Metallic Love

saved the corporation having to pick up the Senate fine, though. Hope I’m not upsetting you?”

“No.”

“You barely knew him. Did you?”

“Not really.”

“Poor old Sharffe.”

Poor old Sharffe, I thought, with unliking bitterness. What had Sheena done to him? Cracked his ribs, dislocated his spine—injuries that might only look like they came from the crash she was about to engineer? Why had she killed him, anyway? Just petty annoyance, like swatting a fly?

The lofty room was lit in quietly slow-moving rays of aqua and gold. Expensive food sat on tables, and there was the ubiquitous champagne. Not a sign of the team. Just humans, looking preened and joyful at their great jobs and the favoritism being shown them.

“It’s going to be an ultra display tonight,” said my M-B companion/guard, whose name was apparently Alizarin, like the paint. “You’ll have heard, she’s coming tonight.”

“Who’s that?” I ignorantly asked.

“You don’t know? Our founder and president. The Platinum Lady. That’s the nickname some of us give her. She’s quite something, though I’ve only seen her before over the phone vids. Supposed to be in her seventies—but she looks stunning, about forty, forty-six tops. One of the richest and cleverest women on the Eastern Seaboard, what we have left of it.”

I said, cautious, “Isn’t she—”

“Jane’s mother. That’s right. Demeta,” he pondered simpering, and added a second name. It took me aback. Most people don’t bother with two names anymore. If two get used, you know this person has unusual prestige, but hadn’t I known that, anyway? Jane never put this second name, which is also hers, I assume, in her Book. Nor am I about to. See how honest I’m being. It’s for your own good, really, and mine, if any good is left that I can recover. The name I’ve coined instead is “Draconian.” You won’t get a single clue from that, except what I’ve already said, her power and authority, her strategy, etc.

“Madam Draconian,” went on chatty Al, at my side, “is due here in about ten minutes. It’s exciting, she’s traveling in on her private VLO. You know the SOTA VLO’s—State Of The Art. In fact,” he led me towards long doors and out onto a wide, crowded, lamplit roof garden, “over there—you see the lighted landing pad on top of the library?—that’s where she’ll be putting down.”

I tried to look impressed. I was cold, even in the warmly air-conditioned garden.

“Is Jane here?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Jane’s coming. I’d think she’s over there, in the library block, waiting to greet Mom.”

Mom. Well, I’d called her that.

Al grabbed us two tall glass buckets of champagne. He squeezed my arm and whispered, “You’re the one that tried out Verlis—am I correct?”

Not all M-B guys are like this. Danny was M-B.

I looked at Alizarin.

He took my look as a coy mask for wanting to say everything. “Oh, go on, you can tell me. God what I’d give—he’s supposed to be sensational. Yes? He and Black Chess, they are the top male lovers. Glaya, Irisa, and Sheena are the females.”

He’d dismissed Copperfield. Maybe Copperfield had been designed solely with more masculine M-B’s in mind? I’d thought they could all be all things to all persons. I said, “What about Goldhawk and Kix?”

“Hey, which one of those do you fancy, then, Loren? Come on, own up.”

“They both look like they’d be wonderful. That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

“Well, true. But you know, those two really are more fighter models than lovers.”

“I thought they each did everything, now.”

“Well, they can. But the recent designs are more—how shall I say— focused.”

Would Clovis, momentarily, have liked Alizarin? Al had thick black curly hair and dark gazelle eyes. But then, Clovis has blond Tirso now.

I’d begun to feel incredibly nervous at the thought of Demeta, the Platinum Lady, landing right across the edge of the park, on the library roof.

Above, the sky was almost as starry as the robot garden had been, and the moon was rising. No sign yet of the Asteroid. Then something big and droning, like a gigantic heavy black moth, came thumping out of the ether and blotted away the moon.

“Heck! It’s her!”

He was all excited. A lot of them were like that, pointing and even applauding. Champagne and corporate brainwashing. And they’d never read the Book, had they?

Bare trees in the park ruffled and shuddered with the wisdom of trees.

The black VLO sank down, its blades spinning in the landing lights. Everyone craned and called out, as if the moon had descended on a visit.

“Look—look—there she is. That’s Demeta!”

Across the distance, about two hundred feet away, I saw the side of the VLO move. Something stepped out, gleaming and pale. Camera flash went off all over the garden, and from below. She must have sanctioned it, this taking of her picture. But then, we were all quite a ways away, and perhaps telescopic magnification hadn’t been allowed.

I couldn’t yet see much about her. Only that slender metallicness. Demeta, at that point, and in the wake of learning her second name, looked to me like one more robot. The Platinum range, registration C.U.— Someone else can supply the rest.

She didn’t let them conduct her over for another seventy-five minutes. By then, the never-ending relays of champagne had the crowd, as they say, in a roar. (If I’d needed to be cured of liking champagne—I didn’t—META would have done that. Theirs was the absolute best. A combination vine out of France via the reclaimed California Islands. And by now, just a snatch of it turned my guts.) I eventually located the carbonated water, a wallflower all alone in an annex, with only two out of forty bottles gone. Despite their strictures for the lower staff, it seemed First Unit personnel could get off their skulls with no questions asked.

I’d also lost Alizarin, which was a piece of luck. But he was keen on one of the execs and went off out of sight, to drape himself, as he had with me, winningly over various chairs and tables in front of him.

When she came into the room, I was standing on my own by two of the pseudo-Greek pillars in the upper area. I had now a good view of Demeta. Everyone clapped again, so did I. (Always be a chameleon where you can.) There was cheering, too, though, and that I didn’t join.

I guess we all have a picture of Demeta from what Jane’s Book says, though really, physically, she never says much, and near the end Jane plans to tell her mother:

I can change all the names. Put your house, for example, somewhere else… and so on.

The very fact Jane didn’t alter her mother’s first name, not even its alternate spelling (a instead of er) indicates Jane must otherwise have concealed her.

And the Book says, two or three pages in:

My mother is five feet seven inches tall. She has very blond hair and very green eyes. She is sixty-three, but looks about thirty-seven, because she takes regular courses of Rejuvinex.

That’s all you ever get on Demeta—unless I forgot something. I mean, what you do get, is how she is, this manipulating, fearsome viper of a woman, who understands every psychology except maybe her own, an intellectual specialist at minor science, gems, theology, and mind-fuck extraordinaire.

The first thing that hit me was a blast of perfume. I was about thirty feet away, and thought she must have sprayed it on lavishly. And then I grasped it wasn’t the strength of the scent, it was that