Metallic Love Read online

  Yes. She was mad. She must be.

  “I need to know,” I said coolly, “what the difficulty is you're having.” I'd meant with the Dust Babes. (The three of them, Jizzle foremost, were now gathered in the hall doorway, looking scared at me, three little children whose mother has arrived to sort out the danger. After all, none of them was older than fifteen.) “Do you have a problem with my girls?”

  “It's not your girls,” our client spat. What was her name? I couldn't recall. “It's this.” She pointed at the VS screen.

  Exactly then, one of the men on the screen walked forward and filled it up. He addressed us all in a charming actorly way. “And now, watchers, I'd like you to come with me and take a look at these amazing creations. I want you to judge for yourselves. Understand, what you are about to see is for real. No computer trickery. Check us against your advertising code unit. And if you have a virtual on your set, believe me, now is the time to turn it on.”

  “A virtual—” the client ranted. “Christ. Christ!”

  I assumed she didn't have one. It seemed unlikely, even on Compton Street. The cities have only just gotten that kind of technology up and running again after the first Asteroid disaster, and so far only the very rich can fill their private rooms with virtual reality images at the flip of a switch.

  The screen was showing curving, low-glowing corridors snaking through some sort of steel and polarized glass complex. Not highly mind-blowing.

  Our client folded down on her couch. “Watch,” she roared at us all. “My God,” she cawed, “is there a devil in Hell?”

  I hadn't heard anyone say anything like that for years, not since Babel Boulevard.

  It made the short hair rise on my neck.

  I was thinking, in the pragmatic region of my mind, Just gather up the girls, tell this nutter Danny will settle what she owes for any work done, and get out of here.

  Then a white, wide chamber opened out on the screen. And there in the middle of it was an old-style chair, simulated carved wood, like something from a play written about 1515. On the chair a man sat, his long legs stretched out, one arm gracefully raised a little, so a big, black-striped bird—a falcon, maybe—could sit in turn on his wrist. He was dressed, approximately, in how we—I—think of Italian Renaissance clothes. A dark red silk doublet, almost black, white linen shirt, lace cuffs—but also black jeans, and black-red boots. His hair was long. Long red hair.

  I'd never seen him before in my life.

  I'd seen him a million times, in my brain, in my dreams.

  It was him.

  It was Silver.

  I was seeing Silver.

  My legs, as they say they do, went to water. (Had only happened to me once before.) Water. That's what it feels like. I gripped the back of the client's couch to keep myself up, and heard her say, deadly and miles off, “It's time this world ended. It's really time now. Come on. It's time.”

  I thought, confusedly, does she know him—did she know him—?

  Then the red-haired man got up out of the chair and walked easy and relaxed towards the camera. He smiled at us with his white, perfect teeth. His skin—silver. Amber-eyed.

  “I'm here for you,” he said. That was all. And your insides dissolved.

  I never heard a voice so musical, so unarrogantly confident, so calm, so gentle. So sensual. So personal. But no, of course I had. In my mind. In my dreams.

  The bird flapped its wings. Was it a robot, too?

  The camera had gone in very close, and every feather was visible. And every feature of his face. The skin was poreless, yet real. It was both matte and burnished. Metallic—but only as if under first-class silver body makeup. Just as Jane described.

  This wasn't any robot. This was a man, cunningly made up to look as if he maybe could be. What a low-down trick.

  The woman in the chair muttered.

  “He's the same. Only—I'd forgotten how . . . special. Just that one time. In the room off the lab. They let it happen—just that one time.”

  The man on the screen turned from us. He picked up a slender, carved wooden pipe. Setting his mouth to it, he produced music. I didn't know what the melody was, but it was fast and complex and ornamental—surely impossible to play so many runs and curlicues at such a speed.

  I heard her mutter again: “Turkish Rondo.” Then, “No, even a virtuoso can't go that quick. What is it? Approximately three times faster than the best. But there's expression, too, tonal color. It used to be a guitar. Or a piano. Now it's a flute. Does he still play guitar? Does the new program allow for it?”

  The screen blinked out. And I nearly passed out. The small shock so sudden, right against the initial shock of seeing him.

  She'd hit the remote and cut the image off. She was crying, and she raised two inflamed eyes to me. “I fucked him,” she whispered. It wasn't an obscenity, not the way she said it. When she said “fucked,” it was as if she said, “I died awhile and was in Paradise.” Then she said, “But you, you ignorant bloody bitch, what do you know about it? You'll never be able to afford a go at him. Nor will I. Funny that. Just lucky, that one time, just lucky they tried him out on me—me and several others. Electronic Metals. Anything for the shitty firm.”

  Jizzle was viciously clawing and tugging at me, trying to pull me away. I could smell Jizzle's perfume, slightly expensive, one thorough dousing stolen from a previous client. But I only leaned over this blond woman's couch, staring in her feral eyes.

  According to Jane, he had said he'd been tested on women—and men, presumably—before they let him, and the others of his tribe, loose in the city. How not—he'd been a pleasure robot.

  Jizzle squealed, “Come on, Lor—she's cracked. Let's go—let's get out—”

  And the woman shrieked, “Yes go, you filthy little whores. Run off and dream about a man you can't have. What they did to him—oh, Christ—and now they've brought him back like it doesn't matter.”

  She was staggering up. Jizzle and Coo and Daph were yanking me by my arms and hair towards the apartment door. As I reeled backwards with them, the woman's coffine mug went straight in through the VS screen. Which shattered like thin ice. A cheap, inferior set, after all.

  Margoh said to me, husky with frankness, “I stole that pendant of yours. Never sold it yet. Do you wan' it back?”

  “Which pendant?”

  “One like a snake's head holding a glass bead.”

  “Oh, yes . . . I thought I couldn't find it. No, it's okay, Margoh. You keep it—or sell it. Whichever. Farewell present.”

  “You're a doll, Loren.”

  “Like anything else?”

  “Well. Your last winter coat, the fake fur. That'd really fetch a price.”

  “If you say so. It's full of holes. Take it anyhow.”

  “Er . . .” Margoh looked shifty and sly. I'd never seen her look like that. When she lied to the people she stole from, she was up-front and passionate with distress at their loss. I cottoned on. I said, “Well, why don't I just leave it in the closet, and you can kind of take it sometime today, before I go. Surprise me!”

  We laughed. Like old friends. Which I guess we were.

  Me leaving. That's the reason she owned up.

  But there had been half a day more before I knew I was.

  Out on Compton Street I had turned and slapped clinging, clutching Daphnia away from me. That wasn't fair. I said I was sorry. She started to cry, and I started to shake, and Jizzle said, “I got some brandy in this cola bottle,” and passed it round.

  “What the hell was wrong with that old bat?” they asked.

  They invented possibilities, giggling at the brandy and the stress of escape.

  I said, “Okay, girls. Why don't you go and buy a sandwich. Something nice. Here's the money. Then move on to the next job. That's over on Marbella, isn't it? I'll square all this with Danny.”

  They went off, tweeting at my handout, which was quite generous. I walked slowly, somewhere. I couldn't tell you where, but hours slid over
me and away. All I saw, all I thought of, was him.

  You see, if I'd ever met him when he was with Jane, I couldn't have helped being insane over him, but I would have dragged a steel lid down on it. Unlike Margoh, I don't steal from my friends. But this—what had the blonde on Compton said? And now they've brought him back.

  Can you raise the dead? Apparently Christ could, I didn't and don't see why not, if it was Christ doing it.

  But surely, too, a scientist could re-create a machine. Even—especially—Silver.

  I thought, naturally, all this was down to Electronic Metals, the company Jane talks about, the ones who made him in the first place. The raging blonde had mentioned them, as well. She had worked there. You could understand why she wouldn't forget.

  She must have been really afraid, told to go and have—my God—sex with a robot. Then. Then she met him.

  Guess where I found myself at seven P.M.? Over on East Arbor. Where E.M. had been situated, according to the Book. Number 21⁄2.

  The third shock. The building was there. Jane reports E.M. went east, but even so, we know that's some sort of lie. Maybe it was strange I'd never tried to find this one venue, of all those in the Book I had tried to locate—and hadn't—except the rich landmarks like the New River apartment blocks (Clovis) and The Island (Egyptia). Though even there, I had never discovered their exact flats. Aside from anything else, general surveillance and security around such residences would begin to question me as soon as I walked in a lobby, or, as with The Island, the instant I stepped off the ferry.

  But Electronic Metals had been here originally, and the site still was. Its neon name remained, too, slightly rusted and askew, probably not working. E.M. was one of those identities Jane had never disguised. Why would she? At the time a lot of people knew about super-robots like Silver, and just who had manufactured them.

  I loitered by the gate, which was still securely locked with a device that shrilled This firm has moved! everytime I approached too close.

  Squinting in through holes in the securomesh, I saw a drab, glass-sprayed frontage. The spray glass had cracked. Weeds stood tall along the yard and out of holes in the walls. In a way it was odd the lock message had been left there, or that its mechanical voice bothered to insist on the obvious.

  The sun moved over. Hot purple shadows spread between the buildings. I was turning away, when a man emerged abruptly out of a sort of shed I hadn't noticed near the gate.

  “You been here awhile,” he said. “What d'ya want?”

  Honesty/Loren, practiced liar, replied, “Well, I knew a woman who worked here. About twelve years back.”

  Always lie as near the truth as you can. I had known her—for about twenty minutes—that mad blonde on Compton.

  “A lotta folk worked around here. Y'see any?”

  “It was just—”

  “They're gone. Made a pack of mistakes, these guys. Senate took the business over. Set 'em straight.” I wondered why this guy lurked in a shed at the gate. As if he read my mind, he told me. “Used to work here myself. Deliveries. Now I get the job of keeping an eye out.”

  “But you've said they've all gone.”

  “Sure.” He was a short, not-old old little man. Intently he watched the ground, as if expecting some creature to tunnel up out of it. “They done some funny things here. Guess you know, if you knew some dame worked here.”

  “She said . . .” I hesitated, very puzzled, “robots—like real people?”

  “That was it. Was why the Senate stopped it. We had mobs here, screaming. Subsistence riots. You can't barely get no job—you wan' a robot get your job?”

  There was no point in any more conversation. I smiled and said, “I'd better get going.”

  He had strange eyes, now that he lifted them, a kind of green, and clear for a man stuck in a shed by the gate of a deserted building.

  “Ever hear of META?” he asked me.

  “Meta—no.”

  “M-E-T-A, that is. Stands for Metals Extraordinary Trial Authority.”

  The purple shadow of a block across the way had almost covered us like a pavilion. In the encroaching shade, I saw the not-old old guy was now watching me intently, as if to see what would tunnel up.

  “Never heard of it,” I truthfully said.

  “Not everyone has. Been an advert on the visuals today. That's META. They say they're bringing them back.”

  “Who?” asked Honesty/Loren, stupidly.

  “The robots. Your friend here, what she do?”

  “Oh, this and that.”

  “Ain't this city,” he said. The shadow covered his face and his green eyes shone out of the darkness. Maybe it's only my beginnings in the costive hive of Grandfather, which makes me continually spot omens. “Just over the state border. Northward. Mountain country there.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “That's where they are. META.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “It ain't on no news yet.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  He turned away. “I get thirsty,” he said.

  I gave him some coins. He took them. He said, “I had one once, when I—back then. I mean, I had one of the female robots. I mean, sex. A copper. That's Copper Optimum Pre-Programmed Electronic Robot. It was to make sure she functioned. Oh, boy. She surely did.”

  I took the chance. I said, “My friend did that.”

  He said, “You read that book, din'ya.”

  “Book?”

  “You know what book. D'ya know the city I mean, where META is? They call it Second City now, since the Asteroid.”

  “Really?” I said. “Nice talking to you.”

  I walked quickly along the street. When I glanced back, he had vanished, perhaps only retreated into his hut, or rushed to some bar. The sky beat unkindly on the empty shell of Electronic Metals. I ran and caught the public flyer at South Arbor.

  Danny gawked at me, stony as a gargoyle, while I recounted the story of a long-lost aunt who lay sick a few miles outside the state boundary. Finally he said, “Don't lie to me, Loren. You're a wee bitty good at it, but I know how you deal your hand. We take it as read. You wanna go someplace else.”

  “I need paying, Danny. Is that okay?”

  “Fine. You've been a great asset. Maybe you'll come back.”

  “I will—yes, of course.”

  “Here.” He put a wad of bills in front of me, and I stared at them.

  “You've earned it,” he said. “You never even hit me for dental expenses like the rest of them.”

  There was quite a lot of money there.

  “I'll pay you back.”

  “And I'm a panda.”

  And so to the scene with Margoh. And so, much later, returning to the apartment in the bat-haunted block near the Old River and finding she'd taken my fur coat—but also left me, sneaked in among my few clothes as only a clever thief could do it, a pair of long-stem-heeled silver pumps. Silver. And exactly my size.

  That sunset I caught the flyer far out of State. I'd had to stand in line about an hour to get my ticket. I had never been across any borders. But then, till I was twelve, I'd never gotten far from Grandfather's lair. Perhaps life is all and only truly that. Incarceration, breaking free. And then the next prison.

  2

  Angels walk upon the air,

  Where the sunset doors unroll,

  Seen in distance, striding fair:

  Hair of fire and eyes lit coal,

  Heartless fusion, flesh with soul,

  Wings that rake the sky's wide bowl,

  Flaming swords that pierce and tear.

  • 1 •

  It was a night flight to Second City, six hours.

  Dawn was coming up when we flew in over a new wide landscape. All night, off and on, there had been splinterings of lights below. I'd seen them because I couldn't sleep, unlike most of the other passengers comatosely puffing and sighing around me. Now and then flyer masts gleamed up, too, like thin towers from some epic tale.
But terrain hadn't been visible.

  In dawnlight I received a sense of hugeness. I'd never seen much—any—open country before. The land looked rough and tumbled, chasms, ravines, plunging to glitter-threads of river. Trees clung in sprays on rocksides, or pointed up in the dark arrow shapes of pines. Then the sky cooled and clouds lifted off, and I saw, distant yet omnipresent, the skyscrapers of mountains. You could just make out, even in the last brass burst of summer, snow on their highest peaks.

  After that we were in over the city, the unknown one, and my stomach lurched, and not only from our reducing speed.

  I'd come here on a compulsive whim. What the hell was I going to do now?

  At the flyer station we all lined up and traipsed through the border controls, some mechanical and some human. I began to think my temporary ID, legally bought before leaving, would have something wrong with it. But it didn't. They asked me why I was there.

  “Chance of work,” I said.

  They didn't trouble about me after that. I could tell the guy who'd asked had concluded I was a hooker, useful anywhere.

  Out on the flyer platform it was already hot. The alien city looked like any city, like the one I'd left last night.

  Where was I headed? What was my plan?

  I felt disoriented and anxious, but it was too late for that. And anyhow, you get used to knowing fear will rarely help, if you're one of the subsistence poor. I toted my bag, left the platform, and went and had a bagel.

  And outside the café, when I re-emerged, was a visual giving the local news. I stood watching it, in case there was anything on it. Anything about him. But nothing was. And a voice in my head told me, Maybe that old man at E.M. lied. Or was nuts. How could I have been so sure the information from him was reliable? Because, I thought, it had made sense. META was some takeover from E.M., and here was one more senatorial, governmental, or big-business plot. . . .

  I walked up through the city. Already I could see one of the better areas ahead. They had made that easy. It was a landmark, built up high and visible from the lower streets, and frosted with sparkle, just like those distant mountains. Was this what the crawling poor were meant to respect? It reminded me of a Heaven on a Hill, or castle, in reproduced Medieval pictures, a structure raised well above the peasant village that served it. And the peasants, along with gazing at this wondrous glory, would also have to watch out for marauding castle knights or chastising angels.