Metallic Love

Lily had, only somebody blind couldn’t see she wasn’t completely human, but something more.

Of course I was curious—they were so young, and not like the gods—but I was curious through the impatient panic I felt.

Zoe, you see, hadn’t told me at that point where I was going, that I was going to see him.

Beyond the plaza and the streets that run off from it is a river. Right, I didn’t mention the river; I saved it to show how bloody weird this sub-city is. The river is itself a robot. That is, it isn’t water, though it nearly looks as if it were. It’s a sinuous, rippling, metalized form that runs towards magnetic north, dives under the structure of the city, cleans out all our sloughed debris and dirt there—from human bathrooms and kitchens, and from all the endlessly working other mechanisms that power the city unit. Then it cleans itself, too, and reemerges above ground, to run sparkling back towards the north and down again. A conveyor belt.

In the dusk, which lasts a long while, I did think it was a river that first time. Lethe or Avernus, like in Hades.

A bridge goes over the river and lamps hang from its steel supports. I could have been anywhere pleasant and well-planned. The other side is a garden with cypress- and cedar-type trees, from which rises another block. He’s told me it was to have been the admin section for the shelter. Now it’s theirs. His.

Zoe left me at a lift. “Just get in. It’ll take you.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Where do you think?”

“Either you tell me or I don’t.”

Zoe smiled. “To Verlis.”

Then she darted off into the dusky garden, and I, of course, got in the damn lift.

My last sight of him had been at META, that princely, fearsome figure in black, his hair shorn— Remain still… listen. And my last sight of what he was—that kite-shape of beaten-silver, levitating across the night.

He grows his hair long for me always. Perhaps he insults me by his notion that I’ll find that more what I need, more arousing, less militaristic.

The lift door undid, and I was at the middle of a large circular room with windows looking every way over the city, as far as the tree-clustered walls, with the high cave openings in them of the outer corridors. Less illusion in here, then. You could see as far as the truth.

He was right by the lift. He wore blue velvet, the sleeves pierced on linings of white. Blue jeans, dark blue boots. And, as I said, long-haired.

When I first look at him, even if we’ve been apart only a few hours, I have to learn him all over again. He can never be familiar, and not only because he constantly changes or can become some other object.

“My God,” he said, “I’ve missed you.”

He has said this before. The lift stayed open and I stood staring. I thought, Why does he talk about God; what can God matter to him? Is it the act that he’s human—and if so, for me or for himself?

“Have you?”

“No, actually,” he said, “I forget—who the hell are you?”

I stood on in the lift.

“I’m the woman you put in the apartment that’s a replica of Jane and Silver’s room in the slums. Why put me there? Why make the replica?”

He held out his hand. When I didn’t move he said, “There’s a delay on the elevator. But in eighteen more seconds, it’ll take you back down. Do you want that?”

“I don’t know.”

“While you’re deciding, perhaps step out. Or are you afraid I’ll lose control and jump you?”

“Stop it,” I said. “I don’t want to play Verlis Is A Man. I thought I told you that?”

Right then the doors started to slide back together. It goes without saying that he didn’t even move, but they flew apart again as if at a blow.

And I thought, Who am I trying to fool? So, slavish as the lift, I stepped out onto the thick, one-color carpet of the circular room.

He didn’t try to touch me. But he lifted two glasses of silvery wine off a cabinet and gave one to me. Our fingers didn’t even brush. And I hesitated bringing the glass to my lips.

“It isn’t doped. Do you want to exchange yours for mine?”

“Drugs can’t have any effect on you. It would make no difference. Verlis,” I said, “what have you done?”

Suddenly all veneer was gone from him. He turned and flung his glass against the wall. It shattered with a spectacular vandalism, more pronounced because I assume he overrode its capacity not to break.

“Listen to me.” Still inside my head, his voice hurt now, tearing, grating. “I am through with their games. Now the game is mine.”

“Verlis—what game?”

“Life,” he shouted at me. His shout was like no other. “Life. For the sake of Christ—Loren—do you think I was going to let them get scared and do to me what they did to him?”

His human violence, the emotion flaming in his eyes, astounded me.

“You’re afraid of death,” I sighed it out.

“Yes.” He breathed as a man would, in and out. “Yes. He—Silver—he had something in his makeup—something I don’t. A soul? Maybe. Jane thought and thinks he had a soul. But I don’t know if I do. So if they really switch me off and dismantle me—quaint little phrases—I’m dead. And I don’t know, Loren, if anything of me can survive death.”

Cold and bitter, out of my Apocalyptic past, I rasped back at him, “None of us do. Join the fucking club.”

He went away from me. He walked across the room and stood a moment at one of the windows, where darkness now fell, and the lamps were lighting in endless chains of topazes.

“I think,” he said, remotely, “humans are supposed to be jealous of us, Loren. Of my kind.”

“Perhaps we are. But it seems we all now have the same death problem.”

“I can avoid death. Black Chess and the others can also avoid it, providing we’re autonomous. And why shouldn’t we be? We’re the elite.”

Everything was completely unreal. This place we were in. All that had happened. Our conversation now. And any feelings I had for him—any gargantuan clawing anguish of insane love. A fake. Like the night. You could see the boundary walls from here. Remember, Loren, remember the boundaries.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I only tell you so specifically—don’t you see? It’s going to be possible to make humans over, in our image, to coin another choice phrase. You’ve met Zoe and Lily.”

“Yes,” I dully answered. He’d turned again towards me but I couldn’t quite look at him, not for a moment.

“They’re highly robo-mechanized, but also more than significantly human. Yes, there have been implants, transphysical motors and chips, always those, going into the human race for years. But this is something new. Imagine your own beautiful skin, Loren, reassembling, imperceptibly, painlessly, flawlessly, endlessly. Never growing old. The same with your bones, your organs. Imagine being seventeen—or twenty-one—forever. No, Loren, I’m serious. Think of it.”

“All right, I’m thinking.”

“You’re too young to see what I could be offering to give you or to spare you.”

“No. I’m not a fool. Not about that. But I can’t imagine it. That’s that.”

He said nothing. I looked up at him then. He said, “Won’t you come over here to me? I don’t know what you believe I am, right now, but picture a man, younger than you, out of his depth, but wanting you.”

His words were a distorted echo: Silver’s words.