Metallic Love

yourself as the hero of your own story. So weird coincidences are bound to happen and several events are organized for you alone. But really, her Book could have been planted for me. To see how something partially unhuman would react to the idea of something completely unhuman that was still… human.

But they’d lost me when I ran away. Until my mother died and they reeled me back in.

Five, now thirteen of us. Me and Lily and Zoe and Andrewest, and nine more.

Why did Demeta tell me? I thought I could see that. Very likely she’d called round on some of the others, too. Because we were apparently superior to robots or humans, yet nearer to humans. So we might be potential allies to humans in any war with machines. And if Demeta was a prisoner, as she said she was, we might just spring her, knowing where our proper loyalty lay.

But I kept thinking, my brain can’t do what their robo-brains can do—block surveillance, falsify tapes—and I need to sleep and I feel the cold and I have to eat. Or can I? Do I?

They starved us on Babel. I could go without food and stay healthy. Even the water—I’d go to the faucet more to get away from chores than because I was often thirsty.

I think of Glaya and Irisa preparing me for the concert.

I think of META wanting to see how it would go between Verlis and me. His kind, my kind. Neither humankind.

So dark in the apartment. I’d turned off all the lights. Outside, the beat of music, the twinkle of lamps. The spot-lit waterfall exploding over to the cupped trees of the park. The moonless sky of invented constellations.

I curled up on the bed. I fell asleep, as if to reassure myself I must. Woke, lay there. I began to cry. I don’t cry. But I cried. As if now I’d learned the way to do it.

And I called his name, under the noises of the precarious, quietening night. Verlis. I pulled at the covers on the bed and wept and called for him, over and over, very low, the sharpness of my tears in my mouth.

• 5 •

My lover came into the room and found me. I hadn’t heard him approach. Suddenly—I recall thinking crazily, as if out of thin air—he was lying beside me on the covers.

“Is this your bed or your bath?” he softly asked. “I’m confused, as you seem to be floating in salty water.”

“Tears. I’m crying.”

“Are you? Is that what it is? I thought the sea had gotten in.”

“The sea which changes constantly, and yet is still the same.”

He held me. “That little piece of inspired doggeral isn’t yours.”

“Jane’s.”

“Yes. You must make up something for me of your own.”

“I suppose you think I can. If I’m what Demeta showed me. I am what she showed me, aren’t I?”

“I don’t kill,” he said. “No, I’m not saying I couldn’t. There’s no bar, no proviso any of us can’t overcome. But I’ve never wanted to become capable of inflicting death. As you know, three of my fellow creatures don’t hold the same conviction. Nevertheless, if I were to kill, I’d probably kill Demeta.”

“You still let her get to me and tell me.”

“Yes, Loren. Glaya tried to; I tried to. Even Jason tried. We all slipped off the glacial surface of your refusal to hear or sense what we might say. But Demeta is the champion mountaineer. She scaled you at one leap. And now you know, as you had to.”

“Is that why—”

“Why I’m obsessed by you? Perhaps, in part. More than human. Isn’t it why you’re obsessed by me, because, despite everything I’ve ever said on the subject, for you I’m still the Silver Metal Lover?”

I cried. He held me. He stroked my hair. The world dissolves into dimness and the smell of salty smoke, like that of ships burning on an ocean. “Don’t go,” I mumble.

“I’m not going anywhere. Just moving you a little so you don’t get a cramp.”

“I can’t get a cramp. I’m—modified.”

“You can get a cramp, sweetheart. You have bio-mechanics, also bones and muscles and nerve endings. And Loren, understand this, too, you can die. You can be killed. Even your excellent framework can be broken in the right circumstance. A heavy-duty bomb, a high-charge bullet through your brain. Anything like that.”

“Is that what I should do? Find a bomb, or a bullet? Or just drop off the mountain.”

“You’re faithless,” he says to me, light as a leaf. “All this time with me, and now running after Mr. Death. Believe me, I’ll be much more fun.”

“Unless Jane is right. Or that—bitch. Souls that reincarnate—”

“As you pointed out, Loren, we don’t know. But you and I, we have a chance to live. Won’t that satisfy you, just for now?”

“They’ll get here,” I whisper, “the Senate, whoever—they’ll destroy you, all of you. And all the rest of— whatever we are.”

His eyes. Even in the dark, through the veils of the sea, I behold his eyes like flames. “One day you really do have to trust me,” he says. “By now there is scarcely any way they can hurt us. And soon—in only slightly more than twenty-four hours—slim chance they will ever dare to try.”

I sat up. Tears were over. Once more I demanded, “What have you done?”

Remember. Despite my vow of lust, dust, rust, must.

Remember this being is the one who’d drugged me, or let someone else do it—and for what? Some other game? Remember he let Glaya and Co act Jane and Tirso for me, and so brought me into META.

I had never asked him why. Never clarified any of it in my thoughts. Why do we do that? I’ve heard of women—I think of Daph in my cleaning gang, how her boyfriend used to give her the occasional black eye. And she’d say, “Yes, I oughta leave him,” or she’d say, “I kind of forget it when things are okay.” Is that what this had been, with me?

Leaning over him in the dark, when he didn’t answer my first exclamation of What have you done? I sat back. I said, out of synch with all the rest, “Why did you drug me that morning in Russia? Why did you let Glaya lie that she was Jane? Verlis.”

“All right.”

He, too, sat up. He and I sat apart, in darkness.

“You weren’t drugged. That was Co’s lie. He was practicing his lying. Like all of us, he has his flaws.”

“Then what? I dreamed something—only it was actually happening—Goldhawk and the others in the apartment, what was said about the train—”

“Loren, you need to get used to the knowledge that your brain can do different things. Nonhuman things. That morning you were humanly asleep, but mechanically—there’s no other way to put it—awake and aware.”

“What?”

“You asked. I’ve told you. Do you recall the ring I gave you that morning?”

“Yes. With the—”

“Blue stone. There was no ring, Loren. I left you a rose from the market. I made you see a ring—in a sort of dream we were sharing, before the others got there.”

“We shared a dream?”

“It’s a synaptic linkup—electrical telepathy. That’s all. People randomly do it. But we can do it lots better. Though, like Co, you’ll need to practice. That time we just got it right.”