Metallic Love

the conditioning, when with humans, then, even in a scenario of threat like this one, is to speak aloud?

Verlis said, “I don’t think I understand what you mean, Gee.”

“She does. The woman.”

“Do you, Loren?” Verlis asked me quietly.

“The train,” I said. “It was derailed, or so they told me. I don’t remember much. I had a knock on the head. It was all very quick.”

“She was in the same carriage,” said Goldhawk. “She remembers.”

I glared across at him. “What carriage?” I demanded. “Why are you going on about it? I got hurt. So what’s your problem?”

It’s as if we are all the same, a family, arguing…

But “You remember me,” said Goldhawk. His face was like a vivid mask. “Kix. Me. In the carriage you were in.”

No, we’re not the same. No family here.

I didn’t like looking into Goldhawk’s black-green eyes. I knew I recalled perfectly the violent episode before the train went off the track. (And in the dream I thought about it more, too. I considered if even the forcing open of the doors at top speed could have caused the crash. Or if there had been some little extra instruction fed back down the power artery from gold robot to robot engine.)

“So. We were all in one carriage. I don’t remember,” I repeated stubbornly, and flooded my mind with a blank nothing.

Verlis put his hand on my arm, warm and steadying, like the hand of a kind father. Something I never knew.

“Leave it, Gee,” he said. “She’s told you, she was concussed. Yes, it can happen. She doesn’t recall.”

“We both know she does. She’s clever. I would like her to take a chemical test on whether she recalls,” said Goldhawk.

My guts went to ice water.

Verlis said, “That’s enough.”

Now it was a command. There could be no moment’s doubt. I glanced at him, then back at Goldhawk, who lowered his head very slightly. Goldhawk said, “Very well.”

“Loren,” said Verlis, light as his kiss, “is my special companion out here. All right? Whatever she says, is fine.”

“And you’d better listen, Gee,” said Black Chess softly.

Goldhawk: “Yeah, Verlis. Fine.”

And then Copperfield said, smiling his own irresistible young-man smile at me, “Nice to meet you, Loren.”

“Hi, Loren,” said Black Chess. “Great place you got here.”

Suddenly, for five seconds, it was a party.

But already they were moving, all four of them, towards the main door.

Special companion. Did that mean client?

Lean and coordinated, they undid the door, and walked through: Goldhawk silent; Copperfield blowing me a kiss as he went, playful, rather M-B; Black Chess a panther who paused to look along the outer passage, profile cut from stone.

Verlis was the last to go.

He said nothing, but his eyes stayed on me. I was caught full in the ray of them. His gaze might mean anything, and I couldn’t read it.

Neither of us spoke. The door closed.

Everything had tangled in my head. Squeezed in my clenched fist, the twenty-four-hour ring pinched my flesh. I felt it, like a vise.

No idea of danger. Not now. Only his unreadable eyes, looking at me. I was his special companion out here. What did he mean by out here—the district of Russia? The world of human things?

When I woke up, it was dawn, like the dream, but he wasn’t there. He had gone, even as I slept and dreamed he left me.

When I moved my head, on the pillow lay a flower; it was a dark red rose. I put my hand on it, asking myself if he had made it from his own body, like clothing, or the ring in my dream. It felt as if it was a rose—petals, stem, a single trimmed thorn. No smell.

What wins then, between anger, danger, and love?

Love.

Danger and anger are everywhere. Love is the rarity, the gem buried in the core of the mine, the outpost of God.

Walking back into Cafe Tchekova, with the rose pinned on my collar, I saw the man at the counter recollected me. He smiled and offered a little bow. I’d put on new jeans and an okay top I’d bought a week ago with my I.M.U. card. I had the card, too.

“All by yourself today, yes?”

“Afraid so.”

I ordered a coffine and a doughnut, and he gave the counter over to someone else and brought the things to my table.

“How is your friend?” he asked me. I had known he would.

“He’s well.”

“How long you know him?” asked the man.

“Seems like forever.”

“Ah. I thought something is between you. His mother, he say to me, she from the Venetian places. Good to hear Italian spoke so good. But he is a marvelous young man. I seen such a face on the great classic statues, or pictures—like from Leonardo.”

“He’s very handsome,” I agreed, modest in my familiarity with the paragon.

The man accepted I was shy, and still smiling, left me to my breakfast. I couldn’t eat the doughnut, managed only about a quarter of it, it stuck in my mouth and throat like lumps of sugary gauze.

And why had I come here? To recapture yesterday? Or to test this man, see if Verlis really had fooled him so completely. I was naive to suspect, even for a moment, it could be otherwise.

He can lie. Even about having a mother. To give pleasure, maybe that was still the driving force—because certainly the man here had been very pleased to find a fellow Italian. The symbol of META on Verlis’s card hadn’t meant a thing. After all, it was on my card, too.

Probably I should go back now and pack up and run, just like I’d been thinking of doing before I faced up to my feelings. Maybe you’ll judge me an idiot. But I’ve said, haven’t I, that I may be spineless.

I stayed out till afternoon. There wasn’t any rain, but in the end I cut back through the underpass between Mason Park and the corner market, and there were a lot of people there busking. About fifty, all told. Girls, guys, kids juggling, an old man with a blue violin and a young one with a pink violin, and a gray dog that took round a Victorian top hat for donations. I dropped in some coins. But all those acts and musics clashed noisily with one another. That was the reality, then. Since none of us was living in a book—not Jane’s, not mine.

In the elevator going up to my rooms, I became aware of a perfume. I thought, at first, the caretaker, who occasionally put in an appearance brooming the front hall or scowling at leaked-in rain puddles in the upper corridors, had sprayed something for “freshness.” But it was a very expensive scent. When I got out of the lift I could still smell it. It went all along the passage leading to my door. Something said to me, I know this scent. But I didn’t, couldn’t. It was a fragrance only the rich would use.

Someone had been here, someone—

So did I turn tail and flee—or let myself in and see if I could locate any implanted surveillance devices, any microchips?

Madness. I wasn’t that important they would do that.

When I unlocked the door and went inside the apartment, the perfume vanished. It wasn’t in there at all. And everything seemed exactly as I had left it: the bed sprawled open, with the faint impress of two bodies still