Metallic Love

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, wearing 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…

Jane said the coppers were actors. Now they acted with more than mere apparent flair. Something in the voice boxes—the singers had this, too—you heard the words up there overhead, as the raft cruised up and down over the plateau of the park, but you heard them, too, as if they spoke inside your ear, for you alone. Such voices. Every word like a drop of light or darkness. But there was more. What the coppers acted was an old play, I don’t know from where—ancient Greek, maybe? She and he—as they stepped forward, they changed. I mean, their clothes changed, in front of our eyes.

Their green panoply had been modern. But suddenly her breasts were bare, exquisite copper half-globes tipped with red buds. She wore a flounced metal skirt, dull gold, and in her flowing lemon hair, snakes were plaited. All this happened meltingly, unassisted, and unobscurely, as we all watched. The copper male had also changed his garments to a kilt of metal scales, his arms bound with bronze rings, a crown of some sort of pale flower on his yellow hair.

The flowers, the metal and clothing, had emanated from their nonfleshly flesh, replacing the original clothing, which had melted into nothing.

The audience applauded this magical action as much as they did the subsequent drama, a brief, weird exchange, sexual and disturbing, yet unexplicit.

After the coppers, the silvers sang and played instruments. Quake-rock was what the silvers gave us. One- handed, he slammed rhythm from a drum, and it sounded like two drummers, four hands. She sang, her range incredible, unassailable, thin, almost whistling notes dropping to a dark purr in the lower registers. But she also had two voices. And next her second voice sang a harmony to her first.

Then he played the flute. He did it this way: placing the flute almost sexually between his lips, then taking up the lute Glaya had tuned for him. As with the drum, he played the lute one-handed, and it had a sound as if three hands were on it, his fingers a silvery blur. The lute also raced in quake-rock, but the flute he played more classically, its slender tones silking over the lute’s galloping, as he held the flute in his white teeth, somehow working it with his tongue…. All the while, his other hand still beat sharp thunders from the drum.