Metallic Love

I, too, had a memory of it. How the hell was that?

All the time, I was staring down at her walking through the lower part of the room to the upper area, on the corner of which I was. There was a kind of dais beyond that, and that was her destination. I was trying to work out how I could ever have smelled that pricelessly expensive scent before. No one in my world, even in the fake world META had recently given me, had ever been wealthy enough to use a perfume like this. Demeta, no doubt, made it exclusively for herself. La Verte. That’s the name Jane gives it: The Green One.

She’s shorter than five feet seven, more five five, I’d say, with her shoes off. Thin, that sort of healthy, polished, starved, tanned thinness only some older women get, and which can go scraggy later, only with her it can’t, because of the juicing up of her tissues from plenty of Rejuvinex. I’d have said she was fifty-eight. Well. Fifty, perhaps. But she is, of course, seventy-five. Her hair’s no longer blond. She’s made a form of patronizing concession to her known age, and all of us who see her now, by going the most ethereal shade of palest shining gray— true platinum. I wasn’t near enough to see the color of her eyes. But she wore an evening dress of a softly metallic shade, silvery green, with a slinking iridescence of mauve. And behind her head rose a collar like the raised fan of some male lizard, shot with purple.

As she went along, sometimes she stopped and spoke to a scatter of people, even shook a few hands with her thin, strong, jeweled one, like antique royalty.

And they were all so impressed, scared of her and adoring.

She never glanced up at us, the redundant ones not important enough to be marshaled on the margin of her processional route.

Jane was in the little group moving along behind her. She’d put up her white-blond hair, and she wore another plain black dress. I thought, Jane’s colors used to be the peacock colors—turquoise and green and purple. Now Demeta had those on. Tirso wasn’t with Jane, either he was kept out or kept himself out, or Jane suggested it. She looked utterly blank, Jane, and she smiled at people who spoke to her and answered them like one more robot, but this time not quite fully programmed.

They were all past, walked up onto the area where I stood, then on and up to the dais.

And I remembered where I’d smelled La Verte before.

After Verlis, that second time in Russia. I’d gone out, come in, and as I went up in the lift, went along the passage to my door—then. La Verte had been everywhere. And now I only knew what it was because I knew what Demeta wore, and she was wearing it.

Demeta had been to my flat. Why? Why?

“Oh, say, here you are. Sorry to neglect you. Jason gets a bit stressed about her. I’ve just been reassuring him. She likes him, for God’s sake. He’s the Platinum Lady’s protege.”

Alizarin was back, flushed with some sort of personal triumph in the love-game.

I nodded vaguely.

He went on, all aglow. “He’s such a loner, Jason. He really needs someone to look out for him. He’s simply brilliant, you know. That’s why Madam Draconian picked him for First Unit here. She’d known him since he was a child. He’s loaded—doesn’t need a job—but hey, if you are a genius, you have to use it. But then there was that awful affair about his sister.”

Something jigged in my mind. My awareness split neatly in two, one half watching Demeta on the dais, surrounded by her suited sychophants, the other peering back down another tunnel of memory.

I heard myself say, bemused, “Oh, was that Medea?”

“Right. Yes, Medea, Jason’s sister. You heard about it?”

“Something. Can’t quite recall.”

“She died, Loren,” muttered Alizarin in hushed tragic tones. “She drowned at their beach house at Cape Angel. Absolute shitsville. And their father died there, too, in his powerboat. Can you believe it?”

Jason and Medea. Do we remember them? I think we do. The evil twins who percolate through Jane’s Book. He made the clever tracking chip and both of them planted it on Jane, and so ultimately ensured Silver’s entrapment.

Jason had been good at that. And now such chips are a feature of everything. Jason’s doing?

Wonder about how Medea really died? And their father, who Jane said they were always at odds with, wonder how he died, too?

Jason.

Alizarin fancies Jason.

The two separate brain halves slammed back together into my complete, limited, mind, as somebody triggered the audio system on the dais. A little fanfare played, and all the room erupted at once in more applause for the Platinum Lady.

She has one of those voices. Cut diamond, but a bit scratchy at the edges. Actor-trained, she can drop whole octaves all deep and purry, and then harden like granite. You hear this all the time, people who can speak like this, on VS. It gets samey.

What did she say? Not so much. She was thanking us all, telling us how successful META’s robot lines were, and it was all due to the talent and commitment of everyone in this room. She named a few personnel and a few products—but the named robots were the type that don’t look like people, or not very much. Then she got to the deluxe line. She didn’t call them “the team.” She named them individually, starting with the asterions, ending, without comment, with the silvers. She mentioned nothing about previous models, or any instability or any worry with the current batch. And I looked around, to see if anybody registered the creepy duplicity of this. But no one seemed to. Oh, they were drunk, and they were smoking, and there were even tidbits of drugs set out amid the buffet—high-class, just-legal-in-private things, clearly labeled, and with lots of eager takers.

If anyone knew anything about technical problems, they never said a word, never looked as if they would. Perhaps they couldn’t even think about it. You imagined them washing off in the shower all the secret nasty crap they might have picked up during the day in the warm lap of META.

“I’m very glad tonight,” said Demeta, her voice on the low purr, “that my daughter, Jane, could be with us to celebrate the occasion, despite her busy schedule in Europe as a singer.” Jane didn’t react, she just smiled slightly at the audience, and Demeta put her arm coolly around Jane, as if to keep her cold. They were now the same height, but Demeta was wearing three-inch heels. (I could see their greeting in the library, Demeta maybe saying, “Now, darling, you know black isn’t really your color.” Or making some remark on Jane’s “busy schedule as a singer”—which doesn’t seem to be professional.) But Jane has grown taller and Demeta has shrunk. There’s always that.

The crowd “yayed” again, and a few whistled “Jane”—Hey, c’mon, didn’t matter, did it, all friends and family here. Demeta kissed Jane on the cheek. I thought of Judas Iscariot. Perhaps that would have been a better pseudonym than Draconian. A traitor’s name.

Had Demeta said something else? I’d lost it. She was sitting down, and Jane was modestly moving back out of the limelight, to get away from her. And now some guy in a pure silk one-piece was announcing we were going to see the culminating demo of our work. The lights started to dim.

I had a mental flash, like the camera flashes earlier. I thought, They’ve been working on them, all eight of them, in the labs, on the elaborate workbenches. Yes, they’ve been taking them apart, testing them, to see what it was that malfunctioned. And they have played along. Verlis has told them to, and how to do it. (The silk-suit man was talking to us again. He was going on a bit. He sounded too bright. Is he filling in because there is some hitch?)

Somehow Verlis has reined in Goldhawk and Kix and Sheena and any others of them with rampantly homicidal tendencies. For how long? Long enough that they’ve passed the tests. And here they are, or will be when this guy stops prattling on, to assure this amoeba of META First Unit that whatever rumors they may have come across, or incident they have seen, now everything is absolutely okay.

He really was going on. Stumbling a little—a couple of unfunny jokes, spills of laughter from the drug-jolly crowd— Why the delay? I sensed a slight flurry of apologies to Demeta on the dimmed-out dais.

Next to me Alizarin self-righteously whispered, “Come on, come on, don’t balls it up, girls.” He added, “And where’s Jason? He was supposed to be up there with her—Madam, I mean. She isn’t going to like that, either, him