Metallic Love

“Good night, Loren,” she said kindly, still like a mother. Of course, she had learned the kindness from him. And I—I hadn’t learned from anyone anything at all.

Other META employees have other rooms round the fountain yard. In the tawny evenings, they collect outside, with their drinks, just as the birds do in the daytime when the humans are off working elsewhere in the complex. When I first went out, these people accepted me. They didn’t ask questions, either, and I noticed they didn’t ask one another anything about what they did, or the firm. They gossiped about who was shagging who, and who they wanted to shag, about families and friends far-off in various spots, holidays they were planning, money. The first night there was even a little digression about the trouble in Second City. Someone said, melancholic, “I loved that mall. You could get really gorgeous shoes. I have twenty pairs from there. I hope they rebuild it real quick.” And someone else said, “I was scared about my brother. He was in town. But I got him right off. He’s okay. He was eating dinner and really went on at me, like his steak was getting cold! Brothers.” I had asked, “Is the power back on?” “Oh, sure. It’s fine now.” Somebody else added this elegy: “There were only seventy or so dead. Considering, that isn’t too awful.”

I’ve met their sort before. They’re not monsters. But they managed to get a good job, and now they live with their heads in insulating boxes with narrow eyeholes that filter the outside world for them. I guess we all do, one way and another.

There is mostly a mode of gender segregation. The guys stuck with the guys. A couple of girls palled up with me, and I let them. They’re called Vera and Dizzy. We sit in the courtyard and drink all three of our day’s ration of drinks, then stroll over in the dusk to the Commissary, an enormous spaceshiplike building, with glass all round, polarized different colors. There is a strict hierarchy, naturally. Chief execs perch up on the highest terrace, about the indoor pool (which has, it seems, robot carp), like nobility would have in olden times. The rest of us take tables wherever we can below.

There is a wide choice of food, and even half-bottles of wine, only everybody gets checked (via their wrist chips, presumably), and if they’ve had all three other drinks that day, they only get one glass of wine. Vera and Dizzy like the fact that I’m never, so far, checked, despite my being a (mysterious) META employee, so I always get the half-bottle, and then let them drink most of it, along with their single glasses. How to win friends and intoxicate people. But I’m not really being ingratiatingly sly and practical, just trying to get along. They do get pissed, though. I mean, three stiff tequilas and then two and a half red wines each. Sometime it’ll show up, I assume, on their chips. Ah. More META operatives with a slight alcohol dependancy.

I don’t give a damn about them. Sorry. It’s a fact. They aren’t, as I said, bad, but shallow as a pancake. Take Margoh, the entrepreneurial thief—she had a backbone, more than I do. And once I saw her run out in the road to drag a kid and a cat out of the way of a speeding big red car. Vera and Dizzy would have stood there and looked shocked, then thrown up at the unrescued result. And afterwards, maybe said wasn’t it a pity about the cat—or the kid; one, not the other. (And what would I have done? I don’t know. I didn’t have to do a thing, because Margoh did it.)

I get sorry for Vera and Dizzy, too. They belong to META. They’re loyal and bound to and fond of META, Demeta’s corporation.

Jane hasn’t called me again. I have tried to call her. I kept getting the switchboard, where a robot (real dehumanized kind) voice told me there was no answer from Suite X07; the occupant was out. This occurred at midday, eight P.M., twelve midnight, three in the morning. I reported a fault on the connection, but next day it was the same. Still is.

During the daytime otherwise I walk around the “campus” of META.

It’s a vast area, all told. The buildings are ultramodern and kind of grim, except for the pretty ones for leisure, like the Commissary, and the gym and dance hall and library. But the grounds are all trees and fountains. I’ve seen a lot of birds and squirrels in the central park. Sometimes you spot people running, I think in training for fitness, with an hour off to accomplish this. They doubtless reckon, the ones who notice me, that this is what I’m doing, too, taking a healthy walk in the crisp cold early-winter weather.

The only security I’ve seen here is mechanized. I tried to locate the hospitality lodging where chartreuse Keithena had taken Jane and Tirso. I found the block, which was truly like some small luxury hotel, though only three stories high. But when I approached the foyer, I received the treatment I’d gotten in the cities, straying near the apartments of New River, or the gate of Montis Heights. A machine kept the glass doors shut and asked my business, and when I said Jane, it said I didn’t have the right ID to come in. “You mean, I’m not chipped?” I asked. The mechanism answered, “You are on current file, but not of the correct ID status.” So Loren the Peasant was turned away once more.

Was it sinister that I hadn’t heard from her again, and couldn’t reach her? I couldn’t and can’t know. Perhaps Tirso, from whom I sensed, paranoidly, some small patronizing subplot, talked Jane out of keeping in touch. They have enough difficulties, don’t need one more. I’m nothing to either of them.

I wondered, also, if she had met Verlis again, and that was it. If she had changed her mind, or even not changed it, but been rushed along by the high tide of her feelings, her love—“It’s the same body, but it isn’t him. I’d know—” that was what she’d said. But maybe she can’t resist, anyhow. Even though she knows it isn’t Silver, even though she knows her every move with him will be spied on, unless he blocks the surveillance, or pretends to…

How long will we—I—be detained? The city is apparently fixed up. All’s well. So why am I still here? (And yes, the gates stay locked.)

I had times, those first seven days and nights, thinking, despite all common sense, I’d simply walk round a corner and find him, standing there. Verlis. My lover. Not Jane’s. Mine.

But I didn’t. I didn’t see any of them, or any hint of them. And since most of the working blocks, including the Admin Block, now, are off-limits to me, doors obdurately shut in the face of my wrong ID status, I’m not going to be able to locate him anywhere inside.

Does he know I’m here? He said he put me in that house off the highway to be safe. (From what? Had he already known what would happen in town?) So why hasn’t he tried to find me?

Oh, he’s lost interest. Either that, or despite everything that’s been said, he and his kind aren’t stronger than META—frankly, how could they be? And possibly, in the light of recent events, all of them—golds, silvers, coppers, asterions—could have been turned off like the power in Second City.

The figure in the checking coffin was swathed in a sort of flaccid opaque plastic bag, to which the wires were attached. Only the head was visible at the top of the bag. And it was Silver’s head, clouded round by auburn hair, but under the long dark cinnamon eyebrows were two sockets with little slim silver wheels going round and round in them, truly just like the inside of a clock…. I saw the shoulder and arm of a silver skeleton, and more of the little wheels turning, but no hand. That had been removed…. “Not very glamorous now.”

I’d left Jane’s Book behind, hidden under the floor of my apartment on Ace Avenue. And it didn’t matter, since it seems I carry most of it in my head.

(And where, do you ask, am I hiding this book, my book? No, I won’t even say. Because… I don’t know because what. Like so much else.)

Today is Day Eight. Sunrise over the distant mountains that nevertheless are closer, turning their white sugar silhouette dark. At sunfall, they reflect vermilion.

I’ve written it all up now. I know this isn’t the end.

What do I actually anticipate? Some sort of interrogation, passed off as a debriefing from the trauma of having slept with the robot kind. And after that? Would META want, and go as far as, to kill me? They might.

I wrack my brains about what to do.

I picture Vera and Dizz out in the dusk, saying for a couple of nights, “Wonder where Lor is?” And then thinking maybe they shouldn’t ask that, and discussing other things. Have they ever seen the robots? They must have. But it’s never talked about. If you didn’t know, you’d think META is just one more big, secretive, faintly government-affiliated organization, dealing with the duller end of espionage or minor foreign policy.