by Tanith Lee
In the corridor, the young man I remembered was called Corinth clumped past in metal toeless boots and a metal scaled cloak, eating a chicken leg morosely.
The handsome thin man, who had directed the drama, looked in twenty minutes later, flustered and chilly.
“Oh, so you got here,” he said to Egyptia. Her eyes implored him, but he was finished with her. There would be no other productions for Egyptia here, despite her handy wealth. One could see that in his face. “Just a last piece of advice, dear,” he said. “Try to recall there are a couple of other people with you in the cast.”
She opened her lips, and he walked out, banging the door so it almost fell off. The place was not in good repair.
“They hate me,” she whispered, stunned. “I was generous to them, I shared my home with them, my love. I was part of them. And they hate me.”
It wasn’t the hour for truth. Or at least, for only one kind.
“They’re jealous,” I said. “They know they’ll be out-shone. Anyway, everyone was against Antektra, too, apparently. It might be helpful.”
“The screech of the peacock,” she said, “the bird of ill-omened and curse-laden death.”
I retouched her body makeup. I wondered if I could have done what she would have to do, and some part of me began to tell me I could, and to visualize I’d be just as scared as she was, and maybe more.
“Jane, you’ve changed so much,” she said, staring at me in the smeary mirror, seeing me for the first time. “You’re beautiful. And fey. And so calm. So wise.”
“It’s the company I keep,” I said before I could stop myself.
“Is it?” She was vague. She’d forgotten, just as Clovis reported. “Do you have a lover, Jane?”
Yes, Egyptia. A silver metal lover.
“Maybe.”
And then, startling me: “What happened with the robot, Jane?”
“Well.” I steeled myself. “He’s wonderful. Now and then.”
“Yes,” she said wistfully, “more beautiful and more clever than any man. And more gentle. Did you find that? And those songs. He sang me love songs. He knew how I needed love, that I live on love… Wonderful songs. And his touch—he could touch me, and—”
Just as I felt I could no longer bear it, shocked to find the old wound still raw, she was silenced. A dreadful siren squealed over our heads and we flew together in mindless fright.
A tinny laugh followed the siren. Patently it was a “joke” they’d rigged for her benefit. “Five minutes to curtain-up, Egypt.”
I thought she might have a fit. But instead, suddenly she was altered.
“Please go now, Jane,” she said. “I must be alone.”
Outside, Jason and Medea fell in beside me.
“We have seats in the third row. How bourgeois of Clovis to ask for those. You’ve got Chloe’s seat, which is the least good. Funny you didn’t have a seat of your own, if you knew you were coming here.”
But in fact, funnier still, for Clovis had done a juggling act and changed the seats around. To their consternation, the twins found they were in the first row; alone—not even seated together.
“What a shame,” said Clovis. “There’s been some kind of mix-up. Doubtless part of the theatre’s vendetta against all of us.”
The twins would now have to sit through the whole play getting cricked necks from turning to see if I was still there, two rows behind them.
As Clovis and I sat down on the end of the row, he said, “I suggest you leave after Egyptia’s first speech. I gather ten idiots rush down the aisles, and when they reach the stage, there’s a storm. The special effects are rather gruesome. Eyes and intestines unsurgically removed. I shall look the other way, but Jason and Medea will be riveted. I think you should go then. If they notice, it’ll take them half an hour to fight their way out, and with luck they’ll collide with the second relay down the aisle, which is a procession of some sort.” Jason and Medea had turned around and looked at us, and Clovis waved at them. “If they ask me, I’ll say you left to be sick.”
“They’ll know that isn’t true.”
“Of course. I’d forgotten your reputation for implacable indifference. It still won’t help them very much.”
“Clovis, you said you would let me have some cash.”
“Tomorrow, you and he take a cab along the highway to route eighty-three. Can you get the fare for that?”
“Yes.”
“Leave the cab at eighty-three and walk down to the Fall Side of the Canyon. Be there by noon.”
“That’s only a few miles from my mother’s house.”
“Is that important? I doubt if you’ll meet her. The spot was decided on because it’s clear of the city and inside the state line, which should mean no observers, official or otherwise. And because Gem can land the VLO there.”
“What?”
“Vertical lift-off plane. Those nasty noisy odorous flying machines, like the Baxter your mother so prizes. Gem is a test engineer and pilot for the Historica Antiqua Corporation. He will borrow a crate from the museum sheds, as he often does, land in the Canyon, and take you wherever you want to be. He said he would, about an hour ago when I called him. He’s relatively imbecilic, by the way, so if you don’t tell him your boyfriend is a robot, Gem will never guess, which may prove rather a bore for Silver. However, Gem will bumble you along and you’ll arrive somewhere. Then he’ll come back and spend the evening with me, God help me. Honestly, Jane, the things I suffer for you.”
“Clovis, I—”
“Take whatever luggage you want, short of a grand piano. There’s plenty of room in those things. There’ll be a piece of hand-luggage in the cabin, with some money. Units, and some bills if I have the time to crack them down at a bank. Aren’t you going to cry, fling yourself on the carpet—if there is one in here, oh, yes—go into a paroxysm of gratitude? Fawn on me? Faint?”
“No. But I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me. Never.”
“Gem will be pleased, too. But I’ll try not to think about that.”
“I wish—”
“You wish I were heterosexual so we could run away together instead.”
“I wish I could thank you properly, but there isn’t any way.”
“I can’t even be godfather to your kids, can I? Since you won’t have any.”
“I might. The way Demeta had me. Silver would make an amazing adoptive father, I should think. I never had a father.”
“You didn’t miss a thing,” said Clovis. And the lights, with no subtlety, either due to incompetence, poor equipment, or would-be brilliant innovation, went suddenly out.
The audience exclaimed, vaguely disapproving.
“Jane,” he said then, “there’s one damned important thing I forgot—have to be shorthand. Listen: Jason finding you—a homemade device of his—a homing device. Check any clothing you might have met him in before today. Look for something small.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me. It’s obviously not wonderfully accurate, but that is how they got as close as they did. It’s been their new game for a month.”
“But I—”
Eerie reddish-ochre light appeared under the curtain as it rose. We fell silent, I with my mind boiling.
A homing device? Patience Maidel Bridge, Jason running by me, and Medea—I needed to go on thinking about this, but then the bare stage yawned before me, clothed only in drifting, bloodstained smoke. And out of the smoke, along a raised platform, walked Egyptia, stiff and blind-eyed, glittering in her metals.
For a second, I wondered what would become of her. But what had become of her was Antektra, and all at once I knew it. She seemed like a lunatic escaped from the site of an explosion, deafened, dehumanized. Her awful beauty hit the eyes. She lifted her hands and held out a blood-daubed (this was going to be a very gory production) drapery.
“Bow your neck,” she said to us, “bow your neck,” and in the midst of everything else, my heart turned over,
for she’d repeated her lines. And then the hair rose on my scalp, as I deduced hair might be doing all over the reasonably well-filled theatre. For her voice dropped like a singer’s, seemingly one whole octave: “Bow your neck to the bloody dust. Kneel to the yoke, humiliated land.”
She stood there, melodramatic, insane, and we hung on her words, breathless.
“This is not the world. The gods are dead.”
I shivered. She had come from the grave.
Of course she would behave as if no other actor existed. They didn’t. They were shades. Only Antektra lived in her burning agony, her broken landscape.
“Relinquish pride, and kneel.”
I sat there, mesmerized, as before. There was no sound anywhere until the raucous clash and clatter of arms. The ten warriors galloped down the aisles, and the audience reacted now with approving squeaks.
“Weep, you skies,” Egyptia cried out, over the noise of war. “Weep blood and flame.”
The warriors converged before her. Thunder banged. Lightning raged across the stage. Caught in its glare upon the platform, Egyptia herself seemed on fire.
“Go on,” Clovis muttered.
“What?”
“Get out, you fool.”
“Oh—” I stumbled up and almost fell out into the aisle. Under cover of strobe-lighted fire and fury, I ran for the exit and out into the sanity and freezing truth of the city night.
I only had enough coins to take the downtown bus, and it came very late. When I reached the stop and got off, it was already one twenty-six A.M. by the bus’s own clock. I had been gone over ten hours. Clovis hadn’t thought of my leaving a man waiting, only a machine. Even though Clovis didn’t really believe that anymore. Had I, however helpless I was in the clutches of my friends, basically thought the same? Of course he would be calm, unperturbed, reasonable about my long, long, inexplicable absence, when I had previously stressed to him the danger I reckoned we were in. Of course he would. Mechanically reasonable.
I ran along the streets, and it was like running through solid dark water, the night was so curiously intense.
When I ran into the room of our flat, he was standing in the middle of the rainbow carpet. The overhead light was on and I saw him very clearly. Seeing him was like seeing the Earth’s center, finding my equilibrium again, landfall. But he stood completely still, completely expressionless.
“Are you,” he said to me, “all right?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky you caught me in,” he said, “I’ve been out since seven, trying to find you. I was just going out again.”
“Out? But we agreed—”
“I thought you might have been hurt,” he said gently. “Or killed.”
The way he said it, for which I can’t find words, rocked me, numbed me like a blow, driving all the words and thought out of my head. And because the words and thought and the events of the evening were so important, I immediately began to push my way back through the numbness toward them, not waiting to analyze his reaction and my reaction to it.
“No. Listen. I’ll tell you what happened,” I said prosaically, as if in answer to the question I had, I suppose, expected from the rational, unperturbed machine.
So I told him, rapidly, all of it. He listened as I’d asked. After a moment, he sat down on the couch and bowed his head, and I sat beside him to finish the story.
“I couldn’t get away. I didn’t dare. Even to call you—I wasn’t sure of the number of the phone downstairs—and then I had to wait for Clovis. It seems so crazy, but are we going to do it? Leave tomorrow, go somewhere else? Like two escaping spies. I think we have to.”
“You’re so scared of this city and what you think it can do,” he said. “To get out is the only thing possible to us.”
“You’re blaming me? Don’t. I am scared, with good reason. I’ve been scared that way all afternoon, all night.”
He put his arm round me, and I lay against him. And sensed a profound reticence. He might have been a mile off.
“Egyptia,” I said, slowly, testing, but I wasn’t certain for what. “Egyptia is astonishing. I only saw her speak a few lines—Silver, what’s the matter? I don’t even know if you can be angry, but don’t be. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t come here. And if you think that was being stupid and panicking, at least believe it was sincere panic, not just stupidity. And after what Clovis said about homing devices… Oh, God, I’d better check—”
But his arm tightened, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to move, and I kept still, and silent, and I waited.
Presently he began to speak to me, quietly and fluently. There was scarcely a trace of anything in that musical singer’s voice of his, except maybe the slightest salt of humor.
“On one or two occasions, I can recollect saying to you that you were trying to get me to investigate myself emotionally, something that I wasn’t geared to do. It turns out I was wrong. Or else I’ve learned to do it, the way I’ve learnt a number of other things, purely human knacks. When you were gone—”
I whispered, “I really couldn’t—”
“I know. I also know you’re alive and intact. I didn’t know it until you came through that door. If I were human, Jane, I’d be shaking. If I were human, I’d have walked into every free hospital this side of the city and hurled chairs about till someone said you weren’t there.”
“I’m so sorry. I am, I am.”
“Strangest of all was the inner process through which I put myself. During which I imagined that, since you were dead somewhere, I would never be with you again. And I saw how that was, and how I’d be. You asked if I could be afraid. I can. You’ll have to believe, with no evidence, that inside this body which doesn’t shake, doesn’t sweat, doesn’t shed tears, there really is a three-year-old child doing all of those, at full stretch, right now.”
His head was bowed, so I couldn’t see his face.
I put my arms around him and held him tightly, tightly.
Rather than joy in his need, I felt a sort of shame. I knew I’d inadvertently done a final and unforgivable thing to him. For I had, ultimately and utterly, proved him human at last: I had shown him he was dependent on his own species.
• 4 •
The earthquake struck the city at a few minutes after five that morning.
I woke, because the brass bed was moving. Silver, who could put himself into a kind of psychosthetic trance, not sleep but apparently restful and timeless, came out of it before I did. I thought I’d been dreaming. It was dark, except for the faint sheen of snowlight coming through the half-open curtains. Then I saw the curtains were drawing themselves open, a few inches at a time.
“It’s an earth tremor,” he said to me. “But not a bad one from the feel of it.”
“It’s bad enough,” I cried, sitting up.
The bed had slid over the floor about a foot. Vibrations were running up through the building. I became aware of a weird external noise, a sort of creaking and groaning and cracking, and a screeching I took at first for cries of terror from the city.
“Should we run down into the street?” I asked him.
“No. It’s already settling. The foreshock was about ten minutes ahead of this one, hardly noticeable. It didn’t even wake you.”
A candle fell off a shelf.
“Oh Silver! Where’s the cat?”
“Not here, remember?”
“Yes. I’m going to miss that cat… How can I talk about that in the middle of this?”
He laughed softly, and drew me down into the bed.
“You’re not really afraid, that’s why.”
“No, I’m not. Why not?”
“You’re with me and you trust me. And I told you it was all right.”
“I love you,” I said.
Something heavy and soft hit the window. Then everything settled with a sharp jarring rattle, as if the city were a truck pulling up with a load of cutlery.
Obliquely fascinated, then, I got out of bed and went to the
window. The quake had indeed been minor, yet I’d never experienced one before. Part of me expected to see the distant skyline of the city flattened and engulfed by flames—substance of so many tremor-casts on the news channels. But I could no longer see the city skyline at all. Like monstrous snakes, three of the girders in the subsidence had reared up, sloughing their skins of snow in all directions and with great force, like catapults. Some of this snow had thumped the window. Now the girders blocked the view of the city, leaning together in a grotesque parody of their former positions. It was a kind of omen.
Dimly, I could hear a sort of humming and calling.
People running out on the street to discuss what had happened. Then a robot ambulance went by, unseen but wailing; then another and another. There had been casualties, despite the comparative mildness of the shock. I thought of them with compassion, cut off from them, because we were safe. I remember being glad that Egyptia’s play would have finished before the quake. She and Clovis seemed invulnerable.
Only when we were back in bed again, sharing the last tired apple, did I think of my mother’s house on its tall legs of steel. Should I go down to the foyer and call her? But the foyer would probably be full of relatives calling up relatives. What did I really feel?
I told Silver.
“The house felt pretty safe,” he said. “It was well-stabilized. The only problem would be the height, but there’d be compensations for that in the supports.”
“I think I’d know, wouldn’t I? If anything had happened to her. Or would I?”
“Maybe you would.”
“I wonder if she’s concerned for me. She might be. I don’t know. Oh, Silver, I don’t know. I was with her all my life, and I don’t know if she’d be worried for me. But I know you would have been.”
“Yes, you worry me a lot.”
Later on, the caretaker patted on our door and asked if we were okay. I called that we were, and asked after him and the white cat.
“Cat never batted an eyelid. That’s how you can tell, animals. If they don’t take off, you know it’s not going to be a bad one.”