Metallic Love

“Loren!” they both cried, like happy children.

Then they stood by me and waited patiently—but for what? They didn’t want or need my grovelings or thanks. They didn’t need to know, or care, if I was thrilled or sickened by this stupendous metamorphosis.

I said to the mirror, watching my painted lips move and the sound come out—so it really was me in there —“Just tell me, how am I going to travel any place like this?”

“It’s arranged, Loren,” said Irisa. “Don’t get in a fuss.”

Hours had passed in my preparation. The apartment was rich with sunfall.

Now, in the passage outside was a guy in a one-piece and shades. He was a bodyguard. No mistaking it.

“Ready, ladies?” he coolly asked. There was some type of gun under his arm. Despite the tailoring, I could just decipher it.

We went along to the lift, and inside was another bodyguard, who perhaps had been riding up and down all afternoon to keep the elevator clear.

No one, certainly, was about in the house. Outside, the street had a few people going along it. Most of them were gawping at the big car by the sidewalk. It was a Rolls Matrix Platinum Ghost. When we got in, the sightseers gazed at us. Thinking us celebrities, someone on the corner had gotten out a little vid camera, but one of our bodyguards held up one finger and shook his head, and the vid went straight back into its case.

The bodyguards rode in front with the driver.

The windows were polarized, and, I’d take a bet, bullet- and explosives-proof.

A platinum robot device in the car, shaped like a trumpet lily, served us—Glaya and Irisa and me— champagne. Did they like it? They drank it. I must have, too, but I don’t recall.

I felt frightened. And I felt alive. I wanted not to be left alone. I wanted to see him again.

We drove along at a fair lick. I thought we’d go out into the countryside, or up to the heavenly heights of the city. Instead, as neons began to harden on the dusk, daggering along our dark windows, the Rolls turned into a long white tunnel that had restrictions on either end to keep most traffic out. The other side of the tunnel was a wide crowded avenue with tall streetlamps already burning up.

“This is Bohemia,” said Glaya.

Irisa said, “There’s the concert hall.”

It was impressive, a huge domed building, all carved, pillared, and paneled around, in the mode of something from eighteenth-century Eastern Europe.

Across the concourse outside milled a lot of people. They let the car through, peering in at the blind windows—pale faces, human, curious, some laughing and some almost… urgent.

The Rolls slid into the side of the building and down into a private car park.

“META,” said the cool bodyguard to a globe that floated up to us. The password. Presumably backed by body ID and chip. A private elevator carried us up into the hall. There were mirrors all around the lift. We three robot women, and our human bodyguards, were repeated to eternity through glass reflecting in glass.

When he walked out on the semicircle of stage below, he was like the only living thing in that whole vast space. The rest of us? Machines.

The applause and calls were deafening.

He raised his head and his hand to us, a greeting, a recognition. He looked relaxed and profoundly together. All he wanted in the world was to delight us, and he knew he could do it. I saw a healer once, one of the Sect. He was bending over a woman with a headache, not touching her, but smiling into her skull. And the pain went, or she said it went. And that was how this man looked, just the way Verlis did, as if the power of Heaven was on him, and he would use it only for good, but with utter enjoyment.

An announcing voice rang through the auditorium before Verlis came on. It told us to prepare ourselves.

There had been plenty of advance publicity. The place was packed, including the exclusive seats to which a uniformed usher had taken me. Irisa and Glaya were gone by then. I was on my own, sitting on a lush plush chair, and all around me the rich and pampered glittered, who, seeing me, didn’t bat an eyelash, for obviously I was rich and pampered, too.

Now all the lights were out, apart from those left burning over the stage. The air smelled aromatic but not drugged. He wore that dark red clothing, like wine in a smoked glass, or sunset under night.

He played a song to us on a guitar, and sang. A simple start, deceptively so. Though the song was popular and most of us had been hearing it on and off for about six months, naturally it hadn’t ever sounded like this. What is Verlis’s voice like, would you say? Or maybe you haven’t heard it. My musical knowledge is limited. I know books better. I think his voice was most like a keyboard instrument. It had an effortless range, as such an instrument would. But there was a hot feral darkness in its deeper notes, and a central quality more like warmth. The high register had elements of spatial silver. Yes, the vocal colors were like his own. And perhaps that is the only reason I see it that way.

He made the guitar, too, sound like another voice, or voices. It sang around him, harmonized and patterned over him, raised its own echoes and prefaces, like shadows cast from a moving lamp.

After he sang, he played a guitar solo. That was classical, I think, from Spain or Italy. It had a rhythm like horses galloping. It was like—what else?—two or three guitars in synchrony: six hands, eighteen strings, and somewhere a drum tapped that didn’t exist. While this happened, an orchestra began to come up through vents in the stage, as if his playing summoned it.

There were drums there now, a whole percussion section, even bells and cymbals. There were ranks of tall stands with flutes perched on them, like waiting snakes, and those curly horns—I don’t know their name. There were two violins (like the underpass buskers, and not), also on stands, with their bows somehow fixed across them. Four oboes appeared to one side, and two lutes at the other. A piano, itself shining silver, lifted at the middle of the stage.

I—we?—thought other musicians would now walk out from the wings.

Verlis had finished the solo, and even greater applause thrashed against the hall’s high roof. He spoke to us, thanking us, like a king. (Did I say? There was no microphone, no acoustic boost at all… it was only there, the music, his voice, inside some secret room of the mind, yet wide as a sky.)

“I want to play you,” he said, “a song I wrote last night.”

The tiers of people on velvet or fake velvet chairs fell silent.

Verlis said, “This song is for you.”

The faintest murmur. To me it sounded like the groan of pleasure at a kiss.

Then once more the silence, in which he sang and played.

He played—the orchestra.

Were you there? Do you remember? Do I? I’m not sure. It— Put it this way, I’ve been told how it was done. No, I don’t mean he told me. I mean, something in me… I don’t know what I mean.

A chip was in every instrument. It responded to his control. His unhuman brain mathematically spacing and allocating each portion and particle of music without a single physical touch. The lutes, the flutes on their stands, the violins, bows skimming, the drums and bells. He, as the conductor did in the historic past, was at the piano. Everything else took its cue and tempo from him.

His face was like that of a serene and smiling statue.

The best seats, you see, were quite close to the stage. I suppose, as he played, I was sitting about twenty feet from him. Whenever I speak of him I feel impelled to describe him over and over, and how he was exactly like a man, and how he wasn’t, and how I (selfishly) hung from his physicality and persona like a filament drifting from the sun.

The song he’d composed was the best song ever written. And the orchestral accompaniment was like an architecture of sound that rose high above the concert hall. Or so it seemed.

He played other things after that. At one juncture, he even asked for requests, and all those he received, frenziedly shouted across the auditorium, he performed, transmuting them at once through the medium of Verlis,