Metallic Love

I hated him before I met him, from the Book. Somehow, too, as he was in the Book, he didn’t seem entirely real in the flesh. (Perverse. Verlis is more real than anyone.)

I met Jason five days after I came here.

There’s a square in the city center, very wide, more a plaza, like in Europe or Mexico. I was sitting at a table outside the coffine place, which works automatically without service, human or otherwise. And Jason walked out of a street and crossed over to sit down opposite me. Everywhere else there was no one. As I said, there are less than sixty people here. And no one but me was in the square, but for birds tweeting and singing. It was fake early morning.

I looked at him, wondering what now, not guessing who he was. Only that he wasn’t one of the gods. Not even the new ones, “the messengers,” as I call them. Jason isn’t perfect in any manner or area.

He said, in his light, rather high voice, “And so you’re the king’s mistress.”

What struck me was he didn’t seem fazed. Everyone was, I’d thought, we human ones, at least. So this must mean he’d known the plan to come here and been glad to go along with it, which few if any of the other chosen had seemed quite to have done or been. And we all kept out of one another’s way as well as we could.

But he’d labeled me. Mistress to the king.

I looked in his eyes. They are beige, by the way.

“Jason,” he said. “That is who I am.” I must have reacted, maybe just gave off a pheromone that said, Jesus God, it’s him. He grinned. “Yes, I’ve heard you read the Book. Unpleasant Jason. I read it, too. Load of gooey girly drivel. Too many adjectives, she’d never use one if twenty-six would do. But did Jason recognize himself, you ask?”

“Did you?”

“I recognized my peculiar elder twin sister.”

“Oh,” I said. “The dead one.”

Not a flicker. “Yes, indeed. Dead Medea. Jane seemed to think Med and I were inseparable. Jane says something about how I was tied to Medea by an invisible cord or something, doesn’t she, in one of her Jane-ish spurts of trying to write like a writer. In fact, it was the other way round. Medea was the clingy one.”

How lucky for him, then, that she had that fatal accident at Cape Angel. I didn’t say it.

Jason snapped his fingers and I flinched, but he was only summoning coffine from the coffine place. Lovely. Sharffe winked at things, this one snaps. He had a big gold ring, Jason. It glittered in the sunless morning sun as the mug came, all thick with cream and choc-bits and visible layers and a wafer and a straw and God knows what. It was a kid’s coffine, for people who like the idea more than the fact.

He drank and gained a little moustache he didn’t bother to wipe off, I could tell, because it was only me he was sitting with. He said, “I expect you wonder why I’m down here with the rest of you.”

“No.”

“Truly? My. Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I’m clever. Demeta thinks—or should I say thought that, too. But then they—and you know who I mean by ‘they,’ don’t you, Loren? —became so important, and I could see where it was going. As they still needed a little help with this and that, I kind of volunteered. I wanted in. And in I am.”

He’s nuts, I thought. He thinks he’s as smart as they are.

But how do I know? Maybe he is.

What did he want out of me?

“I suspect you’re asking yourself,” he said, “why I’ve come over and sat down with you. Aside from being too lazy, just as you are, to brew up a nice hot drinkie in my own apartment. Shall I tell? Would you like that?”

I stood up. Jason snorted into his straw with amusement, and cream slopped over the tall sides of the tall glass, all over the tabletop.

“You’ll so viciously kick yourself,” he chortled, “when you do find out.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“Good-bye, then,” he said as I strode away across the plaza.

There’s something disgusting about him. If I hadn’t read about him, would I have picked it up? Surely I would have.

My apartment lies behind the big plaza square, in a block overlooking the park with the waterfall. The elevators are scented and whirl you up the ten floors smoothly. Only I live here.

I’ll describe the apartment properly. No, believe me, you may want to know about this.

I said the bathroom was marble. There’s a kitchen, too. Everything in it is automated. You touch one key for a toasted muffin or another for a steak. But there’s also room to move around, even eat, and certain gadgets to play with—coffee-grinder, juice-mixer, bread-maker—rich person toys.

Sorry, all that’s irrelevant. (And the bedroom, too, that’s irrelevant, though it has velvet walls that change color slightly at different times of day, to mimic and enhance the in-or-outdoor, fake natural light effects.)

What is relevant is the main central room. Let me talk you through it.

The walls are painted creamy white. A lamp of gold-stitched pale gold paper hangs from a ceiling that is painted to be as much a blue sky as the one outside, with islands of warm clouds. It has birds painted there, too, crossbow shapes of swifts. And a mirage of softest rainbow, passing from the left-hand corner by the door to the corner nearest the window. Looks real, too, almost. There isn’t a lot of furniture, but there are these beautifully made shelves everywhere, and on them stand candles of every color in the spectrum held in matching or contrasting crystal saucers. There is a mirror painted with leaves and hills and flowers.

Do you begin to know this room? I reckon you do.

And there’s the carpet, too, wall-to-wall. It’s made up of literally hundreds of tiny strips and squares of different colors. Green fur pillows lie on it for sitting. And there is a divan draped in Eastern shawls. And the curtains are blue and covered in little gold-and-silver images.

There’s even the hatch door on the wall that this apartment doesn’t need, another sky with a big-sailed, heavily goose-winged ship, a gilded cannon poking from its side, which is the handle-fitting.

Yes. It’s their room from the street called Tolerance, Jane and Silver’s room, that he painted, and they furnished together.

When I came here first—one of the messengers, Lily, took me up—I made a sound as the light flowed in like sunrise to the golden lamp.

Lily only laughed and went away.

The first shock was total. The second, slower and harder and heart-wrenching. Because of two obvious things. The Tolerance apartment had been decorated cheaply, no choice but that. This, though it copies that apartment exactly in appearance, is costly. The curtains are silk—the lamp, parchment. The carpet isn’t formed from hundreds of bits, but made, all of a piece, only the colors splitting it in its sections. The second thing—I could see that he had painted this room. Again. It had to be him. Verlis, duplicating precisely, without a single aberration, from Silver’s hundred percent reliable memory.

Who had the look-alike room been created for, then? For Jane? Probably not. I think it might drive her mad with rage and grief. For someone, then, who knew the past, but hadn’t lived the past. Worse.

Worse.

I asked him about it. It was the first thing I asked him when I saw him. When Zoe had come and conducted me to him, to the king of Heaven-Hell. Which happened the next night after I’d arrived, and as the “dusk” was beginning.

So I have to write about that now. About meeting him again, here.

By then, that second evening, I hadn’t seen anyone around, even from my windows, except a few robot machines cleaning or pruning in the park. (The trees and shrubs grow. They even drop leaves sometimes. They’re not, however, true trees and shrubs.)

Yet when Zoe and I walked out on the plaza and crossed it, about eight or ten of my fellow chosen were littered around the streets or square—all of them keeping distant from one another. They were gazing at things, though, the tall buildings, trees, bats, and so on.

At first I’d thought both Zoe and Lily were part of the human contingent. Now I woke up. In the evening light I could see Zoe wasn’t any particularly neat mortal girl. As she whizzed along on the float-board, exactly as