Metallic Love

And there wasn’t even red on the real white fur, because the water-repellents shook it off.

The magpies had settled, pragmatic, in a fir tree. They were all I’d miss—not even the carpet Sharffe had stood on, or the turquoise bed Sharffe had wanted to lay me in—and if he had, then maybe he wouldn’t be dead right now. Would anyone miss him?

I pulled off META’s orange gown and the bracelets that were too expensive for me to be able to sell without questions.

I dressed in jeans, shirt, and jacket, my most recent buys. I could buy something else later and change, in case of microchips.

I stuffed the jeans and jacket pockets with the bills and coins I’d accumulated. The I.M.U. card I left inside a drawer. I took one shoulder bag, and in it I put the loose pages of this book, nothing else. Do you see? No other Book of any kind.

It was early, not long after eight.

When I opened the apartment door, I was holding my breath. But no one—no thing—was outside.

The caretaker was in the elevator. “Say, what a lousy day.”

“Yes,” I said.

He got out on the second floor. I went down to street level.

I’d almost reached the foyer door when a pair of shadows darkened it. Then the door swung inwards.

Does anyone think in such moments? I didn’t think.

There wasn’t much light in the hallway, and not much outside in the sky. They loomed, a tall black guy in leathers and a blond white guy in dirty-looking denim. Both had cropped hair. They came straight at me, and I pictured—but didn’t think—it was to be a mugging, and I cursed because every nickel I possessed was on me.

But the black guy took my arm and he had the profile of a young African god, and the handsome white guy was tanned, only it was a fake, and his blue eyes were either contacts or another self-sponsored change.

“Loren,” said Black Chess, “do you know us?”

“Hey,” said Copperfield, “of course she does.”

I wouldn’t move. Can you believe it? With muggers I’d have had the sense to give in. But with these irresistible beings, I resisted.

I said, “What do you want?”

“He says to bring you.”

“Who says? It can’t be Sharffe,” I heard myself babble, “he’s dead. So who wants me now?”

“Verlis.”

“Ah,” said Copperfield, all tender campness, “look, she’s relaxed again.” He stroked my hair over-gently, maternally, with his undisguisedly elegant hand. “All soft and dovelike at the mere mention of his name.”

“Let’s go, Loren,” said Black Chess.

As they walked me, like just two more very good friends, down the steps to the sidewalk, I heard myself say, “You were in my rooms yesterday morning, weren’t you? Both of you, and Goldhawk.”

“Of course we were, sweetness,” said Copperfield affectionately. “Though you’re a clever little girl to remember.”

“Why wouldn’t I? You’re unforgettable, aren’t you?”

“Oh, well, true, darling. We are. But you see, there was a little something, just so you’d sleep a little longer.”

My dream had been a fact—the threat of Goldhawk knowing me from the train; the false courtesies; and the ring Verlis made from his metal flesh, that would only last twenty-four hours… even that?

Verlis had drugged me. How? When? But I’d been aware enough to recollect a scramble of the truth.

And where now? “Where are we going?”

“To meet him. He wants to see you.”

Sharffe had told me I’d never see Verlis again, but Sharffe, obviously, had no say in anything now.

I was bleakly angry and scared. That seemed to be all. Predictable, and useless. We went along streets and round to the corner market, and as we crossed it, I could see stallholders keeping an eye on me and my companions. We must look dodgy.

I didn’t ask anything else about where we were going. But Copperfield informed me that next we’d take a flyer. They are the actors, the copper range. He misquoted something from a play to me, a wonderful play I knew, because I’d seen the visual—author, title, and subject unknown in that moment. “They told her to take a flyer, and it was named Desire. You are going on the flyer of desire, Loren.”

Coolly Black Chess said, “Loren, we’re not going to harm you.”

I said, because there seemed now no point in any further pretense, “Oh? Why not?”

“You’re his,” said Black Chess.

Does that sound romantic? I knew what he meant by his, and he meant “his belonging.” He meant, for some reason, and just for now, I was owned by Verlis.

There in that contemporary street, with the cubes and blocks of modern buildings, the mountains all white on gray fall sky, the flyer lines above like spider-silk, it was like some ancient city—Athens, Rome—you know, where they kept slaves.

The flyer carried us out of town and we alighted on a platform by a highway. The pine forests were there, but full of clearings where industrial plants and commercial businesses had put up their smart glassy facades. I thought, then, we must be going to META, but we weren’t. (On the flyer, no one had come near us. We looked, I suppose, dangerous, or my companions did—Black Chess and Copperfield—in their criminal-type disguises. I wanted to say to Copperfield, Who authorized your tan? Because Verlis had told me they mustn’t pass as human now unless META confirmed the action. He had said this in the dream that hadn’t been a dream. Anyway, I knew Copperfield simply had the tan at his disposal. They could do as they liked. Did as they liked. I thought, sitting on the flyer with them. After all, any trouble and Black Chess can transform to a fire-breathing dragon—and this was so filthily funny I’d laughed aloud, and Copperfield said, “Ah, she’s sweet, all keen and eager to see him.” Which shut me up.)

Down by the road, we walked about five hundred yards, then turned up a dirt track between the pines. Their trunks were like prison bars. The sky was blackening with an approaching storm.

There was a bend in the track and we followed it round. They could have done all this in however few split seconds, but they stayed in step with me. A house appeared. It looked like someone’s weekend place, clapboard, a veranda, a patch of yard with roses and a maple tree. When we got up on the veranda, the tempest broke overhead and the pines rattled with hail. I had the crazy notion—or was it?—that the weather was also robotic, and so in tune with them, that they’d held off the hail till we were under cover.

The door just opened.

It was a biggish, old-fashioned, open-plan room, with polished wood floor and a twirly stair going up. Not much furniture. Hail like steel arrows hurtled past big windows.

Black Chess said, “He’s up there.”

Copperfield said, “B.C. means, you go up the stair and you’ll find him. Go along.”

For a slave, I was being treated quite indulgently, and things were even explained to me since, in my ignorance and awe, I might otherwise not grasp what I was meant to do. But then, for now, I was a favored slave.

I walked across the floor and went up the corkscrew stair. They just stood there, and when I glanced back, they were themselves again, long-haired, clad in gems and metals, static in the hail-light, impossible.

Climbing in that rushing light-flicker was surreal. I reached the second floor and there was a lobby with lots of shut doors. They hadn’t bothered to say which door, and naturally that was irrelevant, anyhow. Like the door below, the correct one just opened.

Across the long room I saw him, standing at a window. He had his back to me, but it seemed to me he could see me, not through anything as mundane as eyes in the back of his head, but maybe with the mane of red hair itself, every strand somehow fitted with an optic fiber.