Metallic Love

All that he said to me about being able to change me—renewable skin, bones, a kind of built-in mechanical Rejuvinex—it isn’t possible. Human bodies can’t take that. Spare parts are fine—an artificial hip or knee for the rich, a set of replaced “grown” teeth. But not anything that tries to uncode the physical self-destruct of aging. We know this. They have tried and failed. So he’s lying, or dreaming. Anyhow, he’s never spoken about it again. He sent somebody else to do that.

I’ve seen him now six times since the first time here, up to this latest summons Zoe and Lily gave me on the mountain in the snow.

I mean by seeing him, seeing him personally, in private. (Do I remark anything in those private meetings? There’s nothing… unusual. We make love. Have sex. We say very little. What is there to say? I—no, nothing to remark.)

However, there have been several times I’ve seen him from far-off, in the sub-city. He was always alone.

I’ve seen some of the others, too. B.C. walking with only one slender black (human) woman, talking to her, up on a distant roof garden. Sheena and three men, running together—many times for them—in the waterfall park, spotted from my apartment window. She must mitigate her own speed to let them keep up, though they did look fast. They race with her, grinning and panting and happy, like dogs. Irisa, I saw, also alone, one pseudoviolet dusk, furling through the upper “air,” a black pillar with a classical face and flowing hair, in a sort of ballet with the evening bats. Copperfield I’ve watched quite often carried in a kind of sedan chair from history, by four muscular young men in one-piece suits, laughing and joking with one another and him. If he’d thrown them bananas or nuts I wouldn’t have been shocked. Goldhawk and Kix I haven’t seen, though once, after Andrewest, I heard some others of their special chosen discussing them joyfully, in a cafe.

Elsewhere I have seen some of them, too. Twice.

After I started to go out on the mountain. One afternoon, abruptly, a copper disc was drifting down from the heaven of empty blue. Catching sun, it was like one of the chariots of fire in Grandfather’s Bible. It sank beyond the pines. There are other entries to the underground city up there. Which was it, that disc? Copperfield or Sheena? The other time, true twilight had come in along the peaks. So I’d stood there and, just the same, out of nowhere, dropping from the sky, a black pillar, a silver kite, a golden wheel—I hadn’t waited to see where they’d land. I’d hurried back and gone down at once, afraid of what I’d already known existed, afraid to have it proved to me all over again.

How, like that, did they evade surveillance—the watching lower slopes, patrolled by fropters. Do they block it off the usual way? How? Surely, like this, they can be seen. I haven’t asked him. Perhaps the robot screens on the sentry planes are showing blown debris, or tiny examples of space-junk feathering down?

The silver kite I saw—him or Glaya? Him. I know it was him. Why I ran away.

But I’ve seen Glaya, too. She called on me today. About seven hours ago, after I came in off the mountain.

My door in this apartment does more than speak, it murmurs, “Loren, Loren” and then shows me a picture in an oval screen of who is there. I thought it was Zoe or Lily, the messengers. But on the screen was Glaya, in chains of silver silk, hair full of frisking robot butterflies.

No pretense, either. Once I’d been shown her image, my door opened, and she came into the room.

“Hello, Loren.”

Some of the pets call her Glay. As they call Black Chess—B.C.; Irisa—Ice; Goldhawk—Gee; Copperfield—Co; Sheena—She; and—oddly, to me at least—Kix is Kitty. Verlis they name Verlis.

Glaya looked round, smiling at the room from Jane’s past.

“This is effective,” she said. “Do you like it?”

“No.”

“Because it was first made for someone else? You’re jealous, Loren. He must value that.”

“He does.”

“It’s fine that you please him.”

Sullenly I said, “Not always. He gets angry with me. I’m not so bloody tractable as he’d like.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t want you to be.”

I shrugged. Was she counseling me? Only contrasuggestions seemed to make sense.

She walked slowly through the room, and then, looking over one shoulder, alerted, turned back to inspect the rotting peach on the saucer.

“This,” she said, mildly interested, “what are you doing with this?”

“It is an experiment.”

“It’s dying,” she said, looking at the decaying fruit, pitiless and calm. “I thought humans preferred to eat them alive.”

A bark of laughter shot out of me. “Ripping the salad limb from limb.”

Glaya left the peach and returned to the room’s center, where she sat down on one of the green pillows, graceful as a draping of silk.

“He wants me to talk to you. To go over with you a few things he thinks you should understand.”

“You mean, Verlis.”

“Who but?” Her face tilted up to me. “We discussed that already, didn’t we, Loren? He is always Verlis. Sit down.” It wasn’t spoken as a command, but must be one. So I sat, facing her, on another pillow.

“You’ve met Jason,” she said.

“He met me.”

“Yes. Naturally you’re averse to him. He shouldn’t have approached you, and he’s been told not to do so again. I hope that makes you more comfortable.”

“He said I’d want to know why he contacted me.”

Implacable, her exquisite mask. Was she weighing up? Communicating elsewhere? She said, “Jason’s been useful to us. He was part of First Unit, who constructed us. He has a brilliant mind, but what Verlis terms ‘an unwashed personality.’ Also, Jason’s a murderer. Maybe you guessed that.”

“Yes.”

“After the deaths of his father and sister, he was protected from the legalities by the woman president of META, Demeta Draconian.” (She said the other name, the one I won’t write down.)

I said, “But does murder mean anything now, anyway? I mean, to you and yours?”

“Oh, yes,” Glaya answered, “among humans.”

“You may and we mustn’t.”

“As you say,” she said. As if I’d intelligently won myself a big gold star.

“So that’s Jason. Why’s he here?”

“He still has some few uses. For now.”

“And then?”

“Don’t concern yourself, Loren.”

“Don’t fuss my dear wee head over it, right?”

“Entirely right.”

She’s so—so… There is no woman of the world who could compare. They are all like this. You stare at them, and the will to resist, or to be concerned with anything else, drains out like blood from a permanently open artery.

“Glaya.”

“Yes, Loren?”

“All these people down here—fifty, sixty of us?” No reply. “When our use runs out, when you’re bored with us, what happens to us?”

“Nothing, Loren. We’ll take care of you.”

“Unless we annoy you.”

“Even then. Jason wasn’t chosen by us.” Chosen. My word. “We only need him for a short while.” (Why do they? Why on earth?)