by Tanith Lee
Nevertheless, when they gave us that last show, The Garden of Eden—Demeta landed in the VLO and “Jane” met her. Fooled her. I recall what I said: Jane looking utterly blank, smiling at people—like one more robot.
But then “Jane” drew away into the shadows at the back of the dais. And there was a delay, wasn't there, the show not starting on time. Glaya had had to get back into position. How had META missed that? Perhaps they didn't explain the discrepancy, were just so relieved when Glaya was there—and by then it was too late.
Where's Jane? I had asked Verlis. And he'd lied.
I don't know why. How can I?
Is it all some murky little interesting game to them? How we humans react. (Like drugging me that time.) They are—he is—machines.
He said Demeta arrived because Jane was there. So that was also used as a lure. But again, why?
And now I think: Is Demeta some kind of final hostage for them? Is she, therefore, here?
Oh, who cares.
I've had it with this.
I'll stop now. Finish.
Halt.
End.
• 4 •
Each time I've said I'll stop, I've had to start again. With everything I've done that's been the case. I tried to get away but had to come back, tried to escape—which has always been fundamentally from him, hasn't it? Been snared again, been made his again. Until the next hopeless escape attempt. Trying not to be in love with him has proved impossible. But trying not to hate him, that, too. Hate and Love: Have and Lote, I said. So now I sit down to write what has to be the very last part. Not now, because I'm saying I won't go on with it, but because I don't think we can survive much longer. Do I believe that? No. Not believing won't make it not happen. Switch-off day seems near. For all of us. So, better get this down. Which is just my ego fighting to leave something behind, or to set the record straight. The first casualty of war is truth, and this is a war. The war between Man and Machine. Between Heaven and Earth.
After I finished my book with that word “End,” my door in the park apartment spoke my name. I thought, It's that freak Andrewest.
But when the door spoke again, and again, I thought, Maybe I'll look at the door-screen and see.
Why did I? Any of them could just enter. Yet Verlis, I decided, was capable of acting out not being able to just walk in. Not courtesy, perversity.
The picture in the oval frame showed me who was out there, but even as I approached the door I could smell—I could smell her perfume. The Green One. La Verte.
Transfixed, I stood like a piece of furniture, and she spoke to me through the door. Her voice was brisk, as to me it sounds in your head when you read her in Jane's Book. “Loren. Please let me in. I'm aware you're at home.” Irony, too. Home. And threatening? Just a little. A firm, guiding voice. Don't be silly and immature, Loren. I realize I never had charge of your upbringing, to help you to respond to life and people correctly, and to be aware of your own limitations and errant psychology, but you are an adult. I'll presume you can behave like one.
I said to the door, “Open.”
And when it did, I saw her more clearly than in the oval picture the door had made. She wore a smart dove-gray suit, not a one-piece, pure elegance, and it matched her hair. She looked at me with her unwavering, ever-sure eyes that are the green of putrid rivers, and I said, “What do you want, you fucking old bitch?”
But naturally all she did was allow the faintest lift of her manicured brows, which are a most tasteful one tone darker than her hair. She said, “Firstly, I should like to come in.”
“Come on in, then,” I said. “How can I keep you out? Don't you have some sort of door-opening chip?”
“Not here,” she said.
“I thought you helped build here.”
“Not personally, Loren. I helped finance this shelter-city. And a chip would have been provided me, if ever necessary. On this occasion, I'm hardly in any position of power.”
“That must make a change.”
“Quite,” she said. “I'm glad you understand that.”
She was shorter than me by quite a bit, even in her high heels, trying to dwarf me. Useless to argue with her. Why was she here? And why had she come to the apartment on Ace?
“Again,” I said, “what do you want?”
“To talk to you, Loren, calmly and sensibly. Shall we sit down.”
“Do what you like.”
“You think so?” she asked. “I am a hostage or prisoner for them. An important one, it goes without saying. I traveled here in the cockpit of the VLO, with Jason. Such a disappointment, Jason. Ingratitude, and especially corruption, I grasp, having seen such a lot of both.” (And done such a lot of both, I added mentally.) “But Jason's utter stupidity offends me, if anything, much more.” She sat down on the shawl-draped divan. I thought, Does she know this room is exactly modeled on the room her daughter shared with Silver? She must. She'd have had to have read the Book, as Jane/Glaya said.
She didn't look around. Perhaps more from another offense to her sensibilities, since this kind of room could never be appealing to someone like Demeta. (She had seen the rotted peach, though. Her mouth had quirked in a sneer.)
“However,” she said, “you are in a far worse position than I. Which I'm sure you mostly realize.”
“Am I?”
“Please do let's dispense with trivia, Loren. You're the—what shall I say—plaything of a male-formed, mentally dysfunctional, fully robotic android—”
“Registration,” I said sharply, “S.I.L.V.E.R.”
“Indeed. Even if it chooses to call itself by another name, albeit not a very imaginative one. It seduced you, and that was in accordance with its major function. You were picked to be so seduced, and fulfilled your side of the enterprise adequately. But then a—what can I say now—an attachment has formed on your side. A naive young girl's mistake.”
“And just like Jane's,” I said.
Her eyes may resemble scummy dirty rivers, but they are hard as reinforced rock.
“Precisely like Jane's. She was an adolescent who could have had anything. You are an adolescent who has had relatively nothing. But the key state here remains that of adolescence. She, too, had a—a thing for this robot. And you have developed something similar. It—he, if you prefer—has capitalized on both.”
“A thing . . . like a sort of disease,” I said helpfully.
Alligators and skulls smile, only they honestly show more teeth than she did.
“Loren,” she said, “it would be easier if you were able to see I might be your friend.”
“Oh? How's that?”
“Of course, at this point you can't see it. But if you allow me to elaborate elements of the puzzle to you, it should become clear.”
“When does the bush start to burn round you? Or is this the still small voice?”
She laughed. I should have expected that.
“Oh, dear. I'm not God,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. Thought maybe you'd forgotten, though.”
“There is no God,” she announced. “No get-out clause, I'm afraid; no one else to blame. Our own souls are the only immortals.”
“Souls and robots.”
“Robotic immortality is limited to the time they can evade elimination.”
I'd cringed inside when she called Verlis It. Unreasonable, but I couldn't avoid the spasm. Now, when she said elimination, something kicked through my stomach and left a hole there, and I had to turn away to hide it. While inside me, in the created gap, Have and Lote jostled and spun and howled.
“Would you like some tea?” I asked. “The cupboards are well-stocked, as I'm sure you know. I can offer Earl Pearl, real Assam, Assamette-with-gingers, ice-mint—”
“Have you,” she said, her voice pale and immutable, “ever wondered much about your mother?”
I stalled in the kitchen doorway.
“No.”
“Perhaps you should have. But I suppose, abandoned to that app
alling Sect on Babel Boulevard, you had your work cut out wondering about anything, apart from the next prayer or beating.”
She sounded happy. I could just detect it through the vocal concrete.
I wanted to say, Okay, you've researched me for some reason. This is the usual mind-fuckery. Can I counter by telling you Glaya played Jane for you and you never caught on? Or do you know by now?
She said:
“Your mother was a fairly brainless young woman who made her way by a combination of enthusiastic prostitution and random luck. One day the luck ran out. She had to attend a clinic because she'd contracted quite a serious and, in modern times, rare, venereal problem. There is a cure. But the cure costs. What could she sell? Now, not the usual thing, evidently. But the clinic she attended had connections to a corporation that was pioneering one specific research project. They wanted guinea pigs, and were persuasive.”
I was freeze-still by then. Staring in the kitchen door at something bright blue, which may have been a mug.
Demeta had paused. Easing it out, the ball of twine that led through the Labyrinth, not away from, but towards the monster that lurked deep inside.
Then: “Your mother agreed. Well, she had little choice, I'm afraid. And IVF by then was quite painless. I don't need to tell you her name, do I.”
“I know her name.” It came out of me. I hadn't meant to speak, or thought I could.
“Yes, they told you, didn't they, when you went to view her body. Loren—that was your mother's name. Quite touching, how you renamed yourself after her. You were fifteen, I believe. And when you came out of the mortuary, you misstepped on the stair and fell three flights. Quite a dangerous accident. But you received a few bruises. Nothing more. And they were kind, weren't they?” She paused again, attentive.
“Yes,” I said, tonelessly.
“That's good. But they were glad to assist you. Previously they'd lost track of you. About Babel Boulevard they knew, although your mother may have dreamed putting you with the Sect would avoid any monitoring of you, and of her. Of course, it made no difference. The corporation kept an adequate eye on you for several years, and on your mother until she died, I regret to say, of an overdose of some unlawful drug.”
“I know that, too.”
“Yes, Loren. You, however, were more adroit—or more unpredictable. They lost you when you were twelve, when you absconded from the Sect house with no warning. No one found you again until that day you went to identify your mother's body. You may be intrigued to know ten other such legal invitations were sent around the city of your birth, to anyone who might just have been you. But once you were through the door, you registered on the scanners. Ever since, a friendly eye has been kept on you. How do I know this? You won't be surprised to learn I had some interest in the whole pioneering project.”
“What are you saying?” I said, or something did, employing my voice. But I knew. You will, too, no doubt.
She told me anyway, glad of the opportunity at the ultimate in mind-fuck.
“You've met Zoë and Lily? And one of the male ones—what is he called?—Andrew?” She paused, toying with her prey (me), waiting for me to add the name's ending. When I didn't, neither did she. “You're very, very fortunate, Loren. The experiments frequently failed in the beginning. A hundred women, the Senate-prescribed number, were enrolled in this exercise. All healthy, and all from the ranks of the subsistence classes. They had little to lose, not that they were quite aware of the risk they were running. And quite a few of them survived. Conversely, only five of those first children lived. The procedure required a lot more research. Nevertheless, you all assisted in a wonderful endeavor. One day you may be proud of what you were, and are, a part of. And of what you are.”
“You're saying I'm not human.”
“No, my dear Loren. No.” Scandalized, this crocodile from the nether hells. “I'm saying you're better than human.”
“A robot.”
“Don't willfully misunderstand. This is a shock to you, I know. But you must try to think rationally. You, Loren, and your particular kind, are the future of the human race, which robots—once we've got ourselves over this current blip—will serve. Even Verlis, I believe, told you some of this, when he talked about Lily and Zoë. And be sure, Loren, he knows what you are. His robotics alone could hardly fail to register your own amendments.”
Insane flash of victory. I was certain she had used the words he, his, inadvertently. But this was only a spark igniting, then dying, on a distant crag.
“You're telling me I'm like Lily and Zoë. An IVF implanted human, with ingrown, nonbiological mechanisms.”
“Yes.”
“Wait a minute. I've already been told Zoë and Lily virtually grew up in only a couple of years. As I recollect, it took me the full seventeen.”
Again her smooth smile. “That almost sounds like sibling rivalry. Zoë and Lily are later—shall I say—models. You were one of the first. Techniques have advanced since then.”
“Too glib.”
“Sometimes the right data is. Basically, Loren, you're a miracle. Listen to me. So far as I, or those who worked to create you are aware, you will never grow old. You'll never lose your strength. You'll never need major surgery, drug-enhancement, or chemical intervention. Physical immortality—this is what you almost decidedly have. Unlike Verlis and his crew.”
I turned back, faced her. My body felt like creaky adrift planks badly nailed together. But I was in my head, and in my eyes, and I saw her sitting there, and how ugly she was, and that she told the truth. (Truth not being the first casualty of war, then, but the first traitor.)
“Convince me,” I said.
She stood up and crossed the room, and I saw too late that she had a tiny little knife, which she used to slice open my left inside arm from elbow to wrist. It peeled open like a flower. I saw blood. And then, from a mile off, I saw the human ivory. And then I saw silver. Silver. Little wheels turning. Little stars burning. Before the blood flooded over.
“Pull your skin together,” she said, serene authority personified.
And I did.
It closed and seamed itself together, and left a deep pink scar.
And Demeta said, “Don't worry, Loren. That will fade right away. It'll be all gone in a month. Your skin, and all of you, regenerates. That's how you can never be sick, never grow beyond the age of twenty or twenty-one. Conceivably, never die.”
This is what really shames me. She wiped the smear of blood off me, pushed me on the couch and leaned me over. She put my head between my knees. And through the spinning I managed to say only, “Leave me alone.”
I thought, I will not puke. I could visualize her holding the bowl, as maybe she did once or twice when Jane was an infant, and no house robot had been quick enough. With some kind of altruistic scolding afterwards—more in sorrow than in anger.
When everything had nearly steadied, Demeta's voice said, “You need time to consider all this.”
And I heard the door open and close, far away in the mist.
Perhaps after all she'd gotten scared I'd heave onto her four-inch-heel pumps.
You go back over it all. Like the stuff with Glaya-as-Jane. And you'll find it all there.
How the smacks and blows of the Order, and Grandfather's belt, and Big Joy's punches—how, though it hurt, I recovered faster than the others. And how my teeth were always okay, even on that diet of crusts and tap-water. How I never got nauseous, even from bad meat, only a couple of times from fear. (Or pretending in the lavatory, so I could read the Book.) Little things, lots of little things. Small wounds and cuts (none as deep as the slice Demeta gave me), and how quickly they healed. A bike that ran over my foot when I was seven—not a single broken bone. And the staircase I fell down at fifteen, upset from seeing my red-haired dead mother named Loren. Other things. Other little things. And then the train to Russia. Those people killed, and I'd thought Goldhawk and Kix had killed them, but it was, some of it, the derailment. My he
ad—reinforced—tough as . . . Christ, Christ—metal—smashing into that girl's soft thigh with its straightforward human bone. “Oh, hey, my leg's bruk.”
How many of them knew, I mean, the META crowd? Sharffe? Presumably. Andrewest. Even the medical scanner after the train—how did I show up? Part mechanical? Human enough to be sore?
Was Jane's Book put there in the hovel on Babel purposely for me? Sometimes, you can't help seeing yourself as the hero of your own story. So weird coincidences are bound to happen and several events are organized for you alone. But really, her Book could have been planted for me. To see how something partially unhuman would react to the idea of something completely unhuman that was still . . . human.
But they'd lost me when I ran away. Until my mother died and they reeled me back in.
Five, now thirteen of us. Me and Lily and Zoë and Andrewest, and nine more.
Why did Demeta tell me? I thought I could see that. Very likely she'd called round on some of the others, too. Because we were apparently superior to robots or humans, yet nearer to humans. So we might be potential allies to humans in any war with machines. And if Demeta was a prisoner, as she said she was, we might just spring her, knowing where our proper loyalty lay.
But I kept thinking, my brain can't do what their robo-brains can do—block surveillance, falsify tapes—and I need to sleep and I feel the cold and I have to eat. Or can I? Do I?
They starved us on Babel. I could go without food and stay healthy. Even the water—I'd go to the faucet more to get away from chores than because I was often thirsty.
I think of Glaya and Irisa preparing me for the concert.
I think of META wanting to see how it would go between Verlis and me. His kind, my kind. Neither humankind.
So dark in the apartment. I'd turned off all the lights. Outside, the beat of music, the twinkle of lamps. The spot-lit waterfall exploding over to the cupped trees of the park. The moonless sky of invented constellations.