Metallic Love

Though the fur was real, it had been carefully treated and didn’t mind my wet dress or the drops he shook off his tailored one-piece suit. The light jacket, shirt and pants combo were all linked by zippers, whose metal was solid silver. (Silver.) He also had a diamond ring, a rock, polished, not cut. But it might have been a cultured diamond, after all, never mined.

The ghastly car ripped through the city like a missile. It went so fast I couldn’t see anything, except in the distance—humps of architecture, veiled heights, and garish city valleys. On the horizon, the ghosts of mountains were drawn in by their edges of moonlit snow. It had stopped raining—if it had ever started, out here.

I itched and howled to ask him questions about the robots. I kept quiet. Almost certainly he’d start to gabble, if not now, then if we got to the dinner date.

There were a lot of parks, especially in the district called Russia, and the next one over called Bohemia. “Used to be a Romania, too, once,” he said. “Burnt down—power main blew.”

I wondered if he’d just pull over and begin mauling me. But he didn’t. He was high as that moon. Who’s a clever boy, then?

He was ready to muse aloud by the time we were nearing some out-of-town restaurant he knew of. He abruptly switched the car to auto, and sat back.

“It’s been quite a month, I can tell you, getting The Show ready. Advance publicity and so on. Then the performad—jargon, I mean the advertising performance tonight. Everyone seemed to like it, didn’t they? There was all that talk before—people getting scared robots’d take over all the available work—but that’s never been what they’re for. I take it you know all this was already tried, twelve years back?”

I looked vague. “I was only a kid then.”

“Sure. Mais naturellement. Just a little girl, five or six. You must tell me all about that—” But he didn’t pause, so I didn’t have to. “You see, they are purely recreational, these robots. The first outfit, E.M., they did the whole damn thing all wrong. Then had to recall every single model. There were nine of them. I think I have that right…. Nine deluxe, plus some cute semi-humanoid stuff—nothing astounding there, boxes with humanized heads, that kind of junk. We only have eight deluxe models now. Four men. Four gals. Neat.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Which was your favorite at the performad?” he asked me suddenly, turning his face hard as the edge of a blade towards me. No fool, then. Or not the sort you could necessarily handle.

“I kind of liked the asterions best.”

“Yeah! Aren’t they divine. Shape-changers. Like magicians in old novels. But I’ll tell you, they can all do that, to a limited extent. You saw the golds produce weaponry out of their arms and hands? They can do that all over, even out the chest cavity, or the skull. And the coppers altered their clothes out in plain view. But you see, again, they can all do that—alter clothing, produce weapons. I hasten to add, in case I’m scaring you, they can produce nothing in the weapon line that actually can work, except for the purposes of display. No chance of firing off a real gun at anybody, or throwing a knife. They just can’t do that. Back with E.M., the golds were marketed as bodyguards. No one’s going to allow that now. To take any sort of work away from real people is off the menu.” He cogitated, looking abruptly middle- aged and smug. He probably was, just had access to plenty of Rejuvinex. The car swam slower now down a side track, curtained by pines. “But tell me,” he said, gazing away through the windshield, “what did you think of the silvers?”

Specific. He knows something. But what? And how can he? I said, “They were wonderful.”

“The male,” he said. “What did you think of him?”

“Gorgeous,” I said.

“But I forgot, you liked the asterion male best, didn’t you?”

I simpered. I suppose that was what it was.

“Yeah,” said Sharffe. “You ain’t alone there. They are one heck of a big hit, those two. Have to admit that. But the reason I asked about the silvers, especially the male—” (Yes, what is your reason, Mr. Sharffe?) “Well, he has kind of a personal history. Not the others, only that one. He’s called Verlis, by the way.”

Something jumped in my brain. No—he’s called Silver. I didn’t say a word. And the name Verlis slipped across my inner eye until its letters repositioned. Verlis was an anagram of Silver.

Sharffe said, “What we did there, we reforged from the original model. He was first made, and extant, over twelve years ago, and though the other eight basically got smelted down for scrap, the company didn’t do that with him. There was something about Verlis that had never checked out. They dismantled him, but still kept on trying to find what it was that made him tick differently. Didn’t manage to. And then they just kept him in store. So when META took over the commission, we broke him out first and rebuilt him. He’s the same model, like he was back then. With, of course, the latest improvements the others have. I personally never see anything that weird about him. He’s just like the others, for my money. Too handsome to live, and he don’t live, ma chere. So that’s okay.”

Up ahead, the pines withdrew about a gracious lawn, above which stood a type of Roman temple, its facade bearing the legend O’Pine.

“Hey,” said my happy escort, “how do you rate that name?”

“They’re Irish?”

“Oh, Loren, I thought you’d see the pun.” He explained to me: restaurant in pine forest and the word opine—to hope. I pretended I hadn’t gotten any of that till he said it.

As we were defurring out of the car, he turned to me and said in a hoarse aside, “Jaybeeh.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jaybeeh. You don’t know. Sure you don’t?”

“What is it? Somewhere to eat?”

“Maybe,” he said, amused. We walked up the steps to the doors.

Over my mind the new sound Jaybeeh floated. He had uttered it like a password. In some quarters it was. On the top step, the sound translated in my head to symbols. He had spoken the phonetic of the two letters J-B. Jane’s Book. I nearly missed the last step, but didn’t. Gambled he’d make nothing of it.

I have absolutely no recollection of what we ate. We drank wine with the meal, and liqueurs at the end. We talked about him, I generally think. But I can’t recall much of what he had to say, only those parts about working for META. And that was fairly guarded. This work, plainly, was Senate-sponsored, if not directly government- sponsored. He would keep saying, coyly, “Ah, but I can’t blab about that. Top secret. Commercial spies are everywhere. Do you realize how many other countries are trying to perfect these things? And not all of them, I may add, for peaceful purposes.”

He said nothing targeted again about the silvers. But he did tell me all the robots’ new names. The silvers were Verlis and Glaya; the coppers, Copperfield and Sheena; the golds, Goldhawk and Kix; and the asterions, Black Chess and Irisa. It struck me that every one of the males carried a reference in his name to his metal, even Verlis in anagram. The females did not.

After the meal we left and got back in the car. He switched on the auto at once, saying he’d been drinking a lot. Deep in the fur, we drove off the beaten track and in among the pines, then he put his arm around me, and I thought, This is it, now. This is where I perform my role. So I cuddled up, and when he kissed me, I played along.

I’d never before had sex with anyone I didn’t fancy. I’d been lucky there. The few who tried that I hadn’t wanted, had been easy to put off with words or deeds—like the guy I kicked that time in the underpass, as it were.

But Sharffe was ultrahygienic and unnervingly presentable, and I wouldn’t even need protection. The ones who can afford it take their contraception shots by law.

Nevertheless, when he leaned back from me, his hand still on my breast but both of us still clothed, and not even at first base, I felt a wave of shattering relief.

“Hey, Loren, ma petite chere, you really like human men, too, don’t you, n’est-ce pas?”

“How did you guess?”