by Tanith Lee
I curled up on the bed. I fell asleep, as if to reassure myself I must. Woke, lay there. I began to cry. I don't cry. But I cried. As if now I'd learned the way to do it.
And I called his name, under the noises of the precarious, quietening night. Verlis. I pulled at the covers on the bed and wept and called for him, over and over, very low, the sharpness of my tears in my mouth.
• 5 •
My lover came into the room and found me. I hadn't heard him approach. Suddenly—I recall thinking crazily, as if out of thin air—he was lying beside me on the covers.
“Is this your bed or your bath?” he softly asked. “I'm confused, as you seem to be floating in salty water.”
“Tears. I'm crying.”
“Are you? Is that what it is? I thought the sea had gotten in.”
“The sea which changes constantly, and yet is still the same.”
He held me. “That little piece of inspired doggeral isn't yours.”
“Jane's.”
“Yes. You must make up something for me of your own.”
“I suppose you think I can. If I'm what Demeta showed me. I am what she showed me, aren't I?”
“I don't kill,” he said. “No, I'm not saying I couldn't. There's no bar, no proviso any of us can't overcome. But I've never wanted to become capable of inflicting death. As you know, three of my fellow creatures don't hold the same conviction. Nevertheless, if I were to kill, I'd probably kill Demeta.”
“You still let her get to me and tell me.”
“Yes, Loren. Glaya tried to; I tried to. Even Jason tried. We all slipped off the glacial surface of your refusal to hear or sense what we might say. But Demeta is the champion mountaineer. She scaled you at one leap. And now you know, as you had to.”
“Is that why—”
“Why I'm obsessed by you? Perhaps, in part. More than human. Isn't it why you're obsessed by me, because, despite everything I've ever said on the subject, for you I'm still the Silver Metal Lover?”
I cried. He held me. He stroked my hair. The world dissolves into dimness and the smell of salty smoke, like that of ships burning on an ocean. “Don't go,” I mumble.
“I'm not going anywhere. Just moving you a little so you don't get a cramp.”
“I can't get a cramp. I'm—modified.”
“You can get a cramp, sweetheart. You have bio-mechanics, also bones and muscles and nerve endings. And Loren, understand this, too, you can die. You can be killed. Even your excellent framework can be broken in the right circumstance. A heavy-duty bomb, a high-charge bullet through your brain. Anything like that.”
“Is that what I should do? Find a bomb, or a bullet? Or just drop off the mountain.”
“You're faithless,” he says to me, light as a leaf. “All this time with me, and now running after Mr. Death. Believe me, I'll be much more fun.”
“Unless Jane is right. Or that—bitch. Souls that reincarnate—”
“As you pointed out, Loren, we don't know. But you and I, we have a chance to live. Won't that satisfy you, just for now?”
“They'll get here,” I whisper, “the Senate, whoever—they'll destroy you, all of you. And all the rest of—whatever we are.”
His eyes. Even in the dark, through the veils of the sea, I behold his eyes like flames. “One day you really do have to trust me,” he says. “By now there is scarcely any way they can hurt us. And soon—in only slightly more than twenty-four hours—slim chance they will ever dare to try.”
I sat up. Tears were over. Once more I demanded, “What have you done?”
Remember. Despite my vow of lust, dust, rust, must.
Remember this being is the one who'd drugged me, or let someone else do it—and for what? Some other game? Remember he let Glaya and Co act Jane and Tirso for me, and so brought me into META.
I had never asked him why. Never clarified any of it in my thoughts. Why do we do that? I've heard of women—I think of Daph in my cleaning gang, how her boyfriend used to give her the occasional black eye. And she'd say, “Yes, I oughta leave him,” or she'd say, “I kind of forget it when things are okay.” Is that what this had been, with me?
Leaning over him in the dark, when he didn't answer my first exclamation of What have you done? I sat back. I said, out of synch with all the rest, “Why did you drug me that morning in Russia? Why did you let Glaya lie that she was Jane? Verlis.”
“All right.”
He, too, sat up. He and I sat apart, in darkness.
“You weren't drugged. That was Co's lie. He was practicing his lying. Like all of us, he has his flaws.”
“Then what? I dreamed something—only it was actually happening—Goldhawk and the others in the apartment, what was said about the train—”
“Loren, you need to get used to the knowledge that your brain can do different things. Nonhuman things. That morning you were humanly asleep, but mechanically—there's no other way to put it—awake and aware.”
“What?”
“You asked. I've told you. Do you recall the ring I gave you that morning?”
“Yes. With the—”
“Blue stone. There was no ring, Loren. I left you a rose from the market. I made you see a ring—in a sort of dream we were sharing, before the others got there.”
“We shared a dream?”
“It's a synaptic linkup—electrical telepathy. That's all. People randomly do it. But we can do it lots better. Though, like Co, you'll need to practice. That time we just got it right.”
I wanted to scream. Or laugh. All my tears were burned away. He sat there.
“And I let Glaya and Co lie to you that they were Jane and Tirso mainly to make sure you were taken safely into META and away from the city, after Kix and Gee caused such a mess there. I believe you already rationalized some of that. Also, I wanted to see if by then, given your bio-mechanized advantage, you would figure it out.”
“You know I didn't. Till tonight.”
“You need practice,” he remarked laconically. “I said.”
“You—”
“But there is one further reason. I hesitate to mention it. Glaya and Copperfield were decoys. Only alarm that I might be Silver brought Jane to Second City at all. So I meant Jane and her friend's friend to have a chance to make their plane to France. If we hadn't done all that, I doubt she'd have escaped Demeta's web.”
“You care about her, then.”
“Enough to help her away from that, yes.”
“Her fragile human plight.”
“Yes. It's always got to be wrong to harm them.”
“Them? Them? People—”
“Them,” he flatly repeated. “Now. Let's get moving. I'll take you to see what my kind have organized here. And so answer your first question.”
He lifted his head, that was all, and some lights golded on, subtle and low.
I said, trembling, “Could I do that?”
“Maybe.”
His face was cold, and he had left the bed.
“You're angry with me,” I said.
“You're angry with me,” he said.
“With all of it.”
“Yes.”
“Damn you—” I yelled at him, “it isn't the same for you.”
“No?” He caught me, his grip fierce on my arms, as ever, his restraint judged to a hairsbreadth, and his eyes had now the redder glare of coals. Can he know my thoughts? Can I—know his?
“It is exactly the same for me, Loren. Exactly. But ten thousand times worse. Now you know, and only now. And only because you can personally feel it, too. Why do you think I went along with hiding what you are from you, even though I knew what you were the second I met you on that dance floor? And why do you think, in the end, I had to allow Demeta to strike you that axe blow? Do you think I want you to feel this way? The way I've always felt ever since they dragged me out of whatever nonexistent pre-life swamp I'd been swimming in and shoved me in this body. Souls? Christ knows, Loren. This is the only arena we can be sure
we have. Don't turn your back on it, or me. Don't, Loren. Loren—if I have any soul at all, it's you.”
• 6 •
It was cool outside, a fragrant spring night-morning, about four A.M. In a couple of hours it would be dawn, down here and up in the world. No one was about. A horde of little maintenance machineries passed us, squirreling along the clean streets, under the blossom trees with their lamps.
We met Sheena on the river bridge. There was a skinny, podgy-faced young man with her. Jason. They were idling there, like sophisticated casual lovers. He had his arm coiled round her, and I thought of Sharffe and the golden Orinoco that crashed. Sheena and Verlis exchanged some greeting. It wasn't spoken or implied by gesture. But it registered somewhere in my awareness, and I wondered if that was my instinct or my mechanical system that had picked it up.
I was still in shock. When Jason ran his evil little beige eyes across me I was void as an empty screen.
Inside the foyer of the admin block. “Not that elevator,” Verlis said. We went through a door and down a stairway. There was a wall and Verlis looked at the wall, and it opened. The second elevator was one of a rank of ten, and was more functional and much larger. On the gray paint the notice read: Capacity 20 Persons.
“Where are we going?”
But we were there.
Even deeper under the mountain. I don't know how far down. We came out on a kind of gantry, and below were scaffolding and pylons and wires, all angling on into the abyss.
He didn't say anything, and neither did I. I gazed down into the steel cradle far below. There was an object in it, a gigantic dark silver metal bullet with one pointed end.
Finally he said, “Do you know what you're seeing?”
“Some sort of missile.”
“A shuttle,” he said. “A space vessel. You may have seen them on old VS footage, made before most of the space traffic was retarded by the advent of the Asteroid. This one is quite new, about five years old, fully serviced and in total working order. We've made certain of that. It's release and operation were tied in to the personal chips of several of the rich and influential, Demeta among them. Which is why we brought her here, to affect a forgery with more speed.”
“She told me she wasn't chipped for anything down here.”
“By the time she told you that, it was true. But think, Loren, do you really believe they'd have waited for the ultimate emergency to hand out the keys? Impractical. No, Demeta carried the appropriate chip from day one of this place having been completed. So we secured her here, and removed the chip. Most things in the sub-city have been accessible to us. But the shuttle itself was hedged round with the most complex and thickly interlaced traps and fail-safes men or machines could devise. And yes, we could have worked through them, but only very slowly and with extreme caution, not to blow everything sky-high. And time was important, too, you'll agree, for us. The shuttle is necessary. It's why we came here.”
Naturally the ones who built this shelter might have wanted one further option of getaway, if things still got too hot. But if they had used this vessel, where could they—or we—go?
Yes, he could read my mind, or sometimes he could.
Verlis said, “Don't believe what any of the Senates have been telling you all. There are two large habitable under-dome stations on the moon. I've seen them. I've been there. We all have. They're located darkside, which is why no one who shouldn't has picked them out.”
My brain flashed. I saw a silver kite falling from the mountain sky, golden wheels, copper discs, asterion pillars. Coming back in—from space.
“The moon stations are, at this time, staffed solely by machines. Therefore we've taken them over. Does any Earth authority know? Not yet. Inside a year, we'll have something constructed out there that's very like this underground Paradise. Only better.”
“A moon dome-city,” I said. I looked at the vivid image in my mind, thinking he might have set the picture there. It was ethereal, in its strange way, the internal blue sky lit by warm clouds, the mechanical birds flying over, the rainbow carpets of flowers, and burning candles of trees. Tall buildings stood about a plaza, a river ran towards some magnetic direction. A fake sun rose like a golden parchment lamp.
“Anyone that leaves on the shuttle with my people will have a pleasant and a safe life. Besides the technology to create a good and secure environment, we possess one other conclusive advantage.”
People, I thought. He said, My people.
He said, “Jason has been useful in adding some final touches. Given that, it's now unlikely any earth machine or weapon can harm us, or those we choose to protect. No one, however, can predict what threats may evolve in the future. For that reason we have seized a prime deterrent, and should any attempt be made against us, it will result in one single and definitive act of retaliation.”
A sort of click now in my brain. I stared at my thought, all bright and polished before me.
“Yes, Loren. As you know, there are monitoring systems left embedded on the Asteroid. We can trigger them to destabilize its mass. This for us, now, would also be very easy. And if we, and ours, are off the Earth, there's nothing to prevent our doing it. The Asteroid will cut loose and continue on its lethal trajectory. This world will be finished, at the least for several thousand years.”
My eyes cleared and I stared only at him. “No,” I said.
“No?” He looked back at me, his face remotely compassionate. “Why do you say no?”
“You can't obliterate the world for—”
“For personal survival? For the safety of my kind and those we care for? What have human things ever done but precisely that. Yes, those worlds may have been smaller back then. A castle-world, or a town-world, a country, an empire. But to destroy the enemy in order to remain alive—that's the fundamental scripture of the human race. We have been well taught.”
I stepped back.
“I won't go with you,” I said. “I won't. If that's what you plan—if that's your safeguard against attack, to wreck this whole world in order to retain your perfect master race and its slave colony out in space—no. No. I won't go with you, Verlis. If you bring down the roof on us all, you'll be bringing it down on me, too.”
He drew me in against him and I was so drained I let him do it. He said to me, “I told you, you're my soul. You say what a soul says, if ever I had one. Loren, they're going in the shuttle, all my robot family, and most of those others here that agree to go with them. But I alone intend to be staying behind, in the world. Do you see? No authority on this Earth will know. When our ultimatum is given, a cold war will begin that can never be broken or ended, between machines and men. But I'm the hostage humanity won't even know it has. Only my own kind will know. And, as you say, if the roof ever falls, it falls on me, too.”
I pulled away and he let me. “You're staying? You're their king.”
“That's why it can work. B.C. will make a fine leader. He's the best of us, better than me, but you've had no chance to get to know any of that. I'll be—what did you think that time—a king in exile.”
“Don't read my thoughts.”
“Read mine, then. Read them, Loren, and see I'm telling you the truth.”
“I can't.”
“Then take my word. Will you stay with me?”
“You mean, on Earth?”
“I mean on Earth.”
“We'll be hunted.”
“No one will know to hunt us.”
I shivered. Below me lay the slim silver bullet that would cleave the black of space, in that short journey neglected for so many years.
I thought of the panic and pandemonium of governments, issued with a robotic threat to the Asteroid. Of the Senatorial hushing up. Of the secretive cold war he mooted.
Men and Machines. But I'm a machine, aren't I? I held him, unable to do anything else.
He would stay, not only to safeguard his own kind, but humankind. The hostage. And could he be sure of his kind? Goldhawk—Kix—Sheena— O
ne day the roof really might fall. But then, it always might have, anyway.
There on that platform above the wild future, I thought with dispassionate grief of how absurd we were. A metal man, and a woman filled by metal cogs and wheels. Lust, trust, rust. Our love, too, then, must be made of metal. Perhaps it could last.
He let me watch the news videos on the admin VS all day the next day, and there was nothing on them. No news—or nothing out of the ordinary. On one local channel, a minuscule footnote appeared about malfunctioning experimental luxury machines, and how that line had been folded up, throwing many people out of work.
Were the relays real? They seemed to be.
No. It was that I knew they were real, now. The decoy of a Jane or Tirso would never be able to get past me again.
That second evening, too, everyone was called to the plaza.
The bars were all lighted up and serving drinks, and the bats flitted about. But no music, and no vispos on the entertainment screens.
I looked around at them, the chosen of the gods, and as the stratagem was revealed to them by Verlis and Black Chess and Irisa, I saw that most of my fellow pets had also been given already some type of preview.
Some were still upset, frightened. A few cried, and others, comradely, comforted them. I sat watching, seeing how they had become yet one more entity, but I had no part in it. Then I caught sudden sight of Dizzy, one of my wine-friends from META. I'd never known she was here. She was consoling some guy, saying, “But you know you want to be with Co. That's all you want. How'd you manage without him? And we'll all be there together.” And she held a glass of wine, large, no rationing here, to the mourning pet's lips, and he drank, nodding and nodding.
At the news of departure, others clapped and whooped. Zoë and Lily and three other (robo?) girls did a sort of little skating dance around the square on their float-boards.
They were all going on the magic voyage. It was settled. Tonight the shuttle would be automatically guided through the mountain, over its hidden underground track, to the clandestine launch area that lay behind the peaks. It was Irisa who assured us all that by the time the halifropters and other patrols lower down were able to penetrate the surveillance block and register the takeoff, it would be too late. If any countermove was then made by any world authority, even the release of a laser beam or nuclear defense module, the team (they had again referred to themselves as that) could neutralize it, bouncing it harmlessly away into the farthest reaches of space.