Metallic Love Read online

Page 13


  I was bleakly angry and scared. That seemed to be all. Predictable, and useless. We went along streets and round to the corner market, and as we crossed it, I could see stallholders keeping an eye on me and my companions. We must look dodgy.

  I didn't ask anything else about where we were going. But Copperfield informed me that next we'd take a flyer. They are the actors, the copper range. He misquoted something from a play to me, a wonderful play I knew, because I'd seen the visual—author, title, and subject unknown in that moment. “They told her to take a flyer, and it was named Desire. You are going on the flyer of desire, Loren.”

  Coolly Black Chess said, “Loren, we're not going to harm you.”

  I said, because there seemed now no point in any further pretense, “Oh? Why not?”

  “You're his,” said Black Chess.

  Does that sound romantic? I knew what he meant by his, and he meant “his belonging.” He meant, for some reason, and just for now, I was owned by Verlis.

  There in that contemporary street, with the cubes and blocks of modern buildings, the mountains all white on gray fall sky, the flyer lines above like spider-silk, it was like some ancient city—Athens, Rome—you know, where they kept slaves.

  The flyer carried us out of town and we alighted on a platform by a highway. The pine forests were there, but full of clearings where industrial plants and commercial businesses had put up their smart glassy façades. I thought, then, we must be going to META, but we weren't. (On the flyer, no one had come near us. We looked, I suppose, dangerous, or my companions did—Black Chess and Copperfield—in their criminal-type disguises. I wanted to say to Copperfield, Who authorized your tan? Because Verlis had told me they mustn't pass as human now unless META confirmed the action. He had said this in the dream that hadn't been a dream. Anyway, I knew Copperfield simply had the tan at his disposal. They could do as they liked. Did as they liked. I thought, sitting on the flyer with them. After all, any trouble and Black Chess can transform to a fire-breathing dragon—and this was so filthily funny I'd laughed aloud, and Copperfield said, “Ah, she's sweet, all keen and eager to see him.” Which shut me up.)

  Down by the road, we walked about five hundred yards, then turned up a dirt track between the pines. Their trunks were like prison bars. The sky was blackening with an approaching storm.

  There was a bend in the track and we followed it round. They could have done all this in however few split seconds, but they stayed in step with me. A house appeared. It looked like someone's weekend place, clapboard, a veranda, a patch of yard with roses and a maple tree. When we got up on the veranda, the tempest broke overhead and the pines rattled with hail. I had the crazy notion—or was it?—that the weather was also robotic, and so in tune with them, that they'd held off the hail till we were under cover.

  The door just opened.

  It was a biggish, old-fashioned, open-plan room, with polished wood floor and a twirly stair going up. Not much furniture. Hail like steel arrows hurtled past big windows.

  Black Chess said, “He's up there.”

  Copperfield said, “B.C. means, you go up the stair and you'll find him. Go along.”

  For a slave, I was being treated quite indulgently, and things were even explained to me since, in my ignorance and awe, I might otherwise not grasp what I was meant to do. But then, for now, I was a favored slave.

  I walked across the floor and went up the corkscrew stair. They just stood there, and when I glanced back, they were themselves again, long-haired, clad in gems and metals, static in the hail-light, impossible.

  Climbing in that rushing light-flicker was surreal. I reached the second floor and there was a lobby with lots of shut doors. They hadn't bothered to say which door, and naturally that was irrelevant, anyhow. Like the door below, the correct one just opened.

  Across the long room I saw him, standing at a window. He had his back to me, but it seemed to me he could see me, not through anything as mundane as eyes in the back of his head, but maybe with the mane of red hair itself, every strand somehow fitted with an optic fiber.

  “Hallo, Loren,” he said.

  The door shut behind me. Hail-reflections skittered in the burnish of the floor. I watched them.

  Then he was there, and his reflection, too, stretched down through the lake-depths of the wood, black, silver, scarlet. Something—shifted in my mind. For a moment I felt as if I saw inside his brain—thoughts like silver wheels, red sparks of impulse—and I knew his thoughts, could read them. It was a feeling of utter terror, like falling. I shoved the lunatic notion off me and looked up.

  And he said, in the strangest voice—human, and flippant—“Don't be cross.”

  The weird moment was gone, but reflection was still there—Jane:

  The reflection of the rain ran over Silver's metallic face and throat.

  Loren: The reflection of the hail ran over Verlis's face and throat. And over his hands, which took up both of Loren's hands. Until she pulled her hands away.

  “You won't trust me, then,” he said softly. “Shame. I imagined now you would.”

  “Because I'm your temporary pet.”

  I was afraid of him, of course I was, and yet some part of me did trust him, the way we trust things we love—the dog that turns and rips out our throat, the calm sea that breaks our boat and swallows us.

  “Who told you that?”

  “About being a pet? It's fairly apparent. Oh, don't worry. I'm not getting ideas above my station.”

  I saw him think. That is, I assumed he ran over some connection he always had with the others, and so checked B.C. and Copperfield, and their behavior towards me, and that it hadn't been so bad.

  “This must be difficult for you,” he said.

  “No, why should it be? I don't have a choice, do I? So it's easy.”

  “Loren, I wanted you somewhere you could be safe.”

  “The apartment was unsafe?”

  “In a way.”

  “And here is safe.”

  “In a way.”

  I said, “And Jane? Is she going to be safe, too?”

  “Is that it?”

  “What? Is that what?”

  “You were there, and you saw her brought over to me. And she and I left the room. Is that why you're hostile?”

  “Am I?”

  “I have told you about Jane and me.”

  How did I keep looking at him? It was straightforward. I simply watched the hail—rain, now—the rain-reflection running over his face.

  I had been afraid. Now I felt only desolate. I didn't know him.

  “Loren,” he said, “they meant us to meet, Jane and I. Neither she nor I wanted that. It has nothing to do with anything now.”

  I turned away from him and stared at the rain instead, teeming down the window. A similar effect, like mercury running on a crystal slide, to the reflection on his skin.

  “I can show you,” he said.

  “Show me what?”

  His hands came onto my shoulders and they were hard, and maneuvered me quickly. I was facing, not the window, but a plain white wall.

  “Watch,” he said.

  The wall altered into a VS screen—that is, pictures formed on it. How was he—? He was projecting them, from a memory circuit, as any decent computer can.

  And so I saw Jane walking into a space with velvet chairs and golden lighting. Jane in her dark dress and silver-blond hair. She was white, like I remembered. It was the night before on the wall, after the concert.

  Verlis wasn't to be seen. Obviously not, for everything was from his viewpoint. He was the camera.

  The question burned in my mind: Is this real?

  But she looked up into the camera that was his face, his eyes, and I saw the distress and dismay in hers.

  When he spoke to her, the sound came, his voice, out of the camera lens.

  “They shouldn't have done this.”

  “No,” she breathed.

  “Have you come a long way?” he said, V
erlis the Camera.

  “I don't—it doesn't matter.”

  “I'm sorry,” he said.

  “Yes.” Tears (Like she said, she cries. She can. She hasn't lost the knack) spilled from the green jade of her eyes. The golds had green eyes—sometimes— “This isn't you. Is it?” she said.

  “No, not really.”

  “I mean, you're not Silver. I mean, you aren't—you are not him.”

  “No. Evidently, you of all people would realize that.”

  A horrified wonder ghosted over her face. “You're so exactly like him. And you aren't him. I could see that, even onstage. Who—are you?”

  “I don't know,” the camera said to her, recording its pictures, which it now played back to me on the wall. “I have his memories. I could pick you out, Jane, among many million persons. I could describe you to yourself in an accurate detail even you might find pedantic. But I'm not Silver.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Who or what?” he said cruelly. “I call myself Verlis.”

  “That's Silver backwards, only not quite.”

  The camera gently laughed. Music. “Precisely. Maybe that's the clue.”

  “Is this room wired?” she asked.

  “Yes. But I'm blocking it.”

  “Can you do that?” She was, Jane, even after all that had happened, as naive as Loren.

  “If I need to,” he said. “And it seems to me I do.”

  “To protect—”

  “You. Myself. If I assure you I find this stage-managed meeting of ours acutely uncomfortable, I believe you, again of all people, will credit me with telling the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  She wiped her hand over her eyes. It was the gesture of a little girl. Did he find it appealing? I think a human man would have. Appealing or irritating, one or the other.

  He said, “They're already on their way up here after us.”

  “You mean, META? I suppose,” she murmured, “they don't . . .”

  “Want to risk either of us.”

  “Kind of them,” she said with an edge.

  “It also means you'll be able to reassure your partner downstairs that you and I have done nothing he could object to.”

  “He'd—” she bit that off. She said, “If you've blocked the pickup from here, what does META think we've said?”

  “You've said this is all very difficult for you. I have sympathetically reassured you. You've asked me certain predictable questions about my remaking. I've answered, also predictably. You've been calm and intelligent, and I have been charming.”

  “Are you saying that they still have the impression I think you could be”—she got the name out now with a stammer—“Sil-ver?”

  “It's ambivalent. But they can take it that way, if they want.”

  “Then you're hiding your identity, whatever it is, from them,” she said.

  “Remember, I don't know who I am. That is what I'm hiding.”

  “Why?” Her eyes were wide. There was a sort of dull terror in them now.

  “Wouldn't you?” he said to her.

  “I don't think I'd be able to.”

  “No, but I can.”

  She turned from him, turned her back to him in one abrupt movement, and began almost to run towards the doors. Her face had, in the instant she turned, shown actual fear. He'd seen it. He said to her, “Jane, don't ever be afraid of me—” and so, spun her back to face him.

  “He said that.”

  “Naturally, I recall he did so. As I said, I have his memories. I remember all the words you both exchanged. I remember making love to you”—her pale face flushed—“I remember his ‘death,' if that's what I should call it.”

  Jane put her hands to her mouth. “Stop it,” she said.

  Silence. Then the doors swung open behind her, and in a parody of spying yet generous parents, a couple of the META people sidled, smiling, into the room, and after them others, and the trays of drinks, the whole bloody circus.

  The white wall he'd used as a screen for me, blanked, and now it showed only the shadow of the rain. Curious, in its way, this rain-reflection three times so altered—on his skin, in the floor, on the wall. Like truth, or the “facts.” The same. Not the same.

  I went on looking at the wall, and Verlis said to me, “That, then, was what took place in the private sitting room at the concert venue.”

  “Please. I know what you've shown me, but you can change things. You've told me that. You just told her that, too.”

  “I could have changed the scenario, but I didn't. Maybe you'll take my word for it.”

  “Maybe I can't.”

  “You must like me a lot, then,” he said, “to be so jealous.” When I didn't speak, he said, “She would have answered me.”

  “I'm not—her.”

  “No. You're mine.”

  Here it was again. Black Chess had said it. Now Verlis did, and it stayed neither consoling nor romantic. It carried the brisk clank of the shackles of the most casual possession. Yet I'd lie if I said the statement didn't excite me. I wanted to be his. I wanted him. But also, like Jane, I was afraid. For this wasn't Silver. And whoever this was, so magnificent, so beautiful, his charisma like electricity charging the air of any space he paused to inhabit, whoever, he was of another kind. The robot kind. The soulless and godlike—the tigers burning bright.

  Sheena had killed Sharffe. Goldhawk and Kix had killed the people on the train.

  They were all capable of such acts, and perhaps had all committed murder already, a type of exercise, the way the first models had practiced sex. Even he could be a killer. Especially he.

  When I saw him properly again, he wasn't any longer paying attention to me. He seemed to be listening. It lasted about two seconds. Then he said, “B.C. says we should go. He's been monitoring for me.”

  “Monitoring what?”

  “META,” Verlis said, “other things.” Still on the leash? Still pretending to be? He bent his head and kissed the top of my hair, startling me despite everything. “What you should do, Loren, is rest up here for now. There's a room across the lobby, it's not too uncomfortable.”

  “Why should I stay here?”

  “Just for now,” he said.

  “I asked why?”

  “I know. I didn't answer.”

  He was at the door, which opened for him when he was about five feet away. He stood, then, as if waiting, holding the door politely open for me, so I could go out into the lobby.

  I obeyed him. I was partly concerned, if he went out and the door shut, I might not get it to open for me.

  “This house—” I said.

  “One of META's domiciles for First Unit members. Currently unoccupied. Look, that's the room. There's a bed, a bath. The kitchen-hatch downstairs works. You'll find most of what you might need. I'll be with you soon. I promise.”

  He swung past me and down the stair. He moved so fast, like fire in the corkscrew of the staircase, my heart stumbled. I heard the front door to the veranda also undo itself, then close. Presumably, all three of them had gone. After a bit I went down, and the open-plan area was empty of everything but for that tearful glimmer of reflected rain.

  • 5 •

  Her conversation with him, and mine, was a double helix, and he was the axis.

  I thought about that through the afternoon. The “comfortable” room was makeshift, the bed a mattress on the floor which, though clean, had already been slept in, and the bathroom gave only cold water. The kitchen-hatch downstairs had tea-making facilities. I drank mug after mug of Prittea.

  When the rain ended, the sun went, too. It was a sulky red sunset, but in the noiselessness after the rain, I heard the usual city noises—distant traffic, police sirens, the whistle of the flyer wires.

  The front door would open. I tried it, although I had to operate it manually. From the veranda I could see the far-off lights of the city like floating islands, between the blackness of the pines.

  I felt stupid. I should get o
ut. After all, there was a flyer platform only about half a mile back along the track and the highway.

  I fell asleep on the mattress, and when I woke, it was pitch-dark and I heard someone moving in the house.

  He had said he'd come back: I promise. But I could tell it wasn't Verlis, the one who was in the house now—none of them could sound like this. This, was human.

  All along I'd had the feeling META was out to get me, perhaps only so they could really study me for some patronizing analysis. Then I'd seen that they might be, too, the robots-who-were-gods. Really, I was nothing and didn't matter, but maybe both humans and unhumans like to tidy up any potential little danger—like conscientiously stubbing out your cigarine in case it scorches a table.

  I'd slept clothed. I stood up and moved behind the door, and I had the mug half-filled with tepid tea in my hand. It was better than no weapon at all, and the room didn't offer anything else that was quickly available.

  Yeah, they were coming up the corkscrew stair. Of course they were. And now I heard the crisp steps in the lobby. A small guy, it sounded like, neatly shod. Oh, good. The door opened and someone hit the light switch.

  We glassily glared at each other, like a pair of rabbits caught by the headlamps of each other's eyes. Hers were green.

  “You're Jane,” I informed her.

  She nodded stiffly. “And who are you?”

  (So much conversation lately had been composed of those words who? why?)

  “Loren.”

  “How are you here?” she said. “Did you break in?”

  “Somebody brought me here. Shouldn't I be here?” I was trying to keep it, despite everything, neutral, normal.

  “Well, not really. It's where I've been staying with Tirso. Only he got sick of it and went to a hotel—and why am I explaining? Shouldn't I just tell you to get out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, hell,” she said. Then she laughed. Pretty, her laugh. She is beautiful—exactly as he told her she was. Twelve years older—which made her what? Twenty-eight twenty-nine? Jane. Jane who wrote the Book. “It's presumably some misunderstanding, this, isn't it? I mean, my bloody mother—she's probably done all this to make it even more disturbing. As if it weren't enough already.” She looked at me flatly, seeing something else.