Metallic Love

CHAPTER 5

Silver is alchemically the metal of the moon, valued by several ancient cultures more highly even than gold, since silver is of greater strength, and, in its purest form, of extreme brightness. But silver also tarnishes, is corruptible…

• 1 •

The messengers of the gods came by this morning, Zoe and Lily. They were traveling above ground on their float-boards, and soared down towards me, their dark hair edged with golden sun-flares, their boards shaving rocks and tracts of snow between the scattered stilts of the pines. “Hello, Loren.” “Hi, Lor.” Zoe and Lily look like slim young girls, that new-minted skin that can happen between twelve and sixteen, though their appearance is a little older. The skin, in both, is the color of silky honeyed wood. It doesn’t alter, nor their hair, unless they use a colorant—molecular here, not out of a packet. They aren’t, these girls, human. But neither are they metallic.

“What are you doing, Lor?” asked Lily, nodding her head at me. Today she wore her top hat and tails. Zoe wore a short, off-the-shoulder dress of sea-green. They don’t feel the cold up here, of course.

Their eyes stay the same, too, between deep gray and cool black.

“Walking,” I said.

“You always do that,” said Lily. “Why?”

Zoe said, “She does it to pass the time when she isn’t—”

“With him!” they both chorused, and burst into laughter. Probably it’s mocking. It only sounds mischievous. How would I ever know?

I did know not to ask if I’d been called. They’d tell me if I had. They often play out there, anyway; I’ve met them on the slopes before, now and then, in the past month. They don’t give a toss about the halifropters that sometimes chug around the airspace below. But then, the planes don’t seem to risk coming up here.

“The snow is much thicker higher up,” said Lily, pointing up the mountain.

Zoe said, “And some of the trees are cased in ice.”

Nature seems to interest them, in a puzzled sort of way. It’s like Glaya talking about the trees shedding leaves that time.

“Verlis would like you to go see him tonight,” said Zoe.

“All right,” I said.

I’m not Jane. I don’t thank even partial machines.

(I still don’t know if Jane is here. Sometimes I think she came with us—although I don’t recall her on the VLO—but then I don’t really recall anyone there. Even me. We were all just a kind of mass, staring jointly out the windows of the plane as META burned, and at the exquisite metallic objects that were flying by in the shapes of kites, pillars… )

Lily said, “So long, then, Lor.”

I didn’t say good-bye, either, as they spun off on their boards and away over the sheer slope of the mountainside, gliding next through air, and laughing like little bells.

Is this Olympus? The Greek gods lived on a high white mountain called that. We are on, or inside, a mountain. I guess it’s Olympus, then.

After the first Asteroid disaster, governments and the very rich got together to build shelters. Somebody, however, said that if the Asteroid actually fell on the world, it’d make a crater big enough to knock the earth off its axis. And so there wasn’t much point in shelters. But the ever-positive rich didn’t subscribe to that theory.

Some of the places built are said to be like dungeons. I think this type are extensions of old bomb bunkers. But there have always been rumors that there were other luxurious subterranean worlds made fabulous and kept under strict lock and key, just in case.

The rumors are true. Two of the mountains behind Second City contain the proof.

The bizarre thing is, you go high up towards the peaks and then down into the mountains. And down. Only Hell could be this far down.

Confusion then. Heaven or Hell?

Our robot-gods knew about this shelter because, demonstrably, they can know anything about anything that’s also mechanical. They can access and commune with it. And so when they, and we, their little colony of chosen ones, came here, the massively impenetrable entries were of no consequence.

Interesting, too, that Demeta wanted her regenerating experiment carried out so close to this sanctuary.

That night, as the VLO gunned in over the snowscape of the mountainsides, all I really remember is the pallor of it under the plane’s lights, and the height of the pitiless, staring stars. And then the dark descent.

But it isn’t dark, and if it’s Hell, there are no fiery lakes. The robot garden at META, where he met me, was a precursor to down here. That was just a trial run.

This is a type of city down here. I can’t work out how to start to describe it. You know you are not in a city, or above ground, or breathing true air but something filtered and refined by machines, and it may be full of anything. But even so, you believe it is a city, and there are parks and gardens, and in parts there is sky. A blue one, with clouds, sunsets and dawns, and when it gets dark, it’s a dark that’s luminescent.

Unlike at META, we’re free to go out, that is, up to the surface. But any route off the mountains is perilous, and as far as I’ve heard, no one has tried to get away. Up there, too, it’s freezing cold. Yet if it’s morning, then down here it’s morning, too. Only we have a late warm spring, and our trees (there are trees) are blossoming. Birds fly about, even bats, in our dusk. Robots? Genuine? I’m not about to trap one and pull it apart to see, am I? You can’t tell otherwise.

How many persons was this shelter meant to house? At least a thousand. All told, there are less than sixty of us, and that includes Them.

You come out of high, wide, nonclaustrophobic corridors—all lined with entrances to other corridors, lifts, moving stairs, and all with trees that bloom—into the central cavern, where there are high-rise buildings of glass, and everything set in gardens, and there’s a waterfall like champagne gushing from a cliff. Butterflies, too, did I mention those? And this blue sky.

I have an apartment, two large rooms. I’ll say more about that sometime. The lavatory does what it did at META. The shower works and the tub fills like they did there, too. Only the fixtures are marble and gilt.

Demeta knew about this place. Maybe she was one of the ones who helped finance its construction, and intended to be in it, if anything went wrong.

But is she here? Jane may not be.

Jason, though, is.

• 2 •

Jason’s hair was coloressence charted, a sort of beige, and he had a deep tan…

No longer. Jason’s hair is salty blond now, and the tan, if it is, is faint. He’s thin. Tallish and skinny, and good-looking in a way that not everyone can see. By which I mean I can, but it doesn’t appeal. He has an oddly plump face on his narrow frame.