Metallic Love Page 6

  As we drove on, he asked me what birth sign I was.

  “Scorpio.”

  “Oh, my. I should have known from your eyes.”

  • 2 •

  Above, in the city half-dark, the apartment domes were golden or milky indigo or translucent scarlet spaceships, resting on snow-walls softly stained with revolving rainbows.

  The park below was lamplighted to a blazing green fire, and birds sang wildly in the trees. (“They never get to sleep,” Sharffe remarked, “think it's day all the time.”) A racoon had bounded onto the car roof and off, its natural fur shining like—silver.

  He hadn't exaggerated about the apartment. He winked us in, like he had at the gates in Russia, and then we stepped into an outside elevator made of frost-patterned glass. Rising up and up, we reached a dome like a damson's heart. The city lay below, like all the kingdoms of the world.

  There was a roof terrace garden, running all around the dome. A round door undid itself, glass into glass. He looked peculiar in the magenta light inside. No doubt we both did. I know my dress looked cheap in it.

  The corridor was tiled in veined black marble. That is, real marble, nothing fake. “From Italy,” he told me, waving at the walls. I'd have hated him if I'd had time, but I hadn't, and my heart was going for a drum solo in virtuoso rapid tempo. Then we were at the next door, trimmed and paneled in white marble and gold. I think he said the gold was forty carats, and the door was opened, not by automatics, but two sort of butlers in Victorian gear. And my heart was lost in the tumult of quake-rock.

  All the rooms were lit in different colors. There were plenty of colors/rooms. The foyer was pink. The next room yellow like wine, and the next red like wine. Then we went through an iceberg-blue conservatory, crowded by plants and by people, as the other rooms had been. Then the biggest room yet was in front of us, coolest gold—in fact, only the best sort of panelectric light, but spilling from crystal fixtures in the domed ceiling and marble walls. Everywhere were champagne fountains; you know, the thing where the drink sprays from the bottle and pours down and over to fill a pyramid of goblets. But here it just kept pouring down endlessly from inexhaustible “bottles,” over the goblets, splashing on, sparkling, into basins of marble so white it ached.

  I said there were people everywhere. Sharffe greeted lots of them with cheery intimacy. I noted randomly that not all of them responded.

  In the champagne room people were dancing the Chaste, the two-together dance where you keep both your upper bodies plastered on each other by sheer ability or determination, not touching with hands or arms.

  I stared at this. Maybe I was a little drunk from the previous wine and liqueurs, or the pine forest, or even the sharp, airborne fizzle of excessive champagne—but I had one of those revelations they say kids get. I watched all these people dancing the Chaste, and suddenly I saw them as if I were an alien from another planet, the kind that's a giant ant, or an amoeba, something like that. Because I could see how foreign, in turn, it was, to have this shape—a head and neck and torso, two arms, two legs—all that, strange to me, as if I were of quite another kind.

  And then, through the alien humans, I glimpsed a silky furl of wheat-gold, and a shiver of shoulders and arms with highlights that were molten. Coppery Sheena was dancing with a human man, keeping their bodies supernaturally adhered, their legs and arms quite free. Her dress now was short, primrose satin.

  And Black Chess was there, also dancing in flawless connection with a woman whose eyes were lambent, hypnotized, gazing into his—where a dragon lay, waiting.

  And Glaya, in jade spirals, danced with another woman, breast to breast.

  “Now, Loren,” said Sharffe. Someone was there, a smiling human alien, with a tray of champagne tinted like strawberries. Obedient, I took one of the tall thin goblets. “Come with me,” said Sharffe.

  We walked out across the floor. I thought he was going to dance the Chaste with me. I decided he'd be a rotten dancer.

  No, I didn't think we'd dance.

  I knew what it was. I'd known since he said that password to me. Jaybeeh.

  “Here you are. How are you doing?”

  Sharffe spoke not even self-consciously. He was actor-exact again, and practiced. He addressed the figure as if he approached a fellow mortal—friendly, if not quite a friend.

  And the man, who had not been dancing but standing there by one long window, looking down to the forgotten kingdoms of the world . . . this man, who wasn't alien, but much more, since he was an angel—he turned to look at us. His clothes were white as ice. His red hair was longer than it had been earlier. It ran right down his back. He smiled. Calm as silence.

  “Hallo, Sharffe,” he said. He looked, then, at me.

  He was about half a foot taller. I'm quite tall, you see.

  His eyes were like . . .

  I stood, looking up at him.

  Sharffe said, pleased to introduce us, “Verlis, this is Loren. Why don't you two dance awhile? The floor's great, they tell me. I just have to find somebody—business, always business. Okay? See you, Loren. Soon.”

  His eyes—I have to know what his eyes are like. I have to compare them to something I can recognize.

  Her words flood through me, (Jane's written paragraphs):

  His eyes were like two russet stars. Yes . . . exactly like stars. And his skin seemed only pale, as if there were an actor's makeup on it. . . . It was silver . . . that flushed into almost natural shadings and colors against the bones, the lips, the nails. But silver. Silver.

  He was Silver.

  “Would you like to dance with me?” he asked.

  My lips parted. No sound came out.

  His eyes were not stars. They were suns. I couldn't look into them; they'd blind me. I couldn't look away.

  “You're not afraid of me, are you?” he asked softly. Under the racket of the quake-rock, where almost everyone was shouting that wanted to be heard, his adapted voice entered my hearing with the politest, most musical intimacy.

  “Yes,” I said. “Shouldn't I be?”

  “Not at all. Really, I'm not that bad a dancer.”

  I laughed. It was bitter and rasped my throat. He could see I wasn't tickled by his irony. That I didn't want to play that he was only a man.

  He said, “I apologize for Sharffe. He should have found out first whether or not you wanted to try this.”

  “Why wouldn't I?”

  “Many reasons. But I'm sure you're the best judge.”

  I said, finding my voice properly at last, tempering it, “And of course, you want to dance with me.”

  “Of course.”

  I was speaking, so nearly, Jane's dialogue. Some figment of me said, “Don't you remember?”

  His smile now was quizzical, beautiful. Unfazed. “I have memories, yes.”

  But I reckoned I couldn't say the rest to him. How could I? I'd have burned alive, spontaneous human combustion, from shame.

  After a moment he moved forward, and his body touched against mine, though not his hands or arms. I, the automaton, and he, the angel, began to dance, reflexively, because what else was there to do?

  You are so close, self-evidently, in this dance. His breath was occasional and clean on my face. He breathed as a dancer would, as if he had to breathe. His body on mine felt firm and coordinated, amorous yet decorous. And humanly warm—surely an innovation. He smelled, too, of cleanness and health, and some unidentifiable male scent . . . and sex. Just as Jane described. But his hair had a scent of pine forests.

  His lashes were thick and long, dark cinnamon—do you recall what she said?

  Nothing can be so beautiful and live.

  And, as Sharffe had delightedly announced, Silver—Verlis—didn't live, so that was okay.

  “You dance well,” he said.

  “Thank you. Yes, I can dance.”

  He'd died. They'd killed him. Now he had risen from the dead. Oh, not like Christ raised Lazarus. And . . . even Christ had become a human man.


  My body against this body. I couldn't think anymore. I wanted to fall unconscious against him, and let the sea wash in, the tidal rollers of pleasure and oblivion.

  Something happened—what? He had taken my hand. He led me aside, and the window opened—he, like Sharffe (more than Sharffe ever could), would be able to undo any door, even without knocking on it.

  We were outside, standing on the area of another roof terrace. Way up, the magenta bubble, and behind us the champagne light, and below, the neon world.

  “Loren,” he said. “I like your name.”

  “Verlis,” I said, “why have they altered yours?”

  “Didn't you alter your own?” he asked me.

  Something like a thin spear dashed through me.

  “How would you know that? Can you read minds?”

  He said, “But it's very usual, to change your name, isn't it, with—”

  “With human beings? Yes, maybe.”

  “You don't trust me,” he said. “The idea is very much that you can.”

  “Because you're not human?”

  “Of course.”

  “A machine.”

  He shrugged. “A new sort of machine, Loren.”

  “Stop saying my name.”

  He lifted my hand to his lips. Brushed my fingers with his mouth. “Again, I apologize. What would you prefer to do? He'll cause trouble for you, will he, Sharffe, if you don't go on with this?”

  Even in my bewilderment at his talking to me like this, one human to another—crazy, though inevitable, for I knew his beginnings, that this was what he did the best, that is, be human—I finally understood something else.

  No, I wasn't to be Jane, was I. It was the other one I was being. The blonde on Compton Street. My God, I was to be one of the ones who were the guinea pigs.

  “I'm meant to fuck you,” I said. “Right?”

  “I'm afraid so. But we can always pretend.”

  “You can lie to them?” I asked.

  “Yes, about something like that. My goal isn't to distress or harm you. I know they're keen, but I've already had two partners. They've seen I work.” He raised one eyebrow at me. “But if not doing what they expect will provoke problems for you, maybe we should act as if we're both doing precisely what they'd like.”

  “Wouldn't they be tracking us—somehow watch us—”

  “Not exactly. It's nothing so basic as surveillance. The physical responses I can program and register in myself. Enough to convince them. And then you just tell them I am—”

  “The ultimate demon lover.”

  “Yes. Because, without at all deserving to be, I am.”

  “I know you are. And autonomous, it seems. How can that be?”

  “It's fundamental stuff. I need to be autonomous to some extent. Or how could I operate?”

  “So we slip off someplace, make out we rutted like rabbits, and you provide some process so they believe we did.”

  “That's it. Would you prefer that?”

  “What would you prefer?”

  Light in his eyes. Suns rose within suns. No protest from him now, like to Jane: No one asks a robot what he wants. “I'd prefer to make love with you.”

  “Why's that?”

  “I like sex. Probably not quite in the way humans do, or for quite the same reasons.”

  “I like sex with men.”

  He nodded. “That reaction is the one they might need to know about. Or else they can't test how worthwhile this team will be.”

  “This team—is you.”

  “All eight of us.”

  “Has anyone else been reluctant?”

  “One or two.”

  “I'd better be truthful, then, hadn't I?”

  Without warning he moved towards me. He set his hands weightlessly on my shoulders. He lowered his face to mine. His mane of hair, like thick smoke on fire, tented us in . . . exactly as she told us.

  “Maybe, Loren, just in case, we should make sure that this is really hopeless.”

  Is he kissing me? His mouth is on mine? It's as if—

  I fell through space, or through the world, deep down. Through earth and sea and galaxies. I wasn't frightened. It was all I wanted.

  Had I never in my life before ever fully let go of myself? Is this letting go—of self?

  It lasted seconds, years.

  The kiss hadn't been intrusive. Just his mouth on my mouth.

  I hadn't even taken hold of him. Now I did. Under my palms, the smooth leopard muscles of his back. My eyes were shut. He held me there, the kiss over, held me as I went on falling through outer space.

  “I think, perhaps?” he said against my closed eyes.

  “Where are we to go?” I heard the Loren voice ask.

  “There are private rooms here.”

  “Must it be here?”

  “No. We can go anywhere you'd like.”

  He's a slave. Tethered like a dog. It's merely that the chain will stretch to infinity, until they want to pull him back to them.

  “I have a room,” I said. “Downtown.”

  My eyes didn't open. I thought of Jane and the coat-of-many-colors carpeted apartment on Tolerance, which I'd never found, never could find, as Tolerance hadn't been its real name.

  “Let's go, then,” he said. “Only, you may need to see your way. Open your eyes, Loren.”

  I opened my eyes. He took my hand once more, like any captivated new lover. We walked steadily out of the champagne room, and the azure conservatory, the rooms of red wine and white wine, and the sugar-pink foyer, where the two butlers, not needing to, whisked wide the white-and-gold double doors.

  No one gazed at us or communicated with us, tried to encourage or prevent us. We were just one more couple who'd made the right connection, off to fornicate and be glad.

  Because I had no car, we took a late-night flyer. There were people on the flyer, up in the glass pumpkin with us, sad workers going in to deathly jobs they must struggle to retain, tired girls who had been out hooking. Someone muttered behind us, “See him? It's one of the actors off the vispos. Why does he need to take a flyer? Slumming. Bastard.”

  Silver put his arm around me, that was all. No one came up to start a fight.

  (I wondered what he would do if they did? Magic a gun out of his arm and threaten them? How far did that slave's autonomy stretch? To what level, in the matter of defense, could he, or any of them, go?)

  Certainly, it wasn't like it had been with Jane, those twelve years ago. This time he couldn't pass anywhere as mortal. That really wasn't allowed anymore.

  It was almost light when we walked along West Larch to the apartment house. The distant mountains were reappearing from the dark.

  What did I feel? Bodiless. Like I wasn't there.

  How could I be there? This was a dream.

  The key I'd been given didn't work. This wasn't a chipped or electronic door, but obviously somebody bolted it after one or two A.M. Anyone out later than that had to kick their heels on the veranda.

  But he put his hand over the lock, then the edges of the door. I heard a faint sliding inside—the lock unkeying, the bolts going home into their sockets.

  You couldn't keep him out, then. Or, presumably, any of them. I said, “Isn't that illegal?”

  “No. We're only authorized to use key-coding to assist a human companion.”

  “Suppose the human companion just happens to be a thief or murderer?”

  He shook his head. “No one gets use of us who is anything like those. All customers are carefully checked.”

  We went into the dim predawn building. He walked quietly up the stairs behind me. There were four flights. He could, I thought, equally noiselessly have raced up all four at a hundred miles an hour.

  We went into my flat. As I let up the skimpy blind, he looked around him, like any unexceptional visitor. “You haven't been here long.”

  “How do you know?” I was only curious, not surprised.

  He said, “This room has no smell of y
ou.”

  Jane:

  He said, “What perfume have you got on?” “Nothing . . .” “Then it must be you.” “Human flesh must seem disgusting to you, if you can smell us.” “Extremely seductive . . .”

  And I heard myself say, defensively, “Human habitations have a human stench, do you mean?”

  And Silver-who-was-Verlis said, “Sometimes. But that isn't what I mean. You have your own unique personal perfume. You, Loren, smell good. Young, fresh, and alluring. This room would smell of that, if you'd been here more than forty-eight hours.”

  “What if I smoke a lot of cigarines?”

  “Then of you, plus a lot of cigarines.”

  I stood by the window looking back at him. He seemed in no hurry—how much time was allowed us for this test-situation carnal act?

  “I'm quite experienced,” I said. Also defensive?

  “Yes, Loren—I've been using your name again; are you okay with that? Thank you. You see, they were overviewing the whole crowd in the gardens for suitable candidates. Then they activated, in each case, a quick scan. You know this can be done?”

  “I thought it was prohibited, except for the police, military, and hospitals.”

  “Sure. META is affiliated to those first two, being Senate-sponsored. However, let me reassure you, by law they have to destroy any scan the moment they've seen the data.”

  “What did it say?”

  “They didn't tell me. One moment.”

  I watched him—he wasn't thinking, although it looked like that. He was running some computerized result across some inner mind-screen.

  “If you can read it over,” I said, “then it hasn't been deleted, has it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I can still read it.”

  “How?”

  “Machine to machine, Loren. Simple as that.”

  “What did it say?” I demanded again.

  He said, “Age approximately seventeen. Healthy and reasonably well-nourished. Non-intacta and sexually active. No sign of disease, terminations, or pregnancies. A couple of other comments. Those are less physical than technical.”

  I lowered my eyes.

  He said, “So you are experienced and fit, which I'd be able to guess anyway, wouldn't I, since they picked you? But you're still very nervous.”