Metallic Love

with us, sad workers going in to deathly jobs they must struggle to retain, tired girls who had been out hooking. Someone muttered behind us, “See him? It’s one of the actors off the vispos. Why does he need to take a flyer? Slumming. Bastard.”

Silver put his arm around me, that was all. No one came up to start a fight.

(I wondered what he would do if they did? Magic a gun out of his arm and threaten them? How far did that slave’s autonomy stretch? To what level, in the matter of defense, could he, or any of them, go?)

Certainly, it wasn’t like it had been with Jane, those twelve years ago. This time he couldn’t pass anywhere as mortal. That really wasn’t allowed anymore.

It was almost light when we walked along West Larch to the apartment house. The distant mountains were reappearing from the dark.

What did I feel? Bodiless. Like I wasn’t there.

How could I be there? This was a dream.

The key I’d been given didn’t work. This wasn’t a chipped or electronic door, but obviously somebody bolted it after one or two A.M. Anyone out later than that had to kick their heels on the veranda.

But he put his hand over the lock, then the edges of the door. I heard a faint sliding inside—the lock unkeying, the bolts going home into their sockets.

You couldn’t keep him out, then. Or, presumably, any of them. I said, “Isn’t that illegal?”

“No. We’re only authorized to use key-coding to assist a human companion.”

“Suppose the human companion just happens to be a thief or murderer?”

He shook his head. “No one gets use of us who is anything like those. All customers are carefully checked.”

We went into the dim predawn building. He walked quietly up the stairs behind me. There were four flights. He could, I thought, equally noiselessly have raced up all four at a hundred miles an hour.

We went into my flat. As I let up the skimpy blind, he looked around him, like any unexceptional visitor. “You haven’t been here long.”

“How do you know?” I was only curious, not surprised.

He said, “This room has no smell of you.”

Jane:

He said, “What perfume have you got on?” “Nothing…” “Then it must be you.” “Human flesh must seem disgusting to you, if you can smell us.” “Extremely seductive…”

And I heard myself say, defensively, “Human habitations have a human stench, do you mean?”

And Silver-who-was-Verlis said, “Sometimes. But that isn’t what I mean. You have your own unique personal perfume. You, Loren, smell good. Young, fresh, and alluring. This room would smell of that, if you’d been here more than forty-eight hours.”

“What if I smoke a lot of cigarines?”

“Then of you, plus a lot of cigarines.”

I stood by the window looking back at him. He seemed in no hurry—how much time was allowed us for this test-situation carnal act?

“I’m quite experienced,” I said. Also defensive?

“Yes, Loren—I’ve been using your name again; are you okay with that? Thank you. You see, they were overviewing the whole crowd in the gardens for suitable candidates. Then they activated, in each case, a quick scan. You know this can be done?”

“I thought it was prohibited, except for the police, military, and hospitals.”

“Sure. META is affiliated to those first two, being Senate-sponsored. However, let me reassure you, by law they have to destroy any scan the moment they’ve seen the data.”

“What did it say?”

“They didn’t tell me. One moment.”

I watched him—he wasn’t thinking, although it looked like that. He was running some computerized result across some inner mind-screen.

“If you can read it over,” I said, “then it hasn’t been deleted, has it?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I can still read it.”

“How?”

“Machine to machine, Loren. Simple as that.”

“What did it say?” I demanded again.

He said, “Age approximately seventeen. Healthy and reasonably well-nourished. Non-intacta and sexually active. No sign of disease, terminations, or pregnancies. A couple of other comments. Those are less physical than technical.”

I lowered my eyes.

He said, “So you are experienced and fit, which I’d be able to guess anyway, wouldn’t I, since they picked you? But you’re still very nervous.”

“You noticed.”

“Perhaps I would expect you to be. You seem also intelligent and imaginative, and unease tends to come with both those territories.”

“But not for you, of course.”

“Unease? No. Never for me.”

“Fearless,” I said. “Omnipotent. Perfect.”

“And eager,” he said, “to please.”

Something in his voice—what was it—irony—or something stronger and more loaded?

I walked across the room and stood in front of him. Did I even believe we were together?

“Listen,” I said, “I have— I want to say one more thing.”

“Of course.”

Gentle. His eyes interested and amused. Tender. A lover’s eyes. A friend’s.

I wet my lips and said the name, like one bead of water falling into the light. “Jane.”

Only one reaction. Slowly his face became serious and intent. He responded, but only by repeating that single name again. “Jane.” No question. No reply.

“Yes. Jane. Do you recollect Jane?”

“I have memories. I told you that soon after we met.”

“Memories of Jane.”

“Among other people and events, I have memories of Jane.”

“Among other—but she,” I said, “she was more than simply people and events. Wasn’t she? I thought she was—” I’d been convinced I’d be ashamed to say it. Now, though, there was passion, outrage in my voice that startled me. Let’s be honest. I’d meant to have him. Yes, even though it would make Sharffe and META happy. And yet—

He said, “There was a book written, I believe. Maybe you read it? If you did, Loren, I have to say to you that sometimes one person’s view of events is at variance with what someone else, whether human or not, may or may not have seen, experienced, or concluded.”

“Are you telling me—”

“I’m telling you that those things belong in another life. And that, just possibly, what Jane innocently wrote in her book wasn’t entirely either what anyone else supposed had happened, or what in fact did happen. The one she thought she knew as Silver—isn’t necessarily who I am.”

A surge of actual nausea punched through my guts. Perhaps you will feel it, too.

I scrabbled at my thoughts. Was he saying to me that Jane had invented it, her colossal, luminous love of him—worse—his awakening to blatant humanity through her love, and his? Was he saying that he never loved, and that she was a blind idiot who lied—to herself, to all the rest of us?

Outside, the sky was yellowing. A ray of infant sun tilted down into the room, and burnished the silver of his cheekbone to orichalc-gold.