Metallic Love Read online

  I climbed the sloping streets, the flights of stairs, and rode the moving ones, towards it.

  At the base of Heaven lay a park of sculpted trees, fountains, flowers of incredible hothouse colors. Tame wildlife sprinted everywhere—squirrels, racoons, birds—not shy, running up to visitors to be fed. There were strollers there doing just that. But to the squirrel that weightlessly galloped up to me, I had to apologize, and it gave me quite a sniffy look before bolting up a tree.

  Beyond this park expanded the shining goal I'd seen from below.

  Domes like bubbles rested on milk-white walls, amid the smooth flash of polarized crystal. Behind the buildings the sky and the miles-off mountains, the real ones, fenced the horizon. The rest of the city lay far beneath.

  There were high electric gates, but they stood open. Only a couple of robot patrollers were flitting up and down an avenue lined with blue cedars. A notice in dayneon gems by the gates read Montis Heights.

  There was no point in barging through the inviting entrance. I'd be stopped fairly quickly, and interrogated as to why I was there, like in all those foyers by the New River.

  Someone, though, was coming, walking out of Montis Heights and along the avenue to the gates, under the cool blue cedar trees. In alternating tree-shade and bright morning sun, I noted fluid tallness, a sheen like water. Silver, sapphire, and a burning deepest red.

  Red hair. Skin like—

  I forgot to breathe. A sort of blood-rush blanked my vision a moment. When it cleared, the figure was much nearer, only ten, twelve yards away. And I could see it wasn't—wasn't him. But it was—one of his kind.

  . . . Silver's sister came through. Her auburn hair . . . she looked at me, smiling. I knew what she'd say. “I'm Silver. That is S-I-L-V-E-R which stands for Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot.”

  The female figure moved like a dancer. Boneless and serpentine—and strong. The blood-red hair fell over one shoulder and down to her waist, strands of it powdered a hard, scorching gold. She wore a snake's garment, too, silver, like her skin, fronded over by violet jewels and coils of drops like rain or diamonds. Beauty? They invented the word just for her. For her and for her kind. Yeah, it was Heaven. Angels walked here.

  And, as Jane described, this one was smiling, right at me. And now she, too, had reached the gate of Heaven, the castle-in-the-clouds, but she was inside, and I was outside, and those few steps shut me out of Paradise forever.

  “Hi,” she said to me.

  Idiotically I responded. “Hi.”

  “Were you wanting to come in?”

  An Angel of the Portal. Or St. Peter. I shook my head, dumbest of the dumbest. Then the words opened my mouth and darted out. “Are you a silver?”

  “Sure,” she said. “My name's Glaya. Registration G. A. 2.”

  Her eyes were the color of emeralds under pale blue glass. That was different. Before, their eyes—all the silvers—had been amber. Her body was perfect, her legs long, her feet in high-heeled, high-strapped sandals, silver on gold—on silver.

  Another difference. They hadn't limited her name, as had been done the first time. No, now she had a proper name. Glaya.

  “If you would like to see more of me,” she said, smiling, sensual and pleased, liking my interest, blossoming in it to ever greater unlikely heights of loveliness, “contact META and repeat my registration.”

  I said flatly, “I'm not M-B, actually. And anyhow, I wouldn't be able to afford you, would I?”

  She flirted her eyes in a way you couldn't ignore, M-B or not. She said amicably, “Well, if anything changes there, maybe then. Have a sweet day.”

  And she flowed by me like a metals and jewelry stream, some edge of her clinging garment somehow brushing me, her perfume stroking my face like a caressing hand. Her finger- and toenails were, each one, the color of an individual fire.

  I felt weak, as if I'd run twenty miles, or lain sick a long while.

  One of the robot avenue patrollers had now slid to the gates.

  “Who is here?” it asked.

  “No one,” I said.

  “You have no business here?”

  “No.”

  “Please descend to the lower level,” it suggested.

  My own suggestion was less urbane. “Please fuck yourself.”

  I saw the vispos that evening. They were all over the city, came out of nowhere, as adverts usually do. People were staring at them, or ignoring them. How could they have ignored them? The earth rocks and you are standing, clinging to the edge of nothing, and you don't notice at all? I guess that is life.

  I recall the first vispo I ever saw in the other city, with the group, when I was about eight. Posters that sound and move, almost real. Samuel slapped me for looking.

  Now the slap came again, but another kind.

  I stood on a street and saw this pyrotechnic display rise like a phoenix out of the dusty lower city.

  The experience of the century! META presents The Show. You know we have them—you know you can see them—even touch— Why wait? Face your future with META!

  A woman appeared on the vis-screen. No, a robot appeared. Not Glaya, who was a silver. This was a copper, with skin like creamy electric sunfall, and hair like wheat. She wore a snakeskin of topaz and amethyst, and was smiling her ice-white teeth. She imitated a singing bird, trills of liquid strangeness—a canary? A man took her place, golden skinned, black-haired. He was an acrobat, turning the most unbelievable cartwheels in midair. He had green eyes. And behind him another man arrived, black as jet—a new range, as a banner across the screen told me, asterion metal, from the Asteroid itself—his hair was black also, but long and plaited with gold, and his eyes were rimmed with gold, and he was dressed in black scales. And there was a woman of black asterion, in transparent white, standing, it seemed, in fire that the man had somehow conjured for her. And then a man with silver skin, with amber eyes, with burgundy hair. They had all spoken or sung or fluently called something, or moved in some unexpected and marvelous contortion. . . . This one, the silver one, was playing a mandolin, softly singing a descant to the music.

  Near me, one of my fellow watchers said, “Are they machines?”

  “No, just computer effects,” said another voice. “It's some movie.”

  The little crowd was drifting away.

  I stared up into the filmic eyes of the silver man. It was him. Or would I know? He wore a shirt like bright coins. Even through the visuality, his eyes seemed to see me.

  Then the screen blinked and switched, and I was shown instead a huge car rampaging over desert. Another advertising vispo for another company.

  Where was The Show? Had I grasped that? Yes. Some recreational public garden. META had organized it. META, the firm of the future we must face.

  Had it been him? He was part of a range. Originally there had been three sets of three, hadn't there. In his set another male, a female. But now? They had extended the prototypes, changed them. A black range had been activated, asterion metal, to go with the golds, silvers, and coppers. And eye colors in some cases altered. Blue-green-eyed Glaya . . . Had she been in the vispo? Yes, I had seen her, but couldn't recapture what she had done. . . . And a female gold, too—jumping high, spinning . . .

  And already they were being hired out. For that was why Glaya had been on Montis Heights. Some rich female M-B client, or a rich straight man, wanting her.

  Maybe they all . . . all of them . . . already.

  They were all up for grabs. For grabs.

  Now the other vispo was showing a new line in SOTA VLO's, the vehicles springing, with absurd weightlessness, out of a cornfield, above which halifropters chugged and buzzed like flies.

  The apartment house on West Larch was like a million others, but it had a veranda out front, which was strung with pink neon lamps. In the dusk, my fellow house-residents sat about there and eyed me like hyenas.

  They gazed even more dangerously when I emerged again an hour later.

 
I had used the tenants-only house-shower, where all the stalls were empty that evening. I'd washed my hair. I had a single “good” dress, found in a third-owner store one evening of extravagance a year ago. It was white Egyptian silk, or so the label said, shot with faint flakes of gilt. I'd gone without dinner for two weeks to make up the money. Never knew why I bought it, as if, in the end, there would be a reason. It clung, the dress, just right, not tightly but describingly, and it was sleeveless and low of neck, and the hem—because short dresses are in—was just above the knee. And there were the silver shoes Margoh had given me, too. I was made-up, all my twenty nails painted palest coffine. And my hair hung down my back.

  One thing I hadn't done. I hadn't read any of Jane's Book. I remember Grandfather, always with a little pocket Bible. We only got rationed bits of it, but he constantly read it to himself, poring over the tiny print with a magnifying glass that seemed to swell his red eye into that of some terrifying outer-space creature. Jane's Book was, I guess, like a Bible for me. Though I hadn't read it for years, it always went along with me. It was the first thing I'd take out in a new apartment, and hide. This time I'd worked a loose panel out of the back of the rickety closet, and put the Book, still in its waterproof overcoat, in there, held against the wall. Then I glued the panel into place. But I hadn't read a line. Hadn't even undone the cover.

  Someone whistled, raucously approving, as I swung off down West Larch towards Main Boulevard.

  It was full dark by then. The moon was up over Second City, faded by streetlamps, and the Asteroid was lurking in the east, the baleful eye of God's Destroying Angel.

  They stopped running the subways after the first quakes, before I'd even been born. But Second City had an overland system.

  I got on the train bound for Russia—struck by the European name of the district. That's where the public gardens were. The Show.

  The car was full, standing room only. Were all these other people going there, just like me?

  I stood rocking, holding onto the strap, watching lighted stations sizzle by, the train not bothering to stop now that it was full, and no one's coin in the machine had showed they wanted those places. In all this crowd, would I even be able to see any stage, let alone anyone on it?

  The train's mechanism was noisy, but I caught snatches of talk around me.

  “They banned them years ago, those things. Now it's been regularized. You can always tell one of them. Couldn't mistake it for anything human. They ain't ever allowed normal work.”

  “I saw the advert on the VS. Oh, I've been dreaming of him ever since.”

  “Me, too. I love the black guy—”

  “Ain't no guy, you dope.”

  “Guess not.”

  “You're crazy. You wanna do that—with that?”

  “They can do anything.”

  “They're built for entertainment and sex. But they're expensive.”

  “Two thousand I.M.U. for one half hour. So I heard.”

  Surreal.

  Had Jane ever felt this way, lurched and pulled forward, part of a curious herd, towards this unobtainable yet obsessive Grail? But Jane wasn't me. She, I knew, was uncertain and timid, with a brave, steadfast core. I'm hard as nails, Jell-O on the inside, shivering away under the armor. Spineless, probably.

  The motion of the overland train made me queasy, and I was glad when it stopped and we all got out.

  The next bit reminded me of pilgrims in some Babel tract illustration, approaching a holy shrine, the way the great crowd I was now a tiny part of poured eagerly up the sloping street towards the powerfully lit walls of the Katerina Gardens. The street illumination was all glowing beautifully here, not a single pole not working, and the wall-tops were garlanded with strings of lamps. Every so often a shower of colored rays frayed up into the air over the park. The crowd liked this. They were excited, their faces burnished gold, nearly metallic. I suppose mine was, too.

  There were plenty of gates, all fitted with pay-boxes. It only cost ten to get in, which surprised me, but then, going on the volume of the crowd, both META and the Second City Senate were gulping in the loot. As for the rich, they wouldn't be here. They'd have had some private show.

  The gardens rose in lawns and terraces, thick with huge trees successfully forced to size. The fire-rays feathered over, and now and then a trail of fireworks crackled their stitching up the sky.

  I just went with the crowd, which seemed to know exactly where it was collectively going. I expected we'd eventually reach the highest point and crane over to the corresponding depths of some arena, a bowl of sound with the performance-area minuscule and far below. But instead, the ascent ended on a vast open plateau of short turf, raised like a table under the night. Distant as the rings of some other world, the vague glow of the city was visible at its edges.

  Where was the stage?

  Others were confused, too. I heard my own question asked aloud several times.

  Someone said, “Only one stage I can see.”

  “Well, where?”

  “Look up.”

  We looked. Up into the parallel black plain of night, where the moon was, and the passing light-rays. Another firework opened a mimosa parasol, and silver stars rained harmlessly down.

  When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night. . . .

  A kind of soft roaring began in the crowd, peaked with isolated shrieks and cries.

  I saw a movie once, not a visual, but one of the old celluloid kind. There was a scene where all these people stood on a mountain staring up and watching a glinting chandelier of an extraterrestrial ship sinking down to them from heaven. UFO's went out of favor about the time the Asteroid spoiled the idea of outer space, and everything else. This was like that film. Like people standing, waiting for a UFO. Or—waiting for the gods of the old mythologies to descend from the upper air.

  The crowd's roaring anyway told you something was happening. Something was coming. As everyone did in the film, we all raised our heads, bent up our necks, and scanned the sky.

  It was magical. Clever, cunning, manipulative. But still magical.

  What was arriving was a golden raft that floated in from the east like a sunrise and crossed over the face of the moon and the inflamed eye of the Asteroid. I reckoned it was on wires, fixed high up to invisible masts, this raft. But it looked like a vessel from some supernatural sphere.

  They were on it. Though at first high above, you could see them because of how they were lighted, how they were clothed, and how they were. Eight of them. Two golds, two coppers, two of the new asterion line, two silvers. Each set comprised one male and one female.

  They were dressed, aside from the metallic carapaces of their skins, the long cascades of their flaming, smoldering hair, in second skins of gems, scales, sequins. They were like fabulous insects, and as they drew closer, you caught the radiance of their eyes, watching back at you.

  God, how had I ever thought it credible to love a creature like this? Worship, yes, self-sacrifice—too likely. But not love. How can you love something so perfect you can scarcely bear to look at it? Like staring into the heart of the sun. You go blind.

  But the crowd, eager always for sensation, for something other than the boring drudgery of reality, called and applauded.

  My neck already ached from craning back at that angle. So what.

  The raft sank lower, nearer. Now surely it would be possible, if you were very tall, to put a finger's tip against its underside.

  I could see him. Silver. He stood above the low golden rail, looking down, his wonderful eyes moving over all of us, without any sign of demand, doubt, or dismay, only that nonhuman confidence that had no pride in its composition. His eyes were like malted fire. His long hair, thick, wavered as running water, garnet-red. He wore black blacker than any night.

  It was the black asterions who wore red. I glimpsed them across the raft. I saw Glaya, too, wear
ing gold, tuning a lute long-necked as a swan. The two golden-skinned ones, in silver, stood first on their hands, motionless, then on one finger each, waving to us with their other arms, laughing, and in total equilibrium. The coppers were dressed in peacock green. They threw flowers to us all, but the flowers dissolved before anyone could catch them.

  I saw him. I saw him as if everything else were only partly there, but he was more there than anything on earth had ever been.

  His eyes passed over mine. I felt them—like a touch. Did he see me? A tall, slim, ordinary girl in third-hand white, with tawny skin and dark hair. Human. One more human, with eyes only for him and his kind.

  Of course he didn't see me. But I felt, too, at his eyes' touch, my spirit drawn out of me and into his look, and as his (unseeing) eyes moved on, my spirit and I stayed adrift from each other.

  The Show began soon after that.

  I think they let loose a few authorized drugs over the park. There was a sultry incense smell that reminded me of those church services Grandfather had declared offices of the damned. And the rays crossing and recrossing, maybe they weren't only color and light.

  The ache in my neck went away. It didn't matter, as I no longer had a body, only this adrift spirit, hung like flimsy washing from the rim of the raft.

  They sang to us, and acted sudden dramas, fought, and played. There had been unconscionable improvements made to their skills, for now, it seemed, it was legally imperative that none of these creatures ever pass, even for a second, as human. And they didn't. They'd become magicians.

  Of course, you couldn't for a moment mistake them for anything mortal—if they could do this—and this . . .