Metallic Love

not showing up.”

Suddenly the man stopped waffling. New lights bloomed up in the subfusc, along the middle of the lower room, where Demeta and Jane had walked in procession. I glanced at the dais again. It was dark there, but the lighted central area lit it enough that I was sure I couldn’t see Jane up there anymore. Her hair alone—that would have caught some light, as Demeta’s did. Had Jane left? Perhaps she’d gone to throw up.

A stage was rising up through the floor.

They stood on it, two at each corner of a square. Black Chess and Irisa, Goldhawk and Kix, Copperfield and Sheena, Verlis and Glaya.

They were, all of them, naked, unjeweled, only their hair, the hair at their genitals, their metals.

Perfection is garment enough. Somebody wrote that sometime. I can’t recall who. In this case alone, right here and now, it was unarguably true.

Verlis was the farthest away from me. Even from the back I would know him, but so must anyone.

And now, he wasn’t any Verlis I knew, and anyway, I’d never known him, had I? Be honest, little lying Loren, you don’t know this being from Adam.

It’s Grandfather’s fault I sometimes see things Biblically. Maybe I was the first to connect with what was happening on the stage.

First, Irisa walked to the middle of the stage and raised her arms. And there in the full light, we watched her change. She rose and elongated, a column of darkness, then a fount of tinsels. She extended her body and hair swiftly and steadily, and we saw, breathless and elated, how she became a high and spreading tree. Only her face stayed, up there among the arching ebony boughs, just her beautiful and patrician robot features, eyes half-lidded over, lips half-curved, and from the branches bright black leaves evolved, each like a blade, and then a single brilliant fruit that slowly spun. A golden apple.

In the beginning—

Genesis.

Glaya crossed the stage. Her metamorphosis was curiously, if anything, more startling. She ran suddenly up the trunk of the tree Irisa had become, and as Glaya ran, her lower limbs, her body, were something other. She was a serpent of glimmering mercury, with garnet scales still framing her humanesque face, and two scaled arms and hands, with which she clasped the tree, easing the rings of her python tail about it.

Some of the oldest symbols in the world. The Tree and Fruit. The Snake.

Goldhawk and Kix dropped down on all fours. Forelimbs and back limbs were evenly placed. Their bodies writhed, without either of them moving. They were leopard-creatures—sphinxes—with golden manes of hair but the faces of a man and a woman. They prowled about the Tree and drew aside, and the Serpent, looking down, hissed at them in one long low horrible hiss, and across the unlit spaces somebody (human) giggled, and a glass fell with a far-off splintering crack.

Black Chess and Silver moved together. They grasped each other in a fierce embrace, as if about to wrestle in some theater of Ancient Rome—and became one figure. One man, one elemental—tall, half-black, half-silver, and two-faced, and four-winged—one pair of wings scarlet and one pair gold. They were turning about and about on columnal legs doubled in size, the great arms quiescent, the wings flickering—the heads, set slightly sidelong each to each, watching us always with red-black, gleaming eyes. What beast was this? An Angel. With a furling, instant contortion, it recoiled and was gone into the bark of the Tree.

Now Copperfield and Sheena moved. Had we forgotten them? Their beauty was unspeakable, it was— unfair. Their skins were sunsets, their hair showered in ropes of molten saffron. There was nothing to either of them that was either homosexual or sexual, let alone mortal. Beneath the Tree, under the watchful eyes of the golden Sphinxes, they kissed, twining a moment in an erotic sexless synchronicity that was beyond—before—arousal.

The flawlessness of the Beginning. Adam and Eve, the Apple Tree, the double-faced Angel, the feline Guardians of God.

Only I’d known Grandfather, but could there have been anyone in that drugged and drunken room who didn’t know the basic story of the Fall?

The message was obvious. If God created man, or if anything did, META had now created super-beings more excellent in concept and construct than mankind.

Sheena and Copperfield beneath the Tree acted out an evocation of the Garden of Eden. The words were of average literary worth, but the acting skill, and the whole ambience, raised this scene to an impossible intensity, less poetic than fearful.

Until Glaya, coiling and uncoiling, reached out her serpent hand, and stroked Sheena’s wonderful hair, attracting her gradually into a dialogue. Copperfield-Adam didn’t see, he was playing with the golden Sphinx- Leopards as Sheena-Eve was led astray by Glaya the Serpent, and the spinning, shining Apple was plucked.

Adam and Eve examined the Apple. When it first split in two halves (like my mind had, twenty minutes ago), a sparkling little robot worm crawled out and wriggled away, unnoticed by any save all the audience, which gave off slight rustlings of aversion.

Their debate was brief. They ate the Apple, or appeared to. And Glaya basked on the Tree of Irisa.

In this version, it needed no God to come walking through the Garden in the cool of the day. Adam and Eve fell into the awful plummet all alone.

Shape-shifting, they became flawed. And it wasn’t a sudden awareness of their nakedness that alarmed them, but how they had changed. He grew stooped and lumpen, and his hair shriveled like burned grass. She grew fat, a swollen belly and bulging sagging breasts. Their unmarked skins were marked with boils and bulges and scars. This horrifying transfer happened in slow, repulsive ripples.

The audience was silent now. They could see, even they, the mirror held up in front of them.

Was this what the Fall meant? Not the loss of innocence or the rage of Grandfather’s insane God, but a dropping down into the state of being human? Imperfect, debased, deformed—worthless?

We, beside the handmade children of creation, were dross?

Yes.

Then the double Angel stepped from the Tree and cast them out, the whining, cringing, crawling, weeping things that had been beautiful and confidently happy. As the ruined specters of Sheena and Copperfield ran across the stage, the alchemical Angel separated again.

Black Chess was only there one moment. As Irisa had done, he soared upwards from himself, extending in a curl of black tidal wave that fanned the roof—He had become, once more, the dragon.

Maybe none of those here had ever physically seen the transformation, or at least seen it so close. Exclamations and thin shouts clattered around. And he, the ultimate Serpent, opened wide his veined scaled wings of black basalt and laval bronze, and swung his crocodilian head. At the performad, Black Chess had done all this, but that time he had been up in the air, divided from the watchers—and even then, there’d been near panic.

When his long mouth opened now, and we glimpsed the lick of flames far back in it, that, too, was like the show. But Black Chess widened his jaws, and the glistening teeth, like chips off a moon, reddened as the flame spurted outwards. It hit the ceiling above. A scorch appeared, hot-black and terrible, spreading like spilled blood.

All the noise in the room stopped. How strange. Or maybe not—it was as if everyone there held their breath.

Beside B.C.’s dragon, Irisa came fountaining down. No longer the Tree, for about ten seconds she was formless, and from the midnight chaos of her, Glaya was shooting away in a silver ball like a star, then swirling Irisa ceased to be chaos and became a second dragon. She lifted herself, revealing an underbelly all smooth plates and ribs, flowing and flexing impermeably. Having shown us this, she dropped like a cat to all fours and raked the fabric of the stage with scimitar claws.

The full-throated screaming started then. It was primitive and mostly wordless. But I could hear voices calling, too, that this was only one more aspect of the demo performad—the voices had no weight to them. The screamers knew the truth in their bones.