Metallic Love Read online

  The fourth paper confirmed the itinerary of the others. It added that, as a trusted former employee of META Corp, I would, when current funds ended, be able to apply, through the company, for a labor card. This would then entitle me to some quite lucrative jobs, such as a sales assistant in a second-owner store, or various training schemes that could lead to work in cosmetics, computer engineering, even the study of outer space.

  The fourth paper also advised me to keep a note of my personal number, safeguard my I.M.U. card, and adhere to all terms agreed to with META's representative.

  That night I lay on my bed at the apartment house, not sleeping, thinking of Silver. Now and then I got up and drank some of the rusty-tasting water from the room faucet. There was doubtless better-tasting water over at the apartment in Russia.

  What was I going to do? It would be more sensible to do what they wanted. Wouldn't it?

  And then, kept like the secret mistress of some deranged prince, I'd be there in Russia, waiting for my beautiful and nonhuman lover. Waiting on and on.

  He was interested in me?

  How could he be? If Jane lied, then he wasn't going to be interested in humans. Not like that.

  They just wanted to see if I could get over my strange frigidity that had prevented orgasm. Everything was an ongoing test of robotic skills, even though, already, these beings had been unleashed on the city. We few must matter to META, the ones (unlike the funks and stalkers Sharffe mentioned) who went along then shied away, or couldn't come. Then again, maybe I'd never see him again. I'd been paid off, after all, like the blonde on Compton Street.

  These thoughts—although they flitted batlike through my skull—never lasted long. I knew I'd take advantage of the proffered apartment, and the card. Because I knew I'd go there anyway and wait. For him. Despite all of it.

  Silver—Verlis—God, what am I to call you?

  And what about Jane? Hadn't META ever thought about enticing her into this experiment?

  How to get to Russia. As already stipulated, you take the train, as I had that night a hundred years ago and a couple of evenings earlier.

  The unwashed hyenas glared at me from the veranda as I went off up the street with my packed bag.

  It was less crowded on the train in the late afternoon. There was to be no Show. The passengers were workers going in to their shifts, or people from that lower-middle income group—of whom I was now one?—trekking home.

  I put the coin in the box and the ticket flipped up, with the destination sculpted into it—Russia: Katerina Stop. I sat down with my bag on my knees. There were lots of spare seats.

  For a time the train grunted and rattled forward, noisy like I remembered, with no stop registered or therefore halted at. Then we drew into a station called Winscop. The doors sluggishly churned open, and two figures darted on.

  We were (having looked at the directional map on the agent's report, I now know), on the outskirts of Bohemia, where Russia begins. The afternoon sky beyond the platform was darkly brazen, and pasted over with modern buildings, low spires, cones, triangles. They came from that, moving with a grace that could never be banal or weary, a panache that never needed to wonder at itself.

  A young man and a young woman, in jeans and sleeveless tight shirts, walking shoes on their feet. Nothing notable there. His hair was black, length about midshoulder, drawn back into a tail wrapped round with a black band. She had short hair, spikey, like Jizzle wore it, and it was the palest verdigris green. Also nothing there, really. Even low-income people use hair colorants. So what. Even skin makeup in that gold shade. They use that. I've seen it, only . . . it doesn't look quite the same. It's the sheer poreless balanced miracle of them, that's what gives them away. Twelve years ago, yes, maybe human things could still kid themselves that their own impoverished and muddy genetic pools could, once in a sky-blue moon, evolve humans this astounding. But now, perhaps we have faced up to what we are. Crap, basically. And the very best of us can't ever be as they are.

  They. Them. Those. These.

  The robots. The golds, who now had names like Goldhawk and Kix.

  On two spare seats they sat, serene and silent.

  What had they been doing? Somebody with cash lived out this way? Or was this some further trial of their robot powers, walking among humankind . . .

  A discrepancy, for though their garments were ordinary, they must now never be allowed to attempt to pass in ability as human. That was the law.

  And people had seen them on the vispos, the news ads, all of that. If humankind didn't know they were strictly mechanical, they knew at least these two were from a higher sphere, actors, the favored ones, and had no rights to be riding a railcar.

  I'd been afraid it would happen on the flyer that other night, with him. Nothing had.

  Now, to start, it wasn't aggressive.

  It was a woman who went to them first.

  “Say—are you? Are you the ones from The Show in the park? Yes, you are. I saw you there.”

  Heads turning in the rumbling, galloping carriage.

  He turned to the woman. He looked at her, measured and long. His eyes weren't green, but a green so filtered they were like jet. He spoke. “Yes. We were in a performad.”

  “And I saw you on a vispo.” Another woman had come up, craning forward eagerly, gripping one of the straps rather than sit down. “But they said you ain't human?”

  “No,” he said.

  He—Goldhawk—looked back up at her, totally relaxed, uncaring, unflawed. There was no contempt in his face, but oh, it was there. It breathed from him, like a scented poison. No, I am not human, but you, thing, are.

  She didn't get it, yet she did. She still hung over him, her ugly poor body bouncing at the motion of the train, cheerful, but something gone out of her, like a fruit with the pith sucked away.

  Nevertheless, other people were getting up and crowding over. There was quite a little audience there now, across the aisle.

  A man bent right down and grinned into the face of the golden woman, Kix.

  “How much it cost, one of ya, eh?”

  “A lot,” she said. “Too much for you.”

  The same uncaring disdain. As if they were, these two supreme beings, momentarily bothered by flies.

  “Yeah,” the man said. He was obese, almost certainly not from overeating, but from a medication, perhaps. “Yeah, couldn't afford you, could I. So how about one on the fucking house?”

  She just looked up at him, Kix. Just looked up. And I, across the aisle, only seeing her green eyes rest on him, I shriveled.

  His face went darkish, and he rocked back. “You ain't no machine,” he said. “She ain't no fucking machine,” he added to the rest of us. “She's a whore, and she ain't no good.”

  Another man, young and thin and hard, pushed by the sick-fat man and said to the two golden ones, “Get off the train. Train isn't for you. Get off.”

  Kix and Goldhawk didn't even argue. Nor did they move. They sat there in their seats, and all at once, turning to each other, they smiled briefly into each other's eyes.

  That was when the young man drew his knife.

  He shoved it forward, against the base of Goldhawk's column of neck.

  Goldhawk told him, lazily, “That won't work, will it?”

  “Who says?”

  The thin man drew back his arm and brought it in again, slashing at the robot's face. That took about three seconds.

  I don't know if it would have caused any temporary damage to the metallic skin. Maybe not. It didn't, anyway, even at three-second speed, get the chance.

  Goldhawk was standing, so quick he was a scintillant blur. In that instant, too, his clothing entirely altered. He was clad in black armor, something between that of a Samurai and a Medieval European knight. His hand, now in a gleaming, coal-black gauntlet, met the edge of the knife and it went reeling away. Then Goldhawk took hold of his thin human assailant, and lifted him swiftly up and up, and bashed his head against the roof of the carr
iage. Even over the noise of the train, we heard a horrible crack.

  I thought, He's broken his neck, or the skull—

  Near me, a young woman leaned over and threw up on the aisle.

  Goldhawk let go, and the body toppled back down to our level. It lay there, sprawled. The thin face astonished.

  The male gold looked around at us. He said smoothly, that intimate voice that entered the ear and brain, “There.”

  That was all.

  Beside him, the female, Kix, was also on her feet and armored, but in light, insectile mail.

  Neither of them now had any expressions.

  What happens in this sort of situation? People cower, or run away as far as they can. Or they shout. Do they?

  None of that.

  It was the fat man who threw himself onto Goldhawk. And the rest of the passengers seemed to be pulled forward, as if they were tied to the fat man—and where he went they must, and what he did they must do—a mob.

  Slabs of humanity—arms flailing, blows—thuds and yells now, a sort of stampede. Even the two or three women were part of it—wrenching, wrenching at black and green hair.

  Only the sick girl and I stayed back. She was moaning, “I wan' out—” lying on the arm of the seat, and throwing up again.

  I thought, They'll tear them in pieces.

  Who did I mean? I think I meant the human mob would rend Goldhawk and Kix apart, like furious beaten children ripping up two dolls.

  Or did I think that?

  Can't remember.

  There's a kind of gap there in my head, where thought might have been. No words had come out, nothing coherent. Only the pictures.

  I saw Kix first. She jumped. Right up in the air, over their heads— How high was the car? Maybe seven feet. No one could jump clear up like that—yet she did. She was like a gold-black ball, curling over, compressing, and then again extending out. She had slewed her head and neck and upper torso—spine made of rubber-steel—over against the roof. Impossible. But I saw it. The lower part of her body was also busy. She was crouching on the shoulders of a woman—the woman who'd cried, “Say—are you the ones?” and who now buckled as if a ton of weight had slammed onto and was crushing her, not this slender, lightly armored, elongate and extraordinarily crouched-over insect, which next seized the woman's head between its ankles.

  “Oh, Christ,” hummed the girl lying on the seat near me. She was watching, no longer vomiting.

  Both of us watched. The human woman, bleeding (ears, nose, mouth), sank right down. Her body was on the floor, lying over that of two men, dead, or unconscious.

  For Goldhawk, too, had sprung impossibly high, compressed more like a muscular cube, angled, compact, before concertina-ing back to shape. And in the middle of the maneuver, he'd kicked the two men, and, as I saw, a second woman, over and down. It looked very simple—horrifyingly natural—everything the golds did. As if anyone could have done it, if they'd been athletic and trained enough. And murderous enough.

  Now they stood off, balletically poised. They'd always been the fighters and acrobats. Hired for bodyguards. Now illegal.

  From Goldhawk's right hand a long dagger slid like a shining tongue. Even this was an englamored thing. The hilt was gold and had a black jewel in it. Why did I notice, at such a time? Because the gold and the jewel were all one and the same thing with the rest. Beauty and horror, inseparable.

  The remainder of the people in the carriage—not many now—had at last pressed back.

  So Goldhawk and Kix, free as birds, walked over to the doors, he with the blade swishing, like a walking cane.

  All this while the train had been bolting on, going to Russia like it was scheduled to, not stopping anywhere, since no one had paid for those stations in between.

  There was an emergency button by the doors. Not all trains have these. It's to signal the main power artery if the doors jam. The message runs to the control cabin and the train—itself a robot—returns the proper answering signal that opens the doors. This can only happen while a train is at a standstill.

  Kix put her delicate finger with its peridot nail on the door button.

  If a human did that, it wouldn't work. The safety override would snap in and stop it.

  But the train was a robot, and so was Kix, and something occurred between them, some sympathetic communication.

  Both doors shot open wide.

  The train was going at about a hundred and thirty. When the doors unsealed, a kind of solid air, like chunks of matter, banged into the car. Against the unraveling turbulence of it, the two gold-black-green insect-reptiles were posed a moment, as if to take a bow. Then they flashed away. They were gone, jumped facile and secure off onto the track below. You knew they hadn't lost their footing.

  Down the whole length of the train wracked a raucous, deafening, terrifying squealing. Our car bumped as if it ran upward over big rocks.

  This bit is difficult for me to recount. I saw—we were putting our hands over our ears—someone was at the doors trying to make them close, but because of the bumping he, too, fell away, outward, but not as the two robots had done. A woman was shrieking. Everyone was calling out. The girl next to me, her face white, took hold of me. The train was going upward, up a mountain—it was going—

  There was a long sound. I don't know what. Where I have only pictures just before, for this I only have a word: “sound.” I remember then it was like when you blink your eyes and for a second everything isn't there, and then it comes back.

  Something hit me across the shoulders. Then my head, but quite soft—

  I lay there, and it was so quiet. It seemed to be about sixty seconds before any noises began again. It was almost peaceful, to lie there, on the motionless surface.

  But then again there began to be continual screams and cries, and a drumming kicking, and a strange creaking juddering, on and on, and on and on.

  The auto-medic ran its scanner over me quickly and told me I was fine. Nothing broken, some bruises, some shock. Here are some painkillers. Go home and rest.

  I didn't know what had happened to the others in my car, or on the remainder of the train. I really don't recall what state the train was in. I saw it later on a VS. Not so bad, really.

  They'd portioned us out, the seriously injured going in one set of robot ambulances, the lesser in others, a larger group—my own, the most minor—dealt with on the next station.

  I've heard and seen since, on the local news channel, delivered via that VS (mine), that there were seven dead. I think these seven were all in my carriage. I don't think the derailment killed them. I think they were the ones Goldhawk and Kix killed. No one reported anything about that. The doors flying open while the train was at full speed—that was put down to a mechanical fault. Old rolling stock, bad track. Second City is still mad about it, ranting at the Senate, who looked upset and empathically sad, and will do nothing much.

  When they said go home and rest, the only place it seemed I had to go was the unseen apartment in Russia. A cab took me. It was free, courtesy of the rail company. The medic had organized it, had only needed the address.

  Gray-brown building, part of a long terrace. Decisive architecture, Gothic perhaps. A couple of gargoyles leaned out into the cool tangerine sunset that was beginning. There was a lift. It worked. I was on the top floor.

  When I let myself in, the apartment was furnished. The windows were clean, and some faced west, and outside, in the sunfall, the magpies were flying about over a little park that had a gulf in it that the very first quake must have caused, all grown over and attractive now.

  I sat in a padded chair by the window and watched the magpies. My body hurt. I took a couple of the pills.

  That's all I remember about that day, or the next.

  What happened after? Sharffe. He called me.

  By then, I'd located a bed and lain down on it. When the phone rang I thought I was back in the bat-block with Margoh, but coming out, I was somewhere else, alone.

&nb
sp; “How are you, Loren?” he asked joyfully. “How is the apartment?”

  “I was on the train,” I said.

  “Train?” he said, puzzled.

  “The train that derailed.”

  “Good God! Loren—are you quite okay?”

  Something in my mind, fuddled by analgesics, shock, and many other things, stirred in me like a cold voice hissing in one ear. Be wary.

  I said, “I think so. I don't remember much about it. I hit my head. Not serious. Only, I don't.”

  The smallest pause, during which Sharffe perhaps thinks, She has forgotten about any robots on the train. Or was she in another carriage?

  He said, “Well, you must take it easy. I'm sorry to hear that happened to you, when you were all excited about your new place.”

  All excited.

  He said some stuff. I didn't hear. I acted even more spaced-out and bewildered than I was. But I was pretty much both.

  (Had they gone to all of them? Traced them, the other passengers? What happened with anyone who recalled the events on the train to Russia before the “accident”?)

  Next day, a basket of fruit, cheeses, flowers, and wine arrived. It was a lovely basket, tied with tinsel ribbons, and the most fragrant apples and greenest figs, and French Brie and Camembert, and Favo from one of the last great vineries in Italy, and heliotropes.

  The card said META. Nothing else.

  I believed somebody, Sharffe or someone, would come to see me, to check I really hadn't seen, or had forgotten, anything awkward or incriminating. No one came. Days and nights passed.

  Odd. Thought I'd have nightmares. Don't. But also, I don't remember any of my dreams at all.

  The blow on the head wasn't bad. I didn't even have a headache. Any bruises faded fast, the way they do with me. In fact, I'd been cushioned. I fell with my head on the thigh of that girl, the sick girl who'd grabbed me. She said, when the train settled, and all the rest were calling and howling in horror and pain, and the static carriage vibrated on this other journey of suffering, “I'm okay. You okay? You didn't hurt me. You hurt? Oh, hey, my leg's bruk.”