The Silver Metal Lover

drinking coffine through a chocolate-flavored straw—Jason, or Medea, had pinched me on the arm. A ferocious pinch. It was typical of them. I hadn’t even choked on my drink. What the pinch was, however, rather than a cheery social opening gambit, was the gadget being stuck firmly on my sleeve. Tiny, camouflaged, not detected. I thought they’d done it the night on the bridge, but it was that earlier night, in Jagged’s, that they’d been waiting for prey, and rejoiced when I was it.

I must have bored them at first. I went to Clovis, and then I went to Chez Stratos—they could guess my goals from the directions the trace ran to. And then I went, what a surprise, to the slums. And stayed there.

(Having taken it off, why did I pack that dress to take with me into exile? There were others. I never even wore it. A symbol, perhaps, that I had redeemed him from death, that first time. It was that dress which killed him.)

They’d really tried quite hard, the twins, to find me. I think even that night we met them on Patience Maidel Bridge, they’d been working their way around, portioning the area, looking. The weakness of the homing device was that it faded off inside a building. It had been easy for them to deduce that if I went to New River and the trace failed, I was in Clovis’s apartment block. Or if I went out toward the Canyon and it failed, then I was at my mother’s. But in the slum, intrigued, they’d hunted up and down, never quite able to unearth my location, near, never near enough. And then, when it really did matter, Silver and I left the block on Tolerance, with the black dress packed into one of the cloth bags, and the signal came up like a star. By the time E.M. had confiscated and begun to operate the pickup of the transmitter, there was only the thin shell of a taxi to blur the trace. They found it simple to come after us, even allowing for the post-tremor traffic and diversions. Simple to catch up with us at the Fall Side. And the VLO was late.

So that was how it was. I shan’t comment on it anymore. It’s done.

And I think I can stop writing now, I think so.

Maybe my arms will ache less when the stitches come out, or it might be a psychosomatic pain, and will last months or years, or all the rest of my life.

I’m glad it wasn’t Clovis. I’m glad that time Jason called, Clovis switched the phone off at once. Egyptia is like a story someone told me. I don’t even hate her. You need energy for hatred, too. My mother called and I spoke to her. It was like speaking to someone I don’t know. We were polite. She says my I.M.U. card works again, two thousand a month. And my policode’s being renewed. I thanked her. I won’t use her money. Somehow, I’ll find a way not to. The policode I left behind at the apartment on Tolerance. Clovis mutters about providing me with one when the new coding comes through. Chloe came to see me. She didn’t know what to say. Leo came in with Clovis the other night, and stayed two days. Clovis is beginning to look hunted.

I still wish I’d died. That’s a fact. But I couldn’t do it again. I’m too afraid to do it now. That horrible, creeping, deadly warmth, like freezing to death. The gathering dark, the stars of my lover whirling in it.

Sometimes now I dream of him. I dream of him as he was when I saw him that time, eyeless, the clockwork interior exposed. Great hammers pound on him. Furnaces dissolve him. He seems to feel nothing. When I wake up, I lie and stare into the darkness of Clovis’s spare room.

A night or so ago, after one of these dreams, I got up and put on the light and started to write this last chapter.

I told Clovis about this writing. It’s a book now. An autobiography. Or is it a Greek Tragedy? Clovis said, “Don’t try and publish it, for heaven’s sake. They’ll throw you in jail. I hear the food is awful.”

Somehow, I never thought of publishing. Only of someone coming on the pages, years from now, buried in the ground in a moistureproof container, say, or hidden under a random floorboard in the slum.

But it’s pointless. There isn’t any reason. Reasonless. All of it.

It’s strange. I didn’t want to start writing this last part, and now I can’t seem to stop. You see, when I stop, I break my last link with him. With my love. Yes, he’ll always be with me, but not him. I’ll be alone. I’ll be alone.

But I am alone. These pieces of paper can’t help me.

And so I’ll stop writing.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mother. Do you realize you’re rich enough to buy the City Senate?

Yes, Jane. A number of times over.

I’m so glad, Mother, because that’s exactly what I want you to do.

Jane, I don’t understand you at all.

No, Mother. You never understood me. But let’s be adult about this.

That would be an excellent plan, dear.

The reason I want you to buy the Senate, Mother, is so that I can safely publish this manuscript.

Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the manuscript contains?

You’re quite right, Mother, it mentions you. Not in a very luminous light. However, I can change all the names. Put your house, for example, somewhere else, instead of where it is. And so on.

Jane. I should like to know why you want to publish.

Not to make money. Not to discredit anyone. Not to inflame the poor, of whom I’m now one. In fact, I really don’t know. It isn’t melancholia, either, or bitterness. Even exhibitionism. But this crazy thing happened. You’d react to the last chapter, Mother, really you would. Perhaps you ought to read it…

• 1 •

By the time they’d taken the stitches out, and I’d had my first descarring treatment (“Jane, you can’t go about looking like a walking advert for Nihilism”), Leo had made his third and most successful attempt to move into Clovis’s apartment. Of course, Clovis’s apartment was three hundred times better than Leo’s. But mostly it was infatuation. Leo, dark-haired, tall and slim, as usual, would loll about the place, unable to take his eyes off Clovis. Leo would actually spill tea and wine from looking at Clovis instead of at what he was doing. And once Leo had an attack of migraine, the kind that affects the sight, and as he sat there with his hands over his eyes, waiting for his pills to get rid of it, he quaveringly said, “I always panic it’ll never go, that I’ll stay blind. And then I’d never see you again.”

“How true,” said Clovis unkindly. “You wouldn’t see me for dust.”

I rather liked Leo. He didn’t seem to resent my presence in the apartment, and even flirted with me: “My goodness, why isn’t she a boy?” I never knew if it was tact or ignorance that kept him from commenting on my state.

Clovis, though, became restless, and went out a lot, leaving Leo in possession but unhappily unpossessed.

I was trying by then to think what I was going to do with the rest of my empty life. A labor card would be out of the question, my mother had seen to that, reestablishing my credit rating, even if I wouldn’t use it. So I couldn’t hope for legal work, even if I could do anything. And I couldn’t go on living off Clovis—I didn’t want to do Chloe’s trick and stay there ten months. But then, I didn’t know what I wanted, or rather, I wanted nothing at all.

“The way you now look,” said Clovis, “you could model.”

But there are models by the hundred and my strange face would never fit, even if my body now did.

“Why don’t you write something again, this time commercial?”

“I’d have to pay for the first printing.”