was Zoë or Lily, the messengers. But on the screen was Glaya, in chains of silver silk, hair full of frisking robot butterflies.
No pretense, either. Once I'd been shown her image, my door opened, and she came into the room.
“Hello, Loren.”
Some of the pets call her Glay. As they call Black Chess—B.C.; Irisa—Ice; Goldhawk—Gee; Copperfield—Co; Sheena—She; and—oddly, to me at least—Kix is Kitty. Verlis they name Verlis.
Glaya looked round, smiling at the room from Jane's past.
“This is effective,” she said. “Do you like it?”
“No.”
“Because it was first made for someone else? You're jealous, Loren. He must value that.”
“He does.”
“It's fine that you please him.”
Sullenly I said, “Not always. He gets angry with me. I'm not so bloody tractable as he'd like.”
“I'm sure he doesn't want you to be.”
I shrugged. Was she counseling me? Only contrasuggestions seemed to make sense.
She walked slowly through the room, and then, looking over one shoulder, alerted, turned back to inspect the rotting peach on the saucer.
“This,” she said, mildly interested, “what are you doing with this?”
“It is an experiment.”
“It's dying,” she said, looking at the decaying fruit, pitiless and calm. “I thought humans preferred to eat them alive.”
A bark of laughter shot out of me. “Ripping the salad limb from limb.”
Glaya left the peach and returned to the room's center, where she sat down on one of the green pillows, graceful as a draping of silk.
“He wants me to talk to you. To go over with you a few things he thinks you should understand.”
“You mean, Verlis.”
“Who but?” Her face tilted up to me. “We discussed that already, didn't we, Loren? He is always Verlis. Sit down.” It wasn't spoken as a command, but must be one. So I sat, facing her, on another pillow.
“You've met Jason,” she said.
“He met me.”
“Yes. Naturally you're averse to him. He shouldn't have approached you, and he's been told not to do so again. I hope that makes you more comfortable.”
“He said I'd want to know why he contacted me.”
Implacable, her exquisite mask. Was she weighing up? Communicating elsewhere? She said, “Jason's been useful to us. He was part of First Unit, who constructed us. He has a brilliant mind, but what Verlis terms ‘an unwashed personality.' Also, Jason's a murderer. Maybe you guessed that.”
“Yes.”
“After the deaths of his father and sister, he was protected from the legalities by the woman president of META, Demeta Draconian.” (She said the other name, the one I won't write down.)
I said, “But does murder mean anything now, anyway? I mean, to you and yours?”
“Oh, yes,” Glaya answered, “among humans.”
“You may and we mustn't.”
“As you say,” she said. As if I'd intelligently won myself a big gold star.
“So that's Jason. Why's he here?”
“He still has some few uses. For now.”
“And then?”
“Don't concern yourself, Loren.”
“Don't fuss my dear wee head over it, right?”
“Entirely right.”
She's so—so . . . There is no woman of the world who could compare. They are all like this. You stare at them, and the will to resist, or to be concerned with anything else, drains out like blood from a permanently open artery.
“Glaya.”
“Yes, Loren?”
“All these people down here—fifty, sixty of us?” No reply. “When our use runs out, when you're bored with us, what happens to us?”
“Nothing, Loren. We'll take care of you.”
“Unless we annoy you.”
“Even then. Jason wasn't chosen by us.” Chosen. My word. “We only need him for a short while.” (Why do they? Why on earth?)
“He thinks it's longer.”
“Yes.”
“And if anyone told him otherwise, he wouldn't believe it?”
“Did you want to warn him, Loren?”
Did I? I didn't know.
“What will you do with him?”
“Nothing. But he'll be left behind.”
My scalp prickled. “Left behind in what way?”
“In the usual way. You can see, can't you, intellectual brains made us, but now our own intellect and skills far outstrip those of our makers. Human brain cells inevitably degenerate and die. In our case, the cells multiply and improve.” A sort of sickness enveloped me. It wasn't envy. She said, “However, there are now exceptions to the premise of human degeneration. Verlis told you about it, didn't he?”
“Implants. They can't work.”
“They can work. They do. You've seen Zoë and Lily, haven't you? There are others. Maybe you haven't noticed them or had them drawn to your attention. They all look quite normal, if very attractive.”
“You're telling me Zoë and Lily aren't robots or humans, but some sort of successful compendium of both.”
“That's it, Loren. He told you already.”
“Yes, he said they were.” I looked away from her. I said, “How?”