Metallic Love

by Tanith Lee

  No one, even the ones who had gotten upset, queried any of that. Nor did I. My brain knew that now, the gods hadn't lied.

  They themselves wouldn't be traveling aboard the ship. All seven of them would form a protective cordon to enclose the shuttle, imperiously flying with it from launch to moon landing.

  It seemed, too, everyone knew that Verlis would not be with them. That Verlis was remaining in the world.

  Sheena and Kix and Glaya were positioned behind Irisa. Copperfield and Goldhawk behind Black Chess. Verlis had by then stepped aside.

  In all the sobbing and cheering and skipping about, I hadn't been able to detect Jason on the plaza. Nor Demeta.

  No one had asked Verlis why he had elected to remain behind. It must have been explained to them, as to me. Yet they approached him continually, touching him shyly and caressingly, like animals drawn to a shepherd.

  He had no chosen but me. (I knew that, too, now.) And some of the other chosen drifted up to me as the music restarted, the last party, on the square.

  They kissed me on the cheek like a bride, and praised me and Verlis. They spoke with—respect. Even Andrewest. Even Dizzy who, hovering smiling before me, said, “Hey, Lor!”

  “Hallo, Dizz.”

  “You know me, now,” she said. “On that plane coming, I came up and spoke to you, and I don't think you even saw me.”

  “Sorry, Dizz. Good luck.” And then, irresistible, “Who are you with?”

  “Kitty,” said Dizzy. Kitty—Kix. “Good luck, too, Loren. Great to meet you. Maybe we'll meet again.”

  I raised my undrunk glass of wine to her. Madness was in the air, bright as stardust, gentle as rain.

  When Verlis came across the plaza, the chains and bunches of people let him go. He came to me and put his arm about me.

  We stood looking at the scene. Looking at the gods going away, and the humans and semi-humans also going away, to collect what they wanted for this outlandish storybook journey. The square emptied and became what I'd seen before, vacant, but for blossom and lights, bats and music.

  “Where are they?” I asked. That was all I needed to say.

  “Jason and Demeta? You tell me, Loren. Think, and see, and tell me.”

  It was as if, once I'd been told what I was, what I could be, I had begun at once to be able to activate it. That little, already familiar, soundless click in my brain.

  And mentally I saw, in sharp focus, Jason, lying half-unclothed in a big, glamorous, messy bed. He'd been with Sheena. She'd intoxicated and drugged him, not even had to do any of the grisly sexual acts he liked. He was out and snoring. He wouldn't wake up for at least two more days. Demeta? Ah, not so kindly. She was locked in a well-furnished room. She was pacing about, frowning. She had no makeup on, no shoes. Her fingernails were still immaculate, and she was still as hard as them. I watched her a moment, there in my head, while her own too-clever mind scratched about to assess what she could do. But she wouldn't get free until all this was over. And she knew which, perhaps, was the worst punishment of all.

  “What will happen when the shuttle launches?” I asked.

  “What was said and what you know. Anyone outside, or down here and this side of the river, will be safe enough.”

  Jason and Demeta were this side of the river. There were a handful of others, too, asleep or just elegantly imprisoned. They must have offended, or failed some test. I couldn't care anymore, or make demands.

  The birds and the bats aren't real.

  We walked. One by one, the music speakers faded and the lights dimmed out.

  We went to the park and looked at the champagne waterfall in the dark. Then into the apartment block, upstairs, to make love on the multicolor carpet, just as they did. Those other two. Jane, Silver.

  I dreamed of going to meet my mother, to see if I could persuade her to help me publish my book. Jane:

  She guesses I want to use her.

  In the dream I wondered if the lift at Chez Stratos would say, “Hallo, Loren.”

  But it didn't speak to me, and rather than emerge in the great big sky-room of Demeta's house in the clouds, with its balloon-bubbles showing amontillado sunset, I was in a frosty narrow chamber, and my mother sat on a sort of slab.

  Her hair was red like mahogany. Her eyes were foxy in color. She wore a long white robe, like an actress acting a priestess in some Middle Ages video.

  “Better be careful,” said my mother to me. “After this visit they'll be able to keep an eye on you. It's the bio-mechanics you have. Better than a chip. On the other hand, Loren, it's just those same bio-mechs that can help you to block their scanners, or any of their systems. That's what you were doing since you were eleven. But when you fall down the stairs in a minute or so, they'll look after you, and rev up their own machines so from now on they can trace your movements. Only when you learn, will that be stopped—by you. About eighteen, that's when it'll happen. And then they won't be able to know a thing about you anymore that you don't want them to know.”

  “Like Silver,” I said. “The way he does it.”

  “Verlis, Loren,” said my mother fastidiously, almost Demeta for one split second.

  When I awaken, my lover has gone, and on the pillow there's a silver ring with a stone like blue-green turquoise. It will last twenty-four hours, or so I guess. That's what he promised me before.

  Is my dream correct? My mother, on the slab in the mortuary—but alive—saying I can now fool the authorities just as Verlis and the rest of them can.

  Or was it my own brain again, processing the information?

  I recall how I used to pretend to be invisible to the Apocalytes, after I'd gotten away from them. Had that activated the block that blinded everyone else—the fear-fantasy of a twelve-year-old kid? I think, too, how starting to write my book, I carefully renamed “Danny,” to protect him, and his illegal cleaning gangs. But from the time I was fifteen, META could have tipped off the Senate. Did I somehow . . . blind them to that, too?

  The launch is in about an hour. Before first light. Verlis will be back. He's just been finalizing the last of any mechanized stuff here. We'll be together, and we'll hear the roar two miles off, terrible, like dragons bellowing in the mountain.

  I put the ring on my finger, and then wrote all this. The ring feels solid. The stone's so blue.

  We may die—or is it “die” (his kind of death— mine—what can mine be?). Not now, but soon, out on the mountain, say. Or later, somewhere. I wrote, didn't I, how I didn't think I'd be alive much longer? Because part of me is so sure I won't. How can I? How can this be feasible?

  And I said I've hated him.

  I hated him. But the way I hated Verlis, it's pronounced Elovy-ee. What else can you feel for gods anyway, but both? And some love—burns. It hurts, even when you have it. It rips the scales off your eyes and makes you see too much. It never lets go.

  I saw him say good-bye, and embrace B.C. and Glaya. They—all three—became one thing. Like a carved pillar of silver and jet. Then they separated. Were three individual beings again. Alone. That, too, is love. Love that burns. He and I—what will become of us? If we live.

  6

  First I saw you,

  (Love is leaves)

  Next I loved you,

  (Green that deceives)

  Leaves, when they fall,

  Bring winter in;

  Summer's the stranger

  I meet in your skin.

  • 1 •

  We watched, out on the mountainside.

  There was a drone, and then a thunder, until the rock vibrated. The sky was still dark, and then the dawn came in one scarlet gust, and soared upwards into the stratosphere on a ribbon of white.

  All around, as the thunder ended, birds in cold pine trees began to call, until their too-early music faltered. But the east was starting to turn gray. They wouldn't have to wait long to begin again.

  “Was it so simple?” I spoke aloud.

  Yes, he answered. But I heard him in my he
ad. Not entirely a voice, yet Verlis, unmistakably. And I thought, perhaps, this had always been—this telepathy—a feature of our dialogues, even if I'd never noticed.

  Where we were, the pines grew thick. But even as the bird noises petered out, the chug of robo-copters was punching the air, and getting nearer and nearer, and above us the boughs crackled. Thin headlights sprayed through the trees. The whole battalion of fropters was apparently now aware that something had been perpetrated behind the mountains, and they were rising up, angry as wasps.

  I waited beside him. He'd told me, deep in the pines as we were, we wouldn't be seen, and I'd believed him.

  The downdraft as the heavy planes thumped across the forest showered us with pine needles, in the strafe of searchlights. Then they had gone over. Huge hideous insects, equipped with air-to-ground stings, they swarmed above the upper peaks, seeking with robotic eyes.

  What they wanted was safely away.

  “We should go now,” he said to me. Voice or synaptic link—it was becoming all the same, for the time being.

  One hour before this, he had shown me the ultimate ability he and his kind now possesses, and demonstrated it, there in the apartment below. And when I'd cried out in terror, he returned to me instantly.

  Only gods, hated and loved, have these powers, even if they acquire them through the scientific acuity of such crawling things as a Jason and a Demeta.

  Now, out on the winter mountain, he said to me again, “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  I heard him smile in my mind. “Don't tell me you finally trust me.”

  “Never.”

  It's like glass shattering at an unseen blow.

  He stands there in front of me in his somber clothing, his long hair red in darkness, his skin that's the metal of that moon, where all the rest have flown. And then—the glass breaks. He's all fragments, splinters—crimson, silver—splashing through the shadow-smoke. (Taken and cut out in little stars—) Then gone.

  To shape-change was only the start of the process. Now they have this. Their atoms fragment and whirl apart—and they vanish. No other creature on this earth has a power like that. Only the magicians in old stories, or twelve-year-olds who pretend to become invisible in order to hide.

  God knows what filthy military or subversive use such a technique was planned to assist. But like fire, once, for now this gift has been denied to men.

  Invisible, Verlis hangs over and all around me. I'm veiled and clothed, covered under a dome of energy that is the spinning molecules of my unhuman lover. And so the cloak of protective invisibility is also mine now, just as the rocket-shuttle, out in space, will have become cloaked by the revolving cordoning unseeable sequins of Glay and She, Co and Gee, B.C., Kitty and Ice. Held in that sorcery, it, too, will travel unseen.

  Why should you accept any of what I'm telling you? It's insane. It's true.

  How else, under the maelstrom of thumping fropters, between the motorized patrols, their bucketing vehicles and shouting men with guns, did he and I get down the mountain?

  The energy of him, when disintegrated, stays palpable. I could feel it on my skin, the faintest warm pressure tingling in the freezing predawn air. It kept me from the cold. It kept me from stumbling, and from all danger. And I walked. And everywhere the searchers bounded, passing me bawling and running, so close I smelled cigarines or mouthwash on their breath. So close, once, before I could dodge him, one man nudged me with his racing body. But he never even faltered. I wasn't, for him, there. And farther down, where the quiet had come back, the unsettled deer looked up, in a slender glade by a frozen stream, where icicles webbed the trees. The deer looked up and never saw us. We wove slowly through them, past does with silvery-lit eyes, and if they, too, felt some brush of something, it didn't concern them. Maybe we were only like a lighter, warmer snow.

  Concealed in my protective envelope that was Verlis's unraveled body, I descended the holy mountain to the roads of mankind beneath. I was drunk with the strangest happiness I ever experienced in all my life. And like that single act of sexual love, the——, this, too, has never come to me again.

  I recollect I spoke poetry to him in my head. Of course he heard me. I heard the color of his laugh. It's all so extreme. Who was that poet that said the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom?

  You won't believe any of this. I wouldn't. I don't think I would. . . . Yet even though I was slung among the wicked when a baby, they brought me up to believe in miracles.

  • 2 •

  You wouldn't know us now. I don't know myself. I look in any mirror and think, Who are you? Oddly, I don't really think that about him. He's handsome, still a man you'd maybe turn to look at, one you might afterwards remember awhile. If he was your type. But—you couldn't know he was Verlis. No, none of you, even his enemies and mine, especially they. But I always know him. Even if he isn't to be seen. Even then.

  Where we are now, well, I'm not going to write it down. So don't anticipate some invented name. It's a long way off from the cities where we started. Or, maybe, it's right next door. We do as we please. We're free as birds.

  There's been nothing ever broadcast about the others. The moon remains a mysterious lantern in the night, that men walked on once and don't go near now. It has no stations, of course. The Asteroid sails across the afternoon or the dusk, reminding us all that one day the roof of the sky may come down—but so far it hasn't. And robots? Ah, heck, no matter how brilliant they're cracked up to be, something always goes wrong with them.

  We could tell the world the facts. We don't. And this book of mine: Loren's Story—I may publish (it's easy; my lover, after all, is a master of computer manipulation). But will I? Won't I? Perhaps I'll only pack it into some sealing waterproof and stuff it somewhere, as it is, handwritten and illegible. On a train, on a plane. Under a floor. Under an ocean.

  Why, then, did I write the last pages, and now these?

  Oh, yeah. All those years of clearing up other people's places. That's what it is. Loren, the Dust Babe, compulsively tidying her world.

  So I finished the story. And that was where the story ends, back there when we leave the mountains and go off on our own unclassified journey, not afraid of ID scanners or any other machine, able to fix everything, even able to draw I.M.U. funds and, as if by a spell, leave no mark. Aside from that, I must tell you nothing at all. I won't risk it. Except—

  There was an airport. That day, almost a year ago now. An old architectural airport, decaying, with planes strongly rumored unsafe, and outside lay this wonderful daytime ghost of an Italian city. (It's okay for you to know that. It's a million miles from here . . . or just down the street.) And while we lingered in the boiling lounge, between two unsafe planes, something happened. Something.

  Jane adds her own epilogue to her story. Now I give you mine.

  That afternoon I had red, nondyed, shape-changed hair. I was all a little shape-changed, too—heavier, Venus Media. My companion was an old man, stylish in an old-fashioned suit, and carrying an attaché case. I called him Father. He called me Lucy. We looked prosperous enough to be worth a plane ticket, and not so much that any of the roaming thieves had any acute eye for us. We didn't want to hurt anyone, my father and I. I had already learned a lot about my own physical capabilities, both immediate and kinetic. (Practice makes perfect.)

  Anyhow, sitting there, we looked out at the ruined city in the honey-gold of westering sun. Some of the ruins were Ancient Roman, and some were due to the Asteroid; a number of short quakes had rocked the area only last week, which is one reason the plane was so late.

  “Father,” I said, “would you like a drink? A chocolattina?” (Both our hungers are largely psychosomatic.)

  Fretful, elderly Dad peers at me over his spectacles. “Too hot, Lucy. Too hot.”

  “Well, you could have one iced.”

  He tsks. I seem mildly irritated.

  We act these scenes. They help our credentials. But really we are playing. />
  Inside we were both laughing at it, like silly adolescents fooling the grown-ups, and that was when he said to me, not aloud, but in my mind, “Look, Loren. That child has the same hair you do.”

  “Oh, but I doubt he's gotten it with all the effort I did, staring at it in a mirror off and on for about two days.” (Remolecularizing without scientific aid still isn't that simple for me.)

  But Verlis said, “He's a nice child, Loren. Look, he has a walking-cat with him.”

  I turned to see, and in that moment another signal came from Verlis's brain, under the hat and the gray hair. It wasn't a warning, but nevertheless, it was cold, steely, sudden, and all centered on the redheaded child. The brain-picture I'd already been getting as I turned was altered in my mind. It swam, pulsated, growing very tall, fiery—

  Alarmed, I spun round.

  I saw the cat first, which was a big specimen, a male about the size of a bulldog, but walking neatly on a leash. Those cats were called Siamese once. His legs, tail, and face were as chocolate as any chocolattina, the main coat very thick, a luminous mid-blond, with a silvery halo (silver) along the finer outer hairs. From the chocolate mask stared two eyes, oval and crossed, colored like those topazes which are pale blue. The leash looked like purple velvet. And the little boy, too, he was very well dressed. He was about five years of age. He had fair skin tanned light brown, and brown eyes, and hair that was chestnut-red.

  My thoughts were scrambled. This numbed, harsh beat of something unreadable from Verlis, my own idea no kid should be on display so well dressed in such a place—my God, he even had a wristlet of silver.