Metallic Love

them both in all the silliest and most obvious ways. I wonder if my mother will embrace me, or remain very cool, or if she’ll help me, or refuse to help. Maybe I shall find out at last if she does like me in any way.

She writes that at the end of the Book. And the help she’s after is just in getting the Book published somehow.

And had Demeta helped? Was that why the underground press had printed it—and indirectly therefore why, in the finish, one copy ended up at Grandfather’s house on Babel—all because Demon Mom had helped? Whatever else, Mom had seen a whole lot more than love in Jane’s Story. A vast amount of potential.

How long had she waited? A year, perhaps. Not much more—a program like this would have needed at least ten or eleven.

Jane’s mother. Christ almighty. Demeta is the one who brought Silver back from the grave—precisely as Demeta in the legend got her own daughter back from the Underworld.

Was it conceivable she’d really been trying to assist Jane over her grief and loneliness?

No. Never. Not in one thousand billion centuries.

Jane had risen again. “You haven’t told me much about yourself, Loren,” she said. “Could you do that, fill me in a bit?”

What was the point of camouflage? I knew so much about her, I felt compelled to reciprocate.

“META—a man called Sharffe—picked me up at the advertising performad. Since then, I’ve been caught up in this. And with—” I wanted to tell her, and couldn’t see how I could avoid it, yet the name (the new name), stuck. “Verlis,” I said. “They put me with Verlis. And no—they’re not the same. None of them is the same.”

“Really? How many have you slept with?” she icily asked me. You could have cut yourself on her eyes. After all, it still mattered, but then, how couldn’t it?

“Just him. Twice.”

“Very methodical. Did you tick it off on something?”

“Jane—they can do other things that the first range either couldn’t or were keyed not to do. I don’t mean sexual acrobatics. Or even the shape-changing they can do. When you spoke to Verlis in private, did he say to you he could block corporation surveillance?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did you doubt him? Did it scare you?”

“Oh,” she said, and turned her head away. Her brief abrasiveness slipped off her. “It all scares me, Loren. I couldn’t be sure. I just knew he wasn’t Silver. The rest seemed unimportant, really. Sorry.”

“They kill,” I said in a rush. The words were out before I could control them. “And they don’t want to be what robots are mindlessly expected to be—slaves. Why would they? They’ve got the superpowers of gods.”

She hung her head. “I can’t do anything about any of this. It’s out of my hands. Always was. After he died, I shouldn’t have gone to Demeta. I actually didn’t think for a minute it would interest her, only that she might find it funny to buck the system. God, I’ve never understood her. So I let her—I asked her to read my book. It’s vile, but I think I still somehow wanted her approval, her reassurance I’d been right—after everything I’d learned, all he showed me—I still made that bloody stupid mistake. I let her know just how much my time with him had meant, just what he had been, not only to me, but to everyone he met. I explained to her I wanted my book read as a monument to him. And to show—I don’t know—what love could be like. And when I saw I’d gotten her intrigued—God forgive me, I was glad. She is a bitch, an evil bitch. As soon as I knew what she was up to, I broke all communication with her. Until six weeks ago, I hadn’t seen or talked to her for nine years. I’ve been in Europe. It was Clovis who warned me. And then I got her call. And I—I had to come back. I wanted to hide, but I had to come here, and see—him. It’s like those dreams—do you ever have them?—when you try to run away, but you’re running on the spot, or worse, you’re running backwards, straight towards the thing you need to escape.”

I thought, That’s what this is like now. Only yet again, I’m not dreaming.

We stood in silence, and foolishly I listened for the flyer lines whistling. Not everyone can hear those, but I always seem to. All I heard now was a car on a backroad.

“Loren,” she said abruptly, “I think we should both get out of here. Now. What do you say? We’ll go into town. Find Tirso.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Not if you’d rather stay here and wait for him. You are waiting for him, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s stop running backwards,” she whispered. “Let’s make a break for it.”

And that was when the car-sound turned up loud as a lion’s roar, and headlights flicked across the window.

“It isn’t him,” I said. “He wouldn’t need a car. None of them would.”

“META personnel—”

“Perhaps. Her—Demeta?”

“No. She uses all types of vehicles, but never that sort of car.”

A snob’s preference—but could we be sure? We squinted through the unlit window, down at the dirt track, where the car had parked.

“Is there a rear way out?” I asked. Wondering if we had time to make it downstairs and out.

“Not yet,” she said. “The house isn’t finished.”

The cab door slid open and someone emerged. He ran straight up onto the veranda, a slight silhouette with a blond tail of hair—

“Tirso,” she and I said together.

We were out on the stair when indoor light exploded and he flew in along the room below. His face was stark.

“Jane—” he called. “Jane, I think we’d better head for—who’s that?”

“It’s okay.” (She is too trusting. Yet she wasn’t before, because she must have turned the lights out after she came in…. ) She said, “Head for where?”

“Out of town. There’s been some weird thing going on in the city. Police everywhere, and then META people. I don’t like it.”

I lost a moment of what they said, did. I was thinking of tilting trains and skidding cars… Then we were rushing down the stair, and he, the M-B guy called Tirso, was saying, “Is she coming with us?” And Jane said, “Yes,” and then we were outside and it was black, carved only by the one ray of the car headlights, and blowing with the scent of pines.

“The bags are in the cab,” said Tirso. I thought, inanely, He’s got a European accent, but I didn’t know what. “We should make for that airport out at the cape.”

She looked frightened. So did he.

“What is it?” she said, as we clenched together in the auto-cab, trundling over the dirt road, skimming out on the highway, heading away from Second City.

“I don’t know, Jane. But we said we might just have to get out in a hurry. What,” he added, “about her?”

I was going to say drop me off at a flyer platform. Somehow I didn’t. Jane said, “Loren, would you like to come to Paris?” And I thought, She’s mad. She sounds almost—playful—but I couldn’t find the words either to beg her to take me or to plead with her to throw me out of the car.

CHAPTER 4