The Silver Metal Lover

turned around and looked at us, and Clovis waved at them. “If they ask me, I’ll say you left to be sick.”

“They’ll know that isn’t true.”

“Of course. I’d forgotten your reputation for implacable indifference. It still won’t help them very much.”

“Clovis, you said you would let me have some cash.”

“Tomorrow, you and he take a cab along the highway to route eighty-three. Can you get the fare for that?”

“Yes.”

“Leave the cab at eighty-three and walk down to the Fall Side of the Canyon. Be there by noon.”

“That’s only a few miles from my mother’s house.”

“Is that important? I doubt if you’ll meet her. The spot was decided on because it’s clear of the city and inside the state line, which should mean no observers, official or otherwise. And because Gem can land the VLO there.”

“What?”

“Vertical lift-off plane. Those nasty noisy odorous flying machines, like the Baxter your mother so prizes. Gem is a test engineer and pilot for the Historica Antiqua Corporation. He will borrow a crate from the museum sheds, as he often does, land in the Canyon, and take you wherever you want to be. He said he would, about an hour ago when I called him. He’s relatively imbecilic, by the way, so if you don’t tell him your boyfriend is a robot, Gem will never guess, which may prove rather a bore for Silver. However, Gem will bumble you along and you’ll arrive somewhere. Then he’ll come back and spend the evening with me, God help me. Honestly, Jane, the things I suffer for you.”

“Clovis, I—”

“Take whatever luggage you want, short of a grand piano. There’s plenty of room in those things. There’ll be a piece of hand-luggage in the cabin, with some money. Units, and some bills if I have the time to crack them down at a bank. Aren’t you going to cry, fling yourself on the carpet—if there is one in here, oh, yes—go into a paroxysm of gratitude? Fawn on me? Faint?”

“No. But I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me. Never.”

“Gem will be pleased, too. But I’ll try not to think about that.”

“I wish—”

“You wish I were heterosexual so we could run away together instead.”

“I wish I could thank you properly, but there isn’t any way.”

“I can’t even be godfather to your kids, can I? Since you won’t have any.”

“I might. The way Demeta had me. Silver would make an amazing adoptive father, I should think. I never had a father.”

“You didn’t miss a thing,” said Clovis. And the lights, with no subtlety, either due to incompetence, poor equipment, or would-be brilliant innovation, went suddenly out.

The audience exclaimed, vaguely disapproving.

“Jane,” he said then, “there’s one damned important thing I forgot—have to be shorthand. Listen: Jason finding you—a homemade device of his—a homing device. Check any clothing you might have met him in before today. Look for something small.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me. It’s obviously not wonderfully accurate, but that is how they got as close as they did. It’s been their new game for a month.”

“But I—”

Eerie reddish-ochre light appeared under the curtain as it rose. We fell silent, I with my mind boiling.

A homing device? Patience Maidel Bridge, Jason running by me, and Medea—I needed to go on thinking about this, but then the bare stage yawned before me, clothed only in drifting, bloodstained smoke. And out of the smoke, along a raised platform, walked Egyptia, stiff and blind-eyed, glittering in her metals.

For a second, I wondered what would become of her. But what had become of her was Antektra, and all at once I knew it. She seemed like a lunatic escaped from the site of an explosion, deafened, dehumanized. Her awful beauty hit the eyes. She lifted her hands and held out a blood-daubed (this was going to be a very gory production) drapery.

“Bow your neck,” she said to us, “bow your neck,” and in the midst of everything else, my heart turned over, for she’d repeated her lines. And then the hair rose on my scalp, as I deduced hair might be doing all over the reasonably well-filled theatre. For her voice dropped like a singer’s, seemingly one whole octave: “Bow your neck to the bloody dust. Kneel to the yoke, humiliated land.”

She stood there, melodramatic, insane, and we hung on her words, breathless.

“This is not the world. The gods are dead.”

I shivered. She had come from the grave.

Of course she would behave as if no other actor existed. They didn’t. They were shades. Only Antektra lived in her burning agony, her broken landscape.

“Relinquish pride, and kneel.”

I sat there, mesmerized, as before. There was no sound anywhere until the raucous clash and clatter of arms. The ten warriors galloped down the aisles, and the audience reacted now with approving squeaks.

“Weep, you skies,” Egyptia cried out, over the noise of war. “Weep blood and flame.”

The warriors converged before her. Thunder banged. Lightning raged across the stage. Caught in its glare upon the platform, Egyptia herself seemed on fire.

“Go on,” Clovis muttered.

“What?”

“Get out, you fool.”

“Oh—” I stumbled up and almost fell out into the aisle. Under cover of strobe-lighted fire and fury, I ran for the exit and out into the sanity and freezing truth of the city night.

I only had enough coins to take the downtown bus, and it came very late. When I reached the stop and got off, it was already one twenty-six A.M. by the bus’s own clock. I had been gone over ten hours. Clovis hadn’t thought of my leaving a man waiting, only a machine. Even though Clovis didn’t really believe that anymore. Had I, however helpless I was in the clutches of my friends, basically thought the same? Of course he would be calm, unperturbed, reasonable about my long, long, inexplicable absence, when I had previously stressed to him the danger I reckoned we were in. Of course he would. Mechanically reasonable.

I ran along the streets, and it was like running through solid dark water, the night was so curiously intense.

When I ran into the room of our flat, he was standing in the middle of the rainbow carpet. The overhead light was on and I saw him very clearly. Seeing him was like seeing the Earth’s center, finding my equilibrium again, landfall. But he stood completely still, completely expressionless.

“Are you,” he said to me, “all right?”

“Yes.”

“Lucky you caught me in,” he said, “I’ve been out since seven, trying to find you. I was just going out again.”

“Out? But we agreed—”

“I thought you might have been hurt,” he said gently. “Or killed.”

The way he said it, for which I can’t find words, rocked me, numbed me like a blow, driving all the words and thought out of my head. And because the words and thought and the events of the evening were so important, I immediately began to push my way back through the numbness toward them, not waiting to analyze his reaction and my reaction to it.

“No. Listen. I’ll tell you what happened,” I said prosaically, as if in answer to the question I had, I suppose, expected from the rational, unperturbed machine.

So I told him, rapidly, all of it. He listened as I’d asked. After a moment, he sat down on the couch and bowed his head, and I sat beside him to finish the story.

“I couldn’t get away. I didn’t dare. Even to call you—I wasn’t sure of the number of the phone downstairs— and then I had to wait for Clovis. It seems so crazy, but are we going to do it? Leave tomorrow, go somewhere else? Like two escaping spies. I think we have to.”