Metallic Love

larger group—my own, the most minor—dealt with on the next station.

I’ve heard and seen since, on the local news channel, delivered via that VS (mine), that there were seven dead. I think these seven were all in my carriage. I don’t think the derailment killed them. I think they were the ones Goldhawk and Kix killed. No one reported anything about that. The doors flying open while the train was at full speed—that was put down to a mechanical fault. Old rolling stock, bad track. Second City is still mad about it, ranting at the Senate, who looked upset and empathically sad, and will do nothing much.

When they said go home and rest, the only place it seemed I had to go was the unseen apartment in Russia. A cab took me. It was free, courtesy of the rail company. The medic had organized it, had only needed the address.

Gray-brown building, part of a long terrace. Decisive architecture, Gothic perhaps. A couple of gargoyles leaned out into the cool tangerine sunset that was beginning. There was a lift. It worked. I was on the top floor.

When I let myself in, the apartment was furnished. The windows were clean, and some faced west, and outside, in the sunfall, the magpies were flying about over a little park that had a gulf in it that the very first quake must have caused, all grown over and attractive now.

I sat in a padded chair by the window and watched the magpies. My body hurt. I took a couple of the pills.

That’s all I remember about that day, or the next.

What happened after? Sharffe. He called me.

By then, I’d located a bed and lain down on it. When the phone rang I thought I was back in the bat-block with Margoh, but coming out, I was somewhere else, alone.

“How are you, Loren?” he asked joyfully. “How is the apartment?”

“I was on the train,” I said.

“Train?” he said, puzzled.

“The train that derailed.”

“Good God! Loren—are you quite okay?”

Something in my mind, fuddled by analgesics, shock, and many other things, stirred in me like a cold voice hissing in one ear. Be wary.

I said, “I think so. I don’t remember much about it. I hit my head. Not serious. Only, I don’t.”

The smallest pause, during which Sharffe perhaps thinks, She has forgotten about any robots on the train. Or was she in another carriage?

He said, “Well, you must take it easy. I’m sorry to hear that happened to you, when you were all excited about your new place.”

All excited.

He said some stuff. I didn’t hear. I acted even more spaced-out and bewildered than I was. But I was pretty much both.

(Had they gone to all of them? Traced them, the other passengers? What happened with anyone who recalled the events on the train to Russia before the “accident”?)

Next day, a basket of fruit, cheeses, flowers, and wine arrived. It was a lovely basket, tied with tinsel ribbons, and the most fragrant apples and greenest figs, and French Brie and Camembert, and Favo from one of the last great vineries in Italy, and heliotropes.

The card said META. Nothing else.

I believed somebody, Sharffe or someone, would come to see me, to check I really hadn’t seen, or had forgotten, anything awkward or incriminating. No one came. Days and nights passed.

Odd. Thought I’d have nightmares. Don’t. But also, I don’t remember any of my dreams at all.

The blow on the head wasn’t bad. I didn’t even have a headache. Any bruises faded fast, the way they do with me. In fact, I’d been cushioned. I fell with my head on the thigh of that girl, the sick girl who’d grabbed me. She said, when the train settled, and all the rest were calling and howling in horror and pain, and the static carriage vibrated on this other journey of suffering, “I’m okay. You okay? You didn’t hurt me. You hurt? Oh, hey, my leg’s bruk.”

I didn’t eat any of the fruit or cheese, or drink the wine. That wasn’t a precaution in case they’d doped it. I just didn’t want it. I put the blue-violet flowers in water, because I felt sorry about them. They lasted nearly fifteen days. By then, I’d come out of it. I think so. I think I am out of it.

I have an income and a flat, then. The address is 22-31 Ace Avenue. You can decide if that is the real address, or if, like careful Jane, lying Jane, I’m using a fake street name and number here.

The thing I like most is that the rooms have drapes on all the windows, a type of warm gray silky material; the drop goes right down to the deep gray carpet on the floor. The couches and chairs are tawny or dark green. Yellow cushions. The bathroom is clean, and I keep it clean, because I have been a professional cleaner, and may well be one again. The kitchenettery is five feet by five. I never knew such kitchens were left anywhere for us wee plebs. It has clean running water and a little freezer that stores power for when the meter runs down. But the meter is usually sprinting along because I feed it lots of coins, and though the notice on it warns there may sometimes be a power shortage, it hasn’t happened yet.

There were even new sheets, turquoise ones, or white, in celloplas, for the bed.

I wander about this apartment as if I am looking for something, and maybe I am, or I was. In the end, I went and bought a whole stack of paper and some pens from the corner store, and I wrote this. (Quite a lot of paper left. Probably sell it on again, because this is nearly done now.)

So, it’s my sequel to Jane’s Book. But I don’t want to call it Loren’s Story. I’ve scribbled a title across a single page and stuck it on the front. The title of this sequel is: The Train to Russia.

By now I’ve been here about a month. Fall is preparing to descend on Second City. I can see the mountains from one window, the small one in the kitchenettery, which looks approximately east. They have quite a lot of snow already.

I see him, I mean Silver—or do I mean Verlis—almost every day now.

Ha! Gotcha, didn’t I? (I said you wouldn’t like me.)

No, I don’t see him here, in the silver unflesh. I see him on the VS, on the screen, in news and ads, like all of them: Sheena and Copperfield, Black Chess and Irisa, and Glaya. And Goldhawk. And Kix. And you see them, I imagine, too.

They are the talk of the town.

I have tried to find out if the girl whose thigh I broke when I was flung down on her—though I have tough bones, maybe she saved me from fracturing my skull—is all right. But all the casualties seem to have vanished away.

I’ll stash this under the floorboards sometime. Where I put Jane’s Book a couple of weeks ago. It’s an old house, nearly two centuries. The boards should come up again easily if I work at them like before, with a fruit knife and a spanner. I’ll leave my manuscript with hers for whoever comes after. If that is you, be sure and read Jane’s Story first. Or last.

Please accept my abject regrets that I can’t terminate my own little contribution to the subversive (in my case, unpublished) literature of this world, on a triumphant and beautiful, hopeful note. Don’t blame me. Blame corporations. Blame governments. Or people. Or blame Grandfather’s bloody God. Perhaps he is in charge, after all.

PART TWO A Flyer Named Sesire