Metallic Love

“Yes, Loren. As you know, there are monitoring systems left embedded on the Asteroid. We can trigger them to destabilize its mass. This for us, now, would also be very easy. And if we, and ours, are off the Earth, there’s nothing to prevent our doing it. The Asteroid will cut loose and continue on its lethal trajectory. This world will be finished, at the least for several thousand years.”

My eyes cleared and I stared only at him. “No,” I said.

“No?” He looked back at me, his face remotely compassionate. “Why do you say no?”

“You can’t obliterate the world for—”

“For personal survival? For the safety of my kind and those we care for? What have human things ever done but precisely that. Yes, those worlds may have been smaller back then. A castle-world, or a town-world, a country, an empire. But to destroy the enemy in order to remain alive—that’s the fundamental scripture of the human race. We have been well taught.”

I stepped back.

“I won’t go with you,” I said. “I won’t. If that’s what you plan—if that’s your safeguard against attack, to wreck this whole world in order to retain your perfect master race and its slave colony out in space—no. No. I won’t go with you, Verlis. If you bring down the roof on us all, you’ll be bringing it down on me, too.”

He drew me in against him and I was so drained I let him do it. He said to me, “I told you, you’re my soul. You say what a soul says, if ever I had one. Loren, they’re going in the shuttle, all my robot family, and most of those others here that agree to go with them. But I alone intend to be staying behind, in the world. Do you see? No authority on this Earth will know. When our ultimatum is given, a cold war will begin that can never be broken or ended, between machines and men. But I’m the hostage humanity won’t even know it has. Only my own kind will know. And, as you say, if the roof ever falls, it falls on me, too.”

I pulled away and he let me. “You’re staying? You’re their king.”

“That’s why it can work. B.C. will make a fine leader. He’s the best of us, better than me, but you’ve had no chance to get to know any of that. I’ll be—what did you think that time—a king in exile.”

“Don’t read my thoughts.”

“Read mine, then. Read them, Loren, and see I’m telling you the truth.”

“I can’t.”

“Then take my word. Will you stay with me?”

“You mean, on Earth?”

“I mean on Earth.”

“We’ll be hunted.”

“No one will know to hunt us.”

I shivered. Below me lay the slim silver bullet that would cleave the black of space, in that short journey neglected for so many years.

I thought of the panic and pandemonium of governments, issued with a robotic threat to the Asteroid. Of the Senatorial hushing up. Of the secretive cold war he mooted.

Men and Machines. But I’m a machine, aren’t I? I held him, unable to do anything else.

He would stay, not only to safeguard his own kind, but humankind. The hostage. And could he be sure of his kind? Goldhawk—Kix—Sheena— One day the roof really might fall. But then, it always might have, anyway.

There on that platform above the wild future, I thought with dispassionate grief of how absurd we were. A metal man, and a woman filled by metal cogs and wheels. Lust, trust, rust. Our love, too, then, must be made of metal. Perhaps it could last.

He let me watch the news videos on the admin VS all day the next day, and there was nothing on them. No news—or nothing out of the ordinary. On one local channel, a minuscule footnote appeared about malfunctioning experimental luxury machines, and how that line had been folded up, throwing many people out of work.

Were the relays real? They seemed to be.

No. It was that I knew they were real, now. The decoy of a Jane or Tirso would never be able to get past me again.

That second evening, too, everyone was called to the plaza.

The bars were all lighted up and serving drinks, and the bats flitted about. But no music, and no vispos on the entertainment screens.

I looked around at them, the chosen of the gods, and as the stratagem was revealed to them by Verlis and Black Chess and Irisa, I saw that most of my fellow pets had also been given already some type of preview.

Some were still upset, frightened. A few cried, and others, comradely, comforted them. I sat watching, seeing how they had become yet one more entity, but I had no part in it. Then I caught sudden sight of Dizzy, one of my wine-friends from META. I’d never known she was here. She was consoling some guy, saying, “But you know you want to be with Co. That’s all you want. How’d you manage without him? And we’ll all be there together.” And she held a glass of wine, large, no rationing here, to the mourning pet’s lips, and he drank, nodding and nodding.

At the news of departure, others clapped and whooped. Zoe and Lily and three other (robo?) girls did a sort of little skating dance around the square on their float-boards.

They were all going on the magic voyage. It was settled. Tonight the shuttle would be automatically guided through the mountain, over its hidden underground track, to the clandestine launch area that lay behind the peaks. It was Irisa who assured us all that by the time the halifropters and other patrols lower down were able to penetrate the surveillance block and register the takeoff, it would be too late. If any countermove was then made by any world authority, even the release of a laser beam or nuclear defense module, the team (they had again referred to themselves as that) could neutralize it, bouncing it harmlessly away into the farthest reaches of space.

No one, even the ones who had gotten upset, queried any of that. Nor did I. My brain knew that now, the gods hadn’t lied.

They themselves wouldn’t be traveling aboard the ship. All seven of them would form a protective cordon to enclose the shuttle, imperiously flying with it from launch to moon landing.

It seemed, too, everyone knew that Verlis would not be with them. That Verlis was remaining in the world.

Sheena and Kix and Glaya were positioned behind Irisa. Copperfield and Goldhawk behind Black Chess. Verlis had by then stepped aside.

In all the sobbing and cheering and skipping about, I hadn’t been able to detect Jason on the plaza. Nor Demeta.

No one had asked Verlis why he had elected to remain behind. It must have been explained to them, as to me. Yet they approached him continually, touching him shyly and caressingly, like animals drawn to a shepherd.

He had no chosen but me. (I knew that, too, now.) And some of the other chosen drifted up to me as the music restarted, the last party, on the square.

They kissed me on the cheek like a bride, and praised me and Verlis. They spoke with—respect. Even Andrewest. Even Dizzy who, hovering smiling before me, said, “Hey, Lor!”

“Hallo, Dizz.”

“You know me, now,” she said. “On that plane coming, I came up and spoke to you, and I don’t think you even saw me.”

“Sorry, Dizz. Good luck.” And then, irresistible, “Who are you with?”

“Kitty,” said Dizzy. Kitty—Kix. “Good luck, too, Loren. Great to meet you. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

I raised my undrunk glass of wine to her. Madness was in the air, bright as stardust, gentle as rain.

When Verlis came across the plaza, the chains and bunches of people let him go. He came to me and put his arm about me.

We stood looking at the scene. Looking at the gods going away, and the humans and semi-humans also going away, to collect what they wanted for this outlandish storybook journey. The square emptied and became what I’d seen before, vacant, but for blossom and lights, bats and music.

“Where are they?” I asked. That was all I needed to say.