Metallic Love

They play only entertainment vispos and visuals. There’s no way you can get them to show any news. Perhaps it was deliberate. If people had come down here after an Asteroid apocalypse, it wouldn’t cheer them much, staring at the collapse of the world outside, assuming they could even maintain reception. I’m sure, though, there is some means of keeping communication. Kept maybe in the block across the river. I’ve seen no sign. No doubt, they don’t need anything like that in order to find out what goes on.

After I met Jason on day five (by which time I’d not visited Verlis again in the block over the river), I began restlessly going out more, though not yet above ground. I walked around the city, and along the outer corridors. I found the exit elevators unguarded and operating without any prevention, though I didn’t get in one.

Meeting Jason had truly rattled me. And as I received no further royal summons during this time to Verlis, I didn’t have the chance to ask him about Jason, or even decide I wouldn’t ask him. Would I ask him about Jane? And what had happened to Tirso?

It was likely the same authorities who might anytime swoop down on us, would grab anyone outside our hornet’s nest, anyone who’d survived META’s destruction. A lot of questions would be asked of them, and for a long while.

Another week went by. I was coming across the rest of the chosen now, my fellow pets. Sometimes one or other of them might exchange a word or two with me. A handsome guy in trendy clothes and long hair caught up with me and walked along at my side in the park, and admired to me the nontree trees, wanting to give me, I assumed, a lesson on how they worked, only I didn’t understand the science of it. Then, quite casually, as we were standing under this spreading yellow-blossoming one he called an Acasiatic, he said, “Who are you with, here?”

“I’m by myself.”

“Oh, sure. I meant, who’s your protector?”

Not “master” or “owner.” Not “companion.” My “protector.”

Not intending to say, I told him, “I came in with the group with Glaya.”

“Oh, right. Yummy,” he congratulated me.

“You?” I asked. He seemed to expect it, but I was curious, too.

“Kix,” he said.

Alerted, I glanced hard at him. He looked proud of himself, pleased with his ascent up the ladder of mortal success.

“Kix is a fighter, isn’t she?” I suggested.

“Sure is. Wow, what she’s taught me. We don’t—we don’t have sex. That isn’t her thing. But she likes to do what she calls ‘kitten-fight.’ I can tell you, her idea of kittens is more like full-grown panthers. But she never really hurts me, can judge to a centimeter obviously. I was fortunate to get picked. I wasn’t her first. Tenth candidate, I think she said. But she likes it with me.”

I imagined him with Kix, ducking and diving and weaving and springing, and her like a golden wheel with arms and legs, slashing, kicking, leaping—and never harming a long hair of his head. It hadn’t been like that on the train.

“Who’s with Goldhawk, do you know?”

“Gee? Oh, Gee has a veritable harem. Twelve, fifteen girls. Some for sex, some for fighting, some for war games. Some for all three.”

“You must know who’s with everyone,” I said. I thought he probably interrogated everyone, as he had me.

But he shook his head. “I’ve gotten a notion B.C. has two pairs, two matched black girls and two matched whites.”

“Matched”—it broke out before I could stop it—“you mean, like dogs, or horses —”

He smiled. Could see nothing wrong in it, or his comment on it. Had he always been obtuse, or just gone mad down here? “That’s about the size of it, I guess. My name’s Andrewest. And you?”

“Lucy.”

He raised one eyebrow, then turned and leaned into me a little. “We could go to that auto-cafe over there and have a drink. Then, well. How are you fixed this afternoon?”

This stunned me. I shook my head.

He said, “Aren’t you able to? I’m sure you’ll find it’s okay, if you ask. They don’t mind; I never heard that they mind if we have a nice time with each other, too, when they don’t need us. Let’s face it, we’ll get pretty lonely if we don’t.”

“No,” I said.

“Sure? I’d thought you’d like both, you know, women and guys.”

“I’m not allowed anyone else,” I said, partly to see how he’d react. I should have guessed. He backed off at once.

“Shit, rough. I suppose in your case—I didn’t know you couldn’t, all right? No need to tell.”

“I won’t tell Glaya.”

He now looked dubious. “Ha ha. Okay. No, don’t.” He squinted deeply into empty distance. “I’d better go. I have my training program—I run most afternoons. Gotta keep in shape for my golden lady.”

And that was Andrewest.

Apart from Andrewest, I saw over the next days the pets were generally now beginning to talk to, and even make friends with, one another. Supposedly, some had even been friends before they were brought here.

They’d try to rope me in to the social whirl sometimes. You’d come on a group of them, at the bar tables on the plaza, or in some garden gymnastically working out, or involved in some sport—basketball, tennis even—they were all fairly athletic. They’re generally good-looking, too, some of them beautiful, in the way human things can be, that way that doesn’t ever last. How many more years would they have, being favorites of the gods? Fifteen, thirty if they were genetically lucky and also kept to their diets and “programs.”

But then, none of this was going to last. If we had—have—a year, we and our lords, I’ll be surprised.

(I was already getting a recurring nightmare, a high sky entirely full of VLO’s and fropters, detonations and deadly gas.) Even though this underworld’s meant to be impregnable.

More likely they’ll seal us in, or our robot elite will have to do it. How much high-power explosive can they withstand? We, of course—not much. Or somehow the water will be poisoned, or a virus introduced.

These ideas were (are) so terrible I push them out of my brain, and so apparently do all my peers.

At other times I believe the authorities will just find the means to invade us. And if not dead, any survivor will then be “debriefed” for about ten years in maximum secure custody.

I haven’t spent much time with the other pets. I am uncomfortable with these people, afraid to see in a mirror precisely what I, too, am. But also they get on my nerves. At least, the ones I meet do. I’m certain there are others who hide themselves away—there, that flick of a blind going up in some flat high above the street, a glimpse of someone slipping away round a corner or a copse of trees, in order to avoid, as I so often do, their own kind.

For slaves, we have a sweet life. Even the training programs and food restrictions some of them have been put on are perhaps good for them.

Why hasn’t he demanded anything like that of me? I’m not flawless by any standard. Wouldn’t he rather I was thinner or more fleshy? (There are even capsules for that, the Venus or Eunice range, Optima to Ultima.) Wish I was able to run a mile, or turn long slow somersaults, or sing, or perform ancient Greek dances?

Can’t he be bothered? Or does he like me best flawed. Not to belittle me or indulge his own splendor, but to make out to himself we are the same, young strong finite people, Verlis and Loren.

Like Jane did (the inevitable catastrophe aside), I consider what all this will be like in twenty years. Oh, he won’t want me twenty years; I’ll be thrown on the garbage long before that. But if not, then I’ll be thirty-seven, thirty-eight—and then I’ll be forty and forty-seven and forty-eight and sixty and seventy, and then I’ll be dead. He looks about twenty-four years of age. He always will—but, no. No, of course he won’t. Shape-changer. He’ll make himself old with me. He’ll go gray and stooping, his skin, whether silver or tan, fissured over. He’ll make out like he can only move in slow motion. He’ll do all that, take delight in doing it. My God.