Metallic Love

and cooled to snow.

I had agreed, even legally, to all of this, by accepting the apartment and the income.

Was there still a chance I could run away? Maybe. Surely they couldn’t find me? I didn’t carry any body chip, not even a policode. I was one of the millions of sub-class citizens who’d never earned those bonuses. I was nothing. As for the chip in the ID card, and any suspect clothing (How many of us learned to be ultra careful after Jane’s Book?), I could pull my old trick. Walk out empty-handed. I’d get by. I always had.

“Today isn’t such a great day,” I said. “Perhaps we could meet tomorrow.” (Then I can fly the coop tonight.)

“They have me working on something tomorrow.”

“What’s that?”

“It would seem dull to you. Training.”

“Training. Aren’t you already trained?”

(Trained—train—the train to Russia—) “Excuse me.” I got up and went to the bathroom. I ran the faucets so he wouldn’t hear me retching into the bowl. But of course he heard. His hearing could detect the sigh of a moth against a windowpane. Thank God, he didn’t open the door and insist on holding my head.

When I came out, he still sat there. He made no comment.

“Sorry. I ate something bad yesterday.” Could he tell it wasn’t that?

He only said, “Should you see a doctor?”

“Oh, well, I can afford a doctor now, can’t I? No. I think it’ll pass. I’m never sick for long.” (In fact, I don’t get sick, but you needn’t know that.)

“The biological entity,” he said, “is a crack unit. It can dispel so many poisons. If not always pleasantly for the occupier.”

“Quite.”

“Loren, obviously this isn’t the right time.”

I gazed at the gray carpet. Bits of it rose and fell as I breathed: optical illusion.

He got up and walked the length of the room and back.

He stood by the window, where I had been standing when he first arrived, looking out. He said to me, “Those black-and-white birds are European magpies. META has located Jane.”

When I, too, got up, looking at him, he turned back to me and said, “It wasn’t so very difficult for them. It’s something META wants to do. They’re examining me from every angle, you could say. This is the latest angle.”

“Isn’t it important to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you never felt anything for her. She only kidded herself you did.”

“You’ve read the Book,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“I’ve heard about the Book, and I knew someone who did—”

“Loren, the links I have to META I can process on to other channels. They are not aware I can do this. It blocks the pickup on their end.”

“You’re telling me they can’t hear what we say?”

“They can’t hear a word. What they can hear, what they’ve been hearing—and partly seeing, now—is us indulging in some pretty heavy necking.”

“Christ.”

“You may not believe me, and right now I can’t prove it, but it’s a fact.”

“How? How can you do it?”

“Because they created me a very strong child, Loren. Stronger than the parent.”

The light in the room had changed. Clouds had massed eastward over the mountain framed in the kitchen window. Perhaps it would rain.

As I stood there staring, he came out of that occluded light. He put his arms around me and held me, and my head lay against his shoulder. I was unnerved and consoled, lost and found.

“I’m afraid to meet her,” he said into my hair. “Yes, I can feel fear, a kind of fear. And yes, I’ve denied fear, and yes, I can lie. We’ve established that.”

“Why—afraid?”

“Why do you think? Why are you afraid of me now?”

“But you’re not—”

“According to Jane, I became—shall I say—contaminated, unlike others of my kind, with human qualities. Yes, Loren. I, too, have been given Jane’s Book, and have read it. It took me half an hour. Why so long? I read many of the passages over, and again. That wasn’t me, Loren. But nevertheless.”

I said, “At Clovis’s place after, the message from the dead—”

“The seance? I don’t recall. If I was elsewhere, wherever elsewhere was, maybe it’s not unreasonable I wouldn’t remember. But I guess she believed it happened.”

“She loved you. Did you love her?”

“I must have loved her, don’t you think?”

“I said, did you?”

“When I read her Book, as I told you, Jane’s hero wasn’t me. I clearly recollect all of what happened when I was with her, but my perspective isn’t the same.”

Jane didn’t lie. I lie. He can lie. Did he lie, even then, to her, as, intermittently in the beginning, she had been afraid he did?

“This is too much to take in,” I said.

“I know.”

“Are you saying you understand, or that it is the same for you, as well?”

“No. I can take in most stuff.”

I pulled back from him. “Let’s go out somewhere,” I said.

He nodded, and as he did so, the incredible color of his hair diluted slightly. I’d said to him don’t, but he didn’t have to do what any of us said now. Even what META said, or not in certain ways. Could I really credit that? I didn’t know.

I put on my jacket and shoes, and we went down to the quake park. The sky was becoming iron, and the trees seemed to rustle uneasily at an unfelt wind, murmuring to one another, Weather is coming. Was this fanciful? No more than thinking the machine at my side was a man.

After the park, we walked along the streets of the district called Russia. Sometimes he told me a few things about the architecture of older buildings, based on European cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rain started to fall in wide-spaced drops, then in thick sheets, but we kept on walking.

Soon my hair and clothes were soaked through. My shoes were full of water. I wondered if his tan was sufficiently waterproof. It was, though I could barely see him through the long steel rods of rain. I love you, I thought. I am in love with a robot. By all means, let’s all lie, but not to ourselves. I know what the other two did on the train. Probably each of them is quite capable of that. And he’s said, stronger than the parent, by which is he trying to impress or threaten—or reassure? But I can’t get past this other thing, this love thing. He’s an alien, and I should run and hide myself, but I can’t, I won’t. I’m going to love you, whatever your name is, whoever is going to claim you, or keep you, whatever the hell you do. Forever, it feels like. Till I am dust and you are rust, I must.

At the Cafe Tchekova, when we went in, the man behind the counter called someone out from the back, a big burly guy, who said, “We have a right to refuse you admission.”

“Have a heart,” said Silver (Verlis), easy, friendly. “We got caught in the rain is all. Look, she’s drenched.”

They looked at me. “Sign on the door says dress smart casual,” whinged the burly guy.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” I said.

Silver—Verlis—said, “Sure.” He put his hand into his saturated coat and drew out an I.M.U. card. My eyes fixed. The card was platinum. Top rate. Silver said, “Can I just use this to buy her a hot drink?”

The burly man looked back at the man on the counter. Who said, “S’okay. All right. Take a seat. Do you want we dry up your wet coats?” I didn’t unravel the accent’s origin.