Metallic Love Read online

  It was as if I never heard anything before.

  The sky was white-blue. It was about nine A.M. I walked along the street and turned left towards Hammit and the day market.

  When I reached the market I went on walking, straight through, frowned at now and then by uneasy, Apocalyte-recognizing traders. And then still on, into the city.

  I didn't have any money, of course. I.M.U., as we all know, is the method the rich or lucky use. A few bills and coins get pushed about in the slums. But even those were never allowed us. Grandfather and Samuel had charge of all funds.

  But I never ate much, never being given much, never stayed still much, seldom being able to stay still. Walked virtually everywhere I'd ever been. As for things, I mean goods in shops and on stalls, they were as glamorously alien to me as the sky—I could look, but neither have nor touch.

  I walked for nearly four hours, wandering, staring at everything, and soon I was fairly sure I, on my own, was no longer identified as anything other than an impoverished slum kid. Oh, the freedom merely of that.

  The only problem was, I became furiously thirsty. That was one thing we were permitted at the house on Babel, several drinks of water from the faucet per day—though even there they'd ask you how many you'd had, if you went to the tap too often. Now, no faucet. In the windows of little shops, bottled water looked back at me with green and blue eyes. I think they were what made me so aware of the thirst—normally I could last most days with very little liquid, going for a drink only to give myself a brief break.

  At last I went into one of the small stores.

  “Can I have a drink of water, please?”

  “Can you pay for it?” The woman balked behind the cold box with the bottles, glaring.

  “No. I meant from the faucet.”

  “Get out, you crazy.”

  I got out.

  I stood on the street, watching people going by. No one looked well-off here, but neither did they look like they were dying of thirst as I was now convinced I was.

  My dreamy plan—vague enough—had been to try to locate some of the streets Jane describes in her Book. Tolerance, for example, where she and Silver lived those handful of years earlier, through fall into winter. I hadn't so far been able to find Tolerance, in the company of the group. Nor had I ever heard anyone speak of the place. I decided then, standing parched as one more dying weed on the sidewalk, perhaps Jane had invented the name of the street. I mean—Tolerance—the one thing she and he didn't receive.

  A man brushed by me, careless. He walked into the shop with the woman and the water bottles. I watched him through the open door. He bought cheese and ham from the chill cabinet, and a bottle of beer.

  When he came out, again he nearly walked right through me, but his insensitivity also extended to something else. I don't know how it happened exactly, and for a minute I didn't accept it had. But he dropped a coin. It was silver, and it fell brightly—there, by me. Silver. Then he ambled off and I put my foot over the silver coin.

  I didn't go back in that shop. I walked on till I found another, tiny, like a cave, off an underpass. I didn't buy water, either, but a shiny orange can of carbonated juice.

  The taste of it. I'll never forget. Saccharine as poison, with stinging bubbles that made me cough. To me, champagne. I was drunk on it. Someone told me sternly since, a guy I dated, that I would have been thirsty again in about two minutes flat—only worse. But he was wrong.

  I staggered, inebriated and lubricated, away, and spent the rest of that day still trying to find the elusive streets Jane had named, and not finding any.

  About seven P.M. the sunset was powdering the buildings ruby, and the elevated at Tyrone, which still ran three times a day, was sponsoring a train across the sky, black as a dragon, with thirty glittering eyes.

  I ought to go back now. Face the music and the leather belt.

  But I sat down instead near the iron struts of the elevated, and watched the darkness arrive, like smoke from the setting sun. Perhaps I'd have had to go back in the end. But that was when Danny found me.

  Really, I don't want to say too much about Danny.

  He was then about forty, maybe. He looked younger, but that's all I'll say. Just in case. What he does, you see, is illegal.

  Without any hesitation, he sat down about four feet from me on the pavement. When he spoke, he took me by surprise—not only that he was talking to me, but what he said.

  “See these yellow-red flowers—fireweeds. Notice how they were withered up, lying all flat on the ground? But look, now the dark's come and it's a bit cooler, they're getting right up again.”

  It was true. The drained weeds were standing now, their flowers at half-mast. Even as I glanced, one whole flower jerked and raised its trumpet victoriously to the neon-lit sky.

  “People can be that way,” said Danny, who I didn't yet know to be Danny. “Crush 'em—sometimes they just get back up.”

  I gazed at him sidelong. Grandfather, with all his snarling about sin, had never directed that sex should be interpreted to any of us—ignorance being, seemingly, safer. Nor, therefore, had anyone warned me about men who prey on girls or children. Nevertheless, I was wary. The very fact this man had talked to me, me, less than the dust or the weeds that could rise from the dead—maybe I was cautious even of that, for was he another religious maniac?

  So I didn't answer at all.

  Then he said, “I'm Danny. Who are you?” Like a kid might.

  Only I wouldn't have answered someone my own age right then, either.

  He shrugged. “You've run away, I guess. Yeah? Some old feller mistreating you, yeah?”

  Yes, I said in my skull, thinking of Grandfather with abrupt belligerence.

  “Well, look here, little lady. I have a kind of little gang of girls, some of them a tad older'n you, and some your age—eleven, right?”

  Wrong, I thought, twelve-years-old affronted. I said nothing.

  “There's not a lot of work you can get without your labor card, and I guess you don't have one. But this might suit you.”

  I blinked at him. Then I said softly, “What do you want me to do?”

  I asked mostly in total ignorance, as I've explained. Yet I sounded uneasy and guarded, and he laughed.

  “Hey, hey, no, I don't mean anything like that, honey.” He shook his head, as I sat there wondering what that meant. He said, “The rich folks, they got all the robot cleaners—automatic little dinkies that run up the walls, scrub out the toilet, that kinda thing. But round here, well, we got a few people can afford a human to do all that—if'n they can't afford an automatic. They like girls best; they like young fit girls who can do the work. Think us fellers make a mess more'n we clean up. So I've gotten together my gang. Fifty of 'em. Fifty-one, if you care to join. It'll mean a bit of money. You won't get rich. What do you say?”

  Much of what I'd done on Babel Boulevard had been in the cleaning department, and I hadn't received a quarter for it. It had had to be done for God.

  Now I equated that version of God with Grandfather. An old, gaunt, ranting man with angry red eyes. The other sort of God, glimpsed by then, however obliquely, through the pages of Jane's Book, had no face I knew. He was like the white light Jane had written about. And He didn't need a bloody maid.

  I was still cogitating, the sidewalk hard on my backside, when my stomach growled at the top of its intestinal lungs.

  It startled me. The starvation-training I'd had seemed to have ensured I was never really hungry. Maybe now my body only missed its usual thin soup and half-slice of bread the Apocalytes served up at sunfall.

  But Danny rose to his feet and said to me, “C'mon. I'll buy you a hamburger.”

  And in a kind of trance, like Eve enticed by the serpent to the forbidden fruit, I, too, got up and followed where he led.

  This, then, was the next five years of my life.

  As part of Danny's “gang” (no, his name isn't Danny, either), I lived in various places, always sharing
with two or three other girls of the cleaning teams. We got along, or we didn't. But there was no Big Joy. No Grandfather. No glowering, unreasonable God. (I confess, once or twice I got scared the Apocalytes might find me, drag me back. So I used to imagine I was invisible to any pursuer. I initiated a sort of mantra I'd say over and over if I felt weird, stuck hard at it. Guess it worked.)

  I changed my name, too, when I was about fifteen and a half. What had I been called on Babel Boulevard? Honesty. That had been my name. Maybe why I learned so quickly to lie. However, at fifteen and a half, I altered to Loren. I'd heard it somewhere, and it made an impression. It seemed to fit me, too. A dark name like my hair, my tawny skin, which is what they used to call “olive,” my light brown eyes.

  The best of Danny's flats I stayed in was the last one, situated in a partly ruinous apartment block near the Old River. At night, bats flew out of the top stories—which was where they alone roomed. They circled and flittered round and round through the blue-going-gray dusk, and the first stars came out, pale cold-gold embers, just visible above the haze of river pollution, for this wasn't a well-lit area.

  The cleaning work was always okay. That is, it was dull and repetitive—once you've cleaned one really filthy apartment, you have, with a few disgusting variations, cleaned them all. None of the areas we went were rich, of course. There were a multitude of mossy, green-veined baths and cracked lavatories, carpetless stairways of broken tiles, walls mottled by damp like the pelts of leopards, and rat-riddled kitchen-hatches.

  But we got paid. (Any trouble of any kind, there was always backup from Danny's male contingent.) And sometimes, off the nastier employers, we took the odd goody—a glass of cheap sherry, a cigarine from a two-thirds full packet that usually wouldn't be missed, one go from a bottle of nail polish, if the resident was out, or a box of eye makeup. Sometimes some of us stole things, too. There was a girl called Margoh (how she spelled it, though it was all she could write). She was a genius at petty theft. A knife here, a fork there—a neglected lipstick from the back of a drawer—sets matched up from endless visits to different apartments, put together and flogged to the less moral-conscious markets. Margoh also utilized an actorish streak. Sometimes she would thieve something very missable, like a string of glass beads, or a lightbulb. Then she would go sniveling at once to the person renting our services. “Oh, I'm so worried—I knocked those beads of yours behind the couch—can't find them, I've looked—maybe the sweeper sucked them up—” She'd have the owner, as well as the rest of us, searching everywhere. Margoh became so upset they rarely docked her money. The lightbulbs, etc: she had always broken. Then she wept copiously and offered to pay. Again, it was a harsh employer who turned on her. Rarely did anyone complain to Danny. Most clients thought Margoh a bit dim and felt sorry for her. After all, among the poor, they weren't doing too badly, and she was a much lower life-form.

  I never copied Margoh's antics. This wasn't scruples. I didn't think I had her talent. But no doubt, she taught me something about deceit.

  Other than flats and bats and thefts, by the time I was fifteen going on sixteen, I had become, I believed, me. There'd been a couple of, well, shocks. Unnerving experiences. I don't really want—I won't itemize those. But I'd held together. I had gotten through. And I went out on dates with boys from my own walk of life, saved enough money for contraceptive protection, had my first sexual experience in the back of a dumped car. Sound bad? Hey, it was quite a decent car, still. And I thought how clever I was, proud of my achievement. Forgetting Jane the Virgin's words to her lover:

  Not so I can boast, or to get rid of something . . .

  Forgetting, actually, a lot about Jane, and Silver, too. They were my gods, but they were far off. They'd led me to a better life. But now I was grown-up.

  Even the Book—I'd not read it again. It lay in my portable luggage wrapped up in a plastic overcoat. Mind you, I hadn't thought to pass it on.

  You don't need love to have terrific sex. You need a couple of drinks, a packet of two—contraceptive shots being too expensive—and a guy who (a) you didn't find repulsive, and (b) knew his way around.

  Cynical? Sure. Sure as the stars are fire.

  When I think back, even now, I see how brave Jane was, that sheltered, self-esteem-drained child, older than me only in years, risking everything. But I was a slum cat and I didn't mind, not now, not since I was free.

  At sixteen, I, like several other girls, had my own little cleaner gang of seven, under Danny's overall authority. Some days I didn't even need to work, could go to a visual or a concert, could loiter through the streets, ride the public flyers, idle two hours over coffine at the Chocolite.

  I was Loren, adult, dressed cheaply but to the best of her range, strong nails long and unbroken and painted gold from someone else's polish, a handful of cash in her pocket, a decent bed under a roof to sleep in. I was me. No ambitions. I was young. A visual producer might spot me and grab me for a movie. I couldn't sing, or act, but what the hell. I might even write a novel—I read plenty. (Ironic, it had been Grandfather, crusher of delights, who had taught me, along with all his charges, how to read. And so opened the way to fantasy, dreams, and otherness. Without him, bizarrely, I'd never have been able to understand Jane's Book.)

  I never found, and now no longer looked for, any of the streets Jane had written of. Some of the restaurants she mentioned I'd glimpsed, but mostly they were too upmarket for me. I did once see Egyptia, Jane's demented, beautiful, once-friend, on-screen in a visual, but it was in an obscure theater, and all in some different language—Greek, I think. Even Egyptia spoke Greek in it, or she'd been faultlessly dubbed. They could have dubbed the film, too, in to English, but hadn't, in order to be impressively foreign—it was that sort of visual theater. Not even subtitles. I only went because I saw her name on the vispo advertising. But she was a big star by then in Europe—what was left, that was, of Europe, after the Asteroid.

  Nevertheless, there was a kind of flicker inside me when I watched Egyptia. She, too, had touched Silver. Slept with him in the carnal sense. Damned him, finally.

  But by then the flicker was also distant, deep down inside the obscure ocean that fills up every one of us. I felt it move, the flicker. Felt it ebb away. I had a date that night, up on the hills above the city, where the landscape was somewhat altered from the quake when I was nearly ten. Under the trees, the warm summer breeze blowing strong, someone lying against me. Not Silver—as Silver had lain, of course, in my earliest and most innocently sexual dreams. Not Silver. Silver was long dead. And this was a man. And I was Loren.

  • 3 •

  My gang, the Dust Babes, were over on Compton with a new client, when I got a call at the rooms in the bat-block. I was seventeen by now, and it was summer again, late summer, and I'd had a wild night. I was asleep. Nor was I alone.

  “Lor—Lor, wake up. We got some difficulties.”

  “What? Can't you deal with it, Jizzle?”

  “No earthly way,” said Jizzle, righteously.

  “Jesus,” said my companion, burrowing into the pillow. “I need my sleep.”

  I got up and took my personal handheld house phone outside, into the communal room. The other sharer—Margoh—was out. It was about midday.

  “There's this cracked old woman going nuts here, Lor.”

  “Why, what've you done?”

  “Me? Nothing. She's a crazy old bag, is all.”

  I stood, naked and young and thinking, pushing back my hair in the hot room. But the heat was beginning to bother the phone, it was chuntering away to itself and would soon cut us off. There used to be cell phones once, “mobiles,” but the magnetic interference from the Asteroid put paid to those, and it didn't take much to spoil any other type, especially in subsistence areas.

  “You're fading,” whined Jizzle.

  “Okay. I'll be there in twenty minutes. Give me the address.”

  My date cursed me as I ran about my room. He hadn't been that great. I told him he a
nd I were through, and if he wanted to stay in the bed beyond one P.M., I'd call the police, who owed me a big favor. A lie. But he sat up, all hurt and furious, and I rushed off. “Any damage to my stuff,” I precautionarily added at the door, “you'll be oh so sorry, baby.”

  Any damage. Oh, God.

  What does a bed matter, or a few ornaments and clothes. It's your heart and your soul that matter. Only these.

  I ran up the stairs of the building on Compton. The elevator there was broken, but the very fact they had one showed this district wasn't too bad.

  This should have been a nice job. The woman even had some robot cleaner gadgets she'd been prepared to let us run for her. What had my Dust Babes done? Smashed one of the machines?

  Her flat was at the very top—six stories. A window on a landing looked at summer-dry coppery trees and a quake-site with clematis growing. I hit the door—no auto-panel, but a bell, at least.

  No one came, so I tried shouting.

  Then Jizzle let me in. She looked mournful, her gamboge hair in extra spikes.

  There was a bit of noise. I hadn't heard it outside, the door was that sturdy. A faint buzz of talk—male voices, then the sound of something going over, bang, and splintering.

  “I tell you, Lor, she's off her—”

  “All right. Let me get by.”

  I padded down the short passage and came out in a biggish main room. The VS was on—and it was a great visual set, this one, with four-point surround-sound, and flawless steady color. Part of what I'd been hearing at the door was in fact voices talking on a newscast. It was just a group of guys in fashionable one-piece suits, jawing on. Then I saw the woman, our client.

  She wasn't old, not really. A well-faked blonde, about forty, or else fifty and taking some Rejuvinex—which would make her monetarily better-off than we'd thought. She was in a state, though. She was crying, and she'd just thrown a small table at the wall.

  “Excuse me,” I said, trying to sound both placatory and firm.

  She rounded on me at once. “Come here,” she screeched. “Come here, and sit down. God, you're only a kid. Come here and sit and learn about this—this bloody abomination!” The last two words sawed out in a scream.