Metallic Love

But I reckoned I couldn’t say the rest to him. How could I? I’d have burned alive, spontaneous human combustion, from shame.

After a moment he moved forward, and his body touched against mine, though not his hands or arms. I, the automaton, and he, the angel, began to dance, reflexively, because what else was there to do?

You are so close, self-evidently, in this dance. His breath was occasional and clean on my face. He breathed as a dancer would, as if he had to breathe. His body on mine felt firm and coordinated, amorous yet decorous. And humanly warm—surely an innovation. He smelled, too, of cleanness and health, and some unidentifiable male scent… and sex. Just as Jane described. But his hair had a scent of pine forests.

His lashes were thick and long, dark cinnamon—do you recall what she said?

Nothing can be so beautiful and live.

And, as Sharffe had delightedly announced, Silver—Verlis—didn’t live, so that was okay.

“You dance well,” he said.

“Thank you. Yes, I can dance.”

He’d died. They’d killed him. Now he had risen from the dead. Oh, not like Christ raised Lazarus. And… even Christ had become a human man.

My body against this body. I couldn’t think anymore. I wanted to fall unconscious against him, and let the sea wash in, the tidal rollers of pleasure and oblivion.

Something happened—what? He had taken my hand. He led me aside, and the window opened—he, like Sharffe (more than Sharffe ever could), would be able to undo any door, even without knocking on it.

We were outside, standing on the area of another roof terrace. Way up, the magenta bubble, and behind us the champagne light, and below, the neon world.

“Loren,” he said. “I like your name.”

“Verlis,” I said, “why have they altered yours?”

“Didn’t you alter your own?” he asked me.

Something like a thin spear dashed through me.

“How would you know that? Can you read minds?”

He said, “But it’s very usual, to change your name, isn’t it, with—”

“With human beings? Yes, maybe.”

“You don’t trust me,” he said. “The idea is very much that you can.”

“Because you’re not human?”

“Of course.”

“A machine.”

He shrugged. “A new sort of machine, Loren.”

“Stop saying my name.”

He lifted my hand to his lips. Brushed my fingers with his mouth. “Again, I apologize. What would you prefer to do? He’ll cause trouble for you, will he, Sharffe, if you don’t go on with this?”

Even in my bewilderment at his talking to me like this, one human to another—crazy, though inevitable, for I knew his beginnings, that this was what he did the best, that is, be human—I finally understood something else.

No, I wasn’t to be Jane, was I. It was the other one I was being. The blonde on Compton Street. My God, I was to be one of the ones who were the guinea pigs.

“I’m meant to fuck you,” I said. “Right?”

“I’m afraid so. But we can always pretend.”

“You can lie to them?” I asked.

“Yes, about something like that. My goal isn’t to distress or harm you. I know they’re keen, but I’ve already had two partners. They’ve seen I work.” He raised one eyebrow at me. “But if not doing what they expect will provoke problems for you, maybe we should act as if we’re both doing precisely what they’d like.”

“Wouldn’t they be tracking us—somehow watch us—”

“Not exactly. It’s nothing so basic as surveillance. The physical responses I can program and register in myself. Enough to convince them. And then you just tell them I am—”

“The ultimate demon lover.”

“Yes. Because, without at all deserving to be, I am.”

“I know you are. And autonomous, it seems. How can that be?”

“It’s fundamental stuff. I need to be autonomous to some extent. Or how could I operate?”

“So we slip off someplace, make out we rutted like rabbits, and you provide some process so they believe we did.”

“That’s it. Would you prefer that?”

“What would you prefer?”

Light in his eyes. Suns rose within suns. No protest from him now, like to Jane: No one asks a robot what he wants. “I’d prefer to make love with you.”

“Why’s that?”

“I like sex. Probably not quite in the way humans do, or for quite the same reasons.”

“I like sex with men.”

He nodded. “That reaction is the one they might need to know about. Or else they can’t test how worthwhile this team will be.”

“This team—is you.”

“All eight of us.”

“Has anyone else been reluctant?”

“One or two.”

“I’d better be truthful, then, hadn’t I?”

Without warning he moved towards me. He set his hands weightlessly on my shoulders. He lowered his face to mine. His mane of hair, like thick smoke on fire, tented us in… exactly as she told us.

“Maybe, Loren, just in case, we should make sure that this is really hopeless.”

Is he kissing me? His mouth is on mine? It’s as if—

I fell through space, or through the world, deep down. Through earth and sea and galaxies. I wasn’t frightened. It was all I wanted.

Had I never in my life before ever fully let go of myself? Is this letting go—of self?

It lasted seconds, years.

The kiss hadn’t been intrusive. Just his mouth on my mouth.

I hadn’t even taken hold of him. Now I did. Under my palms, the smooth leopard muscles of his back. My eyes were shut. He held me there, the kiss over, held me as I went on falling through outer space.

“I think, perhaps?” he said against my closed eyes.

“Where are we to go?” I heard the Loren voice ask.

“There are private rooms here.”

“Must it be here?”

“No. We can go anywhere you’d like.”

He’s a slave. Tethered like a dog. It’s merely that the chain will stretch to infinity, until they want to pull him back to them.

“I have a room,” I said. “Downtown.”

My eyes didn’t open. I thought of Jane and the coat-of-many-colors carpeted apartment on Tolerance, which I’d never found, never could find, as Tolerance hadn’t been its real name.

“Let’s go, then,” he said. “Only, you may need to see your way. Open your eyes, Loren.”

I opened my eyes. He took my hand once more, like any captivated new lover. We walked steadily out of the champagne room, and the azure conservatory, the rooms of red wine and white wine, and the sugar-pink foyer, where the two butlers, not needing to, whisked wide the white-and-gold double doors.

No one gazed at us or communicated with us, tried to encourage or prevent us. We were just one more couple who’d made the right connection, off to fornicate and be glad.

Because I had no car, we took a late-night flyer. There were people on the flyer, up in the glass pumpkin