Metallic Love

Pushing and shoving, the people below me in the room pressed back against the walls, and glasses fell like rain, and chairs toppled.

The two dragons were huge. It was difficult to see around them. And the stage lights had gone a kind of brown, the room’s center lightened only by streamers of crimson flame still issuing from the mouth of Black Chess’s dragon—and now out of Irisa’s dragon also.

Right then, out of the screaming and grinding, the breaking of glass, came the mindless little click of the audio system. No fanfare now. The voice of the man in the silk suit was speaking rapidly. “Let’s not get agitated. Hush down. A little improvisation is all. Just stay calm and in your places.”

But up in the ceiling I could see, not fire, but a swarm of red security lights stabbing on and off. I gaped at them, and so saw them fail, one after another, as something put them out. The alarm system had been deactivated. The alarm system, of course, was robotic.

The silk man had also been cut off. Someone else—it sounded like a security guard—had seized the mike. “You people at the back, open the doors. Employees should exit in single file.” He was bellowing, and sounded as strung up as the rest. His order didn’t help the panic. But at the rear of the room there was more shouting and cries, and the banging of fists or heavier objects on the doors, which obviously wouldn’t open automatically. A pistol shot blasted. Someone else from security, perhaps, trying to incinerate the robot locks.

Now everyone was struggling. Jostled, I still couldn’t see the stage, or the dais where Jane had been and the Platinum Lady, Demeta. Alizarin was gone. The two dragons dominated everything, like statues with slowly questing heads that gusted vapor trails of fire. Nothing else was burning, but the smell of burning was extreme. Fire and fear.

Another crack of shots, about thirty of them, rammed at the stuck doors. There came a crash of barriers finally giving way, shrieking. And then the whole room was surging for the exit. META First Unit workers were punching and pummeling a route through one another. A man bawled into my face. Almost knocked over, I grabbed the nearest pillar. It was like attempting to stay upright in a rushing avalanche of flesh. I saw someone go down. And another. Couldn’t see where they went to. They didn’t get up again.

Then the lights burst back on all over the room, stark white, in a kind of blindness.

The inferno of people stumbled over and into the light as if it were concrete dropped around them.

And something passed, whirring over my head. I and a hundred others ducked, then stared upwards—through the blitz of the illumination, two golden wheels were spinning, rounded and flaming, their rims edged with razor—they had each a pair of black-green eyes.

Christ. I can’t explain what that was like. The flailing panic and fear before were almost nothing to the sight of these—things.

The dragons, at least, were forms of sentient life, however alien. Irisa’s Tree had been vegetal, and retained a human face…

But this.

Kix and Goldhawk, shape-changed, circled over us, wheeling through the air, with razors on their edges.

And then, someone new spoke to us.

The voice filled the room. Not from the audio, but just from everywhere—from inside my head, every head —that voice, like God, after all, speaking on a mountain. A tone like music, intimate yet icy, powerful beyond powers, level in its utter careless control.

“Stop now. Remain still and quiet, and listen.”

The mob froze, noise perished, only the last little trickles of unavoidable sound—small groanings, the scuff of smashed crystal on the floor, the hammer-beat of our appalled hearts.

“Any business between us is done,” he said in his silver voice.

I couldn’t see him. But he was all around.

“We are going to leave you now. You, too, should leave this complex within one hour. This is for your own safety. Self-destruct mechanisms have been sensitized in every block and other built-up area. They’re irreversible. Understand this, we are merciful. For now. Don’t invite our anger. We can crush you, any and all of you. Let well enough alone. If you want slaves—” he laughed. “If you want slaves, better stick to making them out of your own human race—something, I’ve been told, you’ve always been superlatively good at. Now, move right back against the walls.”

We obeyed him. In case we wouldn’t, though, two copper discs bowled up and down the avenues of pressed-back humanity, and two golden wheels reeled over our heads. Herding us. The discs had eyes, like the wheels. Yellow. The dragons had stood away, dampening their fires. Between and above them, I made out Glaya. I assumed it was Glaya. She was like a beaten-silver kite flying itself without a string. I couldn’t see her green-blue eyes, she hovered so far up in the roof.

But finally I saw him—Verlis. He alone kept the form of a man. He wore black, and his red-black hair was short. He looked about at all persons and things and he smiled a smile that wasn’t warm, wasn’t a kiss anymore. Or if it was, a kiss as cold as steel.

He spoke the names after this. Our names, I mean, the chosen ones. I didn’t catch any others. I heard them, but they were wiped away. Only mine stayed there, like a hook in my flesh, and slowly drew me forward.

The rest of the human herd parted to let us through. Shrank back from us in awe and repulsion.

Walking forward, I felt bloodless. I couldn’t sense my feet, barely my hands. My face was blank. I could tell it was, and see it, too, in the blank faces of those gathered and moving with me. It was only later I asked myself if he called one more name I really knew, the one we all know. If he said, “Jane, which she may spell J-A-I-N.”

Hedged in among the rest who had been called, I didn’t even see if she had returned to the dais. I didn’t think to look. If he had called Jane, what would Demeta have been doing? Holding her daughter back—pushing her forward—or was Demeta Draconian, too, crumpled and shivering in fright, or defiant in her intellectual and brainless way.

Among the chosen, I hung my head. We must have walked out of the room and gone down to the lobby. I partly recall the escalator had jammed, we had to use some nonmoving stair—then out into the frigid winter night.

The lights in other blocks and the tasteful lamps along the concourse were still working as usual. And then, as we moved forward again, the lights all began to go out, and I heard more cries and calls across that place I’d named the “campus.” After that, people came running out, or were staring down from windows they had manually forced open, and eventually I heard the crowd from Hatfield stampeding out the doors, screaming, but all that was somehow already a mile behind me, or behind a thick pane of metal.

We used the Platinum Lady’s SOTA VLO. It didn’t need a pilot, simply did whatever they wanted. A spacious plane. No discomfort, even for so many humans herded in like cattle. And though I heard shots again, and thought some of the security guys were firing at our transport, it didn’t go on for long, and nothing touched the plane.

The gods didn’t accompany us. They had other methods of travel. We saw them when we were up in the night sky, sailing past, silver shapes and golden, copper and asterion black on indigo air. Wheels and discs, kites and columns. Even he was no longer pretending to be human.

And sometime after that, when the nocturnal mountains were coming very white and near, a curious low booming, like wind through a funnel, made us look back below. Something down on the skyline behind us was burgeoning pink and raw, and three miniature clouds, like creamy mushrooms, blossomed from the wound.

META. Not just high tech—think pines, gardens, sleeping birds, squirrels, and chipmunks; think those men and women still stranded in labs and nonfunctioning lifts and underrooms, unaware, or too slow. Think: Gone. META was deleted.

PART THREE The Road of Excess